Pragmatic Theater: Responsivity V [Using Fallacies]

In the last post, I talked about the fallacy of pretending to introduce interactivity, while still attempting to exert final artistic control--which has the effect of creating the illusion of interactivity, while in actuality shutting the audience out. This is a very cheeky sort of manipulation, and will usually be resented.

However, in some cases, this may not be a bad move, and I would be remiss to point out that in one of my favorite plays of all time, Thom Pain (Based on Nothing), the device is very intelligently mis-used. And the fact of the matter is, I love Thom Pain because it deliberately flaunts the above rule.

The form of Thom Pain is that of a soliloquoy: a hyperconscious character (aware of his own flaws and limitations, but helpless in the face of them--see Notes From The Underground for a superb example) addressing a captive audience. Very quickly, the character of Thom Pain establishes a clear dialogue relationship with the audience, but it is clear that he is not giving actual space for the audience to respond. He moves forward cavalierly, addressing the audience and interpreting their silences however he wants to imply a response. He torments the audience, playing mindgames with them, trying to catch them off guard, and toys with the idea of dragging someone onstage (which he finally does--an audience plant).

But this combination of equal parts inviting the audience to speak and enforcing their silence is part of an undercurrent of sadism that the character is inflicting on the audience. In fact, in discussing his plan to drag someone onstage, he says, "I am- because of my own pains- going to make someone else suffer, without proportion." It is clear from the contextual menace that this is going to be the fate of the hapless person brought onstage (who in actuality will simply be left there). In a way, that sentence sums up one aspect of Thom Pain's relationship with the audience. (One counterpoint would be this sentence: "I know this wasn’t much, but let it be enough.").

Thom Pain swings erratically between forcibly rejecting the audience, and trying to bring them in as close as possible. Because the play is structured as being a Thom-Pain-eyed view on the situation, it is crucial to the structure of the play that no one say anything. There is no better summation for how Thom Pain sees himself in the world than a sea of faces, unmoving, listening with neither approval or disapproval, ready for him to project whatever fantasies, judgments, or emotions he wants to project on them.

So, why in the hell am I going about writing all these rules, if I'm just going to turn around and disprove them? The reason that aesthetic writers (Brecht being the most notable example) tend to be so extremist is because then they don't have to deal with all of the nuance and contradiction that tend to muddy message. Brecht had a message to convey: "An alienated Epic theater is the new way," and it would have been horribly confusing as a guide for him to have said, "Well actually Aristotilean drama is still the heart and soul of theater, but incorporating Epic Theater elements such as alienation will give it an added effect which I feel the nation needs at this time."

So I wrote a generalized rule, which basically said, if you want to make theater interactive, it's all or nothing. Another way of putting it is, if you want to make theater interactive, be ready to deal with the consequences. And basically, it said that the illusion of involvement is worse than no involvement at all.

But like all rules, they are made to be broken. But like all rules, they can only be broken effectively once understood.

Perhaps it is worth restating what the Pragmatic Theater means to me. A Pragmatic Theater is not a theater of absolutes, of a unified aesthetic with no contradictions. Quite the opposite: a Pragmatic theater is a home of all the nuance and contradictions that real life and real art encompasses. The Pragmatic Theater is not an absolute guide: it is merely a way of thinking of theater.

And how is it a way of thinking of theater? It's a way of evaluating theater based on its effects. This would be, it seems to me, the most instinctive and natural way of going about theater, but many people in the art world seem to have a good many ideologies or belief-systems that keeps them buttonholed from taking new approaches.

So when I articulate an idea ("theater needs to be more interactive; interactivity needs to be central and not half-baked"), what I am really saying is that, in my personal judgment, the context and the moment call for a certain approach in general; also, I am stating my own observations about the working or not working of certain methods.

Although I don't sit around citing everything and footnoting the crap out of everything (believe me, the impulse has been there), I do try and keep all of my ideas grounded in specific examples: plays I have seen or participated in, political moments I have watched, things I have read.

Pragmatic Theater: Responsivity IV [Fallacies]

The point I've been building to is this: these fears and anxieties that the artist feels regarding responsivity in art need to be addressed, or they influence the work negatively.


Two examples of this:

1) I saw a production of a show which promised to use "technology" to bring an interactive twist to Puddinhead Wilson an excellent short-story by Mark Twain. At certain junctures, the audience was asked to text message a choice to a certain number, and that choice would determine the outcome.

Why did that fail? Well, the night I attended, very early in the play, we were given a choice: should the main character kill themselves, do nothing, or take a bold action (swapping her baby child with her master's child to save her baby's life from slavery). Clearly, this "choice" is already stacked: anyone who has a basic understanding of theater knows why neither of the first two choices make for good theater.

Almost every audience chose for the child to be swapped. My night, we chose to do nothing. To our great surprise, the cast came to the front of the stage, and sat there, staring at us. For several long, long minutes this continued. I was thrilled. Fantastic. I didn't know where it was going but the fact that the play was going to be completely disregarded because of our choice thrilled me in a way that only the most grievous errors on stage usually do.

We started getting text messages that said, "Why is it important to tell the story?" Clearly, the people behind the production wanted to defend the production: implicitly, they are assuming the story is important. But that early in the play, my only reaction was: why is it important to tell the story?

If I hadn't been surrounded by people who knew me, and by the uneasy atmosphere that tipped me off that my opinion wasn't welcome, I would have asked the questions of the actors themselves. Why is it important to tell that story? I didn't know yet.

Then the actors addressed us. "We've had enough of that," they said. "Now which do you want to do: kill herself, or swap the babies?" That stung. The actors (and by extension, the production) was telling us that we had chosen wrong, which is not something you're supposed to hear when you have a choice. There's a scene in The Simpsons Movie where the head of the EPA presents the President with three plans of how to deal with a natural disaster: the President chooses A, the EPA man says "No, try again," the President chooses C, the EPA man says, "No, try again," the President chooses B, and the EPA man congratulates the President on his good judgment.

We took a vote, and we voted to have the character kill herself. We had not been convinced that it was "important to tell the story."

The actors, frustrated as well, disregarded our vote and swapped the babies. They'd lost the audience. From the point of the choice to that point in the production, they were in conversation with us. But it had been a bad conversation: a conversation with a friend who doesn't listen, who knows what's best for you, who talks when you're not interested and steam-rollers over your opinions. Like that friend who refuses to hear that you're not coming out with him tonight, or like a family member in deep denial of a lifestyle choice you've just confessed.

The real tragedy is that this episode, and similarly pointless episodes of "interactivity" in this production (as well as an equally mindless modernization), obscured a beautifully written story and some very powerful performances. It was as though the director did not know that she was working with a talented writer and talented cast, and just said, "I guess I have to pull all the weight on this production."

If the production was not going to commit to being Remixed (like a choose your own adventure play!) then it should have remained Read-Only. To have the latter pretend to be the former was insulting to the audience's intelligence and dignity, which makes for very bad conversation.


2) Required reading for this post.

So, as you can see in the comments section of this "Overstimulation Roundup," a very interesting experiment was being performed. A play was being told in the comments section of a blog. And just as the unanswerable question of the last production was "Why is it important to tell this story," the unanswerable question of this production is "Why did you want to tell this story in this format?"

You can see the frustration from certain comments by bystanders. But the most astute comment comes from mike, who attempts to participate and then notes such: (here)

mike is right; it's taped. It's not theater, it's video. It's a book. There is no room for response.

Imagine, if you will, the same dramatic situation. Imagine a bunch of people going online, creating characters and a whole world, and inviting the audience (the blogging community) to question the witnesses. To examine the facts themselves. And see the gap between that sort of responsivity, and this kind of hollow show.

Pragmatic Theater: Responsivity III [A Lack Of Spontenaiety]

So, technology is one of the many avenues that people have looked down for a solution to the problem of theater's unresponsiveness. There is a genuine desire for audience-members to be more involved in the show. Fuerzabruta, for instance, partly banks its success on the novelty of having audience-members to wander through the performance as an environment, rather than as a static event which they are trapped to watch.

Unfortunately, there is a trap that is easy to fall into, especially with a world of theater-people who are trained to the realities of the Read-Only Theater. Namely, artists today have an inflated view of the artist's primacy in the work.

Theaterpeople like to be prepared, just like everyone else. That's why we have a script: my theory is that scripts were invented because some theaterfolk were afraid they'd be caught at a loss for words. The script supplies all of those words beforehand. So do pre-blocked directions. I, as an actor, must admit that both the script and blocking don't sit very well in my memory. If a director does not ride me very hard, I will closely approximate both. I don't defend that--it is my job to provide the director with whatever he thinks the show needs--but I would like to point out that originally the script and blocking were to be an aid, and now they have become a requirement.

Nowadays, entire shows are planned from beginning to end. Gestures, facial expressions, emotions, dance routines, songs, lines, movements across the stage, lights; everything is perfectly planned to a 't'. And yet we still tell people that the best part of theater is the spontaneous, every-night-it's-different feel? Phantom of the Opera may have gotten better or worse by small degrees over the course of its run, and maybe occasionally an "event" would happen that would derail it, but if you saw it once a year every year, you'd see roughly the exact same show each night.

And in truth, there's a lot of comfort to the theaterperson in this. After all, if this pre-planned show is good, then it is good. And I don't disagree that sometimes the best way to tackle a show is to pre-plan it. Pre-planned shows can achieve a level of specificity and intricacy that is simply out of reach of improvised, spontaneous productions. Let nothing I say detract from that.

But where has our spontaneous side gone, other than to Improv and the Internet? It cannot solely be blamed on a desire for preparation.

The other is, I'm sad to say, an elitist trend in art that says that only artists can create it, which is rubbish. I believe that true artists are better trained and better qualified to create art (there are some who are not, but I will forgive them). But that only means that they, the elites, should be leaders. They should bring those of us who don't see ourselves as completely artistic with them. It should not be a process of propaganda: it should be a process of education. (That's a whole 'nother kettle of fish, I'll touch that in a later post).

The artist, in self-defense, shuts out all of the people who would disrupt his pre-plan: the audience. After all, the audience has not been party to the process, and doesn't know the plan. So obviously they should sit in the dark and watch the plan as it unravels. What else would they do?

How can we break the artist of this ego-centric approach that only they belong in art?

Pragmatic Theater: Responsivity II - Read Only Culture

I wanted interactivity and responsivity in theater. In a way, it's based on the differences Lawrence Lessig laid out between "Read-Only" culture, in which there is a producer and a consumer, and "Remix" culture, where everyone responds and reacts. The internet, of course, facilitates "Remix" culture greatly, but it existed first: in participatory theater (before the concept of actors/audience originated), in poetry competitions (such as those that Muslim students have competed in for centuries), etc. But after inventions like the Printing Press, the Radio Broadcast, and the Television were created, our most popular forms of getting culture and information became mass media--not aimed at the few people in your local community, but at a global population. And in order for that to be possible, the technology limited mass-media to a read-only culture.

But the Theater has, for quite some time, been a predominantly read-only culture. This is probably because of the rise of literary theater, for which Shakespeare is probably to thank. After all, Shakespeare is more well-known for his published plays than for his actual productions--his actual productions are inaccessible to me, but his text is still reachable to me. In fact, in the English Tradition, the 18th-19th Centuries (from accounts I've read by George Bernard Shaw) was mostly dominated by productions of Shakespeare or translations of popular French farces; and since the idea of producing 'novel' or 'original' works becomes devalued, and thus the established text becomes the core of the show.

Meanwhile: These productions go from being performed in venues like inn-yards to "theaters," which are built with a read-only ethic in mind. Audiences become silent, still, in the dark; more and more they are separated from the stage. Late 19th-Century realism imposes the "fourth wall" and ends the long tradition of soliloquoys and asides in "serious" productions.

So the theater became a (largely) read-only venue. Is that the only way it can be? Is that the healthiest way for the theater to interact with the public? And what would a theater-building look like that took Remix Culture instead of Read-Only Culture at its core?