Broadway on Talk Shows

Well, I had never seen it before, but in the span of two weeks, I've seen Mary Poppins on The Tonight Show (which doesn't have a clip, but the full episode is here), and Fela (with Bill T. Jones) on The Colbert Report.

I don't have much to say on the subject except a few loosely collected thoughts:

• Mary Poppins' segment was, IMHO, terrible. My first impression was "Why did they let the air out of the music of the movie? Couldn't they just do the music the way it was in the movie, which is basically what we're paying for?" The dancing felt less impressive too. When compared with the movie (as I'm sure EVERYONE is doing when they watch -- again, that's basically what they wait for) it suffers.
• Fela's segment was also a bit odd, but worked a little bit better. It just seems weird in context of the show, in a way. The success of the segment on its own was largely the engaging performance of Kevin Mambo, who plays Fela.
• However, beside the performance, I was far more engaged in Fela largely because, well, Bill T. Jones sat down for an interview. He talked about why the show exists, why it is important, and he put forward an argument that tells why Colbert Report watchers would be interested, rather than just people in general. The aspect of using music to speak truth to power--well, let's just say it's a good argument to put in front of Colbert's audience.
• Mary Poppins, on the other hand, kind of appeared contextless: "Here's a Broadway show that wants your money. Enjoy?"

At the end of the day, it's a good step to bring shows to the talk-show circuit (Will straight shows find a way to do this? Will non-profits?) But you can't just plop a big fat crowd-pleaser with no context on whatever show has a good market share. You should get your artists to talk as well as perform, leverage your assets, and make the case for why the TV audience would want to see the play.

Pragmatic Theater: Realism and The Play As A Construct II

So, I originally got interested in the idea of the play as a construct reading Brecht, but that's what it was to me--an idea. Stephen Colbert made me understand what it meant for comedy (which I analyzed academically here, if you don't mind mixing academia and comedy), and I came across it extremely effectively in an admittedly really lousy student production of The Crooked Cross, a play which I extremely dislike, but had one choice that worked really well: namely, the girl who is murdered at the end of the play stays dead, lying there face down as the curtain call happens. And everyone files out, leaving the poor actress lying there face down.

Suddenly, it becomes about more than the play. The audience is literally laughing about the actress being left behind. It also feels like a hokey choice--it doesn't strike me as being inspired, or anything. But there's an awkwardness as people consider, "Do we leave yet? If we stay, will she stay face down?"

At any rate, I walked out feeling as though it was a silly choice rather like the rest of the really bad, really silly choices in that piece. But it stayed with me. There was something emotionally jarring about her staying dead--even though I knew it was a hokey choice. It had blurred the end of the play for me, and in some strange subconscious part of my mind I wasn't allowed to end the play.

For me, there became two tools used in opposition: one is the use of the play as a construct, and the other as being blurring the lines between reality and the play.

On the one hand (as my teacher Laura Levine would tell me to start this essay), you cannot ignore the fact that you are putting on a show, because people are sitting in a theater facing actors, having just paid money for the privilege. In a way, any lack of acknowledgment of that is an insult and a failure.

On the other hand, the audience's ability to compartmentalize theater as something separate from real life allows them to dull its impact--to dull its realism (see previous post). If I had to point to the one chief advantage that theater has over film is that in film, there is very little way for the film (using current technology, I should probably qualify) to avoid that compartmentalization. The film is a physical artifact, and no matter how well constructed it is, it ends rather abruptly--it is playing, and then it is not. The end.

Theater, on the other hand, could be constructed in such a way that people are not quite sure where it starts or end. If you try to create theater that is absolutely invisible, that's one thing--much like "theater" in which nobody knows theater is happening. This is the sort of performance art that groups do outside of a theater, in "the real world" (i.e. in a place where naturalistic conventions are the norm), where nobody knows they're participating at all. That, perhaps, doesn't interest me so much.

But if you are in the place where non-naturalistic conventions are the norm; i.e. in a theater, where no matter how much "naturalism" we try to put in place, we still have plenty of things that get in the way of absolute 100% naturalism?

My approach to this has been to try and create a production wherein the play starts naturalistically in real life--the actors are themselves, they enter into the space along with the audience in some way. The audience knows that they are there for a production, but don't know how exactly it will begin or take place (this is why this method demands a black-box theater, rather than a proscenium). They sit, the actors appear to be preparing, and then something happens that starts to tell the story--transitioning in a way which is not so seamless as to be hidden to view, but in such a way that it seems to progress naturally and consciously from real life. Then the story continues, with the performer remaining the same performer who is present out of the performance, until the performance comes to some sort of an end--but not a clean end, an end that dribbles out into the real world.

In the tradition of Brecht, I'll do the self-serving thing and give an example from my own work (although not in the tradition of Brecht, I'll plug that it's available here for $10 / $2 download). The production Orchestration took place in a black-box theater, but it sort-of began a little beforehand, where the man orchestrating the production (It's important to me that the central protagonist of these pieces appear to orchestrate the entire evening, so that he is in control of all of the elements of the story he is trying to tell; this is the orchestrator) is mingling with the audience, greeting them as they enter.

As the audience files in, the orchestrator ushers the ensemble into the space, including a technical person (who was played by me, the writer-director) who would appear to run the entire show's technical aspects from on-stage, at the direction of the orchestrator.

At the direction of the orchestrator, the story begins--by this point, the audience is absolutely clear that the production has begun. The production tells its tale--at this point, it's mostly a classical production, with a few moments of self-awareness. As the story progresses, the ensemble characters become slowly more and more self-aware of the story, and finally the narrative collapses on the orchestrator, who has no more control over the narrative. Everything is in silence until this point; he breaks his own convention to try and bully through shouting the other characters into obeying him. He kills characters, they resurrect themselves. And now (spoiler alert! actually, I don't care about that sort of thing), he reaches the end of his rope--he can't make them obey his conception of the story: he kicks them out, he kicks out the technical person (me, the writer-director), and sulks.

Then he starts yelling at the audience to get out--they're just as much a part of his failure as anything else. And the doors open, and the characters (who are humming a funeral song from earlier in the production) stand in rows to guide them out. Framed in the doorway is myself, the writer-director, only now I really am actually just myself, and as the audience comes out, still (hopefully) reeling from the abrupt collapse of the play, I thank them for coming with a smile.

My hope is that the beginning and end are blurred in such a way that the performance becomes more real to them, more difficult to compartmentalize as just something that happened in a theater space--even though obviously this is all still just a planned artifact. This is the aesthetic you get in The Office--note the big deal people make about the fact that when they're not filming, the actors are pretending to do the office thing, and yet at the same time they film The Office in such a way that they both are aware and not aware that this is being filmed for someone else's benefit--as though they are aware of producing a construct, but not being aware that the construct they think they're making is the construct they are making. That's the appeal of reality shows: the participants think they're playing a certain role in the drama, but really they're probably playing a completely different role. They may think the competition is about their talent, and they may think that they are the hero in the story, but they are not.

That's what I feel about realism today, and how it relates to the play (or TV series or film) as a construct, and how you go about treating it as a construct. For Brecht, it was as simple as occasionally stepping outside of the construct once or twice (like Jim's sidelong looks at the camera in The Office), but if we leverage the fact of real, three-dimensional, unquestionable human beings in the space of theater, we can do more: we can force the construct we make into the real world.

(By the way, this aesthetic is the result of returning to a single hunch over and over again: I've always hated curtain calls more than anything, except when I'm participating in them, and I haven't known why... it's possible to read this as an analysis of why they ring so false for me).

A Post About Naturalism

I haven't done a theater post in a while, but, this seemed important.

(From American Theater, via TheatreForte)

We have to be very clear when we talk about naturalism in the theatre. It's a stylistic choice, and it's a deadly one for the theatre. Naturalism is a style that developed in the '40, '50, and 60's, that supposedly comes from the Stanislavski approach - but that is to misunderstand Stanislavksi. Naturalism is not suited to the theatre because theatre is about communication with the audience. In the end the only question in the theatre is: How does the play become alive? In fact, theatre only exists in the mind of the audience - it does not exist on stage, or in a play. It only exists because the audience brings it alive.

I've been thinking about this recently, and I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say that all natural theater is deadly theater. But I will point out the key phrase: "Theatre is about communication with the audience." The actors have to remain in conversation with the audience.

What naturalism, and current "naturalist" methods of acting do, is they try to immerse the actor in the "world" of the play. But in order for that world to be "real" (in the everyday sense of reality), the naturalist actor has to shut out the audience. And if the actor shuts out the audience, the actor is no longer in conversation with the audience--and then it becomes awkward when the actors is forced to notice the audience (pausing for a laugh, for instance).

I have a problem that happens to me sometimes when I'm acting, which is that I laugh at things which look funny on stage. Not things that look funny to me; one director said that my laughing problem is that I always have an eye, watching the stage from the audience's perspective, and therefore, when I see something that would be funny to me in the audience, I laugh. Of course, this would destroy any "realism" in the situation.

On The Daily Show, of course, sometimes Jon laughs; sometimes Stephen Colbert used to crack up. This was acceptable--partly because it was comedy, and partly because it wasn't realism. There was no pretense at them not being themselves. Because they are being more honest to themselves, they are permitted to laugh, or to cry (see Jon Stewart on 9/11).

This is part of not shutting the audience out; they have the flexibility to respond to the audience. Barack Obama understands it; that's why sometimes when someone calls out "We love you Obama!" he responds, "Love you too." The freedom to be able to break the moment and acknowledge the audience requires you to be allowed to percieve the audience; naturalism fights that.

The quotation continues:

I saw kabuki theatre in Japan, where, in a given scene, weeping takes place on stage in an extraordinarily stylized form. I was transfixed, looking along the row of faces alongside of me and watching how everyone in the audience was weeping, too. The emotion at that moment on stage was real, in the same way as when Don Giovanni is led down to hell and he sings his last act of defiance. The emotion of that moment is also real--it's heightened, it's extreme, but it's completely real. Reality in the theatre is created by actors, and it occurs only in that moment--which is why you will find actors saying "we had a good night" or "oh, tonight wasn't so good." What actors really mean is that they have found that point of communication, so you can have a great production and you can go and see it and it won't mean anything to you at all if this moment of connection between actors and audience doesn't happen. Equally, I have seen pieces of theatre that are rough and appallingly overacted or rude--and yet I've been deeply moved by them. Sometimes, even with terrible performances, actors find a way to communicate with an audience. That's why theatre can't work on video. It's an imaginative act on the part of the audience. And that is theatre's appeal, that's why it continues.

Perfect, perfect diagnosis of why theater doesn't work on video, and returns to the same point. I just say that heightened and extreme emotion is not the only way of reaching that genuine emotion; minimalism shoots for a gesture at genuine emotion (and therefore is minimized, distilled emotion), and sometimes realism hits emotion on the right level. But I agree.

Everyone thought theatre would die with the appearance of cinema, just as everyone thought painting would die with the appearance of photography. But all photography did was to liberate painting to be itself. Without photography, we would not have Picasso or Rothko. Painting would still be trying to do what photography can do much better. We need painting to do what happened on the walls of caves eons ago - to record what we deeply feel, and the complexity of what we feel and imagine. In the same way, film has liberated theatre to be itself. Without film, we wouldn't have Jacques Copeau, who gave rise to Antonin Artoud. We wouldn't have the plays of Beckett or Pinter. So in the theatre, what you do is to create the language to communicate with the audience on that night in that moment.

This is a fascinating theory, and I love it. It goes back to Plato's criticism of art in The Republic as being three removes from truth (there's the ideal of the object, then there's its "imitation" as it exists in reality, then the "imitation of imitation" of artists). The role of reproducing images, is what landscape or portrait painting was about; photography took that over, and painting got at something else. The role of reproducing narratives is film; theater gets at that something else.

Now, what that "something else" is remains up for grabs. Is it delving into the emotion of it (as this author puts forward)? Is it the relationship to the audience (as this author always puts forward)? Is it a ritual? An artifact? Those questions remain. But this is the starting point.

Conversationalism + 2008: Humor: Response to Andrew Sullivan

(You can read the post I was responding to here)

As one of these newly emerging youth voters, and also am a huge fan of shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, I'd like to expand a little about what you said when you said "The next generation is deadly serious about this country but they also manage to have fun with it. That's the Millennials' real message, it seems to me." It's something a little more serious than fun: it's humor. See, one of the cores of humor is perspective: in order for things like irony or sarcasm to work, the joke implicitly creates perspective towards the truth. If you can remember the terrible rip-snorting fun that was the 2006 Press Correspondent's Dinner with Stephen Colbert, you'll know that it was funny (or really not funny, depending on your perspective) precisely because of the truth that was imbedded in every joke.

I'd like to point out that both Barack Obama and John McCain were frequent guests on the Daily Show (McCain was at one point--and may still be--the most frequent guest of the Daily Show). They both share an ability to laugh at themselves, to poke fun, to show a little bit of perspective. As the campaign marched forward, I was afraid John McCain had lost it completely, but at that dinner recently he showed himself able to. And how did he appear at that dinner? A lot more in touch with the truth than he has been lately. Comedy requires that self-awareness that you and I both look for in a candidate, and it also means a candidate has to give up their self-importance a little in order to make a self-effacing joke. After all, Stephen Colbert's Press Correspondent's dinner was far more effective than if Jon Stewart had done it because Colbert made himself an image of mockery, and then included Bush and others into that mockery. Note that Nancy Pelosi has, on a couple occasions, warned Congressmen not to appear on the Colbert Report lest they get a mocking that they can't recover from.

I want a candidate who'll have a sense of humor. I mean, I wouldn't choose humor over healthcare, but at the same time, the ability to laugh and joke and break the ice, to see oneself clearly and have perspective on the world around us, to be able to burst self-importance and relax the walls a bit--that ability gives me a lot of faith in their ability to pass healthcare. And in this pompous age of ideology, vitriol, and hatred from both parties toward each other, maybe the future of both parties needs to have a lot more humor. Like Reagan deftly joking about his age, Bill Clinton's ability to connect with people (he hasn't seemed very funny lately, though). Even Nixon's memorable "Checkers" joke separated him from a pact of less worthy candidates. I'm not saying Nixon was a great candidate, but if you look at the way that Nixon and Mao were joking around together, you'll see why it was that it took Nixon to go to China.

Of course, in 2008, there is a limit to the sense of humor I'll take. As someone who wanted McCain to be a different candidate than he turned out to be, I feel pretty "punk'd."