And Then, You Act

Making Art in an Unpredictable World

Anne Bogart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134128273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

From well-known auteur of the American theatre scene, Anne Bogart, And Then, You Act is a fascinating and accessible book about directing theatre, acting and the collaborative creative process.

Writing clearly and passionately, Bogart speaks to a wide audience, from undergraduates to practitioners, and makes an invaluable contribution to the field tackling themes such as:

• 
  
  

• intentionality
• inspiration
• why theatre matters.

Following on from her successful book A Director Prepares, which has become a key text for teaching directing classes, And Then, You Act is an essential practitioner and student resource.

chapter 1

context

We are here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

(Jeanette Winterson)

The crash of empty cardboard boxes falling off a shelf sounds differently to a New Yorker on the day, week, or month post-9/11.The view of a skyscraper causes different associations before and after the brutal event. After that September morning, the lens through which these images and sounds were perceived had altered. The context shifted.

Radio Play is the SITI Company staging of Orson Welles’s 1938 radio play War of the Worlds. Adapted from a story by H. G.Wells for radio by Howard Koch, War of the Worlds was first broadcast on the foggy fall evening of October 30, 1938, as a Halloween thriller, or as Orson Welles put it: “The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘boo!’” Welles and his company Mercury Theatre on the Air unwittingly frightened millions of American listeners who took the transmission seriously and thought that Martians had actually invaded Earth. In the context of pre-World War II paranoia, the program terrified a nation. Thousands fled their homes in panic. In New York City, swarms of curious and frightened citizens crowded the streets. In the town of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, the local water tower was pumped full of buckshot as frightened believers fired at what they thought was a giant Martian war machine.

During the 1999–2000 season, SITI Company performed Radio Play successfully in many cities across the United States. Staged in the fictional setting of a radio broadcasting studio, we wanted to suggest all of the terror of the invading Martians without using any special effects. Audiences enjoyed the story and our austere approach to telling it. A second tour to fourteen cities across the United States was planned to begin in the middle of September 2001.Then came 9/11. As the smoke lifted from downtown Manhattan, the new context transformed the meaning and affect of the play, bringing with it a new intimacy and relevance. The lens radically refocused the fiction. A number of venues around the country tried to cancel the engagement because the content was now too relevant and too close to their communities’ present anguish. Even though I managed to convince many theaters to keep their commitments, privately I also was worried.

Several days after 9/11 we began pick-up rehearsals on East Fourth Street in the East Village for the Radio Play tour. The studio, belonging to New York Theatre Workshop, filled with smoke that wafted up from downtown. As the actors moved through the play, I heard the familiar lines in a new light: “Now the smoke’s spreading faster. It’s reached Times Square. People are trying to run away from it, but it’s no use.They’re falling like flies… Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue…Fifth Avenue…a…a hundred yards away…it’s fifty feet…” Previously, these words felt safely at a distance. In the new context, through the new lens, the words touched raw emotions abrasively.

What would our play mean to an audience through the lens of recent events? I wondered if the performance would be helpful or an irritant to the present pain.

As it turned out, the tour was well received and did indeed feel useful. Audiences around the country seemed to crave being in a room together, moving communally through a fictional experience that harmonized with their present ambiguities. The identification of community and the comfort of being together joined with the relevant content stuck a chord.They invariably wanted to linger afterwards and talk. Radio Play touched more intimately upon the dark emotional spaces within the context of the present climate. The narrative took on new meaning and seemed to exercise a more useful and necessary role in the public arena.

Semiotics, the study of signs, is useful in understanding the role of context. Semiotics examines how meaning is created and understood. Semioticians classify signs and sign systems in relation to how they are transmitted. Juxtaposition is one of the basic building blocks in the generation of signs. In visual language, juxtaposition of imagery contributes to the creation of context and meaning.

When the Berlin Wall toppled in 1989, the world held its breath for a brief moment while the eastern bloc countries suspended political certainty and were suddenly free to choose their future.Western capitalism was not the inevitable solution to the abrupt lack of political authority. In a moment of mass wakefulness, people stood on the wall’s debris in a state of political, social, and emotional arrest.Anything was possible.

I felt a similar potential in the betroffenheit—the sense of surprise, powerlessness, and grief after the horrors of 9/11.We awoke, looked around, shared compassion and a willingness to make necessary sacrifices.The doors swung wide open.

Unfortunately, the vulnerable and soulful condition of shock in the fall of 2001 was quickly subsumed by patriotism. Rather than using the psychic arrest to identify a new sense of responsibility in the world, the U.S.A. entered Afghanistan and then Iraq. The perpetuation of violence with violence put an unfortunate stop to a significant look at who we are and our responsibility in the world. The new global context has not yet altered our lives as much as it needs to. Americans were not yet ready for catharsis. We have not made the necessary adjustments. But art can help us to do so. And it is not too late.

In the post-9/11 context, essential life and death issues feel closer to us as we contemplate getting on a subway or an airplane.We seem to be undergoing a profound paradigm shift where religion, values, and meaning must be examined from fresh angles.

Recently I directed Death and the Ploughman, a play written by Johannes von Saaz in Bohemia in 1401 during a paradigm shift in human history when the theretofore-accepted medieval sensibilities—faith, the meaning of life, religious hierarchy, and authority—were suddenly called into question, leading to the start of the Renaissance. Since the premiere of our production in 2004, we continue to tour nationally and internationally because people want and need to see it.We found that in our current context the play speaks directly to present ambiguities and manages to shed light in the dark places of our collective psyche. The story is compelling and universal but also timely. A man loses his beloved wife in childbirth. Bereft, he goes to Death and asks for recompense. What ensues is a profound assessment of why we live, what life is about, and why we die.

The words “Please give my love to Richard,” mean one thing in the context of a casual meeting on a street corner and something quite different when spoken by a person on their deathbed.The context in this case signifies the meaning of the words. In the language of semiotics, meaning is born when the “signifier” (in this case, the circumstance) meets the “signified” (here, the words).

Try this experiment: close your eyes and imagine a young man holding a child in the middle of an empty field. Now mentally erase the image. Next, picture a semicircle of soldiers standing, guns poised, in an open field. Again, clean the slate. Finally, put the two images together: visualize a semicircle of soldiers surrounding the man and child in the middle of a field. The meaning has changed radically simply by the juxtaposition of these disparate images. In the language of semiotics, the man with the child might mean, or signify, “family.” The soldiers signify “war.” When you put the two together, the signified and the signifier, you have created a “sign,” or meaning, with a much greater impact and complexity: “the tragedy and human cost of war.”

During the worst hours of the Yugoslav conflict, a Bosnian production of the American musical Hair became a popular draw in the war-torn city of Sarajevo. Every night, audiences struggled across dangerous bombed-out streets to file into a damaged theater to experience a Yugoslav adaptation of this 1960s anthem of a play.

In 1992, a reporter from the NewYork Times made the trip to Sarajevo to cover the production and its extraordinary impact on audiences. He described the palpable necessity for such a musical within the context of this war-torn country. The song “Let the Sun Shine In” was a particular highpoint of the show. People sang along, emotions high, with obvious enthusiasm for its message. The song resonated to this audience in the framework of their very particular day-to-day struggles.

At the end of the article, the reporter noted that a Broadway producer had seen the production and was contemplating bringing it intact for a commercial run in New York.

I read the article, astonished at the American producer’s lack of imagination. He clearly understood nothing about context. Imagine an audience in a commercial theater in New York City in the late 1990s before the attack on the Twin Towers.This imported production would have none of the meaning that it provided the Sarajevo audiences.

One of the basic functions of art is what the Greeks named catharsis. According to Aristotle, catharsis is a purifying and cleansing of the emotions brought about through the evocation of intense fear and pity in an audience. The etymology of the word “catharsis” also suggests, “to shine light in dark places.”

Meaningful theater experiences do shine light in the dark places of the soul. To engage catharsis it is necessary to be sensitive to where the dark places are to be found at any particular moment. And this demands sensitivity to context.

The artist’s job is to get in touch with the dark places of the soul and then shed light there. Sharing the process with others is the point. Within the context of our post-Cold War, post-9/11 climate, shedding light in newly fecund dark places is a valuable activity. The dark places of the soul that haunt our dreams are understandably matched by the tendency to shut out the issues with the busy work of the daylight hours. But without looking into those dark places, as Carl Jung suggested, we will lose touch with our essential humanity.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too certain that it is right.

(Learned Hand)

The truth does not exist as one thing; rather, it is a tension between opposites. The philosopher Hegel stated that all human development is driven by the conflict of opposites. He called this dynamic dialectic. It is the artist’s job to live in the space between oppositions while articulating compelling fictional worlds from the extreme state of this dialectical uncertainty. A context, in that it is always juxtaposed to a particular event in space and time, further complicates the tensions of opposites. Context is never simple and rarely logical. It can be rife with irrational ambiguities. And yet, the fictions that we create can help us to organize our relationship to the world and find wider clarity and conviction. Hearing the song “Let the Sun Shine In” within the complications of a war-torn Sarajevo made a certain crazy logic and sense to those who experienced it.

Art reimagines time and space, and its success can be measured by the extent to which an audience can not only access that world but becomes engaged to the point where they understand something about themselves that they did not know before.

The fictional world of a play usually differs from the context in which it is performed. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is set in Verona, Italy, but when first performed the context was Elizabethan England. The fictional world of Hair is NewYork in the hippie 1960s, but the context of the performance is Sarajevo during a war or Michigan in 2006.

A consciousness of context will significantly impact your selection of themes, issues, and subject matter, as well as choice of venue and community.We always see the world around us through the current lens of our particular cultural and political moment. A lens is the focusing apparatus of a given circumstance. The lens magnifies certain aspects of the environment and obscures others. In late 2001 an entirely new lens replaced the previous one and redefined almost every aspect of life in the United States.

The translation of page to stage is the translation of the logic of ideas and words into the logic of time and space. To imagine and then articulate the fictional world, or context, of the play is helpful to designers, producers, actors, public relations, and everyone involved in the process. In what context does the play live?

When bringing a play into the present moment, try to imagine the fictional context in which it might best unfold. Is it the present? Is it a historical moment in the past? Is it an imaginary country and society? It is this fictional context that will inevitably meet the actual context in which the performance takes place.

A new play is different from one that has a performance history. The framework of a brand new play is the context of the world into which it is born. The task is primarily to make sure that the play can be clearly heard and seen. There is no need to create a context inside of a context. But because classic plays carry the baggage of their own histories, interior context becomes an issue.

Two vital questions to ask in approaching a classic play: “What was the energy of the very first production?” and, “Who needs to perform this play now?” The original New York production of Hair, for example, channeled the revolutionary energy of the burgeoning peace and love movement of the 1960s. For Hair in Sarajevo, twentyfive years later, the actual context of the war-torn country engendered the energy and vitality that miraculously mirrored the first American version of the play. As for “who needs to perform this play?” it was clear in the Sarajevo production that the Bosnians needed to perform the play. No fictional underpinning was necessary to invoke up the original energy.

To find answers to the two questions, I look at the context of the very first production as a key to finding a corresponding context in which the play might happen in the present climate. What follows are two examples.

I directed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific in 1984. Based on short stories by James Michner, the original musical South Pacific opened in 1949 when the United States was still reeling from the experience of World War II. The framework of the musical, the issues, and the situations were well known to audiences of that time. These audiences responded with wild enthusiasm, partially due to the wonderful music and book and also because the work addressed the tension caused by the insecurities and hopes of the moment.

But for me, the question was how to harness the original energy of the first production of South Pacific into the context of 1984. I asked myself, what does this musical mean in the contemporary climate? What is the significance of performing it at this time? Once I identified the original force released in the birth of the musical, the question became how to channel that energy?

As it happened, in 1984 the United States sent troops to Beirut and Granada. An international crisis ensued. What would happen, we asked, if our production of South Pacific were performed by the actors as a graduation ceremony at a clinic for young war-damaged men and women? What if this clinic could help these men and women who had suffered traumatic experiences in Beirut and Granada to reintegrate back into American society? And what would it be like if, as a graduation ceremony from the clinic, the clients of this clinic performed South Pacific? The roles would be distributed based upon each individual’s particular traumatic experience. For example, if a young man had lost his best friend in the trenches, he would be assigned to sing the song “Ain’t Nothing Like a Dame,” because it is essentially a male-bonding song. The act of performing would serve a therapeutic function. In our production, each actor played a “client” who was then cast by the fictional clinic to perform one or more characters in the musical South Pacific as part of a graduation ceremony.

The enthusiastic reception to South Pacific surpassed our expectations. We spoke to contemporary audiences, and I wager that our production was also true to the spirit of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s masterpiece.We changed nothing in the music, story, or characters, except for the fictional context in which the story unfolded. I believe that we managed in this way to harness something of the actual energy of the very first production. We did not imitate the appearance of the original but, through a careful examination of context, we found an useful container.

I decided to direct Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths because I loved the ensemble nature of the piece and I was interested in its fictional context. The play takes place in prerevolutionary Russia in the middle of winter, which was then an environment of great poverty and struggle and where the characters could express love only through violence. The emotionality and the story drew me to it. I wanted to spend time with the play, learn from it, interact with it, and then share that journey with audiences. But the obstacles I faced were particular. I had the opportunity to direct the play with undergraduates at New York University. How could these young actors tap into the brutal yet beautiful energy of the situations found in Gorky’s play? How could these fairly pampered students find the necessary maturity and expressive cruelty to embody such characters and their particular situations?

In the East Village of New York during this time, a brutal skinhead punk scene thrived, featuring hard-core rock clubs, slam dancing, skin-piercing, and late-night carousing. Here, too, I found love expressed through violence. What if, I wondered, a group of skinhead punks found a copy of Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths and beca...