Pardon the Interruption

Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about theatre. The house isn't empty as I write this; a cold February rain isn't falling outside. It’s not night. Sometimes... we lose the power. But for now it’s on, and so let’s talk very honestly about theatre. Let’s talk very rationally about moving to the fourth wall…and perhaps over the edge.



That's an edit of Stephen King's original foreword to his first book of short stories, Night Shift, where he writes this:

Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about fear. The house is empty as I write this; a cold February rain is falling outside. It’s night. Sometimes when the wind blows the way it’s blowing now, we lose the power. But for now it’s on, and so let’s talk very honestly about fear. Let’s talk very rationally about moving to the rim of madness…and perhaps over the edge.

I imagine my italicized words either read in a robotic voice like Brand New does for their edits at the end of "In the Water" or just another kid's voice, like Mac Miller does on, well, KIDS, fittingly enough. So it's like Stephen King reading in a spooky voice and then I just say, bubbly, "THEATRE!" Something disconcerting.

Now, right, the post. When Miranda July made her first multimedia performance, she called it a "live movie." While I'm not a playwright, I'm not up on contemporary theatre, and I assume everything I experiment with in the writing of this play has been done and done better by real people of the theatre, I was certainly inspired by considerations like July's: "live movie." That's not exactly theatre. When people talk about comics with the same timing as film, they lose track of the capabilities of the form: there's more you can do than have a panel to page ratio for "time"--in comics you can speed it up and slow it down. Theatre is the same way in the sense that it isn't just a live performance of a film--it doesn't necessarily function in the same way. Think about the "aside"--this is an incredible theatrical invention that has its own history. Because the character has to speak aloud (plays were around long before there was even the idea of voiceover), thoughts have to be stated to the audience. Sometimes this is simply a necessary evil, the character speaks, the audience hears, and it's a simple loop like a soliloquy is. Other times, though, characters comment on the aside--they appear to hear the character whispering or making some sort of noise. It adds this weird almost telepathic presence to the theatre--when a character has to have a thought that is connected to the plot, that thought can now be overheard in some way, because it must be stated aloud as an aside. Think about if someone did a very odd school play about telepathy. I'm sure there's all kinds of studies done on asides that I could look into if I wanted to do this, ahahaha, but it's just an idea now.

So what is a "live movie"? There's a few things here that interest me. As you know, Waiting for Gadot actually includes a "live movie" at its center, as two characters act out the "feature presentation" behind a screen that filters them into black and white. The Anthropologist further notes how theatre is not simply movies live in front of you, by pointing out that "Theatre was always in color." (I see "theatre" as some fancy word for "theater," so that's why I use it. "Colour," for example, doesn't necessarily add the same aesthetic for me, so it's just "color.") It's funny because this is the only part of the play where a character is distinctly different from any other--the rest are different versions of me, a sort of fun house mirror game--as I imagine Jude Law and Alessia Cara in the roles. I think I mentioned this before, I just wanted to pick two celebrities I was fond of at the moment. (Tao Lin wrote a novel, itself named after the writer Richard Yates, that had the main characters Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning!) It's something I did at length in my epic poem The Raineyiad that may be a lost work. I need to do a search to see if it's gone or not.

"Live movie," though, can be read two ways. First we have the movie performed live as I have discussed, but what about "live" as a verb--"live movie," be a part of the film, act it out and enter it. That's what happens at the end of "Waiting for Gadot." It's an integral part of my next play/project The Roof, which I won't guarantee will ever see the light of day. Let's go back to where we end the final interlude of my play:

Coming out of character, Pandrio and Pasha remove their current clothing, showing regular clothes under the tatters. They appear much more in control now, out of character. They address the audience and call for their help in restaging the scene. A number of people are selected from the audience to put on costumes and take part in the next scene. You comes out into view.

The end of the film Inception asks "are we still dreaming?" and the end of the film eXistenZ asks "are we still in the game?" Here I can imagine the audience asking, "Is this still the play?" Even earlier as Pompo ushers them out of the theatre, this could be a thought on their mind. This is not a new idea: much of theatre has been tied to performance theory and performance art has always considered the space between the actor and the audience and ways to energize that space. I read the introduction to a collection of meta-fiction I think (never really got into the stories) which spoke of an art gallery where people came to a specific sculpture that seemed to call out to them in a certain way. There was a guard seated by this sculpture and as the people looked at it, the guard told them, "Go ahead, push it!" The sculpture was actually designed to swing after someone gave it a push, an idea that explodes upon the mind of a gallery or museum goer. You can touch this piece! That's why it's here.

In "Waiting for Gadot," the final scenes need to take place outside, so this seemed like a funny way to transition to the outdoors. In The Roof, the entire play should feel like you are just walking around a college campus (and more specifically the parking garage of a college campus) and you are just hearing people talking. I'm not sure how it would work if you tried to talk to them yourself, when I get to it, I'll have to decide if that's a writer's concern or if I can leave it up to the prospective director that'll never stage my play. Anne Carson wrote a fun, loose translation of Antigone called Antigonick, which then got turned into stuff like this, which is described as "an immersive production, where the audience was free to view the play through the whole of Unit A, Marcus Jansen’s remarkable studio/warehouse." It's just incredible what people can do when they stage plays. I'm amazed by it.

This also seemed the perfect way to reintroduce "You." Naming a character "You" already addresses the divide between the people of the play and the audience, turning an "us and them" situation into what I hope to be more of a "you and I." I was really happy when I came up with this, since it gives purpose to the character, who showed up at the beginning of the play, just an idea I had, and that I've found a place for this character. It's like Chekhov's gun, but rather Chekhov's character, and if I want to be particularly cheeky, Chekhov's You.

It makes me think of David Lynch, the painter, studying his painting and saying to himself that there was some sort of motion there, something that needed to happen, in the painting. Suddenly he's a director. What if someone in the audience for one of these "live plays" ends up realizing that he or she wants to become an actor. At a Green Day concert I went to at the beginning of the month, Billie Joe called three different people on stage at different parts of the show to give them a chance to be a part of the performance (either singing, or, as one young boy did, playing guitar). It wasn't always the most interesting to watch as a part of the audience, but it's the art/event giving back to the viewer, letting people become a part of it. Art live, live art.