Theatre to the People

I've been thinking a lot about theatre and communal spaces lately. The most impressive play I've ever been involved with (I was an audience member, but to say all I did was "see" the play doesn't begin to encompass the experience) was We Players' production of Macbeth, which took place at the breathtaking Fort Point in San Francisco. While this isn't exactly a communal space, I am astounded at how effectively the shared experience created a bond amongst the audience members (again, I use the term loosely) and developed a sense of community without ever having us speak to one another.

That was really a long-winded way of saying that I am increasingly fascinated by performances that use alternative spaces. In particular, I am interested in the power of theatre to transform communal spaces. I know the biggest problem that theatre companies large and small face is how to fill the seats...but what if rather than (or in addition to) pumping money into luring people into the theatre, we brought the theater to the people?

I think that rather than waiting for audiences to go out of their way to come to a defined theatrical space, it would be interesting to bring theatre into already defined communal spaces and, in doing so, transform them. Improv Everywhere already does an incredible job at this, creating mind-boggling experiences for unsuspecting viewers. What I am interested in doing, rather than having a huge number of people involved in large-scale spectacles, is literally bringing short scenes into spaces with an already defined audience. Each scene would be written specifically for its context and audience...thus some would be funny, some would be tragic, some poetic, some just plain weird, and others all of these things at the same time. In a coffee shop, for example, maybe it would be a play about two hipsters hitting on each other with increasingly obscure musical references. In the BART maybe it would be a scene about awkwardly making eye contact with someone you know-but-only-tangentially (Do you go up to them? Do you sit next to them? Do you take your iPod ear buds out to talk to them? Do you keep your book open or closed if they sit next to you?). On the street maybe it would be a monologue from a homeless person, and so on and so forth.

If I wanted I could use a narrator to establish the scene's "theatricality." If I felt the message that I wanted to convey would best be told through a series of poems, or no words at all, I could do that.

I obviously have many details to work out, but I am definitely excited about the possibilities!

Figaro

Lest we forget this is actually supposed to be a blog about theatre (whoops!), I want to talk a little bit about a production which, most likely, none of you have seen or ever will see.  That production is Figaro, a collaboration of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Theatre de la Jeune Lune (based in Minneapolis).  Aside from the achingly beautiful singing, the most notable part of this production is its use of live-action film to complement the stage action.  The focal point of the stage is the large white screen at the back of it, upon which is projected live-action video taken of the actors from various angles on the stage.  

I've seen film used in theatre before, but it's never been live footage of the action already happening onstage, and I've never seen it so effectively and artfully handled.  Extreme close-ups of actors during monologues creates a surprisingly personal atmosphere in which every detail, even the smallest twitch of the eye, shares meaning and emotion with the audience without obscuring the unique intensity of the theatrical experience.  The use of film also grants the director (Dominique Serrand) the ability to convey meaning through an unprecedented (at least in theatre) degree of detail.  

The most thorough example of this is Serrand's focus on hand imagery throughout--an expansion and re-envisioning of the expression "to have one's hand in marriage," no doubt--to indicate power (or loss thereof), ambition, love, lust, passion, violence, and (very occasionally) tenderness.  Such imagery would have been impossible without film, and with it, the phrase (which occurs late in the second act) "taking one's hand in marriage" takes on entirely new meaning, as does the tone of the play itself.  The filmic hand imagery lets Serrand take a story that focuses on the ridiculous sexual exploits of the rich and famous in pre-revolutionary France, and focus our attention on the political implications of the play (in a pivotal moment, the powerful, lusty, and wasteful Count balls his fist as he faces the camera, evoking images of Hitler asserting his power before a crowd of German patriots) as well as the unsettling nature of the sexual norms and displays of violent masculinity in the original opera.

Figaro left me with a strong desire to see (and explore) the potential of film (particularly live-action film) and theatre to act together, to create and refine tension, and to capture (and at times compete for) the focus of an audience.