Experimental Theatre

Last night I went to see two plays, one after the other, something I haven't done in ages, since those days when theatre was my whole life. One play was relatively straightforward but flawed; the second, a late-night at the Met Theatre in Hollywood, was not at all straightforward, and deeply flawed--but interesting.

The play is called "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (here's their MySpace page), and it begins with two different things: director Dara Weinberg's desire to explore improvisational theatre, and then her decision to use William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" section from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The paradoxical nature of Blake's diabolical inversion of biblical proverbs seems to have inspired her to cast away one of the defining elements of theatre, namely narrative, in favor of a celebration of moment and instinct. (It's entirely Buddhist in its devotion to Now--and yet, paradoxically, Marc Rosenbush, both a Buddhist and a longtime practitioner of avant-garde theatre, found it all infuriating. But then, so did I, for reasons I'll get to in a second.)

In her Director's Note, Ms. Weinberg describes her approach as "a chemical reaction between the past and the present," further writes that

We believe that part of what makes live performance special is spontaneity.
The other part is madness. The irrational, the Dionysian. We ask you to join us there, to be both spontaneous and irrational, and to surrender to a dream.

All of which immediately caught my attention, because I have long-standing complaints with the shape of most contemporary theatrical productions. When film does Realism so well, what on earth is the point of doing Realism on a stage as well? When I walk into a theatre and see a set consisting of some walls, a sofa and a dining table upstage, I'm immediately tempted to just give up there and then, and get out fast.

Now, people are comfortable with Realism because it looks like their lives, so it won't ever go away from theatre, from novels, from any of the plastic arts, and certainly not from film. But there are other possibilities in a theatre, in that living, breathing, communal space, possibilities that I happen to think are best exemplified by the work of Samuel Beckett, which is exactly why I spent so much time in Chicago as an actor working with Splinter Group, the Beckett specialists (now they are Irish Rep of Chicago). Once I'd found people who saw theatre pretty much the same way I did, I happily abandoned thoughts of developing a career in order to do work that consistently excited me. (Then I abandoned acting, but that wasn't Beckett's fault at all, that was just me realizing that there was something else I needed to be doing.)

Theatre should be stark, and surprising, and unsettling; it should resemble but not imitate real life; it should be poetic, not prosaic; it should be an island unto itself, each theatre space a rotating wheel of worlds. So as I looked at the program for "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," standing there in the lobby with friends and minor celebrities (the wonderful Kirsten Vangsness from Criminal Minds), I read mini-articles with titles like "What's Wrong With Theatre?" and thought Great! My people!

And what I expected was perhaps something a little like Mary Zimmerman's Proust celebration in Chicago a few years ago, an installation piece titled "Eleven Rooms of Proust," or maybe Peter Handke's play "Offending the Audience" (which Marc once directed at Emerson). I imagined a theatre space without chairs, in which we audience members became a part of the production.

My friend Ezra Buzzington, one of the producers of the show, would tell us nothing about the production, wanting it all to be a complete surprise. So I was mildly disappointed to walk in and find a standard seating section where, since I was in the back row, it would be impossible for me to interact with the show at all. (Not that I was entirely up for that--it was a late-night, after all, and I'm a morning person.) Still, there were interesting things going on: several video monitors and TV sets were placed around the remaining three walls of the theatre, and a crew member with a camera was pointing it at the audience, at the set, wherever her fancy suggested. Another crew member was in a kind of dangling crow's nest, with wires that would enable her to cause parts of the set to move whenever she felt like it. Two musicians were perched above the action, improvising music that was alternately heavenly and hellish. The result was a fluid space that was designed to be as improvisational as the performance scheduled to happen within it.

Then the performance began. The actors came out, dressed in some rather silly costumes that suggested a cheap Berlin nightclub's costume party (although I liked the guy with the gas mask on sideways), and the house manager flipped a coin to determine which actors would be "in heaven" and which "in hell." They went to their respective corners, the music came up, and the show began. Almost immediately I had one of those "Oh no" reactions.

First off, the music was too loud, so many of the actors were completely inaudible. Not that it mattered--they had all memorized all seventy of Blake's proverbs, and repeated them randomly throughout the performance--and clearly a few of them were particular favorites of the group, because they got repeated a lot. (Only occasionally did these recitations seem meaningful in any way.) Thus you were left to watch the movement work onstage, and that was just as improvisational, in that "I've seen Bob Fosse's work but never actually studied it" way. Windmilling arms, ungracefully undulating bodies, kinda sorta in time with the music.

From moment to moment, one actor was supposed to take the lead while the others imitated or responded to that lead (mostly imitated); then, organically, a moment would lead some different actor to take the lead. But if such an organic moment didn't happen, then the particular undulation would go on for a while as the group collectively tried to figure out "Okay, now what?" Even worse, only a few of the actors seemed to have any real dance and/or movement experience; one actor in particular was so ungainly, so completely disengaged, that he badly dragged down the entire production. I think he only spoke a line once, never took the lead movement-wise, he simply lingered in the background and awkwardly imitated what others were doing. It felt like watching a jazz ensemble perform when one member of the group only picked up his instrument a week before, has no particular feel for it, and has never improvised before, either.

Jazz is the best analogue for what was attempted last night; and bad jazz nicely describes the result. Jazz is, of course, defined by its improvisational nature, and the good stuff is sublime--but that's because it takes place within a structure. When musicians "trade fours," they improvise solos for four bars while the rest of the band supports them, usually by vamping in such a way that the overall structure of the song remains essentially static, leaving room for the soloist's exploration within that shape; then after those four bars are done, the next soloist will jump in and the first soloist becomes a supporting player. The mathematical precision of the four-bar structure is essential to the freedom and artistry of the solo. But when jazz got too sophisticated, when it moved into the Free Jazz era, then the music became so esoteric that only other musicians could appreciate it. And at that moment, jazz began to die.

Talking to Ezra after the show, he could just as easily have been to a free jazz concert as this theatre performance. When we complained about the utter lack of narrative, he said that he doesn't give a fig about narrative, he wants to watch the actors' exploration of the moment. He's an artist watching artists explore their art. Which is fine for we artists, but if we want the form to survive, if we want theatre to still be here in a hundred years, it can't just be some masturbatory exercise only intended for ourselves and our friends. (I used to joke that in Chicago, the only money anyone ever made was the same ten dollar bill--our friends paid ten bucks to see our shows, then we paid ten bucks to see theirs, and it was always the same bill.)

There is room for improvisation in theatre, of course there is--but it needs to be more bebop than free jazz, it needs some kind of shape within which it can flourish. These guys, they keep throwing out the baby with the bathwater every time, reinventing the whole thing almost from scratch, meaning that by the time they begin to get any sense of what they're about on that particular night, the show is already over.

There was one nice moment. An actor had picked up a flat metal washer from somewhere, was at the head of a line of other actors undulating together, and seemed to be about to pass the washer to the actor behind him; but instead he dropped the washer in her pocket, which produced some amusing responses as people tried to get to it. It meant nothing but it was, in an evening of entirely improvised theatre, the only moment that was actually surprising. And a sense of surprise, of joyous discovery, is exactly what was missing from a show that should have been filled with it.

It's an interesting premise, and I celebrate Ms. Weinberg's attempt to explore it. But this show needs six months of rehearsal before it ever goes in front of an audience again. For now, it's just an indulgent mess that, to an outsider who has the misfortune to wander into it, makes the entire theatre community look bad; that seems to confirm that whole "selfishly self-absorbed" rap that keeps hanging over artists.