Faction Thoughts
Lost In Direction
An essay by co-Artistic Director Matthew Kozusko, PhD.
It has many times been pointed out to us, in any number of ways by various people in all imaginable places, from reviews to web logs to cast parties, that our plays would benefit if we were to work with a director. The advice has been offered sensibly and candidly, surreptitiously, and caustically. It is sometimes gentle and sometimes blunt; it is given in the spirit of coming clean, or in the interest of friendship; it is offered for our own good, for the good of the audience, for the good of the community, for the good of theater. Once it was offered for the love of God. In any and all cases, the advice, however packaged, has been sound advice-sound advice and true. Indeed, there can be no doubt that our plays would be more polished, or more precise, or more consistent, if we worked with a director. We do not dispute it. In short, all of our myriad well-wishers are right: Bedlam Faction plays lack direction.
At least, they lack the kind of direction you typically get when you put one person in charge of directing decisions. We prefer to sacrifice degrees of polish, or precision, or consistency, in the interest of directing plays as an ensemble cast. What is lost in this type of direction is immaterial in light of what we gain in collaboration. Perhaps more important, though, is that we set straight the record about directors. We do, in fact, work with directors. Lots of them. Upwards of 90 or 100, in total, as of summer 2004, if you count cast members alone. What follows here is a brief account of our directorless model.
The idea of a play without a director is certainly nothing new. The most cursory inquiry into theater history will reveal that the director as we know it did not come to be until the late 19th century, and the explosion of experimental collaborative theater since the 1960s certainly saw directorless theater in more radical incarnations than ours. Nor is Bedlam Faction alone today. Chicago’s Theater Oobleck has been performing for at least a decade longer than we have, and they celebrate their lack of direction as vociferously as we do ours. Still other groups work on similar models, and “collaborative” theater, in which a director might or might not be named, is a tradition in its own right.
And yet, the notion that directorless theater is absurd seems something of a commonplace: “it is unthinkable that a play should be presented without having been first interpreted and then realized by the director,” offered Hugh Morrison in 1974 [1]. To be fair, Morrison makes his observation based on the needs of today’s theater, which requires mediation among a myriad of elements—elements that early modern companies, for example, did not have to meddle with. According to Morrison,
Within the limitations of such stage conventions as these [Elizabethan stage conventions], the possibilities for stage action were restricted: no lighting, no scenery, a convention of significant gesture and rhetorical practice, even in the case of the Greek tragedies a predictable sequence of scenes in the play, made the director as we now understand him superfluous. (Morrison 4)
Morrison argues that early modern theater used an extensive tradition of stage conventions to represent standard dramatic emotions, such as wringing of hands to indicate penance. With such clear conventions before them, he posits, actors did not need to strive for realism and therefore did not require a director to help them achieve it. Only after such concerns as “scenic effect, flexibility and realism of action, spontaneity of speech” presented themselves, Morrison argues, did an “arranger or arbiter” become necessary [4]. The point at which these elements imposed themselves on theater companies is not specified, but we may tentatively agree with Morrison that Shakespeare et al. did not find themselves troubled with decisions about scenery. Whether it is fair to suggest that realism of action was of no concern to Richard Burbage, working his way through Hamlet, however, is a matter for some debate—the first player, weeping for Hecuba in act 2, scene 2, has tears in his eyes and distraction in his aspect, which hardly sounds like an account of stilted stage conventions. Hamlet’s often-cited criticism of bombastic playing that follows in 3.3 suggests quite plainly that the conventions Morrison invokes have always been viewed as stilted. If Hamlet’s complaints are an indication that early modern actors did employ a convention of significant gesture (sawing the air), or speak more than was set down for them (setting on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh), or tear a passion to tatters (out-Heroding Herod), they are also an indication that such excesses overstepped the modesty of nature, and that discriminating playgoers at the time preferred the very “realism” that Morrison suggests was unavailable. Hamlet’s instructions to the visiting players at Elsinore show us that such conventions were not followed as a matter of course, and that players might be directed to eschew them—indeed, “direction” is precisely what Hamlet gives them.
And this last observation brings us full circle, face to face with the realization that early modern theater companies did not simply rely on “predictable sequences” to guide performances. They did have directors. To be sure, some “direction” came in the form of cues in the play text [2], and actors did draw on a number of stage conventions to represent standard dramatic emotions—but these features are equally a part of theater today, even if our unquestioning acceptance of contemporary conventions might obscure the fact that they are, in the end, conventions. Other traces of direction in a more modern sense are abundant in surviving accounts of play production. An actor learning his lines worked with the company’s manager, an elder actor, or perhaps even the author himself on the particulars of delivery, from cadence to volume to accompanying gestures. The practice, which was closely linked to training in rhetoric and oratory, was both standard and fundamental, and as a result, much of the play was very carefully “directed” even before rehearsals began. And after a part was memorized, any number of other people would give the process direction, including the prompter, who has been likened to a kind of conductor, orchestrating entrances and blocking[3]. We do not know conclusively who contributed what to any given play, but as a general rule, a company of professional players would have looked to several different people and figures for direction, and the result was a carefully constructed piece. So the principal difference between direction in Shakespeare’s theater and ours isn’t the presence or absence of a director; rather, it is the consolidation of different directorial figures in a single person.
What, though, is the point of laboring over a comparison between then and now? First, to encourage us to reexamine the way we think about the evolution of theater. Second, and more important, to help us reevaluate what we consider necessary in theater today, and why. Once we do away with the question of what is thinkable and unthinkable in today’s theater, we are free to let theater do much more than entertain audiences.
In 1980, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offered a model of production they called “the body without organs.” In this model [4], the flow of energy (in the body, for example), is not constrained or conscripted into the service of a particular organ with a particular function[5] The full potential of energy is available across a range of applications, with the implication that the absence of constraint—of organization—renders a body more productive. When we introduce boundaries into a system, we get both organization and delineation; we systematize, but at the expense of connections; we put things in order, but the series of separations that are necessary come with their own drawbacks. What on the one hand looks like efficiency can be viewed instead as abrogation. The terms (“energy,” “body,” “organ” etc.) are problematic in Deleuze and Guattari, and the body without organs is technically unattainable, so we invoke it mostly to suggest an approach to production that approximates our model of staging plays. By removing the boundaries that organize, channel, and confine energies in a cast, we liberate or free up more energy. An actor keyed into one part, one role, one function in a cast, under the direction of an overseer of sorts who administrates the orchestration of several other isolated actors, can focus all his energy on his assigned function. The results are frequently tremendous, and the value of such an arrangement hardly need be defended. It does not follow, however, that such an arrangement is the only desirable arrangement, the only imaginable model for making theater. Whatever we are willing to sacrifice efficiency, we gain in other areas.
In asking an actor to become very good at one particular thing, you necessarily ask the actor also to forgo contributing to the larger process of which he is a part, in which his part is connected to other parts. An actor who rehearses only her scenes and who takes no part in the creation of scenes in which she does not appear, removes herself proportionally from the play. A focus on one part comes only at the expense of a contribution to other parts and to the whole. In this sense, we choose to work without a director not because we dislike directors, but because we want everyone to take part in the directing. When the direction of a play falls to one person, the play loses in ensemble what it gains in organization; the finished product benefits from the efficient unity of a single thematic-dramatic vision (it has focus, polish, competence), but it suffers from the loss of collaborative investment. When actors help put together scenes from other parts of a play, they become invested in those scenes. They take director-style interest in what happens when those scenes are staged, and they invariably take the awareness of those scenes with them when they return to their own work. Done earnestly, group direction is the difference between a backstage in which cast members pass time between entrances doing crosswords in the dressing room and a backstage in which every gap in the flats and chink in the scenery is occupied by someone watching a play.
To labor this point too long, however, is to miss the larger argument: connecting actors to each other for the sake of the play is only one component of the design, and it suggests a kind of teleology that is ultimately immaterial. The Bedlam Faction stages plays not strictly for the result—a run of performances for the public—but for the fuller process of play making. A play begins the moment a cast agrees to put it together, and it goes on well after the set has been struck; the business of public performances plays only a part, vital though it is. Again, a cursory glance at the mountain of writing about plays, drama, acting, etc., will show that celebrating the value of the process is hardly the Bedlam Faction’s own invention. Our interest in the process of play making—and the comet-trail of play that follows in the wake of closing night—is part of a well-established tradition. Our obsessive focus on that interest may set us apart, however. As our mission statement says, “the Bedlam Faction took up theater because the way it organizes play through community, words, images, and music best suited our strengths and desires,” not because we wanted to turn out plays. Of course, public performances remain the principal focus of our work as casts, and they are powerful point of culmination toward which every moment of preliminary play is geared. We have consistently found that the most effective and most rewarding—if also most exhausting—way of finding that point of culmination is to involve as many cast members as possible in as much of the process as we can.
Footnotes
[1] Hugh Morrison, Directing in the Theatre, London: Pitman, 1973; most recently reprinted by Routledge, 1985.
[2]Act 3, scene 2 of Julius Caesar is a good example, with basic stage directions built into the lines: a crowd member says “a ring; stand round,” directing the crowd to encircle the body of Caesar. More subtle directions could be effected with “false cues,” as in 3.3 of The Merchant of Venice. Tiffany Stern argues that the actor playing Salerio would be directed to frustration by the repeated cue “I will have my bond” in Shylock’s speech. Shylock utters the phrase several times, prompting Salerio to start his line only to be interrupted as Shylock’s speech continues. Shylock’s “I will not hear thee speak” makes sense, and Salerio becomes more and more upset, so that when he finally does deliver his response, he is exasperated. See Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, especially chapter 3.
[3] For further discussion of these points, see Stern, chapters 1-3.
[4]It is not strictly fair to call it a model of production, but the description will stand for the sake of simplicity. D&G derive the phrase “Body without Organs” from Antonin Artaud. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
[5] It is our object in presenting this essay to strike a tone somewhere between the academic and the frivolous. Bear with us through this particularly heavy stretch, and rest assured, our plays themselves are much more likely to feature bawdy farce and scatological humor than references to obscure French psycho-academics.
Shamanic Theater
An essay by co-Artistic Director Michael Mergen
Once upon a time, every performance was a sacred event. I like to remember that when I think about plays, and playing in general.
I am fascinated by Shamans.
The word shaman comes from the Tungus people of the Russian steppes. It is the title for their traditional healers, those whose function it was to maintain the balance between the physical world, the world of the tribe, and the spirit worlds above and below it, the lands of the gods, spirits and the dead. When weather was bad, when times were troubled, when the vicissitudes of life were especially troubling, the shaman was expected to identify the cause of the problem and tell the people how to set the world again to rights so the people could live, thrive and prosper.
And they found lost souls. Literally.
Sometimes among the Tungus, someone would sicken with no apparent cause. They would become listless, sullen and, eventually, completely unresponsive to the outer world. If untreated, the sufferer would die. When someone suffered from this condition the shaman was consulted. The shaman would examine the case and know the cause, intimately, for among the Tungus, shamans were exclusively those who had suffered so and miraculously learned how to heal themselves. The sufferer had lost his soul. Now the shaman had to go and find it. Here is the part that always gets me. The treatment, the finding of the soul, was performed in public. In a yurt, a teepee like structure, domed with a central ceiling hole, a tree would be erected. This tree was a world tree, its roots in the underworld, growing up into the world of the people, and its branches spreading up to the heavens, up through the ceiling hole in the roof. Into the yurt, the people would gather, all together. The stage was set, the audience would gather. Then, the shaman would begin.
The shaman, in ritual garb, as different from the everyday garb of the people as dark to light, appropriate for the role of traveler between worlds, would slip into a trance state and begin to drum and chant. Soon, he would start to dance as well. The narrative of the chant consisted of the journey through the worlds the shaman took as he searched for the sufferer’s lost soul. These poetic chants, epic in length, described the journey through the lands of men, then up into the heavens, then into the underworld of the dead below. They lasted hours, and they were improvised. Although the basic shape of the journey remained consistent from one healing ritual to the next, no two chants were the same( much in the same way that the plot in any particular genre film, romantic comedies for instance, retains the basic shape or structure [boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy realizes he is basically a loser asshole, boy makes public ego-sacrifice proving his desert, boy gets girl again] even though particulars in action are remarkably variable). Meanwhile, during this chant-poem, the shaman danced around the yurt, physically passing through the journey as it was described. For example, when the shaman came in his chant, inevitably, to the section describing his ascent into the heavens, he would, I imagine quite dramatically, climb high up into the tree, all the while chanting. Finally, the shaman would find the lost soul in the underworld, return to the physical world and give it back to its rightful owner.
Whenever I think of this, I can only think of how amazing it must all be for everyone involved. What can it be like to see such a performance? How would such an experience change you? How could such a performance ever exist? What would happen to a community that came together for such a performance? Could we do that?
How can we do that?
What Did I Gain
An essay by co-Artistic Director Shanna Smith, PhD
My mother and I were in Munich one September. Walking across the Residenzplaz one afternoon, we heard a string quintet playing under the covered walkway. Oktoberfest was in full swing, and we'd passed dozens of street musicians that day, but now my mother stopped to listen. The quintet stumbled through some passages, and rushed through others; the piece was slightly beyond their skill. And yet my mother, and a large group of other rapt listeners, were completely engaged. Each time a performer stumbled, he sent a wryly apologetic glance at the crowd. At one point the musicians ground to a halt completely, but encouraged by the audience's palpable good humor and support, they regained their bearings and set to with good will at the top of the passage. The performers clearly loved their instruments, the pieces they played, and the crowd they were playing for; but at least for me, their enthusiasm did not atone for their lack of perfection. My mother was determined to stay to the bitter end; I left her and wandered down the plaza, window-shopping for boots, hats, scarves, and other items far too warm to take home to Austin. I felt curiously off-balance, vaguely dizzy with something; there were too many personalities flitting in and out of my consciousness. I was the self-conscious American, embarrassed to join the gawking crowd for fear of being pegged as a tourist. I was the classically-trained pianist, contemptuously shutting out the cloddish strains of "A Little Night Music" and the clapping of the audience. ("They don't even know that they aren't supposed to applaud between movements," she was thinking.) I was the self-flagellating daughter, scolding myself for scorning my mother's taste and company. And I was the equalitarian populist, appalled at my own self-involvement and outrageous snobbery. It was a bewildering and overwhelmingly uncomfortable half-hour.
When my mother found me, she was teary-eyed but smiling. "That was the most beautiful music I've ever heard," she said. "I'll just never forget that." We had boated in Lake Geneva, toured the castle immortalized by Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon," hiked to the top of the mountain next to the Matterhorn, and rode the largest ferris wheel in the world at Oktoberfest. But when we got home, she remembered the high point of her trip as the string quintet in the Residenzplaz.
Why did they have such a strong impact on her? Perhaps because they were impassioned about what they were doing, and they shared it freely and lovingly with the audience. They brought music rarely heard outside the concert hall to the squares and open spaces of the public, to the ears of some who may never have heard it before. They demonstrated that we make mistakes; we are only human. But if we forge ahead, if we take risks and try our best at something that we don't know perfectly, we will learn and grow. My mother, and those in the crowd around her, found that deeply inspiring.
Upon reflection, it is a poor question to ask why the quintet had such an impact on her. It is much more revealing to ask myself: Why did I not allow it to have an impact on me? Ruthless self-examination suggests that I was afraid of how a snob (any who might be in the square, including myself) would perceive me, if I reveled in ignorance with the common crowd.
What did I gain, by refusing to "play along"? I can't think of anything. What did I lose? A chance to be moved, to laugh, to feel camaraderie with a group of strangers, and to share those experiences with my mother.
All of this is a long way to go about saying that "play" is about letting go of fear, or perhaps going through fear and coming to the other side. The musicians played by letting their love for the music override their fears of an imperfect performance. The audience played by releasing their worries and criticisms, and wholeheartedly joining the performers on their journey. Playing in this way may create inconsistent brilliance, but it never produces mediocre perfection. When people are hungry for joy and creativity and human connection (and most people are), the player is there to share it. When people are hungry for a safely and carefully packaged impersonal experience, they can go to Disneyland.