I think the playwright whose work most resonates with me, right now, is Paula Vogel and her play How I Learned to Drive. 

I think this is the case because I have been struggling with an idea I have for a play, and have been struggling for some time, with the shape of it.  I heard something from Mike Geither recently that resonated with me; Geither said that he’s coming to realize that the structure or the form of a play is what is important, and I whole heartedly agree, and I think there should be a playwriting class dedicated solely to that topic.  In fact, I’m beginning to think that this is actually where the art lies.  I have heard in describing postmodern art forms, more times than I care to mention, that the form is the meaning, and I never really quite got what that was driving at, but more and more as I read plays I am coming to understand exactly what that means.  If we presented every playwright with the exact same story: plot, narrative, characters, etc, and asked them to turn it into a play, it is clear that we would have as diverse a set of plays at the end as we have already had presented to us.  Structurally, stylistically, vocally, in tableaux, image, symbol, language, and in use of space we would see a full range of possibilities for how plays can be constructed. 

I have been struggling with the play I am loosely calling Patterns.  It is a play that uses the metaphor of pattern as its uber theme and begins with a young woman addressing the audience about making a dress and the sewing machine and pattern that she has chosen.  The problem is that I could not get beyond the visual image of the woman addressing the audience and I could not get beyond a play structure that had direct address as its primary vehicle of exchange.  The awkwardness of this form was reinforced recently for me when I saw a couple plays at Little Box, including Waves and Projecting: both of which use women who directly address the audience as their primary form.  Waves has very distinct, well-drawn characters and events and is an emotionally enthralling piece; however, the form of the thing is not right.  In fact, I would characterize it as grueling.  In retrospect, I recently saw the play The Heidi Chronicles at the Eldred Theater at Case and it is, in my mind, what How I Learned to Drive would be had not Vogel had a different vision for the play.  The Heidi Chronicles expresses a woman’s life as reflected upon and shows in linear time the course of events that lead to where she is in the present.  It is boring.  It is difficult to sit through.  It is the exact problem of linearity that Vogel escapes. Very like Waves and The Heidi Chronicles, I simply have no doubt whatsoever that my play Patterns would become the same thing: grueling, maudlin, even tiresome and repetitive–if there is no consideration of what can be done by breaking form and reconsidering structure.  The art comes in the consideration of the form.  The art comes in stepping back and figuring out, like some ancient mathematician or philosopher, what the underlying structure or form is–and identifying how that form can be brought out.  It is no easy task and requires as much focus, concentration, and serendipity as writing alone.

A while back I read an essay by Eugene Ionesco called “Discovering the Theatre.”  I ‘found’ the essay in several beat up copies of the Tulane Drama Review that I somehow have laying about my house.  In the essay, Ionesco writes about his dissatisfaction with theater.  He writes:

“Why could I not accept theatrical reality? Why did its truth appear false to me? And why did the false seem to want to parade as true, substitute for truth?… [The actor’s] material presence destroyed the fiction. It was as though there were present two levels of reality, the concrete reality, impoverished, empty, limited, of these banal living men, moving and speaking upon the stage, and the reality of the imagination. And these two realities faced each other, unmasked, irreconcilable: two antagonistic universes which could not succeed in unifying and blending.”

I think I have finally come to understand what so upset Ionesco and am coming to understand what makes metatheatricality so important and a hyperreal or absurd or fantastic approach to theater equally important: the alternative is “impoverished, empty, and limited.”  There is something about the “two realities” facing each other that just shows the staged reality to be a thin grey thing…or, as Sylvia Plath might say, "They are always with us, the thin people / Meager of dimension as the gray people / on a movie screen. They / are unreal, we say."  As I read realistic plays and watch plays like The Heidi Chronicles it becomes almost unbearable: the unbearable unreal reality of it, like a scab that you mustn’t pick, and yet your fingers keep on sidling over to it.

My mind has boggled lately at trying to figure out what theater is.  What makes it theater?  For instance, can you simply take a novel or short story and put it on a stage, have people speak the lines, and say: “behold, theater?” And if that is not theater, or not theatrical, why is that?  What defines or demarks what theater should be?  I tried approaching the question of “what is theatre” from several different points of view, and have even discussed it on my blog: what is theatre, why is theatre important, etc., all to no effect: any attempt to write about it seems boring or redundant, definitely uninteresting: academic. And even in the context of considering craft with Vogel in mind that danger emerges.  But I’ll go back to Ionesco, as the nature of the conversation changed for me when I found his essay in that 1959 issue of TDR.

The article shocked me. At first, it shocked me because I was appalled by what Ionesco was saying about theatre. Then, I was shocked because I was agreeing with him. Finally, I found myself mentally applying the points he was discussing against the play I wrote most recently and identifying what was right and what was wrong with it—and I knew that what Ionesco was saying was correct. For instance, I’ll highlight one of the comments that Ionesco makes late in his essay which, although it may seem confounding, is precise and elucidating:

The theatre can only be theatre, even though for certain contemporary doctors of “theatrology” this identity with itself is charged with tautology, or considered false, an attitude which strikes me as the most incredible and amazing of paradoxes. / For these doctors, the theatre, being something other than theatre, is ideology, allegory, politics, lectures, essays or literature. This is as aberrant as if one were to claim that music should be archeology, or painting, physics and mathematics. (Ionesco and Pronko 16)

The point is so critical that I will no doubt make a fool of myself here articulating it clearly, redundantly, to myself: theatre is theatre. Well, what does that mean, precisely? It certainly begs a question. It begs a question that I want to avoid like the plague: If theatre is theatre, what then is theatre?

In his essay defending poetry, Shelley begins with a discussion of reason and imagination and the actions of mental processes on the individual and society. I will not presume to be so lofty. I will instead attempt to identify, of my own accord, those elements that make theatre unique. That is, what is it about theatre that makes it theatre? What makes theatre different from poetry, or different from screenplays, or what is unique when it is compared against the novel? To do this, I’ll begin with questions: Is theatre simply a physical space in which an action takes place? Is theatre the notion of seeing an action or event enacted? Or is theatre a glib sneer for practices that are intentionally dramatic and unnecessarily emotional—red herrings drawing attention from something more important? This question ‘what is theatre’ is likely has old as theatre itself and, despite my attempts, it not likely to be any nearer an answer than theatre is near its end. Perhaps theatre can be defined using the words of Potter Stewart, the Associate Justice of the United States, who, in articulating a definition of pornography said, simply, “I know it when I see it.” But if that’s the case, then it begs the willful suspension of disbelief: a phrase that not only irritates some but is a statement whose precise spirit led Eugene Ionesco to write his essay in the first place: namely, that theatre had become dishonest and embarrassingly false. (Ionesco and Pronko 3-18) The complicated fact is that theatre is all of those things mentioned above: a space, an action, and, unfortunately, a diversion. Theatre is many different things to many different people: to children, it is Bread and Puppet Theater or guignol; to subscribers at the Cleveland Play House, it is On Golden Pond; and for more sophisticated palates, it is the productions of experimental theatres such as convergence-continuum or the more extreme performance art of Karen Finley. In the introduction to his book Playwriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically, Michael Wright, talks about plays in a way that can be generalized to theatre, saying:

…there is no longer any meaningful single definition of a play that applies across the spectrum of what is being created around the world, beyond saying that a play is a (largely) live event that takes place in a space that all involved have agreed is a “stage.” And in the end Wright concludes that “there is little reason to believe that theatre will retreat to the well-made play or to some rigid Aristotelian framework. Theatre is far more likely to continue its expansion of form, subject matter, language, use of space, and so on…theatre continues to evolve in an open and free manner. (Wright xiv)

If this is so, then how can one define it? Worse still, how can one judge what is good theatre and what is not good? Is good theatre a full evening of theatre? Is it an hour? Ten minutes? Is it theatre that makes you laugh and feel good—or should it make your heart break? Or should it come right out and punch you in face and scream “hey, buddy, wake up and take a look around you?”

Let’s go back to Michael Wright, who has several ideas regarding what is important about theatre: first, it is a witnessed present, that is, the event that happens in real time; second, it is immediate: there is no filter or interpreter. To Wright, theatre is a ‘witnessed present’ that is “the problems of the characters are being worked out in front of us, right here and now,” and this, whether the play was written “today or in 504 B.C.” (Wright 6-7) And further, Wright notes, that “since the play needs this ‘us’ in order to exist, it’s our present at the same instant, because the problems of the characters reflect on our own lives.” More precisely, “the play is a present event—a play needs real time in which to occur and is put on by real people in front of other real people. Humans are watching humans…when we watch a play, the people performing in the play are right there, we are aware of them and they of us. And this means that thinking theatrically is also rooted in this awareness of the existence of the other.” (Wright 7) The theatre provides a sense of immediacy unlike other forms, “there is no filter between you and what’s acting upon your sensory receptors: we listen, watch, and feel the human struggles on the stage directly.” (Wright 8 ) Wright gives the example that, “we know without hearing a word that the couple over there is arguing, or the man sitting to our left is really nervous. We read these things in the behavior of people, but we also feel these things because we are in the same environment.” (Wright 7)

Aristotle in his Poetics states that theatre’s object is imitation, “Since those who imitate imitate men in action, and these must necessarily be either worthwhile or worthless people.” (Aristotle and Else 17) He then goes on to describe the elements that create good imitations and what they may be categorized as (comedy, tragedy, epic) and of what attributes they must consist. It is of note that the categorizations and attributes that Aristotle outlined where rebranded later as principles and eventually became a form of dogma in Europe that controlled what was and, more importantly, what was not produced for centuries.

Augusto Boal in his book Theatre of the Oppressed suggests that Aristotle’s Poetics presents a coercive structure who’s plain intent was to glorify the powerful and to dissuade those who would challenge them: seeking to elevate one moral sense (that of the patron) above another (that of the viewer) and disenfranchise the “worthless people” mentioned above. (Boal 3 ) Boal defiantly states that theatre is a means to political action and a means of creating political action and a political consciousness. For his trouble he was run out of Brazil.

William Henderson in his article “Why Theatre?” raises possibilities that are both similar to those raised by Michael Wright and yet different, identifying elements important to both those participating in the creation and those viewing it. Henderson is unique in including in his consideration of theatre the aesthetic elements attendant to all aspects of theatre: both inside and out, both actor and audience member. Specifically, Henderson points to the adrenalin of performance and the never-to-be-repeated moments of sheer astonishment; the sensual “pleasure of entering unfamiliar and strange ramshackle buildings, or coming upon an entirely new spatial configuration…the simultaneous danger and allure of performers’ bodies in the space around us”; in true Bakhtinian form, “the multiplicity of dialogues that exist—between performers and audience; between the various technological media at work; amongst the performers themselves; and between them and the technological forces employed—create the possibility of an intellectual engagement at a level which purely electronic media can only gesture at.” Henderson comments that “Theatre is also and always, the circus…is a high-wire event through time with the constant risk of falling off and never being able to recover…”; and that “the frailty of the performance…the very real vulnerability of the performer, the artist; and here, possibly, the real truth…the question not of our power to woo and entertain and audience but of our weakness…the sheer vulnerability of the human being in front of us surely confronts us with our own…the real sense that in our vulnerability and weakness we are fully human and thus fully connected with those around us…” (Henderson 11/08/2007)

In his article, “Why Theatre: Questions and Answers”, Craig Stewart Walker quotes Rick Salutin, a Canadian novelist and playwright, who bluntly states, “anything that brings people together in a communalizing way is valuable.” (Walker 55)

So, to sum things up (to this point), theatre is a physical space (that may or may not be dangerous to get to or strangely configured) in which actors (who may be dangerous or alluring or both at the same time) intentionally imitate (or enact) dramatic and emotional actions (that may or may not be politically coercive) which take place before us in real time (and thus will never be precisely repeated again) allowing no filter or intermediary interpreter (so we have to figure things out ourselves) which exposes the vulnerability and weakness of all present and may demonstrate the truth of our human condition (as weak and vulnerable) in a communal environment such that a dialogue is created, connecting all of us.

Ionesco would be quick to point out, I think, that what is missing (and it should be missing) from the summation I provided above is that which is contained in the latter part of the opening quote I took from him, namely that misapprehension that theater “is ideology, allegory, politics, lectures, essays or literature. “ That is, nowhere in the summation I provided is there any mention of the content of the theatre (okay, there’s one mention)—nor is there any attempt to explain theatre in terms of something else: something that it is not. It is precisely Ionesco’s point that theatre should not be ideology, allegory, politics, lectures, essay or literature, for these forms already exist and do perfectly well on their own. So, theatre should be theatre.

But the confluence of many of these elements into theatre had a damaging (and still does have a damaging) effect on the experience of theatre, leading Ionesco to write that:

I derived no pleasure from [theatre]…The playing of the actors disturbed me: I was embarrassed for them…there was something false in it all…it seemed to me that the actor was doing something inadmissible, censurable. He was renouncing himself, abandoning himself, changing skin…It seemed painful to me, and somehow dishonest…To go to the theatre meant for me to go and see apparently serious people make a spectacle of themselves. (Ionesco and Pronko 3)

On the surface there are a few things that draw me immediately to Vogel and especially the play How I Learned to Drive: the routine breaking of the linear narrative; the use of visual images and aural statements from driving guides/classes to break into this monolog-driven play and add a higher level of meaning; the use of direct audience address/narrative broken by engaging, staged sequences between the characters; the nature of what Paul Castagno calls in his book New Playwriting Strategies, the polyvocal text–that is, the intrusion of other voices.  The idea of polyvocality is taken from Mikhail Bakhtin and his work the Dialogic Imagination, which holds up the novel form as the great potential for polyvocal, multitemporal texts–but theater can accomplish the same thing in a much livelier way.

Pam Monteleone in the journal Theatre Topics, writes:

In Part II, "Strategies of Structure and Form," Castagno explores ways in which the dialogic principle shapes larger structural units, from the "beat segment" to the scene, the predominant "building block" for most contemporary playwrights (129). Two of the most useful chapters examine monologue, a noticeable omission in many playwriting tests. Castagno’s analysis of new monologue forms, multiple narrators and voice-overs, for instance, that blur the distinction between telling and showing, furnish playwrights with more creative choices for structuring time and space than writing "blackout."

Castagno uses playwrights such as Vogel as the exemplars of how new playwriting strategies can be employed and realized.  As a result of exploring Castagno’s book, I have recently read Eric Overmyer’s Native Speech which was equally revelatory to me in terms of jarring narrative structures and spatial/scene changes, as well as techniques for making the monologues work: such as the use of a microphone and radio program, the main character adopting different personas and voices so frequently that the polyvocal nature of the text cannot be doubted.

The power of How I Learned to Drive comes through its oblique approach to the narrative, which is precisely structure.  The play is revealed piecemeal through techniques that break the linear narrative and cause the audience to view events out of time and out of place and thus to view them all through different eyes.  A play that is presented linearly allows an audience to predict what will happen by seeing ahead, and more importantly, to judge the content of the narrative because the structure is an inherited structure which advances a traditional logic that is not only not challenging but is based on assumptions of epistemology that postmodernism directly confronts and seeks to overturn.  The logic of how we know is not step one, step two, step three; experience comes at us from many angles and we never really understand what happened until we can get distance from the events; a distance which the play itself plays with.

The use of visual images and aural commentary or framing provides another postmodern break to the traditional narrative structure and focuses attention on society’s formal structures and rules but abuts them to a highly transgressive story.  Although, I guess I’m forced to consider how postmodern some elements are as I guess Tennessee Williams used projected subtitles in The Glass Menagerie, and I doubt many would consider him postmodern. The nature of these visual and aural segments also function in a highly symbolic way as the mind is much more capable of comprehending and holding concrete concepts delivered through symbolic presentations than highly abstract constructions.  The use, then of these visual and aural symbols provides the mind of the audience something to “chew” on or digest as the contrast is presented or as the overt meaning of the symbol is reconstructed by the playwright in the context of the events of the play.  In some cases, these stage symbols act as foreshadowing for directions that are to come, besides commenting on the action of the piece. For me, this is an interesting “toy,” for lack of a better term, as traditional pattern use in dressmaking can be used in a similar manner; that is commentary can be added to the events of the play from dressmaking texts of a certain period alongside images standard to dressmaking.  These external structures again provide the minds of audience members something to ponder or consider in and of themselves and also in the context of the events and meaning of the play.  Also, these external structures make the text of the play polyvocal or include elements of what Bakhtin refers to as heteroglossia–that is, multivoiced texts create new meaning and multiple layers of meaning.

The use of dramatic sequences is central to the success of this play, as the temptation to have a monolog-driven play that takes as its form direct audience address must have been quite tempting at the outset of the writing of this play.  But as mentioned above, per my experience at Little Box, and other minor plays that I have had the chance to see off and on, this play form may have worked one time (the first time), but has little hope of working effectively with audiences today.  People expect much of their entertainment and given the amount of time people a lot to doing anything these days they have a right to demand the most from the time they spend doing anything other than what they want to do–assuming, of course, that theater isn’t it.  Sitting in a theater and listening to one character vomit for his or her neurotic problems or the history of her neurotic condition is not particularly favorable, nor is a fatty layer of maudlin emotion buttered on top.  People today are much more cynical than of yore and while compassion exists, consistently overplaying emotion does not.  So, finding new ways to make people feel the emotion or feel the emotional confusion or experience the suddenness of the event and attempt to synthesize the experience in the context of the play is, to my mind, a much better solution than mere presentation.  As well, like it or not, when coming to the theater people expect to see representations of dramatic events.  As far as we try to get from the Aristotelian model of play construction there are some aspects which cannot be ignored, and that of a re-enactment is one of them.  Beyond that, character in action is still the single best way for an audience to understand and derive meaning from theater: showing not telling.

The polyvocal nature of the text is driven home (beyond the use of audio voiceovers) by the use of the Greek chorus and the addition of regular interactions with family members–especially those of earlier generations documenting the voice of the past.  The use of the Greek chorus accomplishes at least two things: it further plays with the structure of the play and how understanding of the events of the play and the issues of the play are delivered to the audience; it provides access to yet another voice (lens) through which events are expressed and understanding achieved.  The use of the Greek chorus, I think, also underlines the somewhat faceless nature of influences on our lives.  That is, while we might be able to trace certain childhood mis-understandings of the world back to our family, it can never be precisely clear what their origin is–whether something heard or felt or witnessed–and the use of a chorus presents the audience with a largely faceless construction that can manifest itself in many forms or identities throughout.  Considered in this way, the Greek chorus is much more ominous than any one character could have been.  The ability of the chorus to adopt a multitude of voices again underlines the significance of the polyvocal nature of the play and the diverse method by which meaning is constructed and life is understood.

The end of the play delivers a sense of “this is how I’ve come to be” without the age old framing device of a person sitting down on a wooden stool and saying, “Well, it all began back in…”, and going on to bore us from there, or the terrible linearity of The Heidi Chronicles.

The power for me of Vogel and the “language” playwrights in general, as labeled by Castagno and others, is that they force the construction of theater into a different form–a form that defines itself over for each play and is and can only be unique for that play: as each experience is unique.  In fact, it has just struck me how absurd is the notion of the Aristotelian form for plays–this “handed down” construct: that all plays should be forced into this single form–like Cinderella’s sisters cutting apart their feet to shove them into the glass slipper! 

Works Cited:

Aristotle, and Gerald Frank Else. Poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970.

Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press, 1993.

Brustein, Robert Sanford. Millennial Stages :Essays and Reviews, 2001-2005. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Hayes, Thomas. Weebelly.com: A playwright’s blog: dedicated to all things play building. October (2007): 11/16/2007. http://weebelly.com/26/playwriting-process-thinking-theatrically/

Hayes, Thomas. Weebelly.com: A playwright’s blog: dedicated to all things play building. November (2009): 11/17/2009. https://www.weebelly.com/17/discovering-theatre-a-spring-board-discussion/

Henderson, William. “Why Theatre?” Craft Culture. September (2006): 11/08/2007. http://www.craftculture.org/Bench/whenderson1.htm

Ionesco, Eugene, and Leonard C. Pronko. “Discovering the Theatre.” The Tulane Drama Review 4.1 (1959): 3-18.

McKee, Robert. Story :Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. 1st ed. New York: ReganBooks, 1997.

Miller, Arthur. “The Shadows of the Gods: A Critical View of the American Theater.” Harper’s Magazine 217 (1958): 35-43.

Monteleone, Pam. Review: New Playwriting Strategies: A Language-Based Approach to Playwriting. By Paul C. Castagno. Theatre Topics 14.1 (2004) 375-376. Accessed: 11/17/2009 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_topics/v014/14.1monteleone.html

Walker, Craig Stewart. “Why Theatre: Questions and Answers.” Canadian Theatre Review Spring. 86 (1996): 55.

Wright, Michael. Playwriting-in-Process : Thinking and Working Theatrically. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997.

Oh, what a marvelous piece.  Or is it pieces? I have been thinking about this play, performance, installation, multimedia extravaganza since seeing it on Saturday night.  In the making, on and off, for nearly five years, Raymond Bobgan and Chris Seibert delivered a work that was clever, intimate, mysterious, amazing, shocking, and damn nearly a dozen other adjectives that I could rattle off all to the infinite boredom of you, my fine reader.

The piece begins innocently enough with Seibert stepping forward in the persona of C.C. Bertie who has made a play.  Nervously excited, Bertie happily chats about her work with some modest instructions to the audience–such as to imagine the things that are not on stage (i.e. at one point she says, essentially, “if I’m climbing a flight of stairs… Well, you don’t see any stairs here do you?”)  This introduction is metatheatrical, as it introduces the play within a play and “breaks the fourth wall” by directly addressing the audience.  C.C. Bertie’s character, along with being nervously excited, is shy and overly-enthusiastic as she introduces her work.

The work begins with a video projection along with which Bertie hums and bum bum bum’s the Overture.  The video winds its way through a fire and inside the study of Mr. Hades, whose fireplace we will stare at for the next two hours.  Chiseled into the fireplace are the words “Ars Magna Alchemica Est,” if my memory serves, which means, I think, “This is the Magic of Great Art" or "This is a Great Work of Magic" or something like that. Which, in my opinion, was certainly confirmed by the time the play wrapped up.  My mind immediately latched on to Hades, which was then commented on by Bertie herself who said something to the effect of “I know, it’s creepy isn’t it?” 

We are then introduced to the premise: six people saying the night at Mr. Hades’ estate, one will inherit everything as Mr. Hades is going away.  The six characters include Mr. Cobb; Mr. Cobb’s wife, Blighty; Georgina; the Guy; Nervous Girl; and Young Master Whistler.  After receiving instructions from Mr. Hades, they each retire to their respective rooms for the night, which appear in quadrants on the video screen as surveillance video of four bedrooms.  Except for Young Master Whistler, who leaves the house (against the protestations of Nervous Girl). The plot quickly picks up pace as we see, for instance, Guy looking under his bed on the surveillance video, and chaos generally breaks out as pieces of a dismembered woman are found scattered about the house.  An Inspector arrives to determine what has happened, but the Inspector vanishes after going into the attic. A parallel story is also introduced with Young Master Whistler running off to visit a widow–who lives on a property adjacent to Mr. Hades’ estate. This story introduces the widow as an abused wife (hit and branded with a hot fire poker) whose husband has died (choking on his own vomit).  There are rumors that the widow is a witch.  The parallel story takes on attributes of all such stories, and I was reminded vaguely of Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom.  There is also a strong Oedipal element to their relationship, as the widow constantly takes actions that Young Master Whistler observes as being things his mother also does.

The action of the piece is moved along through various mechanisms which make the work much more powerful than this basic plot exposition provides.  For instance, as the victim is discovered, the video screen breaks into a montage of scraps of slasher films depicting the brutal murders of women being, appropriately, cut to pieces. The use of quadrants of surveillance-type footage ad a certain ‘realistic’ grit to the production. The projection of the fireplace in the study had a surreal impact on me for a variety of reasons. First, I have for many years had strange dreams of being in a haunted house–very passé, I know, but in my dreams the house is alive with a locus of evil in the cellar–usually the furnace room–which I am compelled for some reason to visit. The house can be small or immense.  It can be familiar, or very foreign–somehow, though, I find myself going down into the cellar.  Ultimately, I am convinced that I am being guided through my own subconscious to the source of something powerful and yet not fully known to me.  I feel almost like Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House.  Second, when I was younger I used to play various video games, one of which was The Seventh Guest. And the fireplace and premise for the first part of this play very much reminded me of this game–making me feel very much like I was immersed within it. As well, each ‘character’ introduced is a virtual character shown only as a projection standing with a certain body posture.  C.C. Bertie enacts the role of each character as she tells her story and assumes that character’s body posture, as projected, while speaking–thus, the audience comes to know the characters in Mr. Hades’ house more so by their physical manifestation, than by what each says. With regard to Young Master Whistler and the Widow, this story takes place in a parallel space, stage left of the “main space.”  There is a plain mat with a circle of stones–a magic circle–inside is the widow, outside is the young master. 

(Spoiler alert, as I will be revealing things — I know that Raymond mentioned some pieces going to the NY Fringe, I don’t know if Cut to Pieces is (it should be)–regardless, I’ll be discussing story points).

In Act II the Hades and Persephone plot gathers steam, the Inspector returns, and the relationship between Young Master Whistler and the Widow intensifies.  The act begins, again, with C.C. Bertie coming out and discussing her play and apologizing for the fact that it was sort of weird.  She then goes into a discussion of live studio audiences and how they have signs that they hold up that read “A-P-P-L-A-U-S-E” and when the signs are held up people’s faces look like this: stunned face, and she then claps with great enthusiasm.  A nice comic moment.  Bertie then tells the audience that if she had a show the sign would read “A-W-W-W-W-W” and every time a guest came on the show that would be the sign that came up: “like a puppy.”  At which point, some in our audience did say “Awwww” which produced great excitement from Bertie; who then got the whole audience to do it again with her–remarking that they should remember that, as it would be important later.  The ‘who-done-it’ begins again with the Inspector grilling Mr. Hades.  After some doing, Mr. Hades produces a sack with and dumps out a doll that is in pieces, bemoaning what has happened to her.  The Inspector grills everyone and C.C. Bertie becomes implicated in events herself–surprising her.  The plot of Persephone’s abduction becomes one of Bertie’s descent into the “underworld” of her own head where this whole Whodunit is taking place. Young Master Whistler begins working for the Widow in earnest, gathering black, reflectionless water; building fires; getting wood; etc, and, in general, living with the Widow.  She treats him very well, feeding him food that his mother would only fix on special occasions and he attempts to learn from her–what precisely is unclear.  The Widow reveals facts about her husband’s death after drinking something the Widow prepared for him and that she could not stay in the house after his death, moving progressively farther and farther away and eventually building a new house that abutted the property of Mr. Hades.  The Widow watches the “comings and goings” at Mr. Hades’ house, noting that people go in, but seldom come out.  Only one, in fact–Young Master Whistler.  We learn that there is a relationship between Georgina and Guy, and then hear a “look what you made me do” story about the rape of a young girl–who, according to the story–is dismembered afterwards.  The relentless questioning by the Inspector leads to the implication that Georgina has been raped by Guy. But eventually culminates in the breakdown of C.C. Bertie who hides herself in a box on stage and the Inspector invokes a Pity Party for her counting 1…2…3… at which point the audience says “awwww” per the above.  This continues as Bertie reveals her interest in joining the pity party and the revelation that Bertie is Georgina and the girl in the story (all the characters, in fact) and that she has been raped.  The Inspector says, “oh, you’ve been raped… 1…2…3…” and the audience says “awwww” at which point most people in the audience realized, shocked somewhat, what they just said, how, and the implication of the revelation and their reaction to it.  C.C. Bertie begins giving herself a pity party in the box, chanting “1…2…3… Awwww” incessantly as the Inspector bursts into song I Fall to Pieces by Patsy Cline (dubbed) and the whole stage becomes a mire of confusion and sound and visual effects as the recording of Cline picks up speed and whirs into chipmunk talk and the Inspector writhes and tears off the red dress she’s wearing and falls to the floor.

The technical effects are wonderful during this section as well.  There is a small wheeled cart on stage, which reminded me of something used by hotdog vendors.  In the first act it was the cart on which Mr. Hades “sat at his desk”.  In Act II, the dismembered doll is dumped on top of it and C.C. Bertie enacts several scenes discussing the rape and the relationship with the rapist.  A small camera was installed on the handle of the cart to capture the “eye-level” view of the doll, and the video was projected to the main screen.  This dual theatrical reality is something that I’ve discussed elsewhere in the context of convergence-continuum’s play Spawn of the Petrolsexuals where similar effects were used.  For instance, I wrote:

At another point, Anger Boy, in a crisis of faith, confronts God.  The exchange is carried out in the style of an interview.  On stage, Anger Boy sits on a crate next to a broken TV, talking with a fellow homeless man, played by Wes Shofner.  On the video screen (pre-recorded) is Geoff wearing a suit of clothes sitting behind a desk—very like an interview one sees on a late-night television talk show—and Wes, wearing flowing white robes with a full head and beard of white hair, sits on a nearby couch for the interview.  This event, in the performance, creates a contrast between what the audience sees in front of them on stage (the crate, a broken TV), and what the audience sees projected on the screen (the late-night interview).  The realization of this contrast, and the implication of its meaning (that Anger Boy is imagining or delusional) is a part of the storytelling—a part of the storytelling that would be impossible to convey by any “normal” theatrical means. Thus, for convergence-continuum, the very process of play creation becomes an active one, one that is occurring even during the live theatrical performance, and one in which the audience becomes a participant, not simply a passive viewer.  Both of the examples provided instantiate the artistic statement given above: that is, the audience crosses the threshold into the world of the play and experiences it; and the experience of theater expands the imagination and extends the conventional boundaries of language, structure, space, and performance that challenges the conventional notions of what theater is.  And it is that conventional notion of theater that younger audiences today have come to reject, and which convergence seeks to expand, evolve, and turn on its head.

The same is true here with Cut to Pieces, the live performance by Seibert is contrasted with the prerecorded video on the screen creating a “split reality” or a “layered reality” which creates very complex meaning–very like the Betonie the Shaman section in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, where the dialectic of time and space folds meaning in on itself and expanding our understanding of reality–even unconsciously–exponentially.  The audience becomes aware of this, even if only in a visceral way, and it heightens the experience of the event.  As well, the prerecording of C.C. Bertie inside the larger box, while Seibert bursts out of the box as the inspector dressed in a red dress was a wonderful moment, enhanced by the chaos of the 1…2…3…, etc. and the lip syncing with Patsy Cline.  Seibert writes in ink on her fingers which is visible under blacklight (and through the cart-top camera), creating stick figure people, hearts with names in them, and animated drawings on the screen all lend themselves to very unique and powerful story-telling methods. The interaction with the stones on the mat to create different sorts of “spaces” and the use of the stones themselves as markers for the Widow and Young Master Whistler, further enhanced what I keep finding myself referring to as the three dimensional nature of the performance–by which I mean performances that understand the full-scope of what theater is–the use of space, sound, light, props, etc. to create immersive experience, as contrasted with traditional flat, naturalistic space configurations where two dimensional characters carry on conversations beyond a fourth wall.  Throughout the pace was well-managed and right when the potential for flagging interest presented itself a new direction and burst of energy surged forth reinvigorating the performance and reengaging interest in compelling ways.

In the Act III, Persephone returns to the surface as the doll is put back together. The Inspector takes on a god-like presence on both the stage and the screen, becoming the voice of the unconscious–Superego?–pushing the Ego out of its hiding spot beneath the surface and into the light.  In the subplot of Young Master Whistler and the Widow, we see that despite his better intentions, Young Master Whistler becomes complacent and the Widow, not to be taken advantage of, pushes him out.  Despite protestations of love and hopes for marriage which will not be fulfilled, the Widow rejects Young Master Whistler remanding him to a new path and an alternate life than what he had envisioned.  Young Master Whistler points out to the Widow that he owns the land abutting her property and that is where he hoped to live with her.  Not desiring to live alone, Young Master Whistler gives the Widow the land nonetheless and remarks that he will be leaving.  It becomes clear throughout that Young Master Whistler and Mr. Hades are the same person.  I can’t remember if the Widow states that she will clear the land or if Young Master Whistler volunteers to do so, but the house being razed becomes a fact.  Back at the house, C.C. Bertie is coming to terms with what has happened to her, the mystery having been resolved, and the sudden realization that the house is on fire.  All are running from the house and must escape its destruction.  And C.C. Bertie, the rape victim, gathers together all her shattered personas and stands before the audience as herself, a unified woman once again–damaged, but stronger.  All that is left, presumably, is the reality of the myth, in which Persephone ate pomegranate seeds and was thus remanded to returning to the underworld for half of the year–hence the seasons.  I can only assume that C.C. Bertie will experience a similar fate, periodically returning to the desolate landscape of the interior night throughout the remainder of her time.

I must apologize here as my consideration of this piece was, unfortunately, stretched to many days beyond the performance and I have been forced to rely on an all-too-unreliable memory for the main of this and did not, as I would have liked, see the performance three or four times.  This play by Seibert and Bobgan is one of the best that I have seen in a long time and has impacted how I think of theater making.