behind this curtain

a series of imagined theatres. notes for future performances. impossible performances.

Production photo from Forced Entertainment’s Hidden J

Once, when she and a friend were backpacking in Kuwait, the two were kidnapped by a group of men in masks. Blindfolded, they were led to some distant, dingy chamber, kept under lock and key. Muffled voices in other rooms, in other languages. Some cistern or crawlspace, the walls gathered in on every side.

Eventually a deal was struck. She was told that they would be let free under one condition. She must tell their captors that she loved them, convincingly, make them believe it was true.

Lots of makeup. Lots of costumes provided. A dressing room with mirrors and that golden hue, a door marked private. Plenty of time to prepare, to pick the proper part. Out there a curtain. And when the lights came on the murmurs in the dark beyond dropped away.

It was only when she started to cry that the men began to clap, the air rushing back into the room and feet stamping and cries of encore, all their eyes looking back at her, all those glistening eyes.

In rehearsal the other night we are playing a game of truth and lies. How would you answer this question as honestly as possible? Or, rather, as honestly as possible if you were someone else? This is an entirely different matter from simple dishonesty. They are giddy to start, speaking in absurd extremes, but another quality soon settles over the room: spans of sobriety and the occasional freefall. They are heady with the freedom that the confession offers, and soon they are getting close to the place where everything is true, even it if is not something that they can call their own truth.  And so R. tells this story of her travels through the middle east…

The game only convinces when someone gets hurt. Keep playing until the tears come, then we’ll know the play has crossed over to the other side. Then we’ll applaud.

a series of imagined theatres. notes for future performances. impossible performances.

an audience of rabbits in Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia

A single candle just in front of the far upstage wall slowly descends from the rafters in an otherwise pitch-dark theatre. The descent is very slow, very nearly imperceptible. It unhinges our sense of depth and ground, as if it were something imagined or something that has been there forever. As in Beckett’s Not I where the speaking mouth alone is lit in a nearly empty space, and where that pinpoint of light seems to hover and shift about as we focus on it alone, here the candle gives the illusion of being in more motion than it actually realizes.

As it reaches the floor we just make out the clutch of rabbits scurrying across the stage before the flame goes out.

I remember vividly playing out in O.’s garden as a child–maybe seven or eight–the whole green stretch between the sandbox and the tree house lit up in midday Summer, and catching there a brown shape rushing across the far limits of my sight. The size of a large dog, but far too fast and absolutely silent. When I turned to look it was gone and no one else had seen it. I’ve had this sensation since, of course, but that time it was something much more wild than any other. Completely without form or name, these glimpses are marks of solitude; mine alone, they belong to the kingdom of misgivings. They cannot be communicated. They are but the most glaring of our multitude of sensations that flicker at our attention, that indescribable certainty that someone is watching.

How to give that sense of just missing the appearance? A theatre for the movements out of the corner of our eye?

For the past few weeks I’ve been posting a collection of fragments under the heading “imagined theatres”: scraps of text that could be dialogues, perhaps, or even a single voice speaking to itself, texts that could be images and sequences that trail off and away. In some senses these are inspired by the working process of Romeo Castellucci, a director whom I greatly admire and who has shaped my thought for more than a decade now. The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, the first and only English-language monograph on Castellucci’s singular body of work, reprints several pages from the Italian director’s notebooks:

“The light comes on. A diorama faithfully representing a primitive landscape: two ‘Neanderthals’, one make and one female (represented hyper-realistically), have sex with each other. No pretence. Once the sexual encounter is over, the male gets up. End of performance.”

“A suite of gym machines that ‘come to life’ and function on their own. High amplification. The microphones pick up and make a din of the pneumatic and hydraulic mechanisms that move the part of the machinery.”

“A big countdown display at the back of the stage. On stage, there is just a chimpanzee. The countdown starts at twenty minutes. And at zero?”

“Washing a leather armchair really well. Washing it with water and soap, with scrubbing brushes and sponges. Washing it thoroughly, with commitment and determination.”

“A deer, free on the stage, which looks blurred behind a semi-transparent PVC curtain. The idea of dawn. The idea of fog. A panorama appears to be a long way away.”

“Work on time. Time alone.”

”An infinite series of black curtains (forty or fifty) which open  one after another (they have pieces of white material sewn onto them, in different shapes), until they reach the back of the stage. At the end, the brick wall of the theatre can be seen. The end.”

–selections from The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio (Routledge, 2007), 265-266.

For Castellucci, these conceptions collected over the years act as the raw material for his later work, so that reading these many fragments now will incite an occasional glimmer of recognition: in a sentence or a short paragraph, we catch sight of the seeds of some performance we have already seen, the fingertip of the larger body to come.

I am a writer and only occasionally a director, so my imagined theatres must remain in utero, suspended in conception without actualization. In this way, these imagined theatres take seriously the theatre as a site of “theory”, where the theoretical performs and makes the  scene. For better or for worse,  these are not merely poetic statements or dream images, but propositions in the language and shape of theatrical traditions, set against the rules and dimensions of a certain stage. So that when I speak of passing through a room, for example, or standing on the final cusp of a great desert, I am always also speaking of an event in a theatre. What this means is that these most private conceptions are always public: for a public and/or performed by a public. I imagine that we are all speaking these lines together. What this also means is that behind each imagining lies the expectation that these will take place some day or that they have already taken place in one of the countless theatres that gleam dimly in some subterranean quarter of this world of ours.  A kind of contradiction in terms, an imagined theatre is an impossibility clinging fast to its eventual realization. Finally (at least for now), by putting my imagined propositions and theories on the stage, I am acknowledging the inherent duplicity or what J.L. Autin would call the “parasitic” nature of these thoughts, how they are “etiolations” of both theory and theatre. I own the fact that these are only flimsy cardboard cutouts, that no one is actually getting hurt or weeping. If you look closely enough that dead man in the corner is still breathing.

a series of imagined theatres. notes for future performances. impossible performances.

photo by Uta Barth

In the room that is this theatre, a single window backs the audience. The daylight, dim light, streams in onto a white wall, onto hardwood floors painted white. Everyone is silent and attentive as they watch the gleam stretch out further and further into the gloaming, as the light flips its pages. It takes many hours. After the blue is gone and the grey is gone, the room shudders imperceptibly.

Now is when he would lift his head and see something outside. Now is when he would decide to take a walk.

The artist Uta Barth turns her camera on the vagaries of the sun through windowshades and curtains. The flicker of late afternoon light that glazes the corner of another photographer’s portrait here comes center, so that we see what could be any white wall colored in this particular moment’s cast of light. Nearing abstraction in the way that her entire large-scale print is taken up by the uniform white wall, apart from the edge of a window just peeking over the limit of the frame, off-kilter, grounding us in a domestic world. Our gaze keeps drifting along the skeins of light and reeling itself back to that sharp edge. Some kind of gentle dialogue like swimming away from a beach, testing the current further and further away from shore. The shores of this home, this room, lasting. And then the temptation of the now giving way.

a series of imagined theatres. notes for future performances. impossible performances.

unattributed illustration of focusing hook and cloth.

In half-light, the stage is set with great care by a trio of stage hands: a meticulously realized nineteenth century living room. Lights down as they leave. In the darkness, whispers and then the churning sound of some machine, the shuffling of feet, panting. The sounds cut out suddenly and we are back to half-light, the stage hands return to reset the stage once more, slight adjustments of the furniture, a few new portraits on the walls, replacing the old, perhaps a half-finished meal carefully laid out. Darkness again, this time the sound of lighthearted conversation at several removes, behind another wall or closed door. Again the lights return. Again, the stage hands enter. They clear the table and carry on a large photographic camera complete with black focusing cloth that they place center stage. It faces the audience. They leave. The lights remain on.

a series of imagined theatres. notes for future performances. impossible performances.

At the far edge where the last dune of the last desert gives over. The man speaks, finally:

I wanted to tell you I love you

So I did

Just like that

There didn’t seem much else to do

The best songs were already over

A stairway to a balcony

That looks out to the other mountain

The one I meant to climb

So I kept coming back here

To that fast moving footprint

Like a smudge of lipstick on the bar-top tumbler

Chairs on tables

The jukebox dark yet

Ready to resume that faint blues tune

About a one way train

Cutting across the great plains