The Miracle of Theater

www.milagro.org

If you want ethnic authenticity, turn off the radio. Instead, go to the theater and you'll see in-depth yet entertaining discussions of the complicated American ethnic landscape in plays like Enrique Urueta's Learn to Be Latina.

Currently playing at Milagro Teatro under the direction of Antonio Sonera and starring Olga Sanchez and Nicole Accuardi, Learn to Be Latina is a satirical take on the pop music industry's treatment of ethnicity as part and parcel of their corporate package. It's a good example of how, in the family of entertainment genres, theater's the only place you can get this kind of authenticity.

Hanan (Accuardi) is a Lebanese-American singer with dreams of stardom interviewing for a trio of robotic auditors (Orion Bradshaw, Kelly Godell and Matthew Kerrigan). They love her voice, and they love her body, but she's just a little too ethnic in a - how do they put it? - "shawarma-eating, suicide-bomber kind of way." Hanan's about to walk out the door in righteous indignation when the auditors' boss, the Irish-accented Mary O'Malley (Sanchez) makes her an offer she can't refuse: learn to be "Latiner" and you can be a star. Hanan's Faustian bargain just gets worse and worse as her sense of identity becomes fragmented by the parts she has to play. She's Lebanese-American, but she's pretending to be from Buenos Aires. She's discovering that she's gay, but she "needs to be impaled on star cock by Saturday" if she's going to retain her credibility as a Latina pop star. After all, "Good Latinas don't eat cunt."

Those lines are meant to be rude and unappealing. Urueta alienates us from the characters representing the recording industry by putting abhorrent language in their mouths. Sonera accentuates this effect by giving them cartoonish physicality, most notably the auditors' mechanical movement in the opening scene. The satire demonstrates the ways in which popular music harms us by oversimplifying our ethnic identities. The truth is more nuanced than you hear about on the radio.

Learn to Be Latina is not alone in discussing the complicated reality of ethnicity in America, but theater might be. Playwrights today are writing about their ethnicity in ways that defy stereotypes. And they're getting noticed: Quiara Alegría Hudes won a Pulitzer for Water by the Spoonful. Eliza Bent published a five-page interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in the latest issue of American Theatre about his plays like N(E)IG(H)G(BO)ERS. Stories with recognition in the theater community like these are not being told by theater's rich siblings, cinema/TV and pop music. Those media are notorious for their heavy-handed use of stereotypes. Hipster headdresses at Coachella and George Lucas' anti-Semitic aliens make theater a refreshing venue where we can talk honestly and within a supportive environment about race and ethnicity in America.

So if you struggle with issues of ethnicity, or are simply curious about them, turn off the radio and get to the theater. In spite of the Urueta's auditor's quip that "Whites aren't anything, except for Italians, because Italians are wops and wops aren't white," we're all of us something. And all of those somethings are living in closer proximity than perhaps any other time in America's history. If we want to have any kind of chance living well together, then we need stories like Learn to Be Latina.

Responding to Ulf Schmidt's "Agile Theater"

This January, dramaturg Ulf Schmidt presented a paper titled "Auf dem Weg zum agilen Theater" ("On the Way to Agile Theater") at the Jahreskonferenz der Dramaturgischen Gesellschaft in Mannheim. In it he explores ways in which contemporary theater is failing, and how it can regain social relevancy. His interest in using digital technology on stage has merit but is not new, while his assertion that we appropriate production models from other industries constitutes a categorical error.

 

He begins by drawing a bleak scenario of contemporary German theater. By his report, it' doesn't appear that much different from American theater. Still, his writing features un-cited charts and hyperbole (e.g. "das Ende des Stadttheater-Schauspiels [ist] in den nächsten zehn Jahren denkbar." - "the end of publicly funded theater could occur in the next ten years.") Bob Abelman and Cheryl Kushner's diagnosis in A Theater Criticism/Arts Journalism Reader is more trustworthy. What Schmidt dramatically refers to as "die digitale Naissance" is more prosaically defined by Abelman and Kushner as modern audiences' "access to a wide variety of entertainment options through an increasing array of personal and social media." (2) Not covered by Schmidt with any kind of thoroughness is theater's "relegation to high culture status." (4) Abelman and Kushner attribute theater's seeming elitism to the "digitale Naissance," but ongoing experiments in ticket pricing seem to tell a different story, or at least a parallel story. According to Portland Center Stage Artistic Director Chris Coleman, Signature Theater's $20 price cap has promoted a younger and more diverse audience. Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis has seen similar results by not charging for tickets. Finally, Abelman and Kushner distinguish between screen and stage by noting that the former promotes audience passivity and the later audience activity. (8)

 

Schmidt proposes two primary solutions: incorporating digital content on stage, and following a corporate production model. The first has merit, proved by the experiments of 3-Legged Dog Media + Theater Group (3LD) and their associated companies. In January's issue of American Theatre, 3LD's artistic director Kevin Cunningham noted that "Many of our more recent projects surround and immerse the audience in moving image and sound." The connection to immersive theater is notable in light of Punchdrunk's long-running Sleep No More, and Alex Timbers' use thereof in his current Broadway project, Rocky. In 3LD's specific case, immersive theater addresses the omnipresence of digital technology in our modern lives. Generally, immersive theater embraces theater's capacity for audience activity.

Schmidt's second proposal, following a corporate production model inspired by the work of Hollywood and Silicon Valley makes a categorical error: TV and technology companies create products for mass consumption. Such is the nature of broadcast supplemented by archival platforms like Netflix and Hulu, and the creation of iPads to be sold worldwide to enable access to Netflix and Hulu. Theater, by its nature, is a limited time event. As such, it suffers the same market weakness as any handmade craft: limited production leads to higher cost.

While hyperbolic and un-cited, Schmidt is correct that one of the challenges faced by modern theater (in both Germany and the United States) is the ubiquity of digital technology and entertainment platforms. His assessment that appropriating these technologies for use in the theaters offers one viable solution to this challenge is being born out by American theater companies, and has been since at least the 90s when 3LD emerged from the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. His rather involved fascination with Hollywood and Silicon Valley production models, however, misses the point. Those industries have developed their processes to match the products they create, which are mass producible. By its nature as a live, site-specific crucible of human interaction, theater needs its own production models. Schmidt might do better to look at theaters who have been addressing his digitale Naissance.

 

Aristotelian Tragedy for the Boomer Generation

Linda Alper

Western theater has used stories of death and dying to bring communities together since its Athenian origins. A.R.T. continues that tradition in its current production of Quality of Life.

Jane Anderson's drama tells the story of two sides of one family - one, conservative Christians from Ohio; the other, liberal Californians - both dealing with death. In framing our 21st century political polarization in classic Aristotelian terms, Anderson and A.R.T.'s message is clear - however divided we may feel, we all have death and suffering in common.

Jeannette (Linda Alper) and Neil (Michael Mendelson) have recently survived a devastating California wild-fire. Tim Stapleton's realist set depicts the front of their yurt, surrounded by burnt snags decorated with their fire-destroyed possessions. They are making a temporary life surrounded by an ostentatious display of death to cope with Neil's late-stage terminal cancer. Cousins Dinah (Susannah Mars) and Bill (Michael Fisher-Welsh) come to visit. They have recently experienced a loss of their own - their only daughter was savagely killed in an act of random violence.

Variations of the phrase "I understand" litter the first act. Of course, nobody really does. Neil is the only one whose mortality is really imminent. Bill can't understand, or doesn't want to understand, Neil's marijuana use. Jeanette and Neil don't understand Dinah and Bill's faith in Christ, and it's not clear if Dinah and Bill really understand their faith either. If God exists, why would he take their daughter in such a hellish way? Dinah relates the tales of Abraham and Isaac and of Christ's crucifixion, and admits, "I love the Son, but I cannot stand the Father." Their understanding evaporates with the big reveal at the end of the first act, and their suffering threatens to tear their already strained family apart in the second.

The Quality of Life is a Learish attempt at creating a communal bond out of our shared mortality and propensity to pain. The two sides of this family are representatives of the left and right wing of the polarity that has defined the American political climate of the first decade of the 21st century. Jeannette and Neil represent American liberals, and Dinah and Bill American conservatives. But where they, like our nation, are divided in politics, they are united in suffering and death. An exercise in Aristotelian catharsis, Quality is meant to reinforce some responses to suffering and death while purging us of others. Struggling with Biblical morality and death with dignity are permissible, but suicide born of grief is not.

Death isn't the only thing that unites this family, though. Both American conservatism and liberalism are represented solely by upper-middle class white Boomers. Just as Athenian tragedy was meant to reinforce the supremacy of the power-holding class, Anderson's America is middle-class, middle-aged and white. Not coincidentally, so is A.R.T.'s audience at this play. The Quality of Life is as much a medieval morality play as it is an Aristotelian tragedy. If the Boomer generation doesn't accept death and a (modified) Christian ban on suicide, how will they retain power?

Re-telling "A Wrinkle in Time"

Tracy Young's adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, playing at OSF through November 1st, is a beautiful re-telling of a beautiful story about learning to live and let live and love.

Alejandra Escalante

Young, who also directs, is credited in the Playbill as an adaptor, but this play is really a staging of L'Engle's original text, abridged. This devotion to text, already a hallmark of OSF's work, brings L'Engle's classic tale of embracing your flaws and allowing yourself to love directly from the private pages of a book to the public space of the Angus Bowmer theater.

Meg Murry (Alejandra Escalante) is swept away from her suburban home with her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Sara Bruner) and friend Calvin O'Keefe (Joe Wegner) by the three Mrs. Ws (Judith-Marie Bergan, K.T. Vogt on opening night, and an unaccredited actress as Mrs. Which) to save her father (Dan Donohue). The children learn from the Happy Medium (Kate Mulligan) that all good things in the universe are at war with the Black Thing, a heavy evil presence. Some of the best fighters in this war have come from our insignificant planet - Jesus, Crazy Horse, etc. The Mrs. Ws tesser the children through space-time to the planet Camazotz where Mr. Murry is being held captive by IT, a malevolent intelligence through whose influence the entire planet has succumbed to the Black Thing. In order to defeat IT and save her family, Meg has to embrace her flaws - particularly difficult for an awkward adolescent girl - and to discover the thing that "she's got that IT hasn't got."

At its core, that's just what L'Engle's story is - an adolescent girl learning to accept herself for who she is. L'Engle and, by staging her text, OSF invest us in Meg's journey by establishing a binary moral code. This isn't hard for the audience to accept - we're brought up on binary moralities, whether they be God versus Satan or American freedom versus foreign oppression. In L'Engle's story, the Mrs. Ws are the standard bearers for Good, and teach Meg to accept herself as an individual. IT, whose modus operandi is to subvert the wills of others to ITs own, bears the standard for Evil. This simple devise is the key to A Wrinkle in Time's longevity and continued appeal - it encourages us, especially the young adults among us who need it the most, to simply be ourselves and to encourage those we care for to be themselves.

A Wrinkle in Time is a joy to read and a joy to see on the Angus Bowmer stage. People of all ages need stories that encourage them to love themselves. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is deeply invested in English and American theater classics, and A Wrinkle in Time is a welcome addition to the OSF canon.

A Boalian Viewing of "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" (Spoilers)

comicbook.com

In Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, the first chapter analyzes The Poetics as descriptive of theater as an instrument of social homogenization. Boal treats all narratives with an Aristotelian structure as propaganda. Captain America: The Winter Soldier has such a structure, and promotes a libertarian view of government surveillance justified by fear tactics as un-American.

In short, Aristotle's "coercive system of tragedy," according to Boal  presents an individual who, due to his or her hamartia, or fatal flaw, stands outside the social norm. The tragedian uses empathy to help us identify with the protagonist. Through the recognition of his or her error and the ensuing catastrophe, the protagonist's hamartia is purged from society. Our empathy leads to fear that the same could happen to us, and we are supposed to experience catharsis, or rejection of the anticonstitutional flaw we share with the protagonist.

Boal divides this process into four stages:

First Stage ~ Stimulation of the hamartia; the character follows an ascending path toward happiness accompanied empathetically by the spectator. Then comes the moment of reversal: the character, with the spectator, starts to move from happiness to misfortune; fall of the hero. (37)

Captain America's (Chris Evans) hamartia falls under Boal's fifth type of Aristotelian conflict: "Anachronistic Individual Ethos Versos Contemporary Social Ethos." (45) His world view is defined by 1940s patriotism, and the belief that America stands for honesty, loyalty and freedom. His world view stands in contrast to that of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) who is leading the development of weapons of mass destruction for S.H.I.E.L.D. As Cap observes, "This isn't freedom; this is fear." Our empathy for him is facilitated through a pair of audience surrogates: Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). Sam offers a human alternative to Cap's superhuman invulnerability. As a veteran of our current wars and the leader of a PTSD support group, Sam represents an identifiably human reaction to war. Black Widow is a female alternative to the male-centric world of superhero movies. As Rob Keyes notes on Screen Rant, Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow has emerged as the leading superheroine in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has yet to produce a film with a woman in the title role. Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson is meant to connect the audience to the humanity of our service-people in a film about a superhuman soldier, and Johansson's Black Widow is a major connection point for Marvel's female audience. The trio's moment of reversal comes with Nick Fury's apparent assassination, and their fall when Cap and Black Widow are bombed out of the bunker. They become fully rejected by the contemporary social ethos of militarization justified by terror.

Second Stage ~ The character recognizes his error - agnagorisis. Through the empathetic relationship dianoia-reason, the spectator recognizes his own error, his own hamartia, his own anticonstitutional flaw.

The protagonist and audience surrogates realize that they've been serving HYDRA under the guise of S.H.I.E.L.D. By situating the audience in sympathy with Cap, Falcon and Black Widow, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely imply that we share their interest in anachronistic values of righteous battle for freedom against the modern culture of fear and government surveillance.

Third Stage ~ Catastrophe; the character suffers the consequences of his error, in a violent form, with his own death or with the death of loved ones.

Neither Captain America nor any of the deuteragonists die. The Winter Soldier (the antagonist situated as an anti-Captain America), however, represents a death of Cap's best friend. As Falcon observes before the showdown, "Whoever he used to be, the guy he is now, he's not the kind you save - he's the kind you stop." In other words, the Winter Soldier is not Bucky. Widow's exposition earlier in the movie is more explicit: she talks about the Winter Soldier as a "ghost".  Cap's loss of Bucky Barnes to HYDRA crystallizes his alienation from the contemporary social ethos.

Fourth Stage ~ The spectator, terrified of the spectacle of the catastrophe is cured of his hamartia.

Captain America's hamartia, at its root, was mistaking S.H.I.E.L.D. for HYDRA. More universally, he mistakenly ascribed his own anachronistic prioritization of freedom to the culture of fear promoted within the government. Since he and his collaborators are the ones with whom Marvel wants us to identify, Captain America: The Winter Soldier serves to comment upon the current culture of government surveillance justified by fear of terrorism within a science fiction fantasy narrative.

Maintaining "Midsummer's" Frothy Foundation

Isaac Lamb and Cristi Miles

David Greig and Gordon McIntyre's Midsummer (a play with songs) is a good example of theater that manipulates our emotions through empathy with the protagonists, but it's not a great example. If it was a great example, Greig wouldn't have complicated the characters' direct addresses with screenplay jargon.

Midsummer relies heavily on the characters Bob (Isaac Lamb in this production at Third Rail) and Helena (Cristi Miles) telling the story of their amorous adventures directly to the audience. It feels like a pair of charming acquaintances telling you how they met. You're predisposed to relate to the story partly because you want to like your acquaintances and partly because you are thinking about how you met your loved one (or would like to meet your future loved one) while you listen to their story. But the brilliancy of applying this conversational approach to theater is complicated by Bob's frequent use of cinematic idiom that removes the spectators from the immediacy of the story.

Bob and Helena meet in a bar. Bob is there because he's a criminal and he's meeting one of his criminal contacts. Helena is there because she has a troubling secret she needs to forget about. She asks Bob to share her wine with her. He does, and the pair have an inebriated one-night stand. They agree not to see each other again, but fate intervenes and they meet just as Bob has acquired a plastic grocery bag full of pounds. It's not technically his, but with the bank shutting just as he arrives and it being his 35th birthday, why not just spend it? He invites Helena to run around Edinburgh with him, spending the bag of money that technically doesn't belong to him.

It's a very specific story about a specific couple in a specific city. And yet it accesses something universal. It's a happy story about a happy feeling that most of us have had and would like to continue having. The audience's identification with the characters is facilitated by Greig's use of direct address. It's really as if you asked a pair of people you've just made friends with, "How did you two meet?" and they answer with this awesome story about running around Edinburgh with a plastic bag full of money. We live vicariously through them. Who doesn't want a "how did you two meet" story like that? That strength is diluted by the screenplay jargon that serves to alienate the audience rather than inspire empathy.

This is a "dramatic" play (after Brecht), not an "epic" play. It would do Greig well to remember that. That's not to say this play is bad: it's a fantastic date play. Greig is a star playwright in Scotland, and has made a name for himself with socially conscious plays like The Events. Midsummer, however, is not socially conscious and shouldn't be. Attempting Verfremdungseffekt with it only weakens its frothy foundations. It's theater for date night, not theater for social change. If Greig wants to federalize the U.K., then this is not the play. If he wants to placate the bourgeoisie, then this is a nice little play to do it with.

 

 

Living Stories Development Log, 16. April 2014

"Can you imagine a world without electricity?"

Phil Albers' discussion topic at the end of his cultural movie night for Karuk TANF was particularly resonant for me. He was trying to make a point about how narratives existed for us on the Klamath River pre-contact, but for me the evening was one of looking at the usefulness of delicate technology.

Phil curated a selection of movies by Karuk videographers for movie night, including Living Stories (in which he appears as an interviewee). I went to the event planning on having a talk-back after Living Stories where I could suss out what was particularly engaging and where the video lost them to help me figure out the next stage in developing this project. The talk-back didn't happen, but what happened instead was probably just as informative.

The biggest problem with the current iteration of Living Stories is its visual stasis - it's all people talking to a point just off camera for an hour. As a theater artist, I've been brainstorming spatial ways to improve the viscerality of the experience. The video before Living Stories had the same visual stasis, so when the sound went out a few minutes into my movie and the audience perked up, I found a possible answer.

Video offers a lot of paradoxical possibilities as a medium. For example, as a recorded medium, it ought to have a stable longevity. Without constantly converting formats, however, that's not the case. It's also surprisingly brittle: the wrong combination of technologies can result in the video not playing, or not playing correctly. Third, and probably most alarmingly, video and film promote audience passivity. When we watch a movie, we sit back and consume the information, assuming that we're in good hands. It's only when something goes wrong, the instability and brittleness of the medium creeps in, do we sit up. This medium, that promotes passivity, has an equal potential to promote activity.

So what's next? First, I need to take a cue from the length of the other videos. I want to re-edit Living Stories into a series of discussions-by-juxtaposition on the central topics addressed in the interviews: books versus oral transmission, problems of translation, the role of traditional stories in mental health, etc. These smaller videos ought to play equally well separately as together. More importantly, I want to use the weaknesses of the medium to engage viewers as active participants in the issues under discussion. How can I present these problems using video in a way that the audience is not satisfied by the recorded material and needs to seek their own answers? And how can I structure that exploration? Ought I use curricula or game-play? Or a combination of the two?

And I need to figure out why the sound went out.