"Stage”
By Everett Jones
In one of his more cynical moments, Alfred Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut that he was tired of the whole business of working on audience’s emotions, that he wished he could just invent a machine that would produce emotions at will- press “A” and you get pathos, “B” and you have laughter. Obviously he never fulfilled this rather whimsical plan, yet somehow I feel that the modern entertainment industry has effected the same thing, constantly moving toward a mode of entertainment that is ubiquitous and universal, predicated on such basic sensations and emotions as to be almost guaranteed to affect everyone who experiences it in the same way. One of the discoveries from the month I spent in London this year for Diana Postlethwaite’s theater class was how insecurely the theatrical world fits into today’s digitally wired, sensory- overload media environment.
One of the class’s trickier tasks was balancing its two prerogatives: first, the class’s stated intention to experience London theater and then the touristic imperative to explore London. Over the course of the month it sometimes felt odd that we all had gone to such trouble and expense to uproot ourselves from the reality of the United States to the reality of the United Kingdom, only to spend much of our time there in the fictive realm of theater. And as proud students or faculty members of “committed” “global” St. Olaf, it seemed somehow wrong that were spending so much of our time in this foreign country sitting in the dark and watching entertainment.
One answer to this dilemma, sufficient to at least temporarily relieve my nagging worries, is that theater is a uniquely interactive, unrecoverable experience. Not only that, but as the proverbial strangers in a strange land (okay, not that strange, just a few paces off of what we’re used to), we were not quite the intended audience for this entertainment. The exceptions to this situation were Billy Elliot and The 39 Steps, which both trafficked in self-conscious notions of Englishness (as gritty working-class and as effete and upper-crust, respectively) engineered for the expectations of outsiders. For other productions, however, we had to adjust our sensibilities and make a greater effort to respond to work that was not strictly intended for us. Many people in the class, for instance, found it hard to respond to Lee Hall’s Pittmen Painters, a true story about interactions between working-class miners and the modern art establishment that made few concessions to those uninformed of English politics and class issues.
At other points, the intellectual/geographical displacement was of a more tangled variety, as when we found ourselves participating in a predominantly British audience’s response to Tracy Letts’ August: Osage Co., a drama set in and originating from the American Midwest. A truly moving fusion of place and performance, however, was achieved in War Horse, a spectacularly visual enactment of the huge trauma over World War I still attested to churches and public monuments. For all of the play’s emotional and visual qualities that might win over American audiences, its meaning there would be incalculably altered, and in all likelihood diminished.
As much as theater is tied to specific places and times, there is another aspect of it that is intensely antirealistic. Unlike film and literature, which exist comfortably in their respective realms of celluloid and paper, theater must inhabit the same flesh-and-bone universe as its spectators, while assuming its own, self-directed reality. A chair onstage in an ongoing performance, for instance, cannot quite be a real chair, but rather the idea of a chair, transmuted into metaphor and abstraction by the special context of drama. Our displacement to the unfamiliar reality of Britain, thus, has allowed for and amplified our displacement to the no less unfamiliar, uncharted “reality” of theater. It’s a journey both to a real place and to an idea of a place, which is after all what every journey in some way must be.
