You have to, in a sense, 'funnel' (Rough)

Hey guys. Long time no see. I'm back, for a while, I think. I've started jotting things down in a notebook as I think them, and having all of my random thoughts at my beck and call has sort of filled my head with them. They are just swirling around in there, and just want to, like, get them out!

Speaking of which, I lit the UMTG's production of the Laramie project an indeterminate amount of time ago (As I begin this post, it is three weeks, but by the time I post it, another Mayan calendar or two will probably have gone by). Laramie is a great show, and if you didn't see it then, I really recommend that you make a point of watching it sometime. I had seen various parts of it probably twice before, and both times I cried, even though one of them was a forty-minute travesty of a high school drama festival production. Something about it is profoundly, gut-wrenchingly moving. This time, I was too busy with my lights to get absorbed enough to cry, but I had enough time between cues that I really had a chance to think about the show, and I just wanted to work through a few thought-processes I had about it. If you don't know anything about Laramie, feel free to grab a bite to eat and come back for one of my later posts, but if you are anywhere near this blog, I assume you are some sort of nerd, and I bet you might be somewhat interested.

For the benefit of those intrepid souls who are sticking with me, Laramie is a play about Laramie, Wyoming, a medium-sized town that in 1998 was the setting for the almost certainly hate-motivated murder of Matthew Shephard, a gay University of Wyoming student. The members of the Tectonic Theater Project, a New York group dedicated to "exploring the ways in which experimentation with form and structure can inform theme in contemporary drama" (Wikipedia), traveled to Laramie shortly in the aftermath of the crime to conduct interviews with the people of the town. The 2.5 hour long play is built entirely from these interviews, local news reports, and court transcripts, and shows the reactions of a broad spectrum of towns-folk to the event and the ensuing legal proceedings. There are a number of extremely moving monologues, and a very clear anti-homophobia message, but I don't think I could add anything to the play's treatment of that message. To avoid such a futile attempt and because I am fundamentally a boring person, I would like to deal with some of the formal dramatic issues the Laramie project raises: the virtue of theater as opposed to film, the process of performing metatheatricality, and comic relief in tragedy.

Very early in the rehearsal process for the show, a few of my friends mentioned that they didn't understand why the Tectonics had written a play based on their interviews, instead of simply filming the interviews and making a documentary. The most obvious one is that it is called the Tectonic Theater Project for a reason, and the members just didn't have the money or expertise to make a movie. While that may be true, it simply raises a new question: if your chosen form doesn't do a subject justice, why even attempt to cover it? Either the Tectonics had made a bad play that failed to accurately convey the themes it was tackling, or documentary is not necessarily better than theater for portraying the real words of real people, as would seem self-evident. After all, wouldn't having actors pretend to be the citizens of Laramie and ape their genuine emotions be mockery? How can a play on a stage that is not the landscape of Laramie, acted by people who are not its people, be as effective as actual footage of those people in their native habitat? When held against the hypothetical documentary of itself, the Laramie Project becomes another battle in a war between film and the stage, one that could prove the inferiority of theater, or establish its status as at least equally effective as an emotional representation of real events.

When the play went up, it was completely clear who had won the battle. The entire audience, almost to a body, sobbed at every performance, often more than once. The Laramie Project is incredibly effective, and there is no two ways about it. The only question is why. The objections seemed so valid, so unimpeachable, but when brought into question, they fell apart. "Fake" emotions did bring real tears, and we almost forgot we were not actually hearing Dennis Shepherd address his son's murderer.

A significant part of it is that the emotions of actors on a stage are both truer than and falser than we expect. It is not as though an actor simply pretends to be sad, or angry, or relieved. To be convincing, he must experience that, and so we do feel the emotions of real people when we watch the play, even if they are not the exact emotions of the people whose words we are hearing. To give an truly impassioned speech against the doctrine of "Live and Let Live", the actor who plays Jonas Slonaker must feel, at some level, that "I don't tell you I'm a fag and you don't beat the crap out of me" really is a terrible philosophy. I am reminded (as always) of Cyrano de Bergerac. When Cyrano declares Christian's love for Roxanne, his own love is spurring him on. She wouldn't believe him, couldn't believe him, if he was not really feeling every word he said. The same goes for actors.

At the same time, however, they have much more control over their emotions than you or I, having worked on these emotions for weeks and learned how to be the master of them. They know exactly how they will feel and act at each moment, and everything they do is designed to make the audience feel. A interviewee on film probably doesn't give a damn how he makes his audience feel, except to hope they don't think he is an idiot or bumpkin, and even if he does, he doesn't know his emotions. He can't manipulate them and summon them up the way a good actor can, and even though we all know that it is a con, a precisely acted emotion is at least as moving as one that is sloppy, ill-coordinated, but 'real'.

((That was when I stopped writing over Thanksgiving place, and when I resume now, three weeks later and almost 6 weeks after the show, I have no idea exactly where I was going with that. I am just going to pick things up and try to finish them.)) So we just can't claim that actors are less effective at portraying emotion than regular people. It is, after all, what they do nine to five. But shouldn't an actual recording of events and words be more effective than a stage production? This is especially important considering how unrealistic the staging for Laramie should be. There is a note in the script that says words to the effect of "Costumes, props, and sets should not attempt to be complete accurate. The point is to imply, not to mimic." Everything is so sparse that it should be very difficult to forget that everything you are seeing is fake. Yet, somehow people, and you cry for the characters as though they were real people you went to high school with. What's up with that?

I think it comes down to another magic element of the theater: the personal connection. This was especially apparent for our production which too place in a 100-seat lecture hall, so the audience was rubbing elbows with the actors the whole time. But any theater has that advantage. It is often easier to empathize with a real person you are a hundred yards away from than a pattern of electrical signals separated from you by five feet of air and 5 millimeters of glass. There is humanity and immediacy in a live performance that does not exist for something that has been taped, recorded, and shipped to you through wires. An actor pretending to be real on stage is still realer than a bunch of pixels pretending to be alive on your screen.

It also has something to do with the presentation of a monologue versus a documentary. An interviewee is talking to a camera, doing his best to come up with come up with words on the spot, trying not to embarrass himself, and usually suffering from stage fright. An actor already knows and has honed his words, just wants to hit you as hard as he can with his emotions, and knows how to deal with stage fright. All he has to worry about is moving you, and he can do it better than a movie can, or at least just as well.