Staging real things
Geoff Pywell
The last half century has witnessed a profound confrontation with representation, the problem of the "real," and theater has provided much of the energy for this investigation. This is hardly surprising. No other medium has as its most apparent force the unsettling of perceptual realities; it is these experiences that form the core of Staging Real Things. When the real is placed alongside the apparently real each is charged by the other and the frames of experience that distinguish actual from aesthetic reality are broken down. The fracturing of apprehension is seen in the figure of the actor who is suddenly visibly astride worlds, and in the supposedly ordinary scenic elements employed in certain plays that refuse to be fully absorbed by either reality or aesthetics. This work concentrates on the actual and the aesthetic cohabiting on the special province of the stage without undue fuss but with tremendous force. Within such moments lies true theater, the tension between seeming and being stretched to a point of "cruelty.". Works discussed achieve their startling effects independent of any thematic or stylistic connection. They include, for example, a chapter on David Storey's The Contractor. Take a real tent and erect it on stage and suddenly the surface naturalism is jeopardized by the work beyond the acting that the actors have to perform. The enclosure of the fiction that naturalism aims for is here reopened without overt display. Theater then is the location where art most fruitfully rubs up against life, because life is the last thing that we expect to witness there, where the ironical, the maintenance of constant doubt and true ignorance, is given the most room. Some of the more modern experiments that deal with the mimetic contract in ways that herald a renewed sense of the possibilities of the stage are by Spalding Gray who, through his monologues, has come to typify what may be termed the speculative actor. He has managed to create a theatrical persona that enacts the basic philosophical attitude of disinterested wonder and then grafts it onto the self that playwrights like Beckett, for instance, have given up for lost. The modernist disenchantment so evident in plays like Not I re-emerges in this peculiar interstice between real and real into new illumination through actors like Gray who find positive enrichment in the performance of self that is more real than the self to whom original experience occurs. This is a beguiling ironic presence; the most vital "ghostliness" that fits acting best. . Also discussed are the experiments of the avant-garde group Squat, who challenged representation through constant redefinition of real behavior, and Kroetz's Request Concert, wherein the apparently uneventful and mundane becomes riveting through our human engagement with private, undramatic, but perceptually "real" human actions.
