Flux Theatre Ensemble

During the ends of the aughts (which we are technically still in, no?), I spent some time prowling this web of ours looking for what it would be named. Most of the names seemed to revolve around some unfortunate rhyme with aughts (Naughty Aughties?); but after seeing Mac Rogers' Viral (adventurous theatre producers, read it, recover, then produce it) I thought about how viral was the perfect way to describe our current age, going beyond this decade into the next.

Yet, I suppose somewhat ironically, The Viral Aughts (or Age) has not exactly caught on, or so says our friend Google. Yet the metastasizing power of online thought to spread for good or ill seems the defining characteristic of our age; and whether you wax poetic about its possibilities or lament its dangers, it must be wrestled with. This is the first of a series of posts that will explore what impact the Viral Age will have (and is already having) on theatre, and vice verse.

The first change is that now everything is local; or more specifically, everything local is also global. The idea that we’re now all intimately connected would be old if it wasn’t for the fact that, like that other old/new idea, quantum physics, we still don’t fully understand it.

An example occurred over this weekend. TDF announced that there would be no Wasserstein Award, because none of the 19 plays met their judges’ standards. Twenty years ago, there might have been a letter to an editor. But there might not have even been that; those who stumbled upon the news might simply have thought the award one among many, and entitled to execute the mission of that award to the best of their personal judgment.

But that is local thinking. Now, a decision about 19 plays made by a few people in a room takes on national significance. It becomes a symbol for the ongoing gender inequity in season selection. As a result, what might have previously seemed a local disappointment now seems a national injustice, and a petition (which I signed) achieves 800 signatures in a few days, and a national movement is born to read the 19 plays.

We see this playing out in politics: candidates are seen through an ideological and national lens first, with practical, local concerns secondary. And so moderate Republicans and southern Democrats grow increasingly rare; and so candidates with little experience but the right national ideology are catapulted to fame.

And in many ways, that’s a good thing. Because those decisions made by a few people in small rooms may have seemed local, but cumulatively they led to national consequences; including gender inequity in season selection.

It is no longer possible to make local decisions without considering their long term global impact, not only because the world has run out of frontiers, and our pioneer actions now must live neighbor to their consequences; but because the whole world really is watching.

But whatever good there is in this Viral Age, there are also major challenges; because however our online selves might lap up the miles, our bodies still sleep in a single bed. And I’m worried that we’re neglecting the wisdom of the local for the global, and I wonder what role theatre might play in finding a balance.

That’s for another post; I need to leave to spend some time with good people in a small room…playing Family Feud.

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Rereading Harold Bloom's book on Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, I was struck anew by this passage on page 56 regarding the uniqueness of his characters, excerpted here:

"Instead of fitting the role to the play, the post-Marlovian Shakespeare creates personalities who never could be accommodated by their roles: excess marks them not as hyperboles or Marlovian overreachers, but as overflowing spirits, more meaningful than the sum of their actions...characters who are 'free artists of themselves' (Hegel on Shakespeare's personage's), and who can give the impression that they are at work attempting to make their own plays...they give the sense that all plot is arbitrary, whereas personality, however daemonic, is transcendent, and is betrayed primarily by what's within...And they are never reduced to their fates; they are more, much more, than what happens to them"

Bloom goes on to list some of the characters he believes are "free artists of themselves"- Hamlet, Iago, Edmund, Lear, Rosalind, Edgar, Falstaff, Macbeth, Cleopatra - and will spend much of the book unpacking this central idea. And though I don't always agree with his particulars, I agree wholeheartedly that some of Shakespeare's characters have a vitality that seems to overwhelm their plays.

What recent characters have that vitality, that overabundance of life, that makes them "free artists of themselves"? Please post your suggestions in the comments, and read on for three suggestions of my own.

I think Meredith in Viral is my most recent example. We only receive hints of her past, but her actions in the present flood our imaginations with the things she might have done. Meredith gives you the feeling you are watching only the final play in a sequence of the many plays of her life. Alternatively amused and repulsed by this latest play she finds herself in, there is an awareness and vitality (ironic for a suicide) that makes her different from the other characters, who while compelling, seem to belong only to one play.

Everett from Rattlers is another: almost from the beginning of his long scene with Ted, he knows he is talking with the likely murderer of his wife; and yet he plays with this man for a long time before revealing what he knows. He is possessed by a relentless self-awareness - he sees through everything, especially himself - and refuses to properly participate in the revenge drama he finds himself in. Instead, like a twisted mirror of Rosalind courting Orlando, Everett disguises what he is, finding a surprising intimacy with his enemy.

Marco in Pretty Theft also seems like he's just left a different play, and will move onto the next after this one. Unlike Joe and Allegra, beautiful creations who belong completely to their play, Marco's negative vitality transcends it; his extreme powers of perception pierce everything but the void in himself.

Allegra meeting Ted seems bizarre; but somehow I can clearly imagine a scene where Meredith, Marco and Everett meet in some dive bar in Texas (and woe to the bartender!) What other recent characters have that kind of play-transcending vitality? Post 'em in the comments!

The reason I'm wondering is I think there's a link between this kind of vitality, and the adaptability of theatre, mentioned in this post:

"The greatest plays are also the most adaptable; there is something in them that allows for so much multiplicity of meaning that they are not bound to their cultural time and place. Each group of audience and artists that plays a play shift the meaning to fit their our own unique needs of the moment, while at the same time engaging with the legacy of past productions."

I think that's especially for true for plays with characters like Rosalind and Everett, Iago and Marco, Meredith and Hamlet. Their sheer size means there will always be room for a new interpretation; we will never quite be done with them, or as Bloom might put it, they will never quite be done with us. Read the full story

“The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those around him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, almost indecorous incident…and this was done by that very decorum which he had served his whole life long.”

–from The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolostoy

"Since you're already planning to take your own life, there's something you can do that will make a lot of lonely people very happy."
-From Viral, by Mac Rogers

"I built up this little fantasy for myself. That she suffered. You know? That she knew she was going to die and she couldn’t stop knowing it. And she tried to find peace in the lord, but she was too scared. I saw her laying on the asphalt in a pool of her own blood there knowing she was going to die, like a train was headed for her and she couldn’t get out of the path. And I almost couldn’t live thinking she suffered like that."
-From Rattlers, by Johnna Adams

“How can they still have war?”
It took me a few seconds to leap across the conceptual gap between the highly personal and particular conversation we’d been having and this eternal conundrum.
“They couldn’t,” I told her, “if they felt the loss of each life the way you are feeling this one."
How could that happen? How could those who make and profit from war be given the opportunity to experience the fullness of loss created by their enterprise?
-From Arlene Goldbard's talk at the NET Summit

(Cheery start to a post, no?)

First, go see Gideon's production of Mac Roger's Viral. There are liable to be some spoilers in what follows, but it's a play worth much discussion. Here I want to talk about how it mirrors The Death Of Ivan Illyitch, and how these works, and Johnna Adams Rattlers, serve as one possible answer to Arlene's question.

For more on The Death Of Ivan Illyitch, go here. Done? Then let me add that reading this novella my Freshman year of college was a shattering experience. The terror Ivan feels at the certainty of his death and the waste of his life haunted me for weeks. The uneasy truce I'd made with my own mortality years back was broken, and I felt again, keenly, the size of loss in a single death.

Viral is a mirror of Ivan Illyitch: where Tolstoy gives Ivan a Christian rapture, Mac gives Meredith a secular redemption; where Ivan runs from death, Meredith runs towards it; where Ivan's death causes his estrangement from his community, Meredith's draws her into one; where Ivan's dying is linked to spiritual awakening, Meredith's is linked to sexual awakening.

Both stories, however, do not sugar coat the terror of death, sought or not; and both make the audience feel the full and final loss of a single life. It is their unyieldling focus, and there is no refuge of sentimentality to soften the blow.

Why? Why shatter that truce with mortality and open our mind to that terror and pity? Because these plays stand in direct opposition to the way death is portrayed in our mainstream culture. Heroes stride through fields bloodied with faceless villains; detectives stoically unravel violent crimes with those who bear the loss treated as scondary characters; grandparents are carried off by flights of angels all singing "it was their time". Death and murder are portrayed as necessary, even heroic, parts of life; and little time is spent with the nameless, faceless dying; unless of course, they die with violins and a twinkle of wisdom in their eye.

It's no wonder - it feels better to think of death and murder as necessary - but only one of them is inevitable. In our urge to take the sting out of death, our stories have taken the sting out of murder, and war persists as an inevitable and heroic thing:

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

History bears out the Judge's claim. But maybe the imaginative empathy I experienced through Viral and The Death Of Ivan Illyitch, those experiences that make me seemingly incapable of watching action movies without uneasiness and pain, maybe they can (as Arlene believes) actually save us.

Which brings us to Rattlers, Johnna's play that feature two men dealing with the death of the woman both loved more than the world itself. The quote above comes too late, of course - the murderer finds the remorse of empathy only after the fact - only when he is alone with her dead body. And maybe that's what we need more of in the theatre, painful as it is - plays that take all the wounded and dead together and put them in the room with us; so that we cannot escape witnessing their question.

This is not a license for bleakness - far from it. Rattlers and Viral only work because they are filled with humor, light and hope. Nor am I calling for an end to action movies. But we cannot deny the extraordinary power the stories we tell each other have over our actions. And right now, I think we need more stories like Rattlers, Viral, and The Death of Ivan Illyitch.

So go see it! Read the full story