Course Blog 4: 9/11 and Realism. [Lusk]

I was in seventh grade when September 11th happened.
I went home sick from school early in the morning with a bad stomach ache... due to a history test that I just wasn't prepared for.
The nurses thought that perhaps I was feeling sick because of what happened.
When I asked what happened they told me.
I didn't know what the twin towers were.
And since we take Government in 8th grade, the pentagon was a mystery to me.

I laid on the couch watching the news with my mom that morning.
My mom was quiet the entire time. She wasn't sad. She wasn't angry.
She was confused. I think we were all confused.

The thoughts of, how could this happen?
IS this REALLY happening?
These are things that you just hear about... they don't happen to us.
It was (as Elam quotes Kushner's Angels in America) "very Steven Spielberg".

But this power of empathy Jill Dolan brings up in her article fascinates me.
Because that is not the reaction I had to this event at all. I understood what happened, yes. I understood that this was terrible- that much was clear. But, being such an immature human (development wise) I found my lack of empathy startling. Everyone was having the reactions that Dolan did. They would sit in silence with their eyes fixed on something in the distance, putting themselves in the employee's position, or the flight passenger's shoes. My father became angry with the mere thought of an instant of an impulse that these people had. My mother was frightened for the anticipated retaliation.

And I was still trying to make sense of it all.
I couldn't empathize. I could understand. But not empathize.

Dolan wonders if her training in theatre has conditioned her to feel this way: "Has performance trained me for such painful empathy? Here, I found the world stage the place that drew my subjectivity, that unsettled my presumptive security by putting me in the souls of the dying, imagining their choices, their resolve, their final moments."

What a fascinating thought. Perhaps this conditioning of realism that we discussed in class before, is something that could be harnessed for outside the theatre. Perhaps the method isn't for actors to perform their empathy, but to have that empathy to then understand, and then to act. 

Is there a danger for an actor to act their empathy?
It's true for them, but will it ring true for the audience?
What if one of the survivors is watching this performance? 
How ungenuine would that performance then become, if at all?  

It took several years for me to wrap my head around what happened that day. It took maturing and development. It took the desire to want to know. And the desire to empathize. And I remember one moment, very clearly, that clued me in on that day. 

I was going through my Ani Difranco phase (still am) and listened to her poem, Self Evident. 

It was this performance of her poem that finally helped me understand now what I could not then. It's an angry, upset, sad, regretful, and mournful tail spin of her trying to make sense of what has happened. Her imagery of turning people into poems. To words. To pieces of paper that could fly through the air or get burnt... that was the clincher. 

But, as a performance and a performer, she wanted me to understand what was happening. She wrote her poem with such aggression that she, not only insisted for empathy from the audience, but she demanded it.

But, unlike an actor using the method, she took her empathy for that day, she processed it, made choices of what words to use where, what tone of voice, what cadences the end of sentences should have. And she performed it.

The actor of realism, doesn't take this time to process. Part of the method is FIGHTING that processing. They act. Instinctually. And, for a tragedy such as this on these proportions, I think perhaps that is irresponsible. 

So, not to retract from my previous post on how realism is just the worse, but perhaps there is something inside this method we have yet to extract... and Dolan has found it.
The method is all about empathy. That's what it is. Theatre goers and theatre practitioners though have complicated it. And wanted to make it this system. But it boils down to us wanting to understand each other. Wanting to know what we are all going through. And, I think, the events of September 11th, made us face just how necessary that all is.