Response to the Bloggers of Prompt 5

The blog posts were highly engaging, and I’m writing one post to react to them in general, because I saw several connections between them. Regarding sincerity, Jenna draws our attention to the title, suggesting that the audience knows ahead of time that the characters have been dealt an injustice, and the audience is already primed to believe in the characters’ innocence, and thereby judge their words sincere. Audience predisposition indeed seems an important factor. Just as important is the audience’s reaction to the performance itself. Ming, Justin, and Jennifer each pointed to the importance of the telling of the stories, rather than the over-emotionalized recreation or re-living of the events, as essential to the creation of a sense of sincerity within the performance of the play. I felt the same way—that it’s best to just tell the story rather than preach at the audience. Just as Blank and Jensen write “trust the stories” (xvi), I would add trust the audience.

Ming wrote of her reaction to the focus on the dialogue, which showed us that things weren’t fair, thus eliciting an emotional response in her. Justin also wrote about how the play focuses on dialogue, referring to the way Blank and Jensen pointedly do not follow Dawson’s Unity of Piscatorian Stage Devices, suggesting that to cover the stage with realia would have been cliché and resulted in a weakening of the authenticity of the play. I agree—the use of such realia would seem too self-conscious and detract from the story. It might even seem like the director was trying too hard to convince the audience that the stories were real, thus making the audience doubt the “truth” of the performance. The sparse set allows the audience to focus more on the words, the stories of the characters themselves. The audience can see the contradictions and the hypocrisy become apparent through the simplicity; the simplicity enhances the sense of sincerity. The dissonance between what we’re taught about how the system works and the way the system is shown to actually work is thus all the more powerful—especially when this gap is exploited by Rhodes to harm Sunny and Jesse (36). The audience also sees the dissonance they are feeling played out on stage in the characters who trust the system and are betrayed by it, such as Gary (30-31) and Sunny (43). It’s also felt when David’s prosecutor lies (44). The sense of sincerity felt by the audience does indeed contribute to the feeling that what they see is the truth. I’m not sure if Jennifer is equating the two when she writes “sincere/True” in her post, but I can see her point that the play’s simple telling of these six stories, because they are mediated and crafted, is not so different from Herzog manipulating facts to lead an audience to a realization of larger Truths. I’m not sure about the role of humor in creating this effect, but I do like Jennifer’s use of the phrase “dramatic testimony” to describe the play.

Would celebrity actors cause the “dramatic testimony” to feel less sincere? Would celebrity actors make it easier for spectators to “lose [their] sense of these characters as real people”, as Andrea asks? Would celebrity actors be distracting or would using them provide the distance necessary for theatricality? As Jennifer suggests in her post, I think it would draw the audience’s attention to the fact that it’s a set of stories being told to them second hand by actors. Rather than interpreting this as “an unproductive or unpurposeful phenomenological rupture,” as Justin posits in his post, I suggest the opposite: that the recognition of the celebrity would be beneficial because it would prevent the audience from slipping into the error of conflating the actor with the character—and it would thereby create the space necessary for the audience to engage in the process of theatricality. Here’s where the issue of trusting the audience comes up again. Create the conditions for theatricality and trust the audience to make meaning.

This brings us finally to the question of the role of theater, something that Ming deals with in her post. She questions whether people go to the theater “to take part in moral decisions,” asking “why is the best thing about theater a discussion about right and wrong?” She wonders whether this is because theaters are nominally secular cultural sites, in contrast to religious houses of worship such as churches, which therefore allow an audience more freedom to both have a moral reaction and to “consider the reasons why”—and I would add, for themselves. This seems reasonable. From a Marxist perspective, houses of worship seem like they can easily be places where ideological dogma is received uncritically by an already-receptive audience (this is not necessarily the case in reality), whereas a theater is potentially freer of such a dynamic (ideology is present in theater, too), thereby allowing more room for alternatives in terms of what is being presented (no dogma dictates what the priest preaches, or even whether there needs to be any preaching!), and also more room for interpretation, decision-making, and meaning-making by the critically-aware spectator observing the theatricality unfolding before them.