Above
is a photo from the production of Gogol's play The Government
Inspector, which I saw
in DC for my birthday last Sunday. As I wrote in my last personal
blog post, it was put on by the Shakespeare Theater Company, and
because of this (the Company just won the 2012 Tony Award
for Best Regional Theater Company), I was expecting to be blown away.
I was not. It was like Don Giovanni that way: it was low-brow.
It was farce. It was entertaining, the way Lucy and Desi
are, the way the Three Stooges are. It was not something I
would brag about doing instead of watching those TV shows as evidence
of engaging in “higher culture” than Lucy, Stooges, etc.
HBO’s Game
Of Thrones is
a much more nuanced, challenging, engaging experience than that play
was. That play was popcorn for the older, white, monied masses.
I
couldn't put my finger, however, on how to describe what made it so
until I read Sofer and thought about the gun.
In
the scene featured in the photo, The Government Inspector's main
character, civil servant Hlestakov,
a dandy who
plays on the local aristocrats' stupidity for money, chats with his valet Osip, the
no-nonsense foil to his braggadocio. Osip's delivery
is effectively dry compared to Hlestakov's incessant yammering, and
is the only comic element in the play I found effective. Osip has
just barged in on Hlestakov
holding a gun to his own head and stopping in the mirror to check
himself out (a la Don Giovanni, again; maybe the director of both
productions is secretly the same person). Osip lets us know that
Hlestakov
does this "I'll do it! I swear I will!" every day. Osip takes the gun and points it at Hlestakov,
offering to kill him and finish the job, Hlestakov simpers, and then
they sit. At one point the gun is shot at the roof, but I'm pretty
sure that's the only time it's fired.
A
gun is a tension-ful prop, even in a comedy. There's a reason “loaded
gun” is a metaphor, after all. The old saying that the gun in the
first act needs to be shot by the third (or however it goes) nods to
the potential energy in a gun onstage. And as I considered what made
this play popcorn for the masses, I realized it was because I have
been trained to think of works of art that demand a sense of context,
or history, as better works of art. This play is popcorn because
there was no need to know very much to enjoy the slapstick humor of a
guy too wimpy to kill himself and the valet who makes just as much of
a show in his own way when he proclaims his willingness to shoot the dude himself.
I'll stick to one quote or this post will get too long. Sofer
writes: “As it moves through the play, Kyd's bloody handkercheif
invokes previous performances by bloody cloths, even as it weaves
them into an original narrative" (64).
The symbolism possible in an object, perhaps, is augmented my the tradition in which it is located, and tradition's like a tree in the forest or any signifier: it needs someone around who knows it to exist. Tradition is not a held, physical thing (or prop). Tradition takes place over time and depends on the memories of those who would practice or otherwise react to it (a temporal "object", maybe?). No knowledge of the history of guns in theater is particularly required to exact an affective response from the audience. Unlike the bloody handkerchief, I don't know if that knowledge would augment what an audience member might "get out of it". Perhaps that difference has to do with notions of sanctity and the time period Sofer spends this chapter writing about. But I found Sofer's point about contextualization giving so much life to props informative in terms of how I "judge" art, and whether I even want to be using that kind of "outside knowledge" in the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment