An Investigation on Communication and Intimacy on stage.
Communication is central to the human experience. Not only does theatre examine and investigate communication, but it is also a form of communication. I’m fascinated by what negates communication. Is it talking? Our bodies? Looks? What if other people communicate FOR us? Does that make our communication any less intimate?
Communication is central to the human experience. Not only does theatre examine and investigate communication, but it is also a form of communication. I’m fascinated by what negates communication. Is it talking? Our bodies? Looks? What if other people communicate FOR us? Does that make our communication any less intimate?
In my recent play, (a love story), I have begun to
investigate this notion of second hand story telling with a chorus that
narrates the story. The story deals with three sets of lovers and how they
connect and, eventually, fail. There is a specific scene I’m interested in,
particularly for the audience’s response, in which two young lovers, Greg and
David, speak to each other through flashlights signaling Morse code. Two chorus members then translate their near
5 page conversation (including one monologue that goes over a page). Does the
intimacy in this moment get lost? The conversation is being translated
verbatim, but because it isn’t coming from the original mouths, will the
audience sympathize less? Or perhaps it
will raise the conversation to a new level. Perhaps the conversation, being
translated through an omniscient element, will come off as purer in some sense?
Theatre has fallen away from story
telling. Instead, theatre has turned into a place where we simply SEE a story,
rather than be TOLD a story. I’ve been drawn to plays lately that incorporate a
chorus and/or narrator for this reason. I feel a sense of comfort when there is
a leader of the story. The complications that follow this interest me as well. Does
this character WANT to tell the story? Is it difficult for them to put the
characters through this tragedy every night?
Theatre should be an event that
allows us to question our human experience, rather than telling us what the
human experience is.
2 comments:
Kelly,
You’ve given yourself a pretty impressive mission here, and I am already compelled by your description of its implementation—a love story is a play I already want to see (and by the way, when can I see it?). Here are some suggestions for bringing out your interests more clearly.
• You begin by telling use you are interested in communication, but I think you are interested in the conditions of communicative possibility and the causes of communication’s failure.
• The Morse Code scene suggests to me that you are interested in the barest, most unadorned mode of communication—you might call this information without expressivity. I think this is awesome, both as an intellectual gambit and as a coup de theatre (blinking flashlights on stage! I am there.) Yet having a chorus narrate the contents of this conversation will mean that audiences relax into the narrative, perhaps too easily. If you want to bring out the complexity (and problems) of story telling, why not let the audience see and hear the discrepancy between the code, a surtitled translation of the code, and its transformation in narrative? I found that during Equivocation, the effect of seeing text and hearing it unsettled the primacy of the story-telling function. You might wish to capitalize on this lesson.
• When you say that the theatre has fallen away from story telling, you seem to be waxing nostalgic for a better dramaturgical moment. And yet you seem to want to pressure the “comfort” you take from narrative. Can you show me how you make the tension between these two positions explicit? Again, I would love to see a play that does so!
Dear Kelly,
When you described your obsession with the sex scene from Bent and the notion of intimacy in human speech, I instantly though of this episode of Radiolab in which sound is explored as "touch at a distance":
http://www.radiolab.org/2007/sep/24/sound-as-touch/
Although the reporters explore the notion of the intimacy and tangibility of sound in relationships between babies and their parents, it adds a new sort of beauty and poetry to that scene in Bent.
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