Back to Step One

What is the meaning of life? As an actor, this question bears quite a bit of weight, as it not only has to do with what my work will occasionally confront me with, but more importantly, it really asks me why I choose to do what I do. I dare not admit to having the answer to the question, but I do have an answer: To experience both with others and within ourselves. I discovered, or rather developed this assertion when I was fifteen, roughly around the same time I had consciously decided that acting and the theater would be what I would pursue for the rest of my life.

I have been thinking a lot lately of entertainment. What does this word mean? I used to think it a pedantic term the wealthy of our theatrical community use when describing the greatest of all things (of which, in the lectures I have sat through, they somehow try to convince me they find in the theater) – it was nowhere near what I have always envisioned my art to be. On the day of my high school graduation, my father came to find me before I walked-the-walk. He had a gift – a letter – that I still treasure to this day. In it, he proclaimed his pride for me in that I have never opted for the easy route in the theater and the arts: he told me I am not an “entertainer,” but an actor, striving in my art for a deeper understanding of self (in both myself and audience).

But in both recently traveling to Ohio to meet Kaitlyn’s brand-new baby nephew (where at one point I was referred to as “Uncle Collin”) and becoming a godparent to the beautiful girl two very close and dear friends just gave birth to, that word, “entertainment,” is beginning to change its meaning. It is becoming a very good thing.

Baby Charlie cries quite a bit. Sometimes he smiles. At three months old, he has started to laugh. When I saw Baby Isabella for the first time, she was sleeping soundly, but with a smile affixed to her face (something doctors will try to tell you is not possible at 6-hours-old). The smile of a baby brings immense joy – it somehow stirs a feeling of proud accomplishment, though I may not have had anything to do with their giggling beams (it may have something to do with my love and hope for the human race).

Why does a baby smile? While I enjoy entertaining (if you will) the notion that babies are far more intelligent than the “goo-goo” noises we make would have us giving them credit for, they certainly are not intellectually concerned with politics or philosophical conundrums. Babies scream and cry because of pain and fear – of needing or wanting something – and they smile and laugh because they are entertained. And ask any parent – it is best to keep a child constantly entertained.

Something interesting happened in Ohio. I would love to toss Baby Charlie into the air to make him smile and laugh, but I began to wonder why I would do this. It was certainly that proud accomplishment, but of what? – It was of creating a connection between Baby Charlie and myself. I had reached out across invisible bounds to have genuine human interaction – and we connected, we were sharing the joy of living. My entertainment had been serving a purpose – and I was not an “entertainer.” I was something else, something simpler, greater, more powerful – not necessarily artist in this one step back from the Theater, but certainly performer, of which role in the Theater is taken up by actor.

Also in my time there, Baby Charlie received an early Christmas present of a Jumperoo – mass amounts of entertainment in the round! But what was his favorite part of this phantasmagorical gift? Bouncing! He was allowed to express his excitement for the jungle animals surrounding and playing with him in an extremely physical – dare I say visceral? – manner. And in doing so, he is building the strength in muscles to ultimately learn to stand.

When we watch a good piece of Theater, much is demanded of us – it forces us to delve deep into ourselves in one way or another. And in this, the Theater can, and should, entertain. But what, at the end of it all, does entertainment mean? That is a question I cannot dare venture to answer; pleasure is derived in many different ways, specific to every individual. What is important here is that our entertainment engages us actively – that when in the Theater, we continue to experience.

The Art of Paradox

I would like to respond to Issac Butler's recent tribute to your favorite deity and mine, Dionysus. Bulter, while speculating on the unknowable reasons our art form originated as praise to this elusive god, made an excellent connection with the mythology of Dionysus's death and resurrection to the nature of death and rebirth in the theatre each time we close a show or begin a new production.

Butler's view of Dionysus's evident mortality is incredibly intriguing to me because I've always considered Dionysus as the Bohemian cry for an attempt at immortality. Despite the fair amount of research I've done on Dionysus both for leisure and as a theatre student, I have never found a description of him that surpassed my freshman year History professor's proclamation that "Dionysus was the god of sex, drugs, and rock and roll." This may be why I've always kind of imagined him as a cross between Jim Morrison and Tim Curry's Dr. Frankenfurter, but it's also why I've come to see him as a god of the people. Mythology shows us that the Greeks were fascinated by the concept of immortality. Deities had faults just as humans do; the only difference between them and us was their immortality. Dionysus, although he was always resurrected, had the ability to be killed. He was the only god who shared mortality with men . Still, he is often described as having everlasting youth. Historically, in Dionysus's orgiastic rituals, his maenads, whom, as Bulter pointed out were not priestesses, worked their way into a drunken undulating ecstasy in the hope to copulate with the god and conceive his child. A child fathered by Dionysus would be a demigod, and therefore one step closer to achieving immortality.

Accepting the perpetual awareness of the certain metaphorical death we must eventually experience each time we begin working on a play, I also think we're striving for a sort of immortality. A revival is not the only way to resurrect a dead play- if it was good it will live on kinesthetically and be expressed in the form of actions, ideas, memories and emotions. As Butler mentions that the rehearsal hall is a sacred place, I remember an extremely old director explaining to a student that she dressed up to attend performances because the theatre was her equivalent to church. In the sense that it provides us with emotional and intellectual enlightenment, I completely agree. Idealistically speaking, creating theatre should be an endeavor to make a memorable impact and to connect with something divine, much like the rituals of Dionysus's women.

Butler also sites Dionysus's eventual maturation as another reason he was entitled to his own festival. It is true that by the time the festival was established, he had developed and so had the Greeks. They had just established their alphabet and began recording their dramas. Perhaps not coincidentally, Dionysus was the only Olympian who could read and write. Yet as militarily and politically driven as these festivals were (they took the opportunity of the massive gathering to collect taxes), there was also a ritualistic aspect. The festival began with a reenactment of the Dionysian myth and there is evidence that over 200 animals were sacrificed in the five day stretch. Male actors dressed as women, and large phalluses were donned. We have accounts that the audience was audibly responsive, and were allowed to eat and drink during the festival.

It seems as though Dionysus was a Freudian. His world revolved around intoxication and pleasure. He would not tolerate anyone who did not believe in him and what he represented. Those who protested his divinity often went insane and met horrible deaths. Among the many examples, the most famous is portrayed in Euripides' The Bacchae, when Pentheus's head was ripped off by his own mother for doubting Dionysus. The myth of Dionysus explains that we can not afford to deny the sexual, ritualistic impulses we have. We must recognize and embrace them or else they will destroy us. Perhaps the City Dionysia was about embracing these feelings in a responsible manner. If so, the Greeks proved their civility in finding a religious place for this part of human nature, instead of degrading it as separate and non-holy.

In my discussion, I chose avenues that were unparallel to Butler’s for a purpose. The paradox of Dionysus's evident mortality versus his celebrated immortality as well as that of his inspirational intellect and uncivilized nature are just more examples of the way he represented duality. I think theatre is the art form that most readily accepts conflict and duality because these concepts are our muses and our mediums. We are simultaneously presentational and representational, metaphorical and literal, two dimensional and three dimensional, artist and spectator, teacher and student. In many ways, our art only exists within a dirty, dizzying Dionysian ritual.

**Of course, these are just some connections I've made between Dionysus and my thoughts on theatre. I am not an expert in history or mythology and even the experts are not exactly sure how Greeks viewed their art form. I do not have enough knowledge to assert that these are actually possible reasons for the festival of plays to have been a tribute to Dionysus.

Briefly, Blasted

This production left me with, appropriately, aggressive feelings. To be blunt: I hated it. But to be brief, I left more apathetic than assaulted, and it was the hypocritical arrogance of the critics that has sent me into an almost uncontrollable fury.

Simon Kane, in Mark Blankenship’s preview article of Blasted, alluded to The Dark Knight as an example of the modern mindless violence that we are all over-exposed to. Not Hostile, not Saw I – V, not the evening news. BATMAN. Blasted, according to Simon Kane, is the work of art that is intended to “resensitize” us to the violence of the world that Batman has so frivolously stolen from us. But I question this notion of “resensitization,” as I do not believe cramming horrific violence without any discernible thread of a plot down our throats in a space associated with high art and intellectualism is helping the matter in the slightest – especially as I sit in the back row watching the entire audience lurch forward each time the lights pop up again in a frantic search for the next graphic atrocity. What does this play really say about our cravings as a culture? I suggest a look at Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues, where a dilapidated country uses the world's lust for violence to pull themselves out of third-world status. I am equally put to an alarming state of unease when Ben Brantley admits to empathizing with these abominable characters. There is an abundance of plays with rich plot and relatable characters by excellent and important writers today that some people, like Charles Isherwood in his review of Blasted, seem to want to gloss over (like Martin McDonah or Tracey Letts – whom, Isherwood seems to have forgotten, wrote August: Osage County) in favor of out-and-out violence that they can defend because it is in the high-class locale of the theater – a place not yet squelched by gobs of buttery popcorn or easily expended as background noise to making dinner.

And then, in that same article, Isherwood went on to claim Beverly Hills Chihuahua as worthwhile “escapism.” Of course, I could perhaps be speaking too soon – I admit I have not seen Beverly Hills Chihuahua. But have you?

(However, despite all my feelings here, it needs must be said - because all the articles I have read, for some strange reason, managed to bypass this little tidbit: GO SARAH BENSON, BROOKLYN COLLEGE ALUM!)

The Best Seat in the House

The Beggar's Opera

Rough theatres rejoice! There is no reason to be embarrassed about non permanent seating! Join me in celebrating the growing trend of incorporating the audience into set designs: a practice that gives even the dingiest performance spaces an advantage over the most ornate prosceniums on Broadway.

When a production team mounts a project in a nontraditional space and the members have to decide on a seating layout that will work best for their show, it forces them to think about what part they want the audience to play in the production. Contemporary theorists have asserted that the audience is just as responsible for the quality of a show as the creative team. When we have the freedom to manipulate how an audience member is situated, it allows us to make a subtle, perhaps even unconscious suggestion to the spectator about how they should be viewing the play. Both the original and the revival of Shaffer’s Equus elevated the audience around the playing space, simultaneously giving the audience members an air of omnipotence and entrapping the players in the world onstage. The Broadway production of Inherit the Wind put some audience members into an actual jury box to judge the epic Scopes monkey trial for themselves.

This is especially important to those of us who are interested in progressive theatre, for the activists using the medium to make claims about today's society to inspire thought and change. It’s exciting to know that we can give viewers a little push in the right direction simply by the way we seat them. Incorporating the audience into the design is an ever present friendly reminder that the audience is not a constant; it is living and breathing, just like the production.

Extra onstage seating was common in 18^th century England. Before actor-manager David Garrick banned audience members from squeezing around the stage in 1763, he scoffed about having to look at ghastly, dimly lit faces as a backdrop to the otherwise intimate crypt scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Although Garrick was disgusted with the thought, I can't help but imagine this as a breathtaking tableau, even when I de-romanticize it to include the sleeping guy in the second row, and the woman leafing through her playbill on the top. When we are seated across from other audience members, it literalizes the idea that theatre is a reflection of life, whether rippled or stagnant, because the spectators – ourselves - are well within the sightlines. When the style of seating is harmonious with the rest of a production, it follows logically that the audience is more likely to be alert and appropriately responsive. All of these qualities boil down to a standard Peter Brook definition of a responsible spectator.

These are some of the reasons I am incredibly proud that Brooklyn College is embracing this untraditional practice. After our spring production of Moliere's The Learned Ladies, we will be renovating our coveted proscenium space so that the seating is flexible. Instead of molding a show into a pre-determined space, there will be more freedom to mold the space itself. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more theatres follow suit in the future.