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Is There Another
Way? By ROBERT BETHUNE It strikes me
that theater today is at a point rather similar to where painting was
about a century ago. Once upon a time, if you wanted to see actors enact
a story on the stage, there was only one way to do it: you went to a theater
and saw actors enacting a story on a stage. Very simple. It was actually
a very simple desire, and it had what is at heart a simple solution. That
solution was invented a very long time ago, in several different places—Greece,
India, China, possibly South America. And things stayed in that simple
mode for quite literally thousands of years. Along
came motion pictures. Now there were two ways to see actors enact a story—on
stage, and on screen. And then came radio, and you could hear actors enacting
a story, even though you couldn’t see them, and finally along came
television. Now there were three ways to see those actors telling their
stories. As things grew and changed, each of those ways of doing business
developed a flourishing variety of ways and means, such that we now can
see moving images of actors or hear actor’s voices in quite a few
ways. But
there’s still only one way to experience the living presence of
the actor, and that’s in a theater. There are more kinds of theaters
now, and more modes of presentation, but it is still essentially the same
process: live performance in front of live audience. The
problem is that those other media can do some things better than the live
theater. Radio can open up the drain plug at the bottom of Lake Michigan,
drain out all the water, replace it with vanilla ice cream, chocolate
sauce, and bananas, all delivered by a massive fleet of military vehicles,
and finished off by a multi-ton maraschino cherry—and you can hear
it all happen in the space of 30 seconds, as was done by a very amusing
radio commercial many years ago. Particularly with the development of
computerized graphics, there is literally nothing the mind can imagine
that cannot be presented with extraordinary verisimilitude on a screen,
either large or small. The live stage cannot do these things. It can live,
it can breathe, but it cannot destroy New York City with a tsunami before
your eyes with terrifying visual realism. Nor
should it. The theater should do what painting did: find out what it really
is and be whatever that is. Painting discovered that it wasn’t about
creating visual stimuli that mimic the visual surface of external reality.
Painting discovered that photography did that job arguably better than
it could, and certainly did it quicker and cheaper. Painters discovered
that the use of line, color, form, mass and texture to evoke response
in a viewer was what their art is about, and they proceeded to do so with
great abandon, from the Impressionists through Picasso and all those other
modern movements to our own day. I
would argue that the theater needs to do a very small number of very important
things in order to rediscover itself. These may be painful. It
needs to abandon verisimilitude in design. In particular, it needs to
figure out how to abandon verisimilitude in costuming, because of the
six design areas (costume, setting, lighting, makeup, properties and sound)
costuming has the tightest relationship to external reality. We do not
know how to put shoes on an actor, or a hat on an actor, without evoking
a fairly particular historical period. Even going barefoot or bareheaded
evokes period. If we could break the ties that bind to superficial reality
in costuming, we could find a way to make costumes do what we can already
do with setting, lights and sound: evoke response in the audience through
color, texture, drape, line and shape without worrying about what a person
like that character would have worn in whatever we think of as their time. Here
is the test, or maybe the challenge: develop an approach to costuming
in which Clytamnestra, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, Juliet, Millamant,
Hedda Gabler and Blanche Dubois can all pull from the same wardrobe. Do
justice to each character—but to hell with the period, unless there’s
something there that does the job better than anything else available.
Make the costumes wearable, durable and transformable, so that costuming
becomes a capital investment, like lighting equipment, rather than a consumable,
like program inserts. Is
there a way to pass that test? I don’t know. I’ve never seen
it done, or really even attempted. But if it can be done, the rest of
the design and performance disciplines in theater can also do it, and
theater would then be free to be itself, as painting freed itself to follow
it’s own nose. Who knows where that might lead? |
