Critical Acts
Critical
Acts
Driving Deeper into That Thing
The Humanity of Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge
Gelsey Bell
Adalbert Stifter, a 19th-century Romantic author who is little known outside of Germany (though a number of his works have been translated into
English).2 Originally premiered in September
2007 at Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne, Switzerland,
Stifters Dinge has since been traveling
through-out Europe, with runs in such cities as Berlin, London, and Paris, as well as the Festival d’Avignon in France and BITEF (Belgrade International Theatre Festival) in Serbia (where it won the Grand Prix “Mira Trailovic”) in 2008, and Croatia’s World Theatre Festival in 2009. It finally made its way to the New World for five days in mid-December 2009, where I saw it on an uncharacteristically (for New York City) snow-white Sunday afternoon.
Described by Goebbels as a “composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, a performance without performers — one might say a no-man show” (2009b), Stifters
Dinge’s foundational claim to avantgarde
inno-vation, and the original inspiration for its cre-ators, is an absence of human performers. But rather than fulfilling Samuel Beckett’s dream of a theatre without actors by allowing the text to
annihilate the performer,3 Goebbels and set and
Entering the expansive hall in the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, all I could see were metal stairs leading up the back of a makeshift theatre, much like the ramp into an alien space-craft on a Hollywood set. Despite the distant and ominous reverberations bouncing through the cavernous space, it was my footsteps, and those of the audience members in front of me, that lay the heavy tone upon the afternoon. The pace was slow and felt preparatory rather than tired. Once at the top of the stairs, I was cloaked in almost complete darkness — a stark contrast to the bright afternoon sun hitting the fresh white snow on the city streets I had just walked in from. Turning a corner, I found myself at the top of the small set of bleacher seats facing the dimly lit stage, only 165 seats in all. Though my eyes were taking their time adjusting to the darkness that obscured the enormity of the hall,
I could listen to the aural architecture1 as low
metallic tones and wobbly mid-register melodies bounced off its vast balloon shed roof.
The performance is Stifters Dinge (Stifter’s Things), the latest music theatre work of com-poser and director Heiner Goebbels to cross the Atlantic from Germany. The piece is named for
Gelsey Bell is a doctoral candidate in the department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the
Arts/NYU, where she is working on a dissertation on 20th-century experimental vocal music. She is also an experimental vocalist, a singer-songwriter, and TDR’s Managing Editor.
1. Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter define hearing as “the detection of sound” and listening as “active attention or reaction to the meaning, emotions, and symbolism contained within the sound.” Aural architecture denotes “the properties of a space that can be experienced by listening” (2007:5).
2. Born in 1805 in southern Bohemia, Stifter spent most of his life in Austria as a tutor and schulrat (elementary school supervisor), while he wrote novels and short stories until his death in 1868 (see Gump 1974).
3. “Not for me these Grotowskis and Methods. The best possible play is one in which there are no actors, only the text. I’m trying to find a way to write one.” Samuel Beckett to Deirdre Bair, 19 June 1973 (in Bair 1978:513).
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lighting designer Klaus Grünberg (a frequent collaborator) developed the show by working with tangi-ble materials — things like pianos and water. By choosing to highlight nonhuman activity for a live audi-ence, they created a meditation on objecthood and our relationship to things, materials, and the environ-ment. Composed of an 80-minute performance for a seated audience and then a 20- to 30-minute period in which the audience is encouraged to walk around the stage space for a closer look at its music- making landscape, the whole event is both performance and installation.
The soundscape is dirty and mysterious. Dirty because the tones are impure, overflowing with illog-ical harmonics, and replete with low, gritty discordances. The music evokes enigma both metaphori-cally and literally. Metaphorimetaphori-cally, the dissonant harmonies are struc-tured by a slow beating rhythm, with unanticipated rhythmic accents, that marks time in a con-tinuous machinelike pumping and evokes the cinematic thriller. (Waiting in my seat for the perfor-mance to “begin,” I try to figure out what time signature the music is in. One moment it feels like 4/4 and the next 5/8, until I realize that it is simply a continuous ticking, broken into smaller divisions only by my own creative listening.) In addition, I literally cannot tell how the sounds
were being made. Directionally, it is clear that most of them are created live on the stage, but it is not easy to identify the individual parts that make the sonic whole. The set groans and hums like a waiting beast. Not necessarily an unkind beast, but a disfigured one — a patient monster half in the shadows, waiting until you are more accustomed to its presence, its natural rumblings, before it starts to really sing.
The theatrical space is set up as a prosce-nium without the arch, clearly demarcating the audience from the stage rather than integrat-ing us. There is only the scaffoldintegrat-ing and
over-head grid between the stage and the expanse of the hall. Most of the stage floor is taken up with three rectangular cavities running con-secutively from front to back and parallel to the bleachers; they are filled with water shortly after the beginning of the piece. Flanking the pools on the right are four speakers, poised like heads on tall figural stands. On the left are three glowing contraptions that appear to con-tain the water that fills the pools. Looming upstage are the most sculptural elements of the landscape: pianos, pipes, percussion, leafless trees, metal, and assorted mechanical gadgetry arranged in three layers of depth. The pianos
Figure 1. Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge (2007), at Park Avenue Armory, New York City, December 2009. (Photo: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center)
Critical Acts
are in various states: four uprights and the body of one baby grand turned on its side, all with strings exposed, some with no keyboards, sil-ver mechanical arms rigged to rush across the strings, all prepared in one way or another. The pianos reinforce the decidedly steam punk aura of the whole thing — proud Victorian-era instruments shown in Frankensteinian derange-ment. Mechanical technology that — compared to the sleek digital sterility of today — seems somehow more organic, replete with dirt, rust, mold, even bacteria, as if the gilded-era Armory exists as a greenhouse for forests of wild pianos and steam-powered drums.
However, despite the clear protagonists of the performance being the sonic- producing set and the tenacious “no-man show” mar-keting, the performance begins with two men spreading salt over the empty pools and then filling them with water. Though they do not linger, their appearance as technicians — a performance of non-performance, the under-stated attitude of “we’re just doing our job” — highlights the backstage human hands that make the machine run. They remind the audi-ence that this is a fantastical human
medita-tion on thingness and not the nonhuman in its natural element. They remind us of the light board operator, the usher seating latecomers, and then of ourselves, sinking farther into our seats. Have we gathered here because of our excitement for the void of human performance? What intellectual poetry is involved in such a feat? And what is brought into relief when technicians then walk amidst the performing scenery? For surely their jobs could have been automated as well...The technicians’ presence begs the question, which I think the piece’s creators wanted asked, How nonhuman is the performance of scenery, theatrical props, and musical instruments in this “no-man show”? Or, should I say, how human?
Though there is a progression to the events in Stifters Dinge, the piece moves forward more like a dream than a story. Trying after-wards to recall the sequence, what came when is not only unclear but seems irrelevant. As if the experience was meant to mix in the head of the receiver, to give an overall impression of the show or to exhibit what this creation was capable of doing, rather than conclude along a linear line of logic or plot. This lack of story Figure 2. Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge (2007), at Park Avenue Armory, New York City, December 2009. (Photo: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center)
Critical Acts
is entirely appropriate for a consideration of the nonhuman, as it is humanity that inces-santly creates meaning and mythology. As Alan Bourassa relates, “the human is but the cre-ation of a system of meanings and values that must in large part be called literary. [...] There is no story without the human, no human with-out stories” (2002:60 –61). Furthermore, in a lecture about the piece, Goebbels quoted Gertrude Stein from Lectures in America say-ing, “anything that [is] not a story could be a play” (Goebbels 2009a; Stein [1935] 1985:119). Though Stifters Dinge is not void of the liter-ary, it uses music (which has always had a
con-troversial relation to meaning)4 and technical
and environmental performing objects to probe those phenomena that line the details of a story, that which is unknown and unknowable.
A smooth intermixing of the natural, the mechanical, and the digital surfaces as the image of a map is projected over the pools, which as they gradually fill with water move our atten- tion from an artifact of human idealization to the graceful physicality of water. Subsequently, multiple screens the same length as the pools descend to dance with the shadows of rippling water. Soon one of the anthropomorphic speakers is spotlighted and the voice of a British actor reads an extract from
Stifter’s Die Mappe meines
Urgrossvaters (My Great
Grandfather’s Portfolio; specifically the third edition from 1867), while Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael’s painting
Swamp (1660) is projected on
a screen and manipulated through different colors and saturations at a leisurely pace. The story, told in the first person, describes a sleigh ride in the countryside on a winter’s day in which the travelers hear strange noises and eventually realize that they are caused by branches and
trees falling over from the weight of ice that has collected on them:
Now we recognized the noise that we had heard earlier in the air; it was not in the air, it was close to us now. In the depths of the forest it resounded near us and came from the twigs and branches as they splintered and fell to the ground. It was all the more dreadful as every-thing else stood motionless. Not a twig, not a pine needle stirred in the whole glittering brightness, until after an ice-fall a branch would come crashing down. Then all was silent again. We listened and stared; I don’t know whether it was amazement or fear of driving deeper into that thing. (Stifter [1867] 2009)
It is easy to see in this excerpt how the word “thing” becomes Stifter’s placeholder for both the indescribable and the assemblage of min-ute detail his writings weave — details that tell the story using objects rather than descriptions of people.
The spoken evocations of winter ice then melt into physical rain, which drips and flows onstage from above into the pools while one of the most intact uprights lazily performs a
4. As early as Plato’s assertion in the Republic that rhythm and melody should conform to words in the composition of song (1997:1037, 2.400a), discussions of music have recognized a nondiscursive content that has the potential to either deface or transcend linguistic meaning.
Figure 3. Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge (2007), at Park Avenue Armory, New York City, December 2009. (Photo: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center)
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J.S. Bach Andante (from the “Italian” Concerto in F major; 1735). For me, the scene sonically conjures reminiscences of childhood, staring out the window as the rain beats away at the glass and a family member site-reads a slow movement on the piano in the other room. Exceeding Gaston Bachelard’s insight that “the house allows one to dream in peace” ([1958] 1964:6), I am able to gaze at my dreaming in hindsight, discerning how I have used (and continue to use) familiar natural and musi-cal elements in the creation of my own private mythology. Stifters Dinge performs a poetics of space that both encourages the dreams of its audience and grants time for considering how, why, and out of what those dreams emerge. With no actors to lead us through a story, our most intimate dramas have room to breathe.
However, throughout the piece there are many recorded human voices that emerge from the nonhuman display, both ethno-graphic — incantations recorded in Papua New Guinea in 1905, antiphonal singing by Columbian Indians, a traditional Greek working song — and personality-driven — an interview on French radio with Claude Lévi-Strauss, William S. Burroughs reading from
Nova Express, a television interview with
Malcolm X. These voices occupy a paradoxi-cal function in regards to thingness. They are acousmatic — sounds cut off from their original source — and yet directly cited in the program and therefore historically traced. Depending on an audience member’s knowledge, the timbre and cadences of both Malcolm X and Burroughs are unmistakable and we are told in projected subtitles that we are listening to Lévi-Strauss. The ethnographic record-ings are heard as such because they are songs in unknown languages (from my perspective) and are colored by the sonic qualities of early recording technology, sounding voices that are more distant and thin. And yet while the vocal-izations perform like fireflies from the archive, they can also animate objects, creating vocalic
bodies5 of their anthropomorphic speakers and
stands. Even where there was no visible speaker to attribute a voice to, Goebbels and his
collab-orators chose a distinct location in the sound-scape (and thus our perception of the space) for the voice to emanate from. For instance, Malcolm X’s voice seemed to come from the right side of the audience’s seats, rather than a spotlighted speaker onstage.
Unlike vision, sound is best understood in its verb form, as a doing, a sounding. It requires movement and force (and an appro-priate medium to transmit the waves of its doing, like air), and implies life. The reveal-ing threveal-ing about a music theatre meditation on objecthood (rather than a visual art one) is pre-cisely this relationship between object and the life that facilitates its sounding. The recorded voices, and their paradoxical existence as both disembodied and firmly bodied in technology, reveal our innate vococentrism, the tendency for our listening to prioritize the human voice over all other sounds (Chion [1982] 1999:5 –6), as well as our propensity to anthropomorphize objects by hearing their soundings as voices. We ascribe life-force to the sounding objects themselves if no outside force is immediately perceptible, and then ascribe voice to them as a way to understand them and consequently better entwine them in a power/knowledge dynamic. As Steven Connor explains:
The voice that is heard in the thun-der, the eruption, or the whirlwind, is a kind of compromise formation. In that it is ascribed to a god, or simply to God, the voice transcends human powers of understanding and control; but the very fact that it is so ascribed also makes it possible to begin exercising control, in the very considerable form of conferring a name. To hear the thunder as a voice is to experience awe and terror; but to hear the voice in the thunder is also to have begun to limit the powers of that voice. (2000:25)
However, Stifters Dinge strives to stage “a con-frontation with the unknown: with the forces that man cannot master” (Goebbels 2008), and manages to avoid that line where its expres-sion would degrade into mere symbolism or
5. Vocalic bodies are bodies formed by autonomous operations of a voice, as in the case of ventriloquism (see Connor 2000:35).
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even metonymy. The recordings often appear in the topography of the performance like the rain does, as an object or environmental pro-cess — an idea, a melody, a historical citation — that is put into material and poetic play, rather than as a stand-in for human presence. However, this investigation of liveness and thingness is also seen to play upon the mobile racial line that objectifies the human in the
Malcolm X sound bite.6 This racial context
hints not only at the mutability of definitions of the human, the object, and their dialectic, but ultimately exposes these definitions as creating a false binary, which, just the same, fuels power dynamics.
The finale of the performance (which most certainly inspired the title of the Guardian review “When Pianos Attack” [Connolly 2008]) erupts with the three layers of pianos, trees, and assorted industrial percussion rushing on tracks over the pools toward the audience, nois-ily producing their menacing soundtrack. As the rhythm changes and the collective heart-beat of the room slows, the pianos move slowly upstage again, revealing a bubbling bog in what before was clear water. I become fascinated with the behavior of the bubbles: how they sometimes grow, slide toward each other, and then pop when they finally touch.
Throughout the performance there is a mix-ing of thmix-ings that exist as instruments — objects that a person could control and that become both horrific and uncanny when they appear to take control of themselves, like the pianos — and as environmental processes — the activity of objects moved by outside forces that in turn aesthetically display the object’s materiality, like the chemical change sparked when dry ice is dropped into water. As things go, the stakes of
instrumentality are elegantly clear with musi-cal instruments, because they are created by humans to be used. In Stifters Dinge, most of the scenic instruments are single tones or per-cussion: something dragged along tile on the left side of the pool, two long pipes on the right side, a single amplified string, a sheet of metal, etc. However, the pianos (the materiality from which Goebbels began) are much more com-plicated. Historically, the modern piano and its consumer success are products of the industrial revolution (see Ripin et al. s.v. “Pianoforte”). Beginning in the Classical period, through the Romantic and early Modern era, until the recent ubiquity of the personal computer, the piano has been the dominant instrument in Western music. And as with all technologies, the unique attributes of the piano have influ-enced Western society as much as we have influenced it. One of these influences has been the development and subsequent pervasive-ness of equal temperament tuning, which was designed for the piano and has since greatly influenced how music is written and how other
instruments are played.7 Equal temperament
tuning was designed as a pragmatic philosoph-ical ideal to create a single uniform temper-ament for the piano, so that music could be played in any key without retuning. It compro-mises the natural acoustics of physics for con-venience and has ultimately altered what we hear as “correct” and the way music is “sup-posed” to be played. The prepared pianos of
Stifters Dinge are, in a sense, intentionally
out-of-tune and, as such, their sound displays a certain rebellion against the sound of human control that equal temperament epitomizes to our accustomed musical sense.
6. The objectification of a human into a “thing” is also noted in a Stifter excerpt published in the program but not included in the live performance. The quote refers to a shy young girl, “the dark girl from Nutmountain,” who runs away from the others in the story, at which point a farmhand declares, “I’ll catch that thing” ([1867] 2009). The program contains a wealth of textual material to leave one pondering before or after the performance. In addition to Goebbels program notes, the entire excerpt from Stifter’s “Ice Story,” and citations of the sound recordings, projections, and the Bach, there are two pages of quotes not integrated into the live performance. Three extracts from works by Stifter are interpenetrated by words from Jean-Paul Satre, Heinrich Mettler (who studied Stifter’s work), and Michel Foucault (from The Order of Things, of course).
7. Equal temperament is a system of tuning where every musical interval has an identical frequency ratio. It is opposed to just intonation, where the frequency of notes is based on the ratio of whole numbers. Just intonation allows for a different character in each key and a purity of harmonics, whereas equal temperament affords uniformity to each musical interval. “Western music now exists under the dictatorship of this one homogenized temperament” (Jorgensen 1991:4).
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The environmental processes exemplified by the rain and fog harbor a different set of questions about humanity and control — a sub-lime quality of thingness that spirals into often spiritual dimensions. This dialectic between instrumental control and outside environmen-tal force sets the stage for an unexpected polit-ical dimension to naturally emerge from the piece’s basic structure of inquiry. Many critics and audience members began to think precisely about the human relationship to climate change and the “natural” catastrophes scientists predict humanity’s irresponsibility has and will cause.
One fortuitous influence for this, at least in the short New York run, was the simultaneous UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, which took place from 7 to 18 December 2009 and which had been declared by the Sunday after-noon when I saw the show an unfortunate fail-ure (see Vidal et al. 2009; Revkin and Broder 2009). In an interview with John Schaefer
on National Public Radio (NPR), Goebbels declared this a “wonderful coincidence.” He also explained that the piece was not created as a political statement, but that the ecologi-cal and ethnographic contexts came from the materials themselves:
It came by working with the water, [...] it came by the wood and the metal and the space in which we performed and rehearsed [...], which is a much better way — if you get surprised by the con-text yourself — because then it means it’s open also for all the different perspec-tives of the audience. [...] I’m not there to make a statement. [...] I’m just passing the questions which are actually raised up by the material itself. (in Schaefer
2009)8
Whether those questions found any answers or sparked new questions, or even exactly what Figure 4. Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge (2007), at Park Avenue Armory, New York City, December 2009. (Photo: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center)
8. Goebbels has elsewhere stated: “I doubt that an artist has much of an influence on the political relevance of his artistic work. If art is too much on purpose, if its destination is too obvious, it loses certain qualities as artwork. [...] I think it’s good that the artist does not completely control the political context of a performance” (in Gourgouris 2004:2).
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those questions were, remains unknown and depends entirely on the journey of each indi-vidual audience member. It is in this way that the substantial human element of the piece is the human observer. What one hears and how
one listens,9 in what way one makes sense or
allows non-sense, depends entirely on one-self, and it is in this interior play that the drama unfolds (or doesn’t). As Goebbels admitted, to a certain extent contradicting his own market-ing and exposmarket-ing either ambivalence or ruse: “When people say there are no humans in the performance, they’re mistaken. It’s peo-ple that are at its centre — namely the audi-ence, who are empowered by it” (in Connolly 2008). Following the performance, I joined the rest of the audience in roaming around the mechanically sounding set and inspected its design with avid curiosity, a great sense of sat-isfaction washing over me when I got a closer look at the piano strings and understood what had been done. However, it wasn’t until I left the thing that I could feel how the piece pro-pelled me. Crunching through the snow with echoes of metallic songs accompanying me like ghost images, I departed from the Armory and headed into Central Park for an old- fashion snowball fight with some friends. At that moment, there was no thing that felt more appropriate or desirable than getting my hands deep into the materiality of what had recently reinvigorated the land (and sound)scape around me.
References
Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1964. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Bair, Deirdre. 1978. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New
York: Summit Books.
Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. 2007. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bourassa, Alan. 2002. “Literature, Language, and the Non-Human.” In A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi, 60 –76. London: Routledge.
Chion, Michel. [1982] 1999. The Voice in Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Connolly, Kate. 2008. “When Pianos Attack.” The Guardian, 27 March. www.guardian.co.uk/ stage/2008/mar/27/theatre2 (17 January 2010). Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstuck: A Cultural History
of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goebbels, Heiner. 2008. “Why I Made Stifter’s
Dinge.” Artangel. www.artangel.org.uk// projects/2008/stifter_s_dinge/heiner_goebbels_ on_stifter_s_dinge/heiner_goebbels_on_stifter_s_ dinge (17 January 2010).
Goebbels, Heiner. 2009a. “Heiner Goebbels.” The European Graduate School. Heiner Goebbels/Videos. www.egs.edu/faculty/heiner-goebbels/videos/ heiner-goebbels/ (7 February 2010). Goebbels, Heiner. 2009b. “Program Notes.”
Performance program. New York: Lincoln Center. Gourgouris, Stathis. 2004. “Performance as
Composition.” PAJ 26, 3 (78):1 –16.
Gump, Margaret. 1974. Adalbert Stifter. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.
Jorgensen, Owen H. 1991. Tuning: Containing the Perfection of Eighteen-Century Temperament, the Lost Art of Nineteenth-Century Temperament, and the Science of Equal Temperament. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. [2002] 2007. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press.
Plato. 1997. “Republic.” Trans. G.M.A. Grube and C.D.C. Reeve. In Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, 971 –1223. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Revkin, Andrew C., and John M. Broder. 2009. “A Grudging Accord in Climate Talks.” New York Times, 19 December. www.nytimes.com/2009/ 12/20/science/earth/20accord.html (7 February 2010).
Ripin, Edward M. et al. s.v. “Pianoforte.” In Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online. www.oxford musiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/ music/21631 (8 February 2010).
Schaefer, John. 2009. “Soundcheck: Heiner Goebbels.” WNYC, 16 December. www.wnyc .org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2009/12/16/ segments/146325?utm_source=feedburner&utm_ medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wnyc_ home+%28WNYC+New+York+Public+Radio %29 (22 January 2010).
Stein, Gertrude. [1935] 1985. Lectures in America. Boston: Beacon Press.
9. “To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin” (Nancy [2002] 2007:7).
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Stifter, Adalbert. [1867] 2009. “Excerpt from Stifters Dinge.” From Die Mappe meines Urgossvaters (My Great Grandfather’s Portfolio), translator uncredited. Performance program. New York: Lincoln Center.
Vidal, John, Allegra Stratton, and Suzanne Goldenberg. 2009. “Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure.” The
King/Cate
Stardom, Aura, and the Stage Figure in the
Sydney Theatre Company’s Production of Richard II
Glen McGillivray
Guardian, 18 December. www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-deal (7 February 2010).
TDR: The Drama Review 54:3 (T207) Fall 2010. ©2010 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Behind the mechanical whirr of the rising cur-tain I hear a quiet susurration. A shower of golden fragments flutters from the flies and fills the voluminous Sydney Theatre stage. The air shimmers as if alive. There is no sound but the whispering pitter-patter of the endless golden rain. The cast of nine stand, except for one, fac-ing the audience, spread sfac-ingly and in pairs on the stage: they don’t move and they’ll remain in these positions, mostly, for the best part of the show’s 90-minute duration. Seated downstage center is Cate Blanchett, costumed in off-white trousers, a long-sleeved white shirt, and white slip-on shoes. On her blonde head sits a golden crown and a gold ring glints on her wedding-band finger. Lit from above, she is the brightest thing onstage: a glowing monarch surrounded by drably dressed courtiers. Nothing moves except the twinkling golden air.
This tableau, seen through a cloud of gold, is the opening image of Benedict Andrews’s Sydney Theatre Company (STC) produc-tion of The War of the Roses ( January 2009), an abridged retelling of Shakespeare’s history plays from Richard II to Richard III, adapted by Andrews and Tom Wright. The War of the Roses
stages the plays in chronological sequence so as to reveal the great arc of history as semi- mythical narrative that underpins the ad hoc assortment of eight plays. Previous ver-sions include Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1964 and Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington’s English Shakespeare Company production in 1987. For the STC production, Andrews and Wright took nearly 30 hours of stage time reducing it to eight hours structured into four acts. The result, writes reviewer Keith Gallasch, sweeps aside “bishops, whores, taverners, mayors, mer-cenaries, ambassadors, popular rebels and petty criminals, and Joan of Arc” in order to chronicle the “descent into death of a king-dom and its people” (Gallasch 2009). The four acts are bookended by the two Richards with both monarchs played by women: Blanchett as Richard II and the less internationally known, but equally impressive, Pamela Rabe as Richard
III.1 Whereas all the other roles are played by
the ensemble, Blanchett appears once more only (as Lady Anne to Rabe’s Richard III) while Rabe is a continuing sinister presence, waiting silently onstage, until she appears as Richard
Glen McGillivray lectures in the Department of Performance Studies, Sydney University, and in
the School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney. He has worked extensively as a director and dramaturg, and has published recently in Performance Research (2008) and About Performance (2008). Glen is currently editing the collection Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia: Hidden Archives of Performance.
1. Pamela Rabe is one of Australia’s foremost stage actors. She has worked with all the major theatre companies in the country.
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“Crookback.” For a work of such ambition, it may seem perverse to only focus on one aspect of it but I was intrigued by Blanchett’s cast-ing as Richard II. It was not so much the cross-gender casting that piqued my interest — after all, Fiona Shaw had played Richard in Deborah
Warner’s 1995 production2 — but how the
pro-duction explicitly utilized her celebrity status in the role.
Spectatorship in the theatre is a complex business — particularly when a star is involved; so how does one separate the star from her aura and the actor from her role? On the one hand there is Cate Blanchett (film star and celebrity) and on the other King Richard (Shakespeare’s character). Yet, when Blanchett embodies Shakespeare’s words something else appears that the Prague Structuralists called the Stage Figure (see Ambros 2008): in this production it is Blanchett/Richard. While this Stage Figure is not Blanchett it remains, nonetheless and also,
not not her. Blanchett, and every actor onstage,
is both a social being and a fictional character; but in Blanchett’s case stardom intensifies this juxtaposition. Onstage the star shines and the king glows. Richard is imbued with “Cate-ness,” but it is for the king we weep, not Blanchett.
Blanchett’s star power operates indepen-dently from her role as Richard; her celebrity is, indisputably, a major draw for the produc-tion. Audiences desire physical proximity to a star; a desire (call it “gilt by association”) that is milked shamelessly by producers to increase their box office receipts. At its most instrumen-tal level, a show can simply be a vehicle for its star to do a star “turn”; its main purpose being to place the body of the star before his or her fans. Here, in a way that goes beyond Walter Benjamin’s envisioning in 1936, the actor is “in the service of a ritual” and, far from emancipat-ing her from a “parasitical dependence” on rit-ual, her star status recasts this old relationship anew (Benjamin [1955] 1992:217 –18). Figure 1. An endless golden rain falls on the golden crown. Left to right: Steve Le Marquand, Cate Blanchett, Pamela Rabe in the Sydney Theatre Company’s War of the Roses, Part One, by William Shakespeare, adapted by Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews, directed by Benedict Andrews. Sydney Theatre, 2009. (Photo by Tania Kelley)
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In The War of the Roses Part One, Act One, Blanchett as Richard never vacates center stage but remains for most of the production down-stage center, except for a gradual move updown-stage, as power slips from Richard’s grasp, culmi-nating in a position far upstage center against the back wall of the stage after he has abdi-cated his throne. With its large cast of support-ing roles nearly completely excised, the play becomes almost an extended monologue on kingship, interrupted by the antagonistic voice of Bolingbroke (Robert Menzies), the man who desires the crown. Blanchett dominates cen-ter stage — where she alcen-ternates between still-ness and slouching, fidgeting, pouting, mugging (during the abdication scene she lifts her leg like a dog against Bolingbroke) — and the spa-tial logic of the mise-en-scène and proscenium arch stage ensures all eyes are on her. Dressed in white and highlighted, she provides a focus point in the agitated air.
Rather than resisting or trying to compen-sate for Blanchett’s star power, Andrews has embraced it; for the fans, she is always before them and it is her voice that they hear the most. The Stage Figure of Blanchett/Richard concatenates the aura of contemporary celeb-rity with archaic kingly presence: the much older charisma of kings was just as manufac-tured as contemporary celebrity, and Richard was one of the first to pull this off. According to his biographer Nigel Saul, Richard had “slightly feminine features” and his contempo-raries — friends and enemies alike — all com-mented on his beauty: John Gower described him as “the most beautiful of kings” and Richard Maidstone said he was “as hand-some as Paris” (Saul 1997:451, 452). Reviewing
The War of the Roses for The Economist, Tim
McKeough comments that Blanchett, too, is “known for the pale beauty of her face” (2009). Blanchett’s face possesses, like Richard’s did, iconic power — on Google there are over a mil-lion photos of it.
Celebrity studies, like the celebrity itself, can become seduced by the spectacle and lost in a mirror maze of endlessly proliferat-ing surfaces. It is, therefore, salutary to recall Benjamin’s observation that it is “significant that the existence of the work of art with refer-ence to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function” ([1955] 1992:217). The aura
of kings once worked the same way: in pre-enlightenment Europe kings were believed to be a sacred race apart. Roy Strong writes that the ceremonial entrances of monarchs to cities, that began in the Middle Ages and reached new heights of magnificence in the Renaissance, focused “continually on the eternal myths that were essential to the concept of les rois
thauma-turges, the mystical sacred rulers who were
ven-erated and regarded as a race set apart in the Europe that preceded the age of enlighten-ment” ([1973] 1984:8). It is not surprising, then, that Richard self-consciously cultivated the hieratic aspects of his office and, according to Saul, “developed a fondness for images of him-self in semi-divine pose” (1997:449). Medieval monarchs were venerated as sacred beings and performatively reinforced this through their rituals; aura depends on ritual and monarchs acquired auras through ritual and ceremony. Figure 2. Cate Blanchett as Richard II lifts her leg like a dog against Bolingbroke (Robert Menzies) in the Sydney Theatre Company’s War of the Roses, Part One, by William Shakespeare, adapted by Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews, directed by Benedict Andrews. Sydney Theatre, 2009. (Photo by Tania Kelley)
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Although European monarchs no longer have this sense of sacred mystery, and we no longer venerate them, a star performer pos-sesses an ineffable mystery of her own: stage presence. Stage presence is the inexplicable “it” as in “you’ve either got it or you don’t” (see Roach 2007). From the beginning, “pres-ence” has had numinous connotations; its ety-mology in the OED can be traced to the Latin
praesentia that referred to a powerful or helpful
presence: in the fourth and fifth centuries, this referred to the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The term was not applied to human beings until the 12th century and then it was applied to royalty who were imbued with this sacred aura: an emperor or king had a presence
into which, or before which, one entered.3
A similar, but secular, sense of presence is now attributable to the star actor. Jane Goodall, in Stage Presence (2008), suggests that the actor’s presence combines qualities of both the dignitary and the magus; that is, it com-bines the awe we reserve for the truly sacred with our wonder at the magician’s tricks. Stage-struck admirers in the 18th-century had just this relationship to certain actors as illustrated by William Hazlitt’s description of the actress Sarah Siddons: “She was regarded less with admiration than with wonder, as if a being of a superior order had dropped from another sphere, to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance” (in Goodall 2008:30).
But “presence” also shares an etymology with the verb “to present” — to show, exhibit, display — and Goodall suggests that “presence” implies and requires the metaphysical together with the “practical work of performance and performance training” (2008:20). Both these qualities, magic and mastery, are attributed to Blanchett by Richard Porton in his intro-duction to an interview with her for Cineaste; Blanchett, he writes, “is also intriguingly remi-niscent of old-time movie stars [...] who wowed audiences with an impressive blend of charisma and craftsmanship” (2007).
Since it’s virtually impossible, then, to deny the stage presence of a star (although through technique she can dim her
luminos-ity), the intelligent choice is to exploit it. How does this happen? Wright’s dramaturgy dis-tills the play into an oratorio for Richard and Andrews’s staging places her center stage, but the nuances of Blanchett’s casting emerge at two notable moments. The first of these, as Shakespeare wrote it, occurs when Richard summons a mirror while the details of his abdi-cation are being negotiated. Blanchett, whose face is as renowned in its beauty as that of the historical Richard, stands center, slouched non-chalantly on her left leg, hand on left hip as she gazes into a hand mirror held in her right hand. On the line “No deeper wrinkles yet?” her left hand drops to her side and her arrogantly relaxed posture changes as she looks search-ingly at her reflection, her left hand at times exploring her face. Richard asks:
Is this the face which faced so many follies That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke? Blanchett’s voice drops into its lower register as she bitterly remarks:
A brittle glory shineth in this face As brittle as the glory is the face. Richard dashes the mirror to the floor and it explodes into glass shards: this is the largest and most explosive gesture in the production. Richard looks at the ground, at the shattered image of her face and laments:
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (IV.i)
This scene is a dramatic climax in the play, and when Blanchett embodies these lines and actions, we cannot help but understand them as an extra-diegetic meditation on contempo-rary celebrity. In this moment the Stage Figure produces the sense that the “brittle glory” of the actor’s own celebrity is just as fragile as the king’s; a sense that is reinforced when the king, shortly after, stumbles across the broken glass as she returns downstage.
The monarch is a star whose light might burn brightly but whose ascendance is always provisional. When Richard abdicates, she lifts the crown from her head and a shower of gold
3. Amidst its various permutations, the OED intriguingly suggests a mid-16th-century French usage, présence, which refers to a collection of people, audience. Also, one does not have a meeting with a monarch, but has an audience.
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flakes tumbles from it. Flicking her blonde hair Blanchett walks in an arc left to upstage cen-ter — it’s ambiguous: is she now playing the king or being “herself”? This is done in com-plete silence and I’m suddenly aware that the golden rain is ceasing and the lights are changing to a cooler tint. The whole mise-en-scène changes: the opulence and light of court are exchanged for the hard and vast void of the stage. “We princes are set on stages,” Elizabeth I once said, herself the epitome of 16th-century celebrity, “in the sight and view of all the world dulie observed”: unrelenting scru-tiny is the monarch/star’s lot, and it does not cease even when a star has fallen (in Montrose 1996:76).
Having placed Blanchett so emphatically before the audience, how can she be removed? What to do with that famous face? To deny kingly aura the production has to disavow its star, it has to literally efface her and does so, in a second notable moment, with remarkable subtlety. Blanchett is alone onstage; an actor enters from stage left and fits a tight black lycra hood — reminiscent of a bondage mask — over her head. She is completely masked except for the small hole that the actor, using scis-sors, carefully cuts around her mouth. Just as the play calls for Richard to be sundered from society by his imprisonment in Pomfret Castle, these gestures — the masking and the cut-ting — are acts of understated violence that
sunder the bond between the audience and our desired object.
Blanchett’s face, both familiar and aloof to us, is made strange and faintly alarming by this masking. Her features are effaced except for her mouth, which is now distorted by the hood into a grotesque goldfish pout. Blanchett’s mouth is a physiognomic quirk, a genetic gift to the actor, which in an instant can trans-form her beauty into grotesquerie. Her mouth with its long upper lip can morph from a sen-sual pout to the gaping “O” of a sideshow alley clown — a capacity that the actor is not afraid to use. With her mouth closed she joins the pantheon of great screen beauties and is onstage every inch the beautiful king. With her mouth open Blanchett looks like a Muppet.
The hooded figure before us is no longer “Cate Blanchett” but an anonymous Other. From being one of the most famous faces in the world she becomes, like prisoners the world over, one of the vanished. Although the actor’s body is still before us, the only thing that is recognizably “Cate Blanchett” is her voice. This black-headed figure, kneeling on the stage, casts sightlessly about her and speaks:
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world (V.v) For the sightless actor, her world must now, truly, as her final soliloquy suggests, comprise only her teeming thoughts. For the audience, our glowing reference point has been body-snatched and replaced by a “gimp” on a stage. It is, quite simply, a breathtakingly understated action that works only because of the relation-ship between star presence and kingly aura expressed through the Stage Figure.
Richard is finally murdered, not as
Shakespeare writes in a desperate battle against multiple assailants, but in an intimate embrace with a single assassin. Bolingbroke is told of Richard’s death and falls, anguished, to his knees; in the cold hard-edged void of the Sydney Theatre stage, the contrast between Bolingbroke’s court and the glittering opulence of his predecessor’s could not be greater. As the fire curtain relentlessly descends, the looped refrain “I’m the king,” accompanied by discor-dant electric guitar, blares out. The final image is of the remorseful Bolingbroke, on his knees, Figure 3. From being one of the most famous
faces in the world she becomes, like prisoners the world over, one of the vanished. Peter Carroll and Cate Blanchett in the Sydney Theatre Company’s War of the Roses, Part One, by William Shakespeare, adapted by Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews, directed by Benedict Andrews. Sydney Theatre, 2009. (Photo by Tania Kelley)
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with the rest of the cast, staggering toward the audience.
References
Ambros, Veronika. 2008. “Prague’s Experimental Stage: Laboratory of Theatre and Semiotics.” Semiotica 168:45–65.
Benjamin, Walter. [1955] 1992. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 211 –44. Hammersmith, London: Fontana Press.
Gallasch, Keith. 2009. “the war within, the war without.” Real Time 89, February –March. http:// rt.airstrip.com.au/article/89/9323 (23 September). Goodall, Jane. 2008. Stage Presence. London:
Routledge.
McKeough, Tim. 2009. “Cate and the King.” The Economist, 12 February. www.economist.com/ displayStory.cfm?story_id=13097656 (23 September).
Montrose, Louis. 1996. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porton, Richard. 2007. “Trusting the Text: An
Interview with Cate Blanchett.” Cineaste, 22 March. New York: Cineaste Publishers (6 February 2009).
Roach, Joseph. 2007. It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Saul, Nigel. 1997. Richard II. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shakespeare, William. 1992. The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strong, Roy. [1973] 1984. Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450 –1650. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press.
TDR: The Drama Review 54:3 (T207) Fall 2010. ©2010 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Meeting to Find a Way to Let Me Down Easy
Candace M. Joice
By August of 2009, the status of the US health care system worked its way to the forefront of the political arena. A problem decades in the making, major health care reform under the banner of what the media and politicians alike have termed a “health care crisis” was the focus of a strong campaign initiated by President
Obama and Congress.1 In response, citizens
attended town hall meetings to debate this crisis. The events drew considerable attention
from the media, especially as dozens of meet-ings across the country attracted angry crowds that occasionally necessitated police interven-tion to quell threatening and sometimes even violent dissenters. Consider events such as the Memphis meeting held on 8 August 2009 dur-ing which two increasdur-ingly aggressive dissent-ers were forcibly removed by the sheriff only 15 minutes into the meeting (Moore 2009); or the 6 August 2009 St. Louis meeting billed
Candace M. Joice works as an actor and a director, and is a PhD student at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. She holds an MA in Theatre from the University of Central Missouri and a BS in Education from Southwest Baptist University. She compiled the resource guide for Dr. Beth Osnes’s forthcoming book, The Shadow Puppet Theatre of Malaysia. Her scholarly interests focus on women’s theatre, docudrama, and Christianity in the arts.
1. Congress continued to work on a health care plan for over a year. Meanwhile, Smith’s production was extended twice, finally closing in January 2010. I think the extension of her run is no coincidence: certainly, she is a fine performer and the production value of her piece had enough of its own merit to cause the longer run. However, as Congress continued to extend its own deliberations concerning the health care crisis, it became clear that the dialogue initiated by both the play and by our government representatives demonstrates that this is a conversation that will not end with any bill, even now that it has passed, for it is a topic that is ever-evolving, and one that touches each of our lives.
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as an “aging” meeting, in which six people were arrested for charges as severe as assault after activists on both sides of the issue turned the event into a fervent health care debate (FOXNews 2009). On 11 August 2009, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, one protester wore a gun strapped to his leg as he joined the crowd outside of a town hall meeting fea-turing President Obama, an action he later refused to admit as hostile or inappropriate (Shapiro 2009). The sign outside of Georgia Congressman David Scott’s office was vandal-ized with a swastika, while across the coun-try, Obama was photoshopped into images in which he shook hands with Adolph Hitler (Bazemore 2009; Schmickle 2009).
While not all of the nation’s town hall meetings were met with threatening actions and caustic propaganda, it is rare to find evi-dence of an event that did not inspire citizens to unabashedly display their anger. Concerns regarding the management and practice of health care and health insurance policies are not new to this nation, but the tenacity with which the President and the 111th Congress have dedicated themselves to the issue, along with the similarly passionate reactions of American citizens, has brought the decades of problems and inadequate solutions to a climax. As politicians and government leaders debated the proper solution to the health care crisis, the town hall meetings provided a public outlet for average citizens to express their own perspec-tives on an issue with such personal and far-reaching repercussions.
It is within this climate of ardent debate that Anna Deavere Smith’s new play Let Me Down
Easy opened on Broadway in October 2009. A
“docudrama” production several years in the making, Let Me Down Easy is the latest install-ment in Smith’s series, On the Road: A Search for
the American Character. This one-woman show
is constructed in the same format as her other groundbreaking works of theatre for social change: Smith performs as individuals with whom she has conducted personal interviews, using their exact words in performance. She omits her own voice, choosing instead to bring to her audience the voices of people who might otherwise never be heard. Though Smith’s pro-duction was not originally developed to con-tribute to the health care debates, Let Me Down
Easy affirms the need for events such as town
hall meetings in which the average citizen, rather than just the politician or celebrity, is not only given a voice but also an active, listen-ing audience.
Let Me Down Easy features the same
artis-tic devices as Smith’s previous solo work, but it is also an important step forward in the evo-lution of her particular brand of theatre. Fires
in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) were written to contribute to the
effort to bring national attention to race riots sparked in New York City and Los Angeles, respectively. Smith began working on Fires in
the Mirror in October of 1992 in response to
three days of fires and civil violence in Crown Heights. The violence was sparked by a series of racially charged events: In August 1991, a Lubavitcher (a member of an orthodox Hasidic Jewish sect) driving a hearse accidentally struck and killed a young Guyanese boy, sparking a retaliation later that evening by a group of
Figure 1. Anna Deavere Smith as Elizabeth Streb, Streb Dance Company choreographer, in Let Me Down Easy, Second Stage Theatre, 2009. (Photo by Joan Marcus)
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black teen agers, one of whom allegedly stabbed and killed a Hasidic scholar. Similarly, Smith initiated Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 to address the race riots that exploded in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers who had brutally beaten Rodney King, an African American whom they had pulled over for speeding and driving while intoxicated. In both productions, Smith moved from a narrow exploration of the specific concerns of both the Crown Heights and Los Angeles inhabitants to a more expansive examination of the social and political implications facing the country at large.
Unlike these works, Let Me Down Easy does not have a specific, isolated event as the start-ing point for its primary narrative. Rather than addressing one particular incident and its repercussions, Smith tackled an ambitiously large project: the human experience of illness, healing, and death. Smith says that the play “is both about the resilience of the human body and the vulnerability of it” (KVUE 2009); and that “It’s not just policy, it’s not just politics. These are lives at stake; our lives, how we’re going to live. And also, I think, [it is about] our dignity as Americans” (in Lunden 2009).
Though her primary focus is on individ-uals in the United States, Smith’s characters come from all over the world, making Let Me
Down Easy her most far-reaching play in terms
of geography. Despite the broad range of the backgrounds from which she has selected her characters, Smith’s play does not lack focus or direction. The disparate and varied voices flow through and around her central message: while illness and death inspire a range of reactions, hope, dignity, and understanding should be available to us all when we must inevitably face the presence of illness and death in our lives. Some of her characters, such as supermodel Lauren Hutton, share personal stories about their encounters with illness and health care. Others, like musicologist Susan Yuens, share their perspective regarding the meaning behind our mortality. Finally, to a lesser degree, some, including New Orleans doctor Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, who felt utterly abandoned during the days following Hurricane Katrina, share their opinions regarding policies and health care practices in the United States. Smith’s char-acters include physicians, patients, and friends
and family of patients, but also academicians, authors, religious leaders, journalists, and ath-letes. The sweeping range of demographics represented in Let Me Down Easy is a charac-teristic shared with her previous docudramas, and is arguably the strongest element of her work. In her preface to the published edition of
Twilight, Smith wrote:
One of the questions I was frequently asked when I was interviewed about
Twilight was “Did you find any one voice
that could speak for the entire city?” I think there is an expectation that in this diverse city, and in this diverse nation, a unifying voice would bring increased understanding and put us on the road to solutions. This expectation surprises me. There is little in culture or educa-tion that encourages the development of a unifying voice. In order to have real unity, all voices would first have to be heard or at least represented. Many of us who work in race relations do so from the point of view of our ethnicity. This very fact inhibits our ability to hear more voices than those that are closest to us in proximity. Few people speak a language about race that is not their own. If more of us could actually speak from another point of view, like speaking another lan-guage, we could accelerate the flow of ideas. (1994:xxiv–xxv)
By voicing the perspectives of the rich and the poor, the Republican and the Democrat, the atheist and the believer, the Caucasian and the African American, and a host of charac-ters whose backgrounds defy these binaries, Smith creates an unbiased theatrical environ-ment in which the audience can consider the varied range of perspectives regarding illness, dying, and the utility of health care as a means to postpone death.
It is no surprise that this same discourse regarding quality of life, illness, and health care induced such a high degree of participa-tion in town hall meetings across the country. In Politics, Discourse, and American Society, David Michael Ryfe discusses the origin and influence of the town hall meeting, especially as con-nected with presidential campaigns and terms of office (2001). Ryfe cites the 17th-century
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New England Puritans as the first American community to hold town hall meetings as a means of civic engagement. Since then, the civic utility of town hall meetings has fluctu-ated, but Ryfe notes that the assemblies have allowed “presidents [to] strategically speak to the public to leverage their bargaining power with other political actors” (173). The major-ity of the town hall meetings of 2009 have been held not by President Obama but by members of Congress. However, the same idea can be applied; the town hall meetings provide a stra-tegic opportunity for the members of Congress to leverage their position on Obama’s health care plan by inciting American communities to react publicly.
In this way, it can be inferred that town hall meetings provide politicians with a platform from which they can affirm their own politi-cal agenda under the guise of providing oppor-tunities for the public to be civically engaged. However, to deny the significance of the indi-vidual citizen’s participation is to deny the democratic foundation of this country. As Ryfe points out, town hall meetings do not exist merely as viable tools for “political
bargain-ing” but they take on additional relevance as cultural forms. Alluding to sociologist David Chaney, Ryfe explains that as a cultural form, a town hall meeting has three qualities: “it is socially organized and produced, it generates narratives that provide its meaning (complete with typical plots, characters, and scenery), and it establishes a set of roles and behaviors for participants that mark it as a distinctive social activity” (174). As a cultural form, the town hall meetings are more than political soapboxes. They provide a cultural release of tension and fear by initiating the public into active partic-ipation in American democracy. The partici-pants serve as both the characters and as the audience, engaging in a mutual give-and-take of performance and active observation.
Held in churches, recreation centers, and occasionally, actual town halls, these meetings contrast sharply with the environment created for Let Me Down Easy. At the start of Smith’s play, the stage is strikingly bare and conspicu-ously white. The stage consists of a white oval hardwood floor; a white couch with pillows and a corresponding coffee table; a long white dining table with three chairs; and five
sil-Figure 2. Anna Deavere Smith performs her aunt, Lorraine Coleman, a retired teacher, in Let Me Down Easy, Second Stage Theatre, 2009. (Photo by Joan Marcus)
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very, rectangular, mirror-like pan-els angled toward the floor. The stark space reflects the sterility and unintentional coldness of a hospi-tal, but it is not until the perfor-mance is well under way and Smith has embodied several characters that the purpose of the pallid scen-ery becomes evident. As she per-forms in her simple white blouse and tailored blue slacks, a stage-hand emerges from the wings to bring Smith a new costume piece, a prop, or both. With these sim-ple accoutrements, Smith becomes the new character. The accessories provide Smith with further impe-tus to launch from one charac-ter to another and, similarly, they also assist the audience in accept-ing the transformations. However, most striking is the way Smith dis-cards one prop or costume piece for another, leaving it onstage, per-haps draped over a chair or lying on the floor. In this way, no char-acter is fully left behind or forgot-ten; the presence of each character continues to resonate as the others speak. Each character is continually in attendance for the next, so that their perspectives continue to accu-mulate, whether the current charac-ter affirms or contradicts those who have already spoken. By the play’s end, the colorless stage is brought to life by the vivid, multi-hued
pos-sessions of the diverse assembly.2
This visual tactic underscores
Smith’s emphasis on human mortality. The characters themselves do not remain; it is only their belongings and the impressions of their words that are left behind. Smith has not only
Figure 3. Anna Deavere Smith as the Reverend Peter Gomes (Minister, Memorial Church, Harvard University) in Let Me Down Easy, Second Stage Theatre, 2009. (Photo by Joan Marcus)
2. Both Fires in the Mirror and Twilight featured similar staging devices. For both, the stage was largely bare; Fires in
the Mirror featured mirror fragments that reflected the audience as the primary element of the set, while Twilight
included a number of chairs. Smith also used simple props and costume pieces to add to her basic attire of white shirt and dark pants as she embodied each individual. Unlike Let Me Down Easy, however, Fires in the Mirror also featured the projection of dynamic images capturing the violence and destruction that occurred during the three days of fires and violence in August 1991, and Twilight included occasional projected backgrounds and images, such as graffiti-covered walls projected during monologues featuring inner-city characters, much to the chagrin of some critics (see Laris 1993; and Villarreal et al. 1994).
provided a venue in which the voices of these individuals can be heard, but she also has pro-vided an aesthetic that allows their words and their experiences to become visually affixed in
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the minds of the audience. Smith’s play reflects the important release afforded by the town hall meetings wherein conflicting opinions necessi-tate a response from the participant that dem-onstrates the knowledge gained by exposure to conflicting viewpoints. Without a platform, the individual citizen’s voice is not only unheard but is essentially silenced. Similarly, without an audience the individual citizen’s voice has no relevance or impact on public opinion or pub-lic popub-licy.
The audience is further aided in grasp-ing the identity of the characters begrasp-ing por-trayed by the use of a projection that is flashed onto a small screen above the playing space, which indicates the current character’s name and vocation, along with a title that Smith has selected for the monologue. Let Me Down Easy includes the voices of many individuals who are familiar to the audience at large, such as cyclist Lance Armstrong, film critic Joel Siegel, and former Texas governor Ann Richards. However, the voices of these recognizable personali-ties are not a gimmick to draw an audience. Rather, their presence prevents the audience from detaching intellectually from the world of the play, as if the characters are all fictional creations intended to elicit sentimental reac-tions. The portrayal of recognizable individuals reminds us that all of her characters, includ-ing those who are not familiar to us, are real people.
This reminder is important because it is the average, unfamiliar characters whose expe-riences are most captivating and most rele-vant, and these are the characters to whom the average audience member can most read-ily relate. Yet, these are also the characters whose voices become propaganda for poli-ticians’ speeches and health care campaigns. For instance, Smith’s “A Sheet Around My Daughter” features Evangelist Hazel Merritt, a Yale New Haven hospital patient who refuses dialysis treatment after watching her daugh-ter, who was in her 20s, die after undergoing the same treatment. Smith stages Merritt’s tes-timony with the character facing upstage away from the audience, her face projected on one of the stage’s reflective panels. Merritt is instantly appealing; she is embarrassed by her appear-ance for Smith’s recording of the interview, and jokes about not wanting her disheveled
appear-ance to be captured on tape. However, once Merritt begins sharing her heartbreaking story, her inhibition fades. Merritt’s daughter had been receiving a routine procedure of dialy-sis, yet the negligent behavior of her attending nurses contributed to her eventual and pre-mature death. When the tubes connecting her daughter to the dialysis machine became dys-functional, the nurses were nowhere to be found, and the young woman became soaked in her own blood. The nurses sent her home in a taxi, still wearing her bloody clothes, with-out completing the procedure properly. As she tells her story, Merritt is humble and straight-forward, refusing to cave to the emotions that undoubtedly lie in her grief. Stories like Merritt’s have served as the human interest spectacle with which politicians draw the atten-tion of the public, but in Smith’s play, Merritt’s experience is not exhibitionist; it is evidence of the reality of an issue that hides behind closed hospital doors, as if untouchable by the public or by policy.
Merritt’s tragic story is juxtaposed with comedic, enlightening segments, such as the piece featuring hospital administrator Ruth Katz who was also a cancer patient. Katz explained that at one checkup, the medical stu-dent assigned to her case informed her that her records were irrevocably lost and that they would be required to start anew with compil-ing her medical history. However, once Katz revealed that she was the Dean of Medicine, the records were suddenly located. Segments such as this serve to reveal the intricate layers of classism and inconsistency in current health care practices. The broad range of perspec-tives shared in Smith’s play reflects the variety of opinions being shared in town hall meetings across the nation.
Let Me Down Easy does not provide an
answer to the health care debate that has lately consumed the attention of the politicians and citizens. Instead, the play provides a new kind of venue in which the voices of Americans are released as a vital expression of civic partic-ipation, and as an affirmation of our shared humanity. The experience of illness and death is universal, but the manner in which we all experience them is incredibly diverse. Let Me
Down Easy reminds us that within that
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individual’s experience of illness and dying should be tempered with hope, dignity, and understanding. As one of Smith’s characters, James Cone, says, “Let me down easy. Don’t do it harshly, don’t do it too mean. Let it be easy. [...] Let me die easy, when I die.”
References
Bazemore, John. 2009. “Swastika painted at congressman’s office.” MSNBC.com. www.msnbc .msn.com/id/32377979. (15 March 2010). KVUE. 2009. “Interview: Anna Deavere Smith.”
KVUE.com. www.kvue.com/archive/65250442. html (10 January 2010).
FOXNews. 2009. “Health Care Town Halls Turn Violent in Tampa and St. Louis.” FOXNews.com. www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/07/health-care-town-halls-turn-violent-tampa-st-louis/ (10 January 2010).
Laris, Katie. 1993. “Fires in the Mirror.” Theatre Journal 45, 1:117 –19.
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TDR: The Drama Review 54:3 (T207) Fall 2010. ©2010 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
