Theatrical Discontents.
There's some serious brain-damage in my head. There're so many ideas and very few of them I am able to express and present.
I have this feeling that theatre has been misunderstood. It's misunderstood. I see all those performances in which one actor tries very hard to stand out and ends up almost killing the play and I blame it on capitalism. I know it's a strange take on it but, bare with me.
How many faces and bodies can you fit on a screen each with a personality and not just general by-passers with blank faces? Very few.
How many faces and bodies can you fit on a stage each with a personality and not just general by-passers with blank faces? Few but more than on a screen.
When we go to the movie theatre we look at these portraits, usually there are close-ups of a couple or of one person. For a moment, according to so many theorists whose names I forget, we lose our sense of self and we unite with the character.
Can we unite with a bumch of characters? Can we unite with a whole play?
When I was younger I used to like being alone, I thought it gave more meaning to my thought and was more productive in terms of finding "answers" to all those hypothetical questions and depressed teenager thrives to find answers for. Back then, I liked novel and poetry. I especially liked novels told in the first person, from one point of view.
I liked them because they were about me and my room and my imagination. Poetry was also about me and my room and my imagination. Even if I read a novel on the beach, the beach never takes part in the novel. A place is situated in space that is inside my imagination and all that is written is mine.
A play gets out of hand. There're many characters. It's much more enjoyable to read it with someone. I read The Comedy of Errors when I was 11 in Arabic. It was in my mothers collection. She said it was funny. I didn't find it that funny.
I tried reading it again with a friend. Then, it was funny. I was not a loner anymore when I started liking theatre because for the imagination to be alive in a world with too many voices, my imagination will definitely be short on a couple of even a few of them and then they melt together and it's not funny anymore.
Looking back at it, the more I enjoyed company the more I liked theatre. I can read play when I'm alone, but it still doesn't feel like I'm completely alone because it seems as though there's no dominant point of view from which it's told. (there's an opinion of course but I will not get into that right now). Different characters speak differently, act differently and are always kept company by one another.
To make a play that has no design and no sound and no nothing, you still need a lot of people. One person can't carry a play that has more than one actor. (maybe if they have multi-personality disorder but that's not what I'm talking about right now!) and it seems that there has to be a lot of people involved with this type of thing and they have to work together.
If a character didn't like company, wanted to be alone, how would the play unfold then?
And if an actor wants to be alone and shine in the limelight where did the characters around him go? And how will they help him go through with his action if he doesn't let them speak?
There's a sense of community in this. The way everyone has a certain job and not the other, the way every person completes something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Also, in the way that only if you stop talking over me will I be heard, you have to stop talking so I can be heard.
And you will stop talking or else you will stop making sense if I don't talk back.
It's a limited space in which we step over one another, nothing is just but most things are needed. If one actor doesn't care about the other person at all, a play might end up being completey dysfuntional. There is a general worry about the play as a living thing and actors as parts of it that move like mobile puzzles, completing one another, and in the way, completing a whole picture, overlapping and contradicting.
How would a puzzle be if one person wanted to be a leader? to compete with the others? to be best at something? or to want to outcast others that he doesn't like? Aren't these the concepts and basics on which a self-interest based system is built and fed? And aren't those principles that are growing in different societies every day?
How will theatre survive if each person thinks that their sadness only belongs to them and is not to share? How will it survive if each person thinks that their happiness only belong to them and is not for sharing?
It would be a play where each character talks at the other, does not listen, and therefore, goes nowhere.
It would be this word-vomit'y blob of speech on a stage that no one would like to see.
Self that exists alone just might kill theatre.
