Act Without Words

I didn't see Slava's Snowshow when it came to town two years or so ago. I wish I would have. By all accounts Slava Polunin is the greatest clown performer in the world right now. If you are my generation, or above, you probably saw Red Skelton or Carol Burnett when they had TV shows. I'm gonna say I was really young then, but I remember. I tried to copy the antics and routines. My family will tell you so. Those ways they were so fascinated by or slaved over some small thing, some object or some seemingly trivial happening, how it would get out of hand. I loved that. In fact, a few years ago when Howard Allen talked me into being in The Birthday Party I put in a sequence of pouring and drinking coffee, full to the top of the cup, having to sip, spilling etc, that was my kind of tribute to that clown style. I believe my partner in the scene probably hated it, but he was great. To this day, I have a character named Mr. X that I originated in our family Gong Shows - held annually during our family reunions. (Why I always get gonged though I don't know). Mr. X is in that tradition, with a little Jerry Lewis slapped on for good measure. Anyway, the point is, most of us have some fond memories and admiration for those kind of performers. And I think they have been a dying breed - It sure seems like it.

Enter Patty Gallager and Joe McGrath, playing respectively in Act Without Words and Krapp's Last Tape for Rogue's Production of Beckett plays. While I might have preferred a more physically dynamic and exacting rendition by these performers, I found something charming, simple and glorious about their work. Their thoughts, their actions, their attitudes were ordinary everyday, put one foot in front of the other, just trying to solve a problem or lead a nice life. Which in turn as we all know can result in great achievement or great failure.

Why do we laugh when we see someone slip on a banana peel? And what happens when they almost slip, but don't? I hate those kinds of questions! But people somewhere use them for some basis, some theoretical foundation of comedy. Good luck with that. But I guess they speak to fate and chance and luck anticipation and imbalance and all that. I'm smart but not that smart.

I've seen Dario Fo on tape, improvising, and I've seen Corporeal Mime training with Etienne Decroux. There is wonderful inventive use of the body in that work, and when constructed in action holds forth a compelling logic, all including chance and fate and anticipation, reason, desire and gratification (or not), etc. Decroux was a fan and admirier of the great French boxer Georges Carpentier. I wrote of this in some earlier post. Decroux wanted his performers to possess the same kind of balance, grace, power, speed, and control that Carpentier displayed in the ring, executing "The Sweet Science." (Note to all you Ultimate Fighting fans...not even close, so don't go there).

In order to start many of these actions, clown-like or otherwise, you need a good old fashioned big breathe of fresh air - inspiration - and later expiration - life to death so to speak. When that man gets thrown on stage in Act Without Words, tumbling out perhaps, somehow landing on his feet, his first action is a big old breath. Welcome to life baby! Or so I would imagine it. In Rogue's production, Patty was more subtle with her use of technique and action, less exacting and less obvious than I would have asked for. As a spectator I don't need or want to be hit over the head with a stamp, but Patty's rendition made it more difficult to determine what, if anything, was going on. In many respects that was just fine. I enjoyed that even to a degree. The work was of a more general nature and an acceptance of the script as vague. Given Patty's talents and background in Clown work, in Balinese Mask, I think a more specific and tightly woven set of actions could have been constructed which would have built the intensity and anticipation and consequences of the actions accordingly.

We all know the word text (often glorified by intellectuals of the theatre, and those who consider theatre an outreach of literature) is short for texture, meaning a weave...think rugs and all that. There are tight weaves and loose weaves. On stage, a text is created by actors composing a series of individual actions. These actions include physical movement, thought, emotion, etc, all the characteristics of human nature and behavior, including use of words and language sometimes. What the actors create is the performance text - that which us spectators see and hear. As we experience the text (the sequence of actions) unfolding on stage, we as spectators begin to identify certain behaviors. We begin to understand a certain logic unfolding. We start to harbor expectations and anticipations. And this being America with a mostly upper class British culture influencing our social, educational and entertainment commitments, we suppose we have to pay attention to every moment in polite fashion - which only furthers our expectations and our ideas for what is happening in our presence on stage. In some production, our expected logic plays out fully right to the end and we as imaginative spectators follow it right through with satisfaction. It meets our emotional and intellectual expectations and needs, moment by moment. Other productions interrupt or change the established logic. This sends our senses scrambling. Sends our intellect scrambling. Sends our emotions scrambling. We hate it. Or we love it. This can happen in big or little jumps, slowly or quickly, often or rarely within a production. In Rogue's Act Without Words, and Krapp's Last Tape as well, to me it seemed to follow the established logic through to the end. We could say the initial set up was unconventional - we didn't have all the story and bells and whistles we spectators like to have to indulge our intellect and emotions - but once established, the logic of each piece was carried through by the performance text created on-stage, beginning to end. And so as a spectator, you get left wondering what was it all about. You try to arrange the events in your mind in the same consistently it was presented in. Hard to make sense of that way.

On the other hand, its not easy to craft Beckett's work on the stage with the same spirit that he crafted in on the page, with disruptions of established logics, and biological impact on the spectators senses. You can't throw out all conventions of polite theatre practice - you need them. But you have to craft some violation of those into the performance. You have to give the spectators some unusual considerations, within unusual considerations. One level of unusual consideration is not Beckett. Beckett needs at least two, maybe three levels. Unusual within unusual, within unusual.

OK - I'm calling time out again for now. Hopefully I'll more to say as I continue to mull it all over. Like good theatre makes you do!