WAITING FOR IRENE

A Blog by Peter James

I was sitting in the faded lamplight shortly after midnight waiting for the storm.

I had planned to devote this weekend to the 15^th annual fringe festival. I was to run from black box to black box, weaving through the winding vines of village streets, squeezing shoulder to shoulder with dozens of strangers, a-gog and a-buzz with anticipation. But the risks were too great, and the theatres were closed, and now I had to find something else to do with my time.

As it happened, this was all well and tolerable. The festival being cancelled was not a great disappointment. Many of the shows in the festival were far greater disappointments. But with Broadway shutting down for the weekend as well, the thought struck me, “What if none of us ever got to act again? What if all the plays everywhere were cancelled forever?”

I didn’t presume that this would happen. The storm was, of course, more mild than we imagined, and soon the theatres will re-open and the shows will go on, as they always have.

But anyone who has ever participated in the theatre knows from the outset that you don’t always know when you’ll do your next job. And we’re always being told to live as if we were going to die tomorrow. So whatever it is that the theatre gives us and whatever it is that we try to give with the theatre, we all have to find comparable ways of enriching ourselves and enriching the world, on our own and on a daily basis.

Today, I am unemployed. Tomorrow, I could be dead. So what do I do?

First, to answer that, I have to ask what the theatre gives us in the first place.

With the film industry having thrived for over a century now, people constantly make comparatives between movies and theatre. Let me say from the outset that I am not particularly interested in comparatives. They are two separate mediums, both equally beautiful in their own right, and they should complement each other; they need never compete with one another. But for the moment, let us indulge the comparison purely for the sake of argument.

The undeniable difference between acting for a camera just over your shoulder and acting for a row of people in the back of the second balcony leads many to make the insufferable generalization that film acting is “realistic” and that theatre acting is somehow the opposite.

The counter-comparative is that films are made with smoke and mirrors and technical wizardry, while theatre unfolds organically before your very eyes. All this is worth noting merely to highlight the most central and essential gift of the theatre: the present moment. We all spend so much time mourning our pasts and fearing our futures, we need help getting present.

The fact that theatre is live is a redundancy, a given, something to be taken for granted, but in this digital, mechanical age of disconnection, the novelty of something being alive merits this considerable mention.   

But still you hear people say, quite ungratefully, that the theatre is false, that it’s over-the-top, that it’s somehow bigger than we are. But theatre is not bigger than we are, it is as big as we are, and much much bigger than we usually allow ourselves to be. Big is only one word, other words like, full, open, beautiful, poetic, honest, all these words could also apply.

There is so much inside of all of us, and we all know it’s there, we all know it about each other, because we all know it about ourselves, but for some reason, we’re incredibly afraid of each other, we retreat inside ourselves, we only dare to show a shallow little fraction of ourselves in public. We feel as though we were all incredibly different from one another. When fear, uncertainty, confusion, and hatred take the place of empathy and compassion, we all start killing each other over our differences, having somehow forgotten how very much alike we all are.

The theatre is the rare space where whole droves of supposedly different people, with different histories and different backgrounds come together and focus on the same singular event, experiencing in large part the same thoughts and the same feelings, collectively. We see someone going through something we once experienced ourselves, and it moves us, and we think “How did he know that about me?” And all the other people around us are thinking the same thing, “I’ve felt that way before,” “O my god, that reminds me of something,” “He is exactly like me,” “How did he know that about me?” “How did he know that about me?” “How did he know that about me?”

The plays of William Shakespeare are the best examples of this experience. His plays are also worth mentioning because they are so often the victims of all that aforementioned ill-informed generalizing of “over-the-top, larger than life,” and so on, when in fact, Shakespeare can provide some of the most arresting experiences of empathy one has ever known, and often without entering a theatre.

A twelve-year-old enters his English class on a Monday morning, he’s had a bad weekend. His feelings are running very deep and very personal. He’s going through something in his life at the moment that he can’t put into words, and he doesn’t think he ever could put into words because it feels so incredibly personal, he doesn’t think anyone else could ever understand it. He sits at his desk and opens up the Shakespeare play they’re reading in his class. There on the page is a speech. The character speaking is going through exactly what the young boy is going through. And the young boy discovers that this feeling, that he thought was his own, was felt some four hundred years ago by a man he never met, and that this man found the most beautiful, economic, perfect way to say it. And if the boy wants to, when he grows up, he could stand up on a stage and say it to others.

Theatre tells us that we’re not alone, that we are not isolated and insignificant, that all our fears, our dreams, our aspirations, and despair, are threads in the fabric of history, that we are part of a continuum, that the whole world has and will forever be a breathing organism of which we are an irrevocable component.     

It is important to mention, in the midst of all this affirmation, that theatre depends on conflict. It’s one of its most essential attributes. And with all I’ve said about empathy, about seeing your own life experience in a character, the opposite may happen just as easily. You may see one character and think “How did he know that about me?” but then another character may make you think “What on earth is he doing? How could he?! I would never do anything like that!” Conflict between an audience and a character can teach us as much about ourselves as empathy. In fact, many of us respond more strongly to outrage than anything else. We’ll walk into the night, infuriated at what we saw, and vow to never make the same mistakes that we saw on the stage.

Moreover, conflict within an audience is equally exciting and inevitable. A piece of theatre will sometimes illuminate our similarities, but it often illuminates our differences as well, it provides palpable fodder for ferocious debate, it gets people talking to each other, groping to understand, and to make themselves understood. I think there is no greater impetus for progress and evolution in society.

The theatre is a place for hurling paint against the walls. For chaos. It’s a place where we are allowed to create chaos, where we’re allowed to stoke the fires, to rattle the cages, to scream, to blow convention to bits, and howl at the sky, because surrounding all of that, the whole thing is, ultimately…controlled, rehearsed…safe. It’s a safe place to do unsafe things.

We go to the theatre to experience the TRUTH of our lives, and since it is “not real,” we find it so terribly attractive, because it is truth without consequences. What everyone chooses to do with it when they leave the theatre and walk out into the night is up to them. Some people will be changed forever, they’ll think or feel or act differently every day for the rest of their lives, and other people will shrug it off and go get a drink. We can only do so much about that.   

The theatre fulfils so many of our deepest needs. It keeps us present, it helps us talk to each other, it comforts us, it reminds us that we’re not alone, it etches us a place in the world. And in the end, it satisfies one our most eternal desires: Connection. We all want to reach out to people, and have them reach back. We want to share ourselves. We want to see divinity in someone else’s eyes, and reflect it back on them with ours. We want to experience the whole world in a single moment, and in a single person, that beautiful person we’ve had in our heads and our hearts since the day we were born, that person who is both the love of our lives and our dream of our best selves. And we find this in the theatre. The patron and performer sit on either side of the proscenium and shine their light on one another. The shine, with all their common, unbearable, breath-taking, human beauty. It’s love. The theatre is love.

Of course, when the bows are taken and the play is over, we go back to being strangers again. The connection is only a moment. The question is, do we have the courage to go back into the world and look for that again…to share with someone who isn’t an entire orchestra away…to turn off the footlights and turn on the house lights and dare to see ourselves in someone else’s eyes?

And if the theatres were never to open again, what would we do with our lives? Would we be able, with our own strength, our own courage, and our own faith, to tell the truth to one another, to love our fellow man with empathy and understanding, to resolve our conflicts intelligently, and to live each day as our last, with full and generous hearts?

I don’t know. I hope so. I know I will work on it. But in the meantime, I hope the shows will keep going on.