A God, A Thermos, A Play (Part 2)

Elevator Repair Service Tackles Euripides’ Bacchae

Tragedy, comedy, and catharsis, or who’s sorry now?

The Bacchae negotiates several boundaries: the divide between male and female; divine and human; sacred and profane; character and actor; insider and outsider; and, particularly important to understanding ERS’s rendition of the play, the generic modes of comedy and tragedy. Highlighting the comedy, perhaps in a way that is long overdue, Highway to Tomorrow is a funny, raucous, silly yet serious, energetic play about Dionysus — and his scheming for and wreaking of revenge on his inattentive family and native city.

It is through The Bacchae‘s comedy, rather than despite it, that HTT achieves tragedy. The story’s basic elements — the competition between god and mortal, the breakdown of a family, the loss of a child — are very much part of the production’s story; the tragic mood caused by the unclean conclusion of these crises is palpable for the audience. The laughter is uneasy: finding humor in the absurd, we also find ourselves laughing at calamities — destruction, exile and death wrought by an almighty temper.

Perhaps most shocking, both to an Athenian audience and to a modern one, is the audience’s awareness of Dionysus’ comic mask. According to one of Pentheus’s men, Dionysus “stood there smiling,” (439) and that the Chorus can invoke the god with “O Bacchus, come! Come with you smile!” (1018). The implications are moving. Essentially, Dionysus is directing a scenario, a play, that is simultaneously a comedy for him and a tragedy for Pentheus, whose very name means “man of sorrow.” Pentheus is the hapless, and ultimately useless, thyrsus, or scapegoat. There is no comforting promise of knowledge-through-redemption allowed the tragic hero, much less the players, or even the audience, at the end of the performance.

The Bacchae paves a rough road to catharsis, if there’s one to be found at all — an ambiguous ending which may have made the play all the more attractive to ERS. The company is not concerned with providing a pure catharsis in its theatrical output; rather, their work demands of audience members their own unique act of interpretation, their own “working-out” of the problem.

Objets trouvés, or Teri meets Carl

Aside from the replacement of the thermos for the thyrsus, another substitution took place in ERS’s rendition of The Bacchae. ERS’s affinity for allowing aspects of the rehearsal space to resonate in the performance space means that even its limitations can serve as fodder for invention. HERE, the downtown arts center where all versions of HTT were presented, has a structural support, a big pole upstage center in the playing area. One early casting decision inHTT3, one that remained for HTT4, was to cut the character of Cadmus, or at least to “deanimate” him. Instead, some of his lines were given to other characters, and more interestingly, a static personal, christened “Carl,” was born out of the pole in HERE’s space. The directors initially proposed piping in a distorted voice for Carl, but since that choice seemed like an infelicitious compromise between animation and deanimation, they decided Carl should be mute (recognizing that, after all, the character is “played” by a pole). During the performance, two plastic googly eyeballs were affized to the pole by James Hannaham, and it, like the thermos, was quickened into theatrical life.

Bodow and Collins struggled with staging the scene in which Cadmus and Teiresias dress up to join the Maenads, given the obvious problem that a pole cannot converse, let alone dress itself. In the show’s bittersweet comedic highlight, Susie Sokol (adept at playing eccentrics) as Teri the Seer comes to meet Carl. She calls out Carl’s name from offstage, then enters, calling his name again. She looks around, finds him, walks up to him, and greets him. Expecting an answer, she’s treated to silence. Sokol then goes through a routine where she taps Carl, pokes him, waits for long moments, and even pulls out her script to show him where they are in the play, hoping he will be prompted to say “his” lines.

Sokol finally surrenders to the fact that Carl — the pole — will not answer. Teri the Seer hesitantly approaches the audience, and plucks a photograph out of her jacket. It is a photograph taken of the actress, Susie, as a child; she is shown with a snake draped across her shoulders. As with the thermos/thyrsus coincidence, the photo of Susie-with snake neatly coincides with a demand of this Bacchae’s dramaturgy, as we will learn. She commences a monologue that substitutes for Teiresias’s speech to Pentheus (in which the seer asks Pentheus to pay respect to the god). Sokol, in this mildly improvised monologue, relates that Teiresias was turned into a snake — first one gender then the other — and so offers to the audience a precursor of gender transfiguration in anticipation of what Pentheus will undergo towards the play’s end. Likewise, this monologue serves to underscore the blurred lines between actor and character, Susie and Teri; the actress is as prominent as the character. It is difficult to say who is standing in for whom, and even harder to tell who is in possession of the limelight. The tension between performer and character adds the dramatic and comedic tension of the scene.

Sokol later delivers a similar monologue, based on the messenger’s first speech. It recapitulates al the comic and narrative modes spectators have seen, or will see, during the performance. Sokol steps out of the dramatic context to acknowledge that it’s just one person we see onstage speaking for many: “I gathered myself into small groups and argued amongst myself,” she tells us with a straight face. Once again, the company’s work demands from the audience the acknowledgement that the actor is acting out a role, serving as stand-in for someone — or some-ones — else. Presence, in an ERS show, is foregrounded by HTT‘s multiplied and layered personas.

Oddly, though, both ERS directors (as spokesmen for the group) were hesitant, even reluctant, to subscribe to the idea that an object such as the pole (not to mention the thermos) had taken on a life of its own. Collins and Bodow expressed dissatisfaction with the term “puppet,” in part because they felt the term carried too many associations the company did not wish to portray. They preferred to think of a thing created in rehearsal from found materials as an “object.” They objected to the idea that a false sentimentality would be attached to it (perhaps) by the performers and (almost certainly) by the spectators. Collins was also wary of what he termed an overuse of puppets, which he thought would be “empty, disproportionate, wrong.” Instead, he insisted, “the ‘puppets’ were just objects” (though unable to escape from the nomenclature even as he argued against it); he claimed that it was only the (live) actors who were characters. In spite of this, Collins acknowledged that “they (the objects) have a life in spite of themselves.” He added “when we try to lay all this responsibility on them, they can’t handle it,” and that the objects “should never feel like puppets.” Collins cited the pole/Carl example: “It is a pole,” he firmly declared, “and the wonder of the scene [with Susie Sokol] stems in part from the absurdity of Susie talking to a pole” (HTT rehearsals, 14 September 2000).

The show questions received notions of actor, character, and presence in yet another way. When it came time to stage the death of Paul (noting that the death of Pentheus happens offstage in The Bacchae) the rehearsal conversation turned once again to puppetry. Ironically, Collins and Bodow, stalwart champions against threats of insidious puppetry, first spoke of creating a “lifesize puppet (a headless being),” which, they thought, “might end up being Paul.” By the next week, they had decided to keep Paul Boocock’s body as the puppet, and were looking for ways in which his dress could be used to “disguise” him, the actor. In other words, they wanted the human body but the feel of an inanimate object. Susie Sokol worked at dressing Paul so that the dress would restrict his movement; what they kept was dressing Paul by jamming his arms into the dress’s short sleeves, so that only his hands dangled out, like two limp sock puppets. Even before it goes down and is immobilized, then, we see the actor’s body begin to be transformed into the body of an absurd, oversized puppet. Paul the actor must manipulate the dress in order to deanimate himself; the puppet-master becomes the lifeless, limp figure that “plays” the dead character Paul.

Mediated liveness, or what is theatre?

In his insightful and provocative book, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander argues against the “strong tendency” on the part of many performance theorists “to place live performance and mediatized or technological forms in direct opposition to one another” (41). According to Auslander, such a clear oppositional reference is misleading, because “as the mediatized replaces the live within culture economy, the live itself incorporates the mediatized, both technologically and epistemologically” (39). Rather than embracing a romanticized, oppositional view of live versus mediatized work, some artists ineluctably intertwine live and mediated work. One striking characteristic of the work of a company like ERS, then, is that the work (process and product) heavily utilizes technology (sound and video, the televisual) without any apologies to those who privilege the live experience over the mediatized. The video technology may not be explicit in the performance, but it is implicit in the process. The performance itself, in a sense, has been mediatized through the process. At the same time, however, ERS foregrounds the role of the performer and the notion of presence. Ironically, for a company which maintains its fear of overt or misplaced theatricality, ERS offers as vibrant an example of theatre and theatricality as one could hope for through its complex rendering of actor and character.