I wrote over the last two weeks about how we approach a deep visual reading of a text. We must reach into the text past the surface to discover that place of danger which lies in the center of the work just out of view. As artists our job is to stretch our understanding and expand our reading in order to arrive at the very edge of possibility. From there we engage the text with the directness that art demands.
What we are doing is a kind of archaeology of text. Like Heidegger in the examples I provided in those previous essays, we must take the text as we have it and then go beyond the common understandings to discover the heart of what is said. The authentic meaning does not, nor can not reside in a surface approach to the text. In writing about the literal process that a designer goes through I was outlining an approach that makes possible a greater likelihood of discovering the authentic text as it exists in the Now.
One of my favorite plays by Shakespeare is Midsummer Night’s Dream. I have seen many productions of it ranging from very “traditional” to highly abstract. I recently saw one that, while perfectly serviceable, did little to nothing to truly elucidate any new meaning from the text. It was a lovely entertainment. The design, while rather attractive, did not further our understanding of the text, story or action. This is a common trap with well known works.
Finding a visual expression that is both authentic for the creators and deepens one’s understanding of the text is made doubly difficult by the weight of history that lays upon the text. We as theater makers are burdened by production histories that provide past readings everywhere we look. Thus we must work doubly hard to dig past all that and get back to the original essence. Sure there is a vein of theater that uses past productions in their performance as a way of commenting on this exact process, but that is something other than I am discussing here. And even then, it is done so as a means of more fully understanding the text and its place within history and performance.
As we shed layer upon layer of preconceived notions about a play and get down to the the very heart of the text we find image after image removed until finally we get down to nothing but words. There is one line from Midsummer that haunts me whenever I see it. Puck, replying to Oberon’s reprimand says, “Believe me, King of shadows, I mistook.” That line stands out like a singer in a spotlight on a darkened stage. As soon as I hear it, my brain attempts to make sense of everything I am seeing visually, from design to staging, from the point of view that the fairies are shadows and Oberon their lord, King of Shadows.
This should be obvious to anyone working on the play, yet far too often I see them not as shadows, but simply as weird or “other.” Far too common is it that the shadows, for they are referred to in that language several times, are some preconceived idea of “fairy” or worse, simply something strange.
Some months back I saw a very different production set more or less in a mid 1980′s club. Here the lovers were yuppies and new romantics while the shadows were goths and punks. In this production, while taking a very pop-culture approach, the central discord between the world of the mortals and the world of the shadows is not only clearly defined, but the very text itself is brought into being within our, roughly, contemporary world. The love quadrangle between Helena, Hermia, Demetrius and Lysander is immediately clear. We know who loves who and why. We know who’s parents are upset about said relationships and why. We also know who should end up with who and why. All this before a single line of dialogue is spoken. In this way, the text is revealed to us clearly that we may immediately and directly enjoy it.
This places a classical text before a modern audience in such a way that we may treat it much like the Greeks took their theater. For them, the stories were known intimately beforehand. Going into a Medea the audience would know who Jason and Medea and Creon were. They would know that the children of Jason and Medea would die along with his new wife and her father. What they did not know was how that would happen. They did not know through what action and more importantly through what language that would happen.
As we dig past previous performances of a text we are simultaneously learning and unlearning how a text has been understood in the past. We are learning history, but we must also unlearn assumptions about a text if we are to truly engage with it at a deep level. As textual archaeologists we must break through the rocks and brush past the sediment to get at the beauty of the fossilized remains.
Only when we have extracted the pure thing from out of its history may we begin to locate it in history once again. Seeing a text clearly and without the filter of past productions is necessary if our goal is the creation of great art. We must go beyond our ordinary waking world and traverse the dangerous world of shadows. For it is through encounters with our shadow is art possible.
