There is No More Firmament

At the Warehouse Theater, 2/24/2006
Produced by Theatre Du Jour

[Note: This post is written by special guest blogger, Cameron McPhee.]

Yay, I have always wanted to be a guest blogger!

To preface, I should say that both Jonathan and I agree that any serious attempt to perform this kind of experimental theater in Washington is an asset to the DC arts scene. Setting aside, for the moment, that this piece has often been referred to as theatrically “unstageable,” it is certainly not something that the traditional DC theater audience is used to seeing (or paying for), making it, in some ways regionally unstagable. So I thank B. Stanley for taking on this project and I hope that there is more to come.

That said, I think this production “missed the point” a bit when it comes to creating the sort of theater Artaud called for. Artaud’s theater was, in most simplistic terms, grotesque. It is a “pre-logical” theater, which exists “halfway between thought and gesture”. Artaud’s mission was to create theater that physically (possibly violently) engages the audience and changes their perceptions of reality. Artaud’s technique is grounded in movement, breath, gesture, in essence – in the body. And while Stanley clearly understands this and articulates it when discussing the evolution of this piece, it does not seem to have translated to the stage. His actors were entirely too self-conscious, concerned about being “actors” and worrying about how they look on stage. This sort of vanity is the opposite of the theater of Artaud, which is about baseness, vulgarity, and often the more disgusting bodily functions. It is not about looking pretty.

My first justification for this was that this is a very amateur cast (demanded, of course, by the fact that, unfortunately, no-one can make any money off such a project). Many of the performers are young, some still in school. However, I don’t think inexperience is necessarily the problem. The best members of the ensemble, the ones I felt were the least concerned with “looking good on stage,” were actually those cast members who have never been in a theatrical production. Both Jerry Herbilla and Aaron O. Martin seemed to give themselves fully to the ensemble.

Along similar lines, I felt that the cast could have spent much less time changing costumes and moving back and forth various props and more time trying to work symbolically. B. Stanley’s bio in the program states that he was a student of Jerzy Grotowski (another theater director and theorist who explored many of the same issues about theater and it’s role as a manipulator of consciousness). Where Artaud called it “Theater of cruelty,” Grotowski’s was a “poor theater” by which he meant a theater that eliminated all that was superfluous and extraneous (props, costumes, etc.) and in its place left a “stripped” and vulnerable actor. An actor who can abandon the ego-protection provided by such amenities and transform themselves and the audience. He, like Artaud, desired a theater that was simultaneously a ritual. And I think the sparseness and open-endedness of There is No More Firmament could lend itself to just such a ritual experience.

This is not to say that there were not glimpses of true Artaudian theater in this production. At one point, three actors, draped in some kind of gray fabric onto which has been sewn several disembodied limbs, slither across the stage like war-ravaged slugs. This, more than any other moment, elicited the sensation that our society is slowly adjusting to increasing levels of violence, which we have learned to ignore just like we ignore, say, poverty -- covered in blankets and freezing on the street.

Similarly, one member of the ensemble, towards the end (during a scene in which the cast all wear lab coats and listen to the “scientific explanation” of the catastrophe they are experiencing) used gesture and movement in an exaggerated fashion, much like what I had hoped this whole production would attempt. Too bad she just seemed so out of place doing so.

B. Stanley and the Theater Du Jour ensemble have taken a much-needed step towards destroying the very rigid boundaries of Washington DC theater. I hope (though doubt) that this production will inspire other experiments along similar lines.