by John Guare
at Signature Theatre Company
directed by Michael Greif
opened March 28, 2006

I participate in theater when I can but I don’t see so much of it. It seems like whenever I do I end up thinking, “oh yeah, theater is really weird.”

Live performance is, in theory, more exciting than film because it is present and happening; at any given point in a play, the next moment has not yet happened (unlike with a movie, where it all happened months or years ago and has since been filtered and processed many times over), and our fear of the future comes into play. Which is indeed thrilling. Though I think probably too much of my mind is devoted to things like “what if they forget their lines? what if it all comes crashing down on them?” But a milder, more general version of that anxiety imparts a spark of danger and thus relevance to everything in the theater. It’s real. Also, they can see you; they the actors can see you the audience. You’re all in this together. It’s a ritual that needs to be upheld… for the gods of the theater, I guess. Everyone needs to do their part, and if the performance is a success, you, as audience, are party to that.

This stuff is all a gamble, of course, and it can come back to bite you. We saw this play with an audience of cane-walking coughers who weren’t amused by the laugh lines and occasionally had to repeat things to themselves to make sense of them. At least the woman behind me did. Also at one point she felt compelled to say “this head is in the way,” possibly referring to the head I have been working on all these years. She may also have been referring to the head of the man in front of me, which, for what it’s worth, was in the way for me as well. But I didn’t say so – nor did I say anything else out loud. Nor did I bring cough drops in crinkly wrappers and unwrap them, after coughing for twenty minutes, and then continue to cough. But to each his own. All I mean to say is that in the grand ritual we were supposed to perform, Lili Taylor and I were teamed up, on this occasion, with a crowd of amateurs, and so unfortunately it was one of those times where the “live performance” gamble doesn’t pay off and you start to wonder why anyone would be so foolish as to put on a live show, which can so easily be ruined. Films are immune to indifference. If you show a film of a tree falling, in a forest, with nobody around… or… if you show a film of a lumberjack with a saw, in a forest… no… if you put a tree falling in a forest on stage… oh whatever.

I try my best to see past this sort of thing but it’s hard. This play didn’t really mean too much to me. I think if I had seen it with a really well-rehearsed audience, and they had been participating in the rally of the production, and I had felt that sense that we’re all rooting for the same cause, we’re all trying to chant the same chant and conjure the same magical fiery ball of artistic experience – this is an 80s special effect, I’m describing, glowing blue and animated, hovering over the audience – I would have found my way to believing in that ball. But nobody in the audience was chanting anything and I felt that sense of the performance dropping back to its lowest-common-motivator: why are we doing this? It’s our job to say and do these things. You paid for us to perform the script of Landscape of the Body (1977) by John Guare and here it is. We put together some sets and costumes and stuff to go with it, hope you like it.

I’m saying that if I had been made to feel – via social suggestion, I guess – that we were part of it and the performers had felt that we were part of it, maybe it would have meant more to me. But I’m not sure. Maybe it was just the script. In fact, maybe I went to this place in my head because the script did not invite me to be a part of it, or to have any particular kind of experience, as far as I could tell. It was its own thing, a piece of weird sculpture. It probably would have been that even without the cough drops. It was very odd, an artifact of something I’m not going to claim to understand entirely.

But did the playwright? Did anyone?

On the ground level you can say, crankily, “Well, those people would never say and do those things. I don’t even think those people could exist. And this and that speech was just poetry from the playwright, not the thoughts of the character. And this and that event didn’t seem likely or sensible.” But – and I’m already venturing away from what I can be absolutely sure of – I’m pretty much certain that the play knew all that. It clearly wasn’t an attempt at verisimilitude. It was, rather, as one review I just read put it, “freewheeling.” It was a fantasia. It felt improvisatory. Implicitly it said, “Don’t think that it matters too much whether events cause one another or whether these are ‘real’ people – just take in the flavor of things, consider the texture and tendencies of what I’m showing you – that’s the message.” And so in retrospect it was one of those box-of-goodies artworks, wherefrom we get a sense of the artist himself, more than anything else, by seeing what kind of stuff he likes. I don’t know any other John Guare plays – no, really, not even Six Degrees of Separation, which everyone on Earth seems to know because it was a movie, and no, not even House of Blue Leaves even though they did it when I was in college and everyone said it was good – but I get the sense that for the most part we’re not into the same stuff. Of course, this was written back in 1977, so maybe that’s to blame. But this box of goodies had a “can you believe this it’s a severed head onstage” severed head in it, and a man in a gold dress being gunned to death, and a coke-snorting porn star, and a crazed ice-cream man, and Groucho glasses, and a kid freaking out poetically and then being killed in slow-motion with a wrench, and some other stuff, and I guess I felt a little like I was supposed to think it was “wild,” – either “delightfully wild” or “unnervingly wild” or both – and I didn’t really feel that. That stuff isn’t in my box of goodies; neither was I shocked by it. It was just someone’s assemblage of stuff.

I found it hard – or at least not natural – to think in any way that could move me about issues like the fragility of life and the inevitability of loss, dreams and regrets, memory, love, and other stuff that I think the play was about – because I didn’t feel like I was in a world of real people, and those are real people issues. Nor was I in a world of philosophy. Somewhere behind the goings-on onstage was John Guare, pulling the strings and making weird stuff go down, and somewhere behind his words were his thoughts, and somewhere back there, no doubt, was something human and maybe even touching or bittersweet or funny. But it was not hovering overhead like a special effect. Again, though, that may have been the audience’s fault.

Lili Taylor and Sherie Rene Scott and the cop and the guy in the dress, and yeah, even the kids, all did a fine and admirable job. So too did the couple of people in the production that I knew – the reason I ended up seeing a play at all. I find plays difficult. I also find them expensive. Maybe if they were cheaper I’d see more and get better at them.

But in college they were cheap and I hardly saw any then. But I’m a different person now, at least insofar as my hunger for cultural experience is a stronger force in my life than my sense that I am surrounded by an endless field of portentous and untameable social possibility which can only be escaped by staying in my room and waiting for everyone else to fall asleep, and then going down to the dining hall at 4 AM and videotaping myself eating several glasses of dry Cracklin’ Oat Bran. So take note, theater producers, and lower those prices.

I should point out that I’m not complaining about these tickets, however. The Signature Theatre Company had some kind of corporate help and was able to offer $15 tickets to this show. I’m all for that. Way to go, Signature Theatre Company, and keep it up. I’ll come to the next cheap show, I promise.