Theatricality

Often my friends ask me what I mean when I say "theatrical". Recently I've started collecting simple theatrical ideas around which I can imagine creating an entire show. At risk of giving away my brainchildren, I won't share those but rather share some of my favorite theatrical moments as seen onstage.

A hearing-impaired actor tells his story through sign-language and choreography in tandem with his hearing, speaking counterpart. -Deaf West's production of Big River

A family of minstrels in blackface moves in next door. -Neighbors at the Public

The audience enters across the stage, on display for the already seated audience, and becomes part of a play about the Moscow theatre hostage crisis. -We Declare You A Terrorist at the Public

An actor switches hats and voices and has a conversation with himself, perceived as two different characters- Lebensraum

A rolling staircase moves to create different worlds, connecting and disconnecting places, people and time- Ragtime (Broadway Revival)

The emcee moves a briefcase and drops a brick through a window (oh wait, I did that) - Cabaret

With those ideas in mind, theatricality is usually a combination of the writing and the direction (and in the case of the staircase direction and design). Most of these deal with presentation- how moments are presented onstage. Some are the ideas of the playwright, such as Lebensraum, and others are imaginations of the director, such as Big River, but they are all about layering the text with an extra element that differentiates a play on the page from watching it onstage. In Cabaret, a brick being thrown though a window in a movie or on the page is disruptive, and we see the hate-filled world outside breaking into the beauty of the inside world... but when the Emcee drops the brick, the audience links it into the commentary of the play, because the Emcee is telling us a story that is layered on top of the dialogue. In most productions of the show, the last moment involves the Emcee revealing himself- to be Jewish, to be a Nazi, to be a concentration camp prisoner- and the audience is asked to think back and ask if the Emcee has really just been telling his own story all along. By setting the entire show in an actual cabaret in the 98 Sam Mendes revival, the show became about the cabaret, and the story of Sally Bowles is being told for the purpose of understanding the world of the cabaret (and the emcee), as opposed to the other way around, where the cabaret serves as a way of understanding (or commenting on) the story.

Now try creating that feeling in a 1600 seat proscenium theater. The best I could do was to draw the Emcee's story more vividly by adding in moments that aren't in the text where he tells the story: moving the briefcase, dropping the brick, etc. (I had no idea that this post was going to be about Cabaret- but the show is essentially one big example of theatricality).

I put Neighbors on the list because I think that situations can have inherent theatricality to them, which creates exciting plays out of the premise on which they are based. And the most exciting playwrights create and imagine those moments, which can then be realized by the director, design team, etc.

Theatricality is what separates theatre from other performance, film and life. In its simplest form, it is an actor performing a part in front of an audience. What I comment on here as theatricality is a moment or choice that heightens the awareness of that trinity.

A footnote: I believe that the magic of Brecht's alienation is that we cannot separate ourselves from it, because there are people there, actors and characters layered on top of each other, who feel real things- and alienation forces us to consider what we feel about those things, but it does not remove our feelings.