Twelfth Night Reflection: Were I the first to dissemble in such a gown.

            One of the central questions in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is brought up directly in a witty but otherwise seemingly unimportant speech given by the Fool in Act 4, Scene 2, when Feste disguises himself as a priest to trick the imprisoned Malvolio:

Bonos dies, Sir Toby: for, as the old hermit of
Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily
said to a niece of King Gorboduc, 'That that is is;'
so I, being Master Parson, am Master Parson; for,
what is 'that' but 'that,' and 'is' but 'is'?

            Feste, of course, is not the only character to disguise himself in this play: the plot centers around the assumed identity of a young woman, Viola, who dresses as a eunuch, Cesario, in order to work as a servingman in the Duke’s court.

            So what is “that” but “that” and “is” but “is?” The joke of the scene itself disguises this central issue: what determines something’s identity? The proof that Feste posits right away, “That that is, is” is already disproven when he says it—he is not, in fact, Master Parson. Viola gives us another clue to the answer to this question when she realizes the Countess Olivia is in love with her: “for such that we are made of, such we be.”

            I didn’t really realize when I began working on this show how important these two opposing statements were to the play and to me personally. I chose to focus on the theme of class when I was first conceptualizing the performance, and indeed this issue of “such that we are made of, such we be” is intrinsic to that conversation. Viola acts like a servant, but it is known even before her identity as a woman is revealed that it is not her true place. When asked “What is your parentage?” she responds “Above my fortunes, yet my state is well: I am a gentlemen.” It is important to note that “gentleman” in this context does not simply mean a male (which she is not,) it denotes a very specific class of well-to-do landowners. She is functioning within her “fortunes,” that being her position as a servant, but is inherently of a different class. The countess Olivia repeats this exchange once the presumed Cesario has left the room: it seems to be this, her new paramour’s birthright, that decides for her his eligibility, not his charm, humor, or beauty. Later, when Viola is revealed, Orsino apologizes for having her act below her position, and frames his offer of marriage as repayment for it:

Your master quits you; and for your service done him,
So much against the mettle of your sex,
So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,
And since you call'd me master for so long,
Here is my hand: you shall from this time be
Your master's mistress.          

            On a quite differet end of the spectrum, or perhaps a different spectrum all together, is Sir Toby, who’s behavior in every way seems to put him in the lower class: he sings, he drinks, he makes rude bodily noises. Yet because he is related to the Countess, he is able to get off scot-free for basically every offense he commits, and uses it multiple times as an excuse for his actions.

            I couldn’t have predicted that this particular summer I would have found this whole issue striking a particular chord with me. Although we are not in the world of Elizabethan England where everything is determined by class, it is difficult sometimes not to feel like the situation I was born into (the middlest of middle class, in a place where upper middle class is the norm) affects me often. My year was someone cluttered with themes of financial issues: me and my best friend both spent significant time considering moving back to our home town because of overwhelming college expenses (she ended up doing so,) and I spent a lot of time with  two families who are of considerable wealth and feeling quite left out and I realized in that time that no matter how long I spent with families of different financial and educational levels than my own, or how much college I attended or how similar a career path I chose, I would never “be” like them. It is difficult not to imagine that our little homes where we were born somehow have us on a long tether that can be pulled back at any moment: perhaps “such as we are made of, such we be.”

            More relevant, though, is the issue of assuming identities and functioning in them, and thus we return to Feste’s speech as the parson. “So I, being Master Parson,” he says, “Am master parson.” This is the speech that ended up ringing most true for me about directing and theater in general.

            In theater, obviously, actors take on roles other than their true identities, but I think we often neglect the fact that the other people involved in a show do the same. Unlike other businesses, during a show there is no room and no time for climbing up any ladders: even if you have the skill to be say, a costumer, but have the role of a wardrobe assistant, you shouldn’t be spending time showing off your costuming abilities when you’re supposed to be working as a wardrobe assistant; it would simply send the whole system into chaos. The system of people working on a show is incredibly complex, and I’m finding that more with each performance that I participate in. The jobs assigned to each person are of course very important, but on a psychological level the director, stage manager ,actors ,and designers need to be in very specific places for the whole thing to work. Like acting, to be a stage manager (or director or designer or crew person) one must take on a very specific point of view and pursue a very specific action in order for things to stay on track.

            So I, being the director, was the director for Twelfth Night, but ultimately I am made of the stuff of a stage manager.  I knew going into this show that the only thing qualifying me to direct more than any other company member was the fact that I said I would do it—I called my self a director and I became one, but ultimately I am no more a director than Feste is a parson and Viola is a man.

            That isn’t to say, of course, that I won’t direct again. Taking on roles that aren’t our own is, as I said, what theater is all about. 

The Importance of Collaboration

            The most important part of theater is, in my opinion, collaboration. Importance is often put on fame or profit, in fact, those should be entirely left out of the equation when deciding pursue a life in theater. A drive for money or acclaim should not be part of the drive to create theater—if they result, it should be naturally from the quality of the work produced by people who are devoted to art and collaboration.

            A problem is presented here in the way we think about our audiences in America today. Often theater that is successful or that people perceive as having some sort of influence on the community or the art world is created specifically for fame and profit: take, for instance, any of the jukebox musicals or movie-to-musicals on Broadway and travelling the country today. They depend largely on special effects, cheap referential humor, and catchy songs. This is not to say that musicals necessarily are not legitimate pieces of art, however, many of the shows presented today seem to represent exactly what Jerzy Grotowski described as a tragedy in his 1968 Towards a Poor Theater: shows that are entirely a reaction to television’s superiority in effects and glamour over theater.

            Theater that is genuinely created, without contrived dialogue or flashy effects, will be successful with American audiences based on its own merit and not based on its ability to pander to upper-middle class East-coasters who have Broadway shows available to them. Collaboration between all involved parties in a production is the key to this genuineness and quality.

            When discussing collaboration in theater, it is often a discussion about actors, directors, and designers. However, there are many more parties to be considered.

First, the production crew is as important to the artistic success of a show as the director, designers, or actors. As is often discussed by Anne Bogart, creative decisions cannot be manufactured, bursts of inspiration must simply come. To allow this to happen, a safe space has to be created for the members of a production, where they know they are taken care of physically and emotionally. Stage managers exist to create this space. Directors cannot direct if they are worried about scheduling and paperwork, actors cannot explore their emotional depth fully if they are worried about not getting breaks or not having props. In order to create a wholly developed world on the stage, a world of comfort, emotional openness, safety, and calm must be created backstage, and this is the job of the stage manager. They must also be very in tune to the actors’ needs, which is not something they necessarily can intuit without any input. The world that the actors are creating should come from a world that they have had some hand in creating as well—it is therefore extremely important that the stage manager be part of the creative process as collaboratively as any other member of the design team or cast.

The other important collaborator that can be neglected is the one that is often not present: the playwright. This is particularly an issue, of course, when doing plays with dead playwrights: is it sometimes easy to forget what Shakespeare may have had to say about any given artistic decision when the script is hundreds of years away from his hands. The playwright, however, is the most important collaborator. Many people may argue that an atmosphere of full collaboration between director designer and actor is idealistic. If everyone’s idea holds equal weight, conflict and chaos will ensue. The playwright, or, more importantly, the text, can fix this problem. It cannot be forgotten that a performance of a play must serve the text before anything else. No theme, design element, or invented character background can come before the words in the script. In any disagreement, whether it be about character intention or lighting, the text needs to always be the mediator of conflict.   

This does require giving ultimate trust to a playwright that you have likely never met. We are all human, and it is possible that there are discretions in the text, either in terms of plot or design possibility. Though it is obviously not true, we must assume that once the text has left a playwright’s hands for the last time, it becomes a completely separate entity. We must believe in the magical ability of a text to be a living thing in and of itself.

This can be even more frightening than trusting unconditionally a long dead figure—trusting unconditionally that a constructed set of characters and conversations has a life of its own. And perhaps we are right to be frightened. Plays have flaws. Shakespeare, our god of theater, created mainly flawed plays. But as we would any human being we must accept the texts, flaws and all.

It may be comforting to instead realize that it is ourselves we are trusting. Our instincts lead us to certain scripts, our surroundings bring them to our attention and cushion them with context, if our intuition serves. As theater people, we must trust that it does. There is no starting point but to trust fully in a text and vow to accept all of its flaws.

We must also realize that in accepting the text as a full collaborator in the process we must also accept everything that the text contains. The soul of the playwright and everyone and everything the playwright knew is in a script: we must too accept the real-life people in history as contributors to the process. Directors and actors cannot neglect this, for the power in a play lives in its ability to connect us to other souls in other times and places. Time is the dimension that we cannot move backwards through on our own, we must reach back to the anchors that have been left for us.

This brings us to the last collaborator: the creators of theater itself. Our connection to the past comes also through the people who have done shows before us and who will after us, and to connect to them we use ritual. The breath that an actor takes before stepping onto a stage is the same breath that every actor from Tom Hanks to the first man reciting Sophocles has taken, and in taking it an actor is connected to all of them. Through all of the rituals in theater, new or old: warm ups, curtain calls, superstitions, personal ceremonies that have been passed down to us—we are brought into the community that is all theater creators, and we must accept that they too work with us. As Grotowski experimented with, strength and inspiration can come from ancestral rituals, and for us, regardless of race or nationality, our ancestors are the people who have created art before us.

 This postulate that any given production is a collaboration between not only the people present in the rehearsal room but also everyone who has ever done the play in question or any play at all puts the individual theater person in a bit of a predicament: it makes them very, very, very small. This is why the drive for fame is not a legitimate reason to devote one’s life to theater, you, the individual, is not so important in the grand scheme of things to be brought to a higher level than anyone else. Everyone involved is of equal importance, which is not the way theater is reflected in its interfacing with fame.

This brings us to a bit of a nihilist predicament. If I, the individual theater person, am not important, why should I not devote my life to art, ignoring my personal relationships and ignoring my health?

First of all, it is perhaps a bit too religious to devote one’s entire life to theater. I am not so evangelical as to suggest such a thing. However, even in a theoretical world where performance is a religion as serious as Catholicism, with theaters acting as abbeys or monasteries with fully devoted and faithful followers, it would still be important to prioritize your physical and emotional health. This is where I personally deviate from Grotowski: he was not disinclined to work his performers to the point of physical and mental strain. The line between challenge and strain is extremely fine and extreme attention must be paid to it. The stage manager should, ideally, act as an overseer for everyone’s well-being and observe the point at which each individual involved cross from exertion to overexertion, but each person also must know their own limits and insist on following them. We cannot reach out of our comfort zone without stretching; we will be of no use once there if we are strained once we are there. Physical and emotional unhealthiness spread: in this model, you are part of a complex machine and your literal germs or more theoretical mood can put other people in a similar position.

Making theater is inherently incredibly stressful: a group of people must give birth to a completely new universe, and in that new universe, things are thrown into a distorted perspective which puts many people react in ways that may not necessarily seem reasonable to an outsider to problems (stage managers must be excepted from this). Therefore it is nothing but Dionysian sin to bring, either with physical or emotional stress, more anxiety into a theater. It may be tempting at times to sacrifice all outside normal relationships in order to devote oneself to ones work, but that will inevitably cause emotional turmoil and we cannot, as it were, add more drama to drama.

People who create worlds must also be in tune with the outside world, we must understand how people work and we must use our bodies to communicate it, so, again, while we may want to fully devote our bodies and minds to art the art cannot have weight or depth unless we infuse it with personal experiences. 

Innovation out of Necessity: Why it's important to reread Grotowski and embrace poverty in theater

Jerzy Grotowski, and experimental theater guru from Poland, wrote Towards a Poor Theater in 1965. At that point in the world of theater, Broadway was at the height of its Golden Age, and big-budget hit musicals and straight plays were being produced en masse. Regional theaters had already been formed as a reaction to that, and by this time, many of those theaters were becoming “full grown” (Berkowitz 76) The excitement and experimental potential of Off-Broadway was fading fast as it became more mainstream (Berkowitz 33). Off-Off Broadway was beginning as a more “alternative” alternative to Broadway, Off-Broadway, and the regional theaters that had become more legitimate—this is the world to which Grotowski was welcomed into in America. His presence here is part of what popularized his essay then book, Towards a Poor Theater.

The essay preaches a theater method based only on the actors and the audience—theater as an encounter. Grotowski, in his theater laboratory in Poland, found that without costumes, props, lights, scenery, music, or even a text, theater still existed in the essence of the encounter between audience and actor. These discoveries came from his rejecting what he calls the “Rich” theater. At the time, it is easy to infer that the “rich” theater was referring to the world of Broadway, which was nearing the end of its golden age. He said that “The rich theater depends on artistic kleptomania, drawing from other disciplines, constructing hybrid-spectacles, conglomerates without backbone or integrity, yet presented as an organic artwork” (Grotowski 19).

This comes largely from a reaction to television, as well: the Rich Theater, he says, is basically trying to compensate for the lack of technology that can be used on a stage: “No matter how much theater expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and television. Consequently, I propose poverty in theater” (19).

This devotion to poverty in theater took the form of rejecting conventional proscenium stages, scenery, lighting, and costumes, which Grotowski called “plastic” elements. These experiments with “poor theater” led to a number of discoveries, both about the design elements of theater and the nature of the art form: “The acceptance of poverty in theater, stripped of all that is not essential to it, revealed to us not only the backbone of the medium, but also the deep riches which lie in the very nature of the art-form” (Grotowski 21).

Taking away the stage forced the group to create a new spatial relationship between the actor and audience for each production, therefore trying to match the nature of the encounter between them to the tone of the productions individually. Taking away complicated lighting allowed actors to play with stationary lights, essentially giving them control of the tone of what they were saying by putting themselves into more or less shadow. It also affected the relationship with the audience: “It is particularly significant that once a spectator is placed in an illuminated zone, or in other words becomes visible, he too begins to play a part in the performance.”  Taking away make up, costumes, and personal special effects such as prosthetics, forced actors to use the full extent of their physicality to distinguish characters and make statements (20).

Grotowski’s theater lab was not the first place where the challenge of taking away the traditional aspects of theater led to innovation. In fact, that was the pattern of innovation in theater for much of the twentieth century. There are a myriad of stories from the birth of Regional theater about companies performing in alleys, old fairgrounds, or abandoned movie houses. Early Off- and Off-Off Broadway houses also often found themselves needing to reinvent the wheel in order to make theater happen, performing in cafes, basements, and storefronts.

            Needless to say, a lot has changed since Margot Jones directed in an old fairground and since Grotowski wrote his famous essay. Grotowski’s ideas have been widely adopted, particularly in devised theater circles, which are currently gaining popularity Off-Off Broadway. The “poor” theaters that Grotowski imagined have, in many ways, been found in devised theater and other off-off Broadway work, where production value is not as high. (This includes, of course, La Mama, the experimental theater company where Grotowski was first welcomed into the US.)

But even now those theaters are not so poor anymore. Companies that had their starts in storefronts and cabarets now have budgets of tens of thousands of dollars—as of 2008, the average budget for one Off-Off Broadway production was $18,000.00 (New York Innovative Theater Foundation).

Regional theaters, which often were used as a safe space to do cheaper “Trial runs” of Broadway shows before bringing them to the city have enormous budgets too, thereby certainly destroying, in some sense, the precedent set by their founding mothers. Their budgets, however, are also becoming massive: the Alley theater, one of the earlier regional theaters, has a yearly budget of around $14,800,000.00; the Goodman, another early regional theater in Chicago, spent $18,500,000.00. With that kind of money, there certainly isn’t anyone using found spaces in alleys or old fairgrounds.

The technology that Grotowski seemed to predict and react so strongly to is also here in full force. Broadway shows (particularly musicals) depend on special effects that have expanded perhaps far beyond what he could have imagined in 1965—hydraulics and complicated flying effects are staples of many musicals. The fact that a significant number of shows currently on Broadway or that are soon to be on Broadway, (Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, Legally Blonde the Musical, Shrek the Musical, Kinky Boots, Big Fish, American Psycho the Musical, Rocky, Aladin, Dirty Dancing, Father of the Bride, The Nutty Professor, to name a few), that are based off films, seems to be a fairly clear fulfillment of Grotowski’s nightmare that theater would try to emulate film and television.

In light of all of this, Grotowski’s emphasis on poverty in theater can be used far beyond the purpose that he perhaps originally imagined. Innovation comes from need, and that doesn’t have to be restricted to the art. It is important of course not to destroy the sanctity of Grotowski’s original devotion to the simplicity of the actor/audience encounter. However, it can certainly be used to a less extreme degree (a degree that does not exclude designers and traditional directors, who are important to the world of theater). With his experiments he proved that theater can exist in a powerful way without any “plastic” elements, so even for an audience accustomed to highly realistic sets or high-tech special effects, it is likely that shows with simpler costumes and set would still read and be accessible. High-budget shows in enormous, expensive theaters even run the risk of harming the actor/audience encounter.  There is almost no situation in which the appropriate spatial relationship between and actor and audience is a football field of distance. It is tempting to use the extent of technology available to us to forge ahead in innovating theater—and certainly some well-respected directors are doing this (Andrei Serbon is one example). However, while technology can be used to innovate, and adds a new and exciting dimension to theater, it is equal in its hindrance of creative problem solving. High budgets and nearly infinite technology have the potential to destroy the part of theater design that is puzzle-solving—the part that can potentially set the atmosphere for a creative, problem-solving rehearsal process. Each challenge that is overcome by mechanics or acting is a point for innovation at the core of theater; each that is solved with hydraulics is a point against. For these reasons, a revival of Grotowski’s artistic ideas, while present in some theaters should be revitalized in a more mainstream way.  

We also cannot ignore the fact that currently in the theater, one of the main conversations is about funding and policy. This may be counter to the original intention of Towards a Poor Theater; in fact, the essay specifically leaves out questions of funding or management. Regardless, the ideas that Grotowski discusses, and the core idea of abandoning a “rich” theater, can be applied perhaps quite effectively to the actual business of theater management. There does need to be some money in theater, and we aren’t in Europe—that money isn’t going to come from the government simply to support the art. Currently, theaters make money largely from philanthropy but also largely through their subscriber base. An intentional poverty, created by lowering ticket prices and focusing less on philanthropy, as well as incorporating programs with goals of funding other theater projects, can encourage a number of innovations not only artistically but in terms of running theatrical business. This too is not without precedent: the current standard method of running regional and Off-Off- theaters is by incorporating them as not-for-profit businesses, a practice started by Margot Jones with her Alley theater in the 1940’s.

First of all—the less money a theater has, the less people they can hire. This creates the necessity to collaborate. In regional theaters all over the country, actors keep office jobs maintaining the budget and filling out grant applications for the theater. At the Old Castle Theater Company, in Bennington, Vermont, some actors have been able to work and sustain themselves economically by working both in the office and on the stage (Thorp).

Second of all, having to find other ways to make money besides ticket sales or significant amounts of philanthropy could potentially encourage some very useful practices. Money can be made, though it must also be spent, on other programs. Education specifically is something that theater companies can provide that is much needed in the country—and running classes or providing unpaid or low-pay internships can be extremely valuable to rising theater people.

Another way for theaters to make money is to encourage the use of governmental grants, which come in many forms. Already there are grants that encourage work by American playwrights, work about pressing social issues, or work by new playwrights. More dependency on these grants could have positive and negative effects—while it is important to encourage this type of theater, it also puts companies in the potentially awkward position of producing a play that is not necessarily relevant to them or their audience for the sake of grant money. It does, helpfully, put the focus on one production, leaving the theater company open to the healthy challenges presented by a tight budget. Other types of grants—those that encourage charity and community—seem often to be ignored in the world of theater. These not only can have the same positive affect as a theater-specific government grant, but they can encourage the theater to integrate itself more into the community. Theaters can potentially qualify for grants that could be non-restrictive to their content by donating proceeds to charities—and, though this would take away from the profit of the company, that again would allow them to continue to innovate and problem solve, while helping other people. This leads into the potential for massive reform, in which theaters who receive grant money do so with the promise of donating to other not-for-profit theater groups, perhaps those that are younger or struggling. Instead of the current trickle-down of increasingly experimental reactions to Broadway rippling somewhat violently through the tiers of theater, this could create an actual economic trickle-down which could lead to theater being almost self-sustaining financially. 

            Thus, I too propose poverty in theater. Grotowski’s model of an “avante-garde theater whose poverty is not a drawback” (Brooke 11), can be looked to now as an alternative to the high-budget, high-technology shows that so many theaters seem to strive for. While it may seem that more technology or more funding may be the answer to our search for a new movement in theater, the opportunity in fact lies in the challenges that would come from embracing and even encouraging poverty in the running and production of theater.

Works Cited

Berkowitz, Gerald M. New Broadways. New York, NY: Applause Books, 1997. Print.

Brooke, Peter. "Preface." Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theater. New York, NY: Routelage, 2002. 11-15. Print.

Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theater. New York, NY: Routledge, 1968. Print.

New York Innovative Theater Foundation. Statistical Analysis of Off-Off Broadway Budgets. Statistical Analysis. New York, New York: New York Innovative Theater Awards Group, 2008. Web.

Thorp, Krista. "Oldcastle Theater Company opens new location on Main Street." The Bennington Free Press (2012). Print.