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.