Prologue:
This blog post is going to be a little different from all my previous posts, even the other Off Topics, because I am writing it as an assignment for one of my classes and I will get a mark for it. Yes, I am blogging for one of my university classes – for “Stage & Performance” to be precise. So you will get a real insight in my life as a student in Sri Lanka. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
As you might have guessed from the title of the course, it has something to do with theater; actually it is all about theater and theories concerning theater and models to get something on stage. “Stage & Performance” is mainly a theoretical class, where we discuss Aristotle’s ideas of theater, Augusto Boal’s concepts of performance and audiences, Peter Brook’s different types of theater and so on and so forth. But to get a more practical approach as well, we watched three different plays staged in three different locations here in Colombo.
The task at hand is to draw a connection between the live performances and the discussed theories. Therefore we are asked to write a “think piece”, a “blog post kind of thing”, about one of the plays, in connection with the theory we discussed so far.
We were never actually supposed publish this blog post online, but as I can call this little place in the World Wide Web my own, I thought why not. After all, I’m a blogger and I am supposed to write a blog, why not actually post it. Sure, it is a little off topic and we are asked to write to an informed audience, which means I have to assume that everybody who reads this knows a fair amount about theater theories, which is probably not the case, but I like the idea of sharing this with a greater audience then just my lecturer, and who knows, you might get something out of it as well.
I have to assume that you are all well informed, but I do not have to assume, that you actually saw the play that I am going to talk about. So let me start with…
A Summary of the Play:
“Love Letters” written by A. R. Gurney is one of those plays that do not need a fancy stage with massive scenery, a huge amount of props, sophisticated lighting arrangements, elaborated sound tuning and in fact it does not even need many actors. Two actors, a woman and a man, is exactly the right amount you need to tell the story of Andrew Ladd and Melissa Gardner.
It all starts in their second year in school, when Andy writes a short letter to except an invitation to Melissa’s birthday party. Melissa replies after the party with a letter herself, saying thank you for the present she got from Andy. These two brief written interactions are the beginning of a lifelong correspondence between Andrew and Melissa. From then on they send it each other short notes in class and “get-well-soon” messages when they are sick or break a leg; they send each other postcards from their holidays, Valentine cards and Season’s Greetings; they send each other random letters just to see how the opposite is doing in life; they send each other letters just to keep in touch, even after their lives start to take different turns soon after grade school. Andy, who even as a child seemed to be a more conservative, more focused type of person, pursues a career in law and later politics, eventually becoming a U.S. senator. Melissa on the other hand is more of a free spirit with the soul of an artist. After she is done with school, she moves to Italy to study arts and tries to establish herself as an artist. Although she has a few exhibitions now and then and at one point she actually seems to have success with her work, she never really has a break through that lasts, but more than one break down that takes her to rehab. Melissa always seems to struggle with life and she never really finds her place in it. Yes, she gets married and has two children, but the marriage does not last and because of her bohemian lifestyle, with a fondness of alcohol and men, she eventually loses custody of her two girls. The only actual constant in her life are the letters from Andy and the ones she sends to him. But the same holds true for Andy. Driven as much by his own as his fathers expectations, he follows a very predictable way in life: school, college, military service, work and finally politics. He gets married, has three children, a dog and a house in the suburbs. If we forget about a brief episode during his military service in Japan, where he falls in love with a woman and despite the disapproval of his family gets married to her, his life seems to be a little too good, too straightforward. The friendship with Melissa and the letters seem to be his way out of this predictability, a way to express his true self. This ultimately peaks in a love affair of the two, but when it comes to the decision of giving up his “good” life for Melissa, or giving up the liaison with Melissa he chooses the later. It is only in his final letter to Melissa’s mother, after Melissa’s death, that he admits his feelings for her, and that he realizes the importance of her in his life.
“Is this theater?”
All this is presented to us by two actors sitting next to each other on stage and reading out the letters. We follow Melissa and Andrew through their lives only by hearing about it, but we never actually see one of the scenes they describe played out. Sure, we can imagine what they tell us and we can see it happening in front of our inner eye, but on stage is really not much going on. Which provokes the question: “Is this really theater?” The fairly simple answer is: “It depends on who you ask.” Augusto Boal, with his idea of a “Theater of the Oppressed”, would probably take this performance more as an on stage reading session, but not as theater that provokes the audiences, that engages them, arouses them, leads them to a revolution of the circumstances, or at the very least points out what is going wrong in society. And it is true, even though we learn that Melissa was practically raised by nurses and not her parents, that we have the topic of a U.S. senator cheating on his wife, that we get to know Melissa’s struggle of finding her place in life, it is all rather uncritical presented and not reflected.
However, if we consider the ideas of Peter Brook and his different categories of theater, we can see that such a restricted performance can be seen as a certain type of theater, or rather a mixture of types. Brook identifies (besides others) the “Rough Theater”, which is characterized not only by rawness of the production but also by the crudeness of the actors and the “Holly Theater” which enables the visibility of the invisible. When Brook talks about a “Rough theater”, he by no means talks about an unprofessional or unrehearsed or even a bad theater, but rather a realistic type of theater, one the audience can relate to and the actors can identify themselves with the characters. A theater that does not try to be larger than life, but rather tries to be lifelike and still provoking by showing the audiences outcomes of situations they most likely are familiar with, because they might have experienced them at one point in their life on their own. This is clearly the case in “Love Letters”. We laugh when Andy and Melissa exchange notes in class and get punished for doing so, not out of schadenfreude, but because we might think back to our own time in school and the day when we got busted for passing on a note. At least I do. And when Melissa comments on one of Andy’s Christmas card, where he gloats about his perfect wife, and his perfect children and his perfect life, with a sarcastic remark that she never wants to read something like that ever again, we can relate to it because it’s something we would have done too, at least I would have. But “Love Letters” does more. It reads out the written words of two people and just by doing so, the words come to life and we fill them with images and scenes, and we fly through 50 years in about two hours. “Marry Christmas from Andy Ladd” and another year passed by. A short “interlude” of an Elvis Presley song or something from the Beach Boys and we know we have moved on a decade. Brooks describes the “Holy Theater” as the idea of showing something that cannot really be seen, and this holds true for “Love Letters”. We can not actually see Andy and Melissa grow up and live their lives, but through the medium of letters, through the setting of the stage, through the focus on only two characters and with the help of music that captures the time and the mood of the scenes, we can imagine it. At least I can and I liked it.
And is this not actually what really matters, no matter what the theorists say or think. Isn’t it the audiences that make a play a success and aren’t they the ones who give the real feedback, during and after the play? Each and every one of them decides on his or her own, only really influenced by their previous experiences in life, if they liked it, or not.
As I was one of them, I decided for myself, that I did. I liked the plot, I liked the characters and I liked the actors. What else can one expect?
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