manifesto: the theater of the gap
“ …my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle— I also know that I cannot reconcile them” - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
“I can’t even get from here to there without buying a boat. It’s sad. I miss you. How did this happen?” - Bill Wurtz, History of the Entire World
There exists an unassailable gap between you and I. I am not you. You are not me. I’m afraid of you. I’m in love with you. You detest me. You need me. We are going to spend the rest of our lives standing at the edge of this gap, this space between us, desperately assuring ourselves that we understand each other.
Chekhov understood this better than most playwrights. His characters have the ability to sit in the same room, actively talking to one other, and yet they are clearly alone. In The Seagull, after Konstantine begs Nina to stay with him and she leaves, the gap crushes him. In The Cherry Orchard, as Lopakhin and Varya share their final goodbye, inexplicably unmarried, they are standing on the edge of the gap, throwing words across like pebbles.
Language is a tool that we have developed to bridge the gap. Like any tool, it’s strikingly good in some contexts, and horribly ineffectual in others. Our words have a tendency to reveal far more than we intend. For instance, if I look at you across the gap and shout, “I’m hungry,” on one level I’ve communicated that I have a need for food. On another level, I’ve also communicated that I expect you to help me obtain food, and that I trust you enough to reveal my need. The core of textual analysis is reading into this second level, recognizing that when characters speak to each other, they’re mostly talking about themselves.
Language can express need. It can express relationships, context, and intellectual thought, to some extent. However, language, in its most pragmatic form, fails to express life on the other side of the gap. I can tell you, “I’m hungry,” but that phrase alone cannot make you feel my hunger. If I wanted to make you feel my hunger, I might say, “I’m so hungry. It feels as if there’s a knife stabbing into my gut.” I provide you with a metaphor, an appeal to your imagination.
Theatre is an art form that relies on imagination. Meyerhold realized this truth through his work with abstraction. A naturalistic performance of hunger demonstrates a character walking into a room, looking at a plate of food, and then eating it. An abstract performance of hunger demonstrates a character walking into a barren room, with a single scrap of food lying on the floor illuminated by a spotlight. The character screams, writhes on the ground, and crawls towards it before desperately cramming into their mouth. Over the speakers, sounds of a stomach gurgling play, and sickly yellow lights cover the entire stage.
The former scene tells a story, the latter tells a story and reveals something about the character’s experience of hunger. Both scenes are examples of attempts to bridge the gap, but the abstract construct, through its appeal to the senses, is able to communicate far more about its authors’ lived experiences.
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Empathy is another tool that we’ve developed in the face of our constant separation. It is the practice of imaging ourselves to be on the other side of the gap. In order to do so, we have to alter our own mental landscape, sometimes permanently, to acquire the qualities of someone else’s mind.
Empathy is amazing. It is an essential part of any collective action. Theatre feeds into our ability to feel empathy by providing us with information, often through abstraction, regarding the lived experience of other people. It highlights, through this information, that in spite of our separation, there are some experiences we might consider universal.
Empathy also has its inefficiencies. You tell me that you are “starving,” but I have never starved. I lack the information for what starving feels like, but I have been hungry. Linguistically, I know that starvation is an extreme hunger, so in my mind I abstract my experience with hunger making it more pronounced. I attempt to step into your mental landscape.
But my abstraction might be completely false, perhaps there are qualities of starvation that are absent in mere hunger. Now I’ve entered the dangerous position of assuming we are the same, while in reality the gap between us is as wide as ever.
Our social identities shape the material we use to imagine the lives of others. My lack of experience with starvation is a product of my class. If I tell you that I know what it is to starve, and you believe me, then you might come to believe that everyone, regardless of economic status, experiences starvation. It, falsely, becomes a universal experience, which stifles any chance of exploring the crucial question surrounding starvation; “Why do some people starve and other people do not?”
Bertold Brecht’s alienation effect is a set of theatrical tools intended to illustrate these limitations of empathy. He argues that the gap between spectator and character should be made constantly apparent and, beyond that, so should the gap between character and actor. Everyone in the room is prompted towards critical thought, founded on the recognition of difference.
Brecht’s theatre is fantastic, but it is lonely.
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I fluctuate between empathy and criticism. The gap between you and I shifts between incredible closeness, and insurmountable distance. While I can never truly become you, I can come to understand you, in my own limited, human, way.
My work as a director reflects this philosophy in its commitment to alienation and abstraction. As a facilitator, I have to bridge the gap between myself and my collaborators in order to create a piece of art that reflects our collective vision. At the same time, I need to constantly remind my ensemble that we are not the same people, we have different lived experiences, and those differences also need to be present in our work.
I like to tell stories about people, because people are all we got. If we fragile beings are to find happiness, it is in each other.