In her TEDTalk on Saturday, Leise Trueblood ’16 made a point of connecting her discussion of race in The Lion King to people who don’t regularly see theater. I’ll make a different argument: Go see theater.
I see every play I can in the last few years, and I’ve never been quite sure why. The ones that stick out – Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, David Mamet’s Oleanna, and Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit – tend to be dark and depressing and sometimes funny. They tend to be about people’s lives falling apart. They are way too close to home for comfort. These shows have floored me, causing existential crises.
But I keep going.
I keep going because the existential crises that theater often offers can be cleansing as well as flooring – supportive, and hopeful in a way.
Partially as an attempt to understand the reasons behind my fairly new attraction to experiencing theater, I have spent altogether too much time over the last two- and-a-half years trying to wrap my head around performance theory. Performance theory is the theorizing of lived experience, the attempt to understand how people construct identities in time and space. It interrogates the ways in which we move through the world, bringing consciousness to this work. And yes, moving through the world is indeed work.
When we turn to this theory, we learn why it is that good theater can hit us so hard. “Performance transforms [us as] social, psychological, and emotional being[s]” because it provides a space in which “the politics of identity [can be] negotiated,” performance theorist Deborah Kapchan has written. It is that negotiation that can be so difficult. With a single sentence, she has explained why my existential crises occur.
Theater is a space that allows us to safely try lives on for size as they traverse the stage in front of us. Through their being staged, narrative-lives are made physical and visible, which seems to me to make them more possible than they are when they remain chained to the paper of novels and poems. Like archives, performance is a project of legitimizing, and of finding and making space for oneself and others. It is an expanding of the possible. Performance is a constant reminder that our lived realities do not have to be the way that they are. We can change them.
Some of this increased possibility is perhaps due to the fact that these lives become shared when they are enacted and embodied on the stage. We experience them communally and socially instead of experiencing them in the way that we read: “in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull” (to quote the late Benedict Anderson). Thus, theater becomes a test drive of the socially possible “that,” Kapchan writes, “attempts to make social sense of schism, ambiguity and division through ‘public reflexivity.’” The “shared reality and “fund of common experience” that theater establishes enables “mutual understanding.” As just such a communal experience, theater gives us something that everyday life does not always give: an opportunity for consensus, which is etymologically “feeling together” (as Kapchan and others have pointed out). In this, theater provides something that our everyday lives simply do not on a regular basis. Go see theater. •
