My last blog expressed my admiration for the Green Theatre Collective and their approach to performing theater. The “Green” in their title is not someone’s name; it’s part of their mission to make theatrical production environmentally friendly, to use up as few unsustainable resources as they can. This means taking a “minimalist” approach to theater, the most radical feature of which is: no stage. When Peter Quince, the director of Pyramis and Thisbe the play nestled nestled inside A Midsummer Night’s Dream) takes his band of rude mechanicals into the woods in search of a place to rehearse, he finds just the spot: “This green plot shall be our stage,” he tells them. There’s a metadramatic joke here, of course; the original audience had been watching the actors perform on a stage which they were forced to imagine as a wood; now, either they had to reimagine it as a stage, or simply stop imagining it altogether. The joke is lost, of course, if the stage has been transformed with fake grass and trees into a forest. GTC goes one step further: they perform the whole play on an actual green plot -- in the case of last week’s As You Like It, a lawn on a farm in Shelter Island.
They also employ no sets, no artificial light, vestigial costumes, and only seven actors for a play whose Dramatis Personae specifies 26 speaking parts. This may be, for them, largely a political and practical decision: they’re saving the earth and making do with what resources they can muster. I experience it more in esthetic terms. I’m a minimalist at heart; I hate lavishness. When I was 19, I saw Aida performed at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome with more pomp and circumstance than Kate and William’s wedding; there were live elephants on stage. I hated it. I was bored by the recent Tony-winning play War Horse, which as far as I was concerned was all chrome and no motor.
To make the overcoming of obstacles the dynamic of performing a play is not a new idea. Shakespeare would no doubt have welcomed kleig lights, rear projection, moveable sets and recorded sound effects, but he not only made do without them, he made the lack of them work for him. In the Prologue to Henry V, the Chorus disingenuously proclaims both the inadequacy of the project and its solution:
But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Shakespeare and Company, in the Berkshires, specializes in small-cast Shakespeare; I saw them do Julius Caesar with five actors, and tour-de-force of doubling. And the Public Theater, in 2003, 21-year-old Bryce Dallas Howard and six even lesser-known actors did an amazing As You Like It, in which most of the problems were solved by tumbling and acrobatics: Ron Pisoni played both Orlando and his brother Oliver, and in a dialogue between them, switched characters by doing alternate back and forward somersaults, donning and doffing a hat in midair.
Movies, television and the modern theater can supply whatever is needed in the way of realism without taxing the audience's willing suspension of disbelief; in fact, that's the business that Pixar is in. The Dogma movement in film, which I find ridiculously rigid and tendentious in most respects, is at least an attempt to clear the clutter. But thank God for underfunded but undiscouraged theater companies that are proving, all over the world, that less is much more than more.
Tomorrow or the next day: minimalism in text.
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