Post 3

I have been trying to think how to approach this blog post about yesterday’s play and be able to say something different that we didn’t already go over. And what I found myself wondering was if the play was as affective as it could have been. While I do think the play was very poignant, especially during the last scene, I feel that playwright’s Brechtian approach took away from the activist theater I feel the artists were trying to present. I think the success of the play depends on the audience’s critical understanding and interpretative lens they are using. Depending on how the play is approached, the play gains and loses some of its successes.

Just to be different from my normal mode of operation, I will look at the play through one of its successful lenses which is of experiment and performance. As a piece of artistic theater, I think the play is highly successful. The work is definitely not avant-garde but is highly experimental with all the different types of media as well as the layers of performers who are working the puppets as well as acting as the voice of these puppets. The additional layer of the experimental form of the charcoal that Kentridge provides is also an aspect of successful artistic work. In all of these aspects, the play works beautifully. But this is taking something close to an approach of art for art’s sake. If you look at the play for the sake of having something beautiful and livid to see and experience, this works as good as any modern piece of drama; however, if the play is looked at as a piece of activist drama (which I feel all the artists involved in the work are trying to do) the play is not as successful.

Brecht talked about making theater for the common, thinking man. Two adjectives that do not always go together. I think what Brecht really meant was that he wanted to create theater that appealed to an audience full of Brecht clones or, to be a little nicer, Brechtians. But most people do not function in the same manner as he did. If an artist wants to move his audience to action or empathy or remorse, alienating that audience being reached is probably not the best approach. While commenting or acknowledging the limits of theater and the fact that theater cannot mirror real life may work in some performances, I think this is an idea that even the slowest audience members will pick up on. Children may believe that a man in a red suit who comes into school to talk to them is actually Santa, they understand that their principal in a red costume putting on a play with other teachers is just a show. Therefore, conceptual sets and blocking is not a mind blowing experience for audiences but an understandable artistic choice; however, actors are still expected to give moving performances. While I will never believe that I am actually watching a feud between the Capulets and Montagues, I can be enraged and fully moved in that one moment by Mercutio’s curse of both the houses. If the playwright never lets the audience become emotionally involved with the actors or, even more, let the actors become emotionally involved in the characters, the play is meaningless and will easily be forgotten. How many people have read the The Pioneer by James Fenimore Cooper? Not many. Because it sucks. Because the young pioneer, who somehow magically becomes the Mohicans friend two books later, is an emotionless automaton that no one can relate to.

In the end, even the strictest Brechtians provide empathy for their characters. In the play, the witnesses are portrayed with very life-like, heartbreaking puppets. If the characters were portrayed with Sesame Street like puppets that appeared to be in black face, the audience would truly be alienated. They would also have truly been enraged, the artists labeled as racists and bigots, and theater house possibly burned down. So, in the end, we all need empathy.