I won’t be on the road with the
Transient Theater this
summer, but I’m very excited about the experiment and here’s why:
I’ve got a fireplace in this little cabin we have out in the
Poconos. And whenever I can convince my
wife that it’s cold enough, (doesn’t matter if it’s in the middle of summer,
we’re in what passes for “mountain country” around here, so it can get cool
even in July) I build a fire and sit in front of it and stare, tossing in logs
like a madman.
It was during one of these self-induced pyro-hypnotic states
a couple of years ago that I realized a great loss, for me and for all of us,
for our species; a loss we don’t even recognize, one we don’t even know has
lessened us.
Ever since we were us, we’ve stared into the fire, alone and
shivering or together and feasting; fire and language (and also the ability and
willingness to pick up a stick and smack the shit out of that other guy) are
some of the very basic things that make us us. When you watch a fire you’ve built, you watch
a living thing dance in front of you, you watch it feed and lick the wood, you
watch it collapse, die, roar back up to life. You can see a show you’re working
on, a project you’re about to begin, a
political campaign, just about anything. You can see civilizations rise and sputter if
you look, not close enough, but without any hard focus.
You can learn a lot staring into a fire.
In much the same way, the modern theater artist has lost
something important she doesn’t even know she used to need.
Up until quite recently, theater was a mobile
enterprise. You couldn’t just sit around
the same town square doing the same damned show day after day. People would
start throwing things at you or worse.
So the jongleurs, the bouffons, the jugglers and troupes would be on the
road every morning, literally walking down some road that snaked or crawled
between two towns, rehearsing new bits, congratulating each other on
yesterday’s performance all the while keeping an eye out for highwaymen or
worse, the Law.
This isn’t some romantic hokum, this is how it used to be
and how it always was up until the moment patronage got involved in Western
theater. And even then, after some duke
had built you a theater or more often just granted you the right to perform in
his banquet room, you still made your money out on the road.
And just like the old
simplicity of staring into a fire, you can learn a lot being out on the road.
Most important to the craft, the show gets better, stronger,
leaner and sharper. Forced to adjust the
performance to different playing areas, the players are much more aware of the
physical reality of the performance each time, they are paying more attention
to the crowd and each other than they will when they are comfortable and taking
the space for granted. Different playing
areas keep the show alive and electric in a way that it is impossible to
replicate in a fixed location.
The other thing the road clarifies is the implicit agreement
and relationship between the player and the town, which is a way of saying the
contract between the artist and society.
On the road, you’re a stranger, again, a visitor bringing
something new to the place. You’re back
in the Marketplace, out of the dreaded, deadening Temple of Art, that place
where parishioners nap and you dutifully recite the words, hoping to connect
again with the Old Magic. You’re in the
rough and rolling world again, peddling your wares. And yes, your wares may be
made of dreams and sweat and spit and magic, but the relationship is the ancient,
universally understood transaction: give me your time and your coin and I’ll
make it worth your while. And to
take the time and coins of strangers and have them applaud and smile at the end
is the only reward any player, ever, is really looking for.
And having spent some time on the road, I can tell you that
the best thing about it is the hilarious, very adolescent feeling you have of Getting Away with Something. You’re traveling around, dropping into a
place, doing your show for strangers, gone the next day, off to the next
place. When you tell a shopkeeper or a
hotel clerk or someone at the bus stop what you’re doing:
“We’ve got a show,
we’re on tour, we’re playing tonight down at the…”
they invariably nod, impressed, interested, like you’re some
kind of exotic animal, like you’re the Rolling Stones. They’ve never heard of you, they’re not
coming to the show, you’ll never see them again, but in that moment you get
this completely unearned but absolutely genuine respect from another
human.
And all because you were crazy enough to go out on the road.
Simple things, fires and the road. But it’s concentrating on and appreciating
the very simple things that keeps you honest and focused on what’s important.
I won’t be on the road with the Transient Theater crew, not
this time anyway. I’ll be home staring into a fire, even if it’s the dog days of August, but I’m
very excited about the experiment and I can’t wait to greet them in New York.
