The following essay was submitted long before the pandemic shut down almost all theatre activity in the U.S., about a production that ran in New York City in 2019. As a time capsule of what theatre was and could be again, we think it’s worth sharing now. —Editors
I’m doing a play in a basement.
In this play, we are supposed to look at the audience for most of our lines, and there are always empty seats. There are empty seats and then there are people sitting next to empty seats. Which is worse? Faced with looking directly at people next to empty seats, or directly at the empty seats, I choose the empty seats. The artistic director of this theatre tells us that our show in the basement is sold out! Those empty seats are not real, he tells us. Don’t worry, he tells us, the tickets are actually all sold and people are just choosing not to come. Maybe they read the reviews. Maybe they had hip surgery and can’t sit that long on hard-backed chairs. Maybe they died. That would mean that on each empty seat is a ghost—the kind people sometimes talk about living in old theatres. Maybe I am staring at the empty seats hoping to see a ghost.
Something happens in the theatre that can only happen in the theatre!
That’s what people say.
People are always saying that.
What is it? What is it?
What can happen? I want to know.
Oskar Eustis, in a seminar on collaboration during my first year in graduate school, gave a talk about theatre as the precondition for democracy. You can watch the same talk, more or less, right here.
The idea is: You get live human bodies in the same room and do a great play, and ideas get exchanged. These ideas, because they are embodied by real, live human beings, give people the power to see things from another person’s perspective. Characters speak arguments and ideas that may not be our own, but because the ideas are embedded in a story that we can understand and relate to, we have empathy for those characters, and therefore their ideas. And when we go to the voting booth we think of those other ideas, those other people, and not just ourselves.
Does this actually happen? Is anyone doing this? Should they be? Is that what art is for? What theatre is for?
I worry about a theatre that has as its obligation “democracy.” I worry about democracy getting thrown on the back of the small, strange animal that is American theatre. I worry that our bodies, actor’s bodies, may not take the weight, that we may crave something else from our profession.
It’s convenient to trace the demise of democracy along the same path as the demise of theatre. All those empty seats. All those empty voting booths.
But when theatre was the form of mass entertainment—in Renaissance England, say—democracy was non-existent. Theatre was not a precondition for democracy. It was an escape valve from everything that was, in fact, not democratic.
I worry about a theatre that has as its obligation “democracy.” I worry about democracy getting thrown on the back of the small, strange animal that is American theatre. I worry that our bodies, actor’s bodies, may not take the weight, that we may crave something else from our profession.
Which is why I sometimes feel like I’m wasting my life.
But
Of course
Something does happen
in the theatre
that can only happen
in the theatre.
It is happening right now! To some extent—since we are here together at an event with real, human bodies, and the event is happening in real time, and there is a stage and there are lights. And all of those elements are creating one over-arching dynamic, which is that you are over there, and I am over here. Is anything beyond that happening? Is something being exchanged? What is it? Democracy? Empathy?
Maybe. Maybe….I have empathy for this actress who is no longer young, who is all alone on the stage, and who is speaking to me, without, it seems to me, a full awareness of the facts. Does she know, for example, how small this theatre is? Does she see that some of these seats are empty? Does she know that she is not famous, and we in fact did not know her name until someone dragged us here because our friends go to preschool with her kid?
Or, conversely: There is my friend—Crystal—on the stage! Where she belongs! Where I belong! Where all members of my small community of New York theatre actors belong! She belongs there, she belongs there, please, God—let her belong there!
What is happening is that you are over there and I am over here. That, as far as I can see, is what. Is. Happening.
Well.
In 2014, I gave birth to my daughter. It was a harrowing experience, as a lot of births are for a lot of women. Ever since, I have lived in the relief that I, and my daughter, survived the experience, while simultaneously living in the paranoid dread (suspicion? truth?) that something much worse awaits me. It all has something to do with theatre, if you can believe it. I wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise! Because I’m talking about theatre.
What happens is this: I go to the hospital for an ultrasound because I am still waiting and now am past my due date by two weeks. A doctor I’ve never met comes into the room I’m in and looks at an image of my uterus on a screen. He is actually not a doctor at all but a sort of tall, black-cloaked devil out of an Ingmar Bergman film. But I don’t know that yet.
He asks me who my OB-GYN is and rolls his eyes when I tell him I have a midwife. He acts alarmed when I tell him I only had one ultrasound before this one. He shakes his head and looks at me with empathy—or is it pity? Or disgust? I will never know. He tells us there are cysts completely covering our daughter’s kidneys, so I will have to be induced. He leaves and they take me upstairs to a delivery room.
Once my labor starts another doctor comes in and sits by my bed. She is young and gentle. She tells us that the cysts that were seen on the screen represent a rare disease, and that after about an hour of being born our daughter’s lungs will collapse and she will die. The doctor gives us the number of a funeral home to call and suggests having a friend come to our apartment while we are at the hospital, to clear out any baby clothes we may have waiting at home. She tells us we won’t be able to have children in the future because this is a genetic disease. She tells us that they can either take the baby away immediately after she is born, or I can hold her, but she has to warn us that if we choose to hold her it will be hard to watch because she will be struggling for breath as she dies. We choose the keeping and holding option. I ask the doctor if I shouldn’t have had the herbal tea I had been drinking so much of—if that might have played any part in this. She tells me no, and she leaves. All the doctors do. Most of the nurses too.
Because this isn’t an emergency at all; no one is panicking or trying to save the situation; it’s all settled. My midwife gets them to disconnect all the heart monitors and machines and leads me through the necessary motions of giving birth. I think about theatre classes I had in graduate school: the one, for example, where we had to wear black masks over our faces so that we couldn’t speak to each other, and then pretend to crawl through dark caves until snot and tears and sweat all poured out of us and got stuck inside our mesh masks. What were we preparing for when we did that? We asked each other that all the time outside of class: What the fuck did they think they were possibly preparing us for by making us do that? This. Who knew I was preparing for this.
When our daughter is born she is crying. That’s a good sign, but we don’t know it at the time. I don’t know anything. Most of all signs. The world is sign-less. Nothing means anything. The baby is on my chest and they tell my husband to cut the umbilical cord, which in my medieval medical knowledge I think might be the thing to trigger her death. We prepare for that. My husband and I begin to tell the baby that we love her. I don’t know how many times we tell her. It could be just a couple of times; it feels like 100 times. We say: I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. But we aren’t really saying I love you. We are saying something else. What we are really saying is: Here we are, here we are, here we are. You and me. Me and you. You over there, me over here.
There is nothing attached to this love word, there is nothing we hope to come out of it, there is no future in it—the future, at that moment, is non-existent. A blank sheet of dark sky. The love is not love as I define it now—among people I know and care about. It is simply the first and easiest word we grasp to say the event: We are here, here we are, we are here, here we are. You over there, us over here.
After an hour our daughter hasn’t died and the doctor comes back and takes her away. They wake me up every two hours and walk me to the NICU to nurse the baby. When I nurse I turn my head away from her and stare at a wall—so that I don’t see her face.
In the middle of the next day, a third doctor comes to our room and tells us that they all made a terrible mistake. Our daughter does not have the deadly disease they diagnosed her with.
I nurse like that through the night and the morning, every two hours. Then in the middle of the next day, a third doctor comes to our room and tells us that they all made a terrible mistake. Our daughter does not have the deadly disease they diagnosed her with. The lumps on the ultrasound that the doctor thought were cysts on her kidneys, are, in fact, just water. Her new diagnosis is called hydronephrosis, which is usually harmless and goes away on its own. Before the advent of ultrasounds in the 1970s it was largely undetected.
The journey back up from the dark. Lights and signs and shape to all things.
The philosopher Martin Buber tells us that most meetings we have in a life are really half meetings. We encounter people and we give a meaning to those encounters based on our own hopes and ideas about ourselves and others. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Life needs shape. It needs light and contours, and stories. There is another kind of meeting, though, which is not the meeting of stories, but the meeting of spirit, which is not to say a spiritual meeting, but rather a meeting of another—another as they really are. This kind of meeting doesn’t have a shape. It doesn’t have signs or contours or even hope. You might say it is impossible to quantify or define. That’s certainly what I have said when trying to understand Martin Buber.
When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities….he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.
Or, as interpreted in plain English by Zadie Smith in an essay in Feel Free:
I don’t think it’s possible to prove objectively any of what Buber is saying here; I can only apply it to the measure of my own life, and yours. And I put it to you that when you meet someone you love, when you give birth, when you seem to encounter yourself in a moment of extreme physical peril—something funny happens to time on these occasions. You are uniquely attentive to the present moment. You are aware of living in it.
I thought that my moment of giving birth was a moment of peril. It wasn’t. It was actually just birth. But what is strange to me, what I can never not know now: Even though the moment was in fact not what we thought it was, even though the doctors were wrong and no one was dying—the moment itself, of speaking those words, “I love you,” was and remains the truest of my life.
It is not accidental, to Buber, that time stretched in that moment not in a cone of silence, but rather with words. You would think that there would be no place for words in transcendence. What purpose do they serve? But for Buber a meeting between one and another is not a meeting with the higher self; it is not a meeting with the self at all; it is a conversation. A conversation with the world as it is.
I love you. Of all the words available, those seem obvious and banal. We reached for them because we were at a loss of all words. But what they created was something different from their function. Because they arrived at a reality that was not us. We used them as placeholders, but they were not placeholders. We used them to mark time—but they did not mark time. They were time. They were place. The words stretched out from me, not as me, but as a part of the thing between me and another. I love you was not a story or a name or a woman or a mother: It was meeting, and then also the noun of that word: a meeting.
When the lights come up after a play and the audience applauds, we breathe a collective sigh of relief. We are glad to be brought back to life—to have the doctors come onto the stage and say: We made a mistake. Your time has not yet come.
What happens in the dark? Why do we want to leave it? Do we ever want to stay inside it? Most of the time what we take from the theatre is a story, a story we relate to our own story. This is the definition of empathy—relating someone else to ourselves. It is the fiber of democracy. And it is so boring it makes me want to throw my shirt off. I don’t care about what I take from the theatre. I care about what happens inside it. Right? I want what happens inside it to strip me so that I have nothing to take with me! It is so dark in here! It should be! It is dark enough inside here for us not to know what is on either side of us. You over there, me over here. Dark enough to meet in the middle and not know we are meeting.
For a long time after my daughter was born, and still to some extent now, I have had the sense that I was cursed. The curse happened sort of like a fairy tale, or a play: No one else saw it happen, but what happened was, in the middle of the night, while giving birth, the black-cloaked devil in disguise came into my room. He made sure no one was there, that I was alone, and he asked if I wanted to trade my life for my baby’s. She could live and I would take her place. I said yes, and then she was born and lived, and now I am just waiting for the deal to be finished so that I can hold up my end of the bargain.
I keep wondering what will break this curse? Time, therapy, a kiss? A moment onstage?
A moment onstage. A moment when the ghosts on the seats are so thick that the only way to push past them is with a radical kind of reaching out and touching, a courageous kind of giving up of relevance, of meaning. A conversation. Not about life, but life. Not about politics, but politics. The radical politics of meeting another.
What does the dialogue of that conversation sound like, in a play?
Buber again:
With our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth ….Language is the stammering of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to spirit’s cosmic risk which we call man.. But no speech will ever repeat what the stammer is able to communicate.
And so Shakespeare says: “Howl howl howl howl!”
There are no words in dance, and there are no bodies in poems. But in theatre there are both. And they constantly, hopefully, contradict each other, so we can never choose one over the other.
I’m performing in a play called Plano, by Will Arbery. I’m performing at a company which has been a home for me for many years, Clubbed Thumb. I’m performing with my two best friends. It’s the happiest I’ve been in a long time in a play. And I have been asking myself why? It’s a play I love, at a place I love, with people I love. That all goes a long way. But it is more than that. In the play my two best friends and I are playing sisters. Three sisters, but not Three Sisters. Three sisters who talk fast, as all sisters do, as all friends do, as some plays do and some plays don’t. We are talking faster and faster and moving faster and faster through the play. At some point it feels (on certain nights, in certain moods) like we are talking so fast that we kind of have to be saying the words and not saying the words at the same time. Like we are saying words to convey the information that time is moving forward, and also saying the same word which is not a representation of that time moving forward, but is the act of time itself moving forward. The word is not an indicator of time—it is time. It is also the noun of that word, writ large: “time.”
I don’t have a great way of describing what that feels like. The best I can do is to say that it feels (at times, on certain nights, in certain moments) like saying two words at once, one word with our mouths, and a different word, at the same time, with our bodies.
Well:
What else can there be? What else should there be…in the theatre?
There are no words in dance, and there are no bodies in poems. But in theatre there are both. And they constantly, hopefully, contradict each other, so we can never choose one over the other. We can never say: That is the meaning of that word, because the body we are watching contorts that meaning. And we can never say, that is the meaning of that body, because the word is at that same moment corrupting that meaning. Or conversely: A funny thing happens to time in that moment. It collapses, or extends, and the body and the word become one thing, a thing of opposites, never to be understood—only to be experienced.
So that’s what happens in the theatre that can only happen in the theatre.
The relation to the I-you is unmediated. Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.
It is possible that we have very little appetite for encounters right now. That seems very possible. Buber seems ambiguous about whether art is even an authentic place for that to happen. But Buber could also not have predicted a world in which the opportunity for encounter has diminished as much as it has, for all sorts of obvious reasons. It does not seem like an accident to me that the only place left we can go in our lives that is dark, that submerges us in darkness and leaves us there without any recourse or any escape, to see and speak without being known, is the theatre.
All of that leaves us, as actors, in a precarious situation. How do we bring people with us into the dark? If we do want them there with us, which I believe we do. I don’t think we bring them with us by telling them we have important stories to tell. I don’t think we need to bring them in with us by insisting that their tickets are necessary tools of democratic order. This is not to say that theatre cannot be democratic, cannot be political. But its path towards a politics of its own (which I believe is a radical politics, but that’s for another essay) may not be won by labeling it as such. When actors’ bodies, and the words we say, become indicators of those labels, we get restless and we get bored. We stop worrying so much about whether seats are empty or full. We remember we are performing for something invisible anyways; we turn toward the ghosts in the seats and we start to imagine the invisible audience, behind the seen one, which is full of people—like us, loud in their silence, with their folded hands, waiting to meet us.
It is a strange and miraculous feeling to be onstage with your two best friends. You think: I am safe up here. These two people really know me. They are going to take care of me up here. Even if I really mess up, it’s okay—I am with them, they will save me. I feel so safe sometimes if gives me space to think about other things. Sometimes in those moments, perhaps feeling for my friend’s hand in the dark, I am shocked to remember: We are not alone up here. There are other people out there, on the other side of us! They are saying words too—though we are the only ones speaking. What are those words? Is there any way to hear them? Who are those people? Audience members? Citizens? Souls? I don’t know! What is happening between us? Is anything happening between us. Is that something democracy? Is it political? Is it politics?
I don’t know. Do they feel us? Do we feel them? Is that possible—between groups of people on either side of a stage who do not know each other? Any encounter, even with someone you have lived with your whole life, is an encounter with a stranger. Why should this be any different? Me over here, you over there; us on this side, you all on that side; three bodies colliding with 80 bodies; one breath listening to infinite breathing; all of us groping around in the dark, trying to understand, to release understanding, trying again, giving up—coming closer, touching, and it feels like reality. Or at least more real than life can be.
It feels like joy. Like saying to you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.
