[Communique: 02.09.03]

Just got back from seeing Lovebird With a Mirror at 424 Broadway, The Artist Network. It's so rare for me to see a play and actually find it sexy, and even more rare among plays that are not markedly queer. But this is indeed a sexy play.

Dealing with sex onstage always disrupts the solidity of the fourth wall. Sex is located so materially and so inescapably in our bodies that its appearance prevents us from maintaining the normal separation between performer and character on which traditional theater is based. When a character is insulted on stage, no one feels bad for the actor, but when a hand is placed on a character's crotch, everyone knows that the actor feels it too. A hand laid on a breast is a hand laid on a breast; there is no getting around it. Thus the fourth wall becomes permeable at the point of sexual (or violent, or messy) contact in a way that it does not through normal or pedestrian contact. And at the moment of contact it is as if a wave of electricity travels through the audience.

Then James Griffiths ... says ... "The performance is now stopped. You people have the following choices. First, you can come into the circle, and the performance will continue; second, you can go to anyone else in the room and ask them to take your place, and, if they do, the performance will continue; third, you can stay where you are, and the performance will remain stopped; or fourth, you can go home, and the performance will continue in your absence."

Whenever Griffiths recites these conditions, there is a shock wave in the theater. The "real world" penetrates the "theater world" interrupting a performance.

- Richard Schechner
Environmental Theater

Sexuality in theater is always a place where the fourth wall becomes porous, where fiction and nonfiction leak and cross-pollinate. The reluctance of most theater to be sexually explicit is entirely because most theater does not want to break the solidity of the fourth wall.

My desire is to make theater which engages in such dual-world actions (actions that exist in both the "real world" and the "theater world") in order to do a certain kind of research on social topics. For example, when an ensemble begins to work on a piece that will involve sex and sexuality, they automatically have to face all those critical questions that face us in the larger society. Most importantly, will women and queers and other sexual "minorities" feel safe in the work?

[PHOTOGRAPH of audience] participation in the Caress scene of Dionysus. The performers are the women in panties and halters. Everyone else is audience. After three months the scene was dropped. Too often performers - especially the women - felt used, prostituted.

- Richard Schechner
Environmental Theater

Issues pertaining to the objectifiction of women under patriarchy may be addressed in many ways. Sexual harassment and gendered disrespect can be studied sociologically, psychologically, anthropologically, etc. My interest is in studying such issues theatrically, as Schechner describes above. A theatrical ensemble is always a microcosm, perfectly well suited to research all social issues that pertain to the common culture of the individuals who take part in it.

So what do we need these days? We need a forum where individuals and perhaps even small communities can come together across the lines of gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and culture. We need to call town meetings across these stratifications, and at these town meetings we need to thoroughly investigate the interworkings and inter-relations of these different groups as part of our research towards the possibility of radical democracy (also called working anarchism). In my opinion, the participants in these town meetings should do more than just talk, and they should speak for more than just themselves. They should sing, dance, and play characters; they should tell stories and re-live memories and act out myths. In other words, they should make theater together, building it out of their own bodies and experiences to produce results that are meaningful not just within the ensemble but in the greater society at large.

So that is Rojo with hammer and saw. I think my deepest respect for him comes because he knows that environmental design = construction. The ideas are okay, the renderings beautiful, the models exciting - but it all comes down to hammers, nails, materials, and making the space into the shapes you need.

I think it's the same with performing. The daily physical commitment is what counts. The spirit is the body at work.

- Richard Schechner
Environmental Theater

"The spirit is the body at work."

SPIRIT = CULTURE

The theater is the laboratory of culture, of the spirit.