When we speak of what Stanislavski called Presence in acting, we must also speak of its Absence, the dimensionality of time through the actor, the fact that he who is performing can die there in front of your eyes; is in fact doing so. Of all the performing arts, the theater stinks most of mortality. (Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater At the Vanishing Point, 83)
Vivian Mercier famously described Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens, twice. But, as Blau reminds us, it is impossible to stage a play in which nothing happens. Because even when the actors sit mute and motionless on stage—and in Beckett’s plays, they often do—there is one thing that’s always happening: time is passing. And since we are all mortal beings with finite lifespans, that means at least one other thing is always happening: we are all dying.
In memory of Blau, I want to talk more concretely about theater and the stink of mortality. Specifically, I want to talk about the fact that my response to being diagnosed with and treated for endometrial cancer was to get involved in community theater.
I understand now, as I did not before my diagnosis, that there is a point in life at which one’s mortality ceases to be theoretical and becomes real. This is not an original insight. In fact, this past Good Friday, the rector at our church gave a sermon asking the question, “When was it that you began to die?” She started with an anecdote about something that happened soon after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. That made perfect sense to me, because I believe that I began to die after I regained consciousness following the hysterectomy that removed the endometrial cancer from my body—along with my uterus, cervix, and ovaries.
(As an aside, let me just say that you should feel free to point people toward this post whenever anyone asks you why you care about the ordination of women. The fact that, by 2009, I was a practicing Episcopalian meant that when I needed to talk to my priest about the fact that I had cancer and that the best case scenario was that I would lose all of my reproductive organs, never have a child, and go into surgical menopause at the age of 40, I could talk to someone who was living in a woman’s body and had experienced having parts of it cut away. Also if anyone wants to know why the ordination of openly gay clergy matters, you can let them know how much it meant to us that the priest who came to pray with us in the hospital before the operation was in a long-term same-sex relationship and well equipped to understand what about this situation was terrifying to both of us.)
But I digress.
As I say, others have had this insight before me; but the thing is that you cannot really learn that you are going to die from anyone else. It comes to you through your own embodied experience. The diagnosis was bad. But endometrial cancer has a very high survival rate, and mine was caught early. After the operation my oncologist reported triumphantly that my “pathology was perfect” and that it was about 99% likely that I was permanently cured. I just passed the four-year-mark and so far so good. So you’d think that the crisis is over. But it is not. Because it was only after the operation that the knowledge finally entered me: I’m not going to die of endometrial cancer. But I will die of something.
At around the time that I was done healing from the surgery, we went to see the first production of a community theater that had just started up in our neighborhood. They were a new organization and looking for new members. I thought, my life is finite, and I’ve always wanted to do this. So I went to the next general meeting.
A few months later the founder of the theater and I were directing W. B. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand together. (In my defense I should say that he was a Yeats fanatic long before he met me.) I found that working on that show made me feel alive and happy at a time when nearly nothing else would. It was partly because I was learning something new; partly that I got to work with all these new and interesting people; partly because I’d always loved the play. But I figured out, eventually, that it was really because directing that play was helping me deal with my mortality.
Blau is talking in that passage about the spectator’s experience. But as Blau must have known, the stink of mortality is even stronger for those involved in the rehearsal process. A show has a life cycle, one which is obviously and intentionally finite. Everyone who commits to the show does so knowing exactly how long it will live and when it will die. Everyone who comes to rehearse in your living room—at least if you are in community theater and have no money and no dedicated space, that’s where you rehearse—chooses to dedicate some of their living and dying time to help create this ephemeral thing. Ever since film and television definitively and forever surpassed theater’s ability to create an illusion of actuality, performance studies has been trying to explain what it is about theatrical performance that matters. This is one of the things they keep coming back to: performance as evanescence, performance as an always-disappearing present moment. What Philip Auslander calls theater’s “liveness”—the fact of live human bodies sharing the same space at the same time—is the other. (Auslander doesn’t actually believe in theater’s “liveness;” his argument is that in the digital age there is no such thing as unmediated performance or unmediated human experience. I reject this argument as far as theater goes; but on the human experience front, well, look at what I’m doing, right, posting about the removal of my internal organs on fricking Blogspot.com.) The combination of these three definitive conditions—ephemerality, liveness, and the stink of mortality—is what makes theater a compelling analogue for human life. As Jill Dolan points out in “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative’” (Theatre Journal 53 (2001): 455-479), Blau’s insight suggests that theater’s “liveness" matters precisely because it “promotes a necessary and moving confrontation with mortality” (459).
Which is lucky for me, because as it turned out there would be several more opportunities for me to confront mortality as we worked on putting On Baile’s Strand together during the fall and winter of 2009. It no doubt helped that On Baile’s Strand itself kind of stinks of mortality. For Cuchulain this takes the form of reproductive anxiety; all the kings are marrying and starting families, and he has no one (as far as he knows) to continue his legacy. And then, of course, he winds up killing his only child, knowing and yet not knowing that that’s what he’s doing—after which he engages in a suicidal battle with the sea itself. (Whether he actually dies at the end of On Baile’s Strand is a complicated question for many reasons, but let me not get started on the Yeatsgeekery, we’ll be here all day.) In the journal I kept during that production, I can see myself doing some of this “moving and necessary confrontation with mortality.” I will now favor you with a few choice excerpts.
This is from my entry about the first time we rehearsed the play’s final scene, in which Yeats in his wisdom decides to have Cuchulain come to grips with the fact that he’s killed his own son while the Fool and the Blind Man are fighting over a stolen chicken:
When Cuchulain, fresh from slaughtering the Young Man, walks into the middle of this, the effect is astonishing. The way [our Cuchulain] did it, it was as if he had stepped off Mount Olympus and landed in a Chuck E. Cheese. I give Yeats grief about his writing mistakes; but watching the three of them I thought, you know what, this part really works. The fact that Cuchulain has come to his tragic realization while these two clowns argue about that damn chicken makes it real. Because that’s what it’s like. A terrible thing happens to you, and it catapults you into a soul-annihilating world of fear, terror, and grief. And yet, you still have to go to that staff meeting and listen to the same people have that same fight they’ve been having for eleven years and when they come to drag you into it they look straight at you and they have no idea that none of that stuff matters any more.
Much later in the process, the woman playing the Fool—it was community theater, we were just starting out, we were short on men, there was a lot of highly nontraditional casting in that show—was trying to work out how to handle the very end of that scene. The Fool watches Cuchulain’s fight with the waves from the doorway, and has to say “The waves have mastered him” four times. We talked about it, and before long, the stink of mortality was wafting through my living room:
We decided to use the repeated lines to show the Fool’s emotional trajectory as he moves from optimism to grief. The Fool initially thinks that Cuchulain might actually beat the sea, whereas we all know he can’t. She asked if the Fool was capable of understanding what it meant for Cuchulain to die. I heard myself say, “It’s like talking to a two-year-old about death.”
I’ve talked to my own two year old about death twice. The first time was when her little cousin died in October at the age of three months. For a while after we broke it to her she kept asking, “What’s G [her cousin] saying?” and we would have to say, “G can’t say anything any more,” and explain it again. But she said things afterward that showed she was understanding it in her own two-year-old way. Things like, “Mommy is sad about G,” or “I want G to come back,” or “I will grow.” And we would say yes, you will grow big and big and big and become a grown-up woman, and we would be glad not to have to explain to her yet that grown-up women eventually died too.
We had been talking all along about the Fool as being an overgrown two-year-old. But I had just learned fairly painfully that when it comes to death, I am a two-year-old too. Other grownups may understand and accept death, but I don’t, and I can’t. In those final moments, the Fool isn’t just a two-year-old; he’s all of us, hoping without any reason for it that maybe this time the inevitable won’t happen.
So, yeah, when you direct a play, you learn things about it that you never knew before. But that’s not the most important thing that happens.
I’ve directed two other shows since then, with the same very patient Yeats fanatic as my copilot. Doing that has, I would say, helped my work in that my understanding of drama and performance is more complex and, dare I say it, smarter. But that’s not really why I do it. And for God’s sake it’s not money, of which there is none, or professional cred, since community theater is the repudiated abject that defines the boundaries of professional theater. It’s the stink of mortality. It’s the chance to go on teaching myself, and the people who share the process with me, that living is dying. That liveness is mortality. Which sounds depressing until you realize it works the other way. We live because we are mortal. Life is precious because it will end. The body matters because it must inevitably decay. We think that we have the past and the future but our living is done in the disappearing present and there are too many forces constantly trying to snatch it from us. The next time you go to a theater, and they remind you to turn off your cell phone, remember that this is not just so it doesn’t distract the actors and piss off the people sitting near you. It’s so that you can be present. It’s so that you can all be present and live together, to watch the actors live and to watch the actors die.
