Theatre Experience, Part 2

Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare, MFA Acting Spring Repertory

Shakespeare's plays are fascinating. There are several reasons for this: he was the most popular playwright of his age, his plays centred upon ideas and emotions still deeply thought about today, his language and style have a very likable quality to them, approachable and yet transcendent. Which is why people will often read them first as stories, then read or enact the plays or portions thereof, with the culmination in watching the play itself unfurl on stage, with the words, jokes, soliloquies and puns that the man himself penned. Probably that's why the acting class usually ends up using one of his plays for their repertory, an important performance sequence that effectively forms their Master's thesis.

Of course, the experience of watching theatre depends on the skill of the performers, and for someone like me, who has had very limited experience of theatre, every performance inspires new thoughts and new ideas within me.

The performance that I attended was preceded by a talk about the play itself, in this case, Twelfth Night. The talk was given by one of the faculty members of the School of Theatre and moderated by the director of the play. I've forgotten his name. He professed himself a big fan of Shakespeare, and especially of this play, which he thinks has a deeper significance that what people usually accord it. Most people just see it as a comedy, a funny play with funny characters, funny lines, and pranks. However, as with all of Shakespeare's plays, it has a deeper significance at several levels, and carries more serious themes that usually perceived.

For one thing, it's about death, although it references it in a very subtle way. All of us go through life, and every story told by writers and bards is a journey, through the events of life. But what is the destination? Death. Inevitably, inexorably, we move toward death. We may walk, run, leap, trudge, with or without burden, but the journey continues, step by step, ceaselessly. All our life we run after fulfillment, from one goal to the next, but the overall goal, whether we recognize it or not, is death. This is very subtly referenced in the play, in one simple line that often goes unnoticed because it follows some six lines of description of prior events, by one of the characters.

A contract of eternal bond of love,
Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,
Strengthen'd by interchangement of your rings;
And all the ceremony of this compact
Seal'd in my function, by my testimony:
Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my grave
I have travell'd but two hours. 

The last two lines are the ones to think about: "Since these events, my watch tells me, I have travelled but two hours toward my grave." Cunningly enough, by the time this line is spoken, about two hours have passed from the start of the play.

This leads to thoughts about how we make this journey. Essentially, we run from one fulfillment to the next. Human beings have an appetite; an insatiable hunger for love and contentment that never goes away, no matter how many times we satisfy it. It's true for something as physical as food, and it's equally true for something as abstract as love. You eat, you feel full and happy, and the next day, you're hungry again. It's the same with love. The pleasure of contentment is sublime and deep, but it is fleeting; we run back over and over again for more, ceaselessly all along the journey to death.

The title of the play has a very subtle relation to this. At first look, it doesn't have any connection to any of the actual content of the play - "Twelfth Night" - what does that even mean? It refers to the last night of the twelve days of Christmas; in other words, it's the culmination of the festive season, the last day of satisfying the appetite, spiritually speaking. It's the end of one journey, and the beginning of the next. What does it have to do with the play? Nothing really, except that it was intended as an entertainment for that occasion, and it attempts to inspire a feeling of cheer in the audience.

This much I learned from that talk. The play itself had some eye-openers for me. Theatre is very different from cinema; each has their own challenges, and their own advantages. I've only ever seen movies, and theatre is still very new for me. The most striking thing was how perfect the actors have to be. There is no scope for mistakes in performing one's part - you can't go again if you flub a line or burst out giggling, you have to have perfect timing especially for a comedy, you're so close to the audience that they can see the wrinkles on your face. You have to memorize and speak a couple of hundred lines, which you can't rehearse in between, while portraying expression and body language in accordance with the character and situation.

It's not just about lines and how you speak them. There can be action sequences as well - in this case there were swordfights, juggling, singing, playing of instruments and more. Fight and dance sequences are carefully choreographed - every movement is well thought out in terms of motion, duration and position, and must be executed exactly. Songs and musical sequences must be in tune, and the compositions must be rendered according to the spirit of the play. This play involved one specific sequence, where two characters are juggling, and what's more, they pass the balls between them as they juggle. And they aren't just clowning around to make the audience laugh - there is serious dialogue between the two at the same time, and there are very specific word cues, according to which the balls had to change hands. Juggling is easy to learn, but it requires practice, and it requires some measure of skill to be speaking dialogue and emoting, alongside the juggling itself. That is by no measure easy, especially when there is no scope for mistake.

And none of these actions are written in the original play. Playwrights don't write in actions like that. Those are bits that the actors and their director must add in, to give form and spirit to the play. Playwrights don't write in a screenplay for dances or fights; the players must imagine and execute those. Playwrights don't write songs or music for a play, unless it's a musical. That too has to be taken care of separately. This is why people gain so much in terms of personality when they enter theatre - you have to stretch your imagination so far and wide. Theatre people aren't good at only memorizing and speaking dialogue; they will almost always have a repertoire of other artistic talents too.

An actor has to be able to sing, dance, juggle, fight, perform acrobatics and stunts, play musical instruments and do a dozen other things, apart from just speaking dialogue or emoting on stage. A director must give position to the actors, direct their movements, add in music, dance, fights or other sequences as needed, and bring out the personality of the characters through the actors, by giving shape to the play. This perfection in performance is why theatre people almost always perform extremely well before the camera as well - such rigor is not required in a movie, where you can have several takes for each shot.

I did not have much regard for artistic performers when I was younger - I used to think that they are hyped too much, and given way too much attention. My views have improved a great deal now, thanks to my experiences, both in India and here. I still think most cinema actors are overhyped and given too much attention, talented though they may be. But I have a lot more respect now in general for performers - be they from theatre, music, dance or the fine arts. These fields are more diverse than I originally imagined them to be, and their exponents are usually good-natured, down-to-earth, intellectual and talented people with a passion for their art, which equals any passion that I see amongst the scientific and technical populace for their respective fields.

(My experience courtesy the MFA Acting Class of 2011 at the School of Theatre, University of Southern California, Los Angeles)

Theatre Experience

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize, Steppenwolf Production Company

Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare

Palestine, New Mexico by Culture Clash

I never went to a play in India. I never got to go to a play; my parents weren't so much into theatre, or rather we couldn't be, because theatre is not so commonplace that it is affordable. Plus, there wasn't much to be said for English language theatre where I grew up. And once I reached an age where I could have taken up an interest, it just didn't happen. Certain personal circumstances interfered with it, one of them being the fact that I was in high school, and high school in India means a never ending series of books to study. Not even read. Study.

Still, not being sharp doesn't mean you're condemned to be blunt. Being in Los Angeles, and being in my university brought me the perfect opportunity to at last taste, somewhat belatedly, a lot of the things that I never got to experience at a younger age, one of them being theatre.

It is something, to watch a play unfold on stage before you. Sure, it is not exactly like watching a movie. You get to watch only certain angles. You don't have mikes on stage, or at least not ones that will capture a tiny whisper, so theatre dialogue has to be conducted with a certain loudness, a certain toughness, a certain carrying quality of voice, so that the lines may be understood. Emotions are thus more dependent on facial expression, rather than a combination of expressions and dialogue delivery. Actors have to be able to connect with the audience. It's a very personal thing, seeing an actor up there a few feet away from you, visually telling you a story. You start to enjoy a play, when you can immerse yourself in the story, and connect with what the actor is telling you, thinking about what that character is doing and why.

Plays written today are different from the plays written in the past. Each play represents, somehow, the period it was written in - not just in style, but also in the story, the characters, the way the play treats the situations it addresses, and the reason why it does so. Shakespearean plays were made sometimes for entertainment, as in the case of As You Like It, sometimes about the comedy and tragedy of love, as in Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet, sometimes for drama, exemplified by Macbeth and Hamlet, and sometimes for history, King Henry et al. In later periods, before motion pictures became so popular and widespread, theatre was the main form of entertainment for presenting a story. Agatha Christie, and others, wrote quite a few plays, apart from the usual novels and short stories.

Modern plays are about people, and the way they interact with each other. August: Osage County, for instance, is about a family, and the different tangled webs of secrets, lies, personal problems, and convoluted sexual relationships that the members of that family are entrenched in. Palestine, New Mexico, is about an army captain who goes to talk to the father of a Native American soldier who died under her command, and in the process uncovers the realities of life on a Native American reservation - the way they struggle to deal with different identities of religion, race and tribe. Modern theatre nowadays is as much an art form, as painting and sculpture are.

The characters of plays are also as distinct as the stories, in relation to the period the play was written in. Modern plays deal with very realistic characters, with very realistic traits and behaviour, because the stories they tell are those of people you can relate to. Some exaggeration was allowed, and in fact necessary in earlier plays (again, compare something from today, with something like anything Shakespeare wrote). Dialogue has always been like the speech of the current time, which is why plays today have direct speech that you can follow, while with the older plays, the older it gets, the more convoluted the language. (Though it's hard to believe that people spoke with that kind of convolution in daily life in those times. Perhaps only the lettered and educated people did so.)

There is also a distinct difference, in the setup and logistics of plays, as they are written today, and as they were written in the past, apart from the obvious differences of story and characters. Plays nowadays won't have too many costume changes. The stories cover a very short period of time, and often do not have more than one change of scene, so that the sets need not have more than very superficial changes, mostly some quick shifting of small furniture, and very cleverly coordinated lighting, so the entire play must be seen essentially against a single setting. This also allows that single set to be pretty elaborate and detailed; there can be structure in it. The set for August:Osage County was an entire three-storey house, with the kitchen and living room detailed across the stage. The action involved frequent climbing of the stairs from the living room, and disappearance behind doors which led ostensibly to bedrooms. The set for Palestine, New Mexico was a small clearing in front of a small hill, complete with the shrubs and sands of the desert and plains, rocks and caves, and steps leading up to the reservation on the top of the hill. The play is worth 80 minutes of time, and is performed continuously without an interval.

The set for Love's Labour's Lost was composed of a brilliantly constructed and painted facade, which had sliding panels, ladders, doors and curtains, so that it could be used alternately to represent a room in the castle, or the gates of the city, or the woods outside the city. Furniture was quickly moved about in the few seconds of darkness between subsequent acts of the play. They couldn't have done it otherwise; Shakespeare's plays were written at a time when just such things were required of the stage managers; to produce a forest, or a castle, or a courtyard, when needed to. In the older days, they would've just presented beautifully woven backdrops.

Of course technology today continues to bring forth ever new ways of enhancing the quality of the experience of a play, by allowing for increasingly grand sets, sound, lighting and even special effects. Indeed, it is pretty normal to have some nice pyrotechnic effects, very realistic booming gunshots, roaring ocean waves, and even the relative time of day, created by some smart stage engineers, working with sound, light and special props. Palestine, New Mexico had a rather delightful trick: a special burner, which when triggered, instantly gave out a bright, very convincing campfire. That wouldn't have been so easy to pull off in the old days.

I daresay regular theatre fans have seen all of it, and know intimately the finer nuances of theatre past and present. But to someone who hasn't ever experienced it before, it's certainly something novel, and exciting. And with time to soak up the new sunshine falling on me, my own intellect will make good hay, before the end of the day.

(My experiences courtesy the Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles, The Broad Stage, Santa Monica, the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles)

Art Experience

We engineers lose out a lot when we're stuck in our rooms doing nothing but solving equations. Sure, there's internet and there's music, but there's art too, but not many people are into that.

Art isn't just a pretty painting. It ties together history, observation, ideas, themes, and beauty. Sure, you can find any number of books to teach you how to appreciate and identify artworks, but there's nothing like the experience of being face to face with a beautiful artwork and having an interactive session with someone who's involved deeply with art and with teaching people about it.

This is probably why I was never quite as impressed or excited about museums and their collections back home. Sure, there were loads of things, and loads of beautiful things, but unless you have that human touch, of someone who knows and understands the significance of those things, and can convey that opinion (if you don't want to call it anything else), you can't really begin to form an opinion of any depth of your own. I now have had the opportunity to go through a museum gallery guided by someone, whose particular interest it is to cultivate interest and curiosity, and most of all, wonder, in others, in appreciating the richness of the legacy passed down to us, and it was a wonderful opportunity and experience.

Art isn't just paintings. It's also about sculptures, scrolls, costumes, furniture, and just about anything that conveys the aesthetic bent of the mind, or rather of the collective mindset that represents a particular era. This mindset is very fickle; it will change even from decade to decade, but that change isn't an unwelcome thing, because it makes for progress, for innovation, for a new kind of creativity to take birth and shape itself.

I had read about Renaissance art, and something about the artists whose works defined that period, and in fact, sub-periods within that period. But this occasion, I was face to face with a painting from that period. I was asked to describe what I saw in that painting. It was from the early Renaissance. What did we notice? There was a prominent solid gold background, solid gold halos about the figures, very rich and vibrant colours, though darkened with time due to the use of tempera colours, an extravagantly larger size for the more important figures in the painting, a triangular shape for composing the figures, a lack of three dimensional perspective (depth). The figures themselves were of the Virgin Mary, the baby Jesus, and saintly figures of their time. Each figure was distinctly identifiable by certain accessories that were peculiarly assigned to them; for example, the Virgin Mary is always clothed in a red robe, symbolizing the sacrifice by her baby Jesus, and a blue cloak, symbolizing her exalted status (certain exotic shades of blue were a very expensive pigment to make, especially if you made it from lapis lazuli or the like). These are tiny things, but they make all the difference.

The next painting was also of the early Renaissance, but at an advanced stage, perhaps thirty years later. What was similar or different between it and the older painting? The same figures of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, with saints, but with more figures this time, including angels and women. The same gold halos and solid gold background, but this time with a sense of perspective, with arches and platforms added to give a sense of depth to the painting. The same use of tempera colours, but with a little more delicacy.

The next painting was a complete contrast. It belonged to the high Renaissance period. Again, the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus. But, there was now a background, of a village, a hill, a river, an entire countryside. A deliberate arrangement of ledges and steps, to give both a sense of depth, as well as a sense of immediacy, as though you could reach out and touch the figures. The materials were oil on canvas, which led to the portrayal of much finer detail than is possible with tempera on wood. The halos which so blatantly declared divinity were now simply reduced to faint gold circles, to convey a subtle message rather than a blunt one. The colours were still rich, but now more subtle, with folds and curves very delicately worked out. The figures were of proportionate size, but the triangular composition style was still preserved. The entire mood of the painting was one of peacefulness and serenity, which are rather human qualities. Compare this to the earlier paintings, which you could say were intended to inspire respect and awe for the divine figures that they were portraying. The focus in this painting was on realism, trying to show things realistically, exactly as they are.

The next painting was again different! It was of the period of Mannerism, where the focus was on showing the manner of things. This one again featured the Virgin Mary, with baby Jesus, but equally prominent was her cousin St Elizabeth. Also shown were John the Baptist and two angels. The mood was one of violence, fear, concern, anxiety. John the Baptist was dying, and painted in the classical pose. The two angels were in shock. Jesus was afraid, Mary was unhappy, and Elizabeth looking very grim. The figures were all disproportionate (Jesus, who would've been only eight months old or so was almost the same size as Mary) and muscularly built. There were no fine details, only broad swathes of colours and tiny lines that combined to produces the general effect of figures. There was no background, no intention to convey depth, no halos, no calmness or serenity, no delicacy or subtlety. A cursory knowledge of the events of the New Testament tells us that this is the point when Elizabeth warns Mary that her son would be killed, with this idea being conveyed to the viewer in the form of John's dying posture, John being a sort of precursor to Jesus and their lives running on somewhat parallel lines.

This, I then understood, was appreciating art. Not merely admiring it for its aesthetic beauty, but also understanding its significance in relation to the life of the people when it was created, and the purpose for which it was created. That tends to lend it a fuller quality, and your appreciation then gains some substance, much like the way you would admire someone better when you can see their intelligence aside from their good looks.

The next leg of the tour explored American Art, and its evolution from the time when the country was born until the second world war. The art from the various time periods in American history reflect the ongoing themes and turbulence of the times, as all art does. A young country that has just started to take shape is fresh with the ideas of exploration, patriotism, innovation, individualism, aspiration to perfection, and utilitarianism, and this is precisely reflected in the artworks of that time.

We started with portraits of famous and prominent figures, which were just that: portraits; paintings by skilled artists to immortalize the subjects of the paintings. The centerpiece of the gallery was the bust of George Washington, portraying him in a stern and serious mood, as an orator, a statesman, a man with a huge responsibility on his shoulders. Equally striking were the paintings of famous landscapes, showing exploration of the new territories that would form part of the young country, as well as paintings of scenes of patriotism arising from both the War of Revolution as well as the Civil War, the most striking of which was the painting of Lady Schuyler burning her fields.

This latter painting shows a young woman, Lady Schuyler, picking up a torch and preparing to set fire to the wheat fields behind her, as her husband helps and her daughter watches, along with another young woman and (presumably) a young slave boy helping. Lady Schuyler is the most prominent figure, dressed in white, blue and red (the colours of the flag, and hence of patriotism), deliberately placed in the centre and given a very discernible triangular composition, in spite of the figures all around her. The scene is easy to understand given the context; the family has learned that British troops are approaching, and rather than be conquered, they would set their fields on fire before they fled to warn others, so that no resources would be left behind. One doesn't know how true the story is, but the painting serves to portray and inspire patriotism, in a very symbolic way, and must have conveyed the same ideals throughout time, wherever it was displayed.

Also striking was a certain quilt made by a pair of young ladies for their home, beautifully crafted and carefully preserved. It may seem odd for something as simple as a quilt to be displayed in a museum, but remember that art is anything that's beautifully crafted by human hands. Quilts were in fact rather important items in early American history, indeed there were customs such as quilt-making parties that served to foster community bonding. The women of the household typically made all the household linen themselves, or at least for ceremonial occasions, and both men and women got together for quilt-making parties and each one would make one part of the quilt, the whole being put together when everyone was done. This particular quilt was probably made for a ceremonial occasion, given that it has come to us so well preserved.

It was formed in the main of two kinds of motifs, one being a simple yet elegant flower motif, probably signifying growth and flourishing of the community and the nation, the other being a rework of the bald eagle emblem, complete with drum and other attributes. The pattern was laid out in nine squares, four bearing the emblem motif and five the flower motif, symmetrical in layout, though each individual motif was not quite symmetrical, with the whole being bordered by a simpler flower and leaf pattern. The colour theme was white, with pink, red and green used for the flower motifs. These colours were also symbolic of prosperity and continuing stability. Most interestingly, the word LIBEBTY was worked into the eagle motif, though whether the spelling was deliberate or accidental we may not know. One might suspect it was deliberate, because of the custom amongst craftsmen out of humility to never allow anything crafted to be absolutely perfect, because only the Creator is held to be perfect, and challenging his perfection is to invite trouble.

And this museum is a publicly funded museum, which means around half its operating budget comes from public taxes. The rest has to be raised through private donations, as do the collections themselves, because a museum operating on public funds does not have the kind of money that private museums or vanity museums do, for purchasing works of art. A publicly funded museum cannot spend 15 billion dollars for one painting, the way a private museum could. The collection is thus painstakingly built up, over decades, by convincing people to donate money and fund the museum's activities, including helping it acquire pieces for the collections, as well as donate their own collections as a civic responsibility. The dynamics of how this works also add to the awe you feel as you walk into such a place.

Museums are all about preserving history. Preserving, as best as we can, every representative material piece of the past, and recording our history through each of these pieces. An art museum simply preserves history through the arts, adding a touch of the aesthetic to our sense of history.

(My experience courtesy the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the University of Southern California)