Theatre | The Guardian: Michael Longhurst isn’t short on experience when tackling wildly imaginative stage directions – after all, he staged a play perched predominantly atop a mountain (Force Majeure). But perhaps the most challenging, he says, was this humdinger at the beginning of Nick Payne’s Constellations: “An indented rule indicates a change in universe.”
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I love grappling with what is actually possible to put on stage, and how we can make the impossible possible. A director who leans a lot into metaphor and concept, like the symbolic incline mentioned in the article, may have a shock with logistics when they try to put that on stage and actors have to adjust to it. One show that I think really has to balance between what needs to be literally represented and how special effects can be stylized is The Lightning Thief. When you have a pen that turns into a sword, but a lower budget or high school theatre is putting it on, it’s about creating optical illusions so you can switch out those two props. Representations like that, a giant Fury with wings appearing, or water blasting out of nowhere in that show are done in stylized and interesting ways – however the character Chiron being a centaur lacks those ways of conveying it, with the actor instead just galloping around like a horse on normal human legs. It’s cool how you can go either way with it and decide what you want to play with in a production.
The core of theater is telling a story that is not truly there. The magic of theater is creating something out of nothing and tricking the audience into seeing what sometimes is not truly there. Though directions and designers try to execute their visions on stage sometimes pesky little things like the laws of physics and nature get in the way. I enjoyed hearing about how other artists and companies tackled this struggle of making something out of nothing. There are ways to use lighting, blocking, perspective and more to tell a story of something that is physically impossible, but what this article emphasized is how via breaking down a story into simpler stage directions message can be pushed across in a similar manner without struggling to make the impossible possible. Through simplifying the technical elements sometimes a story and actors movement onstage can be more enhanced as there is less for the audience to focus on.
Theo
I really appreciate when scripts leave a lot of room for creative freedom. Granted, I am not a designer, and am not the one actually making the designs. I haven’t had much opportunity to do it, but I appreciate the challenge of tech designing and/or building weird and whimsical structures. Don’t get me wrong, stock platforms and Hollywood flats are versatile and useful pieces, but I also enjoy a challenge. When it comes to making stage effects – that’s one of my favorite challenges to work through. The article makes a specific mention of Constellations. I remember getting to see that show at the Geffen playhouse – to separate the “universes” – of which there are many – the show employed a relatively simple automated effect where the set arcs of stage left, then the new one arcs on stage right. Back and forth and back and forth – a very simple effect, yet it very well conveyed the idea of separate universes. I now have the privilege to be the job lead for this show next semester, and I am very excited to see how the set will convey this idea (although any automation will sadly be well out of budget… very sad.)
Warping my head around the contents of this articles was intriguing. In my props mini, we were asked a lot about how we can make certain effects on stage. Of course, when someone on stage is bleeding, it’s not real blood. Thus, we have to bend reality and make something that isn’t necessarily real but looks real. I find it very interesting to translate that into somewhat of directing and stage directions. The phase “maybe you set the theatre on fire?” is humorous to me. It is so difficult sometimes to bend reality and put something on stage that you just couldn’t use the life scale to do on stage. Can you actually set the stage on fire during a show? Most likely, the answer is no. But you can figure out ways to replicate that, and I believe that is a strong creative task for the directors and designers, plus a challenge for the actors to complete.
What drew me into this article was the title. The staging of the unstageable is such an interesting term because of how we often try and push the envelope in theater, until there is no such thing as unstageable (although to be fair, setting the theater on fire might be a little bit past the metaphorical line in the sand). Seeing this from directors and playwrights perspective is also interesting - how much they take into consideration when beginning to stage shows and add stage directions. Some of my favorite parts of seeing shows is how the designers, directors, and performers interpret and interact with the stage directions and the world of the play. As the article discusses, so much can change with one small short direction - and for the most part, we all interpret that stage direction slightly differently. A core part of theater is how we interpret it, and how different visions come together to make a whole, and stage directions are an integral part of that.
This is one of the biggest things I love about theater. The sheer amount of creativity that goes into telling these stories on the stage, in a huge array of locations and with an equally huge array of characters from all walks of life, is completely astounding to me. Sure, I might not be a designer primarily, but I did start out in theatre in lighting design, so I will always hold a deep appreciation for what designers, directors, actors, and all the other people involved in these productions are able to come up with. People who aren't in theatre might look at some of these scripts, like the one that is supposed to take place on a mountain, and think "how are they gonna make me believe that this is real?". And yet, when the piece makes it to the stage, the audience will have no trouble believing what they are seeing and will be drawn into the world of the piece. Sure, theatre takes place in real space, but the tricks and tools that the industry at large has built up over the centuries, and the rapidly increasing technology of the day, allow for us to truly transcend space and time in our work, and that is something few other mediums can say they can achieve.
But it’s so cool! Because it’s what separates this from like TV or YouTube. It’s all of the cool things onstage that happen right in front of you and you’re like, how’d they do that? It’s the cool tricks that you figure out and bang your head against the wall about and then you see it during the show and you’re like, okay that’s pretty sick. But just as much as we’re bound to the limits of physics and we being the arbiters of our own reality, I feel like there has to be some onus on the audience to suspend their disbelief for a little big. Just a little bit. We can’t tear up an actual goat and throw it in the fire pit, but would you believe it if a stuffed goats dismembered leg was thrown into the pit and the potion still worked?? Now that’s a miracle!
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