During a recent trip to Argentina, I had to depend upon the linguistic lifesaver of mi compañera, Maria-Beatriz, to make it safely through the swells and tides of the engulfing Spanish. With my rough-grade castellano I could have broken-tongued my way through, using hand-gestures when words failed, and North American bluster when those lay exhausted and strained. But her graceful captaining got me through, and it is to her I owe whatever sense comes out of these musings.
These musings -- in two acts, with an epilogue. Act I: attending theatre in a language I can barely comprehend (and that "barely" denotes an unearned grace -- more accurately, I cannot carry the language's tune) and what that does to the meaning of the word "theatre" (and any homage to the "text"). Act II: experiencing "language fatigue" and how that rather nastily undercuts what we think we mean by the word "humanity." Epilogue: what this all means for my own aesthetic and practice as a playwright.
While in Buenos Aires, Maria and I saw two productions: El Saludador, by Roberto Cossa, and Puck (pronounced "poook"), Shakespeare's tale from the duende's point of view. For El Saludador, I had the chance to pick up a copy in a theatre magazine and read about three-quarters of it before we saw it, so the storyline, and some of the actual language, echoed in my head's ear and eye before they launched into the rapid-fire give-and-take of the dialogue.
For Puck, I had only the outline of Shakespeare's story because they were sanding and polishing the script to fit a commeddia approach and shifting much of the commentary to Puck and his randy (and random) take on the world of the fool-lisp mortals. (Claudio Gallardou, whose troupe, La Banda de La Risa, performed, wore what I hope was a prostethic device of a permanent hard-on for Puck, and to a great extent it became the antenna through which the play's puckishness was broadcast.) So watching Puck became watching how the actors drove the play -- for me, it became dumbshow (despite the language), it became semaphore, it became dance.
The first, and most obvious, observation goes to the heart of my belief that theatre is not about the "text" but only begins with the text, the way a beautiful glazed ceramic sculpture is not about the clay that forms its innards. When the text is unintelligible, then the spectator must rely upon how well the actors shape the "clay" (the text) with their bodies. And this requires a special training that many American actors do not practice. Regardless of the interior work an actor does, it must eventually surface, it must play across the body and face in physical gesture and movement. The text has one language; the body must also have its own sign-language to translate the words into a different medium.
In this respect, these two plays were enjoyable to watch because the performers all inhabited their bodies well, letting the words shape them the way hands would shape clay. Especially Puck, since Gallardou's actors could make this non-speaker understand at least the broad outlines of the issues at stake.
But there are limits eventually to how much layered subtlety can be shown physically -- bodies are big strokes, broad brushes -- and it becomes clear that my language lack makes me lose the finer detail-work: the nuances, inside jokes, puns, etc. I am having simple broth while every else munches down the full main course with all the seasonings! I can be nourished but never really satisfied.
Which brings me to Act II. For some of the trip I experienced what I would "language fatigue." Constantly being in the presence of a language I did not fully understand and couldn't use except through Maria and her friend Hernán's rudimentary English exhausted by restriction, as if I could not fully breathe because not able to fully express.
This led me to a lot of thinking about the way language certifies our humanity, the notion that without a language with which to make exterior what would be otherwise be cemented into the interior, we are, in some elemental sense, not completely human, not completely able to be completely human.
Thinking about this connection between humanity and language led me to think a number of other connected, though not necessarily sequential, thoughts:
I don't want to push the point too strongly that language ability should be a definitive measure of humanity. More accurately, facility in language -- the ability to use language to dissect reality into finer and finer understandings, truths, perceptions, and so on -- keeps us from being trapped in a dumb sensuality or a numb reactivity. It opens us out and prods us to be as fully in the world as we can.
But that "fully" is not solely the gift of language. It is about "incarnation" -- literally putting meat on the bones of the syllables through out bodies, our things and "thingness," and all the interplay of the organism with the world around it.
And thus also with theatre, or at least the theatre in which I am interested. I want to create a theatre that mimics and duplicates what mastering a language does to the body and, in turn, to the universe that bathes and supports the body as the language erupts. I want a theatre of sensuality -- not sexual sensuality but the "sense-is-full" sensuality, that gets us out of our heads and back into our 3D beings, that leads us from the academic abstract and the chattering ego back to the fullness of silence and awe that we owned as babies.
(April 2001)