Notes From A Burning House

A friend writes:  "I was just perusing my blog referral stats, and I
got a search engine hit from someone looking for ‘mumun naked
pictures.’  Hmmmmm.  Is there something you haven’t been telling us????"

Mu Mun is my dharma name, but I know nothing of any naked pictures.
Except for a few baby photos that are kept in a secure location at the
base of a mountain in Kyrgyzstan, the only nude pictures anyone would
ever find of your humble blog-o-spondent would be some sketches and a
couple of paintings dated 1994, when I worked as a figure model for an
artists’ group at Rhode Island College.

Figure modeling was a decent gig.  It paid $10 per hour, and it was a rare opportunity for a skinny guy to feel beautiful.  Any inhibition I had the first time about being nude in front of a roomful of artists fell away as quickly as my bathrobe.  My only problem was a tendency to choose poses that the artists loved but were very difficult to maintain for twenty minutes at a time.

One choice I made was to stand with my left arm raised over my head, holding onto a bamboo rod, while looking to the right.  Turning my torso slightly gave them all kinds of lines with which to work.  Easels were dragged about the room in a fury, and once the territory and vantages were negotiated they went to work.  After several minutes, I felt the arm going to sleep and decided to tough it out.  Surely I could make it for twenty minutes.   I was overruled when my limp, dead arm finally gave way, clouting me on the head as it fell.

*     *     *     *

Today is the 14th anniversary of the 1991 Soviet coup d’etat or
"August Putsch."    Gorbachev was in Crimea and some ministers and
Communist hardliners took advantage, arresting him and briefly taking
over the government and media.  Boris Yeltsin climbed on top of a tank
and called for civil resistance – an image etched in my memory
probably forever.  What a weird, scary episode it was.   By the end of
‘91, the USSR was no more.

*     *     *     *

The first act of XXX Love Act is a little on the raucous side and we sometimes lose people at intermission.  Contrary to what many people believe, actors can see the audience much of the time.  Even when the lights are trained into our faces and we can’t actually see you, we can feel you.  Unless the audience is large and far away from the playing area, we know when you leave.

There is a legend about Richard Jenkins who was, long before he played Nathaniel Fisher, Sr., on HBO’s Six Feet Under, an amazing stage actor.  As a long-time company member at the Trinity Repertory Company, my hometown theatre, his work had me goggle-eyed when I was a boy.  Legend has it that Jenkins was playing in Fool For Love in Dallas when somebody in the front row gathered up their duffel and walked right up the center aisle during Jenkins’s monologue.  As he spoke, Jenkins found a prop shotgun and trained it at the departing patron.  As the patron reached the back of the house, another audience member shouted to Richard: "Pull the trigger!"

The contract between an actor the audience is complex and unwritten.
In some situations, an actor pointing a gun at a spectator – even a
prop – would be considered dangerously deranged, while in another
instance it may be accepted as fair game.  It happened at Trinity
several years ago, during a performance of A Preface To The Alien
Garden.  A spectator answered his or her cell phone (it happens
frequently, you know) and an enraged actor pointed his gun at the
patron – not only crossing the line, but setting fire to it.  A
lawsuit was threatened but averted with a settlement that included
apologies, cocktails, and many free passes.

Sir John Gielgud had license to silence chattering ladies in the front
row ("Do…you…mind??"), while a local player in the city park might not
merit the same authority.  Trinity Rep has long been known for its
interactive audience relations – splashing them, addressing them
directly, moving them around or sometimes coaxing them onstage, and so
on.

During a performance of Voir Dire at Trinity, an audience member had the temerity to answer his cell phone (see what I mean) while Ed Shea was on stage.  They must have been an out-of-towner, because no local would have dared.  Ed Shea, you must understand, is a brilliant actor AND a short, bald-pated flask of Irish hellfire. Shea quietly halted the scene, sat down in an empty seat next to the cell-phone-talker, and gazed benignly at them until they had finished their conversation.  Then he resumed.

We’ll extend that license occasionally, but it can be abused.  Even for Trinity Rep, it seemed a bit much when a firebrand named Eric Tucker (pictured at left with John Douglas Thompson), who was playing Iago in our 1999 production of Othello, exploded in rage at a performance for schoolchildren.  Two of the boys had been chattering to each other.  Tucker screamed right into their faces: "You think you’re at home watching television?  Guess what, I can hear you! Click-click-click, we’re on every channel!!"

Perhaps the difference lies in the assumption of an adversarial relationship.  Jenkins had established sufficient trust to interact with the audience without making them feel completely unsafe, whereas
Tucker assaulted them.  (There is unsafe in an exciting theatrical sense, and then there is just plain unsafe.)

Yet surely one can sympathize.  Patrons will sometimes walk out in the middle of a performance – not even waiting to slip out during intermission – and delude themselves that they are escaping unseen,
like ninjas.  A social contract is in place and the patron is a party to it.  Would it not seem strange if the actors lost interest in the audience, turned their backs on them, and starting talking to the
wall?  (As a young standup comedian, Woody Allen once did exactly that.)  Imagine going to a play and learning the actors had all decided to nip out for beers instead of doing Act II.

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