A "duh!" moment

Sam, I was walking around on Sunset Mountain above the Grove Park Inn the other morning when I had a real "Well, duh!" moment, a blazingly obvious realization. Here I've been going over in my head what it really means to "turn up the difference", to hold two diametrically opposite concepts in my head at one time without letting one obliterate the other--thinking that I just didn't get it. Not a dialectical thinker, me. And then I realized that my whole attitude toward acting and theatre is exactly that. Theatre is full of promising paradoxes, but surely one of the most obvious and enduring is masks vs. faces (most famously in Diderot's "The Paradox of the Actor" but going back at least to Plato) or outside vs. inside. Maybe all the other paradoxes are just reflections of this one. For Diderot, the question was (as for many people it still is): Is it necessary for an actor to really feel the emotions being portrayed in order to give the audience an authentic, truthful experience, or can an actor just display the outward signs to do the job? In fact, if the spectator can't tell the difference, what difference does it make?

The more interesting question, for me, has to do with whether theatre is most productively approached (and taught) via form or content, movement or language, passion or gesture, ritual or narrative. Are we who do it storytellers trying weave a story with a beginning, middle, or end, or are we communally engaged in an immediate, immersive, transcendent experience, a succession of "now" moments? As directors, designers, and actors, are our most important tools the story and its characters and dramatic action, or are they the shapes, tempo, images, sounds, and other stimuli which I present to the spectator/auditor in an experiment designed to determine (among other things) whether her or his reaction to these stimuli have anything in common with my own?

The answer is, of course, yes. But these different approaches or aspects or ways of thinking about theatre are not equivalent or different ways of saying the same thing. They're different, which is not to say, of course, that they're mutually exclusive. For me, the most interesting moments happen when the differences are turned up, made to contradict each other, creating dissonance, cognative and otherwise. When all the elements complement each other, working together in harmony to support the story, say, for me the result is often boring predictability. When they don't, sometimes it's boring cacaphoney. But when they're juxtaposed with something like artistry (whatever that is), then the sparks fly. Then the outside is inside and the inside is outside, like alternating current. Then I'm electrified. Shocked. Stupfied.

So: Duh. Feel like a freshman.