The Ark, Days Four and Five: Brain full

On the heels of the first of two nights of the Zucchini Grotto 24 x 24 cabaret, I find myself home before midnight with no reason to be up terribly late.  This week of 2AM bedtimes has finally caught up to me, and I’m fighting a cold and the impact of having run into a wall.  So while I have a great deal to say about the last two days of work in The Ark, I will keep it a little brief.

Mornings have been taken up with music rehearsals, for the most part.  We will be reading “Threepenny Opera” and “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” late next week, and the idea is to cover as much of the score as we can — albeit briefly — so that we can do proper service to the operas when we take a closer look at them.  I’m very excited about “Threepenny” because I’ve been asked to read Macheath, which means I’ll be trying to breathe life into some juicy song solos.  It’s quite clear that the musical holds a dear place in the heart of many of The Ark participants, and that makes the music rehearsals a great joy.

Yesterday we read “Man Equals Man” (also known as “A Man’s A Man”) and today we read “Saint Joan of the Stockyards“.  Both of these plays are uncannily relevant to the events of today, and both come from a period on Brecht’s life (around 1926 to 1929) where we was finding his own voice and form in his work.

The central plot of yesterday’s play — which I think will rapidly float its way to the top of my list of favorite plays in general — describes conversion of a simple porter into a ruthless killer through a series of events orchestrated by a group of soldiers.  The porter’s identity is gradually stripped away and replaced using totally logical means, and in a script that holds such prescience over the Milgram Experiment and the Abu Ghraib tragedy as to cause my skin to crawl, Brecht has crafted a work that spans the extremes of comedy and horror.  At one point our poor porter is forced to deliver his own funeral oration — it’s powerful stuff.  I want to see a production of this play.  Very badly.  And I bet you would, too.

“Saint Joan of the Stockyards” could have been written last year.  Get this: the story revolves around greed-driven meat packers and livestock breeders and wholesalers who artificially inflate and manipulate the market for canned meat, leading to an eventual stock market collapse, massive job losses, bank failures, and a depression.  Sounds horribly topical, and many of the ‘fake’ newspaper headlines that appear in the play seem pulled right from today’s newspapers.  The construction of the plays is fascinating because it uses classical theatre forms to destroy the form of classical theatre.  He employs rhetoric and verse, and scads of choral speaking;  I spotted more than a few allusions to Shakespeare in the play; yet he does not stick to a classical, Aristotelian style of narrative.  It was probably around the creation of this play (which came after “Threepenny Opera”) that Brecht began to form the basis of his idea of the “epic theatre“, about which he says “catharsis is not the main object: hero and spectator are not the ‘victim’”.  It’s hard to find a ‘hero’ at all in Saint Joan, and the messages in the play contradict each other intentionally and demand a response from the viewer.  And it’s easy to see why this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea: it’s an exhausting play to read because so much is happening and so many different ideas are being presented.  At its completion — especially among a group of 40 artists who have just read it — we demand discussion.  Love it.

The past two days’ plays have really begun to shake my perceptions of the “proper” form of theatre.  North American theatre today is so caught up in realism and catharsis as the preferred means of connecting with the audience.  Brecht presents a mode of presentation that allows for catharsis and realism but does not make them the end to which his means are bent.  Brecht will put characters into deeply tragic situations, and then jar you by giving you just enough extra information to keep you from forgetting you’re watching a play.  One of his favorite methods for doing this in his early work is to set the events in a foreign land where the rules of geography and culture don’t jive with what we know to be true (Shlink, in “In the Jungle of Cities” is purported to be a Chinese man who lives in a place called Yokohama and is referred to as a Malay.  One could argue that this is all a bad accident, or that it was done on purpose to keep you from buying into the story completely.  Shakespeare, it can be argued, did the same thing by setting plays in Vienna [Austria] and then giving all the characters Italian names).  Up until this week I would have cast off those kinds of things as “errors” or “laziness”: now they’re a whole world of production possibility.

As you can probably tell from the way I’m writing, my brain is full.  Tomorrow is an all-music day, which makes me happy because it’ll give me a bit more time to digest the plays we’ve read this week.  What a ride.

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