A few weeks ago my wife and I went to see a production of Opera Parallèle, a theater group here in San Francisco. When we first arrived at the theater, I thought that it could be fun, a sort of date night out for us downtown, where we rarely are together. As the play started, and the music began, I was optimistic; I like Kurt Weill / Bertolt Brecht collaborations, and I thought I might actually enjoy what we would be seeing. I should add here that I'm not a big fan of live theater. Actually, I mostly don't like it.
As the play continued, I began to grow bored and a little annoyed at the action in front of me, and I thought a bit about what it was that bothered me. I quickly realized that my annoyance was focused on the players appearing to watch the main performers from stage left and right, there allegedly as both part of the action and as observers to the action as well. It seemed somehow absurd to me that they should be both onstage, being watched by myself and others in the audience, as well as acting like they were also watching the main performers at center stage, who were alternately talking and singing. Did they think that us in the audience would sit comfortably with this role that they were taking, as both performers and audience?
I am well aware that all art is full of these type of constructs, whether it is the canvas or photograph on the wall, or the film which frames the viewer's eye, excluding them from seeing an 'outside' of the picture, yet in the case of live theater, I find this framing uncomfortable, and I think that it is because the device is not false enough, that it sits too precariously on the line between portraying a kind of reality, while also highlighting the obvious artificiality of the reality it seeks to show.
Perhaps it is this 'in-betweeness' that bothers me most, that the right and left sides of the stage are too blurred, and that this blurring of lines makes me dizzy and threatens to swallow me in its' abyss.
Snagglepuss ready to definitively exit stage left
