I just started reading Hannah Arendt’s book The Life of the Mind, a wonderful and challenging book about “thinking” and its relationship to speech and action. There is a chapter in the book I am very much looking forward to reading called “Where Are We When We Think?”.
Most of the performances I create are about “thinking” and take place in “the virtual space of thinking”. The characters can be understood as the minds that do the thinking. The play’s action involves taming the mind that produces a tidal wave of thoughts, organizing them and the challenge of expressing thought thru language.
While working on THE TALMUD, I consulted with the academic Talmud scholar Sergey Dolgopolski. In his book The Open Past, he describes the Talmud as “a virtual intelligence.” The Talmud is “a complex dance of thinking in which no persona stands at the center.” In our production of THE TALMUD, the question and answer of talmudic debate was a physical dance on a physical stage.
THE TALMUD, Photo by Jenny Sharp
MACHINE LEARNING HAMLET, Photo by Youn Jung Kim
MACHINE LEARNING HAMLET; OR TEXT LIKE DAGGERS even more literally plays with the idea of a virtual intelligence. The actor portrayed a computer AI playing itself in a game of Hamlet. Like a computer playing itself in chess, our AI was both player and game, challenging and responding to itself, ultimately to maddening results.
The characters in MACHINE LEARNING HAMLET and THE TALMUD all had a great facility with language, unlike the zombies in WAKE…SING…, who all began the play with barely the ability to crawl, let alone speak. Their heads however were filled with thoughts. Each actor wore an in ear monitor which fed them the text of Clifford Odets’ play Awake and Sing. In the beginning of the performance, each actor responded kinesthetically to every sound and rhythm of the text feed. Gradually, they became identified with an individual character in the play, remembering how to walk, speak, and act. In this show, taming the mind and expressing thought thru language was a great struggle. The journey of the performance was to leave the virtual space of the mind, and join the world of action.
WAKE…SING…, Photo by Jenny Sharp
PAISIEU, Photo by
In 2015 I directed a play called PAISIEU by Gertrude Stein for the Target Margin Stein Labs at the Connelly Theater. The play was an extreme example of Stein’s difficult language, often a challenge for actors to speak. When the actors spoke about their experience of speaking the language, they described how their bodies think they are speaking coherent language, but actually they little grasp of the meaning of the sentences they are saying. The play was a marathon of characters competing to present the spoken language of the play with virtuosity and athletic movement. By act three, each character (and actor) was exhausted, mentally and physically, by getting the finish line, which was the last word of the play. One of my favorite moments in this show (and perhaps of any show a I made) is when the incredible actor Tim Craig, sits exhausted on a colorful rehearsal block speaking text into a microphone. He stops speaking, but the sound of spoken text continues to be heard softly through the speakers. The actor slowly places the microphone on his exhausted sweaty forehead so we can hear his thoughts better.