Theatrical Space and Place in the Presentational Aesthetic of Director Frank Joseph Galati

"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand! ... Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas. Only I don't know exactly what they are!"

Alice on "Jabberwocky," in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass

Antonin Artaud reminds us that the stage is "a tangible, physical place that needs to be filled and it ought to be allowed to speak its own concrete language" (qtd. in McAuley 5). Artaud's admonition is enticing, but when theatrical space is made to speak, our heads are liable to be filled with ideas without knowing exactly what they are. Unlike Lewis Carroll's remarkably self-possessed heroine, we tend to be unsettled by ideas not readily expressed in words, and downright distrustful when such ideas are associated with something that "seems very pretty." Nonetheless, when disquiet and uncertainty are the intended effect, not-knowing can mark the commencement of searching mental activity rather than its frustration or termination. Director Frank Galati's staging has been described as beautiful, stunning, or dazzling—and unsettling. He is a spectacular storyteller, but unlike the Jabberwocky's nonsensical profundity—and beautiful as his productions certainly are—what he offers is a visceral experience of embodied space that does indeed trouble the mind. This is not a knack for illustration, but a genuine artistic voice expressed in his manipulations of the multidimensional space of the theatre.

In Galati's lexicon and in this paper, theatre is understood to be a transient space engendered by the interactions between organic entities that coalesce within this relationship as "performance" and "audience." Audience is to theatre as the horse to the carriage—you can't have one without the other. Performance can certainly exist apart from theatre, but it is usually intended to generate the entity "audience," which in turn provokes the conditional space of theatre. The dynamics of exchange within this space are Galati's primary concern. He would agree wholeheartedly with Mel Shapiro's assertion in The Director's Companion: "The director's first job is to tell the story of the play" (xv). Galati's presentational aesthetic is founded in the conscious artifice of storytelling conventions that assume a direct exchange between presenter and audience and which acknowledge the authority and subjectivity of a prior text. But as Shapiro points out, the director's voice is not heard in spoken word and plot construction alone, or even primarily. Galati is an accomplished storyteller, but is most notably an artist and an intellectual provocateur in his ability to energize the space of the stage and to shape the social dynamics between performance and its audience.

But how does one begin to chart a discourse initiated by space? In her analysis of Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (1999), Gay McAuley proposes that the difficulty in theorizing a physical language of the stage, as proclaimed by Artaud, lies in the limitations imposed by the linguistic model. She begins by acknowledging that "notwithstanding the fact that meaning is undoubtedly communicated in a theatrical performance, it is simply not appropriate to describe theatre as a language, even if the term is simply being used as a metaphor or analogy" (6). Rejecting linguistic and textual analogies, she prefers "to see the theatrical event as a dynamic process of communication in which the spectators are vitally implicated, one that forms part of a series of interconnected processes of socially situated signification and communication" (7). Like McAuley's primarily theoretical study, my interest is "not so much the signs and sign systems" of this particular director's staging, but the "functions within these processes" (7). Her taxonomy of spatial function includes two categories of particular importance and relevance to Galati's staging: the performance space of interaction between performers and spectators, and the physical/fictional relationship within presentational space. Presentational space refers to the...