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  • “To Speak Is to Suffer” and Vice Versa
  • Deb Margolin (bio)

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Figure 1.

(facing page) Deb Margolin in her first solo piece, Of All the Nerve, first performed at P.S. 122 in 1989. (Photo by Dona Ann McAdams)

I don’t understand anything that’s said about performance, and it’s not my fault. I don’t think. Whether a performance involves language or not, language fails, both within a given performance, and without, as language is applied in a discussion of it. It’s become clear to me that the failure of language is the predication of drama, and that language onstage is just the certain needlework on a larger fabric of silence. If language really worked, there’d be no drama. Theatre doesn’t mind language’s failure; theatrical gestures play with the failure of language in different, poetical ways. I think a play is partially defined by the kinds of silences within it, and the texture of the silence it aggregates around it when it’s finished, not unlike M.C. Escher drawings which are a function both of positive and negative space.

So what does that leave? If I posit Silence as the true residence of Drama, what does that leave the audience, and where does that leave the playwright? It leaves us with synecdoche, it leaves us in the territory where the body is synecdochical, the body onstage is somehow every body, and the family onstage is every family, and the man onstage is Everyman. Notice how that one gets a capital. Like in German.

I have long felt that bearing witness is the most tender, beautiful, generous thing any one of us can do for any other. We cannot prevent each other’s deaths, we can barely mitigate each other’s suffering; what we can do is bear witness. I have seen the suffering of the very old, for whom there is no one left on earth who ever met their Mother, saw their childhood bedroom. Solitary confinement leads to madness, as it obviates the possibility of Witness. I have always said God appears when you’re alone, like Deep Throat, insistent on a pseudonym and a dark parking lot or obscure mountaintop and a fire in the bushes. That way, if you quote Him, you can be called insane and He never has to take responsibility for His actions. Bearing witness. The audience’s compassion is composed of the bearing of witness, to the synecdochical body or bodies, their struggle against time, their love and failed love, their beauty and languor, the nature of their failed speech. And bearing witness in the theatre is a call to Citizenship; it confers [End Page 95] upon the community of an audience certain privileges and it imposes certain responsibilities. The process by which an audience accepts these privileges and responsibilities is, arguably, the source from which theatre gets its alchemical social agency and power.

In Index to Idioms, there is just a woman. We see her moving around in time as if it were a split-level ranch house. We see her listening to music, trying to pee while her daughter suddenly realizes she’s going to die someday, dealing with her blind and deaf dog, facing the sudden loss of all her hair as it falls out of her head on a bus somewhere; we watch her humiliating a man who had sexually bullied her, creating snow out of steam in a dormitory bathroom. We have incriminated ourselves with intimacy, committed ourselves to the repercussions of intimate knowledge. We have evaluated our own proximity or distance from these events in a human life, and that process of evaluation gives us a position in regard to the character we see that is part of a committed human experience: a relationship. Leaving the theatre, we are no longer strangers to this woman’s kind of suffering and rapture. We go out in the world to take care of this woman as a part of the rubric of our daily lives. God damn it! there is someone else for us to take care of, God damn it! Now the autobus...

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