A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) performed at Chekhov International Theatre Festival/Dmitry Krymov’s Laboratory/School of Dramatic Art Theatre (review)

So there’s this company, based in Colorado, with a website that everyone who works in the theater should have a look at. Their name—the Crisis Company—is one of those small, infrequent examples of truth in advertising. What this company makes to order is, in fact, a crisis. They “stage adrenalin-triggering role-play training in a simulated environment for crisis intervention professionals (including police officers, cadets, SWAT teams, corrections officers, dispatchers, hostage negotiators, and hospital staff) to practice verbal de-escalation techniques in a safe environment” (“Crisis Company” Homepage, web). The promotional video on their website contains testimonials from trainees who, over and over, speak of the level of “realism” of the experience. This is perhaps not surprising, as the Crisis Company’s intent, and the desire of the organizations that utilize its services, is to move beyond theory and textbook examples and classroom exercises with colleagues who can’t act into something more real. But real how? The actors imitate the gestures and adopt the vocal patterns and portray the behaviors of individuals with mental health issues in a particular crisis situation. The scenarios are staged in “real world” settings rather than an office or meeting room. But the most important mark of realism for the trainees, the audience/participants of the Crisis Company’s experiential offerings, seems to be the unmistakable reality of their own emotional engagement—the scenarios feelreal and, as one officer put it, “you don’t realize how involved you get until after it’s over and the adrenaline is flowing out” (“Crisis Company,” web). When the Crisis Company talks about “Real life. Real emotions. Real training” in their promotional material, the emotions in question aren’t so much what the professional actors are performing, but rather what the trainees themselves are experiencing as they make their way through a simulation they have paid for in advance and traveled somewhere to attend.

When we talk about emotional realist theater, does its realist quality reside more in the production’s intention and the way it is made, or in how we respond to it? The question of an audience’s emotional life has been kicking around for a while now, ever since the arousal of terror and pity seemed a decent goal for drama, and catharsis was its original de-escalation technique in a safe environment. But with the rise of Stanislavsky’s system and its variation/bastardization in “Method acting,” emotional realism has become perhaps most associated with character psychology and acting technique—with actors’ vivid portrayals of the emotional lives of their characters and our subsequent, vicarious identification with the “reality” of what they are doing. They imagine it and perform it, we believe it and feel it.

But identification is a problematic concept. The origins of realism lay in a desire for more objectively lifelike theater as an aesthetic laboratory for the study of human interactions and behaviors; in his treatise on “Naturalism in the Theater” in 1878, Emile Zola declared, “We are an age of method, of experimental science; our primary need is for precise analysis.” Practitioners from Brecht to Barker have since railed against the manner in which that clinical impulse precisely to examine “real life” has become instead a sloppy, unexamined, even...