Breathing Common Air: The SITI Company Creates Cabin Pressure

I believe theater is a form of active culture. That participating in the theater is an act of leaning forward as opposed to leaning back. For me, the most thrilling experiences in the theater have always been ones where I've felt like I've had a role to play in this room, where something is asked of me as an audience member and I have to meet the actors halfway. Because it is about that, being in the room together, this notion of breathing common air, and that the relationship between the audience and the actor is a circular one.

—Cabin Pressure (SITI 2000a:45)

In a 1999 New York Times article surveying theatre artists on the state of off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway, Mark Russell, executive director of Performance Space 122, examined the changing face of contemporary drama noting: "What we have developed are not playwrights but theater makers" (1999 sec. 2:10). Indeed this generation of "theater makers" is already treading on our stages. Working in lofts and basements, hungry for recognition and funding, they are collaboratively creating a living, breathing theatre that redrafts the formula defined by the playwright-actor-director hierarchy and the old-school rehearsal and performance process. The methodologies employed by these performance ensembles to create theatre vary greatly. But as Ferdinand Lewis notes in American Theatre, the threads that tie the work together are found in the questions that are central to all the work—questions of relationship with the audience, source of inspiration, style, and reconciliation of the individual with the collective (2000:25).

For many of these ensembles, creating theatre that rises from a community both on and off the stage is central to the process. By involving those in the audience and by redefining the long-held designations that divide the work of actors, designers, directors, and writers, these theatre makers are challenging the most deeply traditional models and, in so doing, are reinvigorating the form. Studying Anne Bogart and SITI Company's creation of Cabin Pressure affords insight into one working model.

The SITI Company, founded in 1991, strives to reinvestigate the dynamics of traditional theatre, and they do so by working with a variety of raw materials. Approximately half of the SITI Company's work demands the creation of a new text. The remainder of the repertory includes both well-established and new plays, most recently works by Naomi Iizuka (War of the Worlds, 2000) and Charles Mee (bobrauschenbergamerica, 2001). Much of the SITI Company's work has been groundbreaking in its methodology. What is, perhaps, most remarkable about the Company's process is the unique way in which the entire company creates the staging, a method that redefines the relationship between the stage movement and the text. And a vital part of this process is the integration of sound design as a formative element of the production.

Cabin Pressure, first produced in 1999, is an effective model for the Company's work, both in theory and in practice. Through Cabin Pressure, the SITI Company reconsiders the role of the community in terms of creating and presenting theatre as they explore and redefine the audience-actor relationship. Bogart, who conceived and directed the project, has long been interested in this unique interaction:

As a director in the theatre, I am acutely aware of the tension, the exquisite pressure, or the lack thereof, between audience members and actors on the stage. The quality of the dynamics between actor and audience constitutes a relationship. Sometimes the relationship functions and at times it does not.

(1999a:12)

The text for Cabin Pressure was created collaboratively by Bogart, five actors—Will Bond, Ellen Lauren, Kelly Maurer, Barney O'Hanlon, and Stephen Webber—and SITI sound designer, Darren West. Bogart wanted the work to engage the following questions:

What is an audience? What is the creative role of the audience? What is the responsibility of the audience to the actor? What is an actor? What is the actor's responsibility to the audience? [...] I wanted us to start with no preconceived notions or assumptions about the...