Maxwell’s Ghosts

The Marriage of Maria Braun, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. A fog machine creates the impression of a train station, where Maria waits for any sign of her missing husband. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.

The New York City Players’ Ads is a provocative inquest into the alchemy of live corporeal presence. The piece makes the most elusive of theatre’s fundamental forces visible by its absence. Ads consists of a series of personal statements, delivered by the authors themselves, without rehearsal, on subjects of intimate importance. Richard Maxwell asked friends and acquaintances from a wide variety of ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds—a few work in theatre, but most don’t—to compose a text, and to extemporize, about their individual beliefs.

Maxwell videotaped the monologues, and projected them in performance across a complicated rig of mirrors and screens. The eerie result: hovering figures, neither present nor absent, live nor recorded. The projections preserved accidental signs of bodily presence usually edited out of more polished media images: nervous throat-clearing, stutters, fidgeting. These archived idiosyncrasies brought the performers uncannily closer, causing inadvertent surrender to sympathetic involvement with their likenesses, even as the reality of physical presence remained irretrievably absent. The “depth” of the performers’ confessions jarred with the pixellated surfaces of their ghostly avatars: one speaker, an actor, describes encountering new audiences; another rues the flattening of personality in the age of Facebook. In our digital era, when new media strive to emulate the kinesthetic effects of bodily nearness—dance fads spread through YouTube restagings and Facebook videos archive social gatherings—Maxwell’s experiment attempts to isolate the elusiveness of corporeal encounter, by delivering every aspect of a theatrical performance except live performers.

Throughout his career, Maxwell has shied away from conventional hallmarks of theatrical presence. The director is known for favoring a deader-than-deadpan style, in which actors eschew passionate displays or gestural flourishes, shrugging off their lines in an affectless monotone. In addition, his plays often turn on the problem of authentic feeling in a cliché-ridden culture: How do we tap into wellsprings of real emotion when we’re continually deluged with the culture industry’s comestible units of prefabricated experience? How do we know when we do?

Maxwell mostly casts amateur performers, or performers capable of mimicking the gawky nerviness of non-actors, in his pieces, preferring untutored idiosyncrasies to the polished comfort of the professional. He makes no attempt to shoehorn his actors into “characters.” (In People Without History, a recent piece set during an unnamed medieval war, one of the “knights” wore modern eyeglasses, and sported the same ponytail and beard he wears offstage. In Ode to the Man Who Kneels, a western, one actor’s strong German accent went undisguised and unmentioned.) As a result, there’s always a gap between the figures onstage and the fiction they’re intended to populate. An eccentric pause, a quirky gesture, an odd persona brought intact from daily life to the stage. These peculiarities create static in Maxwell’s onstage worlds, interfering with the representational process. (In interviews, Maxwell has described his writing method as a form of “recording”—preserving odd scraps of overheard dialogue, media culture detritus, or other conversational flotsam, then collaging the scavengings into something resembling a plot and characters.) Ads extends Maxwell’s affinity for the “readymade” qualities of amateur performers, allowing them to speak for themselves without even the minimal mediation of his porous stage fictions.

At Performance Space 122, the setting for Ads resembled a conventional, if minimalist, black-box theatrical arrangement. Upstage center, where the auditorium’s sightlines converge, angled corridors of black masking frame a wooden crate: the soapbox for Ads’ public speakers, a sly allusion to its “Speakers’ Corner” format. This makeshift podium is the only tangible object on Ads’ mostly bare stage. Once the piece begins, the projected performers seem to appear from behind the curtains as though coming from the...