Thresholds of Pain in Performance: Tormenting the Actor and Audience

{ 18 } \ Thresholds of Pain in Performance Tormenting the Actor and Audience —CAROLYN D. ROARK Pain—has an Element of Blank— It cannot recollect When it began—or if there were a time when it was not— EMILY DICKINSON Whether we enjoy or deplore overt violence in filmed popular entertainment, we can acknowledge that the stakes of using violence in theatre are different. “Torture porn” has not caught on in plays, yet . . . though Martin McDonagh may be at the head of a trend. Perhaps it is simply more difficult to watch certain types of violent action in a live setting, even with assurances that what the audience sees is not real. In any case, the situation becomes doubly complicated when a performance undertakes to depict violence in earnest. While allowing for certain sanctioned forms of aggression in live entertainment— sports, for example (especially certain forms of sport fighting)—contemporary theatre audiences demonstrate less tolerance for a live spectacle of one human injuring another, especially if they can connect what they see to a vexed cultural context. If the work claims to operate in the service of alleviating social trauma, this adds yet another layer of difficulty. For a powerful example of the artistic limits of depicting human torment onstage, we can look to Chile’s laborious return to democracy in the 1990s and a sampling of theatrical productions from that era. To prepare for more detailed conversation about the productions themselves , it will be useful to describe the sociopolitical circumstances in which { 19 } THRESHOLDS OF PAIN IN PERFORMANCE they occurred. Patricio Alwyin assumed the presidency of Chile in 1990, signaling the end of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. One of Alwyin’s earliest priorities was the investigation of human rights abuses perpetrated by the previous administration.1 Part of the new process of re-democratization was to put words to the experiences of recent years, which had been permeated by internal violence. The military consolidated its control in a short, bloody coup in 1973. Over the next seventeen years, short periods of stability and economic growth alternated with explosive conflict. Underground resistance pockets fought soldiers on the streets after curfew, police efforts at crowd control resulted in the deaths of protesters, and the populace disputed bitterly over whether the government had saved Chile from chaos or strangled an infant utopia in its cradle. In addition to the public strife came reports of clandestine arrests, abductions, and interrogations. Rumors abounded of beatings and electric shock, concentration camps for political detainees, and mass graves. A grassroots movement, led by mothers and spouses of disappeared citizens, created photo displays of lost loved ones in the Plaza de Armas, demanding information on their whereabouts . After a 1988 plebiscite that effectively ended Pinochet’s presidency, the public greeted the return to democracy with a demand for disclosure regarding government practices of detainment, torture, and disappearance of political prisoners. This was (and always is) a daunting task. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain addresses the problem facing truth commissions and human rights advocates such as Amnesty International. In addition to an unwillingness on the part of the perpetrators and collaborators to incriminate themselves, the victims are often incapable of adequately expressing their own experiences. Pain, like other psycho-physical experiences, can be exceptionally difficult to describe accurately . Scarry talks at length about the difficulty of grasping someone else’s pain; it is harder still for a third party to offer a compelling explanation of an individual’s pain. Efficacy demands that the most explicit description possible be used, yet social mores require a certain reserve or self-censorship in the name of tact. For, as Scarry reminds us, the infliction of pain often involves“the most intimate realm of another human being’s body [as] the implicit or explicit subject.”2 These two things (tact and immediacy in Scarry’s vocabulary) often work against one another. Nevertheless, Amnesty International’s work begins with the assumption that“the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain.”3 Starting with Alwyin, three presidential administrations in Chile have adopted that philosophy as part of their official rhetoric. And among the social...