A Director's Response to Cultural Pluralism

COMMENTS ONPROCESS A Director's Response to Cultural Pluralism Tori Haring-Smith Inside the service elevator of the Atlanta OMNI hotel was this sign: "When these doors open, smile, you're on stage. Let the performance begin." The sign was not part of the ATHE conference, but it put our discussions of cultural pluralism in context for me. While the predominantly black staff of this hotel served our predominantly white conference participants, they were reminded to keep performing. We were in the midst of a complex piece of crosscultural performance art. Like the threshold of the service elevator, theatre is a confrontation of worlds—evanescent and often unpredictable—that occurs when an audience meets and responds to a playworld. Because it creates an environment in which worlds collide, theatre is a particularly fertile subject for theorists interested in cross-cultural or inter-cultural dialogue. I left the meetings of The Women and Theatre Program and ATHE with many questions about how I, as a heterosexual, white, middle-class, Midwestern woman from German and Dutch stock could ever hope to direct plays about experiences that were foreign to my own. How could I presume to shape an audience's experience of life in a black, inner-city tenement or a Japanese internment camp? How could I trust my instincts for truth when the world of the play was so foreign to me? As a director, I want to help expand our theatrical canon beyond heterosexual , white, middle-class plays and to confront worlds unlike my own. Playwrights write from their own experience, but the heart of a director's work is to make sense of others' experience for an audience. A director is a cultural translator. Yet how do I know when the culture of the play is so different from my own that I cannot understand it? When will I become, in theoretical terms, a Colonizer, incapable of seeing in a play anything but impenetrable otherness or a false mirror of myself? My experience seems to tell me that I can come to understand Shakespeare's kings, O'Neill's drunks, Churchill's financiers, and Fornes' torturers. Or, do I merely 89 90 Tori Haring-Smioth invent an understanding of them, one that Shakespeare, O'Neill, Churchill, and Fornes have not been present to dispute? Writers like bell hooks tell me to be wary of assuming that I am capable of this kind of cross-cultural understanding. They make me wonder if I've been more of an artful tourist than a fluent translator. In any case, my relationship to a play is never simple. While I recognize Cherrie Moraga's female experience, I sit outside her stated identity as a lesbian and a Chicana. I connect with George Bernard Shaw through a common body of reading, but have no reference for his nineteenth-century masculinity. Theatre makes meaning by combining similarity and difference. The experience we see on stage must be familiar enough to be recognizable, but not so familiar that it is boring. It must show us what we know and teach us something new. The director's job is to negotiate these similarities and differences , offering the audience a recognizably truthful and yet interestingly new world. In this model of theatre, then, representation must be conflated with reality. Directors and audiences are always "reading" plays through their own frames of reference. Interpretation is always in play. At the same time, even the least "realistic" representation is related to reality or else it would be meaningless . Representation and reality exist in a "yes, but" relationship. Representation is and is not reality. So, for example, in Anna Deveare Smith's one-woman shows, we see both the people she represents and her own identity, running like a thread through all her characterizations. Theatre, then, is not the representation of the real, but rather a dialogue about the real carried on between the spectators and the play. These thoughts comfort me when I approach plays that present experiences foreign to me. I understand the crisis of identity expressed in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro, because I fight my own battles for identity. However, I read Sarah's experience...