Deconstructing the Regional Theater with "Performance Art" Shakespeare

Deconstructing the Regional Theater with "Performance Art" Shakespeare Keith Appier In many cases, staging classics means making the old play new, and many theater-goers seem happy enough to see Shakespeare's dramas transposed to different times and places, cast non-traditionally, or staged with irreverent details or nudity. Many theater-goers understand and even appreciate these anachronisms as ways to give relevance to the archaic roles and circumstances. For reviewer David Richards, successful Shakespeare OffBroadway and in the regional theaters only depends on one thing: "You've got to believe the actors" ("At the Public" 5). Richards suggests that if the actors can perform the play with art and conviction, the updates will do their work and the old drama will still catch fire. What, however, would the reviewers' and audiences' response be if a performance artist directed Shakespeare in the regional theater using a nonrealistic performance idiom to challenge the tastes and expectations prescribed for that institutional space? In late 1991, "performance art" Shakespeare appeared in a major regional theater and, to a large degree, the performers were not working for believability. The British director Neil Bartlett staged Twelfth Night at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in a manner he described as "performance art" (Smith 8). In performing tasks and trying on new roles, the performers produced striking visual and aural effects, with which Bartlett composed a series of surprising and disturbing moments. The production that resulted, judged by the standards for realistic acting, could only have failed. In fact, Bartlett's performance art Twelfth Night intended to deconstruct the realistic acting of institutional Shakespeare within its own institutional space. Bartlett's mise en scène foregrounded the codes of professional Shakespearean performance operating in that space—codes which relate to realistic acting—by violating them, thus suggesting the correlation of realistic acting with cultural and social prescriptions. Elements of Performance Art Xerxes Mehta warns against confusing performance artists, or "performers ," with "actors." "Actors," who engage in realistic representation, 35 The Goodman Theatre's 1992 production of Twelfth Night with (from the left) Lynn Baber as Fabian, Suzanne Petri as Malvolio, Jeanette Schwaba as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Lola Pashalinski as Sir Toby Belch. Directed by Neil Bartlett. Photo: Eric Y. Exit. Deconstructing the Regional Theater 37 "impersonate others, exist in stage time, and respond to their characters' inner psychological promptings" (Mehta 189). Performance artists and other practitioners and theorists greatly distrust realistic representation because the imitation of reality that actors create, though a reductive and interested authorial construction, elicits acceptance and emotional commitment from the spectators . Actors, in creating characters, pretend to be real people, but their performances are relatively simple psychologically. As characters, their conflicts, successes, and failures produce a simplified image of life and a facile ethical model. However, persuaded of the truth of the actor's imitation, audience members share an empathetic mass emotion, something performance artists disclaim as "the fascism of the center" (Mehta 190). Their objections resemble Brecht's; however, Brechtian performance stayed closer to realistic conventions than performance art presentations do. The performance pieces, which may range "from highly personal solo monologues to comedy routines, to large multimedia collaborations between artists from different disciplines" (Champagne 183), generally are not unitary. Partly because performance art derives as much from the visual arts as from avant-garde theater, the performer creates a sequence of visual and aural effects with her body, movement, and words that contribute to "an abstract or associative collage structure" instead of to a dramatic action. To broaden selfexpression , the performer, without seeking to represent a character, will adopt a "persona" to explore different genders and sexualities, different ethnicities and social positions. Sometimes, with equal "naive vitality and directness" (Champagne 177-78), performers do tasks, like dancing and singing, for which they are untrained. Often, to compose a larger image, the performer will mix media and make herself both a performer and a formal object of the composition .1 Sometimes a director will use "the performer as a painter uses motifs on a canvas"; the director may ask the performer to go beyond ordinary selfpresentation , to wear a mask, to perform like a puppet, and even to perform with a puppet...