Pushing the Bounds of Modernism-or not

I am a little fascinated when I think about the early evidence of change that I failed to grasp as change. You often can't predict the longer term direction or development of critical mass for change, but it's fun to reflect on how it played out.

While working on an article recently, I pulled up notes I made on a scenic choice I saw at the Huntington Theatre last fall. It was Bob Glaudini's Vengeance is the Lord's, directed by Peter DuBois and designed by Eugene Lee. It's a domestic drama about retribution in a family that boosts cars. It could have been written any time in the last 50 years and had a kind of made-for-TV feel.

The setting on the Huntington's full-stage turntable included a living/dining room, kitchen, bedroom, center hallway with stairs to a second floor and an outside porch stoop. There was a fence and some exterior scenic off the turntable. The entire show used only the living/dining room and the stoop. The turntable spun around between scenes and a character could be seen doing something mundane in the kitchen or the bedroom, but there was no action there. These richly propped rooms were totally unnecessary for the action of the play.

Many people know something of Lee's work as the designer for Saturday Night Live, but at Trinity Rep where he is resident designer he frequently likes a lot of iconic scenic atmosphere for the mostly open stages, though not usually naturalistic. Although it doesn't show on IBDB, I think he designed LeRoi Jones' (Amiri Baraka) Slave Ship in New York in the early 1970s that uniquely included the audience in the ship as if slaves. This was considered part of the "environmental theater" movement following the artistic upheavals of the 1960s. A few years later, Lee became well known for Sweeney Todd in 1979, when he had an old foundry dismantled and installed on stage to frame the setting that occurred in a more modest space within.

What is interesting - and challenging - to me is the sense of artistic progression and paradigmatic shift I've seen during my life in theater art. Artistically I've been a child of what I call Modernism as a style, which I interpret to be about economy of statement and finding The Essential, about the perfection of form and space and saying as much as possible with a single Picasso-like line. It is the essential economy of poetry and as a dominant style it described the world of art for more than a half century from about 1920 to 1980. As it evolved, in my view the style of Post-Modernism, for whatever else it is about, is about generating the most possible connections and associations for the perceiver/audience. It is about a richer associative experience that is not defined or controlled, perhaps barely even led by the artist. It's a more co-creative, ultimately democratic approach to meaning in art. It is antithetical to economy of statement.

Lee's use of unnecessary scenery reminded me of our BSU production of A. R. Gurney's 1981 play The Dining Room in 1986. The play is a series of scenes of different families' lives playing out in different eras in a generic upper middle class dining room. (An interesting precursor to Tom Stoppard's more complex conceptually challenging 1993 play Arcadia.) Our production, directed by Stephen Levine, emphasized the meaning of the dining room as an institution that was embedded in class. He also asked for a museum-like display of two other rooms in other areas of the theater space as institutions of social class.

In an idle exercise of retrospective rationalizing, I now wonder if these rooms (and perhaps Gurney's play itself) may have been a kind of step toward a Postmodern style. One reading of the event might be that although the rooms were not focused on generating random or uncontrolled connections, they were (self)consciously asking the audience to make their own associations related to the concept of the play. And one might imagine, to the concept of museums and, by extension, to the theater itself.

The pressures of schedule were too great and the other rooms were not propped appropriately or given the kind of presentation the concept required. As a Modernist, I felt like the rooms were a digression, a distraction from the through-line of Gurney's play. I think most of the audience thought they were a strange artsy idea. Only a few people actually spent a few minutes looking at them. The point to be made here is that although they had a more self-conscious purpose, the rooms had much in common with Lee's unused rooms on the turntable.

If I ponder this more, I recognize that Lee's extra rooms clearly were part of the scenic statement of the family home, emphasizing the normal domesticity of this criminal family. There was none of the real randomness of visual Postmodernism, and certainly none of its random eclectic references. I know that in both productions the concept was still pretty controlled, and that Postmodernism can be an influence on a style rather than a driving aesthetic. Neither production really tried to generate the kind of rich co-creative involvement of the perceiver that Postmodernism typically seeks. But both productions expanded the conceptual world of the play.

Within the next decade, we did a number of other productions that were more deliberately conceptually challenging, and I was teaching Postmodernism style as an aesthetic in my classes. Historic cultural evolution is so difficult to see in its time. You often don't know you are part of a movement until it moves on because it can really be defined only in retrospect.

The art world is different today than in 1986, and I think audiences have different expectations for a stage experience. They've seen it all, so ground-breaking has lost its cachet. The challenge today, more than ever, is to define the stage experience in relation to all of the entertainment technologies, from gigantic touring music acts to Cirque du Soleil to Disney entertainment environments to Spiderman on Broadway, all to compete with home electronics. And so we have swirling turntables with whole houses of strictly scenic rooms on them.

We seem to have returned to an era when spectacle and occasion have the most to contribute to the live theater experience. And incidentally, to most other traditional live art forms.

I view that with some concern. I think meaning is important, too.

Scenemaker
July 2011