Post 3: Winking Through The Illusion(ism)

This last week we studied various kinds of "realism" in performance. Goffman and Orenstein helped us question the reality of everyday interactions. The Naturalism history helped situate the style of extreme illusionism on stage. The Underiner reading told of a performance that seeks (sort of) to "put you there" in the middle of an experience that is all-too-real for many people.


Quick review: naturalism strives to create the illusion of "real life" on stage while hiding the mechanisms behind that illusion. The lighting instruments, the struts the keep the flats upright, the jury-rigged "plumbing" that makes the kitchen sink on stage appear to work, the elaborate acting technique that makes characters' actions and reactions appear unrehearsed, even the climactic dramaturgical structure that keeps the plot clear and interesting--all of these get muted or masked. Ideally, in a naturalistic production, no one in the audience is consciously aware of these technical elements; spectators get absorbed (more or less) into the illusion.

The Caminata Nocturna (the border-crossing reenactment event Underiner writes about), by contrast, seemed to dance back and forth between "you're totally in this reality" and "we're pausing to comment/reflect on this reality." Such moments of pause-and-think recall the work of Bertolt Brecht and company.. We'll read Brecht a bit later in this class, but for now (spoilers!), Brecht and co. distrusted the absorption-into-illusion of naturalism and reacted against the labor necessary to maintain that illusion. Indeed, theirs is a theatre of disillusionment. They sought to strip away the veil of "just like life" artifice in dramaturgy and production--showing the lighting instruments, foregrounding the artificiality of the stage, disrupting naturalistic acting styles, interrupting the smooth line of a Freytag plot. Through such dramaturgical and production choices, Brecht and company sought to undermine the ideology of "it just happens this way; there's nothing you can do" that keeps oppressive social systems firmly in place. Where naturalism wants to catch you up in the swift current of plot and character, Brecht and co.--and to a certain extent the Caminata producers--want you to start swimming against the current, questioning character choices and narrative arcs.

For this post, think of some occasion (ideally one you've experienced or witnessed) in which a performance of some sort was "too real" and had to have some kind of intervention/addition/change to interrupt the illusion and make it not quite as problematically real.

Let me give you an example or two of the kind of thing I'm thinking of. First, as we noted in class, most straight play acting styles in the US derive from Stanislavski, aiming at a naturalistic sense of the character as a real, living person speaking, acting, and reacting organically and spontaneously and not an actor reciting pre-written lines and moving in pre-planned ways. In this sense, talking about a "too real" performance seems odd. Can an actor be "too real" when realism is the point?

Well, yes.

Although on one level an actor should seem to be authentically living in the imaginary circumstances of the play, on another simultaneous level the actor has to be aware that she's an actor playing for a live audience in a theatre. She must cheat out, project, enunciate, adhere to blocking, account for technical elements, stick to the dialogue of the script, and do a hundred other things that no actual person does in everyday life. Actors who fail to remember to do these not-quite-real things, however, get quick correction: "We can't see you!" "We can't hear you!" "You can't just ad lib; the next cue depends on this line as written!" All of these would be examples of interventions we make into stage realism, alterations to the illusion that make the acting less "real" for the sake of theatrical convention.

Another, not formally theatrical example of "too real" would be instances of parody or irony. A friend of mine, Kelly Howe, writes about how performances like these run the risk of seeming too real. (Witness, for example, occasions where a headline from the parody news site The Onion gets recirculated as authentic.) Without some kind of "wink" or nod to the audience--a breaking of the illusion of "this is real"--a parody might be taken as the thing it seeks to make fun of. Online (and especially in cases where the parody skewers extreme conservative/religious views), this kind of phenomenon is known as "Poe's Law," which in its original formulation goes like this: Absent some kind of obvious signal, a parody of religious fundamentalism is indistinguishable from an authentic expression of religious fundamentalism.

Can you think of other occasions where a performance of some sort was "too real"? What kind of alteration/addition--a "wink" to the audience of sorts--was necessary to fix the "too real" performance (or what kind of changes would have helped, if any)?