Weaving an abstract

I just realized it’s three months since we started fight training for Hamlet. To the day. Cycles find themselves.

I am currently in the throes of preparing a presentation for “Hamlet…by the book,” an international virtual conference produced by Nathalie Rivere de Carles, a professor at the Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, happening on December 2. Nathalie found Hamlet via instagram, and after I discovered a very generous donation to the Seed&Spark campaign from someone I did not know, I reached out to her asking who she was. Our correspondence turned into an invitation to speak at her academic conference focused on the Prince of Denmark.

This is my first opportunity to talk about the work I do, through Hamlet at LA MAMA as a case study, in an academic setting. I am just so honored.

I am scrambling, however, to produce an abstract about my talk for the conference program. The other presenters have fully fleshed-out, peer-reviewed, research-based papers, and although half of the abstracts are in French, they all look extremely impressive to me. I’m last in the lineup and my space in the program is, well, full of potential, let’s say.

Consequently, crafting my presentation has forced a deep dive into what it was we did that last week of August at LA MAMA exactly. It has also led to deep interrogation about why theatre is so profound for me - and why I have dedicated the last few years to making it in an extremely barebones way. I often find myself needing to justify, to myself, why theatre continues to be relevant and important. I’m a people-pleaser by nature and often don’t rock the boat - and sometimes find myself wondering if I shouldn’t have dropped Chemistry freshman year of college to be able to pursue that pre-med track.

I feel our society at large is disconnected from the depth of the human experience. YEP, WE’RE GOIN THERE. Even our best-selling theatre and film productions are stories we know the endings to, characters we are familiar with, songs we can sing along to, and frenetic special effects that leave us feeling swept up in a lot confusing lights, sounds and - America’s favorite - violence - without much to consider after it’s over.

It is all predictable.

Art has become another way we as a society numb ourselves against the looming global problems we have absolutely no control over. The 87 human emotions Brené Brown details in her book, Atlas of the Heart, are simplified and flattened into the one emotion that is most certain to sell: fear. The media teaches us to fight fear with violence, so the art of rhetoric, problem-solving and debating has been boiled down to blindly annihilating anyone or anything that causes you the least bit of trouble. We are a world of instant gratification fed by fear. 

Theatre is one of the few spaces where a heightened human experience can be put on display and safely worked through. Where a story can be acted out in real time and shared with fellow humans live. The molecules change in a room when everyone is listening and riding an emotional wave together. We don’t get many chances in our modern world to ride emotional waves and trust that we will be ok on the other end. We may not have many examples set for us as to how to do that in a healthy way. 

I think actors show audiences how to safely experience the range of human emotions. Actors study the art of relationships and present relationships to us in the most believable way they can. By seeing moments in our own lives, familiar interactions, played out in front of us, almost under a microscope, we can more easily explain our own interactions, pinpoint triggers and where emotions come from, and watch for other examples of how people solve them, how people dialogue through life. Interrogating our own feelings after a play can help us assess the best ways to solve a problem - and reflect on the resonating negative effects if violence or fear is used.

From the actor’s perspective, I think the best way to fully embrace onstage relationships is to offer them entirely stripped down. My theatre-making is currently led by a curiosity about what comes through when actors have nothing obscuring them, and therefore the story, from the audience. And, yes, I realize that Hamlet is one of those pieces many of us are familiar with and know the ending to, but if it is done right, the beginning will not foreshadow the conclusion for those new to the tale, and scholars will still find themselves swept up in the hope that maybe this time it’ll be different. If the spectrum of each relationship in Hamlet is fully realized, the topography of this classic is entirely unpredictable - which I think is what makes it good art.

And we don’t need lots of special effects to do that for us. It just takes poetry and vulnerability.