The space of theatre is intimate, accessible almost by touch; yet, what is created on the stage, the place upon the space, is disassociated with its actual surroundings that its very intimacy makes it distant, inaccessible. Its very closeness makes that truth bare. It is merely a stage and more than a stage. But then, a word, a silence, a movement, revealed as what it is, naturally defined and explored within the moment it is revealed confronts the intimate distance of the stage and the characters impinge upon it with real emotional provocations and the audience experience the reality of those provocations within the backdrop of an unreal space—the stage that is merely more than a stage—and that shared experience of the reality of the unreal brings the actors and audience into a cohesive whole—specifically, a oneness.
The phenomena of that oneness discovers itself upon the clashing of the real onto the unreal, enhancing the real so much so that the space is made real and those real emotions eliciting such real and moving movements, unhinge and become unreal. When that exchange takes place, they unify and forbid each other to separate. They may stretch and almost break, but they are still united—specifically, they are one.
The tension is grounded in a immediacy within the words and silences and movements that have their beings-in upon the stage. In an abstracted form those beings remain unreal and come to confront and then become the soul of the performers, the soul of the audience and the soul of the space, inheriting the very conflict that is inherent in them. The multiplicities of souls is made real upon the stage, actually presented in physical form. The abstraction reveals itself.
Although communally revealed, theatre revels within individual expression. Within theatre, and perhaps life itself, the individual is never an inherent right, but, instead, an inherent gift. Put simply, a ‘what if’ provoked into the moment. That gifting, that what ifness, releases into exploration so that the real is not unique to itself, the unreal not unique to itself, but communally engaged within their very paradox and the reality that forms from it releases the imagination onto the stage, the unreal imagination that conflicts desires, disturbs the meaning and is borne upon the audience, who, in darkness, experiences the moment individually while becoming closer to the other as the real uplifts into the unreal so the unreal can enchant itself into the real. Specifically, a oneness.
Come revelation. Come enchantment. Come revelry.
I Forgot
A Play in One Act
Clarissa sits on a bench. Samuel leans against the bus stop pole. The bench is new, pristine, dazzling. The sidewalk is cracked and broken with some loose rubble strewn about, as if it was spewed forth from the ground. The pole is ridden with soot.
CLARISSA: I forgot change.
SAMUEL: How far is home?
CLARISSA: I’ll miss the bus if I go home.
SAMUEL: There’ll be others.
Pause.
SAMUEL: You’ll get caught. Pause. And fined.
CLARISSA: Last week I took the skytrain and when I paid someone immediately followed me through the tollbooth before it closed. I looked at her. She didn’t look at me. Am I complicit in her crime? She was tall and thin and had brown eyes, I saw the colour of her eyes, and her hair was really, really long.
Pause.
SAMUEL: This is a bus stop, not a skytrain station.
Pause.
CLARISSA: I skipped work yesterday. I didn’t even call in.
Pause.
CLARISSA: I forgot.
Pause.
SAMUEL: Me too.
A large bus is heard driving up to the bus stop. The sound of it gets louder and louder
until it screams into view and then is silent, stopping right in front of SAMUEL and
CLARISSA, hiding them.
Pause.
The bus drives off. SAMUEL is now sitting next to CLARISSA. The bus stop pole is
crumpled into the sidewalk. The bench is newer, more pristine, more dazzling—
blinding.
The real meaning of the soul expressed onto the unreal space.
Or, is it all unreal? An abstraction from the imagination conformed and conflicted unto physical reality.