[Music]
TONY KUSHNER: There's a great power in the inability of theater to create a complete
illusion.
[Music]
I think that live performance obviously has a certain kind of excitement that digitally
reproduced or electronically delivered media doesn't have.
There's a difference between watching a live actor on stage and an actor in a film because
what you do while you're in the audience watching can and will actually impact the performance
and alter it.
That's not an experience you can have watching a film.
And you don't know when you're going into the theater what's going to happen, which
produces a kind of discomfort and anxiety.
Theater is not finished.
It's not concluded.
When it goes away in a run of a place, it's gone forever, so all of those things are I
think very vivid in one's conscious or unconscious mind while watching the theater.
I think it's an infinitely more powerful communal experience because you team up with your other
audience members and if you don't know them have an impact on the stage, you do that within
the first five seconds whether you've intended to do that or not.
People who have gone to the theater all their lives are unaware that they do it but anyone
who's on stage or who does theater knows that within five minutes of the thing beginning,
you know what kind of audience you're going to be dealing with.
There's great power in the inability of theater to create a complete illusion.
Theater can't really entirely, successfully convince you that anything that isn't actually
happening on stage is happening whether you're talking about a murder or an angel crashing
through a ceiling or any number of things.
You have all sorts of clever tricks to make people y'know sort of—to try and make them
actually believe what they're seeing is happening.
And there is a part of the audience experience of watching these illusions on stage—it's
very compelling and they believe that what they're seeing on some level is actually happening
so they're moved or exhilarated or terrified or whatever as they would be if this was happening
in the real world, but because the illusion is always in theater only partially successful
and not overwhelming and really can't be, just because of a limitation of means because
of the sort of cooling distance, physical distance.
So all of these things work to sort of militate against you completely believing that what
your'e seeing is real and that creates I think a kind of critical consciousness and I think
it's why theater—one of the reasons why theater is absolutely essential to human beings.
What theater does is create a laboratory in which people have a direct experience of being
able to believe and disbelieve at the same time and to watch something and to get what
it's supposed to be and what's made to be and also to read it at the same time and kind
of dig beneath the surface.
There's a way in which the doubleness of theatre I think its poverty of means works in a profoundly
important illogical way and teaches you something no matter what you're watching which is that
you—you can't be a literal reader of life.
You have to be an interpreter and unless you do that, you're a mechanical that doesn't
get the essential truth and joke of life.
[Music]
There will always be new forms of theater and y'know we have a tradition in this country
of experimentation with theatrical form that's really produced some of the most magnificent
works of theatrical art of the last 50, 60 years.
I mean, theater always incorporates sort of cutting edge technology that it can afford,
back in the days, in the 18th century, it brought in all these pulleys and ropes.
Those were the pulleys and ropes being used on ships with the bit most advanced technological
stuff available so the idea that you can hoist scenery by means of pulleys and ropes was
a new application of physics and now you can go see the work of someone like Liz Lacompton,
the Wooster group and she does stuff with video screens and television that y'know—and
it's fantastic and exciting stuff.
The forms will, um, change to this or that extent and still be recognizable.
We can still look at Escalus, which is about as early a text as we have and even though
it was performed by people who thought that the brain was in the liver and who had a completely
different sense of cosmology than we have, so much of it is instantly recognizable and
the basic dramatic form is there.
It's really about two opposing points of view or three opposing points of view to get on
stage and yell at each other until one of them wins or both of them lose or whatever
and part of the experience is always that it's fake and it's not what you experience
in your daily life and it's something cruder and rougher and unconvincing and that's what
theater is for.
To bring you face to face with I think a more essential sense of what human beings are more
stripped down in the sense of what human beings are free of the trappings of everyday life
and the things that we're used to.
I don't see how that really alters and y'know innovation is always important and exciting
to any art form, but I don't think it's, um, it's predictable exactly how that'll go.
I'm Tony Kushner and I'm encouraging all of you to subscribe to THNKR.
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