This is Where We Dream

What is theatre? This post has been a long time coming; I've been intending to write it for probably about a month or more now, but I saw another show tonight that reawakened my need to talk about it.

Since being back in the not-quite-midwest, I've seen a number of shows at small theatres in Chicago, plus Billy Elliot (in a small-for-Broadway-but-essentially-Broadway-style house), and, tonight, My Name is Rachel Corrie at a little studio theatre at St. Louis University. The show that got me questioning what theatre is, however, was an experience called What's it Like to Be You? in which the "actor," I guess we could call him, gets some information from volunteers from the audience before the show and then just has conversations with five or six of those volunteers over the course of two hours or so. He calls them up on stage using index cards they fill out with a few of their interests or an anecdote. When I saw the show, I was entertained but perplexed and wondered what made this thing "theatre."

Of course, two years at PHTS directed my thoughts to Peter Brook and his philosophy that "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across the empty space, someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged." By these standards, certainly people intentionally coming to watch someone entertain them, even just by having a conversation, is theatre. But then I started asking myself what I expect theatre to do. Because I watch people have conversations all the time without framing it as theatre. So what's the difference?

At the performance I attended, the last woman who came on stage spent a significant amount of time talking about how she had just recently started valuing herself as a person, even though she's in her 50's. She told us about losing her daughter to cancer at age 9, about her abusive mother and rough childhood. And I thought, theatre is about connecting people to the stories of their lives and the lives of others. That's complicated enough for me for now. Maybe tomorrow theatre will be something different.

Tonight though, it was that same thing. My Name is Rachel Corrie is the true-life story of a woman who went to Palestine and was killed by a bulldozer there in 2003. The play was constructed by piecing together her journal entries (fun fact, edited by Alan Rickman). The play is her story, the story of witnessing suffering as a privileged American. It's not trying to be political or take sides in the Israel-Palestine war. It's about opening your eyes to lives different from your own.

And I want to act, because I want to be those stories. Acting class and I haven't meshed well. But I still love acting. I still want to be an actress. I want to be a lot more than that, but that's still part of me too.

Relationships are complicated. I'm suddenly very confused.