Play we saw: Slava’s Snowshow
State I was in: Rested, fed, and
PSYCHED for some silly shit
Two
years ago I was feeling really bummed after having finished the run of a show.
It wasn’t my typical “Oh no, I don’t get to see all of the people that I worked
on this fun collaborative piece of art,” type of post-show bummed-out-ness. It
was something else. First of all there was no way that it was me missing the
people who I worked on the play with because it was a pair of Samuel Beckett
one-act plays, each of which only had one person casts, so I had worked with,
if I include every single person involved in the production? 9 people? Maybe 10?
Most of whom I already knew and knew that I would be able to see as much of as
I wanted to. No, it was more of a pretentious issue. I felt completely at a loss
as far as my artistic path forward was concerned. I had no idea what I wanted
my relationship with theater to be. I had just spent a month alone onstage,
puttering around, eating bananas, and listening to recordings of myself
speaking as a younger man, all of which could easily add up to my favorite and
most rewarding theatrical experience of my life thus far, but something bummed
me out severely. It could have been just a general wave of depression descending
on me with the month of March (not an uncommon thing), but I could feel that
something was directly related to the production that I had just finished.
Krapp’s Last Tape is among Beckett’s
most famous plays, the role of Krapp being famously played by renowned playwright
and contemporary of Beckett, Harold Pinter. It’s about a man, aged 69, alone in
his apartment, on his 69th birthday, listening to his tapes that he
has recorded every year since his youth, and eating bananas that he knows clog
him up like a square peg in a round hole. He doesn’t say a lot onstage, most of
the dialogue coming from the recordings of himself. The director of the piece,
being a bit obsessed with Beckett and his work for quite some time, wanted the
audience to enter the theater and immediately be sucked into an artistic void.
Nothing outside the theater mattered while you were in, and nothing inside the
theater was affected by what was outside. Perhaps that “and vice-versa” is an
unfair extrapolation, but that’s how it felt to me.
One of my most
common bits of direction was “the audience should be able to leave the theater
and you would carry on doing exactly the same as if they were there.” In short,
this theater was a one-way street through and through. I was supposed to do my
thing and the audience could take it how they wanted and get the hell over it
if they had a problem. Or voice their problems at the open coffee and cookies available
onstage immediately after the show. But me as an actor was to pay the audience
no mind. Of course, having grown up playing the audience for every drop of
reaction I could get out of them, this bit of direction was unfamiliar, but I
did my best in almost every performance, but the one performance where I took
my leave and played ever so slightly to the audience was exhilarating. This play
was freaking hysterical! It’s ridiculous and I didn’t think that it being funny
would take at all away from the somber, stoic, reflective feeling that the
director seemed to want to go for. But after being told off for obviously looking
to the audience for my own personal satisfaction, I went on and did what I was
told to for the remainder of the run.
So the run was
over and I was miserable for some reason, then I hear about this clowning
teacher who is doing a workshop in the cities, not specifically on clowning,
but on playfulness and game in theater. I went to it and wasn’t thrilled about
that workshop itself. It was a one-evening ordeal where we did some weird games
and then had to move on, but then I went home and asked my friend who does some
circus shit if he knew any cool clowns and he told me to check out videos of Slava’s Snowshow. So I did. A whole new
world opened up to me. I started watching physical comedians, reading clowning
books, taking more workshops with this clown teacher, and was so infatuated
with the more concrete ideas of theatrical play that had been opened up to me
that I actually found some sort of direction of artistic intent again! Not fully
formed but I was at least being pointed in a direction. I wanted things to be
playful, wild, creative, and scary all at once and that is super possible! I
don’t think I can confidently say that I have put that in every single artistic
pursuit I have had since but these little videos of Slava Polunin standing
around while two other clowns ‘played accordion’ had given me some sort of hope
again, or at least a bridge out of the seasonally dreary March.
But seeing the Snowshow
live? It couldn’t hope to compare. These bits that have been done since 1992
all over the world? That should have been stale as shit? Not a chance. I had a
working theory that theater shouldn’t go on for more than a few weekends
because it gets incorrigibly stale after that. Dumb theory, what a stupid thing
to think, this was as good as it got and I think that is because it was a fully-formed
two-way street between the performers and the audience. Everything the performers
did (while scripted or pre-created) was done with permission and eager joy on
the part of the audience, from the littlest gestures to the 15 foot diameter
balloons at the end (spoiler).
I have felt a lot of things at theatrical
productions in my life, but I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of
those feelings amount to some sort of apathy or mild acceptance and only under
exceptional circumstances are the feelings leaving the theater strong and boisterous
in any direction. I have never felt so strongly in the theater than at the end
of this show, I have never stayed in theater so
long after a show to try to collect as much information as I possibly could
about the experience to save for later. I have never left the theater so eager
to talk about what the hell just happened. I have never felt so much because of
what someone put onstage and, despite this show not having a throughline or
trying to say anything extraordinarily profound (or anything at all really), despite it displaying easily
some of the dumbest dramatic and comedic bits I have ever seen, and despite the
fact that I have no idea what the feelings I felt were at certain times, I felt
more, overwhelmingly so, in many moments in the show than I have at any point
in my life, and that makes it the most impressive theatrical feat I have ever
seen. Two years ago I liked it because it looked ridiculous and I wanted to
watch it because I was in a rut of artistic motivation. Now I don’t have any
idea what I felt leaving that theater but I feel like that experience will
always be a guiding hand in whatever the hell I decide my relationship with theater
and any type of performance ends up being. At the end of the day, Slava Polunin is just a man who threw some shit together and made a show. Surely I can do the same? Maybe not on the same level, but in some way for sure!
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