Metatheatricality and Perils of Creation

"Ganesh Verses the Third Reich"
Apparently trains are the transport of choice of Hindu gods

"Sunday in the Park with George" is my favorite musical, the reason because it has the song which has served as the testament to how frustrating and alienating, and essential, the process of making art is. Yes, I am talking about "Finish the Hat," and "watching the world from the window while you finish the hat."

The song came to me as I was in the audience for two pieces this winter. One was "We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915" (whew!) by Jackie Sibblies Drury at Soho Rep in November, and the other was "Ganesh verses the Third Reich," from Back to Back Theatre in Australia, as part of the Under the Radar Festival this month.

And two other works I saw in January, as part of the P.S. 122 COIL festival, "Inflatable Frankenstein" and "Seagull (Thinking of you)" had the same quality to them as well. It was all meta-theatrical, or, works about artists making work, about the questions, frustrations, egos, emotions and (in the case of "Frankenstein" since there was pink goo involved) the messiness of creation.

"We Are Proud to Present" a very long title

"We Are Proud to Present..." was performed in the round, on a set that looked like a modern rehearsal room (in fact, it was so authentic-looking that at one point, I spied an audience member trying to get a drink from the coffee pot/prop, only to be stopped by director Eric Ting).

In the play, six actors were trying to figure out how to tell the story of the German occupation of Nambia in Africa, and the events leading to the Herero Genocide (death toll: 24,000-100,000). Because first-person records on that topic are so scarce, and history is usually written by the victors, the event has been largely ignored in Western history. The question then became: Do we use the records written by the Germans or do we create our own narrative? And if we create our own, (aka make it up), are we then claiming the Herero's stories like the Germans did?

On a similar note, and also about Germany, "Ganesh Versus the Third Reich" had a team of actors at work on a mythical story about the Hindu god Ganesh coming down to Earth to reclaim the swastika from the Germans during World War II. The play showed them nonchalantly pulling plastic tarps across the stage and dimming the lights whenever they wanted to act out a scene in the play that they were creating, so the rehearsal space turned into a performance space before the audience's eyes.

There is also another caveat, some of the actors onstage are disabled, and it's worth noting that during the Holocaust, 200,000 to 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people were murdered. And the "director" in the play, David, is the only person on the team who is not disabled. At one point, he "plays" Josef Mengele, a disturbing turn of events that highlights the disparity of power between him and the other actors.

Beyond the different "Inception"-like layers of these plays, and the beautiful feats of stage wizardry that came from backlighting and tarps in "Ganesh," there was something else that I gleamed from both of those works. In dealing with genocide, and touching on history and the voices of the oppressed minorities, one of the big questions were: Do we have the right to tell this story? Is it sometimes better to tell the story, even if the story is outside of our own experiences, than to not have it be told at all?

Playwright Naomi Wallace encourages playwrights to explore different worlds but cautions, in the January issue of "American Theatre" magazine, that:

There are a thousand ways we can trip and flounder when we enter into writing about experiences far from our own. We might fail to honor the complicated humanity of another. We might find that cliche sneaks into our path and we stand on it and build from there. We might, simply, miss the boat.... "The best corrective...is to imagine the person you are discussing"--or writing about--"in this case the person on whom the bombs will fall--reading you in your presence."

And all of those flounders come to a head in both of these plays, with creators not being sure of what they wanted from the piece. In "We Are Proud to Present," the statement that is repeated over and over again is, and I paraphrase, "We are telling the story." But just telling a story straight is not enough. In exploring any story, there needs to be a sense of urgency. Why does this story matter? And why does this story need to be told by us? Why does it matter to us?

A civic history lesson is not enough. That's why when faced with a political play, most theatregoers run in the other direction.

The actors in "We Are Proud to Present" can't seem to figure out that question of "why." Hence the long-winded, meandering title of their presentation. In the last moments in the play, an African-American actor is "hung" on an orange cable-cord, with the other actors yelling the N-word around him. He breaks character and storms off. The exercise had gone too far.

And at the end of "Ganesh," David explains to Mark, his stage manager, "I just wanted to have a moment of connection between two people." Mark, who has been silent for most of the play, reaches out and embraces David. That was the connection between artists that had been missing throughout the play. And David, having been used to taking the reins throughout the piece, leaves, and doesn't realize that the moment he had been looking for was happening in front of him.

These pieces can be seen as a cautionary tale, of what happens when artists go into a work without imagining, in the words of Wallace, "the person on whom the bombs will fall." They were each so consumed with their own personal vision for what the play should be that they forget there are other voices at work.

Or, it could also be seen as a snapshot in what happens in the rehearsal room, the messiness of it all

Both pieces end the same, with the actors ending their play-making exercise, leaving the audience with an empty (or in the case of "Ganesh," mostly empty) stage. And it's fitting, since an empty stage is the source of every artistic possibility and frustration.