FUGUE opens (and closes) in two weeks in a small art
gallery with questionable acoustics and limited seating, an almost anti-theatre
space that I love precisely because it’s not equipped for performance.
All my
life, various theatre people have gone out of their way to tell me that what I
do is not theatre. One doesn’t rehearse the way I do; doesn’t treat actors the
way I do; doesn’t incorporate cinematic techniques in a play; doesn’t use sound
the way I do. The list is endless and it always reminds me of the end of Hedda Gabler when, after Hedda’s
suicide, one of her guests says, “Good god - one doesn’t do such things” implying
that it’s quite a faux pas to shoot yourself in the head while your guests are
still having dinner. That’s not how one exits this world…So, I thought, if what
I do is not theatre then maybe I shouldn’t do plays in a performance space. I
did REVISION in a large lecture hall at school, and FACE (a long, long time
ago) in a classroom.
FUGUE started as a ten minute scene I wrote for a
reading event at a moment when I was convinced that my writing days were over.
I’d been incapable of putting anything down on paper for about a year. My mind
was like a desert. There was no one and nothing that inspired me. Those months
felt like living inside an eternal blackout, in complete silence. An absence of
sound and light on a barren stage. It was November, and I was miserable because
I wasn’t doing a play, because I didn’t want to do a play anyway, because I was
in the middle of all sorts of renovations so I was coming home to a
construction zone every day. I remember standing in the middle of my not-kitchen
(it was basically a shell at that point) and thinking how nice it would be to
experience a fugue state and be someone else somewhere else, and not even
remember it afterwards. That’s when I sat down and wrote about the
impossibility of writing, about the characters I think of and then discard when
their stories don’t make sense, about everything else that happens in my head
when I’m trying to write a play: the chaos, the constant return to a theme that
refuses to take shape, the tangents on which I go off in an attempt to distract
myself from the failure to write. Curiously, the ten minute scene worked. I
said, “Let’s finish it. Let’s do a play.”
I wonder what people will make of it, I wonder if the
subject will truly interest anyone because – let’s face it – why should anyone
care about somebody else’s mental chaos? I’ve also completely abandoned plot
(what plot? The plot of not being able to write a play?) in favor of chasing a
few themes and images I can’t get rid of, which, like in a musical fugue, keep
coming back to haunt me and my characters, the ones I keep rewriting and
discarding until they rebel.
I wanted FUGUE to be tentative and a little unfocused,
almost like a rehearsal, and I think I’ve managed that, but in the absence of
lights or a sound system the props are out of control, we’re drowning in props
because when you do a play about dozens of potential scenarios you have to
create dozens of worlds capable of accommodating them. Plus often, during the
play, the characters are bored with my existentialist angst and amuse
themselves throwing parties or finding a million little things in an abandoned
theatre trunk that just happens to be on stage, and that’s also a great image for the inside of my head.
I should just stand by the door and say, like Anthony
Hopkins in Freejack, “Welcome to my
mind.” (Did you know that Anthony Hopkins and Mick Jagger were in a film
together? I bet you didn’t…See? Tangent).
And so, in two weeks, FUGUE will come and go and, as
always, I’ll miss the people, because I couldn’t have asked for better people
to work with. It’s amazing to see how much the girls have become these
characters, how much they’ve added to the characters’ inner lives, how easily
they move from tragedy to laughter to boredom to mourning…The Stage Manager
(who also plays the Stage Manager of the production in my head – trust me, this
will all make sense on April 12), looks and sounds as if she’s been stage
managing plays all her life. She checks the props and keeps track of the maddening
changes I make in every rehearsal, and switches between imaginary Stage Manager
and actual Stage Manager with a confidence I admire. (I don’t do well being in
the play and directing it at the same time, but that’s a story for another day).
The Sound Guy is amazing. He’s actually built an
instrument capable of producing a variety of sounds I need during the production.
All I said before the pact with the devil scene was “You know, it would be nice
if we could have some devil sounds here…like when the devil enters…oh and some
serial killer sounds when the devil talks about serial killer movies.” So he
went home and built an instrument.
That actually makes those sounds. Unbelievable.
At the end of each rehearsal I fear that the public
won’t like FUGUE as much as THE REGISTRY or REVISION because those were plays
with a story line and characters to whom one could relate. Perhaps, if I’m
lucky, they’ll experience a fugue state and forget all about it afterwards. But
during the performance they’ll be captives in a world haunted by two images: that
of an actress falling silent during a performance of Electra, and that of a Master Builder falling from the top of the highest
tower. In the background, worlds will emerge and dissolve.
I no longer know what FUGUE is about.
