3/4/2019 1 Comment Theatre ReligionMy first memory of theatre is practicing it. The three youngest of my big Irish family homeschooled with other giant families in our region. We were tied together outside the school system by a priority for religion in our formative years. I would have been under ten years old and my group varied within five years of that—which is a wide range for that age. We created plays for our parents to see. There was never a playwright, rarely a director, and if there was, they always decentralized their authority for the benefit of the ensemble. In some sense, we were scared of each other. But also, not at all. True to the risks I run in my professional life now, eager to impress each other more than anyone else, everyone had a strong creative input and our audiences were always smaller than our ensemble.
We were magnificently contemporary. It was the mid to late ‘90’s and we waffled between cartoonish imitation, dead-pan humor, imagined set designs of baroque scale, and thought of plot as something completely separate from character. There was a series of skits which married humour to the sacred by presenting arbitrary improvisation games to the lives of the saints as a costume pageant. There was a morality play—we’d never heard of the morality plays—about the neutral good of peanut butter and the chaotic evil of Jack’s bean-stalk-giant. We found as much joy in comedic theatre sports as we did in representing the sanctified deceased for God. We dressed up as saints for Hallowe’en too, usually in a bathrobe, and took turns telling their stories. Sometimes this necessitated the kind of full character development that I ask my students to undertake in their acting classes today. What are the symbols associated with your character? What do they want? How are you like them? How are you not like them? What intercession can they bring to heaven on our behalf? It was a party. When I learned, years later, that medieval European theatre was partially reborn in Catholic Churches I was tremendously gratified. My earliest memory of being unmistakably in someone else’s audience was Camelot at the Stratford Festival. My family and I loomed over the whole amphitheater from the cheap seats. I wouldn’t have known at the time that this was an unusually huge space belonging to an unusually well-supported festival. It had the social prowess of a hockey game and the timid poignancy of church. I remember feeling the sense of arrested electricity that followed the Act-One closing number. And I remember having the wherewithal to wonder how a bunch of singing grown-ups were mechanically capable of providing that feeling to a whole audience at once. I like to take this as a sign that I was destined to be a theatremaker: interested in deconstructing how a moment of artifice becomes real so that I could understand and build it myself. Or maybe that curiosity can be attributed to the fact that I was surrounded by 2000 upper-class white people making every effort to keep the sweat of their joy from tarnishing their Sunday best. If theatre sets out to celebrate complex feelings, that would be the one Catholic Mass and the Stratford Festival excel at to magnificent measure. Don’t show it. Unless, of course, you’re trying to impress the neighboring pew. At that time in my life, there was good spirituality and bad spirituality. Just as there was good theatre and bad. Good spirituality involved the unfinishable pursuit of purity through the prescribed path of the Catholic Church. And, credit due, it is a carefully crafted path. The Catholic route to heaven is laid out with convenient simplicity while demanding enough from it’s pilgrims to wrinkle your skin. Just like all the best things in life, to be sure. It is good catechism to say that, regarding virtue and sin, to try is to succeed and to not try is to fail. Whether, in this case, art imitates life or the other way around, I can’t be sure. Either way, it’s not the language Catholics usually use around good and evil. The Commandments and the Beatitudes lead our understanding of what is good and what is not-good. There is a staggering amount of theology on Love. And, one of the Church's best-kept secrets, the seven pillars of Catholic Social Teaching: dignity of the human person; call to family, community, and participation; responsibility to uphold human rights; option for the poor and vulnerable (I take that crude and othering rhetoric right out of the catechism); the dignity of work; solidarity of justice towards peace; stewardship of God’s creation. On the whole I’d suggest that we’re failing triumphantly. To say that a very specific group of actions are intrinsically good or not-good, ignores the actual details of morality. I know that, if you care to dig for them, Catholicism has answers. But we don’t dig for them. Our leaders and teachers don’t. For example, if life is sanctified and holy but theft is evil, then what is stealing for the purpose of survival? I simplify. And yet, this is the language we use. However much better the actual theology might be, the language that provides Catholic theology to Catholics constructs how we go about practicing faith. It is for this reason that almost every Church I’ve entered is mostly comprised of happy middle-class white people. It is easier for the privileged to be not-bad than it is to actively pursue good. Stay with me here. The Commandments are a list of don’ts. The Beatitudes are presented as states-of-being. Since these are preferred to the Pillars of Social Teaching, compared to theatre, it would seem Catholic morality doesn’t care about action and pursuit and movement at all. I had an excellent performance pedagogue in my undergrad who would remind us to keep breathing through our exercises. “As soon as you stop breathing, you’re dead,” she would say. To try is to succeed and to not-try is to fail. As for Catholic morality, it doesn’t seem to be breathing This isn’t a criticism of Catholicism itself. It’s a criticism of how it is practiced. And we knew that full well. Which is a big part of why we started homeschooling. We knew that it wasn't enough to be--we wanted to do. Along the way we staged a backyard production of Sophocles’ Antigone. This wasn’t one of our pageants. It was directed by a homeschooling mom who had studied drama. The author was esteemed by a loftily traditional translation that, if we weren’t homeschooling around it, would have been beyond our years to understand. We were attracted to this particular text because it maintained and defended our worldview. We were interested in the integration of church and state and felt strongly that a failure to elevate a mystical morality through public policy would, as Creon’s Seer warns in the play, invoke “furies from death and heaven.” To be absolutely clear, whatever you grow up knowing is ordinary to you. This very-real threat of daemons didn’t feel scary or cruel. It was just the structure of reality. Having a place in that reality provided an amazing source of purpose and therefore often even comfort. We bolstered our rehearsal of Antigone with a year-long unit on Ancient Greece. Our homeschooling curriculum was incredible. It brought us to study architecture, geography, civics, art, language, technology, and literature. We read an age-appropriate translation of The Odyssey. We built models of Ancient Greek weapons and buildings, topographical maps, we employed historical battle strategy in our hockey games. We philosophized on the meaning and shortcomings of democracy. We made incredibly intimate and personal self-portraits from techniques of ancient art. All in the pursuit of producing a play that would conserve our world-view. I think this was my grade six or seven, I can’t be sure. For production, we built masks and cytons (which are not togas) and our parents erected a ten-foot set, imitating the architecture we had gotten to know so well. We went to a nearby community production of a more modern translation of Antigone then dissected it enthusiastically and ruthlessly. The intensity of examination we brought to our production gave theatre it’s importance. Putting on a play was an expression that demanded as much attention, even self-sacrifice, as religion. Everyone’s work was entirely answerable to everyone else. And, in order to do it like the pros, we had to know everything! These are the building blocks of all noble pursuits. Even if the goal is ugly, it’s endeavor demands magnificent triumph—secret and broadcast—through imperfect practice and into realization. The route to heaven is difficult and familiar across disciplines. Rehearsals included our own input on how the chorus choreographed their movement. One choice invoked a tearfully impassioned disagreement between my brother and I. I wanted us to cross our arms and unfold them on the line “beloved brothers.” He wanted us to open our arms and then fold them on the same line. Such drama. Art and religion are magnificently more precise than their reputation suggests. In both cases, the more insignificant a difference there is, the more important it becomes. This is why I gripe. What got us through the gnashing of teeth was the humble disposition demanded by our religion. In this case, my beloved brother’s more than mine. Somehow, the director who agreed to work on this did not share the dogmatic zeal that drew us to the text. After the show my parents hosted a dinner party for the families involved. Two rooms away us kids continued to imagine and imitate early historic conquests until hearing the gradual growth of raised voices from the dining room. We knew full well that the adults of our homeschool group adored each other so the heat of the argument was arresting. Our director was completely on her own: two glasses of wine into a sea of well-intentioned Christian-conservatism. And she wasn’t gifted with the Christ-required humility to breathe and nod her way out of an argument. Judging by the size of it reaching our ears, we became disappointed to assume that our fearless director might have been, evil of evils: in favor of abortion, perhaps! Or maybe she “believed in” euthanasia. Or, God help her eternal soul, what if she wasn’t perfectly heteronormative? Mixing the admiration we had for our director with the realization that the world is so wide, I must have aged a year in those moments. For the better, I think. That was the last time she worked with us. Much later, I ventured to bring it up with the dad who had taught us Homer that year. Apparently they had busied their dinner party with praises for her work on our production. Of course, to suggest that some art is good, even great, means that other art is not. The dining room wasn’t arguing hot-button topics of political morality at all. I’m told she couldn’t reconcile the notion that some art is better than others. How could you compare one creative expression to another? I’m told she was stalwart: by virtue of something being art, it is immune to any arbitration in it’s quality. There is a reason acting is called acting. It is not standing still. And always breathe, if you stop breathing … If that account of dinner is true then it seems to me that our non-Catholic theatre director was more aptly fit for the job than anyone realized at the time. We must define our goals, criticize them, actively dig for the traditional routes to those goals, and then have the wherewithal to appraise successes that might not be consistent with the original goals. Indeed, one of us was more correct than the other regarding what we should do with our arms while saying “beloved brother” (me, obviously, ha!). Some art is better than others. Some religion too. We had to actively move through the motions to understand it though. Not stand still. The struggle between my beloved brother and I is all part of it. There’s a lot I miss about attending Church. Stasis isn’t one of them. I’ve always hated walking into a room full of people who, by my attendance, are free to assume they understand me, my politics, my morality, my spirituality with it’s false lack of struggles. Theatre, on the other hand, provides the same ancient tradition, the dignity to humanity, participation in community, the responsibility to human rights, the “option” for the vulnerable, work, solidarity of peace and justice, stewardship of our space … or does it? Ultimately, as far as I’m concerned, good theatre is tougher to define than good morality or even good spirituality. Despite the ancient history, theatre isn’t a plowed field of scholarship the way religion is. Because it is active and breathing, theatre is still figuring itself out. And, because it is still figuring itself out, it is closer to attaining some better approximation of those seven pillars of social teaching. It breathes. It acts. It lives. It tries. It fails. It fails better. Which is, perhaps, the true reason I have grown to prefer it. Religion isn’t doing these things. It could, perhaps. Could it?
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6/11/2023 11:28:28 pm
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