That Eternal Question

We briefly interrupt the Mallorca saga (which I have to finish before I go to Paris this weekend) to bring more in the ongoing debate.

I don't mean what happens after you die.

I mean what is or is not theatre.

Friday night I had no plans and my roommate is gone for the weekend so I decided to go see a show. I picked one and headed to the theatre, but by the time I got there it was sold out. I was momentarily bummed, because I had taken the subway and walked a ways (and was wearing heels, so, there's that). But the ticket guy had asked me if I was specifically asking about Vereantes, which made it sound like there was something else showing that night.

There was. I still don't really know the name of it, but I read about it in their season booklet that they had on the counter. It said something about a piano and a machine, and didn't particularly sound like theatre, more like an avant garde concert, but I figured as long as I was there I would go, because I would never get another opportunity to see whatever the hell this was going to be.

I really didn't need the opportunity. There was a piano, and someone played it, quite well, and there was also a strange machine made of a lot of mundane objects that sometimes banged and whistled and tooted and had an organ in it? to the rhythm and in tune with the piano, and other time it was completely dissonant. And sometimes there was just a lot of banging. And every once in a while the other three people who seemed more like sound techs than actors (literally plugging in amps and stuff during the show) would play an accordian or an electric guitar or a keyboard. And every once in a while all four of them would yell in some language that wasn't English or Spanish. I couldn't even trace an arc through the music, and trust me, I was desperately trying to find something to cling to as a thread I could follow.

For the first ten minutes, it was kind of funny. I thought, great, I'm finally at one of those weird European theatre productions that my design teacher always used to talk about, and I have no idea what's going on and that's okay. And then for about the next 45 minutes, I was just really annoyed I had spent money on watching people make noise.

I hate to bring up Peter Brook, because he generally annoys the crap out of me, but dammit he has a point. (For non-theatre people: Peter Brook is a really pretentious British (redundant?) guy who is a really important theatrical theorist. We had to read his book, The Empty Space, the summer before we started at Playwrights, and I hated it.) Anything can be theatre. Theatre is, simply put, a live interaction between an audience and an event, even if that event is just observing an object. It doesn't even have to be framed on a stage, though this was. I would probably put something involving the word "crafted" in my definition, but that could be argued. I'm not sure anymore what the difference is between theatre and any other kind of performance. If you go to the symphony, the musicians aren't playing for you to watch them; they're playing for you to hear the music from their instruments. But you can still watch the faces, the looks of concentration, and in that way it's still theatre.

Side note, I was all excited to go see something at "Teatro de la Abadia" which is in an abandoned church, and the space was kind of cool, but they didn't use the architecture of the space at all and I therefore spent the entire time thinking about how much better PHTS kids would use the space. And then I was grateful for my education, even if I was being subjected to an hour of noise that I paid for.