intellectualism and aesthetics

I saw Mother Courage last night and must say it was quite a wonderful show. The production style lay firmly in a contemporary American style of design and it served the text quite well. By locating the visual language within a modern musical theater world, the emotion and ideas behind the text come through quite strongly. It took me a while to get used to the performance style, but once I did I had a wonderful time.

A friend complained that the staging seemed to be built around a traditional proscenium stage rather than the near three quarter round of the Delacourt. I took the staging to be a "Brechtian" choice and just rolled along with it. Either way I am not sure how much, if at all, it detracts from the experience.

There is a current of theatrical production that tends to over-intellectualize the work. So much effort goes into researching the text, that the play often gets largely ignored. Moss Hart, in Act One, makes the point that sometimes it is better for a writer to approach a subject with no more knowledge than what the average theater goer comes into the play with. In so going, the text can meet the audience at their level, thereby creating a single adventure for the two to go off on. This is a highly effective means of avoiding the deadly trap of didacticism.

By making Mother Courage conform to the visual language of the contemporary Broadway musical, it allowed an otherwise difficult text to be engaged with directly. It sidestepped that deadly didacticism that a lot of "Brechtian" productions of his plays fall into.

Research is a wonderful thing. And I certainly love the various opportunities that different plays provide for researching new and different avenues of thought and inquiry. However, it must be remembered that we are not writing essays. Rather we are constructing a work to entertain an audience. Brecht understands this, which is why there is such a wonderful play between the idea and the emotion and the humor in all of his works.

Once in the theatre, the research must be abandoned. This does not mean to ignore it, but rather to trust that you have done your work and now the focus must shift to a more formal aesthetics. The questions should not be does this or that conform to the research. But rather does this or that look and sound right in the context of this performative moment. The "thinking" such as it is becomes a visual and aural thinking. It is not an intellectual thing at all. In fact, intellectualism can and often does destroy an otherwise beautiful piece of theatre.

The mind is always removed from the immediate world. The mind can only react after it has taken in information and fully processed it. The heart can act directly. It is here, or perhaps the [heartmind], that one must operate in. It is that place of direct action where one does not "think" but rather one acts. That action creates beauty. Allowing the play to be the play and not some intellectualized idea of a text is a difficult thing to do because we love our minds. But our minds often get in the way of our direct action. Preparation certainly can and should exist in an intellectual space, but the direct work itself is a whole different animal.