The Theatre is staging Scintilla at 101, 215 14 av SW, from the 12th to the 27th of September. The play draws on domestic drama themes enveloped by broader questions of environmental crisis and generational trauma. The play follows Marianne, a reclusive artist and vintner, clinging to her home in the midst of a raging wildfire. The uneasy union between Marianne and her son Michael (accompanied by his girlfriend Nora) elicits conversations around long-buried resentments and unspoken secrets. The situation is complicated by the presence of Stanley, a survivalist, and Roberto, a homeless itinerant.
The play is essentially a character driven drama; there are no elaborate plot drives that generate the action. I mean, yes, there is a wildfire that compels the family to make serious decisions. Those decisions, though, seem to be less about logistical complexity and more about the emotional world that they inhabit and the fault lines that cut across their relationships. This is a culturally recurring theme in modern day drama (theatre and cinema), the micro-drama of the family is writ large into the world and re-projects itself as an apocalyptic event. This sort of genre has become increasingly criticized for regurgitating micro-apocalypse themes ad nauseam, that we have reached a point of aesthetic fatigue with these types of dramas, they have become private allegories that have taken on banal dimensions.
I do not agree with this critique at all, what is wrong with genre repetition? As Slavoj Zizek (Slovenian Philosopher) states, “something truly new can only emerge through repetition” (The Organs without Bodies) - repetitive cultural products create the conditions for historically analyzing what it is we have done and what it is we should have done differently. It (repetition) opens up dimensions of historical insight and awareness that would not be available to us if we were not willing to open the past up to interrogation, and in many cases this interrogation (conscious or unconscious) is the product of repetition. There is always a ‘missed encounter’ with history. We all feel and know it; call it nostalgia, regret or shame – it has many words, but the emotional understanding of what such a missed encounter means is painful and visceral to almost all of us. Living with a constant awareness of one’s lost history (potential) would be impossible, hence the gift of forgetting, of throwing that awareness somewhere behind the constant stream of sensory images that flood the mind. The gift of forgetting is the result of psychological repression, a poisoned chalice that can take from us just as much as it gives. The relationship between Marianne and Michael’s is certainly emblematic of that, there is much that has been forgotten, but in that forgetting there are wounds that have not been cauterized, her refusal to leave her house (when on the verge of being engulfed by a fire) is I argue the result of someone who has come to enjoy their symptom far too much. The satisfaction of saying ‘no’ is a form of enjoyment, one that is had at the expense of her son, this ‘no’ is not only a fierce declaration of personal agency, but is emblematic of the hidden perversity (I mean this is the psychoanalytical and not moral sense) that is enjoyed when personal suffering is weaponized.
R.D. Laing (Scottish Psychiatrist) stated that repression was especially necessary for the family unit to function, for what family could possibly exist if it constantly stood on the cusp of reconjuring the trauma of its missed encounters? For the family to function, it must (unconsciously) employ a massive amount of psychological collusion to maintain the illusion that it is the result of healthy emotional choices. The family is not only a social construct, but a psychological one. Witness the paradoxical logic of the family, “So we are a happy family, and we have no secrets from one another. If we are unhappy, we have to keep it a secret, and we are unhappy that we have to keep it a secret. We are also unhappy that we have to keep secret the fact that we have to keep it a secret, and that we are all keeping that secret. But since we are a happy family, you can see that this difficulty does not arise.” (R.D. Laing, politics of the family and other essays). Without getting into the details of the play, secrets abound between Michael and his mother Marianne. Secrets are kept from children to shield them from the emotionally complex and convoluted worlds of adults, the expectation is that children need to believe that a family is whole, that a family unit is the cumulative result of ethically sound decisions. This is ironic because children instinctively know that such an ethical coherence is an illusion, but they nourish the illusion all the same. Not doing so would be an acknowledgment of the fractures that lie at the very foundation of the family. If one were especially cynical, this dynamic would be termed as the conspiracy of the modern family. It is in some ways a conspiracy, because its survival depends on the collective repression of pain, and more importantly, the practice of conversational evasion that comes with such repression.
This may be far too cynical though, pain can be experienced anywhere, and sometimes maybe it is better that we experience it with people who share our history, however fractured, than have to bear it in isolation. Also, where in the world will alienation and unhappiness not be found? Maybe, life is not found in some myth of wholeness but is found in conditions where we are most alienated (by this I do not mean brutalizing socio-economic conditions, championing such forms of alienation would be socially destructive). By alienation I mean a downward plunge in life, situations where we oscillate between nothingness and personal revelation. A collapse or a plunge is not something foreign to life, but is constitutive of it, the very rhythm by which existence discloses itself. There are those moments where the ground beneath us begins to give way, for Heidegger (German Philosopher) these moments are part of what he called the ‘throwness’ (we are thrown into a world not of our making) of human life, the random and arbitrary force of life rubs violently against us, exposing the rational limits of the world and the human mind. Where do we experience this more acutely than in the family? Illnesses, deaths, affairs, etc., but for Heidegger this is quite possibly the price that we must always pay for attempting to venture into the world and trying to understand it. Turning the unknown into the known is always full of risk and danger, there is a necessary shattering that comes with breaking into the un-said and the un-done. Marianne’s revelation of her erotic history to her son is in many ways reflective of this, this revelation is painful, but necessary, it is in fact indispensable for the genuine and authentic encounter between parent and child. R.D. Laing was right in some respects, but wrong in reducing the entire family structure to nothing else than lobotomized individuals, because it (family) cannot only be understood as a mechanism of repression. It is the site, par excellence, where we encounter the fundamental truth of our 'thrown-ness', in family we are both shielded and unshielded, it is where the unchosen nature of existence most vividly expresses itself, and this is where the task of actively constructing meaning in our lives begins.
I was philosophically interested in how all of these personalities enjoy their symptoms (anxiety-ridden fixations) – forms of enjoyment born of political and moral fixation. Martin’s technological rationalism, Nora’s veganism, Stanley’s survivalist fantasies are all emblematic of this. This pathological solace is most pronounced in Marianne’s response to her ailing health, which is to fall into wine-induced revelry. The outside world no longer seems threatening but becomes a stage for her defiance. Her satisfaction with where she is, and who she is, is the result of what Jacques Lacan (French Psychoanalyst) called jouissance, enjoyment born of suffering, she experiences the world through her symptom and not in spite of it. Like mother like son though, Michael’s brooding of the past is something else besides unresolved pain, he has become too used to grieving, he cultivates a grim sustenance from loss. Marianne revels in her symptom by saying ‘No’, but Michael in rehearsing his wounds does not only look for the truth, but like his mother, has come to enjoy his symptom far too much. There are political examples of this at home, institutional deadlocks and debates that become less about the addressing social symptoms and more about relishing the contrived stressors that animate our civic lives with intrigue and contestation. Our digital lives are saturated with online arguments that look for confrontation - enjoyment comes not from resolution but from nursing the wound, letting it fester, and then pricking it again.
Why do we have a cultural fascination with apocalyptic events? (local or global) This is, quite possibly, the repackaging of religious eschatology (religious end of days, cosmic war between light and dark, return of the messiah). This theme is very subtly hinted at when Michael tells Stanley that neither he nor Nora are religious, but this can very well be read as a meta-critique of a culture that has re-summoned biblical motifs around global destruction and annihilation. Let's be honest, the world is in trouble, but like our religious forebearers we modernists may secretly pine for some apocalyptic closure to what has always been a very messy world. There is a perverse pleasure that comes with imagining our annihilation, our secular world is no exception to the eschatological jouissance that we have long lived with - we are haunted by what such an end would look like, but we are, Lacan might say, secretly consoled by the dark and surreal closure that our cultural entertainment around species-level annihilation brings.
I do not want to reveal the end of the play, but suffice to say, the central theme of pain in this play is also the central theme of liberation, i.e., family. We see all five of them out in the dark unknown, and this potentially symbolizes the ideological hope that we still have in family. In the hope that no matter where it is we are careening towards and what dangers we are confronting that we will still choose to move together, with our families, through the world, and that we will do it as shared history in motion. There is also the idea, that the annihilation of our external world is bearable if we are reconciled with our loved ones. Maybe the real apocalypse at a personal level, as the play suggests, is not a dying and broken world but a dying and broken family. Laing's point is that families are not destroyed by their symptoms, they are destroyed only when the dialogue around them ceases. Any family, no matter its neuroses, can survive - as long as it has a shared commitment to name what hurts.
To the production – From what I understand, this is a new theatre company. The passion and strength required to put up a new company is brave and admirable. The avant-garde spirit is strong with this company; you see it in the marketing and the promotional materials. It is important to recognize the immense level of sacrifice and commitment required to do that. This is why I have chosen to adopt a light touch with this review, we cannot kill something before it has been born, but we can be honest. For an established theatre company (even at an amateur level), the reviews will always be what they have been, polemical and razor-tipped, for start-ups, such an approach is not only counterproductive but destructive. Why the latter? If we ask people to take risks (which we always do on this blog), then we cannot extinguish that artistic temperament before it has taken concrete shape and form. No, we must applaud and support it.
That being said, support must be coupled with honesty, otherwise is not really support, just indifference and apathy. Engaging with conversations, even one's that we may not agree with, always creates an opening – whether such an opening results in acceptance or rejection is besides the point, it is the broadening of our interpretive horizons, in the very process of engagement, that makes all these conversations vital.
The pacing and dramatization of the characters in this production evidence quite clearly the fact that this is a new company and they are potentially short of people with technical experience. The characters often seemed unsure where to sit, when to move and how to move. The physical representation of movement was at times uncoordinated, and this reflects a lack of behavioral intent. This is most evident in the interactions between Michael and Stanley, the relationship between them is a difficult dynamic to represent on stage, but it starts with movement, and it falters most when they are both interacting with one another. Stanley’s sitting on the couch and getting up off of it three times in the span of 15 seconds is not a representation of character, it is a representation of artistic indecision. This behavioral indeterminacy was also a problem with other characters, they seemed undecided on where it is they should be situated and you could see them thinking about where it is they needed to move. This is usually something an audience will not want to see, we want to see emotional vulnerability but we do not want to see real time analytical decisions being made by actors.
Stanley had some powerful lines, but the audibility was not there, it is hard to understand a character when they cannot be heard. For a forum like the theatre, a voice that cannot be heard leaves the character and the audience stranded. Stanley has a powerful monologue in between, the impact did not land because of the lack of audibility as well as the fact that the characters did not seem to be following the monologue on stage. This was a general problem in this production, the characters did not seem to be listening to each other. This always presents a problem for the audience because they will instinctively ask why it is they should be paying attention when the characters on stage are not. Many of the dramatic beats did not seem well fleshed out or studied, for example, Marianne’s scene with Michael where she issues a personal revelation seemed to be desultory and left to unfold in a moment rather than carefully built. Spontaneity is important, but without the scaffolding of beat mapping these moments can come across as incomplete on stage. The relationship between Michael and Nora seemed far too plain, there is no relationship that I know of that is that plain, there are always hidden nuances, evasions and aversions that, both, hide and reveal themselves in small moments. It was unclear to me, at the end, what the nature of their relationship was, what did it symbolize for them? No idea. The play rides on Marianne, and she has some great moments, but the characterization is uni-dimensional, most of her moments on stage seem to follow the law of equivalency; each scene echoes the last rather than diversifying and deepening her presence on stage.
Michael comes across as pensive, replete with grievances, but this starts to become predictable as the play goes on, the little nuances and flourishes of organic change and development do not happen before our eyes, so we are not sure what sort of change Michael has experienced. He has obviously experienced some change, the ending quite clearly shows us that, but it feels assumed and very textual, but not earned. Nora enlivens the stage in the first 15 mins, but after that it becomes, again, predictable, the beats look unfinished and her relationship with Marianne also comes across as unfinished. Nora’s responses in her big scene with Marianne leaves us with a blank ambiguity – we are not entirely sure what inner changes they are experiencing, from a technical standpoint this is probably because most the dramatic beats were undeveloped. Many of Nora's moments are repeated with the same tonal and emotional register; this leaves Nora’s arc unfinished and leaves us with the impression that we have not seen her vitality express itself with contextual force. I was also unsure of the role that Roberto plays in this production; does he symbolize something? (at a textual level, he may represent the existential vagrancy that we experience between never fully feeling as feral as Stanley or as digitally integrated into the world like Michael?), at the level of dramatic representation his character’s intent and role was very unclear to me.
Along with the deficit of active listening on stage was a lack of dramatic immersion, it was very hard for me to believe the characters, and I could not look past the acting. I also wondered why the stage was not being used more – people eat, they drink, they put their feet up, they inhabit personal space with the lived rhythm of their bodies, this was (except for Roberto eating a sandwich and Marianne’s incessant wine consumption) nowhere to be seen. This makes it even harder to look past the acting, and in some ways exposes a sort of a catch 22 situation in these instances – when actors inhabit the stage, they cease to be natural, even though they go on stage with the assumption that they have something of the naturalness of life to share. The audience are not there for the act of theatre they are there for the presence of theatre; to witness the hidden but pulsating vitality of life. In R.D. Laing’s sense this presence is entangled with a strange sense of repression, the theatre represses the secret of the audience’s presence, but it is that repression that sustains the illusion that the theatre can present some personal closure or discovery to us. There is no such disclosure to be found in this production, perhaps because the company is still circling the stage without having yet found its own truth.
The company is still in the process of discovering itself. It embodies the spirit of two characters in Scintilla. Marianne's defiance echoes the resolve and determination of this theatrical company to find its footing, even in a difficult climate for actors and companies they choose to brave the metaphorical wildfire of the market and audience inconstancy. Like Roberto, though, they are still itinerant, searching for purpose and carrying the weight of the future without a clear direction of where it might belong.
This production is a 'missed encounter', but this is not always the end of things. Sometimes, the missed encounter is what clears the space for the real one to arrive.
P.S. Before the play starts, we hear an announcer say something to the effect of, 'you are seated in the midst of something incredible'. Let the art and the stagecraft do the talking. Ultimately, quality is all that really matters, let the rhetoric emanate from the audience, that will always happen if they love the show :-)