truepenny | slight epiphany: theatricality

I was thinking about the "reconstructing the crime" scene in The Five Red Herrings and why I'm rather fond of it when in general I loathe that kind of thing, and I realized something about myself.

Viz., I am only comfortable with theatricality when it is clearly marked as such, by being projected on a movie screen, transmitted to a television screen, or performed on a stage. It doesn't have to be a proscenium stage, and I don't mind when actor/characters break the fourth wall (I'd better not, considering how goofy I am about metatextuality and metatheatricality), but even audience participation bits give me the creeps, and street theater, charades, role-playing, even those horrible ice-breaker games that I should have made my students play when I was a TA and never did ... I dislike them all because they're not quarantined.

I went to the Punch & Judy show at the World Fantasy Con and stood in the back, not because I was late (although I was) and certainly not because it was a better vantage point (hello, myopia!), but because I didn't want Punch to "notice" me. I didn't join in any of the audience call and response bits, same way I don't sing when a group not specifically a trained and rehearsed chorus starts singing in public. (Singing in the car is an entirely different matter, and you will stop me only by ripping my vocal cords out.) I don't want the theatrical and the "real" to bleed together. It makes me uncomfortable, twitchy, and intensely self-conscious. It's like shyness, but it's not the same thing. I am also paralytically shy (tho' getting better), so I know whereof I speak. And it's not about performance. I loved acting as a teenager, and more recently, I've never had stage-fright before giving a paper or being on a panel. And I love attending plays and concerts. This isn't a Puritanical antitheatrical stand; it's about category violation.

This attitude toward the theatrical is why I don't want to find out what LARPs are like, or play Mafia, or get involved in an RPG campaign. From a theoretical and academic perspective, I find my own attitude appalling. But personally, I can tell that this is one of those deep-rooted philosophical quirks that one occasionally runs across in oneself; for some part of me a little below the conscious mind, this is a highly principled objection. This is one boundary that I seem to need to BE a boundary.

Now that I know it, I don't know what to do with it. But it is a gift to have a moment like this that allows you to make sense of a small piece of yourself.