slight epiphany: theatricality

[truepenny]

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.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'm a dreadful person. My first thought was "You could use that", meaning that one could, in fiction, write things that push that boundary and use the edge to get... well, edginess.

I hate practical jokes and surprise parties and much audience participation because it is embarrassing, and it's designed to be funny because someone is being embarrassed. I hate it the same way I hate sitcoms.

But the edge between performance and not performance, contained and not contained, could be quite effectively used in fantasy where the line of real and not real is already wavery.

I now want to write something that goes over and over that line in the same way that Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound does only not a play.

Do you like Stoppard?

(The Player King is, it suddenly occurs to me, himself a survivor of the Trojan war, one of those many people who fled Troy to found a nation, except it was in his case a repertory company. And he is, as you can tell from the names, related to the Fisher King, maybe he's his brother, so it makes sense that it isn't successful... and he has come there with a purpose, and this idea really made sense a moment ago, I wonder if I'm delirious?)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, of COURSE you could use it. And it could be absolutely fascinating. Although I think avoiding the public humiliation aspect would be a plus--and I agree with you, that's a big part of why it makes me tense and crabby. I haven't read much Stoppard (nor seen, for that matter, except for one fairly execrable undergraduate production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), but I like what I've read.

I like your Player King idea ... I don't know if it makes sense or not, but I like it. And, I mean, if Aeneas can found Rome and Brutus can found London, why can't a Trojan refugee found a repertory company? Also, possibly, he would be related to the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman. Perhaps there was a curse. Perhaps THAT's why Macbeth is an unlucky play.

Oh dear. I'll stop now.