The Stuff of Dreams
Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater
by Leah Hager Cohen
Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger can write about peril, mortality, heroism. So can Leah Hager Cohen. Nobody in this book tries to climb Mount Everest or catch swordfish in a hurricane, but everyone here responds to a drive that can lead to suffering and danger.
If you're reading these notes, chances are you have done some time in community theater, maybe even directed a show or served on a board. A lot of what happens here will seem familiar:
The Arlington (Mass.) Friends of the Drama (AFD) decides to put up David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly as the second title in its 1998-99 season. The play explores sexuality as an aspect of colonialism, or possibly the other way around. A French diplomat takes a Peking Opera star as his mistress, to discover much later that she's exploited him on behalf of Chinese intelligence. (And that she's a man.) AFD has several good reasons to choose this property: recent work, critical esteem, New York success, smallish cast, unit set, good parts, possibility of balancing sexes in casting. There are arguments against it too: nudity (both sexes), sexual identity as theme, need for an actor of Asian heritage, no happy ending.
The play-reading committee proposes M. Butterfly; many AFD members feel the show will drive off longtime supporters and offend against local standards. Besides, the company has no links to Asian-American talent. But the title attracts a strong, articulate director who can recruit a superb production team, and the season also features the musical comedy Funny Girl, Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor, the vastly attractive Blood Brothers, and the solemn Marvin's Room with its Leo DiCaprio/wasting disease hook. The company decides it needs to reach out to unfamiliar communities, and the show goes forward.
The director prepares a casebook on the play and resolves to cancel the project if no Asian-American lead turns up. The designers and choreographer study Chinese motifs and the brief performance history of the property. Audition week comes, but no one knows whether it will be possible to cast the show.
It is. The cast includes AFD regulars as well as newcomers, and rehearsals are ready to start, but Funny Girl can't get a running crew together, so the Butterfly staff cancels two weeks of rehearsals in order to help out. New entries appear in the Book of Favors. In the end, Butterfly has just over five weeks to get ready.
Not only do the lead players have a mountain of lines to learn, but the production has to cope with an unfamiliar movement style, a diabolical prop plot, design changes, malfunctioning effects, personal blocks, not enough weeks. The unknown playing Song Liling won't open up, and the veteran in the Gallimard role has trouble learning his lines. The three kurogo, "invisible" onstage assistants, find it hard to discover what reward they are supposed to be deriving from their crushing work. The costumer becomes obsessed with tiny details, and the set-building crew must create a unique but smoothly working look from the designer's inadequate notes. Weeks roll by, and everybody on the show runs out to the thin edge of their resources.
I did say much of this would seem familiar if you've worked in community theater. Then what is special about the story and the way Cohen tells it?
In the popular "trail-along" line of nonfiction, the naïve reporter combines watching with interviewing, often adding a spell of library research. In the best work of this kind, the reporter comes to respect the thing observed, but the guard never drops; the reader perceives measured sympathy without too much partisanship. (In the worst, the reporter can't make head or tail of the process and the reader gets nothing, or worse.)
The Stuff of Dreams differs from the standard trail-along in that the writer has lived through the process before and knows the folk and their ways. As a child, Cohen marveled at "summer people" filling the house night after night at a remote stock theater. Her mother involved her with the edgy Bread and Puppets troupe, where she learned to dance on stilts. She performed and worked as a techie at the local community theater and even attended the Tisch School for a year, dropping out to tour with Arts for a New Nicaragua.
A writer with such a connection to her "subject" ceases to be a reporter, or anyway a straight-up one. The story won't follow some objective logic or narrative structure but gets steered by her special insights and prejudices. The result can be a mess, like a Socialist Realist biography where every sentence points to the hero's triumph, or it can be a thrilling and satisfying work if the writer knows that suspense lies at the center of the whole project. That's the case here. Does M. Butterfly go up, does it make back the nut, does it go to the spring competition? Does Patrick ever smile, will the blood bag rip on cue, can the kurogo learn their blocking as it changes every night?
Cohen includes episodes from theater life in order to make the reader aware of the mental currents that guide her telling. While these digressions don't plainly relate to the progress of the story, they serve to tie this M. Butterfly to the world it exists in: the evidently universal drive to do theater, the history of Arlington, the contrast in attitude between amateurs and pros.
Arlington Friends of the Drama (like some other theater companies) started as a ladies' club; the minutes of its early meetings told which members were distinguished by being chosen to "pour." The club in turn had its genesis in the pageant movement before the First World War, an effort that put artistic urges at the service of civic virtues. Connect: Community theater has a long history, and people who took part in it were not always viewed as sort of pas comme il faut.
It isn't just Americans who do amateur theater; Finns and Russians and Koreans do it too. Nicaraguans watch your performance, then borrow your stilts and give you one in return. What drives us to create drives folks all over the world to create. It isn't likely that performers in a Swedish community theater have a much easier time than those in Massachusetts, or that they will draw a line, This far for a better show, no farther. Connect: It's more than a leisure-time activity, it's something you can't stop doing.
Cohen's side-stories provide many such connections. She doesn't turn aside from the M. Butterfly story, she amplifies it, showing how an actor's travail with a bruising part ties up with a kid stretching out on a catwalk to watch a scene over and over, or with a householder searching his attic for a broken musket to use as a prop.
If what I've said has not suggested this already, The Stuff of Dreams is a marvelous book. Anyone who's driven screws on a theater set or stood quietly Upstage holding a halberd or typed up a rehearsal calendar—or who's taken a star bow or found an unexpected flower in the dressing room—will find it touching and exhilarating.
(To read a review that doesn't agree with mine, click here.)
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
Stuff of Dreams