If theater didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. It just had to happen. An art this important requires its own creation myth, an after-the-fact explanation for how storytelling became a performing art. The big one is also historical: In the arenas of ancient Greece an inspired thespian named, well, Thespis added an actor to the traditional choruses who regularly performed the civic narrative myths that were huge and mandatory popular entertainment. This addition of a solo speaker forever altered religious rituals into theatrical make-believe by turning a chant into a story, adding conflict to liturgy. Other characters were added to create scenes and subplots.
The show that must go on finally began.
If there were independent "creations" of theater in other times and places (China, Mesoamerica, the Fertile Delta, the Nile river valley), they remain shrouded in history. But the psychological origin of theater is no less important than the historical one. As a species we are hard wired for theater, continually reinventing it with each generation.
You can see the eternal spring of theater in the youngest "players." When I was a substitute teacher, I got to teach drama at all levels. Getting kids to make up a play was a cinch with grades two through eight. Give them a rough plot outline and they'd immediately divide up into a director and actors and start the storytelling. The boys would invariably find ways to work weapons into the action and dialogue, too often rubbing out characters rather than developing them. The girls would work on conciliatory plot strategies to bring everyone together into a happy ending minus any corpses whatsoever.
There was a problem, however, with getting the high-school kids to improvise theater. All efforts stumbled on two seeming contradictions: Now nearly adults, they imagined themselves as too sophisticated and cool for anything as supposedly uncool as mere make-believe. At the same time, being fledgling adolescents, their awareness of their "lack of form" made it hard for them to leap into imaginary scenarios. How could they pretend to be someone they weren't when they weren't sure who they were in the first place? It seemed as if self-consciousness hurt acting every bit as much as insincerity.
Strangely enough, at the same time, it made them great audience members. Like human chameleons, they could become whatever they saw, identifying for better or worse with gang-banging rappers, anorexic models, Peace Corps volunteers, and a certain presidential candidate. It seemed as if all the energy they refused to put into creating characters was silently committed to empathizing with them. The need for theater remained. Only the outlet differed.
As for adults, that drive for a divine distraction doesn't decline. If anything, it enlarges as we push back as life tries to limit us. We end up by invoking all our creativity to come up with alternatives. We need to see, not just know, that a real girl named Anne Frank refused to lose her humanity though hidden away in an Amsterdam attic. We want to see New York gangs tearing into a mambo at a sock hop. We need to see Joseph or Mary Poppins escape the stage and fly right over us.
This "tell-me-a-story" imperative explains why three-dimensional,
actual-time theater is implicit in the human psyche, the true source of its origin. It's further proof of the single most distinguishing cognitive faculty that separates us from animals: imagination. A cat doesn't have time or thought to fantasize over a world that doesn't contain its master, a food tray, comfy furniture and a few favorite toys. But from the start the human child plays with possibilities as much as toys. This capacity for make-believe, along with our constant hunger for change, is exactly what made Thespis turn a fixed ceremony into a fluid story, just as medieval theater brought the Bible to life for illiterate and very grateful audiences (with the holy characters played, no less by their friends and townsfolk too!).
But to really definite theater by its negation, try the "It's A Wonderful Life" strategy of seeing what would happen if it didn't. Imagine if George Bailey (i.e., theater as we know it) were to have symbolically jumped off a bridge, leaving behind a world that never knew him or it. Would we even recognize that world?
Leaving aside whether dance, film or simple storytelling would also perish from a planet where what you see is all you get, we'd be reduced to a place without parallels, precedents or possibilities. There'd be no way to literally act out what it means to be human. What you'd see is all you'd get, as if there were no reason or way to think that things as they are aren't exactly what they were meant to be and couldn't be different without forfeiting everything. Pretending to be someone you weren't would be a dangerous deception, since you'd be living in a rigid world too busy to entertain any lies. Every politician would mean and keep each promise made. Every lawyer would believe in his client's innocence and argue accordingly. No one would ever say they were in love unless it was a mutual intoxication. The truth wouldn't set us free, but it would be in our faces as nothing less than wall-to-wall actuality.
I don't think we can take such scary sincerity. We'd just reinvent theater so that once more we could work out our problems at a safe distance, with splendid surrogates making and fixing our mistakes. And, most important, an audience left to learn from them. Every stage is a machine for pondering everything outside it. Art makes sense when life can be too close for comfort. That sounds like a system worth saving and reinventing over and over.
author Lawrence Bommer
