A close friend of mine became an Episcopalian, and not long ago he invited me to his confirmation. Before the candidates came forward to confirm their baptismal vows, the visiting bishop asked the church’s children to gather around him at the baptismal font. He gave a brief homily about baptism and confirmation there, one calculated to register with both adults and children.
At one point, the bishop punctuated his remarks by reaching into the basin and sprinkling some water on the children. Many of us adults smiled and tittered. The kids squirmed a little, but they held their peace.
After he had finished his homily, the bishop asked the children a few questions pertinent to it. The kids gave thoughtful answers. Then one girl, around seven, asked the bishop a question: “Will you visit here again?”
The bishop’s face brightened. “I hope I’ll be invited back,” he said. “I really like being here.”
“When you come back,” the child instructed, “don’t touch the water.”
This past June, during an Imperial Russian Ballet Company production in Izmir, Turkey, an orange cat attacked Romeo’s hair just after Romeo had poisoned himself. A video of the cat’s attack went viral. On it, you can hear some of the onlookers’ laughter. I confess that the first few times I saw the video, I laughed until I cried.
The cat test
Most actors don’t care to be upstaged by animals or young children. The problem isn’t just that children and animals are often cute. The problem, according to playwright, director and performer Chris Goode, is that children and animals often undermine a common understanding of the actors’ authority, which is based entirely on the illusion that the play’s script would create. Playwrights, the idea goes, should be authors, and plays should unfold like prose fiction. Children and animals, bless them, often don’t follow the script.
But a stage can’t be controlled as much as can a book or a movie screen. And, really, why should a play’s script or its prompt book aspire to an author’s or a movie director’s level of control? Goode thinks a script, in a better balance with its stage, can give a play at once less control and more authority:
. . . where the will to control is relaxed, authority is not weakened but extended . . . authority becomes inclusive: what is authored is not the event, but the space in which the event takes place—in other words, authoring here is an act in which the “space” of the event as conceived undergoes its transition into a “place” which, ideally, teems with life . . .1
Goode’s distinction between space and place seems to reprise the medieval distinction between locus (the representational space) and platea (the presentational space) still alive in Shakespeare’s theater, at least as Robert Weimann relates the distinction. In medieval theater, the locus were fixed spaces on stage that represented major locations in the particular narrative, for instance, heaven, hell, Ananias’s high seat, and the empty tomb. No direct communication occurred between characters stationed there and the audience. The platea, on the other hand, were practices, sometimes done among the audience and sometimes on stage close to the audience, by which the audience was addressed directly. Weimann gives the example of the fool in three French miracle plays who addresses the audience and comments on events represented in the locus: “‘This must have happened long, long ago,’ he tells them directly.”2
In Elizabethan theater, the non-negotiable authority of the locus, fixed often in medieval theater’s biblical storylines, became “the fictive world of the playscript,” as Jean E. Howard, in her review of Weimann’s work, puts it. The Elizabethan platea bore more resemblance to its medieval forebears, constituting “the place of the clown, the fool, and the madman who often more nearly inhabit the real time of stage performance and, with their improvisations and earthy speech, breach the wall separating actor and audience.”3
One finds Izmir’s cat breaching that wall with the clown, the fool, and the madman.
Shakespeare and Elizabethan theater in general welcomed both locus and platea, allowing them to examine and qualify each other. But as the actor’s and playhouse’s authority gave way to the script’s authority sometime after 1610, Weimann suggests, the people lost their voice in the public space of theater.
We assume that Shakespeare’s productions at the Curtain Theatre and the Globe Theatre, such as Romeo and Juliet, would have been entirely locus affairs as Shakespeare’s plays mostly are performed today. But our modern Shakespeare productions typically focus only on Shakespeare’s scripts and not on platea features of Shakespeare’s theater not contained in the scripts.4 These features include comic actors among the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men such as Will Kempe, who performed as a “clown in Shakespeare’s company for much of the 1590s, [and who] spoke directly to the audience, improvised lines, or performed jigs and displays of acrobatic prowess.”5 The Curtain and Globe were both outdoor theaters, and the Globe’s stage was surrounded on three sides by groundlings who could see one another as well as the actors in broad daylight. The audience members, from the perspective of one another, were part of the show. And some of the Elizabethan theater’s comic relief appears to have been either improvisational or the promptbooks’ recordings of previous improvisation.6
The long struggle between locus and platea, Weimann suggests, amounts in part to a struggle between the powerful, who occupy the script, and the lowly, who occupy the place—the stage and audience—and who breach the wall separating stage and audience.7
I’m not suggesting that a cat pulling at Romeo’s hair wouldn’t have sent the Globe’s audience into hysterics. But I think Juliet, if not Romeo with her, would have at least acknowledged and perhaps even accommodated the cat, perhaps with some impromptu comic relief. Maybe recycle some of Mercutio’s dying words? “Zounds, a cat, to scratch a man to death!”
What if today’s plays accommodated cats? About twenty years ago—long before Izmir’s cat stole Romeo and Juliet—Goode proposed “the cat test.” If you let a cat loose on stage, can the piece being performed “accommodate and include and refer to the cat”?8 Goode’s piece The Forest and the Field played in four different cities, and each city’s performances involved a different cat. The Forest’s script, as far as it went, didn’t mention cats. But Goode would introduce the cat with the players at each show’s outset.
One city’s cat stayed on the stage, climbing a ladder there and interacting with an actor. But another city’s cat spent the play sleeping in its owner’s lap. A third city’s cat mewed sadly for much of the play, though its owner assured Goode that the cat was fine.9
Presumably, while the audiences either enjoyed Goode’s cats or were annoyed by them or forgot about them entirely (or all three), the cats never shattered a sense of the places where the audiences watched—and sometimes responded—and the actors acted, watching in their turn the audiences.10
What’s the point of “the cat test”? The cat, it might be said, swallows the role of the canary in the proverbial coal mine. Does the play offer sufficient mediation between the actor’s “liveness” and “the here-and-now of a particular audience”?11 Does the play seem to promise a real future, one in which even the players can’t anticipate everything but in which the audience and the players face the future together in a kind of implied covenant?12
Goode would say that in Izmir, the answers were no, at least until the cat attacked Romeo’s hair.
The tension between representational & presentational spaces
Theater has a wonderfully tangled relationship with structure. Even on stage, structure can ossify and oppress. But theater, at its best, uses its structure to challenge structure.
Theater’s structure includes the script and stage conventions that both figuratively and literally keep the audience in the dark. Most of us sign up for this dark side most of the times we go to see a play, but Goode sees the darkness as a degradation of public space. The private and public aspects of a play entirely written in private and then staged in a dedicated theater become “wretchedly mixed up in each other’s operations.”13
Ironically, perhaps, Goode has staged one of his most public plays, Homemade, in people’s homes. The homes’ different layouts and objects and the play’s mix of predetermined plot and improvisational dialog based on the actors’ discovered surroundings allow the play to become “fully live and actually specific in place and time”—two requirements for public space.14
Some of this liveness and specificity happened at my friend’s confirmation even though no one, including the children, signed up to be spritzed. (Admittedly, activating the building’s sprinkler system would have been fairer to the children.) The seven-year-old’s instruction brought down the house because (I think) she was defending the locus, the representational space (the baptismal water) by ad libbing in the platea, the presentational space. The tension between the child’s message and her means of presenting it was positively Shakespearean.
Liturgy overthrows the structures it uses
Liturgy, which has a wonderfully tangled history with theater itself, has a similar relationship with structure. Aidan Kavanagh, a monk and Yale Divinity School professor, explains:
. . . liturgy, like ritual in general, exists to undercut and overthrow the very structures it uses. This is not because the Gospel is similarly antistructural, which it is, but because historic human wisdom has detected that human structures ossify and become oppressive or disintegrate when left to themselves.15
Liturgy uses the archaic, which Kavanagh distinguishes from the obsolete, to challenge structure. As a political force, the archaic’s “unrecognized reservoirs of memory” may be “overwhelming” and “difficult to control.”16
Liturgy, of course, mostly doesn’t work that way today. Liturgy’s archaic elements—a rite’s “richly ambiguous corporate actions done with water, oil, food, and the touch of hands”—long ago were largely replaced by printed texts.17 For centuries, Kavanagh points out, we Westerners have been compelled in church buildings
. . . to sit still in ranks of immovable pews resembling lines of type marching across a page and to follow what was being said aloud by watching a text or reading a score.18
Goode’s re-subordination of the playwright’s private act of writing to the public act of acting has its analogue in liturgy. Kavanagh helped to create the field of liturgical theology by re-subordinating disembodied theology to the act of liturgy. Liturgy, he argues, isn’t an expression of doctrine. Instead, doctrine is worked out in liturgy, in the assembly’s public life.
Just as Goode would expand the situs of theater beyond the stage, so also Kavanagh would have us expand liturgy to where it began—the streets. By the fifth century, Christian liturgy in urban areas amounted to a day’s worth of processions from and to various assembly points. Christians involved in this city-wide liturgy assumed what citizens of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem before them had assumed: every city needs “its own proper cult.”19 For Christians, however, the city served by liturgy was both here and not yet here:
. . . this full public liturgy, this urban act, this duty owed to God like taxes were owed to the state (the word leitourgia was used in antiquity to designate both sorts of acts) was simply the Church manifested in its deepest nature in the human civitas as the presence, the embodiment in the world of the World to come, of the Kingdom, of the new and final age.20
The contradiction inherent in a now-and-not-yet city creates spaces for imagining a just and inclusive public life.
In a theatrical and secular context, Goode explores similar now-and-not-yet spaces. As an actor, he likes to open his plays by greeting the audience: “Hello. Thank you for being here. My name’s Chris. This is a show called [title].”21 For Goode, this simple greeting “creates a degree of disorientation”:
Is this part of the performance, or a preamble to it? The answer to both questions seems, self-evidently, to be “yes.” But how can this be both the thing and at the same time not-yet the thing?22
An actor’s “Hello,” Goode says, tends to undermine “the conventions of theatre,” which aim to take an audience outside of their time and place. The greeting’s gift of “both the thing and at the same time not-yet the thing” holds out the possibility that instead of invoking a purely imaginary time and place, the play will invite the audience to imagine political possibilities latent in their own time and place.
The church as the city’s workshop
How far can this political imagination go? Goode’s theater is experimental. It feels like a workshop with its significant overlap of rehearsal and performance, of now and not yet.23 Kavanagh uses the word “workshop” in much the same sense to describe the church’s role in the city. “The Church,” he says, “is the central workshop of the human City.” The Church as workshop serves everyone in the city, not just its parishioners, because
. . . it is not fundamentally the Church which has been redeemed in Christ but the World itself. A redeemed World makes its own peculiar City, a City which then stands as artifact and icon of such a World.24
In this workshop, “radical transactions with reality” would “summon a citizenry to meet in peace.” [26] The not-yet, evident in these transactions and inseparable from the now, informs the now.
What might this workshop look like today? An effective street liturgy might begin by saying “Hello.” By saying “Hello,” participants would neither place a demand on a street’s people nor place a barrier between themselves and the people. A street liturgy might take to heart Goode’s criticism of a lot of street theater:
. . . engaged spectators and casual passers-by are asked to see the performers, the skills, the novelty, but are not always explicitly asked to see themselves watching that work, to see themselves as co-creators of a negotiated space rather than lucky recipients of a topical burst of creative largesse.25
Goode suggests that street theater, despite its reputation for innovation, often unthinkingly extends the modern dominance of the locus, the representational space, over the platea, the presentational space.
The curtain test
To start the discussion about workshops, I’ll make a proposal. What about a curtain test? It might lead to an impromptu neighborhood workshop. That’s all the street liturgy we might need presently.
Drape and secure a curtain over a backdrop stand. Place the curtain and the stand on a city sidewalk or in a city park where you’d workshop. The curtain, which would contain no writing or symbols, would evoke generic and interior public spaces, such as a theater, church, or auditorium.
Also, take a photo of a prominent building or other feature within plain sight of where the workshop would take place. Make a poster-sized enlargement of the photo and attach it to a portable pole or board. The poster of what is already evident from the workshop’s site would be disarming and suggest the kind of reflection Goode speaks of in implicitly asking neighbors “to see themselves watching” and “to see themselves as co-creators of a negotiated space.”
Set out chairs and appropriate munchies and drinks.
Start the workshop among ourselves: how can we create, what can we fix, and who do we see ourselves becoming? Exchange contact information.
No signs, leaflets, or microphones.26 In other words, no us-at-them. All the hellos would be spoken person to person.
Or drop my entire proposal. But whatever you do, don’t plan too much. Minimize the representational. Accentuate the presentational. Later, if disaster gradually or suddenly strikes our local community, we’d continue our work together.
The top two collages are from photos I took in Washington, D.C. The bottom one is from photos I took in Newport News, Virginia. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Chris Goode, The Forest and the Field: Changing Theatre in a Changing World (Oberon Books, 2015), 83-84.
Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, Johns Hopkins paperback ed, ed. Robert Schwartz (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 73-78.
Jean E. Howard, review of Review of Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, by Robert Weimann, Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2002): 390–93, 391.
Much of Shakespeare’s platea is contained in the script, particularly in the words and actions of his low and otherwise comic characters. Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William N. West, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 39 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Howard, 391.
Weimann, 61.
“Simply put, the locus marks the place of ‘the worthies,’ the high characters who remain primarily inside the fictive world of the play script . . .” Howard, 391. As Weimann points out, in 1693, Thomas Rymer scorned some of Shakespeare’s elements of platea in Othello as “the ‘rabble’-rousing ‘little plays, jingle, and trash’ of the ‘low and ignorant.’” Weimann, 35.
Goode, 83-84.
Goode, 85-88.
Goode, 71.
Goode, 79.
Goode, 71.
Goode, 88.
Goode, 76-78, 88.
Aidan Kavanagh, Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style (Liturgical Press, 1990), 40.
Kavanagh, 41.
Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology: The Hale Memorial Lectures of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary 1981(Liturgical Press, 1992), 106-108.
Kavanagh, 106.
Kavanagh, 64.
Kavanagh, 57. See also 51.
Goode, 70. Goode’s announcement of the play’s name at the play’s outset reminds me of the now-and-not-yet first sentence in Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.” Italo Calvino and William Weaver, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Everyman’s Library 138 (Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1993), 3. Metafiction may be said to empower the reader in their struggle against the author-text authority much as Goode’s “Hello” begins to empower the audience in its struggle against the playwright-script authority.
Goode, 70. Italics in the original.
Goode discusses the rigid divide, still largely prevalent today, between rehearsal and performance. The divide, he believes, leads to low levels of “liveness” during the play. Goode, 78-79.
Kavanagh, 42-43.
Goode, 272-73.
When Ivan Illich explains his refusal to use a microphone, he distinguishes between space and place: “But there are deeper reasons why I have renounced the microphone—its use in those circumstances in which I am physically present. I believe that speaking creates a place. Place is something precious that to a large degree has been obliterated by the homogeneous space generated by speedy locomotion, standardized planning, screens and loudspeakers. These powerful techniques displace the voice and dissolve speech into a message, coded sound waves that fit universal space.”