The 'Sat Phone'
by Polly Carl
Recently, I had the opportunity to serve as the production
dramaturg for In Darfur at
The Public Theater. In April, they did a workshop production
of the play, with the goal of working on the script and
design elements through the course of a three-week run.
The plan is to take a month off and remount the play
and open it to critics sometime this summer.
I spend a lot of time in workshops, but given that
I’m mostly participating in readings, I rarely
get to be in the middle of major design debates. So whether
or not to use a REAL satellite phone ('sat phone') in
the play hardly seemed worthy of a major design debate,
but I find that phones pose a problem in just about every
context. For example, in a reading of a play, do you
hold your hand up to your ears, pinky and index finger
posing as the object? Some directors ban mime in a reading;
others think it helps the audience along. This same debate
became central to the realism of In
Darfur.
For me personally, I am now thinking of the sat phone
as representative of the central aesthetic conflict dividing
artists and audiences in the America theatre: Must we
see it, or can we simply imagine it? In the play, a reporter,
Maryka, talks to her editor, Jan, via sat phone. Her
internet communication is down and she relays her story
about Darfur via the phone. The information in the scene
is back story, a crucial point of entry to the play and
somehow, when a performer talks into an object it can
feel like the words go into the object—sort of
like talking on the phone, more nuanced than email but
saddled with the problem of words traveling without faces,
through static, across time. This is a long way of saying
that the sat phone was sucking up the words.
As soon as the director took the phones away, somehow
the words became more clear, the story easier to track.
The choice in the rehearsal room seemed obvious—lose
the sat phone, let the audience imagine it. We were portraying
genocide with seven actors, the play could hardly be
dependent upon realism as its vehicle. But after the
first public performance, the note came from various
directions: “Where’s the phone?” So
although we were asking the audience to imagine genocide
in the small black box at the Public, the phone suddenly
became critical to the staging.
After that first performance, we attempted to reintroduce
as many real elements as possible in this completely
imagined world. It was as if genocide was unimaginable
enough, and we needed everything we could get our hands
on to ground us through the journey of a story beyond
our comprehension.
|
