A Paradox of Stage Performance

Chris Vitiello has been thinking about stage performance lately, which has inspired me to articulate a paradox that I have not yet completely understood.

Like all paradoxes, one might argue that the problem is artificial and contrived: that so long as it is never raised it does not demand a solution. Indeed, I am not suggesting that stage performers lose any sleep over the existence of the paradox I want to present. Still, I believe that just as solving (or dissolving) linguistic paradoxes teaches us something about language so, too, might the solution to this paradox teach us something about the essence of the stage.

Let me begin by imagining a series of unparadoxical experiments in staging plays. I will then end rather abruptly with the paradox, hoping for comments, and with the promise of taking it up again soon.

Imagine, first, a one act play set in the living room of a house. It is the story of a party, a failed romance, and a murder. The play opens with several characters in the room. People come and go through a door at the back of the set, which we understand to lead to a kitchen. Naturally, much of the dramatic tension depends on who is in the room to witness what happens there (and which the audience sees) and on what might be happening in the kitchen (and which the audience does not see). All in all, a very ordinary play.

But suppose, now, that we construct a theatre such that two independent audiences might be witness to this same play. Note that, according to the script, any given character is either in the living room or in the kitchen and nowhere else. We can therefore imagine two plays, one called "The Kitchen Party" and the other called simply "The Party". Given a sufficiently agile playwright, these two plays might each be very entertaining on their own. Our experimental theatre simply offers its customers an additional bonus: having seen the "The Kitchen Party" one night, they can return the next night to see "The Party", or vice versa. If this is done right, the entertainment value would come immediately from the story being presented (available to anyone who saw only one of the plays) and from the little extra details of the plot that would emerge to one who had seen it from both sides.

Now, this experimental theatre company, having had its first success would want to apply and extend this concept in future seasons. Obviously, the setting of the play(s) it shows is arbitrary, as is the plot, and one day someone hits on the obvious "meta-theatrical" gimmick: it is possible to set a play backstage at a play. So the new season has them putting on, say, "Hamlet" on one stage and "Shall We Have a Play?" (a play about the backstage antics of a company of Shakespearean actors during a performance of Hamlet). All the exits in "Hamlet" are entrances in "Shall We?", and vice versa. Everythings depends on the writing of "Shall We" and, of course, on the director's cunning, but this is entirely possible and even a little promising (if also a bit, like I say, gimmicky).

Since each play has to be independently valid as a work of art (according to the ambitions of the company we are imagining) and since the plot is arbitrary, the company now has a way of putting on almost anything they like. If before they had to think of stories that transpired in two specific locations and nowhere else, they now only have to think of any ordinary sort of play, and its correlated backstage. What happens to the characters in the ordinary play is one thing, what happens to the "actors" in the other play is quite another.

The real actors are of course simply never really off stage. The lights come on on both stages and all they do is pass from one stage, where they are in character as a character of the ordinary play, to another, where they are in character as the actor playing the aforementioned character. This is perhaps interesting, even confusing, but still by no means paradoxical.

The plot, to repeat, is arbitrary. We can imagine a romantic comedy on one stage and we can imagine a murder mystery on the other stage (a murder mystery set backstage at the romantic comedy, i.e., an actor who kills an actress for reasons independent of the love his character has for hers on the other stage). Each can be entirely self-supporting stories, but there may be all sorts of extra perks for the member of the audience who knows what is happening on the other stage in its details (i.e., who saw it the night before). When the gun passes from the inside pocket to the desk drawer, or when the prop gun is exchanged for a real gun, certain things make sense, perhaps in a new way. Indeed, one could imagine that the plot itself comes to look very different on each sitting, as our ideal audience member returns to the theatre, night after night, seeing first one side, then the other, the first one again, then other, and so on. (This would be a variant of the sort of movie you have to see two or three times before you "really" get it, but which was very good even the first time.)

There is still no paradox. It is because the plot is arbitrary, however, that we can imagine a further complication that, I think, is dramatically impossible, i.e., a paradox. Recall that you can easily have a play, in any ordinary theatre, that is set backstage. The audience is witness to the sorts of equipment and events you would see backstage, and the actors come "on" and go "off" in order to play their characters, who just happen to be actors. Well, such a play would have a real backstage, where the real actors would go when they are not playing the actors hanging around a fictional backstage. So why couldn't that backstage serve as the setting of the second play of our experimental theatre company?

While I am sure that it can't, I'm still not quite sure why. My clue to the fact that it can't is simple: what would the costumes look like?