Home Alone with Take-Out Theater

“Portrait of a Man in Evening Dress”

by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (c. 1885 )

Home Alone with

Take-Out Theater

by Jamie Jobb

Not unlike maître d's and chefs, theater people locked down at home by pandemic virus have been exploring unique plots to ply their craft in a world where Nobody’s In The House. So, as menus and playbills gather dust, restaurants are relying on Grubhub or DoorDash while performers are choosing platforms like Zoom or YouTube to convey their programs to folks ordering take-out theater at home.

It’s as if the internet has turned show business inside out: where The Audience now seems to be the focus and everybody just wants a role as casual content-providing performer “interviewed” at-home. More of a tour than an actual “show” – with lights, action, special values of live production. Stuck in its own seat, the homebound audient just wants to chat with itself?

What’s up with that?

A few critics have begun to imply the Zoom performance model lacks legs, as we say. Here’s Cleo Levin explaining that feeling in Slate:

“The truth is, no matter how much technology gets involved, I can’t pretend that I’m at a night club when I’m in the same sweatpants I’ve been wearing for two weeks (and I am too stubborn to get dressed up when I will, technically, be alone). I cannot shake the feeling of loneliness with flat images of my friends on a screen. I’ve realized how much someone’s physical presence matters—how important it is to actually have the bulk of another person beside you, the little noises they make, their micro-expressions, the ability to follow their gaze and see what they’re looking at.”

Exactly – to feel like we’re part of an actual “live” audience in “real time”, not pixel prisoners of broadband short attention spans!

Then there are the artistic directors and performers themselves, many of whom seem to believe they’re appearing on Facebook instead of on stage. They chat rather than perform! Like “talking heads” – and we don’t mean David Byrne’s great band.

Also, very few on-line players seem to have full awareness of where their “camera” is … particularly on a cellphone or a pad where more than one “lens” stares back at The Talent. This is a fatal mistake. It squelches any intimacy when a performer seems to be looking askance, or beyond us. We wonder: “Are they lost?”

Video veterans know the camera is no casual observer. It sees your eyes most of all. Any savvy on-line performer MUST account for that essential narrative “eye-line match” in performance. Otherwise the actor appears a little “nuts”, or at least clueless as toWHERE the audience actually sits, which could be literally ANYWHERE.

Plus, can’t anybody think about home studio lighting? Even stuck-at-home professional cable-news talking heads don’t know how to light themselves in front of their bookcases and framed artworks. It’s as if COVID-19 is attacking the central nervous system of performance itself!

I recently suffered through several local live-stream theater “events”, some of them involving performers and companies I’d seen many times on stage in San Francisco and Berkeley. None of these nascent “shows” on line seem even remotely dramatic.

One of them was a big disappointment, by a solo performer I know who’s incredible live – he can recreate the feeling of a neighborhood parade complete with marching band and crowded street, all by himself. I’ve seen him feed off his audience free-range in The House; but home-alone in his living room, this performer falls flat in live-stream.

We can tell his performance “chops” are not there, obviously. He’s NOT looking at us – he seems totally unaware of his “camera”. This casual “hang-out” show ain’t actually performance.

An even worse example of muddled laptop tv is an enfeebled effort at Virtual Audience Humor called “Bill Maher's Home Box Office". This sheltered-in-place-show tanks at the very top because it's so obviously faked-as-fake, that it's not funny.  Maher’s disingenuous post-ironic eye-line view of an obviously absent and historically disconnected "audience" destroys any semblance of humor he can muster as a live-streamer. We see right through his fluffery.

But these incipient prototypes will improve once home-bound theatre folk begin to think like filmmakers. Below are two excellent recent examples of how digital video may be used to heightened theatrical effect on line – well beyond what anyone could see if seated in The House. The first is a solo performance by an acting author who relied on a couple of friends to accomplish his modest live-stream debut. The second is a Shakespearean extravaganza which clearly demonstrates The Royal National Theatre’s decade-long commitment to broadcasting live works from London to audiences seated elsewhere around the globe.

* * *

Paul Sussman shows he understands “eye-line match” in live-stream show

1.

Paul Sussman’s

“Listen Up, Jimmy Carter!”

(23 minutes)

Performing playwright Paul Sussman likes to say he honed his quills for farce and melodrama during a long career in non-profit financial management. That’s not as oxymoronic a punchline as it appears, particularly in the Bay Area where Silicon Valley largess flows onto tax-sheltered ledgers of social change. This insider’s knowledge grounds Sussman’s unique world view.

I met Paul two decades ago in a Charlie Varon workshop in San Francisco. Among Charlie’s students, Paul’s work stood out for his ability to quickly pull focus, jump cut and still keep his story on track. Like Rafa Nadal scrambling to chase a cross-court half-volley drop-shot at net in The French Open.

A Monday Night Marsh veteran, Sussman also mined his developmental experience as a student/political activist, which fed the premise of his “Listen Up, Jimmy Carter!” – recently live-streamed on his YouTube channel.

An initial tech glitch paused Paul at the start. But once his narrative kicked in, it became clear the man has a knack for commanding a computer screen. He knows how to “make” closeups. His body can get physical when he has to say something his words alone cannot convey.

Sussman has written and performed well over a dozen pieces at the Marsh and elsewhere. But this was his first fully-developed solo performance in the acting author’s living room where, like the rest of California, he’d been ordered to stay by governor Gavin Newsom.

Set in his May 1976 memories of Baltimore, Sussman acknowledges his story is chronologically anachronistic. “It was a different time ... Politics was different. 1976 – it was crazy! A nightmare of a president had just been defiling the office, wreaking havoc on the land, dragged kicking and screaming into an impeachment process which the Republicans sabotaged at every turn. (he moves in for a closeup with a nod toward current events) … It was a different time!”

Within the first two minutes of the piece, Paul produced a Jimmy Carter bobble-head, which he directly addresses as a “capitalist-tool peanut-farming fraud”. Carter was the “feel-good moderate” frontrunner among a mass of 15 candidates in the Democratic primary for president that year. Sussman, a Michigan radical Peace Corps volunteer, opposed everything midstream Naval Academy Lieutenant Carter represented. Truth to Power, and all that.

At one priceless moment in the short piece, Sussman pulls out what must be his most prized possessions as a writer: his own journal from when he was six-years-old! He clearly delights to read his own youthful “flowery prose” documenting the day JFK came to town on a train: “How caboose! So cool! But I fear Kennedy's charisma may obscure the neocolonialist Cold War wolf hiding in the sheep’s clothing of volunteerism.”

Indeed, kid ... You go get ‘em!

Let’s hope Paul continues his in-house performances. As expected, he’s set a very high bar for himself and everyone else. To track what Paul Sussman is doing, subscribe to his YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCifyFkvlT992CpLNGVYOHIg

Even a living room has depth-of-field when it comes to performance space

Sussman used fixed camera to great effect, creating “closeups” by moving into it

* * *

“Some are born great,

some achieve greatness, and

some have greatness thrust upon them.”

-- William Shakespeare

Stunning stagecraft commands The Royal National Theatre’s “Twelfth Night”

2.

William Shakespeare’s

“Twelfth Night” or “What You Will”

(two hours, forty-three minutes)

In 2009, The Royal National Theatre introduced its first season of what has become internationally renowned as “National Theatre Live” now recast by the pandemic as “National Theatre At Home”.

Long before any COVID-19 lockdowns, these programs were professionally broadcast from The National stage(s) into cinemas and theaters across the planet. Depending on end-point venues, the plays were streamed simultaneously with the London performance. In some time zones, the show was delayed to more timely coincide with a local audience otherwise asleep when the play originally aired in London.

National Theatre At Home recently offered live-stream viewers worldwide an incredible gift – a free screening of William Shakespeare’s comedy of mistaken identifications -- “Twelfth Night” on YouTube. This was no light, midsummer night’s entertainment, filmed as it was before a live audience in April 2017, when such crowds were able to assemble. The almost three-hour production was so vividly intense that we watched it twice over four nights.

As suggested by the vibrant YouTube screen captures posted herein, the stagecraft is spectacular in The Olivier Theater where spectacular stagecraft is the hallmark. The Olivier’s well-rounded floor-plan harkens to Greek amphitheaters which were designed democratically – every seat meant to be within earshot of actors speaking behind masks without microphones.

Soutra Gilmour’s astonishingly flexible set was designed around the pivot point of the Olivier’s concentric-ringed rotating stages – A set of three interlocking staircases, all framed together and each opening up to provide varied backgrounds for the action. All at once, the set suddenly became a shipwreck, a hospital, a gymnasium, a courtyard, a pool and spa, a brick-walled street, a prison, a patio, a night club, a chapel, an orchard, a topiary garden. The overall design allows for most fluid transitions as players move from one scene to the next.

The excellent cast of twenty actors proved itself very nimble afoot and aface for such a dynamic production. Indeed, two of the seven members of the show’s creative team were the choreographer (Shelly Maywell) and the fight coordinator (Kev McCurdy). The opening shipwreck scene clearly demonstrates the serious circus training these actors needed to be able to pull off this play on this stage.

With a stage crew of 54 and a broadcast crew of 56, the Royal National’s profound production values are on fulsome display here. It’s easy to subscribe to the program on YouTube and each performance is backed up with tons of background video – enough for any serious theater student to acquire a virtual doctorate without paying one cent of tuition.

Next up for National Theater At Home the incredible two-faced “Frankenstein”

http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/ntlin4-frankenstein

Malvolia (Tamsin Greig) confronts Maria (Niky Wardley) as Sir Andrew waits

Malvolia (Tamsin Greig) enters in “yellow stockings with cross-garters”