Theatre Today: Where Can You Find It?

pect these effects in such shows — pricey as they are —
to the extent that audiences for Broadway musicals
willingly accept that the “characters” whose lives and
fortunes they’re presumably following have visible
microphones pasted on their foreheads (or, on the
naked actors in Stephen Sondheim’s Passion, wires running
down their backs), in return for the amplifi ed
and digitally processed sound they enjoy in return.
There is also an aesthetic behind the theatre’s current
turn from spectacle to spectacular. The French
theorist Antonin Artaud argued fi ercely in the 1930s
that theatre should have “no more masterpieces,” that
words in dramas should be valued more for their vibrations
than for their meanings and have only the
importance they have in dreams. Artaud’s proposed
theatre was one of overwhelming sounds and visual
images that would dominate the stage. His arguments,
not fully tested in his own time, have proven greatly
infl uential in ours, starting with the unscripted happenings
of the 1960s and the more lasting performance art
that followed in the 1980s and continues to this day.
Performance art is not normally spectacular in the
technological sense. It is, however, intensely visual
and generally unconcerned with dramatic matters of
plot structure, logical argument, or character development
— preferring instead explosive, arresting, shocking,
provocative, or hilarious imagery. Such art tends
by its nature to be transitory; its individual performances
are often brief (fi fteen minutes, say), attended
by small audiences, and not usually meant to be repeatable
other than for occasional short runs. Most
performance artists prefer it this way. But several have
moved into the more rigorous demands of full theatrical
presentation, often in national or international
tours. Laurie Anderson, one of the most noted such
artists today, pushes the envelope with advanced visual
and sound technologies and with elements of
the conventionally dramatic: she has performed her
Moby Dick, after Melville’s novel, around the world.
Karen Finley’s best-known solo performances have
a strong political thrust. One piece, in which Finley
smeared her naked body with chocolate to represent
the exploitation and sexual abasement of women, led
the National Endowment for the Arts to revoke the
artist’s funding, and so, for her subsequent Shut Up
and Love Me, Finley again smeared herself with chocolate,
this time inviting audience members to lick
it — at twenty dollars a lick, to compensate for the loss
of her NEA grant. By confronting viewers with their
own lust — and disgust — Finley creates a vividly memorable
unease.
Laurie Anderson is a long-recognized performance artist, specializing in
the integration of visual excitement and electronic sound perturbations. In
her “techno-opera” of Moby Dick, as presented at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music in 1999, Anderson serves as singer, speaker (in many voices),
composer, violinist, keyboardist, guitarist, and operator of an electronic,
sound-generating Talking Stick, mostly while perched on a supersized chair
of her own invention.
� Verbatim Theatre
Theatre has always dealt with current politics. Indeed,
the potentially short lead time between initial conception
and fi nished product is one of the advantages
live theatre has over fi lm. But the twenty-fi rst century
has seen a virtual explosion of up-to-the-minute
dramas performed on major stages, particularly in
England and America. Many of these may be called
“verbatim theatre,” as they have been developed from
transcripts of real-life speeches and interviews. Here
are a few examples:
�
My Name is Rachel Corrie was compiled from the
diaries and e-mail messages of American peace
What’s Happening? 269