Some fifteen years ago Dawson Nichols and I were having lunch at a long gone Japanese noodle house on Broadway when he asked me an awkward question that I will now try to do a better job of answering.  Back then we were not the close friends and collaborators we are now—more like respectful but wary competitors for the title of AHA! Theatre’s Golden Boy.  Dawson had a much better line of attack on the prize, because while we both wrote strong multi-actor plays, Dawson also amazed us all with his impressively diverse catalogue of one-man shows, including Stop/Start, Virtual Solitaire, I Might be Edgar Allen Poe and Three Descents of Darwin.  I have always been captivated by Dawson’s one-person work. 

I have also always had my theoretical reservations about the genre, as Dawson must have suspected that day over yakisoba when he challenged me squarely, “You don’t think my solo work is theatre, do you?”  I must have made a weak apologetic smile. I must have hemmed and hawed. I think I finally answered, “Strictly speaking, no, but—“ and then went on to make some half-lame explication, but the look on Dawson’s face showed it all: hurt and disbelief at my dismissive arrogance, even as I tried to explain how much I respected him as a generative and performing artist.

So perhaps now, with my friendship with Dawson a little more secure (I hope), it is time to make that earlier explication sharper, and then explore that explication’s implications within our regional theatre administrator’s collective half-conscious effort to re-forge by fudging a new definition of the art form and thus raise the number of one-person shows they can get away with and still claim that they are practicing theatre.

Before writing this I decided to do a little research by reaching out to my compadres over at 14/48 via Facebook:

Paul Mullin

April 9 at 3:32pm

Hello lovers!

Any and/or all of you can answer. And yes, I’m going to quote you in my blog. I’m working on an essay about one-person shows. And my question is this: “Why don’t you ever have the option of drawing just one actor in the actor draw? Are there any other reasons beyond the fact that that poor schlump would have to memorize too much?”

Let me know.

Love,

Paulie

Shawn Belyea

April 10, 2010 at 3:56pm

Re: Question for the 14/48 Crew

Cuz one-person shows are dumb. Mostly it’s memorization and it’s supposed to be a collaborative effort so we want actors to have some company.

Jodi-Paul Sanford Brown-Wooster

April 11 at 1:06am

I hate one person shows. And yes, I’m looking at you Lauren. There is no intrinsic dramatic tension with one person, it’s fakey.

Peter Dylan O’Connor

April 11 at 3:52p

One person shows are fucking glorified camp fire stories…

Matthew Richter

April 11 at 8:33pm

i love one-person shows. and i think they’re an interesting challenge for 14.48.

but i’m retired.

xom

If you seek consensus, you would be wise not to consult the prophets of 14/48.  Once again, I am left to my own opinions and devices.  I proceed with that caution for you, my gentle reader.

Basically, solo shows boil down into two kinds: the actor’s tour de force and the enlarged lecture.  Dawson Nichols shares the first tradition with Anna Deavere Smith, Chazz Palminteri and countless other talented writer/actors, who generate shows that then require them to become all of the characters on stage, even at times performing both sides of multi-sided dialogue.  Over the last few decades, it has become an increasingly effective way of growing an actor’s career.  Palminteri literally leveraged himself into playing the principal role, Sonny, in Robert DeNiro’s directorial debut film A Bronx Tale, which began as Palminteri’s one-man show of the same name.  As Rik Deskin, Aristic Director of The Eclectic Theatre points out, “When you’re self-producing/self-promoting, a solo show is one way to get yourself out there.”

My friend and comrade-at-arms, Mike Daisey, presents from the lecturer tradition, most recently reinvigorated by Spalding Gray, but one which runs the gamut, in just this country alone, from Jonathan Edwards to Mark Twain and right on up to David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell.  This kind of show employs more direct address, less actorly technique.  Instead of primarily inhabiting other characters, the lecturer’s own personality ties the evening together.  In the hands of a Daisy or Sedaris it can be hugely fun, funny and compelling, but no one plying the trade 130 years ago would have thought of calling themselves a theatre artist, even if a particular night’s performance happened to take place in a theater—unlikely in that age, since theaters were rarely dark and there was a plentitude of active churches, as well as all sorts of lecture halls specifically built for this purpose.  As different as these two kinds of solo show are, and as much as it seems the Nichols / Deveare Smith variety is much closer to theatre as we know it, they both represent variations of the much older, and completely honorable tradition of story telling.

Theatre, however, is something really quite different.  It happens in the preternaturally galvanized space between two or more people on stage and the other people in the audience.  It sprang forth from its older sibling, storytelling, in that radical moment when the teller pointed at someone in the campfire circle and said:  “You be me.  I’ll be the wolf.  We’ll show them how it happens.”  Thus a whole new art form was born.

As a solo lecturer, Mike Daisey has a point of view.  And a damned good one too.  He makes no bones about telling you what to think.  And if you want my opinion, you should listen to him.  I have a different role as a playwright and a different box of tools.  I can show you things happening, but it is up to you what to make of them.  Theatre is dialogue.  Not as part of the narrative, like in a novel, but as all of the show.  Even if no words are spoken, dramatic action takes place in a framework of implicit dialogue: people doing things to other people. This is why our collective audience hackles go up whenever a narrator starts telling us the story instead of enacting it.  Good playwrights understand this and know how to leverage the discordance of direct address narration (see Shakespeare’s Chorus in Henry V or Wilder’s Stage Manager in Our Town).  Lesser playwrights never seem to learn: you can’t tell an audience anything.  They can only be shown.  They can only ever come to their own conclusion about what is happening.

Dialogue breeds risk like flowers bloom scent, and risk is the fabric of theatre.  Because two or more people on stage can never know with certainty what an other is about to do, no matter how many times they have done it before, the audience attends the action with a sense of the innate exposure.  “Anything could happen, and we are in the same damned room with these agitated people.”   Risk is not a by-product of drama.  It is the main ingredient.  

Nothing wrong with masturbation, but everyone knows you cannot tickle yourself.   Likewise, I cannot, as a performer, ever surprise myself to the degree another performer can—arguments about unexpected inspiration notwithstanding.  When there is another actor on stage with me, I have to watch, I have to listen, I have to be wary.  Other actors can push you around, and you can push back.  No one can manufacture this kind of risk in a solo performance, no matter how earnestly the performer tries to convince his corpus callosum  not to tell his left brain what his right plans on doing.   Sure, an actor can mimic dialogue, playing both sides of a conversation, but even at its very best this trick still contains an unconscious but unavoidable note of condescension, like Donald Rumsfeld asking himself ostensibly difficult questions about the Iraq War in a press conference and then answering them with ostensibly matter-of-fact brilliance.  True dialogue adds a crucial dimension which defines theatre, just as surely as the third dimension of physical depth defines sculpture. 

Theatre also trades on what we show folk loftily refer to as “the willing suspension of disbelief.”  Wikipedia defines this notion as “the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment.”  (I should fully disclose here how I hate this term, mostly for its gratuitous gracelessness.  I mean, is the double negative really necessary to nail the point?  What would be wrong with, say, “fabrication of belief?”)  In a solo show disbelief can never be truly suspended.  At best, it can be sent to detention, where it still manages to sulk and grimace and call attention to itself.

Let me be clear.  By pointing out that one-person shows are not, strictly speaking, theatre, I am in no way trying to denigrate them or argue for their banishment.  It has been a long standing tradition for regional theatres to opt for filling one slot in their season with an easily produced, low-overhead solo show, but indications are rising that Big Houses in this town intend to lean on this option more heavily in the future.  The Seattle Rep recently announced its 2010-2011 season in which they will be offering not one, but two solo shows,  The K of D in the smaller Leo K venue and Mike Daisey’s new piece on their Bagley Wright mainstage (a relatively unheard-of placement of a solo show for them.)  If Daisey does well (and as his friend and colleague, I cannot help but hope he does) you can bet you will be seeing more mainstage solo offerings from the Rep.  It is just too cheap for them not to.  And as long as no one’s complaining that they are not actually doing theatre in their theater, well…

Meanwhile, next door at the Intiman, they have answered with unblushing cynicism the call for more locally grown new plays by staging The Thin Place which they laud on their website as “the second world premiere by a local writer in Intiman’s history.”  Note the pride with which they admit a fact of which they should rightly be ashamed.  Using a solo show to rectify their abysmal record reveals how little they wish to risk on the attempt.   How quickly will Intiman abandon and distance itself from The Thin Place if it does not do well with critics or audiences?  How likely are they to offer up the now tired Big House refrain when a locally grown piece does not catch fire right away?  “See?  We tried ‘locally grown’.  It just doesn’t work.  Can we please go back to retreading Pinter, Mamet and off-Broadway’s last season?”  Always behind such excuses are obfuscated variables of production and promotion that contribute to a given show’s putative failure but that go unnoticed and unconsidered in public.   In this case,  the crucial factor that will not be mentioned is that The Thin Place is a one-man show, and not, strictly speaking, theatre at all.

Regional Big Houses defend their solo performance offerings like a richly-endowed sculpture gallery might defend an exhibition of paintings.  “We love sculpture.  And of course we are a sculpture gallery, but sculpture itself is expensive and difficult to maintain.  Instead, why not enjoy some lovely paintings of sculptures?”  Paintings of sculptures can indeed be lovely, but not even an idiot would call them sculptures, any more than Mark Twain would have referred to himself as a theatre artist 130 years ago.  Solo performance billed as theatre is a pig in a poke.  The unpredictability of human beings interacting lies at the heart of what we are selling in the theatre.  We trade it out and bank our future on its diminishment at the very risk of our art form’s soul.

Next up: “Good Friend for Jesus’ Sake Forbear and Never Build another Proscenium Stage”