How does The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist work? What does it need from me as a director? What do I have to give it? What muscles do I need to stretch and develop for this show? (For those of you out there who don't read my other blog, I find it helpful to think of a play as an entity distinct from the people and facets that make it up. The play is the sum of the script, performance, blocking, design, audience context etc. but it has its own interests and needs, I think of myself as serving those needs rather than necessarily serving just the text's needs.)
In the past couple of years, I have spent a good deal of time developing certain muscles that had to do with translating the text to the stage. An easy term for this (perhaps) is my compositional sense. Many friends and colleagues have complimented me on this and commented on this, the way I arrange bodies in space to tell the story, the way I mix music and image and spoken word etc. It's a strength of mine, and I'm very proud of it, and I think it reached its climax in the VCU production of volume of smoke. I composed the shit out of that play, and it was my first time working on something of that scale ($50K budget, 300 seat house, 3/4 thrust space, 10 person cast etc.). I'm very proud of this aspect of myself as an artist.
I say all of this because this particular aspect is not what ....Atheist needs from me. In fact, if a production of ...Atheist had too much visual elegance to it, the play would fall on its ass, all the life suffocated out of it.
...Atheist is about spontaneity and about making a connecting with the audience. It's about storytelling. The story is the spectacle. The play's genius is in its raw-ness, its digressiveness, the appearance that it could veer off in any direction at any point (and frequently does). Reading it, the play feels *this close* to going off the rails, and that's part of what is so very exciting about it.
This was unlocked for me in a recent interview I did with monologist Mike Daisey and his director Jean-Michele Gregory. In it he said:
“The act of telling a story, if you’re truly telling it, has an automatic subtext. The automatic subtext is: Holy shit, I’m telling you a story, what am I going to say next? I really have to tell you this story. And that creates an automatic depth and texturing that has to be imposed if you’re acting.”
...Atheist is all about this. Three people appear in front of us and say "Hey, we got this story to tell you". Their action over the course of the play is to try to convince you of the story's truth even as they struggle with believing it that tension leads to the play exploding in many directions and then imploding on itself before eventually coming to its conclusion.
We associate a certain amount of dishonesty with spectacle, just as if something is too fine-tuned we're not going to believe it's spontaneous, which will rob the play of its delightful suspense... the suspense of "holy shit! where is this going?!"
So it's time to exercise some different muscles. To try to create a sense of rawness, of newness, of spontaneity. Time to use improvisation more in rehearsal (and perhaps in performance). Time to talk frankly with the collaborators about what is in our bag of tricks so we can pull it out and use it effectively.
This may mean the show is not eventually blocked as tightly as I normally like, and that some things change every night, or that there's more room for the actors to take impulses than directors are normally comfortable with. But that's really exciting. Getting back to the basics: Actor + Audience + Words. That's what this play is about, and what this play needs. It needs me to help the performers give it immediacy, risk, to know how it manipulates its audience and revel in it. And it needs to be charming. Really charming. Charming like the Carny who is about to bilk you out of a fiver...
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