performance group potlatch

Comments on The Art of Telling the Truth

These are comments Marc made originally in response to the post on our first meeting. They are important for working on our assignment for the 4/28/06 meeting.

On THE ART OF TELLING THE TRUTH. I want us to produce an evening (coffee house-ish, readings-ish) with the above ironic title and based on our work with that exercise. Last night has inspired me to try and create one (prepared, not improvised) and to write some more about ways of using and developing the exercise.

Briefly, for now, the keys for me are in the “existential categories.” [Ed. note: time, space, body, objects, and intersubjectivity]

[Ed. note: this paragraph belies Marc’s “briefly,” so I’m bracketing it. Important stuff, but not critical until you’ve thought about all this a bit. Skip it if you like and come back to it later.] These I stole from existential-phenomenological psychology and various methods it employs to do “qualitative research.” Language, itself, speaking itself, are not categories, their puzzling nature is “bracketed” or set aside and we assume a person can transparently relate a description of an event. The best modern playwrights, of course, factor in the troubling nature of language and recollection, but you don’t always have to. It’s a good creative exercise for unfolding the possibilities in dramatic communication. And the fact that the event might have happened but didn’t flirts with the whole question of longing or desire or regret (part of our emotional secret as we work with this kind of material; it will fuel the whole production).

Everybody, take a shot at the exercise. You can work in solitude. You need not improv it on demand. Soon I will publish some more suggestions as I continue to work with my own material, but for now–

TWO MAIN APPROACHES:

1. Think of the event. Describe it. Go back over the description and do an analysis using the existential categories. Which ones did you feature? Which ones did you neglect? Add to your full description by working through the neglected elements. Did you attend to what your “body” was about in the description? What happens if you do? How did you interact with others (intersubjectivity)?
2. Think of event (both of these approaches involve positing the event at the outset; you could describe your way toward the event, but that’s “more advanced,” I think, so try one of these approaches first) Write descriptions of the event, one for each existential category (one for time, space, body, object, and for intersubjectivity) You will have five texts. Then experiment with cutting and pasting; combine elements from your five texts into the final monologue.

Then, ONCE YOU HAVE TAKEN ONE OF THESE APPROACHES:

Think through how you want to perform your monologue (it’s still you speaking at this point) using the five existential categories; create descriptions based on this exploration, see if additional lines suggest themselves, add them to your piece.

For example, what additional lines might be inspired by your attending to the performance’s

• time: “my speaking to the listener(s) is timeless; was that only three minutes?; I want to dwell a bit longer, to linger, over details”;
• space: “the listener and I are alone in a room in my parents’ house; I’m sitting in an uncomfortable chair (body leaks in here)”;
• body: “I feel insubstantial, all in my head”;
• object: “why am I telling you this, the words are hard to say, but the image is enjoyable, I want to conjure something for the listener, but I’m afraid”; and
• intersubjectivity: “the listener is an old friend but has never heard this story; I worry she will disapprove.”

How does thinking through this way make you want to add to or subtract from your monologue? Does it influence choice of word or detail? Re-work. As you re-write you are also doing your actor’s homework.

I’m going to try to compose one using method two by the time of our next meeting. I have to be out of town, but I’ll try to send the text along.

Some masterpieces of recollection in which you are unsure of the status of the recollector, i.e., is he/she remembering it correctly or even telling the truth: Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; Pinter’s Old Times and Monologue; Shepard’s Killer’s Head.