Theatre as Rorschach
Well, Doubt is done (look here for the critic’s view) and we’re moving onto Steve Martin’s adaptation of The Underpants. But before we leave Mr. Shanley’s tightly constructed piece, there’s an interesting phenomenon that we noticed during the talkbacks. Many of the audience members who hung around for the talkbacks (and I’d say that we had a much larger percentage of the audience want to chat than usual) were very interested in arriving at a verdict: Did he or didn’t he (did Father Flynn molest the student, or not). At one of the first talkbacks, it was interesting to note that it split mostly along gender lines: the vast majority of women sided with Sister Aloysius (the nun who accused the priest), while the vast majority of men thought that Father Flynn was innocent and that he had been unfairly persecuted by Sister Aloysius. Going forward, we were very interested to see if the gender-based trend continued. Did it? Nope, not really.
After that first talkback, it settled down to a pretty even mix of men and women who came down on either side of the verdict discussion. And another group (and totally unprompted by me, I promise) who argued that the ultimate “point” of Doubt is not what you think the truth is, but a challenge to embrace uncertainty and doubt. Was this group sizey? Nope, not at all. But even among the verdict crowd, it was interesting to hear people talk about how their backgrounds influenced their thinking on the matter. One man had been a school administrator for over 30 years, and he identified very strongly with Sister Aloysius’ instincts concerning Father Flynn. A woman talked about a personal experience when she had been unfairly persecuted when explaining why she sided with Father Flynn.
That got me thinking about more global issues of theatre and art in general. Rene Copeland, Doubt director and Tennessee Rep Artistic Director, talks about one of the greatest aims of theatre being to engender empathy in the audience–to touch an audience, to move them and make them think not only about what they see but also about themselves. This idea of theatre as Rorschach test is a powerful one for me. In my view, the ultimate fulfillment of theatre is not in the performance; if that were true, we could keep the theatre’s doors closed and run a show to our hearts’ content sans audience. No, the true fulfillment of theatre comes not with how the actors, directors, and designers feel about what is being done on stage; the highest aim of theatre is how the audience feels about it–what it makes them think, how, and if, it changes them, even for a moment–and the beauty of one audience member feeling a certain way about a play, and the person sitting right next to them feeling totally different. Just like the inkblots–that one person may look at and see a bee sitting on a flower, another may see a dragon soaring across the sun–our individual personalities, backgrounds, and experiences affect how we react to what we see. In this way, theatre can engender empathy not only in the different lives an audience witnesses on stage, but also when recognizing the different reactions among the people sharing in their experience.
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I found a similar phenomenon while attending the talkback for the production of a play called Women’s Minyan at the Jewish Ensemble Theatre in Detroit. The crux of the play is a group of Jewish women take an oath and form a ‘minyan’ to decide the fate of a mother who has been denied the right to see her children. The issues arrived when a rabbi, who was attending the production after his wife had attended an earlier performance, and when it was over, she overheard another audience member say as they were leaving, “So THAT’s what happens behind the scenes of the Jewish society.”
An understandably alarming reaction to the conflict in the play, the mother’s husband, a rabbi, was accused with evidence of pretty unspeakable acts with her, sexual and physical abuse, which forced her to leave the house and the family, a big no-no in Jewish society, evidently. Now, while that played an important part in the story, the main story was the mother having to keep it all a secret, for the sake of her children and family (I should add that this play took place in a pretty devoutly religious community in Israel.)
The rabbi, who was attending the play, couldn’t get past the negative portrayal of a Jewish Rabbi. And proceeded to voice his discontent about the play, and the issue, and almost made it sound irresponsible for the theatre to have produced the play.
Not to mention, the fact that the play is based upon a factual incident.
It did seem though, that at least in that evenings viewing, he was in the minority, as person after person voiced their opinion that they were aware that the rabbi portrayed in the play was an isolated incident, and they did not have a pre-(or post-)conceived notion about the Rabbinical clergy from the play. Myself included.
Sometimes you take away what you come in with.