Light Bondage: On Restraint in the Theatre

Les Freres Corbusier's Executive Director Aaron Lemon-Strauss (whose Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant is now playing at NYTW--go see it now!) was kind enough to sit down with Stolen Chair's management team and chat about his company's work. He said quite a few interesting things, but one quotable quote which seemed blog-worthy (and which I can't actually quote because I didn't write it down so I'll paraphrase) was Aaron's comment about the relationship between artistic direction and management. According to him, it's the job of the producer/manager to restrain the artist and the job of the artist to challenge that restraint, creating a Hegelian synthesis of risky but responsible art (okay, it's true, he said nothing about Hegel, but I've got a quota of continental philosophers I've got to mention on this blog...).

This got me thinking more generally about the effect of restraint on theatre. Would Moliere have written Tartuffe if he didn't have to continually battle against the Catholic Church? Would Stanislavsky have emerged with, well, the entire basis of naturalistic performance if he didn't have to bump against Lenin and Stalin?

And how does restraint affect process? A large portion of Stolen Chair's looooong development period is devoted to finding the creative constraints which will allow style to emerge. But the balance between "freedom and structure" (a favorite phrase of Stolen Chair's Director of Education Alexia Vernon) has been a little bit different with each project.

In Commedia Dell'Artemisia and Stage Kiss, Kiran acted as a literary ventriloquist, doing her best Moliere and Shakespeare imitations, respectively, while I reconstructed/paid homage to the physical stylings of Commedia dell'Arte and Ridiculous Theatre, respectively. At the end of the day, we could make sure we were on the right track by checking back in with our source material.

One could say there was considerably more "freedom" in Kill Me Like You Mean It, at least insofar as in our pursuit to create a hybrid of Ionescoan absurdism and Chandleresque film noir, neither Kiran nor I had any clear models to mimic, er, "draw inspiration" from. But, lacking our familiar restraints from projects goneby, I must admit the entire creative process has carried much more anxiety. Are we being faithful enough to noir? Are we being faithful enough to absurdism? Have we successfully merged the two in a way that provocatively comments on the parallels between the societies that gave rise to both them and us?

Who knows? I suppose if the show's a wild success, we'll come to respect the anxiety which accompanies risk and perhaps give ourselves permission to swing a little further towards the freedom side of the spectrum. And if we flop, it's paint-by-numbers from here on in :)...