We Are All Actors
by STEVEN PATRICK C. FERNANDEZ
 

      We have our real faces but keep a gallery of other faces etched with their corresponding emotions. Like clothes we chose for specific occasions, we bring out and wear a selected face whenever we need one. Everyday, at any signal, we choose to display any of these many faces to suit an occasion and to produce a desired effect on others. Pleasing others keeps us well.

These faces are like masks; they hide our real feelings. Our real feelings have only one real face, but our true emotion may not be appropriate for the moment. But with these masks, we act for important reasons. We do not wish to hurt the feelings of another even if we don’t really like him, so we put on an amiable face. When we are not prepared in class, we smile and nod incessantly to give the impression to our teacher that we agree to what teacher says. Smiling and nodding keep the odds on our favor that teacher won’t notice that we didn’t read the assigned lesson.

Masks help us do other things. At home, we keep a sunny disposition, do house chores with more gusto than usual, and make sure that all work is seen by Mama so she’d allow us Saturday night out to watch a concert with our girlfriends. We’re sure these girls also do the same.

            In a sense, we are all actors as we were born actors. We like to please our audiences. Acting is innate in all of us. As babies, we threw tantrums to make Mama give us what we wanted. We played cute to receive gifts from Papa’s visitors. Acting is not about being untruthful; acting is a way to cope with things. It allows us to adjust to situations so we may deal favorable with undesirable conditions. Acting from time immemorial has become humanity’s tool to survive. Early men wore fearsome masks to scare off the evil spirits from his earth, even if behind that mask was a face full of fear.

Acting grows from our immense capacity to imagine. It is a necessary human talent. In us we keep the talent to act and the power to recreate an imagined world. In these attributes lie the seeds of the drama and theater, human activities that, from the beginning of man, have played central parts in Man’s quest for answers and in Man’s intercourse with his world. 

Imagination

            We are born imaginative. Acting manifests our imaginative nature. Imagination is what separates us from beasts. Imagination is what allows us to recreate the world as we feel it should be. As young boys, we played police and captured the bad guys. The bad guys always lose because all is right with our world. We determined our world with right always winning over wrong. Our imaginations flew in all places. We’d imagine we were pilots, market vendors, and even fathers and mothers when we played bahay-bahayan. We bought “fish” using Kenkoy paper money, or candy wrappers. We recycled sardine cans, fastened the strands of the walis tingting to the can’s corners, attached some tanzans for wheels, pulled the can with a string, and growled out engine sounds to imagine we were truck drivers.

            Imagination being the key in creation keeps our sense of well-being. Being cognizant of our realities, we harness our imaginations to redo and correct our discordant world. Imagination that prods the mind and the heart to recreate a world to our liking feeds Art to express our aspirations and ideals. Acting and imagination form part of our survival kit. In organized mediums like the theater, this imagination ensures the sanity of society. 

Drama and Theater

As we act in our daily lives we also use drama’s mediums of the body and the voice. But our kind of everyday “acting” is not enough to qualify as theater. Still, our daily “acting” and the acting in theater have the same element: mimesis. This is Greek for “imitation.” But what do we imitate? Life, or snippets of it. When we imitate the swagger of our matinee idol to impress the girls, we act because we copy; we are being someone else. When we imitate the accent of someone we ridicule, we copy his personality; we are being someone else.

But acting on stage goes beyond all these simple imitations. “Representation” would be the more appropriate equivalent of the Greek idea of mimesis than what we understand it now as mere “imitation.” Acting is a part of the whole process of drama produced to theater. Drama evolves from this human propensity to imagine and to recreate. Truly, we are all actors and our world is our stage.

Drama and theater plays important parts in our lives. I have described how simple “acting” somehow works for us. On a bigger, consciously organized effort, the theater is necessary for mankind. We will understand why and how.

I have interchangeably used the terms drama and theater. When we say that one person is ma-drama, we suggest the person’s tendency for histrionics (meaning, a behavior in an exaggerated manner, beyond what we accept to be normal). A life full of drama is a colorful life, a life that is beyond the acceptably normal. Drama therefore suggests standards that are beyond the normal. Are dramatists and actors therefore “abnormal” people? They are. They settle, like poets and painters, in that extraordinary state which many of us consider to be not normal. “Abnormal,” perhaps, because of their sensitivity, superior imagination, and keen foresight. These are qualities which are unusual to the normal majority. Read some of their biographies and you will understand why.

These persons create drama. Drama is the seed, the genesis, the text where the materials of life’s representations originate. Drama is the original idea conceived and brought to fruition by mediums like literature and theater. The material about life may be comic or tragic, or both. It may be uplifting or depressing. It may teach or entertain, or do both. It may be poetic or prosaic, lyrical or narrative. It may be as real as the next person beside you, as symbolic as the icons of the Catholic Church, or as ethereal as a fleeting feeling of exultation. Concretely, drama is the script (or scenario) where performances are built from. It is the sequence of events and images that when realized produces the plays we see on stage. It is the poet’s, the playwright’s, and musician’s thoughts manifested in words and notes and raring to fly out from the page to become alive.

As the playwright begins his creative journey, he completes his travel with his thoughts realized in collaborative production. Several elements merge to evolve the genesis to complete a process we call the theater. With the audience, and the audiences’ responses, we may say the cycle of the production of drama in theater has been completed. 

The Beginnings

The Greeks did not invent drama. Drama is innate in us, in all humans. Drama originated when man was born. This I already described earlier. But these citizens of a very sophisticated culture mastered a lot of expertise in subjects including mathematics, science, medicine, literature, politics, and sports (they invented the Olympics). They were not strictly Greeks because Greece as a nation was not born yet. In those times the present Greece was composed of several independent city-states, many of them at war with each other. The most cultured was Athens where the philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates lived. The Athenians were also constantly at war with the Spartans, a militarily superior city-state. These war stories are subjects of many plays these Greeks created.

If the Greeks did not invent the drama, what they did was to establish formal conventions to stage drama into theater. The very word ‘teatrai’ is Greek meaning “to see.” And on the stage, the Greek audience saw their lives unfold. They saw stories of their gods and how their gods ruled their lives. They feared most the stories about a hero brought to suffering, ignominy, and defeat. They were afraid that this defeated hero’s story may be their own, so they avoided doing the same mistakes this man did. Even then, they knew that they had little choices in life especially when their whimsical gods played cruel tricks on their fellow mortals. This feeling of fear and pity that the Greek audiences experienced was called catharsis, a feeling akin to the purgation of our emotions. Perhaps this feeling comes close to the well-being one experiences after a good cry. Many of us know how well we feel after watching a tear-jerker.

This kind of play was popular. Aristotle called this the tragedy, indicating that this type of a play was more superior that a comedy. It was more superior because of the loftiness of its subject and the nobility of its character. Aristotle described the many conventions of the tragedy from the many samples he watched. One important convention was the unities of time, place, and action. The Greeks believed that because a play is a representation of life, it should therefore imitate life as closely as possible: the action of an event can happen only in one place, in the duration of one day, and with a beginning, middle, and an end. Oedipus Rex is one classic example.

Of course one would understand that tragedy was several notches higher than comedy, in Aristotle’s judgment, when one witnesses that the manner of Greek comedy is much similar to our slapstick Tito, Vic and Joey kinds. Toilet humor, sex, mistaken identities, and physical action are the same ingredients that comedies mix to get hearty laughter. But despite these manners, Greek comedies were satirical comments on war, philosophy, poetry, and other socially profound issues that affected Greek life during those times.

Theater to the Greeks was an educational experience. In the 5th century B.C. during the wild celebrations of the feast of their wine god Dionysius, contests among the best dramatists were held in large circular performance venues called amphitheaters. The stage was set in the middle of a surrounding hill where sat the spectators. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were the best dramatists of tragedies this milieu produced. Aristophanes produced profane comedies of a bawdy nature. Imagine a crowd of about 17,000 all engrossed in watching their plays with characters who spoke without microphones. This was over two thousand years ago even before the first MTV screens were invented. This was why theater had to be bigger than life. Actors stood on elevated shoes, made broad gestures, and projected voice through a vocal contraption in the large masks they wore. These representations of life were expressed even more vividly by the perfect acoustics of the amphitheaters. 

World Theater

            Greek theater (also called Classical Theater because of its formal conventions) reveals to us how the Greeks viewed their world and how, through the plays themselves, attempted to understand and control this world. This has always been the way of art and of the theater. As human expressions, these creations they put on stage were their own interpretations of their worlds. This is why each historical time, each nation, and each culture will have a theater that varies. In this diversity of theater, common threads run through them: mimesis, the collaboration of many, creation that goes through a culturally-determined process, interpretation, and the integration of other artistic expressions like dance, music, the visual arts, and literature. Unlike poetry, theater is not a lonely art because people are involved and it requires an audience to respond to the final work. Oftentimes, theater has been deemed the “art of all arts” because of the merging of these other forms.

In these various forms also, theater functions in different ways, according to how the creators want their theater to be. Today, we look at theater as a form of entertainment, to delight in shows and to take us momentarily away from our life’s drudgery. In the Medieval Period in Europe, theater was used to preach the teachings of the Church (which was the most powerful entity during those times). Some of these works include anonymous plays like the allegory Everyman and The Second Shepherd’s Play. The Greeks did not only use theater to entertain but to reveal their views about the logic in their universe. There was an intellectual and philosophical quality in Greek Theater, as the Greeks were cerebral people. In fact, emotion in tragedy was highly discouraged. Bloody and hysterical scenes were not presented; these were enacted out of sight of the audience, or simply narrated by a chorus. We don’t see the hanging of Jocasta or the blinding of Oedipus in the Sophocles’ play.

In many cultures, theater and ritual cannot be distinguished; both merge as one spontaneous whole. This practice may be seen in many Asian cultures where theater plays a religious role and where the performers are also the audiences. Worship is conducted as in a theatrical performance. Dances to seek blessings from the supernatural are performed, chants are sung, and stories of myths are reenacted. The whole gamut of costumes, music, character, and plot are evident in these performances. But while we may not have a paying audience watch these performances in a venue, these forms are still theater because they merge the qualities of drama and production. Mimesis is inherent. In a sense, even our Sunday Mass qualifies as theater as it represents events in the Last Supper two millenniums ago, and as actors, we take the roles of the apostles who partake of the “flesh and blood.” Yet, the Mass is not seen as entertainment but as means to renew our Faiths. Theater works in so many ways.

Theater in various times and places revealed the minds and hearts of the cultures that created it. We may study cultures and history through these theaters’ characteristics as these theaters present to us the lifestyles and thinking of the cultures that established them. Characters, plot, the manner of storytelling (or non-storytelling, as the case may be), the setting or design of a play, and various other elements are influenced by a prevailing style conditioned by the artistic temperament of each milieu. Shakespeare in progressive Elizabethan England had the temerity to throw out the Greek rules, invent history, and create circuitous plots to the delight of his audiences. The bard will remain the most successful dramatist of all times.

The French, being logical people, were more circumspect. The strict rules of classical theater suited their minds so in the French Academy (which was like our Board of Censors today but with more powers) were formulated the rules of “good” theater. Only those who kowtowed to these rules got their grants and the respect of the patrons, so we had an age of the revival of classical theater, the Neo-Classical movement. Foremost among these new classicists were Corneille, Racine and Moliere.

The Spanish had a different makeup: they were gregarious and emotional. Their Siglo de Oro of Spanish theater presented theater of baroque and romantic proportions. Opulent sets back dropped highly-charged characters in elaborate costumes. Materials developed from folklore, domestic life, and politics. Their audiences in theaters surrounded by fences called corrales delighted in fantasy and the swashbuckling ways of their romantic heroes. This 16th century age of Lope de Vega, Miguel Cervantes, Lope Rueda, Pedro Calderon de La Barca, among many others, was also Spain’s age of expansion and its subsequent power over many parts of the world. This age coincided with the time of our Spanish colonization; our theater (as our literature) therefore took much influence from the Spanish, an influence held for three centuries abetted by the Church and the State.

In Asia, theater thrives because it is engrained in the peoples’ lives. Taking a religious fervor, theater functions in multi-fold ways: it is a means to communicate with the supernatural, it teaches and engrains traditions, it gives the community a sense of identity and thus, coheres the community. Lore, legends, and local lifestyles are materials for theater that integrate the other arts. Asian Theater is distinctive from the theater of the West (meaning Europe) because there is much dancing and music making, as there too is dialogue. Its setting may be quite minimal, as in the Japanese Noh, or elaborate as in the Kabuki. Its characters are presented in a different way. These characters paint their faces, use masks, and move in stylized gestures. An actor grows in the theater and learns by way of long apprenticeships. China has its opera, India its classical dances (Odissi and Kathakali), Indonesia its puppet theater (Wayang Kulit), and Cambodia, Bali, and Thailand its classical dances.

As a footnote, observe that theater practice was at its peak in times of economic prosperity. You will note too that in Western Theater, the better times produced great playwrights (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Moliere, de la Barca) who worked on plays that were more presentational (using means rather than the realistic approach) than verisimilar.

 Presentation of Mixed Means

Each age kept certain styles of performance. The Greeks had the chorus dancing and narrating, and a single actor (Thespis was supposedly the first one) emoting. The religious plays of the Medieval Period were mounted in places where people converged, like in the market place. We may imagine that their settings of heaven and hell were quite literal paintings. In fact, we get a lot of these biblical images from the artists of the Middle Ages who produced them, like the fluffy little angels, the halos over the heads of saints, or the fiery atmosphere of hell. Their characters were either good or bad, nothing in between.

Shakespeare created motivation in his characters. This means that his characters were like real people responding to stimuli from other characters or from events. If ever his characters suffered, the consequences were brought about by their own decision or indecision. Lear thought that Cordelia loved him the least. Hamlet wavered in his plans for vengeance. They bore the consequences of their actions.

But the classicists criticized Shakespeare so much because his plays had scenes that moved from one place to another, from one time to the next, and these produced convoluted plots like a whole network of London’s sewers. Shakespeare didn’t care because he lured the audiences even on hot afternoons (his theater didn’t have a roof) when they stood for hours to watch his exciting, sometimes bloody spectacles. Sets were not popular in Shakespeare’s time. The evocative words of his masterful text took cared of this. His plays performed on an almost empty stage of three levels: the highest for heaven and balcony scenes, the middle level for war and other scenes where the king receives his guests, and a space very close to the audience (the thrust stage, or an extended apron – the part nearest the audience) where the characters often whisper (in asides) directly to their audiences. It was indeed an exciting time for theater!

If these classicists criticized Shakespeare, they were aghast about the capa y espada (cape and sword) kind of theater the Spanish produced with its entire Baroque-like environment.

Theater during those times was unlike that which we watch today. Actors spoke directly to the audience, in oratory. There were no directors then. Blocking, or the manner by which movements of actors were arranged on stage (the traffic of performance), was not a required practice because actors were left to decide how best they would move and delineate their roles. The closest concept to a director was perhaps the lead actor, or the playwright, giving suggestions to the others about vocal delivery and movement.

But Science changed all these.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Science was changing a lot in the thinking patterns of people. Science was also challenging the age-old precepts that religion taught. The world was going through an Age of Reason and philosophers like Descartes, scientists like Galileo, psychologists like Sigmund Freud, social scientists like Karl Marx, and evolution theorists like Charles Darwin led in bringing new paradigms to the modern outlooks about our world. In Art, the Realists were contending that art, being “imitations” of reality, necessarily had to depict the real world as one saw it objectively. Persons had to be depicted like real persons in verisimilitude. This era was also an age of inventions and machines that produced a lot of surplus goods but brought about great changes in society. Through the Industrial Revolution, many of these changes were unfavorable to the great majority who flocked to cities to earn jobs.

Subsequently, the theater was affected by such changes. Since human behavior is governed by human laws that may be understood by Science, characters in plays were shaped according to psychological parameters. The actions of these characters were determined by their psychological makeup. Their personalities were influenced by biological, cultural, social, economic, and political factors. Realistic plays required characters responding to stimuli as real persons would respond to in the real world. Here too developed the “three-dimensional character” in plays that required “organic unity,” where parts somehow melded to form a whole, and a beginning-middle-end structure was discernible.

If Shakespeare’s plays or the Greek plays were presentational, the plays of this Age of Realism were representational. The fourth wall (the imaginary wall that divides the performance from the audience) was erected. Actors who were too engrossed in their roles (living the part, as they say) were a separate entity from an audience which separation was made more distinct by the darkness in the audience’s part. The audience therefore was like a peeping tom privileged to witness some conflict happening inside a room.

Because theater had to be objectively real, the sets (physical surroundings in the play) had to be real too to the last detail. In instances, designers had to transport to the stage real fireplaces, real walls, and real salon décors to the last drape. Action happens in short durations because if a play is supposed to run for an hour, only an hour’s action in real life can be possibly recreated; otherwise, the play’s credibility is taxed.

Science’s demands for the objective observation of life influenced the development of the proscenium, the box-like stage, where the viewers witness life unfold as if observing specimens in action through a microscope. The proscenium displays life like the glass enclosures of exhibits in museums. This type of theater I am certain is the type most of us are familiar with. In fact, I proffer the generalization that your image of theater invariable draws from this kind of realistic performance. This is the beginning of Modern Theater. Foremost among the dramatists of this age is the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House, Nora) who many consider to be the Father of Modern Drama. In Ibsen’s league are the Swede August Strindberg (Miss Julie) and the Russian Anton Chekov (The Cherry Orchard). Konstantin Stanislavski, another Russian, developed a method of acting that follows human behavior very closely. It is this type of acting (“Acting is Being”) that most of our more popular actors on stage and in the movies study and imbibe.

The photographic accuracy of portrayal in the realistic theater was the essential reason a counter movement prospered to fault this theater’s lack of interpretation and creativity. What interpretation about life is there, indeed, if all one does is copy it? Life, in all its complexities and ramifications, cannot simply be captured like a picture. A simple linear narrative cannot merely depict the multiple facets and irrationalities of our world. The lack of reason in the cataclysmic world events of the 20th century like the two world wars stimulated our artists and chroniclers of human affairs to rethink the creative depiction of our world. There was the cry to return back to presentational theater, and in this rush to bring answers to our confusions were developed new manners of theater along with new these theaters’ philosophies: expressionism, theater of the absurd, theater of cruelty, underground theater, epic theater, theater of poverty, anthropology of theater, post modern theater, and the like.

New ways of production developed. In some, the process of creation took more importance than the play itself. Plot was thrown out. Characters became less human than real people. Symbols and metaphor were emphasized. Sets became more and more minimal, and at times were purposely distorted to emphasize the anti-real. Meanings took precedence over the depiction of a character in crisis. The conventions of the traditional play with a beginning, middle, and end were rejected. More experiments flourished. Playwrights and dramatists from the West looked Eastward for new inspirations and materials.

From this crop of philosophers-dramatists rose the ranks of Bertolt Brecht, Eugene Ionesco, Antonin Artaud, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Jerzy Grotowski, Luigi Pirandello, and a host of many others. These are names that matter in the arena of World Theater.

In the Philippines, our contemporary theater has been influenced by the theater of the West. The reasons are obvious. First, we never had a theater tradition in the sense that Europe, China, and India had theirs. Second, our over three hundred years of colonial rule has obliterated whatever seed the beginnings of our theater should have birthed. Third, our colonial educational system provided the impetus for the popularization of European and American drama.

Spain and America influenced Philippine theater. Four decades ago, mostly purely English-spoken plays in the realistic mode were performed inside universities with mostly student audiences. The Spanish colonial period produced the religious senakulo (dramatization of religious-oriented stories) and the secular, convention-directed comedia (locally, moro-moro or its variants depicting the clash between the Moros and the Christians). The later part of the Spanish period produced the zarzuela (a play usually of domestic themes with singing and music). From America came the drama (a play in dialogue about ordinary lives, including romance) and the bodabil (from vaudeville, a hodgepodge production strung by skits, short music and dance numbers, and vignettes that have evolved into today’s variety show). From Broadway (America’s commercial theater district) came the musicals, plays whose storylines are sung and danced (although the similar sarswela earlier introduced by the Spanish, has already taken popular roots in the country).

Today, our theater has transfigured its own characteristics grown from our own experiences, history, and culture. In the regions, plays with music are staged in the vernacular and are popular among the folk. Their forms are multifarious, their functions varied. Theater forms and means have evolved their local variants. The list by all means is incomplete. And while Philippine Theater still struggles to identify itself, it has successfully shaped its own qualities and its own aesthetics. 

Theater is Forum and Ritual

Whatever the means and whatever the subject, we all enjoy watching theater. We enjoy because theater, by feeding our imagination, transports us to another world. This “other world” may not necessarily be a world of fantasy. It may be our own world, and the recognition of this delights and instructs us.

The experience of the moment of participating in a performance embraces us as we partake of the visual, aural, mental, and emotional interchanges that take place. Unlike in the passive participation in the movies and TV (you don’t shout “bravos” after an actor completes a good scene), the theater allows us to actively participate in its unfolding. The theater, by allowing its audiences to immediately agree or reject what it shows, is therefore both ritual and forum: it shares in a communal activity that is active and present. We enjoy too because our innate acting sense is rekindled as we, by identifying with characters in familiar situations, psychologically inhabit the world of the characters themselves.

From the seed of an idea in drama to its production in theater, the performance completes a process where the audience occupies the other end of a taxing yet highly fulfilling cycle. The audience is highly regarded in this cycle because it determines the performance’s success. The audience’s responses and the subsequent play-audience interactions like good chemistry reconnect to the original idea conceived by the playwright. It is an idea that has been filtered through a lot of creative procedures reshaped by a long line of interpretations. The idea has been tossed around by a community of artists that include a director, the designers, the choreographers, the actors, the musicians, the technical personnel, and other such variables like the stage and the venue. The performance is the link between the original idea and the community of audiences.

But whether in Europe, China, or the Philippines, theater holds common grounds. It represents human experience. The presentation of this human experience is reenacted through time and in space. It merges the temporal and the plastic arts. The creative process is communal. The work is reshaped by the interpretations of a community of artists and audiences. Even with the original idea’s vision of a world, the collaborative process allows this vision to reshape itself. And in its final form, the shared work requires an audience.

Theater allows us to experience other lives in a delightful way: by watching theater. We love to laugh and to be pampered by good entertainment. We delight in recognizing our foibles together. We may be depressed after watching a tragedy, but we all come out alive because we know that this depression being temporary has taught us new insights. And in real life, “acting” has taught us to cope, to survive. Like in the experience of the stage, our daily “acting” keeps our sanity intact. Theater has survived through the vast ages of man because it is necessary.