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In a previous book to
stage life of props,
you considered
physical stage objects.
In this new book,
Dark Matter, you
study immaterial
things that are just
as important to the
drama as material props.
What got you interested in
writing about visible things
in theater?
Well, the first book
was fun, because I
came at it from my experience
in the theater as an actor
and as a director, which
was my profession in my 20s,
and when I worked
in the theater,
I noticed that everybody,
directors, designers,
actors, were
obsessed with props,
obsessed with physical objects.
Were they going to
work, where were they,
could we get one that
was designed correctly,
did the guns fire, would
they fire in rehearsal,
would they fire in performance.
So props are a little bit
of an obsession for theater
practitioners and when I came to
look around for a dissertation
topic, the idea of objects
came to me as something
that are so important
in the theater,
but that were being talked
about in theater criticism
as if they were abstract, as
if they were static symbols,
and I thought they were more
interesting and more dynamic
and more mobile and I wanted to
capture some of that mobility.
So my book, The Stage Life of
Props, which you mentioned,
which grew out of
my dissertation
was my attempt to
see what happened
if we could focus on this
very material concrete aspect
of theater that was still very
mobile, very unpredictable that
traveled in time inside
a play from play to play
from playwright to playwright,
and I came to the conclusion
that props were time machines
of the theater, really.
That they were ways
for playwrights
to really interrogate theater
history and ways for actors
to explore character
in new ways.
And it turned out to be a
really rewarding project for me
and when I finished
that book, I really
wasn't quite sure
where to go next,
so I just started looking
at things that interested me
in plays and it
struck me that I had
been looking at a number of
different kinds of things
that were in a kind
of in between space.
They were in the play, but
they weren't necessarily
on the stage, so for example,
a central character who
didn't appear or a bug,
a listening device, that
was hidden in the ceiling
or a world of black magic,
a world of the supernatural.
And as I started
collecting these pieces,
it struck me that
I really didn't
have a vocabulary for
talking about unseen objects,
unseen characters,
unseen actions,
and that that might make
an interesting book.
Because every time I
don't have a vocabulary
for talking about something
that interests me, I think,
ha, there might
be a book in here,
because part of the delight and
the challenge of writing a book
is to try and find a vocabulary
for something that you notice
or you're curious about,
but that there isn't
to receive language out there
that can really do justice
to it.
Andrew, you discussed
how playwrights
use of what is not there, yet
not not there still exerts
a strong gravitational pull.
Can you explain what you
mean and give examples?
Well, this is exactly what dark
matter is in my definition.
It's the invisible
dimension of theater
that is present in the
imagination of the audience,
but isn't concretely
realized on stage.
So a very famous
example of that would
be the central character or
a central character who never
appears on stage and probably
the most famous example of that
in the modern theater is Godot
in Samuel Beckett's Waiting
for Godot, which,
as everybody knows,
is a play about two tramps
in the middle of nowhere
who are convinced that
this man Godot that they
have an appointment with
is going to show up.
And they wait and they wait and
they wait and he never does,
and they never leave
and they try to leave,
but the idea that
Godot is going to come
keeps them anchored in this
purgatorial state of waiting.
And of course, if Godot
actually showed up,
it would ruin the play.
So he's a marvelous example
for me of dark matter,
because to me, Godot is
not there in the play.
He's not physically present.
He never arrives.
There's no actor, but
he's not not there either.
He's part of the
fabric of the play,
and he is actually
the gravitational pull
that holds the tramps
to their tree, that
keeps them rooted in
this terrible situation
that they're in of waiting
for a salvation that is always
just out of reach or always
just out of view or always just
withheld.
So it allows Beckett to
really share with the audience
this experience of frustration
and boredom and waiting
and obsession and yearning
for change, salvation, rescue,
answers.
So Godot is a wonderful example.
I don't actually talk much
about Godot in my book,
because he's such a
familiar character,
and he's such a
familiar figure that I
thought it would be
more interesting to look
at some other things that are
not there, but not not there.
So another example that I
talk about early on in my book
is Macbeth's famous dagger.
So when Shakespeare's Macbeth is
on his way to murder the king,
he is suddenly faced with this
hallucination, this dagger that
is hanging there beckoning
him towards the murder
and it's very difficult to
say where that dagger is,
because for Macbeth,
it is absolutely there.
It can't not be there.
He has to see it.
He can't close his eyes
and make it go away.
It's always-- it's
always just hovering
and he tries to grasp it and
his hand goes right through it,
but he can't do anything
to make it go away.
So from Macbeth's point
of view, it's absolutely
part of his experience.
It's absolutely
part of the play,
and I think we in the audience,
although we don't see it,
share in that terror,
share in that horror,
share in that sense of
uncanniness and hauntedness
and ghostlyness and ethereality,
and the dagger takes on a power
that it couldn't possibly
have if it was a literally
present object on the stage.
And there are some film
versions of Macbeth
that do actually have
a dagger in that scene
and it makes all the
air go out of the scene,
because as soon as you realize
that prop and make it literal,
it loses its uncanniness.
It loses its power to really
haunt our imagination,
and that's what interests me
in the not there not not there,
these things that are part
of the fabric of the play.
They're woven into the
experience of the character.
They're woven into the
experience of the audience.
It's just that we
can't see them.
We can't touch them.
They're always elusive
for some reason.
When I think of the phrase dark
matter, I think of physics.
Would you say a
little more about
the scientific connotation
and a related question,
can you say how it came to
discuss A Midsummer Night's
Dream in terms of
quantum mechanics?
Yes, well, when I
was trying to find
a good analogy or
a good metaphor
for these phenomena that
I was writing about,
things that are not there
but not not there on stage,
it came to me that dark
matter was really perfect,
because in physics,
dark matter refers
to this invisible
nonluminous mass that
pervades the universe.
We can't see it.
We can't touch it.
We can't really
measure it, but we
know it's there and not
only do we know it's there,
but it's actually
most of what is there.
That is to say, I think
scientists estimate
that something like 80,
95% of the matter that's
in our universe is dark.
It doesn't emit light.
It doesn't emit X-rays.
It doesn't admit any
kind of radiation at all.
It's this mysterious
invisible glue
that is holding the
visible world together,
but scientists have no idea
what it is, which is delightful.
So for me, what makes
the analogy work,
and it is an analogy, of
course, is that how do
we know that dark matter exists?
Well, we know it,
because we can observe
its effects, its gravitational
effects on the things
that we do see.
So for example, dark
matter was originally
posited to explain why rotating
galaxies don't fling themselves
apart.
There has to be
some kind of glue
that's holding them together.
There's some kind
of matter there.
We see gravitational pull.
We don't see what's
pulling, so again, we say,
well, it must be this
mysterious dark matter.
Who knows what it's made
of, but there it is.
It's definitely there,
and in the theater,
the invisible phenomena
that I write about
can only be known by their
gravitational effects
on the characters, by
the gravitational effects
on the world of the play.
So we see the invisible
dagger's effect on Macbeth,
we see the effect of the
invisible Indian boy,
this mysterious figure of desire
in A Midsummer Night's Dream
that both King and queen
want to get their hands on,
but we never actually
see him, this Indian boy.
We see his effect.
We see how his gravitational
force exists a tremendous pull
on the world of the play.
So it's as if there were
these invisible magnets that
are holding the iron
filings of to play together,
and that's what I wanted to
find a vocabulary for talking
about trying to explain
some of their uncanny power.
So the question of how I
got to quantum mechanics
in writing about A Midsummer
Night's Dream is also
interesting, and obviously, I'm
not qualified to do science,
but what struck me
while I was exploring
the metaphor of dark
matter was how apt
some of the scientific
concepts were
for describing these
strange phenomena that I
was looking at.
Like the characters who
behave like regular people
when we see them on stage,
but when we don't see them,
there offstage lives exist
in what quantum physics likes
to call superposition.
That is to say, characters
that we don't see
can seem to be in
different states of being.
simultaneously, just
as a quantized particle
can be in two places at once.
So Bottom the clown in A
Midsummer Night's Dream
is a great example.
He has this strange
love affair once he's
transformed into a donkey
with Queen Titania,
and we see them in a
love scene in act 3,
and we see them in a
love scene in act 4,
but we don't see what happens
between those two scenes
and in fact, it's
very difficult to tell
if any time has elapsed.
If this is one continuous
scene or if there's
some kind of erotic
encounter between these acts.
So we just can't tell what
happens between these two
characters between
acts 3 and act 4,
and so I argue in my
book that in a sense,
their erotic
encounter both happens
and doesn't happen in the play.
We can keep both of those
possibilities in mind
in some way without
them necessarily
canceling each other out,
and that's part of the game
that Shakespeare is
playing with the audience.
He's playing with
the indeterminacy
of the dramatic arcs of
these offstage characters.
And this is, it
seemed to me, quite
similar to the way that
quantum physicists describe
the subatomic world, which
only looks a certain way,
because it's being
observed in the same way
that, let's say, light
looks like a wave
if you ask it
wavelike questions.
But it looks like
a particle if you
ask it particle like questions.
The same thing can
be said, perhaps,
of some dramatic characters.
They look like
regular people when
you ask them certain
questions, but then they
look like very, very
strange sorts of creatures
when you ask them different
sides of questions.
There are characters
in Shakespeare
who have different lives in
different versions of the play.
So for example, we have
three versions of Hamlet
that made it into print
in Shakespeare's day,
and Hamlet's trajectory in each
play is a little bit different.
So he is a kind of unstable
particle you might say.
In one version of the play he
encounters Fortinbras's army
marching across Poland and he
has a very famous soliloquy
that he delivers, and in the
other two editions of the play,
that encounter just
doesn't happen.
So we can't say that
there's a single real Hamlet
behind those three
avatars of Hamlet.
We just have to say,
well, we have these three
different textual
versions and they
exist in slightly different
versions of the same world.
And again, there's a
nice analogy in physics,
because some physicists have
claimed that every time we
reach a fork in the
road, the universe splits
and a new universe begins, so
that all possible trajectories
actually happen.
They just happen in
different parallel worlds.
It's called the many
worlds hypothesis.
So again, this
seems to me a kind
of nice analogy for some
of the indeterminacy that
are being played with in
drama, especially modern drama.
So I invent this term
called quantum dramaturgy
and what I mean by quantum
dramaturgy is the kind of play
or the kind of
theatrical world where
characters don't have definitive
offstage trajectories.
When we're not looking at them,
the world of cause and effect
or the laws of cause and effect
can be suspended in a similar
way to the way that the
subatomic world becomes a world
of probability, a cloudy
world, a fitful world,
a world where we can't really
speak in certainties about
where a particle is or isn't.
When we're not
looking at it, it's
going to behave
in a different way
than when we are looking at it.
You begin the book with
a powerful retelling
of the medieval passion play
of the three Marys' visit
to the sepulcher
on Easter morning,
where they see the empty tomb.
You discuss how the
real presence of Christ
is paradoxically guaranteed
by his felt absence.
Can you say a little about this?
Yes, well, this is an
extraordinary instance
of dark matter for me,
because of course, we
should remember that the
medieval drama in England
was a religious drama.
It was an orthodox drama
and it was very much,
I think, taking
place in the shadow
of the Eucharistic controversies
about the real presence
in the Eucharist and this
medieval festival, the festival
of Corpus Christi developed
in the Middle Ages in order
precisely to celebrate Christ's
real presence in the Eucharist
after consecration.
And the climax of these long
plays or cycle plays-- really,
I mean, there were many plays
that were performed over time
that retold the stories of the
Old Testament and the new--
culminate in telling, sometimes
in very graphic detail,
the story of Christ's
passion and Resurrection.
And the climax of
the passion play
was where, indeed,
the three Marys
go to the tomb on
Easter morning and they
meet the angel and the
angel asks, who do you seek
and the three Marys say,
we seek Jesus of Nazareth,
and the angel takes
away the stone
or reveals the sepulcher with
a flourish and there's no body.
And that moment of showing
the absence of the body
is the ocular proof
of the Resurrection,
so that the real presence is
guaranteed by the felt absence.
And to me, that is really the
paradox of theater itself,
the paradox of the way that
theater can make so real what
isn't physically
manifested there,
that something that is not
physically represented on stage
can become absolutely central to
the experience of an audience,
whether it's religious faith,
whether it's uncanny terror,
as in Macbeth, whether it's
a kind of absurdist comedy,
as it is in waiting for Godot,
which I suppose you could say
is a sort of passion
play, perhaps.
So that seemed to me a
very, very good example
and the reason why I started
off the book with it.
It seemed to me a
very, very good example
of how what is not shown, what
the playwright decides not
to show, can be the
absolutely crucial event
of a theatrical experience.
The structure of the book
is perhaps a little unusual.
You begin with the
medieval period
and move on to contemporary
drama and performance.
Can you talk a
little about how you
decided to structure the book?
I wanted to give
readers a flavor
of how playwrights and
audiences in different periods
of theatrical history
experienced dark matter,
and because the idea of the
book is really quite general--
that is to say, invisible
phenomena or the dark matter
of theater, it really only comes
to life once you're looking
at specific instances of it--
I wanted to really look
at how specific examples
of dark matter emanate
a kind of power,
both in the fictional
world of the play
and also over the audience
that's looking at it.
And as a theater
historian, I've always
been interested in how the
first audiences reacted
to these plays when they were
performed in their own time.
Works that seem
classic to us now
might have been experienced
as very exciting, very
strange, very dangerous when
they were first performed
or simply confusing.
So that's certainly how the
professional Elizabethan
playing companies in London
were viewed when they began.
In the 1560s, 1570s,
people weren't really sure
what this new mode of
professional entertainment was.
There wasn't a tradition
of professional play
going at the time.
So one of the plays I
write about in the book
is Marlowe's Doctor
Faustus, and the fact
that certain audiences
watching this play
hallucinated an
extra devil on stage
in this play about black
magic and fled the theater.
And again, I got very
interested in that
as an example of how
dark matter can perhaps
burst onto the stage
as hallucination,
and I really was trying to take
it seriously and think, well,
what was it about the
way that Elizabethans
thought that made them prone to
such kinds of hallucinations.
So what I did in
the book was to take
six examples of dark matter,
six different plays or groups
of plays, situate them in
a particular historical,
and try to account for
their peculiar power
in the theater of it's
own day, in the theater
of their own day.
So the book is divided
into six case histories
really in which I pick
a locus of dark matter
and I try and reconstruct
what made the not they're not
not they're so powerful,
so compelling, so unusual
in that particular instance.
Andrew what would
you like the read
to take away from the book?
I think that audiences
know when they're
watching a play that what
they don't see is as or more
important as what they do see.
I think it's something
that we tend to forget
when we read about theater.
When we read about theater,
we tend to focus or write
about theater, we tend
to focus on the visual,
because it's the
visual that really
comes to mind when we
think about our theatrical
experience.
So you might say we privilege
the visual in some way.
So what I would like
the reader to take away
is a kind of recognition,
I think, a kind
of recognition of what
happens to him or her
when he or she is
in the play house
and is really in the grip
of a theatrical experience
that incorporates
things that are seen,
things that are unseen, things
that are heard offstage,
events that are narrated,
but never occur,
things that may be
hidden on or off stage.
So what I'm hoping is
that the reader will
have a certain amount
of recognition,
but also a certain
amount of novelty
in terms of having his or
her attention drawn to things
that perhaps might not be
the first thing that he
or she would think about when
thinking about Doctor Faustus
or when thinking about A
Midsummer Night's Dream
or when thinking about
a contemporary play.
So what I'm hoping is that
the reader will get back
in touch with that imaginative
dimension of theater
that is really motivated
when the lights go out
and you're in the
dark and you are
imagining what might be there.
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