Theater Much More Than an Artistic Distraction

Author: Laura Rockefeller

In the face of suffering as great as that which swept the United States after Sept. 11, many people feel, as student actor and director Joe Varca '02 said, "that you just wish — and you think — the world will stop. There should be no classes; there should be no attempt to communicate it, no attempt to articulate it just yet. Just silence and reflection and sadness and then you move on. But the world didn't stop." No, the world kept going, forcing people to either try to quell their grief and keep up with the life bustling around them, or to take their own time to deal with their pain and watch helplessly as life kept spinning forward without them.

With people in such varying emotional states in the wake of a traumatic experience, it is natural that they might look towards theater, a medium which student actor and playwright Nick Olsen '02 said is valued by some as "a nice distraction" and by others because it "can ask tough questions when people aren't expecting them." Regardless of which way one looks at it, theater does provide an outlet for people who are looking for a way to sort out all of the ideas surging in their heads.

The question is whether theater really can respond to a crisis of the magnitude of Sept. 11 in a way that people will find emotionally fulfilling. Varca explained that with the work he does, "hopefully within a single story we can find something that may not be related to the situation, but that reconciles the situation by giving us something beautiful for just a moment — even if it's in a fictitious world where a hypnotist appears on the side of the road. I think that theater is … attempting to encourage compassion and hope at a time where there's not a lot of it." Hearing stories of others who are dealing with similar emotions, even if in a different context, may help people to find ways of working through their own difficulties.

Professor of Theatre Douglas Sprigg commented that the people in the Middlebury Department of Theatre, Dance and Film/Video "feel that art is a way of engaging in the problems of life. We are always trying to reflect some realities in the work." He explained that theater could be seen as an attempt to do two things: "to entertain and to educate … audiences and artists use it for both." Although theater can, at times, simply be a distraction, it also has the ability to be much more.

Theater can speak to people as a result of the intention of the company or simply as a result of an audience member's take on a moment in a production. Sprigg explained that when he saw this fall's production of Shakespeare's "Henry V," which was performed a little over a month after Sept. 11, the final moment of the show was "an artistic image of the bodies piling up after any war."

However, the events and images of Sept. 11 were still very alive in his memory, and for him, the moment "became an image of the bodies piling up under the rubble" at Ground Zero. It did not matter that this play was written in the 16th century about soldiers dying in France.

The emotions were so common to all of humanity that the images could be translated to a crisis in 21st century America.

Sprigg added that the experiences surrounding Sept. 11 have also come to his mind while he is directing and teaching. He found that there are "so many things that would relate." He explained that "if a character was forging on through hardship," he found that students sometimes ended up finding that feeling of desperation from remembering their feelings in the difficult days following the attack on the World Trade Center. Common emotions and struggles appear in plays that may, at first, appear to be totally unrelated.

Varca said that if a moment can capture something universal like that, then "in that moment — through all the range of emotions — you catch the spectrum of our humanity. And that's what the whole point is. It's using experiences like Sept. 11 or another crisis and allowing one story from that event to capture our humanity."