Theater Art and Art of Theater

Annamaria on Monday

Once again, I am hiding out from the topic of current events.  So you will not be reading the pacifist sermon that has been playing in my head all week.  Nor the prayer I'd wanted to say.  Today I am going to hide out behind what I consider a timeless topic:experiences of the arts of sculpture and theater.

I have written a few blogs over the years about Hudson Valley Shakespeare.  Fifty miles north of Times Square, surrounded by green hills and over looking the majestic Hudson River, for the past thirty-five years, HVS has brought us fans the joy of live theater performed in repertory under a tent.  To me, the most beautiful thing about the HVS productions is the simplicity of the circumstances.  Actors perform at ground level to audiences of just over 500, sitting bleacher-style on three sides.  The stage is in open air; the productions almost always employ few props and practically no sets.

The magical intimacy of the performances is about the night, the playwright's words, the actors' voices, and the audience's responses. People in the chairs are participants who share in the captivating story, laugh together - often at 450-year-old jokes.  Are moved by the fear, the anger, the hope, the confusion... that the actors portray.

It's glorious.

I have also written here about my admiration for the sculptor GianLorenzo Bernini, especially about his ability to captivate viewers of his work by presenting his subjects in action: his David about the launch the rock at Goliath.  Or something as simple as a cardinal about to speak.  Viewing a Bernini is a bit like watching a play.  With him, one feels involved with something going on.  Something like what happens to audiences at HVSF. It's not a passive experience.

I just recently learned that besides being a great sculptor, painter, and architect, Bernini also wrote and produced plays. And then some!  In his theater pieces, he went to great lengths to involve the audiennces.  One source described his Inundation of the Tiber like this: "He enjoyed seeing his guests caught up in the action. The stage seems to have contained a number of dams or dikes, arranged so that the water could be seen bursting through as it advanced toward the spectators. When the water broke through the last dike facing the audience, it flowed forward with such a rush, and spread so much terror among the spectators that there was no one, not even among the most knowledgeable, who did not quickly get up to leave in fear of an actual flood. Then, suddenly, with the opening of a sluice gate, all the water was drained away." 

Imagine that!

In another production, Bernini's stage fire became so realistic that , "There was such terror among the spectators that it was necessary to reveal the trick to keep them from fleeing."

Gives new meaning to the old rule about crying "Fire" in a theater, don't you think?

The closest HVS ever came such a performance, for me anyway, was the summer of last year. The play, Mr. Burns, had a scene of a violent storm. There were, of course in the 21st Century, sound effects and light effects to create the illusion. But as it happened, on the night I saw that play, an actual thunderstorm descended on the tent at exactly the right moment. The thunder, at one point, became so loud that the audience could not hear the actors.  They had to stop the performance and wait until the storm passed. After about 15 minutes, when the play resumed, the very next line an actors had to say was "The storm is over."  The audience, as you can imagine, burst into peals of laughter.  Not even the hyper-brilliant Gian Lorenzo Bernini could have managed that!