I’m from Chicago. Chicagoans are different than Minnesotans. Everyone is different than Minnesotans. OK, everyone is different than everyone, but I live in Minnesota now, so Minnesota is what I think about.
When you move to Minnesota, everyone warns you about the passive-aggressive thing. So, you nod and think that you’re prepared. But you’re not really prepared because all your life passive-aggressiveness has been the punch line of a joke on a sitcom. Someone who obviously has no life and incredibly bad taste in shirts, holding his or her hand up to the neck in some kind of clichéd gesture of vulnerability, expresses the opposite desire from what he or she really wants. On television, they usually do it in a high-pitched voice – as though shrillness makes it funnier.
Here, in Minnesota, in reality, however, otherwise normal people – people who wear nice suits and dresses, who look good and not crazy atall – Here in Minnesota, even these types of people won’t tell you what they’re really thinking. And they do it in clever ways that make it almost impossible to know that they aren’t telling you what they’re really thinking. Not only are Minnesotans passive-aggressive, they’ve got passive-aggressive skills. They’re good it. It’s really passive. It’s oddly aggressive. It works.
What does this have to do with my play? Bare with me: Chicago is the City of Big Shoulders. Chicago prides itself on its blue-collar, hard-working, straight-shooting, big, blunt citizens. Chicagoans aren’t exactly aggressive-aggressive as much as they are just, kind of, there. Raw. Decades of slaughterhouses and corrupt politics have nurtured a rough-around-the-edges, unpretentious, bloody, messy thereness.
The character of each city can actually be experienced in the way that theaters do plays. When Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago did a production of Craig Wright’s Orange Flower Water, a play about adultery, there was screaming and shoving. When the Jungle Theater in the Twin Cities on Lyndale did it, well, there was less shouting. People in Minnesota shout less. In general, Minnesotans are more restrained, more stoic. They aren’t really precisely passive as much as stolid. Live theater reflects the community. Hence, the same play is entirely different in a different place.
Unfortunately, because I grew up in Chicago and because I wrote the original version of this play Everywhere Signs Fall ten years ago, there is a certain blunt thereness to the characters that is hard to explain if you didn’t grow up in Chicago. It’s like trying to explain Jewishness to someone. You can read all the books and know all the rules but there is a certain indefinable something. Example: During the Guthrie’s basically enjoyable production of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a play about the Irish immigrant experience rather than the Jewish immigrant experience. It was just a feeling. While the actors were excellent, there was something indefinably not Jewish about them.
The Chicago acting style has a clear but hard to pinpoint approach. So does Minnesota. Chicago actors are raw, loud – sometimes like a really cool looking bull in a china shop. Minnesota actors are restrained. They’re never false. They’re smart. Intellectual and effective. Their choices are like surgical punches that land. They’re clear and talented and hard-working. But – and – they are stolid. Restrained. Their instinct is to pull back. Like their town.
In this play Everywhere Signs Fall, the characters are working very hard to avoid dealing with the problems they should be confronting. They’re distracted and desperate and irrational. It’s like the house is on fire, but they’re trying to pretend its not. But then moments come for the characters when they can’t ignore that they’re burning and they explode in fear or rage or desperation or humor. Something unrestrained. And aggressive.
I’m just describing how strange it is to watch a play being rehearsed and realize how many ways it can be altered, changed, and adjusted because of the different live energies that different live actors and acting styles bring to a script. Even geography effects the final production.
In case you didn’t know it already, in case you’ve heard it but didn’t really believe it, in case you really did think that “Live theater is always different” is as much a performance cliché as “I’m just taking it oneday at a time” is a sports cliché, please believe me that live theater is always different. I don’t mean that someone might flub a line or forget a few pages of dialogue or say a certain line in a slightly different way. I mean that the show you watch on Thursday and what you feel and think when you watch it will be entirely different the next time you see that play – depending on the actors who do thescript, the town in which you’re watching it, the size of the audience, the style of the director, the weather, the stage, the day, etc., etc., etc.
I’ve heard poets say that their poems should mean different things to different people. In theater, we actually dramatize the concept.
If you don’t believe me, you should spend the next month seeing a few plays three different times. As an added bonus, if you actually pay for three tickets to the same show, you’ll earn the undying love of every theater in town. Love is good. Enjoy.
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