May 2005

 

Dramatic Potentials

By Leena Prasad

 

A man on stage told the story of his prayers to God in which he begs God to not let him fail 6^th grade.  God disagrees with the request and tells him that he must suffer the consequences of his actions.  Although he fails 6ths grade, he gets a kiss from a beautiful girl on the same day as he brings his report card to his father and he thanks God for the small favor.

 

This poignant scene occurred in a monologue during the amateur night show by students of the ten-week performance art class at The Marsh on Valencia Street in The Mission.  I was invited to the show by a friend who was performing that night.  My friend informed the audience that his father has listed ‘histrionics’ as one of his skills in a school admissions application.  My friend, continued to entertain us with a soliloquy about the history of his development as a theatrical artists and his current struggles against being labeled “Americanized.” As a first-generation immigrant from India, he struggles to maintain his identity while participating in all that America and San Francisco have to offer.  His calculated exaggerations of real life events paid off in tumultuous audience laughter.

 

Another actor talked about her childhood in a household where all-work-and-no-play was the motto.  Fortunately, she was rescued by one of her neighbors, a rich spoiled girl who introduced our protagonist to the ‘glamour’ of smoking cigarettes and titillated her imagination with tales of sexual conquests.

 

Solo acts like these, often based on personal stories and calculated to elicit laughter or tears or both at the same time, are the trademark of The Marsh.  The shows are successful enough to sustain the existence of this small alternative theatre and I walked away from that night’s show wondering why personal stories are so compelling?

 

Why did a memoir like “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” catapult the writer Dave Eggers to an acclaim that’s not enjoyed by writers who create stories from their imagination?  Was it for the same reason that reality television has become so ubiquitous all over the world? Does humankind harbor an insatiable curiosity for the lives of others? Or, maybe real life story access the same “Peeping Tom” mentality invoked by the indulgence in gossip.

 

In the past, readers savored ‘roman a clef,’ a fictional account of the lives of famous people. Now, even the lives of ordinary people are fair game.  Albeit the MTV show “The Real World” pioneered the idea of reality shows, the concept is not new.  To my knowledge, it goes back to at least as far back as 1921 when an Italian playwright, Luigi Pirandello wrote a play called “Six Characters in Search of a Play.”

In Pirandello’s play, a ‘real’ family invades the set of a theatrical rehearsal and insists that the director of the play switch the story that the actors are rehearsing to that of the story of the family.  At the time of its release “Six Characters in Search of a Play” was considered to be groundbreaking in its theory that real people’s lives are much more interesting than the lives of fictional characters and that actors can only fake emotions whereas real people display genuine emotions.

 

Reality television, however, hasn’t been able to find a firm foothold as a substantiative mode of entertainment.  Eggers’s ‘memoirs’ were ‘based on truth’ not necessarily the exact truth.  The same holds true for James Joyce who pioneered the genre of “autobiography as art” with his “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”  The solo acts at The Marsh were based on real stories but were dramatized to elicit audience emotions.

 

Perhaps the lives of real people would always be fodder for mass entertainment but a little bit of fine-tuning of real life, by expert hands, has the potential to achieve artistic aplomb.