I was thinking about what the inherently Jewish styles are, especially of language and performance. And this popped into my head, round about the Dimona section.
FOOTNOTES.
Commentary is a scholarly art, a religious one, a Jewish one – and I need to do a play with more commentary in it. Like the “Footnote” character I interpolated into LYSISTRATA. It just seemed natural to do. But only natural to the brain of someone brought up on the arguing rabbis in the Seder. It’d be great to have commentary characters in the Passover project.
I did so many things right in LYSISTRATA, and I still don’t know how I did most of them. I need to do that show again. It’ll have been ten years in two.
September 30, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Have you read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell?
October 1, 2007 at 10:13 am
Yes, of course!!! I read it on a plane flight and it was fabulous. The thing is, I don’t really like ACTUAL footnotes because you have to look away from them, down to the bottom of the page. I like VH1 popups, I like sidenotes (margin notes) or side-by-side – and I especially like the idea of an actor jumping in with them.
October 2, 2007 at 3:35 am
It seems to me that in a performance setting it’s going to be very hard to do more than one “track” of presentation at once, no matter how it’s done. And if you want to get the sort of layered commentary-on-commentary-on-… effect that is the experience of reading Jewish theology, it’s going to be even worse.
Perhaps instead what one wants to do is have a base scene and then those actors freeze while other actors step out from the wings and discuss what just happened. (My brain is helpfully trying to envision this done to Tartuffe.) An alternative, which I think I’ve even seen done — Into the Woods for example — is to have some of the actors switch back and forth between meta levels, but that doesn’t feel like footnotes to me.
(I’ve just flashed back to fall of last year when someone gave a presentation at CSDL about Antoinine Maillet’s Pelagie-la-Charrette which, at least according to the presentation, features three layers of narrative each of which is aware of and interacts with the other two. I’ve been meaning to get the English translation out of the UCSD library ever since. I am going to do that tomorrow.)