"I Am a Camera"

"I Am a Camera"

Okay, so maybe the title of my last blog – FINAL Thoughts – was a bit premature. We are going on 3 weeks since I saw the show, and still the mental kettle burbles. All I said in that post – that the show was a very special, personal experience for me—remains completely true. I just feel like saying more.

My thoughts today run toward something a cast member said to me. As an actor myself and a teacher of acting, I asked what made this show different from the perspective of an actor. The cast member said that it was more ‘cinematic’ than theatre generally was because of the proximity of the spectators.

For anyone not familiar with the difference, the major contrast is size. When you are acting on stage in a house which seats 499 or more, in a sense, you have to play all the way to the back row. Tiny gestures, subtle facial expression changes – they don’t read. People can’t see them when there’s that much distance between you and them, so everything the actor does has to be a little bigger (or a lot bigger, depending on the style of theatre you’re doing.) When you’re acting for camera, it’s right in your face, and the mic is right there as well. Because the camera is so close, and because when the image is shown to viewers on the movie screen, they will have jillion-foot wide/tall image of you to gaze at and interpret, the acting can (and has to be) tiny. Supremely understated facial expressions will read beautifully, powerfully. Film folk tease theatre actors, telling them to ‘bring it down a notch, or ten,’ and theatre folk tease film actors, telling them ‘no close-ups in theatre; get it all the way out there to back row.’

Theatrical acting becomes more cinematic when you’re playing in a smaller venue – a black box space that seats 100 or less—but there is still more separation of actor and spectator than at SLEEP NO MORE. The SNM audience is *right there*. A spectator can be anywhere from thirty feet, to three feet, to three inches (or less!) away from an actor. Movie cameras can get crystal-clear close-ups of actors, but most theatre patrons (especially those of us who sit in the “nosebleeds” I can afford) can’t do the same with stage actors. In SNM, spectators can get close enough to be able to look over an actor’s shoulder and read what the character is writing (and misspelling one night I saw the show. I’m sure it was a character choice….) Even if you keep your distance, you can still hear the actors breathe, and if you’re close, you can feel their breath on your skin. A SNM actor doesn’t have to be ‘bigger’ necessarily, because all the details, even the tiniest, read to the spectator who is literally sharing the performance space with the actor.

An aside: I also want to talk about how much of SNM is actually ‘theatrical’ more than realistic, but how and why their brand of theatricality is actually more REAL than realism. That’s for another day though.

The proximity of the spectator brings me to another of SNM’s cinematic values – that of spectator as camera. Each spectator is the “camera” through which the scene before them is recorded, in our memory at least. We have two sophisticated auto-focus lenses, and we can pan, tilt, zoom, rack/deep/or selective focus to our heart’s content. Additionally, the entire room we’re in is within our ability to keep in frame. Some of that is possible in a regular theatrical experience, but unlike a typical theatre where we are tied to our specific seat, at SLEEP NO MORE we can also cinematically track and truck at will. In fact, we go it one better and actually become a kind of steadicam. No need to lay track or stay only parallel to the action. We can (and must!) ascend and descend staircases, do curlicues, enter and exit through countless doors, dash down hallways, cut around corners, negotiate mazes (and damned high windows, and through the bars of wrought iron gates…or not.) We can look at anything we want from almost any angle, even extreme close-up, at any moment we choose. Can’t do that in a typical theatre space. You can do it with a camera while making a movie, but the director selects the angles for us, and the spectator cannot change them. That is where SLEEP NO MORE actually improves on cinema AND theatre.

The final cinematic element that comes to mind is that of dreams and fantasies. Most everyone has had the experience of dreaming you’re watching a movie, and then as the dream goes on, you go from spectator to participant. The nightmare version I had as a child: I’d be watching a horror movie about witches, and suddenly there I was running from the rapidly approaching witch myself. More pleasant iterations of that dream began to occur when I discovered porn. I won’t elaborate, but you get the idea. Spectators also sometimes wish that the cinematic characters they love were real and that they could commune with them, fight at their side, comfort them, and generally live in that world along with them.

In SLEEP NO MORE, you get to! (Kind of.) You get to live in the world, for up to 3 hours, right along with the characters. You can go where they go, and even their most intimate or helpless moments are not hidden from you. Every prop or piece of set dressing that is tactile for them is for you too, and you are welcome to touch it, manipulate it, read it, feel its weight. You feel the dirt under your feet in some rooms, the cold of the corrugated metal that lines hallways. You can sit on furniture, smell the smells, feel the temperature differences and water droplets, hear the sounds, even taste some things. When they run, you run too, and your muscles ache after a break-neck dash up the stairs, and your breathing and heart rate quicken because of actual physical exertion. Your excitement level piques too as you are part of the chase, a ‘partner in crime.’ It all feels real because, in many ways, it is! Again, it’s an extension, an upgrading of both theatre and film.

SLEEP NO MORE appeals to cinematically-based romantic fantasies as well. Who hasn’t, whether sleeping or waking, fallen a little in love with a character and wished they were real and could return your feelings in kind? In SLEEP NO MORE, the beautiful leading lady or handsome gent sometimes fulfills that fantasy! Out of the crowd, a SNM actor will see something in you, over everyone else that cycle. They actually “come down out of the movie screen” in a surreal Woody Allen PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO moment and take your hand. But unlike PURPLE ROSE where the movie character comes into the spectator’s world, the SNM actor invites you, and only you, more deeply into their world. For an intensely magical span, you’re in the moment together, just the two of you: they need you, they connect to you, they are emotionally vulnerable with you, they touch you, they tantalize you, and you are their whole world. It is exquisite! Then, almost as quickly as it began, it’s over and you go back to being ‘just camera’ again. But to have that experience at all?!! A fantasy become reality!?! It just doesn’t happen in real life – ever! Except at SLEEP NO MORE.

While SLEEP NO MORE borrows liberally from dramatic literature, it also borrows more than just music/themes/characters from classic Hollywood. It’s the rarest of invitations for the spectator to experience live theatre by becoming both the cinematographer and a participant in their own, ‘gonzo’ movie. It just doesn’t exist anywhere else – not crafted and executed to this level.