Entry Five: On First Realizing I Understood What Was Being Said On Stage
My first memory of attending the theatre was all visual--jewelry and tights and feathers. Except for my father's snoring, I have no memory of sound. I'm certain that means something.
And as for language--that's another memory altogether.
I am sitting near the front of that Stratford thrust stage, at something like 4 o'clock (for those of you old enough to know about clocks with hands). I am witnessing an event on stage that I know now was Marc Antony standing on the balcony, looking down on Caesar's body below him upstage centre, and looking out at the actors (mostly Spear Carriers--see Episode One) facing him upstage. He says 'Friends,' and the crowd begins to turn away from him. He says 'Romans,' and they begin to move toward the exits. He pauses and says, with all the emotion he can muster, elongating the syllables, 'Countrymen!' There is a pause in all action. The 'people' pause. They consider. He begins, 'I come not to praise Caesar--[a further pause]--but to bury him!' These 'countrymen' slowly, individually and not as a group, turn back upstage toward Marc Antony, and now pay attention. Their attention is clearly temporary, and they might turn away again at any moment. Antony goes on with this funeral oration--and their attitude towards him, and towards Caesar, visibly changes. And aurally, as they murmur, they respond more favourably, understanding and agreeing with a word here, a phrase there, a line over there...they respond to the words as if they finally, finally, at last, at last, understood what the hell is going on....
No--wait--that was me--
I have had decades to think about this moment, and to think about why this vivid, brief memory was clearly such an important moment for me. Let me take this apart.
First of all, it occurs to me that for a very long time, during all of those annual visits to Stratford to 'attend to' a Shakespearean play, I didn't actually understand what was going on. Oh, I remember, after a certain age, perhaps eight or nine, that I read the plot synopsis very carefully, and relied on it as the action proceeded on the stage. And I read the cast list, with the names, and the relationships among all the names, just as carefully, also consulting it throughout the performance. But what this says to me now is just how ill prepared I was for this narrative experience.
It was not 'natural' for me to sit in a darkened theatre and look at people through that darkness, doing things in another time and place that was not my own--or anyone's--and, you know, 'getting it.' This is a technology--the theatre, lighting, the costume, all of it--and it requires training to understand. Or familiarity. Or time.
In my case, there was no training. What my parents could give me was time and familiarity, and this they gave me. After that, I was on my own. Just so--I poured over the program--and oh, how I miss those programs, reading the notes and mini-essays, memorizing the characters and their relationships, committing the plot points to my short-term memory, grateful to arrive at my seat way, way ahead of the beginning of the play because I had work to do to prepare.... This is a habit I still have, arriving very early to my seat to prepare myself.
So perhaps this memory of myself and Marc Antony was a moment when I actually understood what was going on. For once--for the first time--it wasn't then about what first impressed me about the theatre sufficiently to have a memory--costumes, colour, movement, all on both actors and audience members. I suddenly realized that I understood the language....
I think that for all of those first ten years of theatre-going, I didn't really understand what anyone was saying. Shakespearean poetry spoken on stage, for a boy from a farm with an Ontario public school education? Of course not. Just because we are present when people are speaking, doesn't mean we know in the slightest how to listen. It is a skill to listen for more than a few seconds at a time, and though I was an 'early adopter' of (not to say addicted to) television, I had no experience with live long-form speaking of any kind--church sermons were not, after all, that long--and certainly none with multiple characters and with narrative. When I think back on what I do and don't remember, I think it's clear that, though I may have enjoyed many things about being in the theatre, the thing that did not come naturally to me was...'Shakespeare.' The words in all their poetic complexity, the characters they created, the narrative action those characters created. This was learned....
And when I heard Marc Antony say those words, and saw that crowd listen and understand and respond, negatively at first, and then with a change of heart and mind--something happened. It was absolutely, unquestionably, 'memorably' a physical change in me. I remember the rush of emotion, the flush, warm feeling in my face. I understood the words, and I could see my (all right, fictional) spear-carrier in the midst of that crowd, being me, representing me, understanding the words for me, and responding to them.
So there, you see, my 'supernumerary' self was on stage, on my behalf, helping me to understand not just 'the show'--the colour and the movement and the spectacle of it all--but the effect that words had on people.
Yes, yes, I know what an early response to this will be. Could I have picked a simpler way into that understanding? I mean, Marc Antony's funeral oration of the body of Caesar is not exactly difficult. And to anyone who says that--I respectfully disagree. If the understanding of spoken language is difficult, then it's difficult all the way. And at that moment, something changed in me, and my mind began to understand. I remember it as sudden, and as emotional. And I tend to believe this memory because it isn't just the beginning of that speech that I remember, but the whole speech. I even 'got' the part about crossing the Rubincom, and that simply shouldn't have happened.
I think too many people assume that 'theatre going' is somehow a perfectly simple thing, a part of our ordinary way of seeing and hearing and sensing the world. That if we just sit there, somehow it will come to us. Or perhaps no one thinks this way, though I have certainly experienced this attitude throughout my life. But no, it's learned. It's an 'activity'--not a 'passivity'--
So there it is. My representative on stage, my Spear Carrier, has both a lot to respect and a lot to answer for. The actor on the balcony was Bruno Gerussi, and I have his voice to thank for a sudden understanding of spoken verse, after no doubt years of gestation. But it was the 'mob' on stage, facing the speaker, just as I was, who represented me, and by watching them I learned. As it is always, being with people....
The 'spear-carriers' of the stage carried me forward into understanding. And if you think that's a minor event...then you haven't been to the 'student matinee' performances I've attended. Then you know what it's like to be exposed for the first time to this hypothetical 'Shakespeare.'
