Animal Acts for Changing Times
By Una Chaudhuri
The fabulous frogs currently cavorting on
the Lincoln Center Theater stage belong to a long line of theatrical
animals that have delighted audiences since theatre began, momentarily
distracting them from the antics of that most self-absorbed of
animals, the human being. While Cats has now ceded its
appearance of immortality to The Lion King, the live
camels, sheep and donkeys of the Christmas show at Radio City
Music Hall persist through generations, part of a tradition that
links Sondheim's frogs to their originals in ancient Greece and,
beyond them, to the sacrificial animals of the rituals from which
theatre itself arose. (A note in the Playbill for Edward
Albee's recent prize-winning animal play, The Goat, or Who
Is Sylvia?, noted that the Greek word for "tragedy" translates
literally as "goat-song." More on this Playbill later.)
But the frogs accompanying Nathan Lane
on his journey to Hades in The Frogs have one striking
new feature: They are not only gorgeous to behold but also unexpectedly
naturalistic, even scientifically precise. The brilliant colors
and varied markings on their costumes seem to be based on careful
empirical observation, and to celebrate the marvelous diversity
of the real creatures they represent (who happened this summer
to be the subject of a special exhibit a few blocks away, at the
Museum of Natural History). Intentionally or not, designer William
Ivey Long has subtly departed from the long-standing practice
of distorting the animal figure on stage--usually in the direction
of cuteness and sentimentalism. These frogs are dazzling and entertaining,
as stage frogs should be, but the inevitable anthropomorphism
of the stage animal seems to be tempered, in their case, by a
powerful connection to actual animality, and so to the mystery
of the non-human.
Historically, however, the theatre has
not had much use for the mystery of the non-human. As
one of the many arenas* in which we obsessively contemplate ourselves,
theatre has, like the other arts, relegated animals to its metaphorical
margins. By and large, in the theatre as elsewhere, human animals
have been interested in their non-human cousins chiefly as mirrors
for themselves. The Playbill mentioned earlier, for instance,
offered an easy out for anyone interested in ducking the shocking
subject of Albee's play: interspecies sex. Speaking of goats as
symbols of the "powers of procreation, the life force, the libido,
and fertility," the article did to the goat what drama--indeed
what art in general--usually does to animals: turns them into
metaphors. Even the most powerful animal presences on stage have
a hard time resisting the urge of their interpreters (whether
spectators or playwrights, directors or critics, actors or dramaturgs)
to recast them as symbols of human behavior and allegories for
human preoccupations. So Albee's Goat is "really" (as
some people have insisted to me) "about homosexuality," just as
Ionesco's pachyderms are really fascists, O'Neill's hairy ape
is really the proletariat, and Peter Shaeffer's Equus is really
a pagan god.
More generally, animality stands in for
all that is repressed by culture, as exemplified by Albee's earlier
animal play, The Zoo Story, in which Peter and Jerry
wage territorial battle over a bench in Central Park until they
discover what their alienated urban existences have so agonizingly
repressed: that they are animals. A similarly metaphoric use of
animality is evoked by Pinter's remark about the famous "menacing"
quality of his plays: they are, he said, about "the weasel under
the cocktail cabinet."
But no matter how quickly the animal presence
is contained by anthropomorphic moves, the passage from human
to animal and back again is always thrilling, complicated, full
of possibility. Shakespeare captured it in a single line: "Bless
thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated!" The human encounter
with animality is both terrifying and exalting. For the actor
who embodies it, like Bottom, or for the spectator who witnesses
it, like Quince, it is like crossing into another country, hearing
a strange language, experiencing a frightening recognition that
is at the same time a delicious bafflement.
The animals who have shared the stage with
human actors through the ages--usually only as verbal images and
references (drama, like language itself, teems with animal imagery
and simile), sometimes as costume, movement and behavior, and
occasionally in their own organic persons--have generally been
taken for granted, no more attended to or specially considered
than their countless offstage counterparts. The history of human
interaction with the non-human has been a remarkably unselfconscious,
even thoughtless one.
In recent years, however, perhaps in response
to the accelerating extinction of species and certainly galvanized
by the animal rights movement, cultural consciousness about animals
has undergone a sea change. An emerging field of academic inquiry
known as Critical Animal Studies looks at the myriad cultural
practices through which people relate--today and in the past,
here in the West and elsewhere in the world--to the non-human
animals with whom we share the world: practices like pet-keeping,
zoo-going, meat-eating, hunting, cock-fighting, bull-running,
wildlife protection, endangered species re-population, pest-control,
animal rescuing, animal experimentation. The list is endless.
Some rare, some ubiquitous, some deeply controversial, some habitual
and utterly normalized, some culturally specific, some universal,
these practices encompass a vast array of sites and events: zoos,
circuses, rodeos, farms, dog shows, cat fanciers clubs, race tracks,
fur-shops, slaughter-houses, puppy-mills, research labs, crime
scenes. That list is endless, too.
To become aware of the complicated ideas
and feelings generated by these practices is to acquire a new
lens for seeing the role that animals have played in our stories
and entertainments. From Aesop to Disney, talking animals have
been used to delight and instruct, and the most satisfying lesson
they teach is the tacit one of human superiority. They are a kind
of language we use both to flatter ourselves as well as to denigrate
our enemies. To call someone an animal is the easiest way to insult
them (and then to justify mistreating them). Moreover, if we say
that it isn't right to treat human beings (say, the Abu Ghraib
prisoners) like animals, we may be tacitly agreeing that it is
all right to treat animals in that way (that is, cruelly).
This ideological use of animals is frequently seen in conservative
crusades: In the recent national debate about gay marriage, for
instance, many right-wing radio hosts warned that the next stage
in the slide into immorality would be inter-species marriage.
If we give in to the homosexuals, they wailed, can dog- and cat-lovers
be far behind? The animal is always the final appeal for the moralistic
defenders of "humanity."
Lately, however, a new understanding of
animality has been manifested in the arts. In painting, film,
literature, photography, video and theatre, animals seem to be
"speaking back" to human culture, rejecting the rhetorical exploitation
they have endured for so long. These new representations are challenging
us to think anew about animals and about our relationship to them.
Taken together as a phenomenon, or trend, these new "animal acts"
suggest that the lives of animals are not as distant or unconnected
to ours as we think--that they are not, as the title of Caryl
Churchill's disturbing animal drama puts it, so "far away." They
seem to be proposing, too, that animals are not figments of our
imaginations: they have independent existences and real lives
as rich as our own. (Perhaps this awareness also accounts for
the amazing costumes of the Lincoln Center frogs; it certainly
accounts for my reaction to those costumes).
To listen to animals, and to represent
them in new ways, does not, by any means, require strict naturalism.
Science, after all, is just one of the cultural discourses that
operate upon animals, and is far from capturing the vast mystery
of what the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee calls, in
the title of one of the greatest animal fictions of our times,
The Lives of the Animals. A wildly imaginative, even
farcical style can bring contemporary animality into view just
as vividly as scientific naturalism. For example, one animal play
that was part of this summer's Fringe festival in New York City,
Noah Haidle's Kitty Kitty Kitty, featured brilliantly
nonsensical costumes: the red-suited felines of this play were
as far from the cuddly Disney norm as the Lincoln Center frogs,
but in the direction of inspired silliness rather than naturalism.
Haidle's proliferating kitties, cloned
by a mad scientist (to cheer up his suicidal cat!), cleverly evoked
a disturbing feature of animality that the household pet helps
us to forget: that animal identity is inherently plural. Not only
do animals exist in herds, packs, swarms and flocks, but there
are countless species of animals, outnumbering their self-styled
"paragon" by billions. In this regard the names of the cloned
cats--each new clone has an additional "Kitty" added to its basic
generic name, resulting in dialogue containing long strings of
the familiar bi-syllabic endearment--is a delicious send-up of
the biblical story of Adam naming the animals, one of many myths
we humans have used to shield ourselves from the scary fact that
there are so many of them, and* so few of us, that we need them
and therefore must "know" them, while they can be essentially
indifferent to us.
Some recent animal plays, such as Mark
Medoff's Prymate, A.R. Gurney's Sylvia, Elizabeth
Egloff's The Swan and Mabou Mines's Animal Magnetism,
to name just a few, have provided rare opportunities for actors
to explore and convey other ways of being--to answer, through
performance, a version of the question now famous in Animal Studies,
asked by American philosopher Thomas Nagel: "What is it like to
be a bat?" Nagel's 1974 article opened up a discussion that holds
much promise for theatremakers--actors, playwrights, designers,
directors--looking for larger frameworks within which to locate
their explorations of human life.
As
the chimpanzee in Prymate, for instance, Andre De Shields
delivered a performance crafted of such acute observation, humility,
affection and generosity that spectators actually shared in some
of the inter-species relationality that the play was about. Like
a modern-day shaman, the actor used the body and spirit of the
animal to lead us on a journey into another order of existence,
one that our organisms still remember, even if our social identities
do not.
Sadly, De Shield's brilliant performance
could not overcome the clamor of offence taken by those who could
not get past the actor's race. Yet it was precisely the risk the
production took in casting a black actor as an ape that made it
so much more interesting than the rather conventional drama of
ideas the play otherwise was. In taking this opportunity to face
down the racist stereotype from within, as it were--that
is, by fully embodying the being of the animal rather than merely
mimicking its superficial behavior--De Shields added empathy to
the acting convention that has for so long denigrated animals
as well as the "othered" groups to whom they are compared.
Early in the last century, the great Irish
poet William Butler Yeats cast his vision of a coming new age
in terms of a powerful image: "What rough beast," he asked, "its
hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
The lumbering animal evoked by Yeats was one of many signs that
the optimistic humanism inherited from the Renaissance was unraveling.
The conviction that man was, as Hamlet says, a god-like "paragon
of animals" was giving way to a less flattering characterization,
in which animality played a larger role. Today, another vision
of the human relation to animality is emerging: not a simple substitution
of the animal for the divine in the definition of humanity, but
rather a questioning of the price we have paid for our historical
insistence on our separation from animality. The Elephant Man's
cry of self-assertion--"I am not an animal; I am a human being"--has
echoed through our culture for centuries as the sheerest common
sense, habituating us to the falsehood at its heart: the notion
that "human being" and "animal" are not embedded categories but
mutually exclusive ones.
For theatre as for the other arts, the
process of reclaiming our close relation to animality requires
an interest in animals as themselves. It requires that we guard
against and deliberately avoid the anthropomorphism that comes
so easily to us. Whether animal experience is explored physically
(as De Shields did in Prymate) or through language and
imagery, as happens in many other plays (including Far Away),
the important move is in the focus on animals as and for themselves,
and on how we human beings have lived with them, used them, loved
them, or simply taken them for granted.
The rewards of sharing the stage with those
with whom we share this planet are considerable. To be willing
to imaginatively enter into animal being while acknowledging its
radical unknowability is to let go of political and psychological
certainties, to question the assumption of human superiority,
and so also to dislodge the systems of preference and privilege
that sustain oppressive social distinctions based on race, class,
gender and nation. In this sense, the animal is the latest figure
to be enlisted in the ongoing exploration of identity that has
defined progressive politics in the past several decades.
Brett Leonard's recent Guinea Pig Solo
and Tracy Letts's Bug both work from an acute consciousness
of the shared spaces and destinies of human and non-human animals.
A contemporary rewriting of Georg Büchner's prescient classic
Woyzeck, Leonard's play literalizes (and, in its title,
names) a practice that Büchner had glimpsed as being part of the
disastrous foundation of modernity: animal experimentation. While
Büchner's soldier is at the mercy of a mad scientist, Leonard's
Gulf War veteran is embedded in a baneful but banal medical model
that systematically animalizes humans. The play teems with animal
references ("elephants, rats, caterpillars--who gives a shit?"
is a typical one) and with accounts of strange animal behavior
(established through cruel experiments). The "proven scientific
facts" we hear about various animals ultimately position the American
soldier in a continuum of brutal exploitation--a chain of command,
if you will--that tethers him, like a laboratory animal, to hopelessness
and exploitation. The web of animal practices the play invokes
leaves no doubt that human "guinea pigs" like the protagonist
are a byproduct of (among other follies) an insane disregard for
other living creatures.
In
Bug, a different order of animality throws a dark light
on American experience: Here the main character--also a Gulf War
veteran--suffers from the paranoid delusion that he has been infected
with microscopic organisms, which now swarm under his skin. Like
the alien invasions that gave the 1950s Cold-War culture its ideal
allegory, the subcutaneous infestation is a suitably creepy metaphor
for both our increasingly pharmaceutical way of life as well as
the infiltrations of terrorism.
The art critic John Berger once said that
the main animals visible in the modern world--zoo animals and
household pets--are monuments to their own disappearance, screens
for the oblivion to which we have confined all species except
our own. The stage critters we've spotted may be something similar:
the ever-more-endangered species of non-human making a series
of farewell appearances. Certainly that was the explicit message
of another of this past summer's great theatre events: Theatre
de Complicité's The Elephant Vanishes. The mysteriously
disappeared animal of this title seemed to represent precisely
Berger's view of the zoo animal, especially as its gigantic video
image loomed monumentally behind the stage. But the extraordinary
way in which the missing animal was brought to life--by the slowly
moving bodies of five actors, each also moving a chair to evoke
the beast's massive limbs--suggests another possibility. These
new animals may be part of a search for new ways to think about
our place in a changing world, at a frightening time. The city
that was the real subject of Complicité's production--a hyper-techno
Tokyo of speed, lights, noise, violence, junk food, ads, slogans
and insomnia--epitomizes the present. The futuristic human-machine
hybrids so beloved of the past century's movies and pop culture
robots and cyborgs and aliens have little more to offer us. They
have produced both terror and solace, alienation and understanding.
A renewed regard for our ancient companionship
with other animals may provide something equally complex but more
humane.
[Editor's Note: By special arrangement,
this article is appearing simultaneously in HotReview.org
and American Theatre.]
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