Tag: Bogosian

Samuel Johnson on Reality in Theater

Theatre is powerful because it works in exact concordance with the way our heads work (not the way reality works). To quote Samuel Johnson (via Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human): “Imitations produce pain or pleasure not because they are mistaken for realities but because they bring realities to mind.” The truthfulness of the theatre is determined by the audience. Theatre is consensus. And that consensus is a function of characters who speak and act the way characters in our collective head speak and act. In other words: archetypes. Success can only be measured by the ratio of what I (the artist) see, versus what the audience thinks they see. Marcel Duchamp, a great lover of science, suggested this ratio. He said the closer to one-to-one this ratio becomes, the greater the artist. But of course, no one can measure such a ratio.

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
Eric Bogosian
From the end section – BUILDING CHARACTER MY METHOD FOR CREATING THE SOLOS

God and Lou Reed

Well, let me tell you something: my God – I believe in God – my God is a capricious little fucker. Or should I say “big fucker”? I mean, here’s a guy – we’re all clear here on who God is, right? The most powerful being in the universe! Has to be, if He weren’t, if there were some other being more powerful than Him, well then . . . he’d be God wouldn’t he?

My God is all powerful. He can do anything. My God could feed every hungry person on the planet Earth – like that (Snaps fingers) – tomorrow! He could rid the world of disease – like that. All those little bald children on the Cancer Channel? Gone, healthy, in great shape! (Snaps fingers) God could do that.

He could give us an extra hour of sunshine every day. Create a few more parking spaces. But noooooo! That would be too easy. He doesn’t want to do that! No, my God doesn’t like to do the easy stuff, it’s boring to Him. He doesn’t want to do what everybody wants Him to do. Kind of like Lou Reed, He does what He wants to do. He’s got integrity. He’s not going to sell out.

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
Eric Bogosian

The Value of the Theater

But no matter how frustrated I get, if I can say it, if I do it in front of an audience, I get some relief. In other words, theater keeps me sane. For me, it is medicine for a toxic environment of electronic media mind-pollution. All that machine/profit-oriented info is poisonous to my inner machinery.

Theater clears my head because it takes the subtextual brainwashing of the media madness and SHOUTS that subtext out loud. (“You are shit compared to the fabulous creatures out there in star-world.” Or “You are ineffectual because the world is too big for you to make a difference.” Or “The solution to your misery is money, money, money!!!” Etc.) Somehow, when I really examine the boogeyman of my inner thoughts, he’s not so scary. (“You are going to lose your job and end up homeless. Toe the line. Toe the line. Toe the line.”)

Theater is ritual. It is something we make together every time it happens. Theater is holy. Instead of being bombarded by a cathode ray tube, we are speaking to ourselves. Human language, not electronic noise. Theater is laughter, which is always a valuable commodity.

Above all, theater is empathy as opposed to voyeurism. All good theater is about imagining a walk in someone else’s shoes. All theater asks the same question: What would I do if were me up there?

I’m pretty sure about all this. What I don’t know, I put in my shows. There’s alot I’m confused about. But one thing I know: Theater remains at the frontier of the greatest mystery – what it means to be human.

Eric Bogosian, from the introduction to Pounding Nails in the Floor WIth My Forehead.