on the page, or on the stage?

   I played a character once in an Irish tragedy that involved the death of my brother and the dissolvement of my family. In that play, I cried. I sobbed onstage, and I watched the body of “my brother” being carried in on a wooden board, still dripping water from where he had been dragged out of the sea. My hands trembled as I held a scrap of what used to be his jacket, and my tears soaked into the saltwater already dampening the cloth.

   It may be easy to think of it all as a story or a fantasy or the abstraction of some bored playwright’s mind; but theater is so much more than that.

   Every time I cried, did my tears fall the same way? Did my thoughts dwell on the same things? Did I play the exact same scene for my audience?

   The answer to those questions is obviously no, and that’s because theater is bringing life to art and art to life. It is the imaginations of many come together, and thus made tangible and powerful and adaptable.

   And that’s why theater is so important.

    Actually reading a written work, rather than seeing a stage performance, allows the readers to envision their own creative view of the story. That’s an important part of art and of personal exploration; and maybe in theater you lose that creativity of the individual reader. William Shakespeare included stage directions or actor notes; William Wordsworth wrote detailed imagery and painted beautiful pictures; Tennyson brought to life legends and history and myths. Their readers can make these words into anything they want, and imagine them however they see fit.

   But with theater, you create a story that’s powerful for everybody involved.

Actors on a stage are not separated from the audience watching them. The backstage crew is not part of a different story than the members of the pit. They each interact with each other and draw upon the emotions and work of the other groups to make the experience a powerful one, and the story lives and breathes because of the efforts of everybody involved. It is no longer in the imagination of one single reader, but instead has become a communal event. There is something magical, almost transcendent, about being in a theater where each person is experiencing the same story performed in the same way- be they the actors, the audience, the backstage crew-, but feels their own emotions and reactions. It’s interactive, it’s enlightening, it’s humbling.

   When we saw Much Ado About Nothing, I already knew the story; I knew the characters and their motives and their meanings. You go into a theater, though- especially Shakespeare’s Globe-, never quite sure what you’re going to get.

And, had I gone another night, I would have seen the same story again- but it wouldn’t really have been the exact same story. Actors are real people, and the characters they play become real people as well. The Globe is a particularly interesting and intimate space for this very reason. The amount of interaction that goes on between the actors and the audience, especially the groundlings, allows for an incredibly communal and emotional experience.

    Did Shakespeare intend his play to be reenacted, centuries later, in the way that we saw it at the Globe? I think yes. Old Will designed the Globe to be a space for everyone, from all walks of life. He wrote his plays to be adapted and picked apart and made into movies like She’s the Man or 10 Things I Hate About You. Shakespeare knew theater and loved theater and knew that theater changes and people change theater.

    Theater is emotive, and communal, and something that will last through the ages. It provides a way to bring people together and create a story that means something to each of them, and will mean a different thing every time to every person. It is a way to interpret words and make ink changeable; it is a mode of expression, and it is always in transition; it’s as close to real life as art can get.

 (Much Ado About Nothing, performed at Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London)