“Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”

So does Shakespeare’ Hamlet admonish us. And so I ask you to be kind and let me be well used as you here these remarks or I will come back to get you. I am delighted and honored to be a part of this august body of colleagues and like Hamlet’s players, I feel a bit of an interloper in more lofty proceedings. However, when asked to grapple with the notion of art and the human condition one feels remarkable empowered to hold forth. I think there may be more than a clue in Hamlet’s words concerning the function and place of the theatre in the human endeavor of living. The theatre has from its origins, and I believe continues to be, “the abstract and brief chronicles of the times”, “the mirror up to nature.” Human nature. The place where we can come together as a community and look at ourselves and our current condition as we wrestle with issues of ethics, emotion, personal relationships: in short all the issues that make up the stuff of our everyday lives. It is a safe place, a secular confessional, if you will, where, in the privacy of a darkened room, we can face our inner selves as we identify, sympathize, and empathize with the other on the stage who acts out, on our behalf, all the peripatetic permutations of being human.

As an actor and an educator I always search to find what one might call a Grand Unified Theory of Art. Why do we make theatre or any other of the artistic genres? What is it that compels us to get up in front of each other and express, emote, explore? Perhaps if we look towards its roots, we may be afforded some clues.

The theatre originated in the cultures of primitive societies, whose members, it is thought, used imitative dances to propitiate the supernatural powers that were believed to control events crucial to their survival. A shaman, priest, or medicine man (in effect, the first director) taught complicated dance steps and led these ritual dance-dramas-- to persuade or compel supernatural forces to regulate the seasons and elements, to ensure the Earth's fertility, and to grant the tribe success in hunting and warfare. Other ritual dances were believed to expel evil spirits that caused disease and to force the souls of the newly dead to depart the world of the living. The priests and performers in these dance-dramas wore masks, which sometimes represented the spirits invoked, and costumes made of skins, rushes, and bark.

At its root then is the life of the human condition and spirit. The theatre is an attempt to understand the environment in which we live, to organize and support us at times of major transitions in life. At first it was a dance; a communal ritual that gave us a medium to celebrate and transcend the crises of nature, the dark, the harvest, of death. The actor, the human being, the modern spiritual guide, will don the mask and transform into some other creature - a god perhaps, a king, a hunter, a neighbor - who leads us in a dance which makes some comprehensible form out of the chaos of life’s eccentricities. The theatre helps us in our quest to control and understand the events in life that are otherwise uncontrollable. As knowledge of natural phenomena increased, drama ceased to be exclusively ritualistic and also became an educational tool, especially in initiation ceremonies that acquainted the young with tribal culture. A later development, more germane to the evolution of the theatre and drama of today, was the enactment of legends of gods and tribal heroes. Such dramas were also performed in early civilized societies. In Egypt, for example, dramas dealing with the god Osiris continued to be produced until at least as late as the 5th century BC.

At its core the theatre is ritualistic, instructive, celebratory and religious and spiritual, emanating from some deep inner human need, [which need, I would assert, speaks of the very nature of being human] to connect, share, understand our deepest, most hidden parts of ourselves in our search for life’s meaning and what Karl Jung might describe as the business of becoming whole; experiencing life and experiencing ourselves as complete, psychically balanced, integrated human beings. Its communal roots point to a need that we all share which go beyond the boundaries of culture, language and time. The theatre, in short, is humanities way of developing its own mechanism to transform what is an otherwise chaotic, ambiguous, ineffable life experience into a reconciled, organized whole, with a beginning a middle and an end, characterized by a spiritual, ethical, emotional and psychological import which, when the dance is over and the curtain rings down, leaves us feeling moved, enlightened, relieved and in the best of experiences, more ourselves.

But why is that the case? Well, I think if we look at the development of the theatre that might give us some insight. The dancers and tribal leaders worked together in the dance. There was no observers per se, the player and observer were one. But the Greeks developed that.

The history of European theatre begins with the Greeks, whose annual festivals in honor of the god Dionysus included competitions in tragedy and comedy. According to tradition, the first of these dramatic forms evolved from choral songs (choric dithyrambs) concerning the death and resurrection of Dionysus. This occurred about the middle of the 6th century B. C., when Thespis of Icaria, in a drama of his own composition, impersonated a character and engaged the chorus in dialogue, thereby becoming both the first playwright and the first actor. Thespis, from whom we derive the word Thespian, won first prize in the initial tragedy competition held at Athens in 534 B. C. and is also credited with the introduction of masks, which were thereafter a conventional feature of Greek and Roman theatre. The tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles later added a second and a third actor to tragedy, and about the beginning of the 5th century BC comedy was given written form by Epicharmus of Syracuse and was also admitted to the festivals.

Retaining its religious and spiritual import, the Greeks brought the prehistoric traditional use of mask and dance to the theatre, and were responsible for two major innovations: the separated actor and the audience. It is this development that I believe gives the theatre its power. The Greeks created a forum where the audience can “know itself” through the action of another. We can step outside of the dance and watch as others perform. We gain consciousness in the act of observation. As groundbreaking as that may be in formal theatre history, it is not hard to imagine how fundamental that is to the whole enterprise of life that most assuredly goes to the very beginnings of humanity. How hard is it to imagine the hunters returning to tell stories of the hunt: te creation of the audience. The auditorium, the hearing place, is formalized. And because of that development, the individual and the society may see, criticize, and explore the Self. The group dance had been differentiated. And in that differentiation we have the essential elements of the theatre; the actor and the observer. And those elements pervade all the great flowering of the drama, the Greeks, Shakespeare, Spanish Golden Age, The NOH in the East. The components remain the same: Actor, a Story, an Audience deriving from all social and economic strata, and an open space: and no more. No technology, no environment, and with the exception of music and mask, no special effects.

Theatre is essentially story telling - a formal way to communicate with each other. It is a contract between actor and observer. And in that contract, there is an intriguing paradox which to my mind speaks to the power and function of the theatre and how it profoundly impacts upon the human condition and in fact, expresses the very core of the human condition. It is what Ii would call “The Paradox of the Mask.” From its beginning when the shaman donned the Mask, he BECAME for his audience the god himself. And we believed. In the theatre, when the actor dons the mask of character, we STILL believe. How in the world do we sophisticated, rational, intelligent human beings accept and allow ourselves to be emotionally manipulated over and over again? As strange as it seems it is because we UNDERSTAND and ACCEPT that the actor is PRETENDING. Because the pretense is up front, acknowledged and understood, our critical, suspicious, evaluative minds are satisfied and quietened. We let down the guards of seeking the ulterior messages, motives, agendas and manipulations of our everyday interactions with the adversary of the other and we ACCEPT as truth what we experience. The paradox is this: In the theatre, when we are told the truth that we are being lied to we will believe what we hear. In life, when we are told that we are being told the truth and nothing but, then we suspect and tend to doubt motives and credibility. Further, in the dark of the theatre we can reveal our deepest secrets. As an audience member we give over to the universal human impulse to empathize. We make connections to our own guarded experience with the fellow on the stage. “That is me,” we say to ourselves, “that foolish, egotistical, manipulative character. The fool that falls on the banana peel. I recognize him in myself. I’ve been there, done that.” It may not be conscious, but it is there.

Inside the mask, under the protection of pretend, the actor is also free. Free to be himself, fully, openly, candidly connecting to his most personal experiences and sharing them in full view, and no one ever knows that that is himself indeed. So in the theatre, both the audience and the actor have agreed to play a game. The audience knows that this is an actor and not the person itself and therefore is willing to listen and be moved. The audience is freed of the embarrassment of seeing someone revealing intimate personal details. The actor knows the audience has come to be “done” as it were, and wearing the Emperor’s new clothes, stands naked as the human “mirror up to nature.” The mask’s function is not to conceal, but to reveal.

In search of the Grand Unified Theory of Art, my lab has been primarily the works of Shakespeare. The greatest, some would argue, of English speaking poets, he is in fact the most produced playwright in the United States. Probably because his work is in the public domain and royalties are non existent. Thank God for that because the good news is that the plays are worth doing. I have an idea about his plays that make them continually doable... and that goes beyond the economics question. All of the plays are predicated on a number of notions that reveal themselves over and over in the plays. This isn’t a Shakespeare lecture so I won’t get into too much detail but I would like to point out a few of these basic notions. First, there is the intrinsic value of honesty and honor. The characters say what they mean and mean what they say. If a character is lying, he will let us know. The characters are verbally explicit. They live in a world where language is the coin of the realm and the utterance “my word is my bond” has credibility. In Henry VI we here the famous rant “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!” Unlike our culture that would be no great loss because in Shakespeare’s world lawyers are redundant. No need for contracts when one’s word will suffice.

There is also an egalitarianism in the plays, where nobility is not a function of birth, but a function of nature. One’s integrity and magnanimity is the measure, not status. Shakespeare tells us that is revealed by action, not inherited by birth. Helena in All’s Well, Hermione in Winter’s Tale, Edmund in Lear, all demonstrate how nature prevails over birth. The plays live on an archetypal level as well, working out the great struggle of opposites between the forces of the masculine and feminine principals. Kate and Petruchio, Beatrice ad Benedick, Berowne and Rosalind act as emblems for that struggle within ourselves. We too are attempting to reconcile these opposing forces within our spirits and Shakespeare instructs us how. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the plays reenact over and over the quest to understand the nature of being human: a quest to understand and experience that transformative moment of enlightenment when we, in the guise of the central character, accepts responsibility for our actions - a kind of responsibility that goes beyond a sense of shame, guilt, or burden. Hamlet’s “Let be. The readiness is all” Lear’s “I am a foolish fond old man,” reveal a profound and simple acceptance of circumstances not with struggle but with enormous grace. Shakespeare is most ‘shakespearian’ when he shows us a human being who knows experientially to include and accept ones own limitations, foibles, failures. It is that moment when we reach the center and the pinnacle of the human experience, becoming whole.

For me Shakespeare’s plays, and by extension all of the drama, is concerned with that one question: The transformation of the human spirt. It is this notion where I think we get closest to the idea of a Grand Unified Theory. What I mean to say is that the experience we seek in the theatre is the astonishment of understanding how to live, the ‘satori’ of enlightenment, the great Ah ha!, where we apprehend our true natures and see that the circumstances of life do not run us, but where we can feel a sense of authorship and create a context which would include all of the oddities of life and be at one with them. An experience where our Self can be magnanimous enough to include all the ambiguities of life and reconcile within ourselves that sense of struggle and opposing forces. Shakespeare gives us plays where the central characters, in the midst of tempests and storms, ambitious machinations, confused identities, suffer and through their suffering come to know who they are, fully, wholly and in triumph. It is a Greek idea, to be sure, found as early as the chorus of Agamemnon: “wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Shakespeare’s characters find that, in the end, and in spite of it all, life is worth living. In the exchange between the true and loyal son Edgar with his father Gloucester, who, in despair from being figuratively blind and gullible through life and from being betrayed and blinded by his bastard son in a brilliantly poetic irony, we see the essence of what Shakespeare and what I believe to be the essence of the role of theatre in our lives:

Glou. No further, sir; a man may rot even here. Edg. What! In ill thought again? Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all. Come on. Glou. And that’s true too.

Gloucester, blind and in despair comes to some remarkable INSIGHT about being alive. That life is worth living because we are alive. One of Shakespeare’s greatest inventions of Prospero finds himself at the end of The Tempest accepting and forgiving his treacherous brother. That is the height of his magical power - the power to accept things in others and in himself. Considered by Prospero to be the most loathsome being on the Island, Caliban becomes an emblem of Prospero’s own baser nature, and in his most triumphant moment is able to utter. “This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.” The ambiguities of our darker natures are not to be shunned but accepted and embraced and as life itself

One last word on Shakespeare. I said that the plays represent an expression of the Grand Unified Theory of the Theatre. I believe that. All of his plays are about the transformation of the human spirit. They can be divided into tragedies and comedies based on the timing of the transformation. A comedy can be defined as a struggle in which the central characters have this transformative moment before its too late. A tragedy is a life struggle where the transformation happens after it is too late. In both kinds of plays people suffer the exigencies of life, but they are resolved differently. The outcome for each is clear. In a comedy, the life force is added to: symbolized in marriage and new birth. In a tragedy, the loss of life force is culpable: a stage strewn with death, which had been radiant with life. If only Lear had figured out 60 years earlier just how foolish he was, what a better world he would have lived in. The good news is that the theatre gives us the forum where Lear can go through that hell so we don’t have to.

Allow me to recount a personal anecdote to illustrate my point. While I was playing Bolingbroke opposite Richard Thomas, my father was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He was about to enter surgery during the run of the show. Now in Richard II there is a famous farewell scene between Bolingbroke and his aging father John of Gaunt. The scene is fraught with the underlying tension that because of the length of his banishment and Gaunt’s age, they may never see each other again. That scene was incredible difficult to play without becoming an emotional dishrag, as the circumstance so closely mirrored my own personal life. In fact, the actor playing Gaunt had unwittingly chosen to have Gaunt’s illness reside in his stomach. I was able to rehearse saying good-bye to my father each night with Shakespeare’s words. My father did succumb shortly after the operation and when I returned the experience was different. The scene with Gaunt no longer held the emotional charge it had before his passing, but the scene in which Bolingbroke returns had an unexpected and surprising one. Gaunt had in fact died during his absence and now Bolingbroke spoke to his Uncle York saying. “You are my father now.” For some days, that scene was as emotionally available as any I had ever done. The play gave me the structure to organize my own sense of loss, bewilderment and grief, turning it into a gift to my father, the play and, one would hope, the audience. Little did they know what was happening inside my own mask. I would only hope that the sense of truth got across.

The theatre allows us to practice, engage and develop our capacity for accepting the ambiguities of life. It allows us to engage in the questions of who we are in this world, how do we live with our fellows and what sense of purpose and meaning can we give it. That is its purpose and that is why it will continue to be a part of the human experience, in spite of the onslaught of mass media and resistance to knowing ourselves.

I would like to close with a passage from the music critic Robert Donington that expresses far better than I the sense of what I want to convey this afternoon. Although he wrote of the music, his words apply to all the arts.

[Theatre] moves us just because it is so true to that most fully human of our moods, when we accept ourselves for the mixed, vulnerable and indeed mortal creatures that we are. Theatre is at its greatest when it puts us in mind at once of our own mortality and of life’s worth and beauty, and reconciles us to the paradox. Indeed I cannot help feeling that fundamentally this is what all great art is about. Art is equal to all our moods. It can range from tragedy to comedy and touch on everything in between. It can make us want to laugh or want to cry; but it is never more typical than when it makes us want to laugh and cry at the same time. Under all our moods there lies this master mood which in some degree is always present. The best comedy is that which holds a hint of tragedy, and the best tragedy is that which is infused with comedy: Shakespeare is a supreme example if this familiar principle. Nothing moves us so much as being confronted with our own hidden awareness that our mortal existence is a fitful compound of light and shadow, coming from the dark, bounded by death yet radiant with life, a finite thing yet somehow infinitely worthwhile. Great art reminds us that there can be bitterness, but the bitterness does not cancel out the sweetness. That is no so easy to remember and we have always needed the resources of art and religion to help keep us in mind of it.

If the pain cancelled out the delight of living, life could hold no meaning. But pain and delight do not cancel each other out; they can add up to an immense aliveness of which the value is indestructible even if mortal life itself is not. And something very like this is as plain in Beethoven as it is in Shakespeare, or in Michelangelo. Great art reconciles elements which are harsh, and in themselves ugly, with other elements which are warm and beautiful. Theatre and art reconciles these opposites, and in so doing helps us to reconcile them and to become reconciled with life.

-Robert Donington. ‘Wagner’s Ring and its Symbols Faber 1963 pp. 89-90

Thank you very much. © Edward Gero 2001