by Pete Peterson
This morning I walked into a quiet theater in Franklin, Tennessee, where we’re about to begin the first day of production on A Christmas Carol. I’m the only one here. The room is cool and stark and full of echoes. Here’s what I see:
A darkness. A void. The neutral tones of the auditorium and its walls all crowd around a yawning black emptiness, a space filled with nothing less than the hope of being called into life and light.
Here in the moment before, everything is possible.
For years I’ve been ruminating on the idea that theater, as an artform, is inherently incarnational. More than prose or poetry or song or painting, theatre puts on flesh and becomes itself. It becomes more in its flesh than it is on the page. This is a profound mystery to me.
When I sit down to write, I have a vision in mind that I’m writing toward–this is true, I think, of all writing. But when I write a book or a short story, I have the benefit (or burden) of being the final arbiter of that story’s reality. In other words, by the time Fiddler’s Green (a book I wrote over a decade ago) finds itself in your hands, there have only been a couple of people involved in the crafting of it. Me, my editor, my early readers…that’s about it. The final realization of the story is mine to deliver to the reader and his or her imagination, and as a writer, I’m conscious of that proximity to the reader’s imagination, and so I try to paint my scenes and textures and emotions as vividly as I can in order to recreate as closely as possible in another’s imagination what I have in my own. The reader will have to judge for herself how effective I’ve been.
But when I write a play, the creative process is wildly different. I’m aware, for instance, that none of the audience will read my stage directions, and therefore, they’ll never know whether or not a particular production even took heed of them. I’m also aware that I can’t control the visual design of the show or the interpretations that different actors will bring to their characters. Essentially, a playwright builds a scaffold onto which dozens of other artists will graft their own work. If the scaffold is well-built, it will support the work of others whether that work is threadbare or mastercraft. There’s a necessary humility inherent in the work of writing for the stage; a humility that reminds me I have to let go of control so that others can finish what I began. I’m just here to build the underlying scaffold.
So when I say that the artform of theatre is incarnational, I mean that it lies flat on the page until a living, breathing, human form takes it up and gives it three dimensions; we can walk circles around it to see how it works from different angles. I don’t think you have to strain your eyes very hard to see that there’s a theological dimension to that. There’s a sense in which the law, as it was given to Moses, laid flat on the page (or the tablet) for generations before Christ enfleshed it and helped us see what it looked like fully embodied. And what’s fascinating to me is that when the Word took on flesh, it surprised people. It didn’t change, but it meant itself in a whole new way, in a way that wasn’t apparent until it stood up and walked among us.
Again and again, this is my experience of theatre. I write. And then the words stand up in front of me, and when they do, they mean more than I meant, more than I even knew to mean. Incarnation is a miracle. Over and over again. On the stage in microcosm, and in Christ–macrocosm.
So today, as I look on the void of the stage here in middle Tennessee, I have a tickle of joy as I await the miracle of creation and incarnation. Matt is now sitting at his sewing machine on the stage and his “grand curtain” is taking shape piece by piece. Stephen is hanging lights. Mitch and Ace are busy hammering and welding and making magic out of everyday materials. Tony and Laura are editing and creating and breathing music and light into being. Caitlin and Becca are spinning threads of communication that tie us all together. Elyn is conjuring poetry out of movement and motion. Through all of these hands and minds, something is coming. Something is becoming. Out of the void: life.
In the beginning, A Christmas Carol, Act 1, Scene 1:
[Stage directions] Darkness. Spirits hover over the face of the void, all silently undulating on the formless stage. And then, lights.
Rabbit Room Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol opens on December 7th. Tickets are now available at www.RabbitRoomTheatre.com.