The Paradox of the Mortality of Theatre

Every night, the audience takes on a different character. The variations in response from one night to another must assuredly be one thing that makes this sort of work rewarding in ways that movie work could never be. That is, we have the luxury of witnessing that response. We also have the luxury of using that response to discover new things. How do you communicate with one audience in comparison to how you communicate with another? The variation exists. Recorded media have the distinct advantage of being passed down to posterity as, for over seventy years, Charlie Chaplain has been putting on the same exact act, night after night, week after week, for an amount of time that long ago surpassed the end of his life. These media are remarkable; however, every person who ever watches Charlie Chaplain eat his boiled shoe will be seeing Charlie Chaplain eat his shoe in exactly the same way.

In stage theatre, in live media, every performance offers its own particular quirks and, whereras there is beauty in the seventy year lifespan of Mr. Chaplain's work, the lifespan of each performance lasts only as long as the lights are up. The next night, the performance is a different animal. Every night, you are bearing witness to something that will never again happen just as you saw it. Despite their fidelity to the script, the cast and crew will never put on the same show twice: timing, timbre, movement, body language, cues, and even certain set dressings will always be ever so slightly different. Part of this is the result of trial and error-- of discovering small problems and adjusting to them. Another part of this is the human factor, be it mistake, or exploration, or even just the particular mood of the particular actor or crewmember at that time.

Most often, except in extreme and rare cases, the variations are not large and they might not even necessarily be noticeable to an audience but, still, each night, the play, the piece, comes alive in its own way, its own incarnation, and never again in exactly the same way. It is, in a sense, alive in a way that recorded media, by their very nature can not be. It is born, lives, and dies all in a single night, only to be reborn the next night. And, should a script thrive and be produced months, or decades, or even millenia later, it again takes on new life. Maybe it connects us all, actor and audience, crew and critic, in a way immeasurably human and, for now, potentially immortal.

Forty years ago, people were also watching the plays of Tennessee Williams.

Four hundred years ago, people were also watching the plays of William Shakespeare.

Two thousand five hundred years ago, people were also watching the works of Aeschylus.

People have died; cities, nations, and even entire civilizations have crumbled to dust in those two and a half millenia but you can still see actors-- live, breathing, feeling actors-- performing stories that have outlasted the Soviet Union, the Aztec civilization, and the Roman Empire. And, each night, each of those stories in each of those performances is told in a way that never, throughout all of time, will ever be told again.