The Idea of “Story”
Posted by Martha Lavey on 3/08/2006I had the pleasure of conducting The Well-Appointed Room post-show conversation last Sunday. A focus of our conversation was the idea of “story.” We noted the way in which the play foregrounds the telling of stories. In the first half of the play, “Nostalgia,” the central character is a playwright, the creator of stories. He is, as well, a person who maintains a personal journal in which he writes the “story” of his life. In the second half of the play, “Prolepsis,” the central character acts as a narrator: he tells the story of his life directly to the audience. Within “Prolepsis,” two characters arrive to tell their life stories.
By foregrounding the act of storytelling, Richard Greenberg is drawing our attention to the “stories” we tell ourselves – our personal stories (in the form of journals and personal narratives); our cultural stories (in the form of plays); and, given the centrality of September the 11th, 2001 to the play, the story of our nation (our history). By interweaving these various strands of storytelling, and by bringing the storytellers into collision with one another, Richard is not only foregrounding story – he is problematizing storytelling. Which story, which stories are the truth? Which storytellers are reliable? Which form of the story is the most convincing?
We acknowledge, in our conversation, that The Well-Appointed Room, by presenting this dense network of stories (by, itself, offering itself up as a single play, but told as two separate stories), provides an interpretive challenge.
A woman in the audience, taking part in the post-show conversation, related that she is a frequent theater-goer. In addition to The Well-Appointed Room, she had recently seen two other new plays at other Chicago theaters: Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Next Theatre, and Craig Wright’s Grace at Northlight Theatre. All three of these productions have received very good reviews (and having seen all three of the productions, I can happily endorse their quality). This woman was honest to say that all three of the plays in question were challenging. Just at the level of “what happened?,” the plays required interpretive effort. She was clearly a sophisticated theater-goer but she evinced a kind of wistfulness for a time when one could receive a story “with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” It felt less like a complaint, a corrective, than an acknowledgement that telling the contemporary story is necessarily complex (and, perhaps, less comforting).
I was grateful for her observation – I think it’s dead-on. As Richard Greenberg is proposing in The Well-Appointed Room, our narratives – of ourselves, of our world, and through our art – have been disrupted. It’s harder to tell who’s “right,” it’s harder to believe what we’re told, it’s harder to discern “the truth.” If we, as a theater, are to take seriously our role as a site for stories and storytelling, we will necessarily participate in the complexity of our collective narrative.
One of the things that emerged for me, in this conversation, was the uniqueness of live theater to both tell a story and to provide an interpretive community for story. At the theater, we can hang around afterwards and talk about what we just saw. You can talk with some of the folks who picked the plays, or acted in the plays, or work in the artistic department that makes the decision about how the plays are chosen and produced. In other words, you have direct access to the point of view from which the story issues.
This is why we have increased the opportunity for post-show conversation from two times a week to, next season, eight times a week (after every show). We are modest enough to know that we, at Steppenwolf, cannot make our collective story easier – a big part of our commitment, as a theater, is to the inventiveness of new artists. We are committed to relating the stories of how we live now, in the language of our most innovative artists.
What we can do is offer you an interpretive community. We can invite you to talk about what you have seen, to construct meaning with the input from the artists and staff responsible for the work. It’s been a great pleasure to engage in conversation with you. As an audience, you are so smart, so adventuresome, and so candid – it’s enormously fortifying to listen to you, in response to the work. I invite all of you to participate in the conversation. Stay for the post-show conversation, respond on the blog, send me an email. Take advantage of what Steppenwolf so happily offers to you – our best effort at starting a conversation about the way we live now and a great eagerness to entertain your engagement.