What Turns Talk To Savagery?
Posted by Randall Newsome on 6/04/2009
I was coming home late one recent evening, having met up with some friends after a performance of Art, and I witnessed a fight in the street outside a bar in Wicker Park. It was not good.
A crowd of young men, who were dressed for the nightclub scene were accompanied by a solitary young woman in high heels and a white dress. I’d heard some yelling as I was walking on the other side of the street, and I glanced over just in time to see a guy catapult a bottle at another guy’s head. There wasn’t really anything I could do to help, except for maybe trying to get somebody to throw a bottle at my head, but that seemed pointless. So I stopped to rubberneck (as rubberneckers often do) because I don’t see real-life fights very often, and I was curious about what was going to happen to the girl in the white dress, who was screeching like a deranged crow.
Now, I’ll admit to you - nothing makes me feel like a superior human being more than watching some dudes (and I mean “dudes” in the pejoratively literal sense) trying to beat the bejesus out of one another outside of a bar. Unless I’m defending myself or a loved one from physical harm, throwing a punch at someone seems like a ridiculous notion. I can’t say I’ve never wanted to, though. There have been plenty of times when I’ve watched certain personalities on a certain “news” network and wanted to land a couple roundhouses square in their jaw. But that doesn’t really count. Television just has that effect on a person.
Violence has been part of my daily routine as an actor in Art. Although the play begins harmlessly enough with longtime friends discussing the merits of a piece of modern art, the conversation soon degenerates into a nasty brawl, punctuated by a blow to somebody’s skull.
That may sound unlikely considering that these guys are very good friends. Not to mention they’re wearing suits and talking about a painting. But it is likely, because the ingredient that so effectively turns talk to savagery is ego.
I’ve been taking Hapkido lessons (a Korean martial art), and a couple days prior to witnessing the street fight in Wicker Park, I had been discussing fighting with my instructor, Kevin Sogor, a uniquely perceptive man as well as a Master of the art of Hapkido. He used to work in security for music celebrities and in nightclubs, and I asked him if there was a commonality in fights that erupted in the nightclub scene. He said that invariably, fights are started over something trivial like a spilt cocktail or a scuffed shoe. If it’s not something like that, then it starts over a female (and she will more often than not, accidentally get knocked down). But the consistent element in a fight, he asserted, is the ego.
When I started to work on this play, I realized early on that it’s not the artwork that my character, Serge was defending. And it it’s not the right to express himself (which is often the go-to motivation for characters that use a lot of syllables). It was his ego.
At the beginning of the fight, the playwright Yasmina Reza writes that “Marc throws himself at Serge”. We took that as our cue that we needed to take the violence to a level that truly made this day different, and to intensify the challenge these guys faced in repairing their friendship later on. The fight also polarizes the triviality of what got the ball rolling to begin with, and how it got personal: the fight about art turns to a few choice words about a woman and then it breaks loose. It had to mean something and they had to be going for the jugular.
Our characters fight about a white painting. I don’t know what those guys in the street were fighting about, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the girl in the white dress. Well. It was white before she slipped in her high heels and was lying flat on her back in the street, still screeching.
At least the white painting doesn’t suffer quite such an indignity.