Creative Interpretation and the Politics of Failure

In her 2005 book Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, theater scholar Jill Dolan reminisces about her attendance of a performance of The Laramie Project at the Zachary Scott Theatre in Austin, Texas. The documentary play, written (or rather: compiled from interviews into verbatim theater) by Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project, deals with the aftermath of the homophobic murder of a gay college student named Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998.^[1] As a theatrical piece that features dozens of characters and thus lends itself easily to large community theater productions, The Laramie Project had quickly become a staple of LGBTQ political theater in the US and beyond, and the memory of Shepard (who is not a character in the play) had been honored in numerous productions following its Denver world premiere in February 2000.

In her account of the Austin production, directed by Dave Steakley, Dolan focuses on the end of the performance she saw on March 3, 2002, in which audience members were asked to pick up small candles placed under their seats to have them lit by actors wandering through the seat rows. On the level of textual equivalence, the flickering candles were supposed to represent “the sparkling lights of Laramie, Wyoming” (101), as the last line of The Laramie Project has it, but as a performative gesture, they also symbolically bound together in the theatrical space a community of mourners in what Dolan calls a “ritual honoring of loss, of grief, of wrenching, unexpected change” (131). While Dolan describes her emotional reaction to this particular choice of staging Kaufman’s play as “moved in spite of [her]self by this moment, even as [she] understood that the performance manipulated [her] feelings” (131), not all spectators cared for holding candles together. Dolan cites an email by one of the performers in the Zach Scott production, who complains that some audience members

refused to have their candles lit in the final moment of the play, by waving us off and making a clear gesture that they did NOT want to participate. In addition, several . . . actually started down the aisle when the candle-lighting began, awkwardly and forcibly trying to make their way around [actor] Martin Burke as he was in the aisle lighting candles. (Robert Newell qtd. in Dolan 132)

Dolan goes on to speculate about possible reasons for those spectators’ refusal, ranging from individualist resistance to the communal didacticism and “manipulative emotional sentiment” (134) of participatory performance strategies to outright homophobia. However, my interest in her description of this theatrical moment is more formal, as it details how a particular creative decision on the part of the production team of the Austin Laramie Project – having the audience hold candles together in a communal gesture of remembrance – did not play out as planned, at least in some performances. What Dolan’s account highlights beyond the performative struggle over the politics of memory and memorialization is a difference between a theatrical production (as the temporally stabilized creative interpretation of an artistic individual or team) and the individual performances of that production in which some creative choices may or may not be actualized, for whatever (time- and site-specific) reasons. Dolan’s archive in Utopia in Performance consists of two different accounts of two different performances of the same production of The Laramie Project in Austin: about the first performance, which she attended personally, Dolan recounts how she herself ambivalently played along with the candle-holding and thus, at least on the surface, actualized the creative interpretation of the Zach Scott artistic team; in the second performance, related to her via email, several (if not many) audience members resisted the audience participation devised by the production and thus (actively) failed to do what the creative interpretation of the play had intended them to do.

Needless to say, such failure might have varying political implications (Dolan also reports that her own partner did not hold up her candle, “not necessarily because she didn’t want to honor Matthew Shepard, but because she preferred not to have her emotions managed” 133), and the political nature of these implications might be more pronounced in some plays than in others. Importantly, however, the theatrical dynamics of actualization and refusal, of success and failure Dolan describes may be considered perfectly ordinary, even to be expected, as they represent part of performance’s constitutive contingency, its structural unreliability that for many is part of its appeal – the very “magic” only a gathering of live bodies can create.

While Philip Auslander cautions us against romanticizing theatrical liveness – he takes issue in particular with Peggy Phelan’s classic argument that “Performance’s only life is in the present” (146) by pointing to the fact that “liveness is not an ontologically defined condition but a historically variable effect of mediatization” (3) –, the contingency of live interaction still fundamentally affects the different performances of The Laramie Project Dolan analyzes. Or perhaps it is less the liveness that is at stake here but, following Nicholas Ridout, the troubled “face-to-face encounter” (15) that lies at the heart of theatrical experience. Ridout suggests that theatrical co-presence, or face-to-face, creates contingency because of “a certain failure of relation [. . .]. That is to say when the promise of a direct face-to-face encounter between two human beings is made within the theatrical set-up, either the act of delivery or the act of collection is always compromised” (31–32). For Ridout, this compromised face-to-face encounter animates theater’s “ontological queasiness” (34)^[2] that specific theatrical productions eventually must contend with (and often try to disavow). Either way, the artistic team’s creative decision to include participatory elements in the staging of the play in fact places aesthetic emphasis on the very contingency – or queasiness – of performance. Formally speaking, thus, subsequent complaints about unforeseen or unintended consequences of that contingency appear somewhat paradoxical.

From a structural perspective, the participatory elements in the Austin production of The Laramie Project temporarily suspended (some of) the institutional safeguard mechanisms put in place by professional theater companies (such as the spatial separation between performers and audiences, playscripts that fix the textual basis of the performance, prompters to help performers remember their lines, etc.) that would otherwise ensure the basic repeatability of a production and minimize the queasiness of the face-to-face encounter – a repeatability that not only has aesthetic but also commercial implications, as most theaters typically generate their income from repeated performances of a single production, often for years on end. This insurance against the structural risk or unreliability of performance supposedly guarantees that any individual performance merely, and repeatedly, actualizes what the creative interpretation of a director or an artistic team has decided on and rehearsed in advance. In mainstream (and/or commercial) theater contexts, this somewhat mechanistic alignment of production and performance and the attempted curtailing of performance’s contingency is considered a form of skill or professionalism.

This alignment is also presupposed by much professional theater criticism (that is, the critical assessment of a particular creative interpretation), where the opening night performance typically comes to stand in for the production as such. As David Román has reminded us, such criticism “conflate[s] the unique and dynamic experience of any given performance with an absolute reading of the production [. . .] [and] sets up the fantasy that production and reception stop after the opening night performance” (xvii). As a result, whatever happens at the nth performance of a production, days or months or years after the opening night, usually does not make it into the theater record.

As convenient a shortcut it might be, this alignment of production and performance also tends to situate the “creativity” of creative interpretation on the side of the production: what theater criticism usually evaluates is the conceptual (art) work of a director or an artistic team (and if it is a new play, of the author) rather than the contingencies of a specific performance situation. In fact, whatever happens in a specific performance that reviewers or audiences attend is typically subsumed under the more general idea of the production. In Acts of Intervention, his book on AIDS-related theater and performance in the US, Román attempts at counterbalancing this bias by offering a chapter-length analysis of a specific performance of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1991) on the eve of the Clinton election in late 1992 (the chapter is aptly entitled “November 1, 1992,” highlighting the historical specificity of that one performance he attended on that day and the feeling of hope associated with the long-awaited end of the Reagan/Bush eras). And to be sure, Dolan’s account of the various performances of the Zach Scott Laramie Project could be read along similar lines: what is so fascinating about moments such as the failed communal candle-holding in Austin is that the easy subsumption of performance under production no longer holds, because the performance does not adequately actualize the conceptual work of the production, thus forcing audiences to actively notice (or even precipitate) an incongruence between performance and production that was formally there all along.

Consider a second example, this time from a repertoire performance of Ayad Akhtar’s 2014 play The Who and the What I myself saw at the Akademietheater in Vienna (in a German translation by Barbara Christ) on December 18, 2018. As will become clear, this performance also failed to actualize the production’s intentions, but this time, the effects of the performance’s contingency were not primarily related to participatory dynamics, but to a performer’s skills not adequately realized. The production had opened the previous spring and was, after Disgraced (2012, Geächtet) had premiered in November 2016, already the second play by Akhtar produced by the Burgtheater (the Akademietheater is the smaller, 500-seat stage of the Burgtheater, Austria’s national theater). The Who and the What is set among a Pakistani American family in Atlanta, Georgia, and dramatizes a generational family conflict revolving around race, religion, and gender identity.^[3] Although the play even offers a feminist reading of the Quran, it is essentially conceived as a comedy, or more precisely, as Akhtar reminds readers in an introductory author’s note to the printed version of the play, “as a dialogue with another comedy” (xi), namely William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1594). By emphasizing the comedic aspects of the play, Akhtar uses genre conventions to appeal to a presumed universalism roped around the heterosexual family unit, even suggesting to American Theatre that (implicitly white American) “audiences are always surprised at how familiar the characters feel” (qtd. in Bent 23). And Eliza Bent, writing about The Who and the What for American Theatre, agrees: “if you’ve ever had an overbearing sister, or a protective father with slightly old-fashioned Republican values,” she argues, “you’ll recognize Zarina and her well-intentioned father, Afzal” (23).

Arguably, the supposed comedic universalism of the play also led to the Burgtheater’s decision to have the Swiss director Felix Prader stage The Who and the What, a theater artist not necessarily known for his expertise in Muslim cultures or US American plays, but rather for having previously directed light comedies. The production’s casting decisions also de-emphasize the specific Pakistani American context, as the play is staged with an all-white cast speaking standard German in Vienna. This curious choice of having white actors (among them stage darling Peter Simonischek as the religiously conservative father Afzal) play Pakistani American characters has drawn criticism concerning cultural representativeness and has even earned the production a so-called Golden Raspberry in the category “the biggest hypocrisy [die größte Scheinheiligkeit]” at a tongue-in-cheek award gala hosted by the Viennese off-theater WERK X, which recognizes Vienna’s “most unpolitical theater productions” every year (Deutschbauer).

While I will return to the cultural politics of Prader’s staging and casting decisions later, I am for now interested in the formal dynamic already highlighted earlier in Dolan’s account of the Austin Laramie Project: the incongruence between the general production (a form of creative interpretation envisioned and rehearsed by a group of theater practitioners) and the specific enactment of this production on the particular night I (or any other spectator) saw it. For in the December 18, 2018 performance, Simonischek failed to remember the entirety of his lines in the play’s epilogue, and thus the performance actualized neither Akhtar’s dramatic text nor its creative interpretation by Prader and the artistic team. Whatever the meaning and significance of both play and production were, they remained curiously virtual in this particular evening’s performance.

As a spectator, I felt this was a special moment. I had witnessed actors forgetting their lines before, but I had never before experienced memory failure this severe on a professional stage. The prompter (sitting in the first row) and the three other actors present during the scene all tried to cue Simonischek in one way or another – to no avail. “Oh dear God [Ach du lieber Gott]” was all he could mumble, words that at the same time marked the pious appeals of the character and the desperate stumbling of the actor. After a while, the lighting technician simply decided to black out and thus ended the performance – leaving a prominent actor of Austria’s national theater visibly embarrassed during the final applause.

Unlike in Austin, where the structural incongruence between production and performance became apparent because some audience members refused to engage with the intentions of the production, in Vienna, the unreliability of performance manifested on stage only: in an actor forgetting his lines so completely that not even the prompter, as an institutional safeguard mechanism, could prevent the situation from happening. In both cases, however, the alignment of production and performance did not hold because of a failure whose possibility is always already present in the theatrical moment: a specific performance may fail to actualize what the production intended to happen in the theatrical space.

But how can we theorize the meaning of such failure? First, to speak of failure in the context of performance does not necessarily imply the normative dismissal of a specific performance as a “flawed” enactment, an artistic vision not properly executed, but may rather serve as a starting point for the articulation of alternative meaning-making practices, and hence, of yet another creative interpretation. Sara Jane Bailes’s understanding of failure is interesting in this respect, as she seeks to claim the poetic dimension of failure as a performance strategy. “Forgetting [a line of a playtext],” she argues,

produces the possibility of a number of versions (the ways of coping with forgetting and making-do as well as alternative versions of the line itself) that might stand in for the forgotten words, such as paraphrasing, improvising text that leads in another direction, standing in silence, reinventing the text through gesture, and so on. (2)

For Bailes, all this is potentially generative of new meaning and thus an act of creativity. At the same time, however, it is important to note that Bailes is invested mostly in failure as an intentional strategy and therefore as a mode of planned theatrical representation that implicitly realigns production and performance. Hence, she makes a crucial distinction between “performances of failure” and “performances that fail” (62), highlighting the former in her analysis. As Patrick Blenkarn points out, this distinction is not only typological for Bailes, but also carries (political) significance, as “The failures of those pursuing failure intentionally seem to have, for Bailes, more political affect than those who fail in ignorance or who fail but would really rather have succeeded” (101). Looked at with this distinction in mind, Simonischek forgetting his lines (assuming his nondelivery was a mishap and thus unintentional) constitutes a performance that fails rather than a performance of failure. Accordingly, the potential of this failed performance to create a new work of art with alternative meanings, always already in excess of the (prerehearsed) creative interpretation of the production more generally, would be curtailed by the nonintentionality of its actualization. The failure of some audience members in Austin to hold candles during the final moments of The Laramie Project, on the other hand, was likely intentional and could therefore be framed much more easily as generative of new meaning, as a creative practice of resistance with various (and ambivalent) ideological functions.

The distinction between intentional and nonintentional theatrical failures as alternative meaning-making practices is sidestepped when it comes to technical malfunctions on stage, that is, performance contingencies precipitated by neither actors nor audiences. In a piece for the popular theater website OnStage Blog, for example, Lindsay Timmington relates an (perhaps not so uncommon) incident that occurred at the Sunday August 20, 2017 matinee performance of the 2012 musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (written/composed by Dave Malloy, directed by Rachel Chavkin) at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. In this performance, for reasons unspecified, the sound and in particular the performers’ microphones broke down. As Timmington reports, the actors initially “soldiered on; projecting like champs while their mics failed,” but the performance was eventually stopped, and the actors left the stage for several minutes, thus unwittingly interrupting the prerehearsed creative interpretation of the production. In the break that ensued while the technology was fixed, “the last few rows of the balcony started humming the melody [of a musical number that had just been performed] and the pit musicians plucked along in time with them.” This impromptu audience performance was followed by “THE WAVE [that] moved through the 1,138-seat theatre with seemingly everyone participating as directed by the conductor.”

For Timmington, this spontaneous interruption was “one of the coolest things [she has] seen” in the theater. It seems then that the technical failure of this particular performance of The Great Comet enabled the creation of new performative meaning on the part of the audience – an actualization in a concrete theatrical event that was not intended or rehearsed by the musical’s production team. Arguably though, this alternative interpretation of The Great Comet was not (or not primarily) reactive to the show’s dramatic narrative (as it was in Dolan’s account of The Laramie Project audiences who refused to hold candles) but rather to the general mood in the playhouse: an affective relation that prevented audience members from becoming impatient or annoyed as their expectations of theatrical professionalism were frustrated. Instead, the audience in this particular performance remained in a good mood and even chose to actualize something “cool.”

The Broadway audience’s creative reaction to technological failure in The Great Comet draws attention to a second conceptual dimension of failure in the context of performance: for in professional theater, failure is not only a mechanism of signification, but also related to questions of value, and in particular to the relationship between the labor of theater practitioners and its exchange value for spectators who paid (at least) the price of a theater ticket. And while it might not be the only value to be gained from theatrical performance, audiences may simply pay just to be in a good mood for a night. The above relationship between labor and value is usually circumscribed in the institutional environment of professional, even national, theater, where technical (more than creative) competence in terms of acting skills and stage functionality is used to set and justify the exchange value of a performance.

Usually, the economics of the Viennese Akademietheater in which Simonischek forgot his lines, for instance, does not tolerate what Giulia Palladini theorizes as “idleness” (22), a form of theater labor that comprises “loitering in the pleasure of theater-making as a ‘doing’” (14). Instead, audiences will typically expect a well-rehearsed, well-functioning performance for the price of their ticket, not a contingent loitering experience. Against such expectations, Simonischek’s memory failure quite obviously troubles the exchange value that usually accrues from the professionalism of Austria’s national theater. At the same time, there is an element of extraordinariness or sensational value in this complete forgetting (and the awkward performance moment it generates) that potentially enables more creative approaches to, and perhaps less restrictive renegotiation of, the relationship between theater labor and its value.

Dolan’s account of The Laramie Project frames the exchange value of the production in a different manner, as she explains that audiences for the play were partly recruited through educational contexts, with some audience members having to attend performances as students as part of their course work rather than of their own accord (132–133). Hence, the refusal of these audience members to participate in the performance as intended by the production could also be understood as an attempt to trouble the educational (rather than the financial) value of the theatrical event. For the audiences in the The Great Comet matinee performance described by Timmington, however, technological failure seemed not to have troubled the exchange value of the theatrical experience at all. On the contrary, in Timmington’s account, this failure even afforded additional value, as it emphasized the collective excitement that comes with the unpredictability of the theatrical event. Timmington’s line of argument relies on Jordan Tannahill’s Theatre of the Unimpressed, in which he claims that only theater that takes risks and fails occasionally still has vitality (and thus value) in a mediatized age (12). In this alternative understanding of theatrical economics, it is not flawless theatrical professionalism but precisely the possibility of failure (and the vitality or unpredictability it generates) that makes performance labor so valuable for the paying spectator.

And finally, failure also has cultural and political dimensions, as it often reveals tacit conventions or standards that entrench particular (classist, racist, sexist, ableist, etc.) normative behaviors. The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam’s attempt at “dismantl[ing] the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (2), is instructive in this context, as is, for instance, Joshua Chambers-Letson’s perceptive description of his mother’s (class-based and racialized) failure to perform as a blasé New York audience member during a Nao Bustamante performance at P.S. 1 (174–176). Arguably, this larger cultural dimension of failure is particularly present in Simonischek’s Viennese performance as the failure to deliver his lines (though in all likelihood unintentional) might be read as indexical of a larger representational failure of the production: its nonchalant use of cross-racial impersonation, where white actors casually stand in for and speak as South Asian characters. The Akademietheater performance I saw thus unwittingly responded to the structural racism of the production, as Simonischek’s universalist attempt to speak for the Pakistani man literally breaks down in the end. Simonischek’s failure to speak also points to a tension between the dramatic text and Prader’s creative interpretation, as Akhtar’s stage descriptions insist on a linguistic difference between Afzal’s daughters Mahwish and Zarina, who “speak without any accent” (5), and Afzal himself, whose English is supposed to have “a very noticeable Indo-Pak accent” (13). In Prader’s staging, all actors speak standard German, and accordingly, the linguistic Othering of the father character is not realized performatively. This attempt to emphasize (linguistic) universalism over racial difference, however, is somewhat troubled in the particular performance I saw, as Simonischek’s failure to speak creatively performs the symbolic speechlessness of a racially and linguistically Othered character in a way the production had not intended him to do.

Of course, the alteration of the play’s meaning through unrealized lines is situationally highly specific and likely did not happen in any of the other performances of the Akademietheater production of The Who and the What. Likewise, Dolan’s speculation about possible reasons for some audience member’s refusal to hold candles collectively is limited to the specific performances of The Laramie Project she saw or was told about, as this refusal probably did not take place in other performances of the same production. And in a similar manner, Timmington’s observations about the “coolness” of the audience reaction in the repair break in The Great Comet only apply to that one performance she attended. Still, these performance moments are part of the theatrical lifespan of a production and inevitably shape its meaning-making process. While these additional performance meanings may get lost in the official record, as (published) criticism typically focuses on the opening performance of a production, these meanings still inform the process of creative interpretation and may add to our understanding of it. We might thus do well to attend to these and other failures to actualize the intentions of a production in specific performances, as they point us to a formal complexity in the relationship between theater and performance: the tenuous alignment of production and performance and the fact that there can be no complete certainty that the creative intentions of the production will be realized in a specific performance.