Narcissism Inevitable: Jean Ann Douglass’s Some Editing and Some Theme Music
Narcissism Inevitable
“What makes for the prospect of some sort of radical democracy spreading outward and growing up,” asks Louis, a character in Tony Kushner’s modern history play Angels in America. Two decades after Kushner pondered this question at length, many look to the Internet for the promise of equality. In 2006, I (and each of you) was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, when the periodical heralded the advent of a digital Millennium, falling into oracular fits over the egalitarian potential of the World Wide Web’s second age, with its “cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.” Signaling this new era of technological emancipation, Time’s would-be prophet Lev Grossman scoffs at philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Man” conception of history and crowns us all, “for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.” Incendiary rhetoric—the kind one might expect from Kushner, not from the presses at one of America’s largest media corporations. Theater, however, is as ambivalent as the character that mouths the playwright’s question. An art with origins in the oldest world orders, theater tends toward a more nuanced worldview, cautious as it reconciles itself with the proliferating virtual conduits of its audience’s everyday experience.
Though democracy isn’t explicitly at issue in Some Editing and Some Theme Music—a new theatrical work at the 2009 New York International Fringe Festival—it is at stake. In their postdramatic examination of the diarist impulse that abides in YouTube, the practice of “vlogging,” social networking, and other forms of mediatized performance, Brooklyn-based director Jean Ann Douglass and a spirited company of three draw attention to the ecstasies and limitations of these new platforms for expression. Out of all the fun had with computers onstage, a rationale for the theater’s hesitant acceptance of new media emerges: not hackneyed phobias about newfangled technology, but sophisticated qualms about the web’s counterfeit freedoms.
By collaging various literary excerpts with pre-recorded video diary clips and live feeds of the performers delivering terse autobiographical broadcasts, Some Editing and Some Theme Music displaces drama altogether. In the absence of a “fictive cosmos,” a virtual dramaturgy coalesces around attempts to stage the fabric of hyperreality, with its fragmented narratives and relucent interfaces. The show recreates the cyberspace experience as a structural principle for the live theater. Stationed in front of glowing Apple notebook computers, the performers recite the show’s bookish component, the bulk of which consists of quotations from the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson’s commentary on the diary of Samuel Pepys and an introduction to Virginia Woolf’s collected journals. The script reads like a browse through GoogleBooks after searching the subject “diaries.”
Interspersed with these compartmentalized monologues are videos, projected overhead, of the actors recounting personal anecdotes or confessing private feelings from a childhood bedroom, an apartment terrace or Bryant Park. Then there’s the live “vlogging.” Back-lit with bright candy-colors, the performers salute their webcams with sporadic bursts of the brand of enthusiasm that only surfaces when talking about oneself: “Hi, my name is Cecile. I own a really fabulous pair of red cowboy boots.” “Hi, my name is Evan Prizant, I just turned twenty-five, and I have a large cat named Zeus.” “My name is Julia Frey. And this is a journal of my life.” This is charming at first, but as the incessant self-promotion accumulates, one hears the desperate ring of “Please be my Facebook friend.” Eventually, the live video projections verge on simultaneity: the face of each actor bleeds into the next, compounding to the visual glut.
Eventually, the entire show reboots. This time the actors perform the whole piece in silence under a DVD-style commentary track. Magnificently, they subvert our assumptions about what seemed to be clumsy performances—after all, the Fringe Festival is essentially a theatrical analogue of YouTube’s amateur showcase. But now we realize the performances are polished and minutely calibrated. On the recorded commentary, the director adds to the information overload, chronicling the rehearsal process, explaining some of the show’s more opaque references, and departing on inane sidebars—such as how she (perhaps drunkenly) came into possession of the entire library of Gossip Girl books. It’s as if we’re following numerous hyperlinks, launching from what the actors are doing onstage and arriving at tangential worlds of trivia. In this dense, “pop-up” dramaturgy, the theater audience becomes a pack of helpless web-surfers. Theatergoers toggle between manifold sites of performance, the way they might click through emails, blogs, Wikipedia entries, and the neon squalor of MySpace—but meanwhile they’re left with little real agency.
The thread bundling this parcel of theatrical perceptions—the textscape of found literary passages, the prefabricated and live videos, and the pre-recorded commentary—is the company’s fascination with the human need to give an account of oneself. In place of dramatic action, the performers present the profusion of individual “accounts” littering cyberspace. Hinting at the sort of lost faith in fairytale fictions that Hans Thies Lehmann detects in a theater that has discarded drama, bright-eyed performer Cecile Monteyne delivers a speech that suggests the appeal of the Internet’s array of logging opportunities:
Accounts in its reportorial not calculative sense. Account, accounting—an account of what is going on. Better than journal or diary by far. Diary makes me think of those girls at camp, always fat and damp little girls, who had fake green Morocco diaries with locks and keys they wore on chains around their grubby necks.
In such cheap diaries are penned fantasies that make the confusing scenes of a child’s world cohere, but “accounts” ostensibly depict the world uncrafted. The web is a boundless space where anyone may satisfy the compulsion to log, unedited, momentous incidents or insignificant minutiae. In the show’s opening sequence, Cecile switches on her webcam and, eschewing narrative, reports actual details about that night’s performance: “Evan designed the costumes, but these are my own pajama pants that I’m wearing,” she says; or, “My mom’s sitting in the front row right now.” The show thus begins with an acknowledgement of the real situation shared between audience and performer, and continues in a theatricalist manner that reflects the self-consciousness of most homemade online videos. The clips projected onstage, whether logged or live, are about the performers themselves and their experiences making and managing posts for YouTube—videos about videos. Performer Julia Frey confesses her insecurities in one, sighing, “I’m questioning…uh…how I’m doing on these videos. These have been unedited and…kinda just…full of “ums” and “uhs” and weird pauses and ramblings.” In another clip, performer Evan Prizant characterizes the nature of the YouTube network:
You put up the videos, and people watch the videos, and you can subscribe to other people’s videos, and people subscribe to yours. And you’ve got to subscribe to their videos, or they’re not going to subscribe to yours. That was something I was never good at because I never really liked the other videos.
Wryly, he satirizes the vanity inherent in the whole enterprise. It’s not so much about establishing a community as self-promotion. This satire extends into Some Editing and Some Theme Music’s commentary track sequence. There, Douglass hawks t-shirts with graphic prints that refer to dance gestures in the show, and speculates sincerely on the impact of her work on theater history. Recognizing the scale of the theatricalism at work in her commentary, she mocks it:
How Meta is this shit you’re watching right now! So it’s the commentary of Evan doing commentary of the video that’s in the show that he recorded. Just so many levels. Layers on layers on layers. [silence] I don’t really like using the word Meta, and I’ve heard lately that the new word is “theatricalist.” Or at least that’s what they say at Yale, and so goes Yale so goes the rest of theater scholarship. But I don’t know, both words seem pretty pretentious to me and I try to cut pretentious words out of my vocabulary, right as they are.
Suddenly, her observations become a canny critique of YouTube culture’s self-absorption, but also of the theater’s. (A self-absorption I found myself sucked into, amused to be a Yale-trained critic there to review the show and add yet another level of commentary.) Though the show deftly manipulates media for theatrical ends, a tension persists between theater and these new modes of performance. Some Editing’s interrogation of display juxtaposes the theater’s self-awareness over YouTube’s self-obsession.
As it diagnoses the inevitable narcissism that bubbles up with new means to put ourselves on view, Some Editing subtly points to the cipher of self-display passing itself off as political enfranchisement. The delusive freedom of expression made available by YouTube (and other such web-based media) ironically, threatens the prospect of a democracy where power is, in Tony Kushner’s phrase, “drawn inexorably downward and outward.” Of course, the freedom to present oneself and one’s thoughts is not literally the hazard; it is the self-centered attention seeking that freedom potentially engenders. Some Editing and Some Theme Music suggests that the web’s unrestricted public forum, where one can jibber ad nauseum, has become a substitute for political efficacy—a decoy that saps the individuals of their will to act by offering the seductive satisfaction of self-disclosure. As Kushner put it, of all of America’s “petrified little fetishes; freedom, that’s the worst.”
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