Gratitude for trailblazers

Given the just-past holiday, I've been thinking a lot about the artists to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their fantastic work. Of course, I am intensely grateful for the multitude of brilliant and talented artists who have graced our productions for the last year, but it's rare that I stop to think of the trailblazing ones who have left their historical mark on the art of theater and design, who made or make work that continues to influence our medium today.

Among those I am most thankful for are Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim for their beautiful melodies and clever lyrics; the perfectly unique and vastly different plays of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Yasmina Reza; the singular set design of Christine Jones; the stylish, iconic costume designs of Edith Head and Theoni Aldredge; and the musings and provocations of Antonin Artaud and Peter Brook.

The theater artist, though, to whom I owe the deepest debt of gratitude is an English director who worked for many years for the Royal Shakespeare Company named Stephen Pimlott.

When I was 15 years old, my grandfather sent my mother and I to London for a 2 week summer vacation. At the time, I had done a great deal of musical theater, and we went to see several West End musicals together, but the highlight of that trip was a visit to the RSC to see Richard III. While I'd spent hours poring over my mother's volume of the complete works, captivated by the photos of giants like Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, and Vivien Leigh, the language had always seemed inaccessible, ancient, and irrelevant. My experience at the RSC that evening changed not only Shakespeare for me, but my entire perspective on the possibilities of language and theater completely. 

It wasn't a modern-dress production; the men wore stockings and the women the flat bodiced corsets of Elizabethan courtiers. It wasn't flashy, there were no extraordinary technological innovations or even much in the way of a set. But under Stephen Pimlott's direction, the language of Shakespeare didn't just become comprehensible; it became alive, immediate, dangerous. David Troughton's Richard was as engaging and dastardly a character as I'd ever seen on stage, at once horrible and cruel but charming and even, at first, sympathetic. As I watched the story unfold, it wasn't some ancient drama held at a safe distance from hundreds of years of history; I felt implicated, as if just by being present I had contributed to the gruesome crimes of Richard myself.

When the play ended, the audience clapped, enthusiastically, but didn't get on their feet. Coming from Knoxville, TN, where every mediocre regional or local theater production was always given a standing ovation, regardless of quality, I was shocked. The most amazing three hours of performance I'd ever witnessed had just transpired before me, and yet this audience seemed unphased!

Four years later, I returned to England to study for a time at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. Part of our program was not just studying the literature and history of Shakespeare, but attending several performances and working with the staff and artists of the RSC. I saw several excellent productions that summer: a Casablanca-inspired Comedy of Errors starring a pre-Doctor Who David Tenant; a hilarious production of The Rivals (also with Tenant in the lead role); a heavy and brooding Henry IV Part I. But nothing compared (and nothing has since) to Pimlott's take on Richard II. 

Dressed in simple contemporary clothes (Bolingbroke was crowned by a sweater-wearing Richard), in a spare white box set at the now-expanded and renamed Other Place theater, the complicated and comparatively quiet politics of Richard's deposing were presented in the most effective production I've ever seen. Taking audience implication as far as I'd ever seen, we were never in a darkened house, but lit as the playing space was lit. When Bolingbroke (played by the same David Troughton I'd seen as the other Richard) addressed the court to stand up and kneel for the king, he didn't speak to just the actors on stage, but to us... And when we, as audience, stayed seated, wrongly believing we were secure in our spectator roles, he stepped closer, repeating the line until we realized we were as much a part of the court (and just as threatened if we didn't comply), as Shakespeare's characters... and the entire house stood up and kneeled in the bleachers. At the end of the play, the audience got to their feet again, lauding Pimlott's genius as I had felt he deserved years before. 

What Pimlott did with Shakespeare was something I'd never seen before (and have still rarely seen accomplished with as much success even with lcontemporary and interactive works) was to bring it not just to life but into YOUR life. He pushed the boundaries of the audiences comfort, but instead of feeling abused or subjected to gimmickry, it felt absolutely natural. Pimlott didn't build a world and ask you to step out of yours and into his; he brought his world into yours, and made them the same. His work never felt like an escape (which I still think is a worthy quality in a piece of theater), but like a confrontation.

Unfortunately, Mr. Pimlott died in 2007 before I ever got to thank him for his incredible work (or, more's the pity, to work with him on something), but his influence on at least one theater maker lives on as long as I do. Nicholas Hynter's praise of him on his passing in the Guardian is wonderful, and his statement that "[Pimlott] threw himself at everything with a voracious love" was so completely evident in his directing. I only hope that I can live to be half as inspiring to others as he was to me, and that someone will one day say of me, as Hynter said of him, "There was nobody in the theatre who was better company and was more fun." 

Cross-posted from http://suzaneraslan.tumblr.com