On Writing : Theatre of time by George Schwimmer

Hi, Robin, The physical elements on stage are not my primary focus – the story is. I needed to do away with sets and costumes in Reluctant Prophet because it would be impossible to tell the story or to stage it otherwise. The play has 10 locales, employed 16 times. It has 52 characters (played by 24 actors). It covers a span of 37 years, from 1888 to 1925. Aristotle would have had a fit. Clearly, I couldn’t use sets and costumes to tell the story I wanted to tell. I thought that if Picasso could reshape and rearrange form and space, a playwright could similarly reshape and rearrange events and time. Which is what I’ve done. The main operating principle is associations in a person’s mind. We all have had the experience of hearing a song or smelling a smell or seeing something which brought back to us from our memories an event or a person from years ago. That is how I wrote these two plays. The Reluctant Prophet opens with Cayce 45 years old and someone at a distance calling his name, “Edgar!” Which brings back a scene from his youth when something important happened. The first line of Hamlet Dead is, “If it’s to be now, it won’t come later – if it won’t come later, it will be now – if it won’t be now, then it will come later. The time is unimportant, but the readiness is everything.” Everything follows from that thought. To further expand the concept of simultaneous space-time on stage, there often are two—even three—scenes on stage at one time in Hamlet Dead, Hamlet’s attention swinging back and forth from one memory to another. Hamlet also has the opportunity to experience some moments that were hidden from him in life so that he can observe and fully understand how events unfolded. As thoughts and memories of people, words and events flash into his mind, they are seen and heard on stage. A word leads to part of an event six months in the future, a line to happenings of the previous night. Characters appear and fade away, are seen through each other, through another moment in time. Fragments of the ‘past’ and ‘future’ intrude into the ‘present', tying together what in life had at times been hidden or unclear to Hamlet. The same sort of mental flow takes place in Reluctant Prophet, though that play isn’t as fragmented. Since I – and theoretical physicists – believe that all time is NOW, my image is of a flower, like a rose, whose petals are closed at the opening of a play, and open one petal (scene) at a time, until we can see into the heart of the flower. Note that the flower is all here, NOW, both when it is closed and when it is open. The difference is that we can see inside it in one instance. And keep in mind that some flowers close and open again, allowing us to view their center more than once. And that it is possible to remove one petal without necessarily affecting the rest of the flower significantly. And if a story can meander and leap about on the page or in a film, why can’t a stage play? It can, if you discard the notion of a fixed ‘reality’ in scene and costume and characterization. Years ago there was a group of actors who did ‘transformations’, changing from one character to another in a split second. Mimes do that all the time. Can’t do that if you have fixed sets, costumes, makeup, etc. and a totally linear story. For me, “rehearsal clothes” in a production are not really rehearsal clothes, they are simply meant to look like rehearsal clothes. I once directed a production of Henry IV, Part 1, and I told the costumer that although the costumes should look like contemporary rehearsal clothes, the colors and line of each costume should fit the character, as if the character had lived in the present time. This is opposed to dressing the male characters in Hamlet in tuxedos, for example. All the male characters dressed in tuxedos reflects nothing of the characters’ personalities. So, if Falstaff were living today and went to the grocery store, what would he likely wear, with emphasis on the color of his clothing. So, what I’m after is the essence of the character reflected in casual everyday clothing. Hope this answers your questions. George

Robin, “What would be the advantage of reshaping and rearranging events and time?” In the case of Reluctant Prophet, the play could not have been written without the structure that I used. In the case of Hamlet Dead, it is less an advantage than a different – and deeper – perspective. Novels have been inside the heads of their protagonists for at least a hundred years, maybe more. The stage has not (except for Shakespeare and Arthur Miller). Why? Shouldn’t we be listening to people’s thoughts, in order to figure out where they are coming from? Everyone wonders about murderers and serial killers, “What in the world went through that person’s head?” Right? So, shouldn’t we be exploring this inner space, and not just sending rockets into outer space? It’s a matter of getting a different perspective into people’s motivations. Why do we attract certain memories to us at certain moments? There is a reason. Perhaps if we can find those reasons, we will understand more about the human mind and soul. So, the rearranging of time is a byproduct of putting a person’s mind on stage. There can be other uses for time, but for now that’s my interest. Right now I’ve just begun writing a play about a character from real life, who narrates what has happened to him. Although he’s moving chronologically at present, he doesn’t have to be, since the story of his life is over, like Hamlet, and he can talk about the events in his life in any order that he wants, as his memories come back to him. And what reason did Picasso and Jackson Pollock have for their paintings? They were looking at things differently than others. “Does character dialogue reflect modern day speech as well?” I began writing Hamlet Dead as an exercise, when I discovered that very intelligent people (a vice-president of a university, for example, and a national columnist) were bored at productions of Shakespeare because they couldn’t understand many of the words. Theatre is supposed to be dynamic, exciting, not boring. I found that much of the meaning of Hamlet or of a given scene or Hamlet’s motivations were obscured by the archaic language. In a hundred years, Elizabethan English may be completely foreign to us. So, I did use modern standard English for Hamlet Dead, retaining what I could of Shakespeare’s words, those that we understand easily when they are spoken on the stage. I did not employ colloquial speech or modern vernacular. To someone not familiar with Shakespeare, I feel it will still sound like speech from long ago, but you will be able to understand every word now. I didn't change the story, the characters, or the philosophy.