Amy R. Cohen (Randolph College)
Screen Lessons and the Orchestra
In June 2020, Randolph College decided that it would not be safe to stage the bi-annual October Greek Play in person. The play, Sophocles’ Trachiniae, had already been cast, with two key roles being played by a senior, and so the director and cast made the decision to present the play in the Zoom format. The move to Zoom led to many decisions that challenged a company used to the original practices framing for every choice, and the production highlighted several elements that every company must consider.
The Randolph College Greek Play has since 2000 endeavored to use Athenian theatrical conventions (Duncan 2019). With a large outdoor theatre, they stage plays during the day without artificial lighting or electronically amplified sound. They cast a chorus of at least eight and compose music with which that chorus sings and dances. They use full masks, and they cast only three or four actors for all of the named roles.
Of that list of the basics of original-practices Greek drama, only the last survived the transition to the Zoom. Had the actors even been allowed in the theatre during the pandemic, they would not have been clearly visible or audible from the orchestra on Zoom, and so the theatre was out of the question. In a large outdoor theatre, Greek masks melt into the person of the character as they do on 5th-century vases of plays, but they remain uncanny close up. Since Zoom would only intensify that problem, masks were out, too.
The company then quickly realized that the kind of intensive engagement with the audience they can provide in their theatre operates quite differently on screen. In the outdoor, daylit theatre, an actor can focus on a particular person in the audience and the rest of the audience—in the same space and community with the particular person—will share the connection. In the theatre, actors can easily and frequently switch from narrow individual focus to expansive general focus on the audience to maintain and broaden the connection. Masked, actors can even use that ability to “spotlight” to direct the audience to focus on specific characters. (Rehm 1992, Marshall 1999)
On Zoom, with individual actors and audience divided physically from every other individual, the company could not achieve those dynamics of original practices they way they can in a Greek theatre. Instead, seeking the same effects, they chose to play almost the entire tragedy framed individually from the shoulders up and almost always speaking directly into the camera. That head-on direct-to-the-camera style sometimes gave the impression that a character was speaking directly to the audience, sometimes to another character, and sometimes, it seemed, to both. That result echoed, at least, some of the engagement and focus possible with the original practices, even if it lacked the corporate and community dynamic of the large theatre.
This trade-off and others will be the center of this exploration of how every theatre experience has lessons for every other.