Culture With A Capital C

Some of my anxieties during Empire Travel Agency were: Will the actor driving this car, talking to another actor via Bluetooth, turn too fast and hit a jogger? Is that man on the street corner in the play? Are these people exercising under FDR drive in the play? Is that horrible smell in the play? Am I in the play? Is Giovanni in the play? Is that woman texting on a stoop a production assistant, letting another production assistant know we’re on our way? Did we just run down the wrong hallway? Is this actor hitting on me in character, or is he hitting on me as himself? Above all, how must I act to make events go according to plan?

Such questions yield surprising insights. For starters, it’s crazy that anyone drives a car. It’s scary to ride shotgun as an actor recites lines while driving, but even scarier — crazier — is that people do this all the time, while improvising, which requires more focus. One personal revelation was how little time it took me to assume responsibility as a participant — to want, very badly, to help the actors do their job. I began to act, too, to reinforce the reality of the world they presented, delirious and hole-ridden as it was. Only occasionally did I think of how I must look to them or consider how much of myself I revealed in this process.

I really, really enjoyed reading Dayna Tortorici’s theater diary of three plays she saw this fall: John by Annie Baker, Judy by Max Posner, and Empire Travel Agency by the Woodshed Collective. Each review made me want to see the play in question, even as it reminded me that I keep making promises to go see Culture With A Capital C that I never follow through on. There’s something about a play, as she mentions in the section about John, that highlights the discomfort of sitting with a group of people, watching and waiting and expecting to be entertained on a level proportionate to however much you paid for your seats. But that’s part of the experience, I think: revealing a little bit about your personal expectations as an audience member is its own kind of performance.