Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Storytelling and Theatrical Truth

Two snapshots:


  1. Three people duck and weave through torrential rain in search of a bar. When they find an appropriately dark and cozy spot, they slump on their chairs. One woman puts her head down on the table. The other woman stands and stretches her back, which is stiff and sore with tension. All three of them feel emotionally flayed by what they have just witnessed. 
  2. A reading of a new musical still very much in progress. It's about a violent, shameful event that took place here in Vancouver, just blocks away from where this event now takes place. At the end of the event there is a wonderful moment when two members of the longshore workers' union meet with the cast. One of them tells a short true story that illustrates why this musical about a long-ago event is still, sadly, relevant today. 
I love stories. I think that stories are the reason we have theatre, art, music, dance. As we struggle- more and more in these dark times- to make some kind of sense of our human condition, these stories won't save us, but they may help us to understand. To process. And maybe even to learn from the past. 

I spent five years in a place where the past was mined daily for stories. Literally mined, in some cases, as this was a gold rush town. We sang, we danced, we interpreted the past- for entertainment, yes, absolutely, but also to keep those stories alive. To say You were here, and we remember, and we honour you by telling your stories now. We acknowledge that this piece of our past was important. You did not always do the right thing, and your treatment of the environment and the local indigenous people was often, frankly, appalling, but we are not perfect either, and we can learn from what you did. We ARE you, separated only by the passing years. Sometimes the history we interpreted was told in a way that was frankly, pretty cheeseball. Sometimes it erred on the side of being accurate, but dull. And sometimes, like Goldilocks' porridge, it was just right. 

It's an interesting puzzle, deciding on truth versus theatrical truth, and I remember a perfectly civil but passionate discussion between a playwright/director, a historian/playwright and a writer/historian about staying absolutely faithful to the truth versus telling a compelling story. And here's where I declare my allegiances: I am passionately on the side of theatrical truth. (And just as passionately against cheesiness, but that's a whole other blog post.) But it takes a discerning storyteller to know when the truth needs a tweak, and when to leave it alone. I am reminded of a wonderful passage in an L.M. Montgomery novel where the young heroine writes down and publishes a story that someone told her, and is confused when someone praises her for her work. "But I didn't do anything," she protests, "I just wrote down what he told me, in his words." "Exactly," replies her friend. 

So then, we get to storytelling. Which is a whole other art, and one that's ably celebrated in Vancouver by events such as The Flame and StoryStoryLie. The format varies, but often there is a theme or prompt, and storytellers tell a true story that has something to do with that theme. 
And we get to my first snapshot, where three people spent an hour in a bar trying to digest the stories they'd just heard, and finding it rough going. One of those people, of course, was me. 
We'd played music at a storytelling event, a fundraiser, where the prompts were Best Laid Plans, and Confessional. Which, obviously, have a lot of room for interpretation. But for whatever reason, all five true stories went to dark, dark places. There were
  • Two stories from people dealing with serious, life-threatening cancer
  • Two #MeToo stories
  • One story-slightly lighter- about racism
  • And us, a 3-piece band telling stories through our songs all three of which happened to be written by me.
All of the stories had laugh-aloud parts, and all of them were well-told.

Well. I can look at the bright side and say that seldom was our music as welcomed and probably even needed by an audience as it was by that one. Reeling from the emotional impact of all this personal darkness, the audience was silent and spellbound by our songs, and applauded enthusiastically after each one. 
But on a more serious note, I can honestly say that never in my happy, mentally stable and privileged life have I ever felt more viscerally the need for trigger warnings. The stories I was hearing were  devastating to hear, and my friends and I ALL felt bruised by their impact. And afterwards, in that bar, we struggled to make sense of it all. It felt, I said, a lot like being accosted by that person who you've just met, who proceeds to tell you unsavoury details about their lives before they barely know more about you than your name. (In fact, I met a person like that very recently.) Why were the storytellers placing such trust in strangers?  And on the flip side, what about our trust as an audience? Was it being betrayed by being exposed to such a poorly-curated event?

Art can and should lead us to the dark places. One of the most-lauded shows in Vancouver this fall was a story about a father and his changing relationship with his adult, severely disabled son. I didn't get a chance to see it, but 100% of the feedback I heard was strongly positive, in the vein of GO SEE THIS NOW. The musical I was recently involved with (snapshot #2) tells the story of a violent and deadly labour dispute in Vancouver through songs and scenes. 
So what's the difference? Do we, or I, need a veil of fiction to go safely into those scary places?  
I think there's some truth to this. Fiction takes the story and makes it universal. We see a story and think That could be me. Whereas if someone's telling you their story, I think that it's actually easier to withdraw, to become desensitized to their woes.

On the other hand, I have to say that I am enormously glad that people are helping to remove the stigmas around abuse, mental illness, and other huge issues, by being honest and telling their stories. While I would not personally choose to go there on social media, I applaud my friends who have the courage to be graphically honest about things that have happened to them. I need to say this, so that you don't think that I want to sweep this stuff under the rug. I don't. Maybe the difference (for me, anyway) is that reading a piece that someone's written still allows me some distance and the option to absorb their dark story at my own pace. I can choose to read it; I can choose to leave it. Or I can have a conversation with a friend and feel honoured that they would choose to confide in me. But being in the same room as all that darkness laid on me by strangers felt very different, and by the end of it I felt used. 

So I guess I'm not posting this to say I have any answers. And of course, I'm sure that other people attended the same events I did and had totally opposite reactions than mine. Maybe they thought the new musical was boring or it didn't resonate with them; maybe they embraced the true stories as raw, honest, and necessary. 

We have entered an age of sometimes brutal honesty and oversharing, thanks to social media, but as many people have already pointed out, even the oversharing is more curated than we often realize. As more people come forward with their stories, I think we need to ask some questions: 
How do we best share dark things in a way that respects both the artist and the audience? 
As I head east to help tell a hugely popular fictional story with very dark undertones that has become shockingly even more relevant in the past week, I leave you with these questions:
What is the best way to tell a story? Truth? Fiction? Or an artful combination of the two?

2 comments:

Rowan Lipkovits said...

Your post puts me in mind of the controversy over Mike Daisey's 2011 (yikes, time marches on!) play the Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which culminates in a scene where a deformed factory worker gets to actually touch and interact with the product that broke his body... a scene which is fictitious. I didn't feel that it compromised the narrative, but a lot of people -- sensitive at their Western consumption habits, no doubt -- used its failure to be factually true to denounce the entire venture. I've always like to approach such situations through the lens of the quote by (the very problematic) Picasso -- that art is the lie that reveals the truth.


https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/theater/mike-daisey-discusses-the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs.html

http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/19467113501

EastVanAllie said...

"The lie that reveals the truth" is totally what I believe in, Rowan. A friend of mine who was commenting about this post on Facebook pointed out that "A story can be a profound one, but it might not be theatrical." And I think that sums it up perfectly.