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A play is not a self-contained artifact: its nerve-endings extend past the stage, into the audience. A play is really what the performers and the spectators make together. It is a brain, a hive, a network of seemingly separate minds.
Inevitably, this is what the first weekend of performing my new play Childdeathsong taught me: that I’m not presenting a finished thing, an object, to be interpreted, a living subject that destabilizes the notion of a singular interpretation.
Even if the text and the performances remain the same or essentially the same from night to night, there is still plenty of room for the ineffable, the mysterious to enter in.
If the script is the matter, then the audience — the atmosphere of the room on a given night — is the dark-matter; the invisible other half of the play.
It is easy to talk about the matter of the play: the text, the actors, the costumes, the set… but so often what matters, is the presence (or absence) of that extra thing; that dark matter.
Life.
