Dramatic solutions: theatre reimagined

By Barry Levey

You're liable to feel a little unsettled when five actors dismount the stage only to surround and stare at you for a solid three minutes. The actors in Yale's new Ensemble Theater Company don't stop there, however; they interrupt each other's rehearsed scenes, they perform strange warm-up exercises in the back of the theater, and they mock the over-intellectualized themes of their own work. In fact, it almost seems that these performers are playing more to each other than to the audience.

Almost, but not quite.

The audience is the primary focus of the Ensemble, in fact: The actors directly address the crowd as "hey you," offering beer and pizza. The company delights in nothing more than redirecting the audience's attention, dragging the spectator kicking and screaming into the world of the play. What the audience sees, feels, wants, and expects takes on near-religious importance. "Everywhere we are audience members," says Ensemble director Andi Stover, BK '97, during the group's public "non-lecture" last Wednesday. "When we exist in a commercial, we must come to the theater to stop being spectators."

Stover's desire to explore "what the theater means and how it relates to life" is a driving force behind the new Ensemble, and a sentiment shared by the founders of two other new student theater groups on campus, the Physical Impulse Theater Company and Acting Locals.

It's no secret that theatrical opportunities abound at Yale. But more and more students are finding that existing dramatic outlets are not sufficient to fully explore what theater is and what theater means. These students are banding together outside of this "closed structure," as Stover puts it, and forming alternative groups that focus
on questions of communication, movement, and politics.

For members of the Ensemble, this means rehearsing six days a week and four hours a day, in an effort to discover "a process that isn't completed by a final production," according to Elisabeth Waterston, DC '99. "We're trying to find new forms of theater. That's definitely hard at Yale sometimes."

Waterston "just heard the idea around" when Stover and others began thinking about forming a new theater group dedicated to this pursuit last semester. "There were signs up, it was open to anyone interested," and Waterston decided to give it a shot. While the Ensemble is Stover's senior project in the Theater Studies major, she is quick to point out that each actor is tackling the experience with her own goals and expectations. "Everyone in the group has a different reason," she said. "But we all want to
discover new ways to work together as
an ensemble."

The Physical Impulse Theater Company (PI) grew out of a similar process of open workshops, after founder Stephen Aleman, PC '98, decided to explore issues raised by a theater movement class."I wanted to use the body as a tool of expression in theater," Aleman said. Co-founder Ben Mazzotta, BK '97, "was thinking the same thing at the same time," and a theater company was born.

"There's a huge disparity between dance and theater in American theater, where bodies are sometimes totally ignored," Aleman complained. "We wanted to bring those closer together." Toward that end, he and Mazzotta held auditions for company members, and invited the campus at large to attend open workshops. Auditions for the new semester's company are taking place this weekend. Interested actors and dancers can expect "contact improv, a dance technique experimenting with moving through space in certain ways." These exercises eventually coalesce into a performance, like last semester's Irrational Constant, which was PI's first production.

While PI focuses on movement in the theater, Acting Locals has a much more political goal: "to provide free theater about the shit that matters," according to organizer Leslie Blatteau, CC '97. "It started last semester because we wanted to do strictly political theater advocating a contract settled in favor of the unions." Now that the contract issue has been settled, Acting Locals continues to "work on new short plays about how Yale exploits the city of New Haven."

Perhaps more than the Ensemble or PI, Acting Locals thrives on existing outside the established theater structure at Yale. "I wanted to do street theater because I have
a problem with theater that costs money," Blatteau explained. "The audience there
is not the crowd that's going to do
anything about the problems that theater can raise."

Like the other two theater groups, Acting Locals finds that the theater is the
ideal medium for its form of expression. "I'm an anarchist," Blatteau said. "The
U.S. political structure is bunk. I want to
go out on the street where there is no
structure." Theater provides a means for a sort of pointed anarchy, a way of speaking to the public without being bogged down
by the "red tape" of more political
institutions.

The Ensemble, PI, and Acting Locals share two obsessions: the theater, and changing it. "Typical theater that's happening is ignoring a huge aspect of what it could be," says Aleman, voicing the sentiments of all three organizations. As more and more
actors become disenchanted with complacent audiences, the popularity of
student theater groups seems destined to rise--and audiences seem destined to
be unsettled.

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