Last night, at the beginning of rehearsal for Winter Journey—a play which I have done in the past few Decembers, with slightly evolving casts and slightly evolving scripts, more than slightly evolving direction—I had no real ideas. And I hate directing for the sake of directing.
So often a play doesn't need a director. It only needs a director, I think, actually, at key points. The role of a director, in fact, isn't to direct everything at all times, but to step in to either stop things from breaking down, or to accelerate them at the point at which the actors will otherwise stop short. You're guiding, keeping things on a path. But it's boring if you're just the one defining the path, at least in my opinion and experience. Collectively defined, generative paths are much more interesting, much more robust and complex than something you chart out on a piece of paper ahead of and hand out to people.
Anyway, because I had no ideas and no real feeling, because my mind has been over-mined and exhausted, we kicked and passed and threw a beach ball around the room for 90 minutes while doing the scenes instead of running through them as normal. Then after a five-minute break, we did the scenes the way they're supposed to be, and something new was there.
Today, reading, trying to finish, Rene Girard's The Violence and the Sacred, I came upon an idea of Girard's that helped explain it. “The Sacred envelops play.” Play—a theater play, or theatrical play—is not a mockery or performance or demonstration or mimicry of the sacred: it literally becomes the sacred. At a certain point of play, if the play is authentic enough, you tap into the basic nervous system response that's activated in ritual and prayer. You can't actually distinguish the two, and if you do, you kill that basic nervous system response. And you destroy the fusion of animality and rationality that is constitutive of the human.
Gerard's analysis of the scapegoat also helped me understand the role that I've played in relationships and friendships and my social circle and in so-called downtown culture at large. Something I didn't understand about the archetypal notion of the scapegoat is that they're encouraged to break the rules and often allowed to roam free prior to their capture and murder.