L A N T E R NSan Francisco 1995 Spring Digital Restaurant Guide
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One of the most innovative directors in today's American theatre, Anne Bogart has brought her unconventional and often controversial methods into use as she tries to release American theatre from its slavish devotion to realism. In fact, Jon Jory, Artistic Director, Actors Theater of Louisville believes "Anne Bogart is the most important acting and directing theorist since Stanislavski and Brecht".
Having honed her skills in more than sixty productions over the past nineteen years, Ms. Bogart's foothold in this field has metamorphosed into a stronghold. Universities across the nation offer classes in her techniques and she has formed a major theatre training school-the Saratoga International Theater Institute.
She has also directed South Pacific, a production that initially raised the ire and then the admiration of the Oscar Hammerstein Estate; she created a Brecht piece entitled No Plays No Poetry for which she won an Obie (Off-Broadway award); and she received a second Obie for her astonishing work on Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz. In this creative symbiosis between writer and director, Bogart's flourishes.
Tadashi Suzuki, with whom she created the Saratoga International Theater Institute, says that "Anne Bogart is taking on the backbone of American theatre: realism and the Stanislavski-derived system which supports it." As she does so, we are fortunate that we may watch, for she is a developing theatre icon, a legend in transit.
Marshall McLuhan was termed both the "mystic of the electrons" and a "magician-mountebank" for his controversial theories on the growing proliferation of electronic media during the 1960s. McLuhan concluded that this new electronic media, and our continued emphasis on it, were reordering our senses.
Because Anne Bogart wanted to explore how society's innovations affect individuals, she conceived THE MEDIUM, based on McLuhan's writing. She asserts that "because of technology and the huge changes that are happening with communications mediaÉwe are all changing as human beings, kind of drastically." Bogart decided to dramatize the moment of McLuhan's stroke and ensuing loss of speech.
The instantaneous occurrence of McLuhan's stroke is distorted into a kaleidoscope of his theories as the audience is transported into his mind. He moves into the world of television and bounces from channel to channel by remote control. Each channel allows him to experience firsthand the fulfillment of both his most insightful dreams and worst nightmares for the future. These theories are incorporated into the dialogue of such traditional programs as the western, detective drama, talk show and dating game.
Through this structure, Bogart explores five issues which she considers central to our conceptual reality of society. What is the new "discarnate" landscape which is developing around us? What is the role of art in our lives now? What is the impact of new technologies on our psychology? What are their effect on our relationships? Finally, what does our future look like?
As McLuhan gets pulled further into television's vortex he learns that, although he cannot stop the wave of the future, "there is no inevitability, as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." But instead, at the center of the technological vortex, he loses his voice, and accepts his destiny as a member of a species no longer useful in the face of future innovations.
Bogart draws on elements of American Expressionism from the 1920s. She leads us on what she describes as a "hallucinogenic voyage" through our newly developed psyche where scenes, movements and moments "shift abruptly, at times manically, suddenly lyrically, like the blips and bleeps of electronic media." This form allows the play to condense philosophical texts with emotional and visceral images in an intensely physical, choreographed form. * Michelle Spencer
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