the timboucher experience

I take for granted that other people are at this thing with different intentions from me, with different relationships to ‘theatre as an entity’. Me, I’m bringing to this past Monday’s “Opera Potpourri” at the Peabody Conservatory, months of deep historical research into folk theatricals like the Commedia Dell’Arte of 16th and 17th century and how they evolved into “legitimate” theatre in places like Paris, along with royal courts across Europe. When these highly-skilled improvisational performance troupes took their show on the road, they descended with their antics upon the marketplaces of far-flung towns, cities and villages. Gradually, their skill in amassing crowds was noticed by noble patrons who saw ways to make use of their popularity. In France, the Italian players were even given their own theatre, an institution which spanned not just decades but generations. In the early days of these theatres, the Italian players kept to their original tongue for performances. To please foreign audiences, then, they had to juice up the outrageous “zany” (from zanni, a type of Italian commedia clown) elements of their comic skill, along with over-the-top slapstick antics and pantomime elements to draw the action forward for an audience who may not be able to follow all of the verbal elements of the performance.

Not everyone, I’ll wager, is at tonight’s event for the reasons I am. A skinny middle-aged Jewish woman stands up a few seats over from me. She seems to be the only person in the place giving a standing ovation. The second act has just ended (the night was three one act French operas by different authors). Scattered shouts of “bravo” burst forth from a cluster of seats down-house and to my right. I get the feeling people are just yelling that word not because they know what it means, nor because they feel that deeply about the performance. They’re yelling it because that’s the word you’re supposed to yell at the end of a fancy performance. They saw it on tv or something.

Not that I’m one to talk. My only prior exposure to a full-length opera before this has been on the big screen: Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” at the Charles Theatre a few weekends prior to this. At that, I ate popcorn and drank a coke. Does that happen at regular operas? I have no idea. I squirmed in my chair. I’m guessing that happens at operas not infrequently.

I am in the Friedberg Concert Hall, a lovely theatre at Peabody, probably unknown to many area residents. I would guess the seating capacity is somewhere over five hundred - and that’s without taking into account the balcony above me. The place isn’t packed, but it has a marvelous feeling of fullness. People are expecting something. This is a special event. Some people are dressed up. I waffle over whether or not it’s appropriate for me to wear a winter cap inside a theatre with statues of muses lining the walls. I decide its not okay, until I get to talking with the black ladies behind me during the first intermission about how cold it is in here.

“There must be an air vent above us,” one of them says. I agree and put on my hat.

During the second intermission, the Jewish lady is standing again, this time shouting.

“What’s she yellin’ about?” one of the black ladies quips.

She is yelling to catch the attention of the Asian pianist who performed the musical accompaniment for the second piece. Evidently she knows him and she wants everyone in the immediate vicinity to know this.

“Have you guys been looking at the words?” I ask my new friends after discussing the merits of the work presented this evening.

“If I wasn’t reading the words, I don’t think I could follow it,” one of them responds. “Can you tell what’s going on?”

“It just looks like a bunch of people walking back and forth,” I admit.

But that’s what I’m looking at, maybe what I’m looking for even. The staging: how actors move about in the performance space, their general physical attitudes, their gestures, their expressions, their faces. It’s a relief, for once, to not have to bother myself with what people are saying. Most of what people say - I realize while watching this three operas without understanding much more than a smattering of the tongue they were written in - simply doesn’t matter. In real life, there are all kinds of cues that go alongside conversation, fleshing it out into much more than just the words. In theatre, clever directors and players can amplify these alongside-helpers with the aid of props, costuming, blocking, etc.

But here at Peabody - a music conservatory, and a good one at that - what we have are singers. They are students and they have, most of them, been focusing most - I’m sure - on the musical aspects of their performances. A few are natural all-around performers, whose skills will only be honed through engagements with a live audience tonight. But for many, it seems that their bodies as instruments have scarcely been considered. I’m not talking about dancing, mind you - nothing so extreme. I’m talking about vitality, about lively movement, about passionate expression.

“It was a little wooden,” I admit to my new friend while miming ‘The Robot’ after she has revealed the first act wasn’t passionate enough for her.

I’m imagining what it would have been like to see some of the old commedia shows without knowing Italian. A little like this, I think, except a lot more physical action is my guess. The various stock characters have highly stylized systems of movement and expression typical to each character. Basic rules each one improvises around within a sketched out scenario posted before the performance. Musically, tonight’s opera is nothing like that. Two different animals. The music is complex and carefully composed. You’re supposed to be listening to the music, not picking apart the staging. I know that, but I can’t help it. I work in theatre.

It’s like that joke: how many guitarists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? You pick some high number like, twelve, and then say: one to screw in the light bulb, eleven to stand around and say, “I could do that!”

I’m no opera singer, I’m sure. Watching, I couldn’t help but wonder how one could take the basic story being pantomimed by the actors, wholly separate it from the music, and distill it down into a compressed nugget of dramatic action. I didn’t read the English translations of the lyrics, but I had read the synopsis in the program before the acts commenced. This gave me enough of a foothold into the plotlines to decipher the rest.

Copeau, among others, advocated for a long apprenticeship of the actor in which speech was altogether forbidden to him. Upon reaching such and such milestone and proving his mastery of pantomime, he was then allowed to gradually add in utterances of gibberish to punctuate his action - but not actual words. It’s a restriction which historically was levelled by censors of the French government against second and third tier theatres, forcing their performers to become only all the more creative an articulate as a response. The gibberish could become a kind of praying in tongues, when combined with the ritual attributes of pantomime, creating a kind of universal language of human experience which can be transmitted to any person regardless of race, age or orientation within the space-time axis.

This, I believe, is the bedrock of the underlying Great Work of which opera (itself meaning “work”) is but one of many shards broken off a tradition as old as humanity itself. Maybe older if we can be so open-minded as to peer into the animal kingdom and label performances such as mating dances and territorial displays as a kind of proto-theatre. Which I believe we can. We should be able to make a kind of theatre that even animals and birds and insects could understand. An opera that beings from other dimensions and galaxies would be able to understand and appreciate. Why not?