I
The lights rise on a perfect replica of your childhood.
It’s all overexposed and slanting askance
So that the grass is too green, and your parents are
So young the scene shivers.
Everyone is there:
Friends and neighbors, piano lessons, the boy who moved away, the barn still standing, the man looming too tall behind the counter, photographer that never got developed, her promises and baby teeth in small Ziploc bags, and whole states of Oklahoma with graveyards of neon light, and trees at every window, that morning and that door left ajar, that game of hide and seek you kept playing long after everyone else went home.
Hold. (The director looks around.)
Ah, nostalgia. (A faint smile.)
And yet, something is still missing.
Let’s try this again tomorrow.
II
In the years since the artistic director first proposed the idea, the company has settled into a perfect schedule for the repertoire: a production may only be played once every six months,; brush-up rehearsals are strictly forbidden. When a new actor is invited in to take over a part, they must fully learn the role, but then are given an appropriate span of time to forget it sufficiently.
At first the reception was cold; the critics panned the work as amateurish. And for a time hecklers composed a sizable portion of the audience, but soon they too watched with bated breath as the actors stumbled over lines and entrances, or alighted on a sudden inspired recollection. The beauty in such moments transfigured all. It was on the best of these nights that the audience would spontaneously run to the stage to hug the actors, or scream in horror at the tragedy before them, or sit long in silence forgetting what they were meant to do, how to clap or even how to move – all habits broken – but alive, so alive.
Let us remember how to live through forgetfulness. In his short study of marcel proust, the lone book written during his abbreviated academic career, Samuel Beckett posits that “the man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything. His memory is uniform, a creature of routine, at once a condition and function of his impeccable habit, and instrument of reference instead of an instrument of discovery.” There is a lesson to be learned here about acting, which, like living, requires us to forget our part in order to implement the “instrument of discovery.” Actors who do not forget what they are supposed to do sacrifice their liveliness to habit. And, as Beckett tells us elsewhere, “habit is a great deadener.”
The first of these imagined theatres replicates the past perfectly, but it is a past that never completes its form, a past that retains an uncertain relationship towards the future it was always touching. It must, in other words, keep forgetting itself in order to keep desire moving. That is the way with nostalgia, which fractures us afresh with every passing day. Such memories are overworked, overexposed, and yet never held in hand. We may rehearse them daily, but we will never get the scene down correctly, never get in the habit. Something is just beyond us, over the horizon, the door standing ajar. The intense privacy of this first theatre means that it will only work for “you.” Each feature is designed with your attention in mind.
The second theatre moves the art of forgetting into a public sphere, teaching us once again how to behave as if for the first time. The mistake, the forgotten line – these puncture our habits of watching and acting with sudden appearances of life unscripted. We wonder at these irruptions of potentiality in any performance we attend. This theatre is a studio for the art of forgetting, where trained professionals practice for our pleasure, so that all of us, in turn, might forget our social selves and roles. The repertoire of our daily lives, its routines and phrases, systematically abandoned. What actor has not been asked: “How do you remember all those lines?” Instead, we will ask: “How do you forget all those lines?”