but reunions and summer construction haven't happened yet, it's like a movie set built incon- gruously in stone.The reason for going up yesterday was a production of a piece of documentary theater developed by Stephen Wangh and Kristin Dombek called "Testimony: Scenes from an American Apocalypse." This course-based project, part of a multi-year exploration, had 14 Princeton students conduct interviews with people on campus and (over Spring break) across the country about their faith, or lack of it. The "testimonies" were then brought back and knit together into a powerful performance piece, each student embodying several different people of very different religious persuasions.
The genre of documentary theater - in some ways more like documentary film-making than anything else - is an intriguing and relatively new one. It makes different demands on actors than creative drama, including a distinctive relationship of responsibility to a specific person whose words you are speaking. I know a bit about the genre because my friend C, with whom I co-taught "Religion and Theater" last semester (the reason I went to this), has written and directed some documentary theater pieces of her own (I was in the one about Clifford Odets!). "Testimony" was engaging and well put together, but in a few cases I thought it nearly broke faith with its subjects. It's one thing to have two monologues unfold in syncopation - showing similarities across great differences of background and conviction - but it's another when people who had clearly been interviewed on their own were made to seem in conversation with each other.
I hope to see further iterations of this project - perhaps at Lang! I'll leave you with a poem to which one person featured in the play alluded. This was in a scene artfully juxtaposing an Evangelical's account of being saved by coming to understand mystery and wonder with a secular poet's discovery of her vocation to be a poet. The poet described taking a class of middle school students to a poetry festival, and hearing the following poem by Mark Doty. It's final line cracked her open, made her realize she didn't want to be a teacher all her life but instead a poet - for poetry can express wonder in ways people locked into religion cannot know.
Visitation
When I heard he had entered the harbor,
and circled the wharf for days,
I expected the worst: shallow water,
confusion, some accident to bring
the young humpback to grief.
Don't they depend on a compass
lodged in the salt-flooded folds
of the brain, some delicate
musical mechanism to navigate
their true course? How many ways,
in our century's late iron hours,
might we have led him to disaster?
That, in those days, was how
I'd come to see the world:
dark upon dark, any sense
of spirit an embattled flame
sparked against wind-driven rain
till pain snuffed it out. I thought,
This is what experience gives us ,
and I moved carefully through my life
while I waited. . . Enough,
it wasn't that way at all. The whale
—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,
like the early music of Beethoven—
cruised the footings for smelts
clustered near the pylons
in mercury flocks. He
(do I have the gender right?)
would negotiate the rusty hulls
of the Portuguese fishing boats
—Holy Infant, Little Marie—
with what could only be read
as pleasure, coming close
then diving, trailing on the surface
big spreading circles
until he'd breach, thrilling us
with the release of pressured breath,
and the bulk of his sleek young head
—a wet black leather sofa
already barnacled with ghostly lice—
and his elegant and unlikely mouth,
and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,
and the way his broad flippers
resembled a pair of clownish gloves
or puppet hands, looming greenish white
beneath the bay's clouded sheen.
When he had consumed his pleasure
of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,
in his own admired performance,
he swam out the harbor mouth,
into the Atlantic. And though grief
has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,
through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look
at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness
which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?
When I heard he had entered the harbor,
and circled the wharf for days,
I expected the worst: shallow water,
confusion, some accident to bring
the young humpback to grief.
Don't they depend on a compass
lodged in the salt-flooded folds
of the brain, some delicate
musical mechanism to navigate
their true course? How many ways,
in our century's late iron hours,
might we have led him to disaster?
That, in those days, was how
I'd come to see the world:
dark upon dark, any sense
of spirit an embattled flame
sparked against wind-driven rain
till pain snuffed it out. I thought,
This is what experience gives us ,
and I moved carefully through my life
while I waited. . . Enough,
it wasn't that way at all. The whale
—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,
like the early music of Beethoven—
cruised the footings for smelts
clustered near the pylons
in mercury flocks. He
(do I have the gender right?)
would negotiate the rusty hulls
of the Portuguese fishing boats
—Holy Infant, Little Marie—
with what could only be read
as pleasure, coming close
then diving, trailing on the surface
big spreading circles
until he'd breach, thrilling us
with the release of pressured breath,
and the bulk of his sleek young head
—a wet black leather sofa
already barnacled with ghostly lice—
and his elegant and unlikely mouth,
and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,
and the way his broad flippers
resembled a pair of clownish gloves
or puppet hands, looming greenish white
beneath the bay's clouded sheen.
When he had consumed his pleasure
of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,
in his own admired performance,
he swam out the harbor mouth,
into the Atlantic. And though grief
has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,
through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look
at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness
which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?
The theater piece was able to let the poet make her argument forcefully, but also gently question it through the juxtaposition with the Evangelical's account - question it not to poke holes but offer the possibility of bridges, conversations. At its best, the whole play did this. An exciting project!
