"It Looks Like Us"

by Joshua Glass 

[On 16 January 2021, I published a post on Rick On Theater called “Hyperreal Theater,” which I noted was “little known, and had a short life in the 1980s and then largely passed from the scene.”  I went on to explain:

The concept of hyperreal theater is based on that of hyperreal art, so I should explain the genre in visual art first.  Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are so meticulously rendered that they resemble high-resolution photographs.  In fact, Hyperrealism in painting and drawing is often equated with Photorealism.

[Quoting further from my introduction to “Hyperreal Theater”:

‘Hyperrealism’ is made up of the word ‘realism’ and the Greek prefix ‘hyper-,’ which means ‘over,’ ‘above,’ or ‘beyond. . . .

Hyperrealism is an art form that creates illusions by enhancing reality.  Hyperreal artists in the medium in which they create place added focus in their work on the visual, social, and cultural details of everyday life.

[Joshua Glass’s “It Looks Like Us” appeared in the New York Times’ T: The New York Times Style Magazine of 22 October 2023.  It’s a look at Hyperrealistic sculpture in the age of AI and deepfakes.]

The new eeriness of hyperrealist art.

This past summer [9 June-22 July 2023], a naked man was suspended from the wall of Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris, his arms spread-eagle, resembling something between a crucified person and a cadaver. Onlookers couldn’t help but wince. One aghast couple seemed to turn their heads away. But like the dangling body, they, too, were unclothed sculptures — lifeless yet eerily lifelike.

The work was from “Grace,” an exhibition by the American sculptor John DeAndrea [b. 1941], who at 81 has been making human doppelgangers like these in a studio near the Rocky Mountains for almost six decades. His monthslong process involves first putting live models in silicone rubber molds, which are cured and then built up with layers of plaster. This negative mold is then filled with fortified plaster, which is cured, perfected and eventually recast in bronze. Finally, DeAndrea meticulously applies layers of opaque and transparent oil paints to the skin and eyes and adds hair until everything looks creepily authentic.                           

Art critics have come up with various terms for work like DeAndrea’s, including hyperrealism, although DeAndrea notably has said he doesn’t consider himself an artist. Perhaps a better name for it comes from Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]. In response to a 1906 essay by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch [1867-1919], who wrote of the discomfort that arises when the viewer “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate,” Freud expanded on the concept of the uncanny. It’s the place where art and life converge and briefly become muddled, in a way that’s confusing and uncomfortable.

                            

Why do artists keep returning to the uncanny, which Freud placed into “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”? The hyperreal would seem to represent a very modem state of uncertainty: What is that thing? How can it look both recognizable and foreign at the same time? It’s an aesthetic that tends to return at particularly unstable moments in history. Freud wrote about the uncanny in 1919, months after the end of World War I, which had left millions dead and Europe in ruins. DeAndrea — who says his work “ain’t dark” to him — in the mid-1960s began experimenting with casting techniques that would allow him to accurately represent the human body, though he was probably less concerned with the Vietnam War than with the narcissism of what the author Tom Wolfe [American author and journalist; 1930-2018] would later describe as the Me Generation. Other hyperrealists, most notably DeAndrea’s contemporary Duane Hanson [American sculptor; 1925-96], were more overtly political. Hanson didn’t shy away from the war in Vietnam or American racism — his 1969 “Vietnam Scene” depicts dead and wounded U.S. soldiers lying on the floor — though he’s best remembered for his fiberglass-and-polyester-resin sculptures of tourists in southern Florida.

[In his essay “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”), Freud tackles the horrific concepts of inanimate figures coming to life. It was first published in 1919 (vol. V, iss. 5/6) in the journal Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften (“Imago: journal for the application of psychoanalysis to the humanities”), edited by Sigmund Freud and published quarterly in Vienna and Leipzig from 1912 to 1937. Wikipedia defines the subject thus:

The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or individual as not simply mysterious, but frightening in a way that feels oddly familiar. This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.

[There are many translations of “The Uncanny” into English available.

[Tom Wolfe’s essay, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” ran in New York magazine on 23 August 1976. He didn’t actually use the phrase “the ‘Me’ Generation,” but his coining of the term “the ‘Me’ Decade,” which referred to the 1970s, gave rise to the label for the Baby Boomer generation. Born immediately after World War II, this population bubble started to come of age in the ’70s and Wolfe saw them as the epitome of self-absorption, narcissism, and self-indulgence.]

Each subsequent decade has gotten the hyperrealist sculpture it deserves. Right now we’re living in a moment defined by an erosion of trust in what is and isn’t real — whether that’s a former president’s election fraud claims or the proliferation of deepfakes and artificial intelligence software. The uncanny valley has transformed from a horror film trope — in movies from Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979) to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982) to the unsettlingly human robot in [Gerard Johnstone’s] “M3gan” (2023) — into a more quotidian concern, as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos propose a fleet of humanoid robots to address the U.S. labor shortage. It’s possible that hyperrealist art has never felt as topical, or as chilling, as it does today, and advancements in technology have also rendered the style more real than it’s ever been.

Over time, hyperrealism incorporated elements of extreme exaggeration, which only seemed to heighten the shock of the uncanny. That effect is palpable in, for instance, the Australian artist Ron Mueck’s [b. 1958] gargantuan child made of glass fiber, “Boy” (1999): Installed in the ARoS museum [Aarhus Kunstmuseum (Aarhus art museum)] in Aarhus, Denmark, the child is nearly 15 feet tall, even crouched in an almost fetal position, and all his details are rendered with excruciating precision.

The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan [b. 1960], a master of discomfort, has contributed to the hyperrealist tradition for more than 20 years. His funny and disturbing “La Nona Ora” (1999) shows Pope John Paul II in his papal regalia, writhing in pain on the ground after being struck down by a small meteor. The pope retains an odd dignity, still clutching a staff with a crucifix on it, as if that might help him through this encounter. Two years later, Cattelan made “Him,” a dreadfully realistic sculpture of Adolf Hitler, kneeling like an altar boy, hands clasped as if in prayer. As in the work centering the pope, it’s the absurdity of the contrast — between evil and innocence — that’s so effective and obscene. “It is a fake until proven otherwise,” explained Cattelan of his installations of this nature.                                

Many works of hyperrealism call on old traditions of mimesis, among them anatomical wax models based on real carcasses, a technique dating to the 18th century. Lately, though, new technology has made hyperrealism easier for humans to achieve, while simultaneously complicating the practice. The Australian visual artist Patricia Piccinini [b. 1965], 57, has been making anthropomorphic chimeras out of silicone, fiberglass, leather and human hair for the past two decades: a grotesque porcine creature, its brood suckling at its teats (2002’s “The Young Family”); a bearlike man who could pass for a shaved Bigfoot (2012’s “The Carrier”). Recently, however, she had a disconcerting encounter of her own when she came across images of artworks online that appeared to be attributed to her. “It had my name on it, but it wasn’t me,” the artist said. It was the product of an A.I. art generator — one that used randomized machine learning to mimic her reimaginations. “What I saw looked like it had been made by someone who had only been told about my work by someone who didn’t understand it,” she said.                                                  

It’s a worrying development for any artist, but also one that has made human-engineered hyperrealism even more relevant — us versus the machines. In 2011, the Austrian-born sculptor Erwin Wurm [b. 1954], 69, modified a red Mercedes-Benz MB100D van so that its rear half curved up the side of a wall. When it was installed four years later outside of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, a traffic warden gave it a parking ticket. Wurm says that we live in an age when our brains are constantly trying to make sense of what we see. “Is it nature or is it copying nature?” he asked. “You think it’s nature, but then you realize, ‘Wait a moment, it’s not. It’s something else.’”                                              

With his series of “One Minute Sculptures,” begun in 1988, Wurm has taken hyperrealism to its inevitable extreme: He’s turned actual people into bizarre and improbable sculptures. He directs strangers to participate in seemingly impossible scenes — in which office supplies protrude out of orifices, or a forehead is attached to a leaning tower of oranges — instructing them to pose for 60 seconds or less as he photographs them.                                                   

“Reality is totally insane, we have to compete with it,” said Wurm. That, ultimately, is why such art matters: By jolting us out of our usual perspective, it makes us question what we may be overlooking every day. “I see the world going in a strange direction,” Wurm added, “and I’m scared for the future.”

[Who remembers the “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” ad slogan for the company’s audio cassettes in the 1970s and ’80s?  Isn’t that what artist Erwin Wurm meant when he asked, “Is it nature or is it copying nature?”

[And Patricia Piccinini’s complaint that the imitations of her work made by artificial intelligence looked as if they “had been made by someone who had only been told about my work by someone who didn’t understand it” is very much like the anecdote about a blind person who’s asked to describe an elephant by touch.  After the examination, the person states, “This is a large animal with two tails.”]

"The Future of the Past"

by Evan Moffitt 

[Some years ago, I published three posts on Rick On Theater that touch on an issue that last weekend appeared again, this time in an article in the New York Times about high-tech art.

[“Books in Print” (posted on 14 July 2010) looks at the loss of pleasures associated with printed books, newspapers, and magazines when they all go digital—but it touches on the loss of permanence, the ephemerality of the electronic texts.

[I examine this issue more closely in “We Get Letters” (7 April 2015).  I discuss at some length the problem with preserving and archiving electronic writing—e-mails, texts, social-media posts, blogs, e-journals, and so on—the way we can archive old printed newspapers, magazines, and correspondence. 

[The problem that related directly with Evan Moffitt’s “The Future of the Past,” though, is how to retrieve those electronic communications later once the original technology has become obsolete.  It’s not far off, that obstacle: I already have old floppy disks that I can no longer read and video tapes I can no longer watch.

[Also related to Moffitt’s article is my point in “Conserving Modern Art” (11 December 2018).  It’s a report on the issue of how to conserve and preserve modern art made of experimental and non-traditional materials and in innovative styles that don’t age well or lend themselves easily to cleaning. 

[The post, based on an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., concerns physical media, while Moffitt’s article examines high-tech and mostly electronic creations like computer art or video art.

[The artists, either material or technological, weren’t thinking of maintenance, aging, or obsolescence years in the future when they started experimenting with new or high-tech materials and techniques.  No one had any idea how the innovative and non-traditional media would age or become inoperable. 

[“Conserving Modern Art” does raise the matter of the loss of the technological mechanisms for retrieving video, digital, audio, computer-based, web-based art, works of “time-based media.” 

[“The Future of the Past” appeared in the 22 October 2023 issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, a (more-or-less) monthly publication of the New York Times.]

What’s at stake in trying to exhibit and preserve art that is, or at least used to be, high-tech?

Up a buckling flight of stairs on Murray Street in Lower Manhattan, the dusty workshop of CTL Electronics is crammed with once-novel relics: cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions, three-beam projectors and laserdisc players from the previous century. Hundreds of outdated monitors are arranged beside money trees and waving maneki neko cats, an installation in a kind of mini-museum run by CTL’s proprietor, Chi-Tien Lui, who has worked as a TV and radio repairman since immigrating from Taiwan in 1961. At CTL, which he opened in 1968, Lui initially sold closed-circuit TV systems and video equipment, but for the past couple of decades, his business has had a unique focus: repairing video artworks that, since the onset of the digital age, are increasingly likely to malfunction and decay.

[Maneki neko (lit.: “beckoning cat”) is a traditional Japanese figurine to cultivate prosperity, especially in business.  It’s a traditional cat statue typically placed near the front of Japanese-owned businesses to greet and attract customers.  The cat typically has one paw raised and swinging as if beckoning passersby.  Some maneki neko have built-in electric or solar-powered motors to facilitate non-stop waving.]

Many of CTL’s clients are museums looking to restore works by a single artist, the video art pioneer Nam June Paik [Korean American; b. 1932], who died in 2006. Known for his sculptures and room-size installations of flickering CRT monitors, Paik began visiting the shop in the 1970s on breaks from his studio in nearby SoHo. While some conservators have updated his work by replacing old tubes with LCD screens, Lui is one of the only technicians who can rebuild Paik’s sets from spare parts, as if they were new.

Paik’s work was on view, along with video works from dozens of other artists, in “Signals,” a sweeping exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year [5 March-8 July 2023]. Many pieces in the show, such as those in the video collectives section, played on boxy Sony CRT monitors, long favored by artists for their austere, stackable design, and which stopped being produced in the 2000s. The cube CRTs are essentially worthless to consumers, but museums are willing to pay a premium for them on eBay — “if you can even get your hands on one,” said Stuart Comer, the chief curator of media and performance at MoMA, who helped organize the show. “I had to tell security, ‘Pretend these are Donald Judds [American sculptor; 1928-94],’ because they’re basically priceless at this point.”

It’s an ongoing dilemma for the modern-art institution: New technologies are only ever new for so long. When the phaseout of the incandescent light bulb, a go-to material for artists from Robert Rauschenberg to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, began in 2012, museums either amassed stockpiles of the old bulbs or found a reliable supplier. Dan Flavin, who spent his entire career working with fluorescent light, always had his preferred manufacturers. Last year, the Biden administration proposed as part of its climate policy a sunsetting of compact fluorescents, and a few states have recently enacted legislation that in the coming years will also ban the longer tube lights that Flavin used. For now, museums continue to go through the estate of the artist, who died in 1996, to replace burned-out lights. Not all artists are so precious about their materials, however: In 2012, when Diana Thater presented her 1992 video installation “Oo Fifi, Five Days in Claude Monet’s Garden” at the Los Angeles gallery 1301PE, where it had first been shown 20 years earlier, she updated its clunky CRT projectors to digital ones. She digitized the video, a collage of film footage from Monet’s garden in Giverny, France — itself a technological update of the Impressionist painter’s vistas in oil — because, she said, “I don’t want my work to look fake old.” Paik, for his part, left behind a page of instructions specifying that his works could be updated, as long as the integrity of the original look of the sculpture was respected, to the best of what the technology would allow.

In conserving works made with more mundane materials, museums generally rely on an artist like Thater or on the artist’s estate to provide guidance — or even the materials themselves, as is the case with Flavin. But technology now moves at a much faster pace. A museum’s task of protecting art in perpetuity has remained fixed, even as artists’ materials have changed. Art institutions are likely the only places in the world that are currently planning how they might be able to fix an Oculus Rift [discontinued line of virtual reality headsets; 2013-21] 50 years from now. Rather than keep stockpiles of expensive and obsolete technology in storage, museums have to find clever ways around software updates, from video game emulators to server farms to niche businesses like CTL. But they, too, have a life span as short as, or shorter than, those of light bulbs. There are far more obscure materials for artists to choose from than ever before.

Glenn Wharton was hired in 2007 as MoMA’s first conservator of time-based media, or works that often depend on commercial technology that can have a limited shelf life. “I saw the writing on the wall that it was hard to even buy videotapes anymore,” Wharton said. In the early days, he was making decisions “about changing the works of art” that were the equivalent of a painting conservator using acrylic instead of oil paint: “We were swapping out CRTs and sometimes moving toward flat-screen technology, or changing projectors or even digitizing.” Ultimately, Wharton decided, “defining the authentic state of a work of art is central to what conservators do.” So when the museum acquired a work dependent on a specific technology from a living artist, he’d ask how they wanted it to be conserved and displayed.

Wharton now runs a program at U.C.L.A. that has helped to clarify one of the main issues in the emerging field of digital conservation: digital obsolescence. If certain art is dependent on an extinct technology, how does one preserve the art so that it outlasts the technology itself? Sometimes by addressing a phenomenon called bit rot: As Caroline Gil, the director of media collections and preservation at the New York nonprofit Electronic Arts Intermix, explained, “Digital files of all stripes are made up of data — zeros and ones — and, every so often, a zero can turn into a one through electrostatic discharge in your hard drive or in a big server farm. That corrupts the file.” There are methods for fixing this, she said, “but that’s a very niche level of understanding, and I don’t think a lot of archives or collecting institutions do that, really.”

Coding expertise is still uncommon in museum conservation departments, but that may have to change. “The art world is kind of running on an old operating system of Modernism,” said Cass Fino-Radin, a conservator and founder of the upstate New York firm Small Data Industries, even as museums are collecting newer artworks that, at their core, are composed of code. In 2016, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York contacted Fino-Radin for help with a two-year-long assessment of digital materials in its permanent collection. The project included a detailed case study of a defunct iOS app called Planetary, acquired by the museum in 2013, which allowed users to browse a music library like astronauts soaring through the Milky Way. Debuting in 2011, Planetary had been rendered incompatible with iOS software updates within a few years, so the museum decided to share the source code on GitHub [a platform and cloud-based service for software development and version control] for anyone to try to fix it. Ultimately, it was an Australian developer, Kemal Enver, who got it functioning again, releasing it in 2020 as Planetary Remastered. To Fino-Radin, it was a warning sign: “For museums, hiring a professional software developer to do that kind of annual maintenance isn’t something that’s ever been remotely needed in history, and so institutions just don’t have the money to do it. It’s a new line item in their budgets.”

For works dependent on old hardware, conservators sometimes rely on a method known as emulation: “You’re fooling a current computer into thinking that it’s running on an older system, meaning I can turn my MacBook Pro into a virtual machine where I can run a net art piece in a Netscape 1.1 browser,” said Christiane Paul, the curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This approach was adopted at Rhizome, a New York nonprofit dedicated to promoting and preserving digital art, which in 2012 presented (along with the New Museum of Contemporary Art) an online exhibition of interactive computer games for preteen girls co-created by Theresa Duncan that had first been released on CD-ROM in the mid-1990s. Visitors to the Rhizome website can play Chop Suey, a delirious adventure through a small Ohio town, by connecting virtually to a server running the game on its 1995 software.

Many artists don’t think about what will happen to their work when they are gone. Or they never imagined certain pieces having much of a future. In “Super Mario Clouds” (2002), an early video installation by the artist Cory Arcangel, the 1985 Super Mario Bros. video game plays off a Nintendo console with all of the game’s animated features, apart from sky and clouds, erased. Obsolescence was partly the point of the work because, as a then-unknown artist, Arcangel didn’t expect to be showing it 20 years later — and by 2002 the consoles “were considered trash,” he said. An edition of “Super Mario Clouds” was bought by the Whitney, whose conservators were aware that the console might not function much longer. But the source code remains available, and Arcangel has granted the museum permission to use a Nintendo emulator to show the work.

Yet is an emulated artwork, even if indistinguishable from the original, really the same artwork? This riddle is sometimes known as the paradox of Theseus’s ship: According to Plutarch’s legend, as the Athenians preserved their former king’s boat through the decades by gradually replacing its decaying old planks with new ones, philosophers wondered, could the ship still be considered authentic if none of its original parts remained?

The conundrum is why some artists and conservators have now incorporated outwitting obsolescence into their practices. Lynn Hershman Leeson, an 82-year-old artist who was a contemporary of Paik’s, has been working with A.I. technology since the late 1990s and in 1983 made one of the first interactive video art pieces: “Lorna,” created originally for a groundbreaking new technology called laserdisc. Twenty years later, she upgraded to another now-bygone technology — the DVD. Lately, she’s been experimenting with a futuristic method of archiving her work. Looking to preserve a series of videos and documents from her research on genetic manipulation and synthetic biology, she turned to a technology at once far older and more cutting-edge than anything else on the market: DNA. Hershman Leeson first converted her research into a video timeline on Final Cut Pro [a professional non-linear video-editing application], and then enlisted Twist Bioscience in San Francisco, which manufactures DNA products, to chemically synthesize it into a sequence. The resulting genetic material is kept in two vials in her studio, as well as in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. “DNA has a 500-year half-life,” she said. “I also saw it as a metaphor, a poetic conclusion to all of this work, to create something that’s relatively invisible and holds our past and our future.”

The problem is, neither Hershman Leeson nor the museums that collect her work are able to retrieve it from the sequence. In theory, the process is reversible, but it’s also expensive and time-consuming. At least for now, the work belongs to the future.

[The question Moffitt asks above, whether “an emulated artwork, even if indistinguishable from the original, [is] really the same artwork,” and then recounts “the paradox of Theseus’s ship,” reminds me of an anecdote I heard a long time ago.

A man was visiting a rural stretch of Illinois, gathering local folk stories.  He heard that a farmer in the area claimed to have the rail-splitting axe Abe Lincoln used as a young man.  The fellow sought the farmer out and found him in his yard chopping firewood.  The folklorist asked the famer about the story, and the farmer repeated his oft-told tale.

“Yep,” he said, “Young Abe lived ‘round here and did some work for my family over a hundred years ago.  They gave him a new axe to use while he worked here, and we still have it.”

The visitor was delighted and amazed at what he heard, and asked the farmer if he could see the axe.  “Sure,” said the farmer.  “It’s right here.”

“You mean, your still using the axe Lincoln used

“Of course.  It’s a tool meant to be used,” and the farmer handed the man the axe.

“Well, you’ve certainly looked after it well.”

“Oh, sure.  ‘Course, we replaced the handle three, four times and the head twice.”]

"Patrick Stewart reflects on his life and legendary career in new memoir, 'Making It So'"

by Jeffrey Brown, Anne Azzi Davenport, and Alison Thoet 

[On the PBS NewsHour of 13 October 2023, Jeffrey Brown, the program’s arts correspondent, interviewed English actor Patrick Stewart (born 1940 in Mirfield, West Yorkshire) on the occasion of the publication of his memoir, Making It So (Gallery Books, 2023).  Stewart spoke about his start in the theater and some of the techniques he used on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company and his work on television and film roles.]

Geoff Bennett: Patrick Stewart cut his acting teeth in the theater, taking on numerous roles in Shakespeare and other classics.

For his second act, he became known to millions as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the revival of the "Star Trek" television and film franchises, as well as Charles Xavier in the popular superhero X-Men films.

Now he tells his own story in a new memoir, and sat down with Jeffrey Brown recently for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Patrick Stewart, Actor: Glamis hath murder’d sleep. Therefore, Cawdor shall sleep no more [William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2].

Jeffrey Brown: He would become one of the world’s best-known actors, and everyone has to start somewhere. And, for Patrick Stewart, that was the day a teacher handed his class the text of William Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.”

Patrick Stewart: He said: “All right, Act 4, Scene 1. You’re all cast. All right, start reading.”

And, of course, we all went [Stewart mimes reading to himself and “zips his lips”] — and he yelled at us: “Not to yourselves, you idiots!”

And then he said: “This is a play. It’s people. It’s real life. It’s not just being on a stage. You have got to invite people into it.”

Jeffrey Brown: Some seven decades later, at age 83, Stewart invites us into his own life drama in a memoir titled “Making It So.”

[“Make it so” became a catchphrase of Captain Picard, commander of the Starship Enterprise as portrayed by Stewart on the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94). A standard command used by British naval officers to mean “Make it happen,” “Get it done,” or “Do it,” Picard used it in the very first episode, written by Gene Roddenberry, creator of the original 1960s series, and D. C. Fontana.]

Patrick Stewart: There was something about having those words, even though I was mispronouncing them, in my mouth that felt good, felt I was in control.

Jeffrey Brown: It gave you a voice. It gave you a self. It gave you a confidence.

Patrick Stewart: Yes, exactly.

What it gave me was that I could drop the Patrick Stewart.

Jeffrey Brown: What does that mean?

Patrick Stewart: It means that I didn’t really like who I was. And I felt much more comfortable when I was somebody else.

Actually, the first time I walked onto a stage and breathed in, because I was nervous, I realized suddenly I felt safer than I had felt in any of my childhood years. I mean literally safe. Nothing bad can happen to me on the stage.

Jeffrey Brown: As he writes, the future captain of the Starship Enterprise grew up in a tough blue-collar town in the North of England without hot water or an indoor toilet.

His first years alone with his mother and older brother were good ones. But his father’s return from World War II changed everything. His father, described as a weakened alcoholic, would beat his mother, and young Patrick could not protect her.

So, there is this mix of wound and strength, I think, that runs through your whole life story. Do you feel that?

Patrick Stewart: I do. I feel it in my work. I feel it in important relationships. And I have benefited from it and also from, oh, 30 years ago, when someone I knew quite well said to me: “Have you ever thought of therapy, Patrick, psychological therapy?”

And I said: “No, no. Why would I do that?”

“Give it a shot.”

And, thoom, I was hooked right away. And that has been one of the ways that I helped to understand my life, my childhood, my father, understanding, because he just made me angry and fearful when he was around. And he’s one of the people I miss now, because I’d like him to read book.

Jeffrey Brown: Stewart would work his way up as an actor from local productions to studies in Bristol, eventually to the heights, the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He writes of lessons along the way, including how great actors develop — quote — “an invisible cloak of truth that elevates their performances.”

The actor is both pretending and not pretending?

Patrick Stewart: I don’t like the word pretending, although, in a sense, pretense is partly what we’re activated to do when we’re acting.

But the people that you have mentioned, their performance, their work lives inside them.

Jeffrey Brown: A lesson he learned when a director convinced him to take on one of Shakespeare’s vilest monsters, Polixenes in “The Winter’s Tale.”

Patrick Stewart: And he said: “I think you’re fearful, Patrick, but what you must understand is that this character already lives inside you.”

And I was kind of outraged at that. And he said: “But you’re an actor. All you have to do is let it out.”

[It seems Brown made a mistake. In 1981, Stewart played Leontes in an RSC production of The Winter’s Tale directed by Ronald Eyre. I found no record of Stewart’s ever having played Polixenes, who’s a secondary character in the play, a sort of catalyst.

[In a Shakespeare Unlimited interview for Washington, D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library (Patrick Stewart on a Life Shaped by Shakespeare | Folger Shakespeare Library) about the memoir, conducted by Barbara Bogaev and posted on 10 October 2023, Stewart said that Leontes “is such an unspeakable character. I can’t, and I don’t want to identify with him.” Stewart said he spoke with the production’s director, who told him, “Patrick, this man lives inside you already. . . . All you have to do to play this role is let him out.”]

Jeffrey Brown: A whole other level of fame would come in his late 40s. While the actors strike continued, Stewart asked us not to use clips from his work on “Star Trek” or “X-Men,” where, by the way, he co-starred with Ian McKellen.

But fans well know how he, yes, commanded those roles with his voice and presence. In fact, though, Stewart himself knew nothing of this new world when he first came to it.

You were not “Star Trek”-literate, huh?

Patrick Stewart: Not remotely. I wasn’t even a fan. I wasn’t a fan of sci-fi at all.

(Laughter)

Patrick Stewart: And I still struggle just a little bit.

Jeffrey Brown: But you’re saying that, in these characters for television and film, you were able to find the same way in that you found to Shakespeare on the stage?

Patrick Stewart: Exactly the same.

Jeffrey Brown: The complexity?

Patrick Stewart: Yes, and making sure that, if the complexity was inside him, when I released it, it would make sense. It would be understandable. And I think . . .

Jeffrey Brown: To yourself, as well as the audience?

Patrick Stewart: Always to myself, yes, but, hopefully, as often to the audience. And that was always my objective.

I wanted to bring the audience into our world. I was never that interested in thrusting it out, but just inviting people to come in and share what we were experiencing.

[As Vladimir in Waiting for Godot] Say I am happy!

Ian McKellen, Actor: [As Estragon] I am happy.

Patrick Stewart: In 2013, he took to the stage, again working with McKellen, in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

[Stewart and McKellen appeared together in Godot in 2009 on a tour of the United Kingdom, followed by a West End run at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. The production then ran at the Cort Theatre on Broadway in 2013-14, where it played in repertory with Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land with Stewart and McKellen at the head of a cast of four.]

Ian McKellen: [Estragon] What do we do now, now that we’re happy?

(Laughter)

Patrick Stewart: It requires connection. And that connection isn’t made by yelling and acting.

There’s a wonderful American comic whose name I now can’t remember who was asked once: “What is acting?”

And he said: “Acting, acting is yelling!”

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: But not for you?

Patrick Stewart: No, not for me.

Jeffrey Brown: There is one big role Stewart still wants to take on, King Lear. But, he says:

Patrick Stewart: Somebody, actually, the other day said: “You know, you’re a bit too old for King Lear.”

(Laughter)

Patrick Stewart: Can’t — can’t get it right.

So, I feel that, even though I may be too old to play Lear, I could give it a shot.

(Laughter)

[note: McKellen played Lear in the West End and on video when he was 79; Stewart is only four years older than that. (Lear himself admits to being 80 “and upward.”)]

Jeffrey Brown: All right, we will look for your King Lear.

Patrick Stewart. The book is “Making It So.”

Thank you very much.

Patrick Stewart: Thank you.

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists.

[Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[As Senior Coordinating Producer of “Canvas,” Anne Davenport is the primary field producer of arts and culture pieces and oversees all coverage.  She’s been leading “Canvas” since its beginning, collaborating with Chief Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown for most of her 21 years at PBS NewsHour as well as with others.  Alison Thoet is a writer and a “Canvas” associate producer and national affairs associate producer at NewsHour.]

 

A Directing Experience, Part 2

by Kirk Woodward

[Welcome back to Rick On Theater for the concluding instalment of Kirk Woodward’s “A Directing Experience,” his account of serving as associate director for Upper Montclair, New Jersey’s Saint James Players’ first-ever production of a Greek tragedy. The play was Sophocles’ Antigone and the SJP production ran from 15 to 17 and 22 to 24 September.

[If you haven’t read Part 1, posted on 13 October, I recommend that you go back and pick that up before reading Part 2.  Kirk’s report is continuous and the second half won’t make much sense if you don’t know what happened from the start.

[Kirk reports that Director James Broderick attempted to give the theatergoers at SJP’s Antigone a taste of the performance Athenians in the 5th century BCE might have seen.  For ROTters who are interested in what we know of the performances of ancient Greek plays, I’ve added a brief description of how classic Greek theater worked after “A Directing Experience.”]

SCOPE OF THE PRODUCTION – As the weeks went on I started thinking of the show more as a musical than as a play. Actually, the more elements involved in a production, the more it resembles a military operation. There’s a senior officer (the director), a number of staff officers (the sound, set, costume, lighting, and front-of-house chiefs), and a lot of troops whose activities need to be coordinated.

ATTENDANCE AND LINES – Attendance is often a problem in community theater rehearsals. Not only do people have excused absences for vacations during the summer, but sometimes people just don’t, or in our case wouldn’t, show up, and we’d scrape to find pieces of the show that we could rehearse. (Our long rehearsal period probably contributed to this.)

We didn’t find such scrambling as much of a problem as one might think, because our show was made up of so many component parts that if someone who needed work wasn’t there, somebody else who needed work probably was there.

The opening circles I mentioned included vocal work led by the chorus leader. Vocal work is of obvious value, probably for any play, considering our ordinarily lazy American diction, and certainly for this one. The sanctuary where we performed requires clear and purposeful speech.

Actors are often asked, “How do you remember so many lines?” Actors tend to smile at the question, but in fact the process is remarkable – in some cases, almost miraculous.

Ordinarily, actors have successfully memorized their lines well before the show opens, but a pressing question is “when” – at what stage are they “off book” and able to function smoothly without glancing at a script (or reading from it) or asking for help.

We were no exception. Ordinarily it doesn’t do any good to fuss at people for not knowing their lines. They know they don’t, and the rest of the cast sees it too. Jim was patient. My style too is to assure the actors that they’ll have the words down pat soon, and to congratulate them when they get anything right.

There’s no great way to deal with problems of line memorization as far as I know. A director can’t get inside someone’s head. What’s more, even when the actors can make their way through a rehearsal without reference to a script, they still may indulge in any amount of paraphrasing.

Again, a director has to decide what attitude to take toward this problem. Often the stage manager may be asked to keep notes on inaccurate speeches and to discuss them with the actors at the end of rehearsal.

One of our casts learned their lines fairly promptly. The other did not, with both major leads struggling visibly with them until the final dress rehearsal. These actors, note, were among the more experienced and “professional” of the cast. Hard to understand. I felt that the uncertainty about lines in that cast never entirely went away.

Halfway or a little more through rehearsals, the cast was asking if the show looked like it would “work.” My reply was that Jim had designed it in a particular way. I think it’s safe to say that his entire approach was new to us. Although nobody used the word, he had a “style” in mind for the play.

It involved lots of things happening on stage, often at once, and a delivery of lines as though they were being announced, slowly and clearly. He told one chorus member that their delivery of a speech had “a lot of 2023 in it” – it was too “modern” for the concept. He gave many line readings to the cast, and they were always much more stately than everyday speech. That was his intention. 

The chorus held to Jim’s approach. However, the lead actors increasingly did not, instead talking with each other in a more “modern” way, and I believe this worked to the play’s advantage, providing variety and a bit of what the audience was more used to, particularly in contrast to the chorus.

METHODS – As rehearsals went on, I came to believe strongly in two directing principles: 1) Don’t speak unless you have something to say, and 2), if you do say something, make it something the actors can use – something they can put into practice.

I hit this particular nail on the head once in these rehearsals. As actors try to get “off book,” so they can rehearse without their script, sometimes they have to stop for long pauses while they think of the next thing to say, and sometimes these pauses become habitual. Asking one actor to close up the gaps in his words, I said pleasantly to him, “It’s called ‘acting,’ not ‘pausing.’”

TOWARD THE FINISH LINE – As we approached the Labor Day weekend, more and more cast members requested that weekend off, including a few who weren’t coming to rehearsals anyway. Jim tried to schedule extra line rehearsals but got little response, so we began the final six rehearsals with a great deal to pull together. Jim wrote the production team a summary which included the following concerns: 

     We have actors playing leading parts who have not appeared at rehearsal for almost a month. It's possible these people will return not being fully off-book.

     We have actors playing supporting parts who have attended few rehearsals and were not even close to being off book when last they rehearsed.

      The musicians are adjusting to a last-minute departure. We've never [had] even one runthrough of the music. At most, we'll have the musicians for Monday night and Tuesday night. [Fortunately we had music for the two last final rehearsals as well, thanks to the musicians who made the time.]

      The opening scene -- with the Master of Revels -- is still...well, let's call it a "work in progress." [As noted, this scene was ultimately dropped.]

     Many of the light cues have changed.

     The blocking at the end of the play has been changed but never rehearsed with the full cast.

    We don't have ushers -- I can live with that (I'll manage the house). [Thanks to our stage manager, a high school student was ultimately recruited to usher.]

    In short, we're simply not going to get to that place we all hoped we'd get to. In fact, it now seems certain that we won't have a single full-cast rehearsal before opening night.

     I ask you to bear up, and soldier on, in the face of what could be rather daunting adversity this next week. There are some factors we can't control (other people's behaviors and responses) but please try to be patient with each other (you always are, by the way -- this is just a reminder!!) upbeat and supportive with the many cast members who have worked hard, and try to help out in any area where the ship is listing (lend a hand with the costumes if you have a minute, help an actor run lines, etc.)

     We're all going to see things that don't work, but as much as possible we really can't change things at this late date. We've got to build up at least a little bit of muscle memory, so let's learn to live with the imperfect (I'm saying this to myself!) 

     We need to focus this week on traffic control -- getting people in position to enter their scenes on time, listening for cues, and making sure people are arrayed in costumes and with the right props when they need to enter. The niceties will either take care of themselves. Or they won't.

His list looks daunting, but in fact most of the things in it were manageable, and most got handled. To illustrate what did and didn’t, here’s an email I wrote Jim after opening night:

Hi Jim,

I'm so glad for you about last night, because it really is vindication that what you envisioned can be achieved. Excellent. We'll work hard tonight and see how it goes.

I had a very few notes - possible thoughts. For the Saturday cast:

* The Sentry shouldn't wrestle Antigone onto the stage the second time he brings her in. The point is that she is resigned to her fate. It was like a wrestling match.

For the Friday cast:

* A big gap after the Orator's speech. Something should happen immediately.

* I imagine you've fixed this already - the gap before the first Chorus appearance - maybe a cuing problem? Or too much music?

* Creon's first entrance - can Jamie and Sharon start entering on the second verse of the "triumphal music", so he and she aren't just standing there so long? Last night they came in as soon as the music started, and there's lots of it.

* Again, something you may have fixed - on "O fate of humanity," should a couple of lights go out to emphasize it?

* Need a fast blackout after "Like the fairies." She might not have been able to hear the cue.

* Haimon should exit on the floor exit. (We talked about this last night.)

* When Sharon asks Jamie what's happened, saying that she can take it - can he briefly turn away from her, to motivate her asking the sentry?

* Jamie is clearly "dying" and dead at the end.  Is that what you want?

* As you know, that curtain call has got to be virtually continuous. Colleen and I stopped clapping long before it was over, and we're staff! 

* Curtain call - some on the floor can exit at the stage left door to help people get offstage faster.

* Can the backstage hall light stay on, or should it be off during the show, and if so, can they see?

FINALE – The sort of items on that laundry list will look familiar to many directors. The fact is that the first weekend of shows went much better than I would have predicted. So did the second. The audience response at the end of the performances was enthusiastic, and there were few technical glitches. A “talkback” with the cast after the Sunday matinee showed a great deal of intelligent audience interest.

One cast still had to ask for prompting at its final dress rehearsal. Nothing of the sort happened in performance, but as noted above I felt there was a subtle hesitation here and there that had an effect on its performance days. Learning lines may not be the be-all and end-all of acting, but it’s important.

The adventure wasn’t over yet. One actor, from the “Saturday” cast, had never actually quit the show, but also hadn’t actually attended a rehearsal in weeks. Finally, between the two performance weekends, he resigned because of illness. It seemed difficult to get another actor to replace him – although he was only in one scene, it was a long one.

Jim’s solution was inventive – turn that scene into a dream sequence in which Creon imagines the voice of his son (the missing actor) arguing with him – an argument carried out on the son’s part from a microphone offstage, reading the part. “Brilliant,” I told him.

However, an actor playing Creon recruited a replacement, so we’ll never know how the last great experiment would have worked out. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” Jim emailed me, “and upheaval is the father of anxiety.” The replacement actor was excellent.

FIGURES. By my very unofficial count 285 people saw the show over six performances, which is excellent for the St. James Players. There was no admission cost; the show was free.

My friend Dan Landon, for years a theater manager for the Shubert Organization, says, “One dollar over the nut [the expenses], it’s a hit.” Again by rough estimate, the show probably cost under two thousand dollars, the largest part of that for costumes. Audience donations will probably bring in just under two thousand dollars, plus a substantial amount from program ad sales. It’s a hit. Profits will go to a charity.

SUMMARY. Unquestionably the show was a success in just about any terms. How, considering the considerable obstacles during rehearsals? Some answers:

Antigone itself, as written by Sophocles, has well delineated conflict and vivid characters. Jim’s considerable script revisions added to the script but didn’t detract from its core. The story line remained clear.

Very few people have seen a Greek tragedy performed (a statement based on audience comments). They didn’t know what to expect but had a feeling it was supposed to be important, or “good.” It had cultural cachet.

The principal character is a strong woman, an appealing feature for many, including me.

The staging was unusual – formal, often ritualistic, with some naturalistic acting within those limits, performed in the beautiful front of the sanctuary of the church, which added a seriousness that a regular set probably would not have provided no matter how well it was designed and executed. 

Formal ritual is not often an element in many plays performed in local and regional theaters. Jim insisted on retaining or imitating as much of the original religious purpose of Sophocles’ play as he imagined and could incorporate.

A number of dances, musical interludes, and other elements within the play, plus the long opening sequence(s), were dropped during the rehearsal period, making the play leaner and perhaps easier to follow than perhaps would have been possible otherwise.

The whole experience was unusual for the audiences, as well as one could judge. Novelty itself was enough to carry a great deal of interest. The dancing, chorus, and music really were “cool.”

Rehearsals had been scattered throughout the summer, but in the final continuous six rehearsals the cast did have an opportunity to pull the show together. At the opening the production was “tight” – as noted, more for one cast than for the other. At the last performance, the casts were evenly matched.

The actors really did hold their own. Whatever the appropriateness of the acting choices they made – a variable  – they doubled down on them and were consistent in them. Some of the acting was quite fine – the last scene of the “Friday” Creon was as fine as I can imagine it could be, rivaled by the last scene of the other Creon.

On stage the cast was committed to the play, and that commitment carried through to the audience. Even with only six performances, I did note that the determination to make the play “work” weakened a tiny bit as the casts felt more secure. If we had had a large number of performances, this might have been a problem.

Although I believe Jim visualized “platform” acting as described above, in practice the actors of the principal roles moved more and more into a “naturalistic” style of acting – real people talking to each other – and this contrasted well with the formal elements of the play and probably made it palatable.

Many of the elements that might have been expected to make the staging of the play seem diffuse were removed during the rehearsal period.

Ultimately, credit for the success of the show goes to Jim, who had a vision and stuck to it, and to the cast and crew who brought it to fruition. Jim had ideas, whether I tumbled to them or not, and having ideas carries a lot of weight. The choreographer and chorus leader pulled off what Jim had imagined in their areas.

Theater is full of surprises – one of the reasons that many of us find it enormously rewarding. Our production of Antigone proves the point. One feels even Sophocles might have been pleased.

[Theater, which was an integral part of the culture in ancient Greece from 700 BCE, was centered in the city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political, and religious focal point.  I think, in light of Kirk’s report above, it would be of interest, especially for readers who aren’t theater scholars, to have a gloss of what we know of this origin of our modern Western theater.  I’ll be brief, and anyone with further curiosity can look up additional details in the many sources available, both in print and online.

[Ancient Greek theater developed in the Classical Period of Greek history, the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, and lasted into the Hellenistic Period, 336-146 BCE.  The great classic tragedies, including Sophocles’ Antigone, were composed in the 5th century; the oldest surviving text is The Persians by Aeschylus (ca. 525/524-ca. 456/455 BCE), first performed in 472 BCE.

[(Aeschylus’ next surviving play was Seven Against Thebes, first performed in 467 BCE.  It tells the story of the Theban civil war in which Eteocles and Polynices, Antigone’s brothers, slew each other, setting up the story Sophocles recounts in his tragedy 26 years later.)

[I’m not going to give a summary of the history of classic Greek drama because I want to focus on the production methods that we know of or have deduced from such sources as the surviving plays themselves, Aristotle’s (384-322 BCE) Poetics (335-323 BCE), accounts of contemporary historians such as Herodotus (ca. 484-ca. 425 BCE), hints and clues from examining the surviving theaters of the era, and modern archeologists like Luigi Bernabò Brea and Madelaine Cavalier, who discovered a cache of models from the 4th to 3rd century BCE for theatrical masks in 1973 (the so-called “Masks of Lipari”).

[One historical note, however: Greek drama developed from chants in honor of Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans), the god of revelry.  (Why director Broderick of the SJP Antigone made Zephyr, a god of wind, the “Master of Revels” is unclear, but since that sequence was dropped before performance, it’s also irrelevant.)  

[Because of this association, theater in ancient Greece was sacred to Dionysus.  For this reason, the most important festivals in which dramatic competitions were held were the Dionysia, and the premier theater in ancient Greece, built on the Athenian Acropolis, was the Theater of Dionysus (completed in ca. 325 BCE).

[The Dionysian chants were later adapted for choral processions in which participants would dress up in costumes and masks.  Eventually, certain members of the chorus evolved to take special roles within the procession, but they were not yet actors in the way we would understand it. 

[According to tradition, in 534 or 535 BCE, Thespis, a poet probably born in the early 6th century BCE, astounded audiences by leaping onto the back of a wooden cart and reciting poetry as if he was the characters whose lines he was speaking.  (In other accounts, Thespis is said to have introduced the first principal actor as distinguished from the chorus.)  In doing so he became the world’s first actor, and it is from his name that we get the world ‘thespian’ as a synonym for ‘actor.’  (The International Thespian Society is an organization for high school and middle school theater students.)

[Little else is known of Thespis or his acting, but he started a trend.  In about 471 BCE, Aeschylus introduced the second actor, and around 468 BCE, Sophocles brought on the third individualized performer.  They played the roles Kirk refers to as “named characters” played by “actors with character names.”

[Plays in ancient Greece were performed during late winter and early spring, perhaps because of the hot climate. The theaters were outdoors and open to the elements, and the plays were performed in daylight.  The actors, who, incidentally, were all men (as they were in Elizabethan/Shakespearean times as well), wore heavy costumes (another possible reason for performing in the cooler seasons) and masks, and performing required strenuous physical and vocal exertion, which would have been impractical in hot weather.  Each play was usually only ever performed once (until later in Greek theater history, during the Hellenistic Period, when it became permissible to perform older plays).

[Greek theaters were huge. The Theater of Dionysus could hold 15,000 spectators.  The audience sat on seats carved out of a hillside (or man-made berms in regions with flat terrain). This seating area, called the theatron (‘place of hearing’), encircled a round playing area called the orchestra (‘place of dancing’) where the chorus performed.  At the back of the orchestra was the skene (‘tent’ or ‘hut’). This was a stone building that acted as a dressing room and was where the actors made their entrances from and their exits to.

[The actors performed in front of the skene, which was unchanging—except, perhaps, with some paint.  (It’s probably obvious, but this is the Greek word from which we get the modern word ‘scene’ and, by extension, ‘scenery’—though there was none in Greek theater.)  On either side of the orchestra were the paradoi, two stone passageways through which the chorus made its entrance and exit.

[There was also some form of crane-like stage machinery that facilitated special effects—such as the entrance of a god from above—but we are unsure as to exactly what this machinery was or how it worked.  It’s been dubbed deus ex machina, Latin for the Greek term apo mekhanes theos (‘god from the machine’), used metaphorically today to mean the sudden or abrupt resolution of a seemingly unsolvable plot problem by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. 

[(There’s a terrific example of both applications of the deus ex machina in a play at least partly by William Shakespeare—Pericles, Prince of Tyre [published in 1609].  In a report for ROT of a 2016 production I saw, I wrote that in order to resolve some intractable plot complications [sense #2], Diana, Roman goddess of wild animals and the hunt, appears “raised up high [sense #1] behind a scrim and intoning in an otherworldly voice in an honest-to-goodness deus . . . er dea ex machina.”)

[Because of the size of the Greek amphitheaters, plus the lack of walls or ceilings, and despite excellent natural acoustics, hearing and seeing were problematic.  The elaborate costumes and masks were aids to the latter, of course, intended to make the actors more visible.

[The basic costume was the common garment worn by ancient Greeks, the chiton, a draped, shift-like tunic.  There were differences for men’s and women’s chitones which were replicated in the theatrical costumes for each gender and the chiton was accessorized for character reinforcement.  Actors playing female characters also wore prostheses to give the impression of breasts and soft, rounded abdomens.  They wore a white body stocking under the costume as well, to make their skin look fairer.

[Male characters in tragedies also usually wore kolthornoi, calf-length boots with thick soles to give the actors more height for both stature and visibility in the large theaters.  Female and comic characters wore sykkhoi, soft slippers or ‘socks’; because the kolthornos was often translated as ‘buskin,’ we have the expression “sock and buskin” as a metaphor for the world of theater.  (On 25 and 28 May 2014, I posted a two-part piece on actors who were spies; it was entitled “Sock and Buskin & Cloak and Dagger.”)

[As for the speech, we believe that the actors spoke in stentorian tones—what I think Kirk meant by “platform acting”—and may even have sung or chanted the lines.  We don’t know how the actors related to one another in a scene, but the common belief is that they didn’t play off one another as modern Western actors usually do in Realistic dramas or comedies, and may have all faced out toward the audience.  Gestures were probably few and big.

[The masks were elaborately carved or assembled by skilled mask-makers.  Paintings and vase decorations indicate that they were helmet-like, covering the actor’s entire face and head, with holes for the eyes and a small opening for the mouth, as well as an integrated wig.  They were made from organic materials, which is why there are no extant examples, as they would have decomposed over time.

[The masks were probably made of light-weight materials such as stiffened linen, leather, wood, or cork, with the wig consisting of human or animal hair.  It was once thought that they served as a kind of megaphone, but the mouth holes are too small to serve such a purpose, but they may have functioned as a resonator.

[An artfully created mask can appear to change expressions when it’s activated by a really experienced and talented masker (see my post “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011).  The masked actor can make the mask seem truly alive by the angle the audience sees and the play of light on the frozen expression.  But the Greek masks restricted vision, another reason that the actors probably didn’t move around the stage much; they would, however, still have moved their heads and angled their bodies for effect.

[The masks, of course, made it possible for one actor to play multiple characters, including women, in the play.  Remember that there were, at most, three actors to play the named characters; in Antigone, there are at least seven, including three women.  Some of the masks represented single characters, with recognizable iconography to identify them, but most were generic—a young and beautiful woman, a crone or witch, a heroic warrior, and so on.  Small changes, such as a different wig or beard, and voilà, a new character.

[As Kirk states above, the plays of ancient Greece were performed at festivals in honor of Dionysus called the Dionysia.  (There were other festivals dedicated to Dionysius in and around Athens, such as the Lenaia, but for the drama, the Dionysia was the important one.) 

[There were two related Dionysia in Attica, the region around Athens, each lasting seven days.  The older one was the Rural Dionysia, held around the time of the winter solstice, so in December or January by our calendar.  It was very ancient, almost certainly predating the invention of tragedy, and probably celebrated the cultivation of the grape vines.  (Dionysus was the god of wine.)  It started with a procession, probably followed by animal sacrifices, a ceremony honoring worthy citizens, and other rites. 

[These were followed by competitions in music, singing, dancing, and choral chanting.  After the middle of the 6th century BCE, plays may have been performed—first tragedies and satyr plays, then comedies as well—but they would most likely have been plays that had been performed the previous year at the newer festival in Athens itself.

[That would be the City Dionysia, established by the Tyrant Pisistratus (ca. 600-527 BCE; Tyrant of Athens: 561 BCE, 559-556 BCE, 546-527 BCE).  (The first dramatic contest was held in 535 BCE, when Thespis won the first prize.)  It was here, around the vernal equinox (that is, March to April), that the great dramatic competitions were held: tragedies and satyr plays from the festival’s inception, comedies from 490 BCE. 

[Three selected poets each presented three tragedies and a satyr play.  (When comedies were added in a separate competition, comic writers also presented three plays, but no satyr play.)  The three plays may or may not be thematically linked, and the satyr play would be connected somehow to the tragedies.

[The satyr play, only one of which has survived in its entirety, Cyclops by Euripides (ca. 480-ca. 406 BCE), was a ribald drama having a chorus of satyrs, creatures associated with Dionysus.  The satyr play’s mytho-heroic stories and the language style were similar to those of tragedy, but its plots, titles, themes, characters, and happy endings were reminiscent of comedy.  The chorus of satyrs’ costumes focused on the (permanently erect) phallus, and their language used wordplay and sexual innuendo.  (Aeschylus was noted for his satyr plays, but only one fragment survives.)]