On Friday, 18 December, last year, I spotted an obituary in
the New
York Times headlined “Noah
Creshevsky, Composer of Complex ‘Hyperreal’ Music, Dies at 75.” I had no idea who Creshevsky was, or what in
the world “‘hyperreal’ music” could be.
I couldn’t conceive of such a thing, so I read the obit and even looked
the composer up.
What intrigued me
was that though I didn’t know anything about hyperreal music, I was familiar
with hyperreal art and, more specifically, hyperreal theater. I couldn’t see how music described as
hyperreal could be related to art and theater made in the same style.
The truth, it turns
out, is that it isn’t. But my brief
exploration of the genre led me to the notion that hyperreal theater would be a
good subject for a Rick On
Theater post because it’s an interesting
theatrical style, it’s little known, and had a short life in the 1980s and then
largely passed from the scene. I decided
to give it a go.
Let’s start with some
definitions. Since ‘Hyperrealism’ is
derived from ‘Realism,’ I’ll start there.
Realism is an art movement that
advocates the representation of the subject of a piece of literature or visual
art without stylization. The world
depicted in the artwork seems like real life to the reader or viewer. It’s not, however, reality, but a
representation of reality by artistic means.
‘Hyperrealism’ is made up of the
word ‘realism’ and the Greek prefix ‘hyper-,’ which means ‘over,’ ‘above,’ or ‘beyond.’ Note that in the literary and visual arts, as
distinguished from music, the notion of exaggeration isn’t applicable (see
‘hyperreal music,’ below).
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.
I won’t write any more about
hyperreal music, but let’s describe what it is.
Noah Creshevsky, a composer and performer of electronic music, didn’t
invent hyperreal music, but he coined the label. In his 2005 essay “Hyperrealism, Hyperdrama,
Superperformers and Open Palette,” Creshevsky defined the genre thus:
Hyperrealism is an electroacoustic
musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared
environment (“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or
excessive (“hyper”).
The “real” sounds from “our shared environment” in his works
were scraps of vocal and instrumental music, speech, outside noise, television
snippets, and other bits of sound, much of it sampled or taken from
recordings.
When I pointed out the Times obit to my friend Kirk Woodward, who’s far more musically
knowledgeable than I am, he listened to some of Creshevsky’s compositions and
then remarked that some sounded “like intellectual Spike Jones, and I heard at
least one piece which made me think of the Beatles’ ‘Revolution No. 9,’ except
more musical.”
My response was that
“the description of his work made me think of Leroy Anderson—maybe a precursor
of hyperreal music.” For instance, “The
Typewriter,” written in 1950 and recorded in 1953, features an actual
typewriter as a percussion instrument.
Other pieces use instruments, sometimes exotic ones like temple blocks
and a slapstick, to recreate natural sounds like hoof beats or whip cracks, as
in 1948’s “Sleigh Ride.”)
“There’s also a
little Dada in it, too,” I added; “—especially George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (1923-24),” a
composition for player pianos, mechanized regular pianos (16 baby grands) plus
other automated instruments (4 bass drums, 1 tam-tam, 3 xylophones) and
noisemakers (siren, 7 electric bells, 3 airplane propellers, fans).
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.
Hyperreal theater was pioneered as a style of playwriting by
California playwright Adele Edling Shank (1940-2014), Shank was inspired by such painters as Robert
Bechtle (1932-2020) and Richard Estes (b. 1932), among several other hyperreal
artists. Theatrical Hyperrealism
combines an objective perspective borrowed from photorealist painters with
classic dramatic values like characterization and plot.
In an interview requested by West Coast Plays, the semi-annual publication that first published
Shank’s SUNSET/SUNRISE, the dramatist
told her husband, theater scholar, playwright, director, and drama
professor-emeritus at University of California-San Diego Theodore Shank (b.
1929):
You and I were both interested in
exploring the theatrical equivalent of the painting style of hyperrealism or
photorealism. After studying the
characteristics of the painting style we discussed how they could work in the
theatre. For example, the paintings keep
the viewer on the surface, there is no projection into the painting, no
emotional involvement, no interpretation.
In “Against Interpretation,” her famous 1964 essay, Susan
Sontag asserts, “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it
is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” I cited this passage in my 12 June 2018 blog
report on Where We Are: Selections from
the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960, a Whitney Museum of American Art
exhibit, and declared:
I have had a hard time agreeing
with Sontag’s ban on interpretation for one fundamental reason: it’s not
possible to experience a work of art—or nearly anything else—without finding
some kind of meaning in it. I think it’s
human nature—we’re hard-wired to find meaning in what we see and experience.
So I can’t entirely accept the Shanks’s premise about plays
that can’t be interpreted—or whose elements can’t be interpreted. I still don’t think that’s possible.
Playwright Shank continued, nonetheless:
What you see is what there
is. I extended that into a theatrical
style and made some basic decisions. The
focus would always be on the present moment; there would be no projection into
the future and virtually no past revealed.
This meant little or no exposition.
This is a slightly disingenuous remark because of the six
California Plays in the hyperreal style, several are connected narratively, so
some of them do comment on the pasts or futures of others. For example. Winterplay, though it was written later, is a prequel to SUNSET/SUNRISE and Tumbleweed follows on The
Grass House (and also includes a character carried over from Sand Castles, a sequel to Stuck).
(I’ll discuss some of these plays shortly.)
Theodore Shank, who staged most of his wife’s hyperreal
premières, differentiated between theatrical Realism and Hyperrealism as
exemplified by the work of Adele Shank:
The theatre style called “realism”
is quite different from “hyperrealism.”
Realist plays present characters behaving in a theatricalized manner
which oversimplifies the work of the audience through exposition, a high degree
of selectivity, and by performance techniques such as a single focus, actors
facing the audience and pointing lines, etc.
All but the central action tends to be suppressed. Actors focus on the dominant stage interest
rather than on the preoccupations of their characters. As spectators we have become so accustomed to
this style in the theatre that it seems natural even though highly
theatrical. In hyperrealism the apparent lack of selection and the
abundance of detail is actually more natural, but because it is unusual in the
theatre, the performances seem theatrical.
(I take exception to Shank’s characterization of the acting
in Realism; what he describes above is not in line with my training or my
practice. Indeed, all the teachers I
worked with emphasized the opposite techniques of those Shank describes. Shank’s general conclusions are not wrong,
however, so the comparison generally holds.)
All of Adele Shank’s hyperreal plays—she wrote in other styles as well—construct
portraits of the American dream, or rather the difference between the promise
of that dream and the dissatisfaction of characters who’ve achieved it. The
Grass House, which I discuss a little more in a bit, looks at what one
theater’s literary adviser called “a spoiled Eden.”
Shank’s hyperreal plays microscopically examine how
individuals relate to one another. The
style requires a script of simple language that’s interesting, but free of
artful ambiguities, heavy symbolism, or other distractions that might keep the
audience attending to presentation (language) rather than underlying truth
(human relationships).
In terms of plot, playwright Shank meant the organization of the
incidents of the action, not the progress of a storyline. While her hyperreal plays do have narrative
elements, they’re not examinations of a protagonist’s destiny, but rather
explorations of a condition.
Further, the dramatist kept the plots very simple, “A complex plot,” said Adele Shank, “creates
too much suspense. It involves the
audience too deeply in the fictional world, so they hang on what might happen
rather than being focused on the present moment.”
The hyperreal sets make the intended microscopic examination
of the characters all the more accessible.
Even the minutest details are rendered with photographic accuracy—and
everything is as real as a theater can possibly manage. (It might remind one of David Belasco’s
famous 1912 production of The Governor’s
Lady for which he recreated a Childs Restaurant on stage using materials
and food from the actual restaurant chain rather than conventional
representative stage scenery.)
Speaking of his wife’s writing, Ted Shank wrote of the sets:
The setting was the starting point
for . . . the . . . hyperreal plays. In
order for the productions to function in the hyperreal way intended it was
essential to develop the setting from closely observed reality because
imagination is not sufficiently detailed and is too influenced by mediated
experience.
Among Adele Shank’s most prominent hyperreal works were the
six California Plays that included SUNSET/SUNRISE
(1979), Winterplay (1980), Stuck: A Freeway Comedy (1981), Sand Castles (1983), The Grass House (1983), and Tumbleweed (1984). (These plays, once hard to find in print, are
now published together in California Plays [South Gate, CA:
NoPassport Press, 2015].)
One excellent example of Shank’s hyperreal plays is The Grass House, first presented by San
Francisco’s Magic Theatre from 12 October to 4 December 1983; the director was
Theodore Shank, the playwright’s husband and UCSD colleague.
Set on a marijuana farm in the California hills, The Grass House depicts Anemone
preparing to marry Moon Hawk. Present
are Anemone’s mother, a “call girl” (she lives and works out of a VW bus), and
her father, a municipal court judge, as well as other members of the bride’s
and groom’s “families.” As the group
prepares for the ceremony, many hidden facets of their characters and histories
are revealed, baring many small cracks in façades and relationships.
Shank, as in most of her work, is parodying the American
dream—here the back-to-nature simplicity of rural America. In a 1983 script evaluation, literary manager
C. Lee Jenner (who was also the teacher who introduced me to Shank’s hyperreal
plays) observed that Grass House
“evokes an image of the pioneer spirit gone awry.”
The idyllic myth of farm life is turned on its head: the
farm is a pot farm (an illegal crop
in 1983), and far from escaping the threats of modern city life the alternative
lifestyle was meant to leave behind, the would-be urban refugees contend with
coyotes, a fear of strangers, and the site of an ancient tragedy on their retreat. They surround themselves with guard dogs,
rifles, and bolted doors.
Most of the characters are trapped in untenable lives that
only seem productive. Only Anemone and
Moon Hawk, who seem just as trapped as the others, finally show signs of being
able to escape.
Like all hyperreal plays, the style of Grass House requires fastidious attention to minute detail in
production and characterization.
Adele Shank used what she called “role models” for her
characters, so each of them possesses characteristics and behavior traits of
actual individuals. While the
characters’ lives are different from those of the models, Shank limned “their
way of speaking, their energy level, and their personality.” Actors playing the roles have the
characteristics of real-life people to work on—even if they don’t know the
models.
Shank followed the same pattern with the settings, which
were created from actual locations in California. The house in SUNSET/SUNRISE (see below), for instance, was conceived
from a composite of real homes in the Davis, California, neighborhood where the
dramatist lived when she wrote the play.
SUNSET/SUNRISE (Shank’s first hyperreal play), premièred
in February 1979 by the Dramatic Art Department of UC-Davis under the
direction of Ted Shank; it was then presented in the Actors Theatre of
Louisville’s New American Play Festival from 28 February to 23 March 1980.
In the backyard of
a California home, a lawn-and-pool party is getting underway. During the course of the evening and night,
cracks appear in the surface of several of the empty relationships, some
temporary liaisons are made, and some realizations dawn on a number of the
characters.
Principal among
these are Louise and James, whose yard is the scene of the party, and their
daughter, Anne, who’s believed for some time that she’s so allergic to
everything except plastic that the only way she can venture out of her room is
in a gas mask and wetsuit. Ordinarily,
she stays in her room and communicates with the world through a two-way TV
hook-up.
As her parents
finally make tentative overtures to reestablishing their faltering, empty
relationship, Anne makes an attempt to come out of her protective shell,
literally and figuratively facing the world naked.
Offering
a cockeyed picture of affluent California suburbia, the dramatist is telling us
that a life that doesn’t go below the surface is ultimately a lie and will
destroy what remains. It’s clear that
none of the characters begins the play with a true relationship based on
honesty and trust with anyone else. Most
are engaged in duplicitous affairs with others at the party—some of which
affairs are, in themselves, lies.
One
character, Josh, Louise and James’s son, lives in an old car in the backyard. It doesn’t run and is connected to the
house’s power supply by an immense extension cord—what one of my teachers
called “the world’s longest umbilical cord.” Josh won’t live with his parents, but he won’t
actually move away, either. It’s an inverted
take on youthful rebellion and the vaunted California car culture.
That’s
probably one of the most visible idiosyncrasies in SUNSET/SUNRISE (after Anne’s set-up), but another, less
obvious one is much more intriguing.
Throughout the party, Louise incessantly feeds James cholesterol-heavy
foods and drinks. It’s never mentioned
in the dialogue, but we’re witnessing a slow-motion attempted murder by
cholesterol poisoning!
I
think this is an extraordinary play, Hyperrealism notwithstanding, with a stimulating
situation that’s both recognizably all-American, and unique. Though the empty lives of all the characters
could be seen as symbolic, it plays as reality.
The effect is startling and moving.
The Hyperrealism
of the play demands an elaborate set, which requires that all of the trappings
of life—sounds, objects, language, light, and so on—be represented with
absolute, precise reality on stage. Everything
that is seen on stage, including a practical barbecue, TV monitor and camera,
and the general patio with furniture, must be absolutely true-to-life.
(Shank
has said that the SUNSET/SUNRISE set
can be designed with the pool off stage—but if it’s part of the mise-en-scène, it must be a real pool.)
The
style also affects the acting and directing.
Because of the hyperrealism of the language and conversation, there must
be what Shank calls “out-of-focus” dialogue and other Robert Altman-esque
touches of cinéma vérité.
The
actors and the director must construct the behavior of the characters with a
clarity that will make the process as transparent as possible to the
audience. Careful attention needs to be
paid to details in body
language, vocal intonation, and blocking, every element that delves beneath the
words to the feelings and attitudes that constitute relationships.
Stuck: A Freeway Comedy, Shank’s third hyperreal play,
was arguably her most audacious—with respect to its production style, though
not so much in its text. First produced by the Magic Theatre from 7
October to 22 November 1981, the première was staged by Ted Shank.
The premise of the plot is that on the same stretch of a California
freeway that connects a suburb with a city, there is an accident resulting in a
traffic jam every morning and every evening.
Over the months, some of the commuters have gotten to know one another
and have developed rituals that help them cope with the frustrations and boredom
of their lives.
The 12 men and women in the carpools all work for the same
corporation, but they have little contact with one another except during the
traffic jams. They aren’t neighbors, and
they aren’t friends. This situation is
the same for both acts and, in Ted Shank’s début staging, the cars—five for
each act (with two of them in each act the same)—are facing in the opposite
direction in act two than in act one.
For all intents and purposes, this is the carpoolers’ world.
In a 1982 issue of Theatre
Design & Technology, Ted Shank described his production:
Adele Shank’s Hyperrealism demanded, the director asserted,
“nothing short of actual cars and the appearance of a real freeway.” The Magic Theatre staged the play in a
warehouse on a pier extending into San Francisco Bay the length of two football
fields (720 feet or 240 yards, including the end zones).
A special enclosure was built inside the warehouse to serve
as a performance area and seating for 99 spectators sitting in three rows in
each side of the performance area, designed to look like a two-lane freeway.
The seating platforms were sharply raked “so the spectators
looked down into the [performance] space at a steep angle.” This, felt Ted Shank, “gave the spectators an
unusual perspective . . . which aided in creating an increased psychic distance
for the spectator somewhat akin to looking down on a street from a window in a
building.” Shank thought that this made
the theatergoer more an observer than a “psychic participant.”
The ends of the freeway performance area were closed off
with black drapes. One end could be
opened with pulleys so that the cars could be repositioned during
intermission. The asphalt floor of the
warehouse was painted with Aquatar to make the roadway look freshly surfaced
and all the details of the road were based on California Department of
Transportation specs so they’d be authentic.
The specifics of the freeway set were meticulously matched
to actual highway appearance, such as the yellow painted lines that demarked
the shoulders which were sprinkled with glass powder to make them reflective as
on actual highways. Some materials were
even purchased from the same suppliers from which Caltrans gets its road
materials.
Here’s how director Shank describes the visual effects of
the production; note all the atmospheric detail set designer Andy Stacklin and
lighting designer Patty Ann Farrell incorporated in the concept:
The flood lights used to light the
seating areas were directed toward the audience so they could not see into the
unlighted performance space until the house lights went down and the stage
lights came up. Act One begins with the
commuters in a morning traffic jam on their way from the suburbs to work in the
city. It is a foggy spring morning which
gradually clears. Act Two takes place
the following fall during an evening traffic jam as the commuters are on their
way home from work. As the act begins
the rain has just stopped. The highway
and cars are wet (having been sprayed during intermission) and the windshield
wipers are on. By the time the play ends
it is dark and the only sources of light are the interior lights of the cars, a
reading light in one car, and a flashlight—at the very end of the play the cars
are started and the headlights and taillights are turned on.
Adele Shank wrote in a “Playwright’s Note” in the play text:
“None of the cars need have engines, although it would be desirable if one car
in each act could start.” You can see
where that comes into play, and in Hyperrealism, it wouldn’t do to use a
recording of an engine turning over to substitute for an actual car starting in
the performance area in front of the audience.
(In the Magic’s production, it seems that all the cars were
operable. Except for one, says the
director, they were borrowed from him and the actors. Spiffed up, tricked out a little for the
show, and polished to a showroom sheen, they were as real as any street-worthy
car in San Francisco.)
Here’s more of how that worked:
Simple effective solutions for the
required sound effects were devised by Al Agius-Sinerco. As an overture to each act and to help make
the transition into the performance, two-track stereo tape recordings of cars passing
on a freeway were heard going from West to East in Act One and from East to
West on wet pavement in Act Two. The two
channels were fed into two Bose 800 speakers, one at each end of the
performance enclosure. At first the cars
travel at highway speeds past the audience, then they slow down, gradually come
to a stop with engines idling, horns honk, and engines are turned off. At the end of each act cars are heard
starting in the distance, then cars nearer are heard starting, and finally the
cars on stage are started by the actors.
Ted Shank describes several other sound effects employing
cassette tape recorders in each car for various purposes (along with some other
audio tech such as a PA system and a siren in one car), and then he concludes:
The hyperreal setting, cars,
sound, the use of car lights, and the unusual perspective from which the
performance was viewed created a theatricality which led the audience to
perceive the common place [sic] objects
as well as the characters and events in a fresh more acute way. . . . Having entered the unique seating area
audience expectancies were aroused. The
sounds of cars passing on the freeway began, house lights dimmed, and the stage
lights came up on a surprising view of a freeway with real cars stuck in a traffic
jam.
According to Theodore Shank, the hyperreal painters who were
Adele Shank’s models emphasized “the materialism in our culture by painting in
more-than-usual objectified detail which helps keep the spectator’s focus on
the surface materiality of the objects represented—often cars, storefronts, or
rooms in middle-class houses.”
This, Ted Shank asserts, was also the playwright’s aim. He explained:
As with the hyperreal painters,
the accumulation of detail in our productions creates a distance which tends to
keep the focus on behavior, on appearance rather than on psychology, social
analysis, or emotion. Traditionally,
realism in the theatre has been used to draw the audience into a subjective
relationship with the characters, their desires and predicaments. The spectator becomes psychically absorbed
into the fictional world rather than being distanced from it. Instead of perceiving acutely the events
presented, the spectator is psychically suspended awaiting what is about to
happen. In our hyperreal productions the
use of accumulated detail is an attempt to create a distance which puts the
spectator in the position of observer or voyeur rather than psychic
participant. In this condition each
audience member is forced to focus on present events and is able to perceive
them more keenly. Spectating becomes
more an act of perception than emotional involvement. It is as if one were looking through a window
watching unknown people and gradually coming to understand how they are related
and why they behave as they do. Although
interested in the fictional situation, the spectator is not made to want a
particular outcome because each spectator is a detached observer.
Interestingly, to my ear, this sounds positively Brechtian. What Ted Shank is describing is an
application of the Verfremdungseffekt,
the distancing device Bertolt Brecht applied in his Epic Theater that’s often
Anglicized as the “alienation effect” (a translation I dislike; I favor
“defamiliarizing effect”). (Of course,
this is Ted Shank’s exegesis so it may be he who’s the Brechtian.)
I’ve never read that Adele Shank was specifically influenced
by Brecht, but lit manager Jenner wrote that Adele Shank’s “Brechtian side is
warmed with compassion and humor,” which I think is accurate.
The playwright herself observed, “There is a very distanced
relationship between the spectators and the characters. We in the audience have almost no emotional
involvement with the characters.” But
she also acknowledged that “there is a recognition of the characters by the
audience, not an emotional identification.”
Jenner also used another Brechtian principle to characterize
Adele Shank’s Hyperrealism. The
playwright “intends her audience to ‘look at’ but not ‘feel with’ her
characters,” the lit manager wrote. “To
this end,” she continued, “she manipulates various distancing devices within a
generally realistic context. . . . [A]
web of realistic behavioral and contextual detail keeps audience attention on the surface of the action.”
Another painter whom Adele Shank’s hyperreal works evoke, at
least for one analyst, is David Hockney (b. 1937). Bonnie Marranca, now the publisher and editor
of PAJ (formerly the Performing Arts Journal) and a theater
professor at The New School, compared SUNSET/SUNRISE to “people
picnicking in a David Hockney set,” invoking “the non-explosive, past[el]
shadings of Hockney,” a pop artist, photographer, and set designer for plays
and operas. He’s sometimes considered a forerunner
of the Photorealists.
Ted Shank outlines several techniques his wife used in her
dramaturgy to accomplish her aims, but one that especially interests me is his
and Adele Shank’s approach to acting in a hyperreal play. In part, this is because I mentioned acting
earlier and in part because I trained as an actor and have taught it. In any case, Ted Shank says his and his
wife’s goal is “to increase performance detail.”
Specifically, he describes “an unconventional focus for the
actors.” This is the concentration not
on the character’s “single center of interest,” but on his or her “specific
interest . . . at each moment.” What Ted Shank is referring to here are what
most actors call their objectives.
The “single center of interest” is what Stanislavskians call
their main objective or superobjective; it’s what the character
wants to achieve. For Hamlet, say, this
might be “to unmask the murderer” or “to avenge my father”; for Lady Macbeth,
it might be “to make my husband king.”
(In some other acting systems, this has alternative labels: Bernard
Beckerman called it the project and Aaron
Frankel called it the character’s action
or the main character action. Director Harold Clurman called it the spine—both of the play and of each
character.)
The “specific interest” for each moment is the individual
objective for a scene or beat. In
Stanislavskian acting, these momentary objectives are derived from the main
action, which is overarching. What Ted
Shank is proposing is that the actors all essentially eschew the main action
and focus solely on the objectives for each scene. This is the hyperreal detail translated into
acting technique.
The rationale, according to Shank, is that because the
specific interests might be different from an overall interest, this technique
makes “for several simultaneous centers of interest thus creating an impression
of complexity and the absence of dramatic contrivance.”
This dramaturgical technique appears in another context as
well. In conventional Western theater,
conflict drives the drama; it is the engine that carries the play from the
beginning to the conclusion. There is
often a protagonist and an opposing antagonist with conflicting objectives:
Macbeth wants to be king of Scotland, but Macduff wants to prevent that.
As another literary manager said in her evaluation of SUNSET/SUNRISE in 1979: “This is a play
which doesn’t have strong dramatic conflict but rather a series of encounters.” She added later that “several little dramas
are evolving.” This is certainly a
product of the actors concentrating on the momentary objectives rather than a
superobjective for the play as a whole.
Shank went on to provide more specifics about Hyperrealism
in his wife’s plays:
The more-than-usual detail, the
lack of an obviously-directed focus, and the use of simultaneous conversations
and action [those Altman-esque tactics I mentioned earlier] give the audience
the impression that they are discovering the details of action and setting for
themselves as they do in the real world.
Because the spectator’s focus is not forcefully drawn to each detail
that is seen, the details seem not to
have been contrived for perception but left to chance discovery. And because the spectators are put into a
frame-of-mind for observation rather than emotional involvement, they are able
to make these discoveries.
Playwright Shank had a final admonition about the scope of
Hyperrealism on stage. While some
analysts have commented on what her husband characterized as “the bizarre
elements” in her plays (the daughter’s communicating through a CCTV rig in SUNSET/SUNRISE), or the “non-realistic,
magical elements” (the specter of that ancient catastrophe at the pot farm in The Grass House) as Jenner described them, the writer insisted, “Hyperrealism is
not at all the same thing as documentation.”
SUNSET/SUNRISE is not a blow-by-minute account of family life in
Davis, California. It is a contrived and
structured play presenting an illusion of reality, based on observations. Like hyperrealist painting, I have attempted
. . . to make the spectator observe acutely, [not] become involved in the
psychology or emotions of the characters. . . .
The play focuses attention to things we don’t usually notice.
[ROTters interested in learning more about
theatrical Hyperrealism should turn to the two essays mentioned above. Ted Shank’s TD&T article is accessible on line at https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/hickmanbrady/tdt_1982summer/index.php; he discusses many more details about the physical
production of Stuck as well as
more specifics of hyperreal theater.
[“Hyperrealism in the Theatre,” the interview of Adele
Shank, is only available on the ’Net in California Plays on Google Books, but it’s slightly edited. When libraries reopen, back issues of
TD&T should be in many collections,
but West Coast Plays 4 was hard to
find 25 years ago, so I expect it will be harder still today.
[Adele Edling Shank was a
long-time member of the faculty and chair of what is now the Department of
Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. A native of Litchfield, Minnesota, she grew
up on a farm 50 miles west of
Minneapolis.. In 1953, her father got a
job with the California Agriculture Department and the Edlings moved to Sacramento,
California.
[Adele Edling enrolled at the
University of California, Davis (BA, 1963; MA, 1966), where she met Theodore Shank; they were married
in 1967, She joined the faculty at the
University of California, San Diego in 1981 as a lecturer and was named to the
permanent faculty in 1984. Shank and her
husband, who is a professor emeritus in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UCSD,
established the Adele and Theodore Shank Professional Playwriting Residency
Award at the university. The endowed
position funds internship positions for master of fine arts students at UCSD with
theater companies around the U.S. A
theater on the university campus is named in honor of the Shanks.]
