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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY)
in order to reach confidently the production’s style by Tuesday? It occurs to
Purcarete to play the entire piece without masks — but this is impossible at
this point. The language of the entire production is built on them: the doubling
of masks and voices. That rupture — the one speaking and the other acting —
evokes the aesthetic of puppet theater, but this, however, must come off with
total precision. Silviu suggests that we dispense with the masks and make do
with strong facial colors, because he no longer has confidence in the arrival of
the masks. Dragos Buhagiar suggests gold-colored makeup — but in that case,
what would we be playing, that’s the question. Purcarete envisions strong face¬
painting nonetheless, calls in the theater’s makeup artists, wanting to explain
the latest proposal to them. In fact, he wants to dispense with the masks of the
Lucifers: gray makeup, black teeth. Silviu exits, thinks with visible gestures,
thinking various options through. “I cannot rearrange the entire production
in forty-eight hours,” he says.
Meanwhile, the lighting people are at work, having received specific instruc¬
tions about the installation of the lights. Cleaning up, corrections, bafflement
— and all simultaneously.
Enikö Szd4sz complains to me about the text’s unintelligibility: diction,
breathing, articulation, emphasis. That’s right, yes. Except that, well, nobody
is yet truly speaking the text; they rattle it off as well as they can, running
after the scene, props get switched, chaotic exits and entrances: it’s all a natu¬
ral consequence of the production’s complexity, I tell them. When they’ve all
found their places, the text will get its voice: I trust in that.
A newer proposal: get rid of the masks except for the Adam-Eve pairs, and
double them with amplified voices, while the others speak. Yet another text¬
apocalypse! Because even though everyone knows the text, it’s entirely dif¬
ferent to speak it aloud, to articulate it aloud, to formulate true and exact
thoughts, rather than to mutter it to themselves invisibly behind the masks
just to keep the action going. Let’s see what the actors have to say about the
idea. And if they say yes, when will I have time to rehearse, to work individually
with each of them on the text — since we haven’t had the time thus far, we’ve
always been racing for time like those who’ve lost their minds? Somehow, the
text always gets left for last in these projects, which also means that the real
textual work never happens, and the actors get inevitably slapped around by
the critics, even though it’s not their fault. Only once everyone’s mask is perfect
can the work begin to define the masked characters.
The solution is born: only the Adam-Eve pairs will wear masks; in this way,
the switching between pairs will also be easier for the audience to follow.
“Maybe it will be comprehensible that Adam and Eve find themselves not in
their own skin,” says Silviu. According to the actors, this version is achievable
in the short time available; “Let’s tackle it,” they say.
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