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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 facepainting 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 instructions 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 natural 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 textapocalypse! Because even though everyone knows the text, it’s entirely different 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. + 269 +
