New York, New Yorker			Claudio Pinhanez

Week 5: hyper realism

A hyperdose of realism, coming from movies, TV, and even theater. Something has been bugging me since I've arrived in New York and started going to the theater, and movies here. Tonight I went to see Daisy Foote's "When They Speak of Rita". It is a beautifully constructed text, and two of the actors (Hallie Foote and Ebon Moss-Bachrach) are really great. But like the main character, Rita, something was missing from the beginning: it was not theater, it was voyeurism. The actors were so real, and at the same time so distant, so oblivious to the audience, that I felt like a voyeur. Somehow, it felt like a TV movie, not like a theater. Never any character/actor look at the audience and created the kind of complicity and connection that are the nectar of the live performance.

And this is all over Broadway. In "The Real Thing", although to a less extent (rescued by the needs of comedy), in dropping chandeliers in "The Phantom of the Opera", or when transforming the stage into a helipad for "Miss Saigon". Standup comedy is the other side of the realism, where the performer never leaves the reality, never reaches its fantastic side. In the movies, in "X-Men", in "The Perfect Storm", even in Ridley Scott's "Gladiator". An obsession with reality, with making even the portrayed reality more real than the reality. The storm is made more realistic, more visible than a real storm, to convince us about its terrific power. "Survivor", "Who wants to be a millionaire?", "Who wants to marry a millionaire?", are just new coins of the old game of "Cops". Voyeurism on video, even if for fabricated reality. The wrestling phenomenon is another symptom, but maybe the redemption of it. Yes, I confess, I sometimes watch it, and I am fascinated by the transformation that the inclusion of dramatic components have created in the show. WWF is now a long soap opera, but the characters are not flat and real, they have mythic proportions. It is a pity they are so bad actors, because the scripts are interesting.

I miss fantasy, allegory, metaphor. Suspension of disbelief instead of computer gymectic special effects. So far, help came from abroad. With Filao, a circus-theater from France, creating a complex work out of simple circus, great choreography, and the fantastic world of a writer. French imagination, and metaphorical complexity. And also Peter Greenaway, with his opera "Writting to Vermeer", visually striking, with water pouring over singers, dancers, projected words. Even when I don't understand all the connections, the fantastic are many times richer in meanings, in the complexity that pure reality has. Don't understand me as trying to make an eulogy to alienation: it's not about content, it's about form. America is obsessed with reality (or imagined reality, most likely), and this mania is spreading through our other cultures.

Somehow I feel that those thoughts are not completely right, I'm still trying to digest the flurry of ideas and feelings. Probably some of the examples are mistakenly chosen, too bad, but my feeling is that there is something into this idea. Anyway, it is not far from some of the comments of Umberto Eco about American culture, maybe they are even a repetition, but in the worst case I'm in good company. It's more about my feelings about the reality than the reality of my feelings.