Theater as a Forum for Intellectual Debate? How British.
by Kate Taylor
Sat, 26 Jan 2008 at 11:56 AM
"A serious house on serious earth." This is how Philip Larkin describes a place of worship in his poem "Church Going," which plays a pivotal role in "Grace," the new play by Mick Gordon and A.C. Grayling that is in previews at MCC Theater.
To Mr. Gordon, a wunderkind of the London stage world, it is the theater that is — or should be — this "serious house." Mr. Gordon was previously an associate director at London's National Theatre and the artistic director of the Gate Theatre. Now he runs a company called "On Theatre," where he creates plays that address subjects of intellectual or social debate, such as religion, dying, love, and the nature of consciousness.
Before he started this work, Mr. Gordon said in a brief interview before last night's performance, "I was reading a lot of writing by young playwrights that wasn't about anything. I think that's a misuse of theater."
For each play, he chooses a collaborator –– an expert in the given field whom he admires. For "On Dying," he collaborated with Marie de Hennezel, a psychologist at a French hospital for the terminally ill, whose book "Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us to Live" was a bestseller in France. For "On Ego," which is about consciousness, Mr. Gordon collaborated with the neurologist and author Paul Broks. For "Grace" (the London production of which was called "On Religion"), his collaborator is Mr. Grayling, a philosopher, self-proclaimed "naturalist" (a term he prefers to "atheist"), and author of some 20-odd books.
Although the structure of Mr. Gordon's plays varies, his technique always involves doing lots of interviews, through which he looks for the interesting character or nugget of a story that he can steal for his play. For "Grace," the crucial germ was a story Richard Dawkins told him about going to Canada to visit Michael Persinger, a cognitive neuroscientist who experimented with inducing religious experiences by stimulating the brain's temporal lobes. Subjects had to wear an apparatus, known as the "God helmet," which produced a weak magnetic field. At the beginning of "Grace," the main character, a female academic based loosely on Mr. Dawkins, undergoes the experiment, triggering a series of flashbacks to her painful falling-out with her son after he decided to become an Anglican priest.
You would not know from watching "Grace" that it is based partly on reporting; it is structured as a fairly conventional, four-character fictional play. Asked what he thinks of the techniques of Anna Deavere Smith, who uses interview material verbatim in her plays on topics from race riots to Presidential politics, or of David Hare's documentary approach in "Stuff Happens," his play about the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq, Mr. Gordon was dismissive. These fact-based approaches don't exploit all the possibilities of theater, he said. Plus, they pose as nonfiction, when in fact the playwright has to edit or, in Mr. Hare's case, imagine whole chunks of the play. "Documentary theater has had its day," Mr. Gordon said.
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