Strange fruit

I must say that one of the things that encapsulates the theatrical experience for me is the very simple act of carrying strange objects around with me, knowing what they're for, and knowing - as I do so - that nobody else has a clue why I'm carrying that with me as I walk through the hall, down the street, or on the subway.

In the past, that has been canoe paddles, a medical bag, swords, a staff of office, large yellow pantaloons, a life-sized portrait without a face, and a decapitated head. This year, it's a large box containing a bundt-pan sized ring of green jello and a half-collapsed skull named Gloriana. Most people don't know her name is Gloriana, of course, but it's one of those things that you just feel compelled to refer to by name. What is even more amusing about Gloriana is that her jaw is held on with Gorilla and Krazy glue and she is older than most of the cast (her date of manufacture is 1985). And she's wearing lipstick.

Kudos to anyone who can tell me why she's wearing it.

It may seem strange that carrying odd things about is what encapsulates theater for me. But I'm not an actor, I'm a technician, and the theater is all about strange objects. It's about things that you've cobbled impossibly together to resemble something else entirely. About putting string and wire and paint together and making an obelisk, a monument to human intellect and imagination. About closing your eyes, stepping back, and flipping the switch and finding out whether your little creation glows brightly or sets the theater on fire.

Characters are like that, too. These funny, mish-mashes of the writers who've scripted them, the directors who interpret them, and the actors who breathe life into their hollow forms. They're these funny things that appear one way in your mind, but then take on this uncontrollable energy once you let them loose within a body. Each time, they are different. Each time, the glue and strings that compose their flesh are unique.

There is no absolute Hamlet. Hamlet must change as time passes, as the seasons turn, as kings rise and fall, as new countries are made and new worlds discovered. Yes, there is a timelessness to Hamlet. To any character or play. But it is not that Hamlet, as performed in 1600, has endured. It is that Hamlet has adapted. And I do not mean in the Ethan Hawke sense. I mean in the sense that we find something within the hollow essence that is Hamlet that is relevant, that is real. What is real now in Hamlet may be - but most likely is not - the same thing that was real when his words were first scripted. But he has endured.

This endurance is not unique to drama. Far from it. Novels, poems, songs, paintings. All endure. All adapt. But theater is different. It must be. It is a medium not of words or paint, but of bodies and voices. Yes, there are words. Often, there is paint. There are lights and clothes and makeup and music. But the bodies. The voices. These are the true medium of the theater, and no one person has control over it all. Not even in a one-man or one-woman show. Because the theater requires the audience. It needs - like we need air and food and water - the people who come, who stand or sit and listen and watch. The theater is not simply what is put into it by the designers and directors and actors. It is what the audience takes, and what it gives back.

That is its true beauty. The strangest fruit of all, that ripens as you watch, that blooms and fruits and seeds itself within the minds of those gathered to witness a singular event that can never and will never happen again. The crowd of transient participants who have the privilege, the honor, of witnessing a birth, a life, and a death all in the two-hours traffic of the stage.