Conversation with Daniel Brooks
How long have you been engaged with Half Life? For a number of years now, when we both went to Glasgow at the invitation of Neil Murray who was running the Tron Theatre. The deal was that John and I went together, and he brought the first scene or two of Half Life and I brought my play The Good Life, which I had done once and was rewriting. We worked with a group of students from the Royal Scottish Academy (their national theatre school), over about four days; John worked on his play and I worked on mine. We’d meet at night, and I’d show him what I was working on, he’d show me what he was working on and that was the beginning of our working together. He wrote a couple of scenes there, ending up with about five scenes which were presented at the end. But other than expressing interest in the core of ideas he was looking at, I didn’t do much work other than encouraging. After that I got a short workshop together—two days, I think—with a group of actors, three of whom are still with the play: Maggie Huculak Diego Matamoros, and Laura de Carteret. In that workshop, John added a couple of scenes, we read it, talked about it, and put it on its feet…I created parameters for what people could do; for instance, there was no audience, because I didn’t want the actors to “play” anywhere. We were in a studio with windows and I’d ask them to look out the window, to play the play as if it was a real space. We did that two or three times because it was very short at that point and we got a feel for how it might play, what the acting style might be, how the ideas affected the acting…John began to move things around, maybe he added another scene… Did that directorial intervention affect the characters, how they were developed? I think the company of actors and I affected the writing by asking certain kinds of questions. As this is the most realistic or naturalistic of John’s plays—it’s a real place, in a real time—a chronology is important; when people say something is real, it has to be seen as being real. If there’s an inconsistency in something being said by one character another character has to question it, or refrain from questioning it, but that is part of the game. So if the audience knows that I smoke, and I say in a scene that I don’t smoke, that’s dramatically important…These are the nuts and bolts of storytelling, so a lot of what we did was ask questions about those essential realities. For instance, John talked about the “second floor” (where Patrick is sent in the play) and we made some demands of him about that place. We asked a lot of questions about that second floor. He began to find some language to describe that place that was more accurate and provocative and thematically coherent. Likewise Donald’s driving to the nursing home: I insisted there be some reality around that; if he had to drive two hours every day how does that affect him? How does that affect how we view the sensation of time in the piece, both from a narrative standpoint, and how it feels for Donald to sit in a chair. So those are the things we pressed him on.…Narrative coherence. It’s possible to experience the play simply as a very powerful emotional narrative. But what would you say the underlying themes or ideas are? The play looks into many things in a very poetic, probing and playful way (I mean playful in the true sense); it has its characters and the audience question what constitutes a person, an identity, a thought, a memory. What does it mean to live knowing that we die, knowing that all that we think and all of our memories ultimately disappear. And what is memory? How does it live with us? What do you live for if there’s no greater memory of our existence? There’s a beautiful line in the play: “if there is no God, then everything will be forgotten.” And what does it mean to love? In the play someone rekindles a love for somebody they think they used to love. But as an audience we don’t even know if she knew that person. So how real is that love? How real is any love when it takes place in the mind? To what degree is love a fiction, an important fiction? John plays with these ideas in subtle ways. For instance: there’s a great joke where the preacher is giving a sermon behind a door; when the door opens, we hear part of the sermon. On the surface it’s just a theatrical joke. But there’s thematically a lot of substance. [In the sermon] he’s speaking blithely about 60 million deaths and we in the audience laugh because of the context in which he says it. But those are 60 million lives, 60 million memories, 60 million specific experiences of love and time, parents growing old, or not, all forgotten and turned into a joke…John explores all these ideas about identity, experience and love from many angles. One of the major theatrical devices in the play is the device of interruption. The play begins by having a character tell a story about being interrupted at a party and then that character is interrupted as he tells it. It’s a device that allows John to dramatically shift the attention of the audience at any given moment And to hold their attention. Once he’s established the trope, he’s both diverting attention and making sure you know that--- Yes. And that’s essentially the nature of Clara’s mental difficulties: her attention shifts from one moment to the next, radically. At one moment she has a coherent understanding that her son is married to Susan. It’s out of time, out of phase. But her intention is clear and her question is simple and pure: How is Susan? When Donald says, I don’t know, we’re divorced, she immediately shifts her attention and says, you must be very lonely. She enters into another present without a problem, without any cognizance of the radical change in her intention. These themes are repeated through many different prisms. Another major theme or question: is it possible to really know another person? What does it mean to know ourselves when our consciousness and our minds are such shifting phenomena? That theme is reflected in many ways, with many devices, well, two main ones. One is the character of Donald. Donald is perpetually attempting to part the curtains and understand human psychology—not only in a general sense because he is a psychologist ,but also as a human being. What’s real for his mother? What are Patrick’s real intentions, and what are Anna’s? Is Tammy stealing? Donald’s always trying to penetrate behind a curtain, and theatrically, that’s set up in a number of different ways; three times in the play, someone speaks to someone behind a curtain… It’s amazing how delicate the play is, when you read it. Like a series of bubbles…each little scene bounces onto the stage, hovers there and bounces off. There’s no grinding of gears and not a lot of exposition. As the director, how do you translate that delicacy into something that people will sit in their seats and get? Part of the director’s job is to tell a story, using text to tell a story. A different set or environment tells a different story. By having actors stress different things you tell a different story. My sense of John’s writing in this play in particular is that if an actor displays too much emotion, we’re removed from the story and taken too deeply into the actor’s immediate emotional experience. John’s characters, although they feel deeply and intensely, often are overwhelmed by many contradictions. So language is a tool to escape or avoid thought or the danger of a human interaction. Language is an experiment at all times, an experiment at attempting to express a feeling or a need… I have to get at the internal life of the characters, allowing the internal life to be more profound than the external life. What does that mean you have to do, what’s your responsibility? John writes on many different levels. There’s usually a potent theatrical metaphor in every scene, but he doesn’t always think about how you get from one to another, what it means on a stage to move from a church to a hallway in a nursing home. Part of my job is to figure out what that means, what that feels like, what the audience sees and doesn’t see, what’s essential in a space in this play. And then, rather than that scene change being an obstacle, what can we create that will add to the experience of this play for an audience in moving from one location to another? What kind of theatrical editing can we create that will enhance the experience of the play, in the aesthetic experience of it, in exploring its metaphors more deeply and also in creating the music of the play. For example the curtain: obviously it has theatrical purpose, used to reveal and hide and create spaces but that's also how curtains are used in hospitals... Yes. And the bed, for instance. We tried the bed first as a reclining hospital chair, a kind of wheelchair, which was more practical to move. But it became clear that you need a real bed, [especially] for the power of Clara at the end of the play. There’s something about the archetype of a hospital bed. Part of my job is to assess what’s necessary and what isn’t. So once you choose a hospital bed that creates a lot of demands….it’s a big object. And if an actor lies on it, he or she can’t be seen by all of the audience. Very practical concerns come from making certain choices. Are there specific challenges in shifting this play from the small, intimate spaces, where it has played until now, to a large space [like the Bluma Appel]? There are. This stage is much bigger. So all the timings change. The opening of a curtain takes longer; what ramifications does that have on the experience of the play, on how we read the person who’s moving the curtain? It’s going to feel much more theatrical. All the moving of furniture, all the timings will change. The floor area is much bigger. So we’ll experience characters and characters in space in a different way. It’s an incredibly intimate piece, and everything the characters are talking about and doing is very personal; how does that intimacy translate… Sometimes it’s a question of voice, where an actor pitches his voice will be different. And when does an actor have to sacrifice that intimacy to open up, which means literally, physically, shifting a leg so the body is open to an audience…these are the things we’ll assess the impact of. The themes of the play are so large. Even though they’re played in a very delicate manner, the themes are large and they can fill the space as large as the Bluma. What about some of the other aspects—sound, lighting—as you transform the production from a small space to a large one? In a small space, it’s much easier to control the feel of the sound and to locate it. For instance there’s a lot of ambient sound that you’re not always aware of. There is sound connected with scene changes; what happens when we extend that sound for four or five seconds? Will the sound need some internal dynamic? If it’s a drone and it’s five seconds longer this time, will it need to swell in volume? And with lighting, how much of the floor do we light? How much do we open up the lighting? One of the things you experience in these nursing homes is how profoundly alone people can seem…I feel tremendous sadness in those places. Loneliness, isolation; people who spend hours and hours alone with their thoughts that have come from a life lived and that will be forever forgotten once they’re gone. I hope we can capture that feeling in a theatrical way, by the size of the stage. That will affect how we light it. Is Half Life a dark play? No. Not at all. I think its an extremely optimistic play.…To take very seriously a love affair between a man who is nearing the end of a very difficult life and a woman who’s not entirely coherent is such a beautiful act of generosity and optimism. John is a really special playwright, an artist who puts an enormous amount of time, thought, consideration and craft into his work is an optimistic act. And then a group of seven actors and a director and a number of designers creating an aesthetically and psychologically coherent act of theatre is an optimistic act. It’s a play in its melancholic way that celebrates connections and failures to connect in life… Daniel Brooks was talking to Necessary Angel board member Marian Botsford Fraser
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