The Line
I’m craving reality.
I’ve been craving reality for a long time. I fill my days with stupid, mind-numbing reality TV (Love Island is a personal favorite) and in-depth documentaries or episodic true crime series that I haven’t had time to watch until now. As much as I love watching documentaries and reality shows, these media don’t exactly translate to the stage. It takes a group of very special people to create a piece of what we call “documentary theatre.” It requires individuals who are both intelligent and imaginative, stringent and expansive. Documentary theatre requires that quality I was talking about in Hamilton: we know that Washington and Burr weren’t really Black men, but we buy into it anyway because it’s theatre. It is the world of “what if?”
If you pursue the development of production without at least a little bit of “what if,” then you might get something like The Public’s production of The Line. It’s pretty difficult for me to introduce even an ounce of criticism into this production when it is one of the most well-intentioned theatre pieces to have graced my computer screen. It is a simple tribute to New York’s healthcare workers- no, actually every healthcare worker who is fighting this pandemic. In an effort to preserve their testimony (perhaps), The Public has simply compiled interviews from these healthcare professionals as if it were a collage of pictures that slightly overlapped, but not enough to obscure the content of any one piece.
When you present a picture and you call that picture “documentary,” then you are setting yourself up to paint a picture that is 100% real. But it can’t be real. You have actors. You have stories that don’t actually belong to those actors. You have portrayals and impressions. While watching The Line, I was thinking about the work of Richard Maxwell. Specifically, I’m thinking of his show, Ads, which included all real people. No actors.* Real people telling their real stories. It wasn’t perfect. It was unpolished. No one was a professional actor or paid public speaker. But it was real.
I won’t get into the specifics of Ads too much, but the point is that The Line felt a bit… I don’t know. Conjured? Out of sync? It was almost as if the rhythm of the real speaker was being buried by the habits of the actors. Because of this, everything felt slightly off. It was like you typed in these real peoples’ testimonies into Google Translate, and then out came some wonky translation that only partially made sense. It was at this point that I asked myself, why not pull a Richard Maxwell? Why not get these people to tell their own stories? On the other hand, I could tell that, in their casting, they stayed true to the demographics of the real workers. Casting is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to fix misrepresentation, and yet, it is seldom used to fix the problem. Here it was. And honestly, it inspired me. It allowed me to trust that maybe from now on things really will be different.
I was also thinking about Lenox Hill. If you haven’t seen this documentary series, you need to. You need to right now. They most recently released an episode that spans the first two months of the pandemic, and it is humbling, it is tragic, it is inspiring, it is hopeful, hopeless. It’s everything. Real medical workers. Real stories. It shows you everything you’ve been worrying about at home. Everything that feels so remote, and yet, so close to you. And for all of that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about the power of reality.
The Line is available for free here until August 4th, 2020.
*If you would like to read more about Ads, shoot me an email and I’ll send you a segment of my thesis where I discuss the production.
