Most plays occur within forward-moving spans of time—"Long Day's Journey Into Night," for example. Even in "Poetics," his theatrical primer, Aristotle calls tragedy "a whole [with] a beginning, a middle, and an end."
But no more.
As playwrights explore new ways of delivering storylines and delineating characters, they are tinkering, more and more boldly, with innovative ways to theatrically depict the passage of time. And the basic idea is as old as time: In the musical "Assassins," opening on Broadway April 24 under the aegis of Roundabout Theatre Company, the climax arrives when the long-dead John Wilkes Booth appears in the Texas School Book Depository and exhorts Lee Harvey Oswald to pull the trigger on President Kennedy, thus insuring posterity for all presidential assassins. The characters obviously could not have met, but the technique—surreal, audacious, unsettling, unusual—makes for galvanizing theatrics.
Tinkering theatrically with time isn't limited to subjects of serious import. In his upcoming "Valhalla," opening Feb. 5 at New York Theatre Workshop, playwright Paul Rudnick intertwines the story of Bavaria's King Ludwig II—known as the "Mad King"—with the '40s-era tale of a Dainsville, Tex., teen named James Avery. Flipping back and forth between eras—Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" and "The Invention of Love" also come to mind—is a well-trod way to lay down plots and make subtle points.
In Relentless Theatre's new production, "The Hunger Waltz," running at Manhattan Ensemble Theater through Jan. 25, playwright Sheila Callaghan takes an even edgier approach. Directed by Olivia Honegger and starring Off-Off-Broadway favorite Susan O'Connor ("Never Swim Alone"), the piece explores one woman's search for her identity over a span of 600 years, leaping effortlessly through the 18th, the 20th, and the 22nd centuries.
Gwen, O'Connor's character, "has to take a personal journey to figure out what she wants," says Callaghan, "and she is the same character in all three eras—in fact, all four of the play's characters are in the same dynamic no matter what the era the action occurs in." Callaghan, who is also plugging away on commissions from Playwrights Horizons and South Coast Rep, stumbled onto the notion of toying with time while in graduate school at UCLA. "I wrote the last act first because I was interested in creating a new landscape—a post-apocalyptic play. Then it started being more about how language would change in the future—emulating patterns of speech, transmogrifying language, finding an 'email' way of speaking. Finally, I got attached to the characters—looking at where they had been, not where they were going."
In a move recalling Michael Frayn's approach to "Copenhagen," Callaghan structured the plot of "The Hunger Waltz" so that "the same thing happens, more or less, in each of the three acts. The characters, of course, are shaped by their environment, and perhaps by what the characters learn in the previous acts. Yet there is always the husband, who is always the sort of head honcho in the household, and there is always the same love interest for Gwen." Add in some "elements of the supernatural" to the play, and Gwen's quest for self-actualization becomes a truly timeless tale.
Callaghan theorizes that her interest in toying with time is the result of her "unwillingness to access our own time" in her plays. "I don't think I even have the tools to express myself about our own time. I have no access to perspective—I'm just not charmed by our time enough to feel like I could write something. I feel it would be a wretched piece of theatre, this unworthy time we live in."
Playing the Trans-Temporal
While "The Hunger Waltz" freely shuttles its characters through time like chessboard rooks and pawns, the National Theater of the United States of America, a collaborative troupe, is presenting "What's That on My Head!?!" through Feb. 8 at the Nest Arts Complex in DUMBO. The piece examines the "residue" of 400 years of American culture and history and takes a curious route to its theme, tracking three "contestants" as they play "a trans-temporal game show."
According to company member Mark Doskow, "There are several eras the piece focuses on. First, it starts in the old world—Jamestown in 1607—then it moves simultaneously to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, then to the 1890s with the Industrial Revolution and the Western frontier, then to the 1920s with speakeasies and Prohibition." The three "contestants," he adds, possess "an Everyman kind of sensibility. They are, in a sense, archetypal celebrities."
To understand the nature of the company's collaborative spirit, says fellow member James Stanley, it's essential to imagine a kind of freely associative process. "One day after a show, we were clowning around and someone came up with a game called 'What's That on My Head?'—I think it was [fellow member] Jonathan Jacobs. The idea is that you place an object on your head and you have to guess what it is by the sensation of it, which is absurd. Now, the nature of our company focuses on American identity—trying to attain a democratic process. By playing a game, we came to decide that we wanted to look at history from a new perspective."
Come again? How does a company go from playing games to playing games with time? "One of the things common to the theatre throughout history is storytelling," Doskow explains. "The question for us is whose perspective we are looking at, whose perspective is accurate. We wanted to try and be historically accurate but also to look at history from a more entertaining point of view, to take this 'residue' and distill it into a game show in which three contestants would work their way through American history."
Helping them along, naturally, is the ubiquitous celebrity panel. "We looked at a lot of '50s and '60s game shows to see how they were done," Stanley says, "and through these celebrity archetypes we could 'lay in' historical scenarios and see how the contestants would respond."
Doskow and Stanley insist that creating a time-bending piece, especially one created through collective creative consensus, is not as haphazard as it may seem. "No, there isn't just one director—people just kind of come in with ideas," Doskow says. "And themes play a large role in our work—in this piece, it's the idea that there have always been those in history who lead revolts and become the ruling class, only to have people revolt against them, thus beginning the process all over again." Sticking to themes, rather than getting stuck on semantics and staging, is how the company arrives at agreement on text and, in the case of this piece, how they turn the passage of time into something tantalizing.