A hand, reaching out like an antenna, touches my hair—then pulls away sharply. It returns, curious, to pat its way around my skull. And comes back again, affectionately, to tousle my hair like a puppy’s ears.
During the workshop, Andrew Schoen, who plays the Son, wasn’t the only actor to run into me. As I observed the action, seated on a platform about a foot off the ground, another felt my notebook, then moved away. A third almost ran me down and, in the process, threatened to fall onto the platform himself. I didn’t know whether I was more scared for him or me—and it wasn’t clear whether my role was to be an immovable object or a person. But just watching this one wordless exercise illuminated the conflicting human impulses to be safe and to explore.
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“It’s the mind,” Varga chimes in. “‘Oh, I must memorize the text! I must memorize!’” Debrei continues, “But for us, everything starts from the center”—he gestures at his midsection—”from silence, immobility. To move, it’s nothing. We must start from the zero point, the creative zero.”
When I ask Debrei and Varga a purposely naive question—does the actor’s emotion transfer automatically to the audience member?—Varga answers with a flat no. “It’s not explicable when emotion arrive to the audience,” she says. “This is what I call magic. It can arrive if we are in the moment, truly, and whole. That is the reason the preparation is so important—to be prepared, we need to have the physical body.
So far, Theatre Y has mounted just five productions (one a trilogy) in as many years. The Binding will be its sixth. Lorraine is known for producing politically oriented plays, most of them by the Transylvanian/Romanian playwright Andras Visky, and she describes The Binding as “political in the largest sense, meaning that there’s a refusal of the system. There’s a rebellion inside this play. I feel it in myself as we start to work through the text—and I love work that creates a riot inside the individual watching it. I trust a play that causes you to resist the text. That visceral response is so fascinating, how you can usher someone into their very own opinion. You are giving them nothing—you are only causing their own spirit to grab hold of its own conclusion.
Thu 8/22, 7 PM
Theatre Y at Saint Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square
2649 N. Francisco
708-209-0183
theatre-y.com
$50 suggested donation includes movement preview, performance by Denes Debrei and Heni Varga, and food, drinks, and live music.
