At some point as we venture down the long and winding road of theatre criticism, we inevitably approach the question of "What is a play?" Then, just as quickly, we grab another drink and forget about it. But then, maybe, we find ourselves in a situation where we can't run away from the question, and we have to consider what it actually means to be an audience member.
This is the question I grappled with when I attended White Rabbit, Red Rabbit on Saturday night. I am not certain that what I saw was a play; it felt more like an open dialogue across space and time (on the other hand, perhaps that's precisely what a play is). In any case, whatever it was, I am glad I saw it.
White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, is the product of Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour. I think it is important to note that the script has not been translated. It was written in English: a language with which Nassim admits to having some difficulty. It seems, therefore, that the play was always intended for an international audience, that it was a way of reaching out beyond the borders of the country that he, himself, could not leave.
At this point, I would typically write a summary of the play's plot. But in this case I can't. It's not that I don't want to, I just can't. This is not a play that tells a story from one point to another. As I said, it may not be a play at all. Most plays have directors, with casts, and effects, and rehearsal processes. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has one actor on a stage, with one script, sealed inside a manila envelope. Our actor opens the envelope and begins reading from the script for the first time. This much I knew about the play going into it, and I wondered what it would be like to sit through a cold-reading of a script. But as it turned out, this was not at all like an actor doing a cold-reading of a script.
The actor was not so much performing the script as he was talking to it. The script was, itself, a character in the play. And I don't mean the writer, though he was a character as well, although in a different way. The writer and the script both engaged with the actor on different levels; the actor then engaged with the audience, as an intermediary between them and either the script or the author (and sometimes just as himself). The actor is a prisoner of sorts. He is bound to do whatever the script tells him. Although no one there is actually forcing him to continue on, the words on the page prove inviolable, and the actor is at their mercy. This sense of utter submission is important, because at the centre of the stage are two glasses of water; one of them is poisoned; at the end of the night, the actor must drink from one of them.
On each of the three nights, a different actor took the stage: Pamela Haig Bartley, Joshua Beaudry, and Raymon Montalbetti. A dedicated reviewer would have gone to see each performance to get a fair and balanced grasp on the play, but as it was, I was only able to attend the closing night. Montalbetti brought an erratic kind of energy to the experience, at once quick at vibrant, then instantaneously transforming to so slow and sombre that time pauses on a single breath. He began with a preface to his performance, which was not so much an introduction as it was an intimate peek into his own process, calming the swirling emotions in the moments before he embarked on a completely unknown adventure. He absorbed all of his spatial relationships until finally, with a heavy breath, he could begin reading.
It was a bizarre experience when the play began, because I didn't really understand what the words on the page were doing. But it became clear soon enough the nature of this conversation taking place. I was not being invited to watch a play; I was being forced to bear witness to an unprecedented sequence of actions, spiralling toward a terrible end.
For both actors and audience members, we are always aware, on one level or another, that we are watching a play. I knew, of course, that Mr. Montalbetti was not really going to be poisoned in the moments before curtain. But that did not stop a culture of fear spreading as the play went on. Soleimanpour uses our trust in the illusory nature of theatre against us. There is a crawling, lingering sense of dread that the faith we place in the divide between theatre and reality will betray us, that those unseen figures producing the play may not have everyone's best interests at heart, that all of those things we don't believe will hurt us may turn in an instant, and we will not know what's coming.
As it turns out, none of the actors participating in the play wound up dead. So that's good news. But Soleimanpour's point has been made: our security only persists insofar as select people continue to operate in a way that protects us, as long as our safety does not stand in the way of their own. Because the most unsettling aspect of the play was how all of us in the audience were trapped there as spectators, unable or unwilling to interfere in the events onstage, even knowing that Montalbetti was not fully in control of his own performance. No matter what happened, all we could do was watch.
And now, I suppose, before I conclude this review, I should address the play's title. It calls back an old social experiment with a group of hungry rabbits kept locked in a cage. There is one carrot; the rabbit that gets the carrot is painted red. The white rabbits, furious at this imbalance in power, will attack the red rabbit in retribution. When this experimented is repeated enough, the carrot becomes irrelevant; regardless of whether there are carrots for everyone or no carrots at all, the red rabbit will always find itself the victim of the warren's rage.
What does this mean for us, for us civilised humans? I guess that's what White Rabbit, Red Rabbit was all about.
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