[boxhead]. Darren O'Donnell
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![[boxhead] - Darren O'Donnell](fpic_read702040.jpg "[boxhead] - Darren O'Donnell")
rationalism that is capable of telling us very specific things – the show ran fifteen seconds faster than yesterday – but things that are empty of any real meaning. It also leads to other neuroticisms, like the fetish for arriving on time. Adopting the attitude that collaborators will arrive always at the correct time – whether they’re late or not – has meant that the time spent waiting for them (when a traditional approach might be to get all freaked out about their lack of respect) provides time to get to know each other, shoot the shit and stumble upon ideas that might not have manifested had the offending collaborator arrived punctually.
With [boxhead], an atypical collaborative relationship is necessary between the actors and the stage manager as they coordinate the complicated interplay of the different voices. Each actor plays two characters: the doctor and the doctor’s narrator. Very often there is a complicated choreography of button-pushing on the vocal effects technology. Stephen Souter, the late, great stage manager, was the first person to tackle the task. He stuck a colour-coded circle beside each and every line in the script and on each button of the effects box and would carefully follow along, making hundreds of precisely timed switches. In that draft of the script, each actor played three characters, so at times there were six vocal settings. He, and subsequently Beth Kates, had to be completely on the ball, remaining as focused as the actors, the three of them working this tight choreography to create the illusion that there are multiple characters in constant conflict. This choreography is a very delicate thing that also happens to be travelling at an intense clip; as actor Adam Lazarus points out, ‘There’s somewhat of an unforgiving focus demanded – one missed word, a pause, a reorder, an extended breath, throws the show out of sync for ten minutes.’
The entire experience for the performer is something that materializes some of the themes of the show. I wanted to create something that went beyond merely representing a post-rational state and actually forced the performer into a state where they had to abandon their rational mind and fully accept the groove of the show. The split of consciousness required by acting can be an amazing thing to watch – an actor can sometimes appear to be fully engaged in a complicated discussion or choreography while in her head she might be assembling tomorrow’s grocery list. But, inspired by the writings of E. J. Gold, who was, in turn, inspired by G. I. Gurdjieff, I wanted to create an experience for the actor that would be so overwhelming that it would be impossible to concentrate on anything else, so that the constant obsessive yammering in my head that provides the soundtrack to my life would stop and I could simply plug into the machine of the show and tune out of life. Gold and Gurdjieff both have techniques and exercises to overload the conscious mind, in order to let intuition run the human biological machine, as Gold calls it. Actors are often told not to overthink, to simply get in there and do. That’s easy to say. [boxhead] was designed to make this happen by giving the actor as much to deal with as possible: complicated text, multiple characters and a detailed and complex physicality that is often at odds with what is being spoken, as the actor’s voice has to portray one character while his body portrays another.
Paul Fauteux, the original boxhead: ‘[boxhead] is a very unique performance experience. It is not acting in the traditional sense. It is a concentration exercise. The exercise is created by the layers of disorientation which must be focused through while performing: the box on the head, through which we can see only dimly when it is tilted down and only the inside of the box when we are looking up; having to reach very precise locations onstage in the blackouts while we can barely see; the rhythmic, very imaginative, often non-linear language; the precise physicality; the fact that our voices are treated so we hear our own voices in the box and another voice going out to the audience simultaneously; the abrupt switches from one character to another – all these layers of focus create a trance-like zone of hyper-concentration which is extremely satisfying because it moves the actors’ imaginations past the intellectual into the subconscious and throws them directly into the immediate.’
Adam Lazarus: ‘The box is heavy, hot, humid; you hear voices, you can’t see. It’s like having a box on your head.’
The set was initially designed by Cand Cod – an anagram of the first initials of Darren O’Donnell, Chris Abraham and then-producer of the show Naomi Campbell. The great thing about working with a couple of people who have little experience in a given medium – in this case, set design – is that we didn’t have very much attachment to our identities as set designers, yielding a relaxed productivity, where small suggestions, large concepts and final touches would just bubble to the surface as we hung out and got the show made. It was the same when Naomi and I worked on White Mice – just casual conversations between two people who have worked with sets all their lives but who don’t know anything about designing them. This loose amateurism yielded a great design that was totally organic and relaxed. Small collaborations created simply to get things done can often make big differences. David Kinsman, the publicist at Theatre Passe Muraille, did a final and lasting tweak on the title when he encased it in square brackets. So great and so obvious, but no one but David saw it.
Chris brought on Romano De Nillo, the percussionist who created the sound score, which turned out to be a massively important element in the show. It was great to watch them work: Chris would describe feelings for accents, stings and scoring and Romano would toss stuff back. It’s as close as I’ve ever seen to a couple of artists hanging out, like they were just a couple of guys jamming in some basement, but while in the pressure cooker of a brief rehearsal period. This relationship owed a lot to Romano’s ridiculous relaxedness (he’s an Italian Newfie) and Chris’s brilliance at leading large groups of collaborators, tapping and making room for people’s strengths. There weren’t supposed to be any songs in the production – the first staging had maybe two. But this element worked so well that with each subsequent incarnation we’ve added a couple of numbers, always tweaking the satire so it remains current.
One of the collaborators I’ve always been keen to engage is the audience, looking for ways to rigorously include them in a way that isn’t mortifying, embarrassing or dorky. The solution for [boxhead] was small but decisive: it would be the audience’s responsibility to provide the key to the doctors’ dilemma by pulling the rope that drops their compatibility results, revealing why they have been unable to conceive a baby. This moment is a second-rate rip-off of Brooks’ and Verdecchia’s Noam Chomsky Lectures, where they leave the responsibility for the show’s final cue to the audience, who must call for a blackout, an onus we experience as analogous to the more general responsibility Daniel and Guillermo are laying on us throughout the show. Back in the day, that moment blew my mind: rigorous audience participation that perfectly expressed the themes of the show. In [boxhead], the realworld stakes are decidedly lower, but for the four characters onstage, it’s a crucial moment that has yielded either an incredibly nervous tension in the room or audience members leaping over one another to pull the rope. It’s a small but important moment of audience collaboration; as I’ve argued elsewhere,1 the active presence of the audience is pretty much the only positive factor that distinguishes theatre from film, video and television.
One of the problems at work in the way theatre artists usually think about collaboration is the conception of a theatre production as an organic totality. New York–based Mexican-born philosopher Manuel DeLanda points out that organic totalities are closed systems in which relations of interiority create a situation where component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to the whole: ‘A part detached from such a whole ceases to be what it is, since being this particular part is one of the constitutive properties. A whole in which the component parts are self-subsistent and their relations as external to each other does not posses an organic unity.’2 A theatre production is an organic totality, with the component parts not possessing any meaning if they’re detached from the other parts. The actor cannot meaningfully speak those lines in any other context, the costume designs remain on the drawing board if they’re not realized in the production, and a given sound montage is only valuable when it’s in relation to the particular line and actions of a particular actor playing a particular part. There is a paradox of an atomized dependence in traditional theatre that forecloses fluid, flexible and autonomous collaboration.
These insights have been driven by my time spent working with various visual artists, particularly the Instant Coffee collective. When