LJ Idol - DW - 5: Kayfabe (~1500 words)
In professional wrestling, kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or predetermined nature of any kind.
~Wiki.
In class, some people write notes, some sleep, some are bored, and a few rare ones write down not only regular notes, but also certain phrases the professor says, which, especially out of context, can be extremely funny.
I never was among the last group, and most often took copious notes.
Yet there is still another aspect of learning from someone I cherish: the little tidbits of personal experience, which they sometimes share. An unspoken rule of the learning environment is that a certain distance should be maintained between the teacher and the student, which makes learning personal things about your favourite professors all the more meaningful.
These are the few facts that I know about Valerian Ivanovich Gervids, my beloved late physics professor. He would tell us to practice drawing horizontal and vertical lines, circles and ovals by hand, because we would not always have rulers and compasses handy, and it was obvious from the way he wrote on the board that he practiced the same himself.
He had an old fluffy cat and lived on the 10th floor of an apartment building. This came up as we were studying gravity, with him asking if we had ever tried to throw pet fur off a balcony and had it fly upward, not down on the flows of air.
Finally, it came up during a class on nuclear fission that his son in law, also a graduate of our college, was one of the people who came from all over the Soviet Union to help "liquidate", eliminate the consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe. And that while the young man was there, he helped develop a method of the remote discovery of the more radioactive debris, which had to be removed and sealed as quickly as possible, yet were invisible to the naked eye. To locate them, you had to superimpose ordinary photographs with images made from the same viewpoint using the X-ray film at a certain exposure. The latter only showed bright spots caused by the radiation, but looking at the two images together, the responders could go where they were most needed directly, and lose as little time as possible.
In Chernobyl, time was critical. You could go to certain areas only once, for a few minutes at most, then never in the remainder of your life be allowed near radiation sources again, for risk of the radiation sickness. Despite these precautions (which were ignored during the first desperate efforts to limit the consequences, when qualified personnel was in short supply and time flew), many developed the sickness afterward; some died from it.
I equally cherish the little in- and out-of-character moments actors have during and after the shows that I go to.
The only play I have seen the late John Hurt in was the one-man-show Krapp's Last Tape, which as story of an old man who lives alone and has an odd way of celebrating his birthdays. Every year, he records an (audio) tape summarizing his life to date, and listens to a single randomly chosen tape from the years gone by.
Despite the audience being there, the character is alone throughout the play, and does not interact with the spectators at all. Mr Hurt said in an after-show interview that the only way for him to judge the audience's reaction to his performance during the show was by how absolute the silence in the auditorium was becoming as the plot unraveled.
During one of the performances I was at, the silence was so absolute that the audience did not realize that the play was over. The silence continued into the final black out, but as the lights went on again, neither did Mr Hurt break character. We saw Krapp still sitting behind his desk, where he ended the play. Then he looked at the audience for the first time, shrugged, opening his arms wide-and was John Hurt again in the blink of an eye.
In the five performances I have seen of another play, John Gabriel Borkman, with Fiona Shaw, Lindsay Duncan and the late much missed Alan Rickman, emergencies happened with members of the audience twice in the same week (the only such unfortunate events I have witnessed in theatre). Both times, the actors left the stage while those who needed help received it. One time it was during a scene between Rickman as Borkman and Shaw as his wife Gunhild. It being a period play, he offered her his arm as they exited, like any gentleman would a lady.
The second time it happened during a shouting match between Gunhild and her sister Ella Rentheim (Duncan), which the actresses then had to restart from its shouting climax, with no emotional buildup preceding.
On the one hand, you go to the show and you hope it runs smoothly, yet on the other, little details like these make you love theatre, and your favourite actors, even more.
The off-stage and supposedly out-of-character moments can be equally fascinating. The "meeting actors at stage door" culture is noticeably less developed in Russia than it is in Britain and the U.S., and when I was young, "stage-dooring" was frowned upon by my parents as an excessive and overly exulted behaviour.
Myself, I go there rarely, when the need to say a personal "thank you" outweighs the feeling that I intrude upon a busy and already too-often-approached stranger's personal time. I have only ever approached Alan Rickman, Philip Quast and Stephen Fry.
My first time at the stage door, after Alan Rickman's play Seminar, was also the easiest. The show being on Broadway in New York, the stage door experience was semi-organized, with barriers brought out to separate the actors from the audience, and a security guard present in case of emergencies. It felt less intrusive that way.
The play told a story of a private class, a writing seminar, taught to four aspiring young writers by a greatly renowned editor and part-time asshole (Rickman).
It was interesting to see all five actors from the play interact with spectators at stage door, and the public personas they were projecting (in the case of Rickman, Hamish Linklater and Jerry O'Connell) and creating (Lily Rabe). Mr Rickman was all "you can take a picture of me" (not with me), as he attentively listened and stayed until every one who wanted and autograph got one. Mr O'Connell, in what, I believe, was his debut Broadway appearance, acted the hyper excited schoolboy. Mr Linklater was a slippery Janus who was both there with the fans and not. Ms Rabe projected a slightly exaggerated gravitas-in-training, and Ms Hettienne Park, the fourth seminar student, looked embarrassed by the stage door hoopla and often quietly slipped away.
Having told all these stories, I come, again, to the same conclusion I often do, that I prefer most things in moderation, and that there is no better way to emphasize a role, be it in theatre or in society, than by occasionally breaking character.
To conclude, here is a prefect example of this from yet another play, the musical Follies, which I went to see because Philip Quast played one of the title roles in it. The story told is that of two couples, Ben (Quast) and Phyllis and Sally and Buddy, who return to New York for the anniversary party of the old musical Follies, where both ladies used to star while the boys waited "downstairs" for them to come out after the shows.
At the party, it comes out that all four suffer from the midlife crisis, are on the verge of divorce and do not know what they are doing with their lives anymore. Sally is ready to elope with Ben, her old flame, and Phyllis feels dead inside.
Yet nothing changes after the play, and the couples, through much turmoil, learn that maybe, just maybe, their perfect partner has been by their side all this time.
In the culmination of the musical, all four main characters sing their main songs, also called "follies", which summarize all that they have gone through and learned about themselves. And in Ben's Folly, he stumbles, and stops, and for a heart-stopping moment your heart drops for thinking that it is the actor who has forgotten his lines, and not Ben who does not know how to go on anymore.
Philip Quast was improvising that heart-stopping moment differently every night. During one performance, I was seated in the center of the front row, and when he (Ben?) asked the laughing audience, "You think it's funny, don't you?", the illusion was complete that the words were said to me, and the invisible "fourth wall" separating the scene and the audience had disappeared.