Third Person
Third Person is a lecture-cum performance in the form of a third person narrative. The story follows the strange love affair of two ordinary men whose brushes with loneliness, death and madness frame their attraction. Two performers, who may or may not be the subject of discussion, speak into microphones and use video projection, slides and overhead projectors (all under their own control) to illustrate the Third Person narrative.
The format of Third Person resists traditional theater conventions by primarily having the performers speak directly to the audience. Following a lecture/presentation format allows the performers to speak ‘around’ somewhat charged and personal material, illustrating the story with video, drawings and slides instead of ‘acting’ out scenes as if the audience was not present. Because the text is mostly directed right at the audience, the gaze of the audience becomes important to the performance; they receive the text as in a lecture or presentation as opposed to the way they would in a ‘play’. The separation between performers and characters becomes hazy – a fine line develops that encourages the audience to question the nature of the performance itself. In fact, the authenticity of the story and of the performers is subtly called into question. It is expected that the audience will begin to wonder how much is ‘true’ and how much is fictionalized as the piece develops.
The two performers control all the technology in Third Person and are primarily seated at a table facing the audience. They speak into microphones and illustrate the performance using overhead projectors, video projection and slides. Other than the equipment, the two performers, two water glasses, a projection surface and the table, the space is bare of scenery.
The text that the performers speak concerns the relationship between two men who meet by accident and begin a metaphorical journey into invisibility marked by their progressing disinterest in the world around them. Their desire to feel something, anything, brings them closer to death and love than they expected. They turn inwards, retreating from a sick society as they spend more time with one another. Their relationship spirals through the excesses of love, sex and drugs and eventually leads them into a no-mans land of miscommunication and numbness.
Using the lecture/presentation model to tell this story allows the sometime delicate texts to be accepted by the audience without judgment. The goal is not to see the genuine character revealing their story, but to see it from the third person, a vantage point from which strange occurrences can make sense. Even as the piece progresses, the texts begin to connect more with the two performers – to the point where it beings to feel as if these two people speaking are actually talking about themselves. This format mirrors the disorientation the two men in the story face as they go deeper into their relationship by abstracting the relationship between truth and fiction. This form purposely avoids a melodramatic, emotional performance style favoring instead a more stylized form.
As the story unfolds, breaks begin to emerge where each performers is alone on stage, seated at the table. They speak confessionals to the audience in first person – a direct and purposeful switch of tone and perspective meant to disjoint and disrupt the narrative while simultaneously instilling the sensation that perhaps this story has been about the two performers all along. In these moments of disjuncture, individual, localized narratives emerge that are related to the themes being discussed in the main story but are not directly linked with the narrative. These ‘side stories’ provide anecdotal evidence that the story of the two men is not isolated from the real world…in fact there are many strange fictions that relate to the story of Eddie and Joel. These speeches have a different feeling from the scenes with two performers. They are more intimate and have a somewhat careful, unrefined, raw feeling to them.
By the end of the piece, the text returns to a form that directly mirrors the first scene, but the content has become potentially more emotional. Avoiding an emotional delivery, however, in favor of abstraction gives more room for the audience to have their own experience. The performers do not steal the experience, instead they deliver it to those viewing the work for them to make their own conclusions.
Third Person marked a major shift in Proto-type’s work. Previous pieces like Cheap Thrills and Three Ring, which were large-scale narrative driven physical theater pieces collide with the austere, paired down format of About Silence to create a new format with Third Person. Third Person is an experiment in using a simple format to tell a complex story without apology or commentary.
Third Person premiered at the Brick Theater’s Moral Values Festival in 2005.