The Drinking Party -- a review
By PFSheckarski, 04/18/2010. Originally appeared in Tulsa Theatre Weekly
Above, clockwise, from left: Starr Hardgrove, Rob Harris, Ira J. Smith, Andy Axewell, Alexander Walter, Terrence Bellows, and Craig Walter, in the Midwestern Theater Troupe production of "The Drinking Party."
It's easy to forget that what we consider to be classic literature was in large part meant to be not merely read but declaimed. This is certainly true of poetry, which was long a spoken art before it was a written one.
There is even some reason to believe that literate people in classical times, and even as recent as St. Augustine's time, could not read without moving their lips.
St. Augustine writes in praise of St. Ambrose: "his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest."
St. Augustine had apparently never seen anyone achieve this before, with such surprise he writes about the spectacle.
What is the effect of divorcing the word from speech?
The written word mediates language, distances us from the ideas and thoughts behind the words which end up reifying them. The spoken word, however, at least allows us to communicate not only in (within) language but with the infinitely subtle inflections of timbre, pitch, and so forth, along with the gestures and facial expressions that accompany a speech.
The written word is cut off from these accents, these signifiers, and is in a way only half a language, a mere translation, even as little as a placeholder for what we had originally intended.
The spoken word is not only more accurate but is more human, too, because our own bodies produce it: the hot air from our lungs, enlivened by vibrations from our diaphragm, carved into recnogizable shapes by our tongue, teeth, lips and palate.
As a result, the Nightingale Theater production of Plato's Symposium, here rendered as The Drinking Party, gives bone and flesh and blood and breath to what is so tempting to dismiss as, and so often encountered as, a dry and reified text with little application to ourselves.
It's easy to forget, or never learn, that these men were all contemporaries. They had known each other for years, had histories -- friendships, enmities, rivalries, romances. Their physical relationship with one another is present in the text, but almost invisible until actors give it life. The way they place a hand on a friend's shoulder, drape themselves across a bench, circle their prey: all these details and more give deeper meaning and nuance to their arguments.
There's much to love in this production, but I think Cruncleton's staging is especially admirable. Multi-part arguments move around the stage, guiding us through the beginning, middle and end of speeches, paragraphs and even sentences. These actors have little trouble giving shape to the complex speeches; Aristophanes (Rob Harris), Eryximachus (Andy Axewell), Socrates (Craig Walter) and Alcibiades (John Cruncleton III) are particularly talented in this regard.
The staging also helps us to make sense of the nested stories.
Returning to the subject of physicality: What seems an odd and irrelevant detail in writing -- Aristophanes' hiccups -- become a considerable disruption to the proceedings during Eryximachus' speech, who even allows himself to get annoyed at his collegue's interruptions.
This is essential. It's the human element in philosophy, for as unapproachable as many philosophical texts can seem, philosophers too struggle with the limitations and situations of their own flesh. Written out, the words all blur together into an arcane scrawl, spooling out in perfectly straight lines that we follow drunkenly, stumbling, weaving.
As a stage production, though, we realize that our inability to keep to those straight lines is no fault. In fact, not even the elocutionists themselves listen to each other with absolute faithfulness. They tune out, glance at one another, share secrets, enjoy their libations, prepare their own speeches.
On paper, these characters can seem more or less interchangeable, but the actors have done a superb job of finding human truths within the speeches and embodying them.
Harris's Aristophanes gives my favorite speech, and gives it so well. Aristophanes is a man who has to make light of everything, to reduce it -- not to earn mere laughter and applause (though he enjoys that very much) but to prevent any single idea from claiming tyranny over his friends' minds. He is a man who fights for intellectual freedom through his parodies and satires.
Thus, Harris's performance isn't merely about monkeying through this humorous speech; he gives the correct weight to the terror and desperation underlying lovelessness, achieving a balance between humor and pathos.
I am tempted to think, because Aristophanes re-articulates his point about humans seeking wholeness so many times (at least 4, by my count) that Aristophanes could have been consciously parodying himself at the end of his speech, and I would have liked to see Harris push a little in that direction.
Walter's Socrates is a smiling Buddha, and even when his companions' attention flags he sits and absorbs every word of each speech. It is clear that he, even more than the others, loves -- and pursues -- truth. I also like his quiet pleasure in correcting the others' praisings of love. It's this kind of behavior that caused so many of his contemporaries to regard him as a gadfly: after an hour of pleasing speeches and drunkenness, Socrates stands up and basically says, "Look, let's get down to brass tacks. You're all talking nonsense and here's why."
Because when you come down to it, Socrates was kind of an ass, and it's a testament to his relentless pursuit of knowledge and truth that he remained as attractive to his contemporaries as he did.
Until they killed him. But that's another production.