Othello Melts Into Air, Into Thin Air

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air . . .

Prospero's words sum up the feeling I had after we our last performance of Othello. If you've performed live theater, you know what I mean. The weeks and weeks of rehearsal, of the tech crew working to get properties on and off the stage, the hard work getting the stage lit and the many sound cues right and getting the images right that our production projected on silk screens and the hard work the costumers performed to dress us up in our roles all vanishes into memory and into thin air when the last performance is completed.

When I performed in my first play in Eugene, it took me a whole day to let go of Prospero, the character I played. I was morose. I didn't want Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to vanish. I wanted to hang on to it. I was attached to it. But, then when I played in other plays, I began to enjoy the idea that like the pageant of life itself, there is actually very little that happens in a given day that we can hang on to.

Life is transitory. Live theater magnifies this reality. It is futile to hang on to the moments and events and experience that pass. Yes, we can have a record of them in pictures or verbal description or on video tape, but these records are not the thing itself. The thing itself is always gone, vanished, into thin air.

So, Othello is gone. It touched our audiences. Our cast had fun together. I hope the tech crew had fun. They were under more pressure than the actors. Their work, too, has vanished.

Saturday night's performance was video taped. I doubt I will watch it. I'd like to keep the memory of Othello in my mind where I will stretch it, magnify it, give parts of it special emphasis, and move away from the documentary truth of the play. In many ways I would rather have the truth of this play live in the subjective reality of my mind. I'm not that interested in the objective truth of the video tape. I want to live in the experience of our performances vanishing. It's the mystery of live theater that so much pleasure is derived from something that is worked at so hard and turns out to be so impermanent, something that vanishes into thin air.