Thankless Honesty & Theater

Theater is a thankless art form. I’m not talking about money. (Although I could). Theater is honest. (And therefore thankless?) We’ll see. Let’s go back, but not all the way back to the middle of this introductory paragraph and start (for the second time) with Theater is Honest. And then will circle back around.
How? Is theater honest? Well, it isn’t a lot of the time. Infact, most of the time it’s a big lie. Actors pretending to be other people (albeit very effectively), on a set that is a made up place, with lights that act as the sun, moon and stars. Totally dishonest, actually if you think about it. A big lie. Maybe. Certainly. In some cases.
OK enough of the dillydallying questions. Let’s get to it. How? Does the Jessica think theater is honest? Thanks for asking. It starts with a question. Theater does. And hopefully ends with one. It starts with a question a playwright is asking perhaps to himself, perhaps of the world, perhaps it’s just a little moment in time. And then it becomes questions that the playwright’s collaborators ask of that playwright. The designers ask “What does this look like?” The actors ask “What’s my motivation?” The director shoots herself in the head. Just kidding. Sort of. The honesty starts with a series of questions. And ends with a series of planned questions, an unplanned ones too - unfortunately, and fortunately, there's no complete harnessing of human curiousity and where it can go.
The nature of questioning: ultimately it’s reactive. And if you have the right talent in the room with you, the combined reactions allow the play to float above each of the collaborators as its own entity. In an ideal world, and since it’s not an ideal world, we might as well talk about the ideal—In an ideal world the reactive nature of artists collaborating carries over into the performances of the actors. When questions are the heart of the process, ideally (again that word) the reactive nature of questioning and answering comes alive on stage.
The best part, though, is that the final questioners and the final answerers are the audience. They walk into a room. A large flower grows on stage and small person walk under it. What will happen? They ask themselves. They ask themselves what is this world? They react with laughter, or tears or outright boredom. The breath between the audience and the performance is a big question waiting to be answered by both parties in that moment. That is honest. And pentultimately real.

In our “real” lives we are dishonest most of the time. The way we smile at the person who is driving us crazy. Or when we don’t tell the person we love that we love them. Or when we answer, no you don’t look fat in that. Or when we ignore our debts. Or when we don’t cry. We don’t have time to listen or question or experience the breath between people. And real life doesn’t give us the space that exists in theater between the audience and the performance to allow a real immersion in a story, even if that story is our own life.

So theater can be, (ideally), more honest than real life.
So why is it thankless? The nature of true honesty, a bird’s eye view of an experience, and the live performance means that once a moment has happened, it dies. Except in the memory of those who watch it. However, that memory will be filtered through the rememberer’s brain. The moment that stands on its own that has a collective breath of question between an audience and a performance dies the moment it happens. That’s honest. That’s thankless. It’s also beautiful. And it leaves me questioning, where did it go?