Postdramatic Transformation of William Saroyan's 'Hello Out There'-guided by Hans-Thies Lehmann

Q2. You have been given another challenging but exciting directing opportunity. This time, you are asked to mount a ‘postdramatic’ adaptation of William Saroyan’s Hello Out There. You are dumbstruck and think it is impossible so you want to turn down the offer. But then the producer introduces you to the dramaturg of the production, who is none other than Hans-Thies Lehmann, the famed author of Postdramatic Theatre! He has flown from Germany to help you direct the show as a postdramatic piece. Now, imagine how Lehmann would guide you in your adaptation process and describe in detail how the play would be performed in light of his theory. Be sure to provide at least THREE ‘postdramatic’ scenes or elements of your production.

 

 So, that means a mean producer once again tried to fool me with his ‘a kiss and a punch’ trick. I am indeed dumbstruck and seriously considering quitting the job, but I have no choice but to accept since I desperately need the money. Plus, I decided to show the man, Hans-Thies Lehmann some respect since he has flown all the way here to help me. I have heard that he is nearly eighty years old and now retired but dang, he got some passion.

 

 Anyway, the first thing he teaches me is that Postdramatic theatre is largely defined in opposition to dramatic theatre and Aristotelian theatre. It can be diversified hugely in form and content but principal to it is the idea of a rejection of simple, logical, causal sense being made from a piece of theatre. It argues that the world is best represented not through them but in the struggling of the unreconcilable multiple logics.

 

 With that being said, the first ‘postdramatic’ scene I designed is at the beginning of the play. The stage is in a semi-circular shape and I basically staged the iron bars of the cell in a curve between the stage and the audiences. Therefore, the young man in the play hollers “Hello-out there! Hello-out there!” and asks, “Nobody out there?” directly towards the audience around. Then, a girl suddenly voices out from one of the back seats in the dark for audiences saying, “Hello.” “No-this here is Emily.” and the play begins. The important thing here is the audiences in this play will have well-informed that this play is something different and you are allowed to speak or engage in the play. Thus, if someone has answered the hollering of the young man, he would respond with his improvisation, so-called ad-libs like, “Are you the girl?” “Well, I am actually looking for a girl named Emily, she is my partner actress.” “Great talking with you, now please help me finding Emily!” The whole scene or the play itself would be the coexistence of the scripted act and the performers’ improvisations. Few lines after, Emily asks the young man, “Who you hollering to?” and he answers, “Well-to the audience! But you know, they are as quiet as rocks.” Then she asks again, “What about Katey?” and instead of just saying that he doesn’t know anybody named Katey, he tries to find anyone named Katey among the audience and just spontaneously makes a Conte. In the play, the script of Saroyan would not play the dominant role but rather acts as a basis for the unpredictable interactions among the performers and the audiences.

 

 The next one that I want to elaborate on is one of the postdramatic elements I put in the play in accordance with Lehmann’s guidance. It is called the ‘alternative reality’ which means I will arrange not only the original story, killing the young man, but other alternative endings. Alternatives would be like, 1) The man eventually gets the courage to control the rage towards the young man and faces his wife instead. 2) The girl actually be able to find the gun in her house and makes to come back just in time, and 2-1) buys the time for the police to come. Or 2-2) She gets killed instead of the young man and the group flees away. 3) The girl has found the gun but she does not make it in time, so she sees the young man dies and he is being carried away, she instantly goes mad and kills them all. These alternative fragments would all be sooner or later shown to the audience but some of the options need certain triggers from the audience. For example, the story goes by route 1) when the man asks the audience whether to kill the young man or not and if the audience successfully persuades the man not to kill.

 

 The last element I present to you is pantomime. Yes, the one that the act of expressing thoughts and emotions with movement rather than speech, that is correct but this is quite unusual. Unusual because it is a mime, however, accompanied by narrations. And the narrations would be something that is unexpected by the audiences. Before we get to that, I must let you know that I added a few more scenes since this is a one-act play, so there is not much room for effective expression, I mean effective in the sense of aesthetic art. That said, I extended the timeline of the process of developing intimacy between the young man and the girl. Unlike the original work, the whole narrative would not end within one day, rather it takes about three days to build an affectionate relationship. The play includes scenes such as the young man telling more about gambling to the girl, the two characters working out together, and a scene where the girl working in the jail as a cook. As you might have expected, these scenes would be made as a two performers’ pantomime without any spoken words yet at the same time, there would be a narrator who is ‘an object’, not a living thing. To give a detail, in every scene that would be carried out in the form of mime, we pick a specific object that would definitely exist in certain places. For example, the iron bar of the young man’s cell or a cutting board which the girl uses in the work. In each scene, the object would wear indistinctive clothes like a plain black outfit or a cloak with a hood and just openly give comments to the ongoing action in its own viewpoint right at the stage. Let’s say a bar would say “Jesus, here we go again, this guy just can’t stop hitting me, is this some kind of a nervous breakdown?” or like, “Oh, this guy stopped grabbing me panicking, it’s gotta be something related to that girl.” and a cutting board could respond to the girl like, “Hmm, her chopping seems particularly cheerful today, might be something good happened!”. So the main characters here are like I said, in muteness, and they are just performing the act with the presence of narration. This particular staging would make two expected effects; first, the audiences will focus on the imageries and movements of the performers rather than the communicated information in terms of language. And second, the audiences could actively guess what exactly would be the narrators’ identity and then reach the “Ah-ha!” moments when they finally get to realize. Yet, well, maybe not, because like the man-Lehmann told us, you never know!

 

Answered by 김통렬