Emotional Vocabulary Lessons

BY Venus Zarris

When my dear friend Nancy and her husband are arguing, her 6-year-old, Merrick, tightens up into a little knot, gets silent and teary eyed. Her 5-year-old, Jared, on the other hand, boldly goes up to them and says, “When you use that voice it hurts my heart.” This helps defuse the conflict for him and often helps to defuse the conflict between his parents.

Both are brilliant children. But Jared intrinsically possesses something that Merrick struggles with. That is, a powerful emotional vocabulary considering his tender age. Fortunately, for Merrick and the rest of us who are not communicative prodigies, emotional vocabularies can be taught. But this is not a subject found in curriculums. Advances in emotional vocabulary normally come by way of personal experiences that create empathy and epiphanies. They come by way of internalizing interactions to the point of verbal description.

Out of all of the benefits that theatre provides, perhaps the most profound is the ability it has to expand our emotional vocabularies. The ability to emotionally describe experiences is the only way to begin to reconcile the confusion, pain, anger, danger and conflict. It is the only way to start the process of claiming some control over that which we are powerless. Theatre takes us out of our individual vacuums and exposes us to life through verbal and visual language that enables us to emotionally define our own experience. 2007 saw a wealth of theatrical examples that delivered this emotional insight.

You may not think that lines like, “Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians,” “Three Nipple Cousin Fucker,” or “What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fucking fucking fuck?” could possibly elicit some form of emotional transcendence. But Bailiwick’s fantastic American Premiere of Jerry Springer The Opera offered deceptively profound lessons on the complexities of human dysfunction. In act one, we see how several people choose to air their most bizarre and sordid personal obsessions on national television, rather than in a therapist’s office. Act two takes us on location in hell where the freak show of sexual indiscretion transfers to a treatise on the foundations of Judeo-Christianity. Lucifer requires an apology from Jesus and Jerry must make it happen or stay in hell. The interactions between God, the Devil, Jesus and the Virgin Mary appear as dysfunctional as the Ku Klux Klan tap dancing number. But the absurd, startling and hilarious chaos in hell and on earth reiterate the need for us all to be good to each other.

“You don’t have to study up on right and wrong,” we’re told in the Goodman Theatre’s lovely production of August Wilson’s final play, Radio Golf. The complexities of human interaction can often blur the lines between doing what is obviously the right thing and personal gain. In the end we must look at our situation through a simplifying filter and make the right decision or, as one character explains, “I’m afraid you look away from what’s right too long, you can’t turn back.”

Infamous Commonwealth Theatre’s Midwest premiere of the rarely-produced Holocaust tragicomedy Resort 76 proved that no matter how many stories of Nazi viciousness you hear, there are always more available to sicken and shock. In the midst of staggering oppression, one character rhetorically asks God, “How can you begin to weigh our sins in the last 500 years next to the brutality they do in one day?” The human triumph of a seemingly small act of decency bestowed on a cat, despite the suffocating despair, showed us that hope can surface out of chaos.

Redmoon Theatre’s enchanting visual fairy tale Once Upon A Time (or the Secret Language of Birds) soothed the weary eyes and hearts of jaded adults, allowing us to re-experience childlike wonder and tenderness.

MidTangent Productions’ audacious A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Queer Tale told Shakespeare’s classic with musical and gender bending magic that celebrated the decadent delights of deviation.

Silk Road Theatre Project’s Merchant On Venice took another Shakespearian standard and transformed it into an amusing spectacle of cultural intersections. It was a polemic on theological and ethnic collisions that illuminated the overlooked Hindu-Muslim American communities, thereby emancipating the general perceptions of our all too homogenized body politic.

The Goodman Theatre’s beguiling production of playwright Sarah Ruhl’s hilarious, haunting and at times horrifying Passion Play: A Cycle In Three Parts exonerated us from the banal indulgences of our ever-growing collective superficiality. Ruhl took us on an astronomical journey that reincarnated 16 characters through three different time periods and locations of war in history, thereby facilitating a collective experience of tribal catharsis and epiphany.

About Face Theatre’s production of Pulp coined the phrase, “I’m a lesbian, plain and simple.” On the surface this may not seem like a profound expansion on emotional vocabularies, but the endearing script, delightful music, unsurpassed humor, incomparable direction, and picture perfect cast infused with steamy sexual chemistry, dared to deliver something rarer than Haley’s Comet. That is, unapologetically happy endings for all of the lesbian characters. This vindication and emancipation from chronically tragic staged treatment was a joy as well as a breakthrough.

Trap Door Theatre’s mesmerizing Chicago premiere of Emma was a non-stop lesson on articulating the corruption of our social and political reality. Playwright Howard Zinn’s provocative homage to one of the early 20th century’s most profound voices, Emma Goldman, inspired audiences to look at the their world with a greater degree of scrutiny and passion. “The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought,” and “The most violent element in society is ignorance” are just two of Emma’s incisively compelling observations.

Redmoon Theatre’s Hunchback delivered illumination through an “organic labyrinth of fantastic forms” that take shape theatrically, visually, literarily and emotionally. In this spellbinding telling of the classic story, we came away dazed and enlightened.

The Goodman Theatre’s annual production of A Christmas Carol defied the rote memory of this holiday classic to produce an emotional embracing of Christmas that transcended the hype and commercialism of the season for even the most stubborn Scrooge.

Whether direct and obvious, subtle and subversive, subliminal, abstract or dreamlike, what came through in all of this excellent theatre, more so than the stories or characters, was the insight on eloquence and resolution. Although extraordinary and entertaining on several levels, the poignant impact of the aforementioned productions highlights some of 2007’s most exceptional work and successful emotional vocabulary lessons.

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A Changing of the Guard in Chicago Theatre

Reid:
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Bommer: Professional Audiences? It could happen...

Vire: Backwards and Forwards

Goddu:
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Theatre in the Blogosphere