Exulting in Monotony
Uta Hagen & the everyday life.
Cover Image: Saltash with the Water Ferry, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1811. The image depicts what one 19th century critic described in a letter as, “what the mind sees when it looks for poetry in humble actual life."
Ordinary life is very fashionable right now. Blame whatever you like; call it recession-core or point to our ability to film and publicize any moment of our days, but regardless, monotony is en vogue. This is true in the church as well. A brief Google search yields dozens of books, posts, and podcasts recommending the ordinary moment for its spiritual value. I don’t think this is a bad thing. In the spirit of the trend itself, I am simply noticing and observing, wondering what else is there.
One such book, the recently published Ordinary Time by Annie B. Jones, speaks to the enduring value of a settled and stayed-put life. As she narrates the rhythms of living in the same small town, remaining in a faith tradition, and working the same job for a long period of time; she unearths the beauty buried in the ruts of a “boring” life. One example she offers is theatre.
“Actors and performers give us this beautiful gift of doing the same thing, night after night, over and over, in excellence and with joy, all so we can feel as if they’re doing it for the very first time. They give us the gift of magic, and it’s why I cry at the end of nearly every play I’ve ever seen. It’s because I’ve witnessed something holy.”1
The stage may not be your first thought when you imagine a slow and savored life—how can red velvet curtains, spotlights, and sequined costumes endear us to our immediate days? Surely the magic we seek from the dark seats of the audience or the smoldering spotlight is that of a sharp departure from the ordinary. And yet what is experienced in the flash of an onstage moment is the product of practice, of wearing out a single script in a florescent-lit room with the same people saying, “from the top, with feeling.”
When I consider theatre and the everyday, my thoughts go to one of the most popular dramatic theorists of the 20th century, one I often turn to when studying for a role. German-American actor and theorist Uta Hagen cultivated an entire theatrical pedagogy founded on attentiveness to everyday life. To exist normally onstage, she challenged actors to aggressively observe daily life in order to recreate it onstage, resulting in a careful reverence for the ordinary. Her exercises include tasks such as dropping a pile of mail and picking it up again, making phone calls, looking for a lost item, or waking up from a nap. Over and over, the actors learn truthful expressions of human activity which can then be adapted to the particular circumstances of their character without some fraught sense of pretense.
We know a slow, everyday life has the potential to teach us patience, to regulate our nervous systems, and to rosily paint our daily walks and little treats. But through the lens of Uta Hagen, I see the ways that the faithful enactment of monotony produces better art.
The faithful enactment of monotony in art cultivates innocence.
The dictionary tells me that innocence is not ignorance, but a lack of guile or corruption. Uta Hagen tells me, “Creativity depends on maintaining innocence and a never ending curiosity about the human condition.”2 An innocent life or the work of an innocent artist combats a culture of cynicism and ennui.
Hagen describes this guileless curiosity as “the actor’s greatest gift, the childlike innocence and faith that ‘I’, the character, am living now, suspending all knowledge of what is to come, to leave myself open to surprises, vulnerable to everything done to me, so that my actions will become necessary.”3 Existing in the present moment, the common moment, asks us to become just as small as we actually are, to risk being moved and stirred. Not dulled by addictions to extremes, we find ourselves shaken by the glory of the same skies we commute under each week, or newly awakened to and moved to contend against cruelty.
Uncorrupted curiosity deepens art’s creative power, in both the painter and viewer, the actor and audience, or the author and the reader.
The faithful enactment of monotony in art sharpens anticipation and expectation.
While expectation may seem contradictory to embracing the ordinary or living in the moment, it is important to note that the goal of exulting in monotony is not stasis, but attunement. It would be dishonest to suggest that we can live mindlessly in a present moment with no expectations of what will come next. This makes for bad acting and frozen living. As Hagen writes, “We never know what the next moment will be, but we always have expectations about it.”4
Negative examples of actors moving with too much expectation are generally not the product of anticipation, but of the actor proceeding from that former assumption—that they know what the next moment will be. The truthful expression of life, however, balances on a tightrope between absolute certainty and complete oblivion, in that space of possibility and expectation. Hagen offers examples of this, describing an actor who knows their character must be surprised by the contents of a letter. If they manufacture shock before the letter is fully open, or let the action become rote over series of rehearsals and performances, the moment of discovery is deadened, both for them and the audience. But similarly, if they open the letter without an ounce of expectation, the audience becomes suspicious and disbelieving—it would be inauthentic for one to receive even an ordinary message and assume there is nothing inside. The actor must discern what their character predicts (a bill, perhaps?), and how the contents of the letter deviate from that expectation.
Hagen explains how her own acting grew longevity and life—that daily resurrecting magic that Annie B. Jones described earlier—when she “suspended knowledge of what was to come by unearthing the character’s expectations.” Alive to the immediate and unremarkable, Hagen’s role became “a new adventure of playing as if for the first time instead of a repetition of the night before.”5
Additionally, a thorough knowledge of expectations better equips us to know when to disregard them. A good artist acknowledges not only their own expectations, but those of their audience. The best creatives build interest by diverting audience expectations, moving between convention and chaos, playing expertly with the subversion of norms. We do this in music, adjusting chord progressions; we do this in improv, creating laughter from surprise; and we do this in writing, too.
So much of my writing circles around theology and ministry, so let’s draw an example from there. I could linguistically paint the wonder of Christ in Mary’s womb to you, saying, “He is wrapped in glory and love.” But how much sharper would it be for me to anticipate your expectations of my descriptors—two conceptual words, emotive but intangible—and divert them: “He is wrapped in glory and amniotic fluid.” The known details of biology come alive. The image deepens for the reader when the writer slows down enough to anticipate, meet, and subvert expectations.
The faithful enactment of monotony in art deepens our sense of grandeur.
It attunes us to the transcendent. It is deeply countercultural to value innocence, to be ravenously curious instead of certain, to mark and articulate our expectations, to be completely present to the unremarkable. But this is the plane where God moves. Artists tuned in to tedium are better able to harken to the cosmic story, that redemptive move of eternity that prowls on silent paws and unfurls more gently than fern fronds. The artist who does not resist the ordinary finds it to be the ecosystem of the divine, and is then better able to call others towards it.
I would be remiss to reflect on theatre and the everyday life without mentioning the most famous play devoted to the topic. If you are unfamiliar with Our Town by Thornton Wilder, it is a Pulitzer-winning drama which uses metatheatrical devices (the play knows it’s a play) to depict life in a small American town through the life and early death of Emily Webb. In the final act, Emily is allowed to revisit her life and rather than selecting a moment of consequence, she chooses the scene of her 12th birthday. Overcome by the impossible beauty of transient life captured in this seemingly unremarkable milestone, she turns to the stage manager:6
EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.”
Saints and poets, friends.
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Annie B. Jones, Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put.
Uta Hagen, A Challenge for the Actor.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Thornton Wilder, Our Town.