Here’s the thing about rehearsals that nobody wants to admit: they’re not more truthful because they’re purer. They’re more truthful because the lie hasn’t settled yet, hasn’t hardened into the kind of official story you can sell tickets to.
A rehearsal is where readings collide, actors, designers, text, space, institution, like cars entering an intersection nobody bothered to put lights at, and you can hear the metal crunch, you can smell the burning rubber. Bakhtin called this heteroglossia, a condition where multiple voices insist on speaking at once, refusing synthesis, refusing to shut up and let one voice dominate, and he was writing about novels but he might as well have been writing about rehearsal rooms where actors are advancing incompatible interpretations, designers are arguing with the space, the text is speaking in registers that contradict themselves, sometimes in the same goddamn sentence. Meaning exists here not as a conclusion but as a force field, something generated through friction rather than resolution. Unstable?
Yeah. That’s the whole fucking point.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ
But let’s be clear because I’m tired of romanticizing this: rehearsal is not a utopia. Power is everywhere. Someone decides when rehearsal starts and when it ends. Someone decides which experiments get repeated and which are quietly abandoned like embarrassing relatives nobody wants to talk about. Time, money, institutional pressure, these don’t disappear just because we call the space “process,” just because we use words like “exploration” and “discovery.” Rehearsal can lie too. It can hide coercion under the language of collaboration, normalize exhaustion as devotion, mistake hierarchy for necessity, for the natural order of things. The difference is not that rehearsal lacks power but that power is still visible, still contestable, still arguing with itself instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
Actors fuck around with the text, and I mean that reverently but also with full awareness that not everyone is equally free to fuck around. Some bodies are allowed more risk than others. Some failures are forgiven, written off as “trying something bold.” Some are remembered, weaponized, held against you. Treating the text as alive, as something that might bite back, is not a neutral act. It’s negotiated. It depends on who you are, what you look like, how much institutional capital you’ve stockpiled. Barthes‘ death of the Author didn’t abolish authority, it just redistributed it, scattered it around the room like shrapnel, and rehearsal is where that redistribution is felt most sharply, where authorship hasn’t yet been consolidated into a single voice that can pass itself off as inevitable, as what the text “always meant.”
Barthes distinguished between readerly texts that deliver meaning as a finished product, shrink-wrapped and ready for consumption, and writerly texts that demand the reader’s participation in making meaning, that make you work for it. Rehearsal is writerly not because it’s unfinished but because it refuses to pretend that meaning arrives whole, fully formed, handed down from some theatrical Mount Sinai. Performance, at least in its conventional form, tends to reverse that labor. It consolidates. It stabilizes. It packages. It asks the audience to receive coherence as if it were natural rather than manufactured, as if somebody didn’t spend six weeks beating it into shape.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ
Susan Sontag warned us about interpretation’s hunger to dominate, to reduce art to content, to extract a meaning that can be paraphrased, sold, consumed, forgotten. Rehearsals don’t escape this impulse because nothing escapes this impulse, we’re all trapped in the same late capitalist machinery that wants to turn everything into product. But rehearsals delay it. They allow surfaces to remain surfaces a little longer. They allow sensation, rhythm, awkwardness, contradiction to exist without immediate justification, without having to explain themselves to some imaginary audience focus group. But this delay is fragile, provisional, always under threat. Someone always arrives eventually asking “What does it mean?” and they’re not asking because they’re stupid or bourgeois, they’re asking because institutions require legibility to function, because money needs to know what it’s paying for.
Derrida showed us that meaning is always deferred, always incomplete, structured by différance, that slippage where meaning is always somewhere else, always not-quite-here. Rehearsal makes that visible. You can see it happening. Performance often works to conceal it, not always maliciously, not always consciously, but functionally, structurally. The problem isn’t that performance lies. Everything lies. The problem is that performance claims closure it cannot actually sustain, pretends the argument is over when the argument is never over. Every performance is haunted by the rehearsals it suppresses, by the alternatives it discarded, by the meanings it couldn’t afford to keep alive because you can’t have six different interpretations of the same moment all happening simultaneously in front of an audience who paid money to not be confused.
And this is where my own position becomes compromised, and I need to name that because otherwise I’m just another asshole pretending to stand outside the system while benefiting from it. I am not neutral here. I am making decisions. I am arguing forcefully for one configuration of theatrical value over another. This essay is controlled, cohesive, decisive. That’s not an accident. I’m not letting it sprawl into incoherence just to prove some point about multiplicity. Authority doesn’t disappear just because I critique it. It relocates. It hides in different places. The ethical question isn’t whether authority exists but how it is exercised, acknowledged, and made vulnerable to revision. And I don’t know if I’m doing that well enough. I don’t know if anyone can.
Brecht understood this. His Verfremdungseffekt wasn’t about chaos for its own sake, wasn’t about breaking things just to watch them break. It was about responsibility. Showing the apparatus doesn’t eliminate power, it exposes it, makes it visible, says: these choices were made by people, and they could have been made differently, and you should be thinking about why they were made this way and not some other way. Rehearsal does this by default, by accident almost. Performance has to choose to do it, and most performances choose not to because it’s harder, it’s riskier, it pisses people off.
Gay McAuley’s ethnographic work matters here precisely because it refuses romance, refuses to turn rehearsal into some fetish object of authenticity. She shows rehearsal as procedural, negotiated, contingent, a space governed by different rules than performance but not free of rules, never free of rules because there’s no outside, there’s no pure space untouched by power and commerce and all the compromises we make to get anything done. Failure is permitted, but not infinitely. Experimentation is valued, but within limits, within budgets, within schedules. Rehearsal is honest not because it tells the truth but because it reveals the conditions under which truths are produced and abandoned, chosen and discarded.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ
Herbert Blau reminds us that theatre is built on impossibility: presence slipping into absence even as you try to grab it, coherence unraveling in time no matter how tightly you stitch it together. Performance tries to mask this with wholeness, with the illusion of completion, with a clean ending that ties everything up. Rehearsal doesn’t overcome impossibility. It works inside it, makes art out of the wreckage. But, and this is crucial, and this is where I have to stop myself from going too far, rehearsal cannot be the end point. If it were, if we just stayed in rehearsal forever, it would become another aestheticized refuge, another fetish of authenticity, another way of avoiding the harder question of how to make performances that don’t lie about what they are.
What I want is not endless rehearsal. What I want is performance that refuses closure.
Not performances that collapse into process porn, that congratulate themselves on being unfinished like that’s some kind of virtue in itself, but performances that retain contradiction as an active force, as something alive and dangerous. Performances that don’t pretend the argument is over just because the lights went down and the audience clapped. Performances that stage decision-making without pretending those decisions are final, without pretending they’re the only possible decisions. Performances that allow meanings to coexist without resolving into a single authorized reading that everyone can agree on and forget about on the drive home.
This means performances that show their seams, yes, but more than that, performances that structurally resist finalization, that build incompleteness into their architecture. That allow audiences to encounter multiplicity not as confusion to be solved, not as a problem the director failed to fix, but as a condition to be inhabited, to be lived with. That don’t hand over interpretation pre-chewed like baby food, but don’t abdicate responsibility either, don’t hide behind “it’s whatever you want it to be” as if that’s not its own form of cowardice.
I don’t want to see what you decided the thing means. I want to see what it’s still struggling to become. I want to see the authority that chose this version and feel that it could have chosen otherwise, that there was real choice involved, real risk, real possibility of failure. I want performances that remember rehearsal not as something they outgrew, not as training wheels they removed once they learned to ride, but as something they carry forward, unresolved, still fighting with itself.
Rehearsal isn’t the last honest room in the building. That was a lie I was telling myself because it was comforting, because it gave me somewhere to hide from the compromises I make every time I walk into a theatre and pretend to know what I’m talking about.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ
Honesty is harder than that. Honesty is making performances that don’t seal themselves shut, that don’t pretend the mess is over, that don’t package contradiction as coherence and sell it back to us as meaning we can consume and move on from. Honesty is admitting that I want something maybe impossible: performances that function like performances, that have beginnings and endings and tickets and audiences, but that refuse to do the one thing performances are supposed to do, which is resolve, conclude, finish, let you off the hook.
Everything after rehearsal doesn’t have to be advertising. It can be an argument that refuses to end, that follows you out of the theatre and into the parking lot and into your car and keeps arguing with itself while you’re trying to drive home, that won’t let you settle, won’t let you decide what you think because it hasn’t decided what it thinks, because maybe there’s nothing to decide, maybe the point is staying in the discomfort, staying in the question, refusing the comfort of an answer.
But I don’t know. Maybe that’s another romantic lie. Maybe I’m just uncomfortable with endings, with commitment, with saying “this is what it is” and standing by it. Maybe what I’m calling honesty is just another form of evasion, another way of avoiding the responsibility of making a claim and defending it.
All I know is I’d rather watch something argue with itself than watch something pretend it has all the answers. I’d rather see the collision than the cleanup. I’d rather leave confused and alive than satisfied and dead.
Rehearsing Sophocles Savage Blasts at the Wave Organ