So What the Hell IS Real Anyway?
Maybe the text is just sitting there like last week’s corpse… cold, rigid, embalmed in academic formaldehyde, while the actor’s body is out there in the trenches, sweating through the shirt, bleeding into the floorboards, happening in real time like a Mahler Symphony you can feel in your fillings.
The body’s supposed to be the dangerous one, right? The wild card. The thing that won’t stay in its lane, won’t follow the institutional playbook, won’t sit up straight and recite its lines like a good little soldier of approved meaning.
But let’s cut the romantic bullshit. The body isn’t some noble savage. It’s already been to finishing school. It’s been trained, drilled, disciplined, calibrated like a fine German instrument. Power doesn’t need to break down the door, it’s already inside, moving through the musculature, the posture, the way you hold your fucking wine glass in that pretentious asshole way you do. The body is fluent in compliance before it ever gets near subversion.
So if the body is just another text, and it is, friends, it absolutely fucking is, then what exactly are we pointing at when we say “real”? And how’s it supposed to overthrow anything when it already knows the dance steps by heart?
The Player Who Wept (Or: When Fake Gets More Real Than Real)
There’s this moment in Hamlet, and stay with me here, when these traveling players roll into town. The First Player does his bit: Aeneas speaking to Hecuba about Priam getting carved up like Sunday dinner. And this actor commits. His face goes the color of old newspaper. His voice cracks like cheap plaster. Real tears. The whole bloody catastrophe.
Hamlet watches this performance and it destroys him. Not the play, the watching. Because here’s this professional liar convulsing over a fiction, over a story that means absolutely nothing to him personally, while Hamlet, who’s got a murdered father, a whore of a mother, and every actual reason in the world to burn the place down, can’t move. Can’t act. Can’t do shit.
This scene takes a flamethrower to the comforting fantasy that being and seeming are two different countries with a nice clean border between them. Because what happens when seeming produces real effects? When “actions that a man might play”, pure theatrical bullshit, actually rewire the nervous system of the body performing them?
The grief may be manufactured. The response isn’t. That line we thought separated performance from reality doesn’t just blur, it detonates the moment flesh gets involved.
The Body Doesn’t Know It’s Lying (And Doesn’t Care)
Actors figured this out a long time ago, somewhere between the third drink and the call time. You imitate the external shape of an experience, the slouch, the stammer, the way someone holds themselves when they’re barely holding it together, and the body, that magnificent idiot, fills in the rest. The nervous system doesn’t wait for a philosophical memo. It just responds.
Same thing happens in the audience. I know it’s theater. My rational brain is sitting there with its arms crossed going, “This is fake, this is fake, none of this is real.” And still my chest tightens like someone’s standing on it. My breath changes. I cry like a child who’s lost something they’ll never get back.
Somewhere in the circuitry, the information that would normally shut this reaction down, the “this isn’t real” warning label, gets suppressed. Ignored. Overridden. The body responds as if the threat were actual, as if the grief were mine, as if any of this mattered outside the duration of the performance.
And that suppression isn’t a bug. It’s not a malfunction. It’s the condition of possibility. It’s how any of this works at all.
The Real Is What Kicks Your Ass
So stop pretending this is about truth or authenticity or any of that graduate seminar horseshit.
The real is not sincerity. The real is not someone’s precious interiority. The real is not whether the emotion “belongs” to the actor or came from their actual childhood trauma or whatever origin story makes you feel better about paying attention.
The real is what produces effects regardless of its fictional status.
Once you swallow that, and it goes down hard, meaning becomes secondary. Semiotics can map the signs like a good little cartographer, but it can’t account for the force. What matters is what acts on bodies. What changes posture, breath, tempo, attention. What makes you lean forward in your seat or recoil or reach for someone’s hand in the dark.
A lie can do real work. A fiction can reorganize your physiology. That doesn’t make it honest. It makes it effective. And effectiveness, my friends, is all that matters when the lights go down. Yeah, that sentence applies to a lot of things.
Displacement Without Alibis (Or: Everyone’s Stealing From Somewhere)
Call it displacement if that makes you feel like you understand something. A real stimulus, some buried rage, some unprocessed loss, something that actually happened, gets pulled from the actor’s personal wreckage and relocated into a fabricated situation. The emotion is real. The signs are real. The character is not.
And here’s the beautiful, terrible part: no one watching can ever tell the difference.
The source of the emotion is locked away. The process is a black box. The interior is sealed tighter than Donald Trump’s conscience. Which means sincerity is completely useless as a category of analysis. You can’t verify it. You can’t read it. You can only imagine it after the fact, project it backward like a comforting bedtime story about how art works.
All anyone ever responds to is surface, timing, pressure, rhythm, duration. Arrangement. The rest is mythology.
Who Controls the Conditions (Or: Let Me Tell You About Power)
So here’s the real question, the one that should keep you up at night: who controls the conditions under which bodies respond?
I do. Or at least, I try to.
As a director, as a producer, as the person holding the keys to the kingdom, my authority doesn’t come from knowing what’s “real” or having access to some higher truth. It comes from structuring time, space, repetition, exhaustion, anticipation. From deciding how long something gets worked, when it stops, what information is given, what gets withheld. From controlling the temperature in the room and the number of takes and whether people eat or sleep or see their families. Of course, sometimes the unions have a say in this.
Actors don’t cry spontaneously like rain from a cloudless sky. Audiences don’t flinch by accident.
Someone builds the environment. Someone tunes the pressure like a radio dial. Someone arranges the conditions so certain responses become more likely than others, so probable they start to feel inevitable.
That someone is me.
I don’t control outcomes, bodies remain unpredictable, thank god, the last wild thing… but I do control conditions. And that’s where power actually lives. Not in commands or threats or ideology you can argue with, but in the infrastructure of when and how and under what circumstances.
Hegemony, Stripped Bare (Or: Gramsci Without the Sentimentality)
This is where Gramsci becomes useful, if you strip him of all the romantic revolutionary bullshit.
Hegemony isn’t about belief. It doesn’t require agreement or even awareness. It works by organizing effects. By making certain rhythms feel natural, certain responses feel obvious, certain arrangements feel like the only way things could possibly be.
Not because they’re true. Because they function.
Power here isn’t the king on the throne barking orders. It doesn’t command. It engineers environments. It directs rather than dictates. It sets the stage and steps back and lets bodies comply on their own, without force, without resistance, without even realizing they’re complying.
Consent, in this model, is not something you think about or choose. It’s something your body does. You lean in. You hold still. You accept the terms without ever being asked, without a contract, without a gun to your head.
Performance doesn’t sit outside this machinery like some pure artistic space. It is one of its primary techniques.
If performance has force, and it does, it absolutely fucking does, it’s not because it reveals truth or unmasks ideology or liberates anyone from anything. It’s because it rehearses consent. It trains bodies to inhabit certain structures, certain arrangements of power, without questioning them. Without even seeing them.
Affect isn’t liberation. It’s infrastructure. And I’m the civil engineer.
Control Over Truth (Or: Why I Don’t Get To Hide)
Performance doesn’t need truth. It needs control.
Truth is unverifiable. Sincerity is inaccessible. Process is unknowable.
Effects, however, effects are observable. Repeatable. Distributable. Scalable.
And that doesn’t absolve me of anything. It removes my alibi.
Once truth is off the table, once we stop pretending this is about authenticity or good intentions or the purity of the artistic vision, all that’s left is the force I apply and the consequences it produces. The pressure and the bodies it acts upon. The conditions and what they make possible or impossible.
I don’t get to hide behind “but I meant well” or “but it’s art” or “but they consented.” All of that is just noise. What matters is what I do and what it does to people.
The Gap That Won’t Close (Or: The Ethical Field I Live In)
I don’t know where the actor’s emotion comes from. The audience doesn’t either. That gap between surface and source never closes. Never will.
But that gap isn’t a puzzle to solve. It’s not a problem requiring a solution. It’s the ethical field I operate inside.
I don’t get to resolve it. I don’t get to verify it. I don’t get to purify it with good intentions or theoretical frameworks or claims about artistic necessity.
I only get to decide how much pressure I’m willing to apply. How carefully, or carelessly, I arrange the conditions. Who I’m willing to let that pressure act upon. How long. Under what circumstances. For what ends.
And then I have to live with what it does.
Not what I intended. Not what I hoped. What it does.
That’s the deal. That’s the job. That’s the knife I chose to pick up.
And every night, when the show’s over and the audience goes home and the actors stumble into the cold fog, I have to look at what I’ve made, not the beautiful lie of it, but the actual human cost, and decide if I can live with it.
Most nights, I can.
Some nights, I can’t.
But I keep doing it anyway.
Because that’s what power does.aPhotos are from a rehearsal of Theater Theater, a piece created and directed by Erika Chong Shuch in collaboration with Mariah Castle, Aaron Landsman, Dave Maier, Benoit Monin, Rowena Richie, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, and Ryan Tacata. The real bodies. The actual conditions. The work that produces the work.
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