I’m still hung up on Poulet, Bachelard, and Barthes, specifically that Sur Racine moment when they briefly gathered under what they called the Geneva School of existential phenomenology. The name sounds like something you’d find scratched into a bathroom stall in some Left Bank shithole, and maybe that’s fitting. But the work matters, pulls at me like a song I heard once at 4 a.m. that I’ve been trying to remember ever since. Here’s what keeps dragging me back: these guys had almost zero interest in actual theater (Barthes being the exception), and yet their criticism is absolutely soaked in theatrical logic. They were writing theater without admitting it, which makes it realer somehow.
Take Poulet. His whole method is about inhabitation, about entering what he calls the authorial cogito. You surrender your own moment in time to think as Racine thinks. This isn’t interpretation as some grad school parlor trick, some puzzle you crack to impress your dissertation committee. This is interpretation as a durational event, a sustained occupation of another consciousness. You move in. You unpack. You let their furniture rearrange your skull. Bachelard works differently but arrives somewhere similar. He treats imagination not as expression but as architecture, building interior worlds room by room, image by image, each one activated in time by whoever’s paying attention. Before Barthes even gets around to shattering the whole notion of the unified author, these critics are already treating consciousness as something that unfolds, collides, withdraws. Something alive. Something with teeth.
Their analyses don’t read like arguments. They read like performances. Consciousness, in their writing, becomes this mutable field, a space with boundaries that won’t hold still, where images appear, loop back, crash into each other. Vision matters. Rhythm matters. Duration matters. This is theater whether they cop to it or not. A performance happens inside whoever’s reading: images hit their marks, miss them completely, return changed. All of it unfolding in time and darkness, like some song stuck in your head that mutates every time it cycles through.
Barthes eventually just admits the theatricality. His shift away from the unified author toward plurality, grain, pleasure, that’s not abandoning phenomenology. That’s re-staging it. Meaning stops living in some single consciousness you can inhabit and starts living in the event of reading itself, in that live encounter between text and whoever picked up the book. Where Poulet wants coherence, Barthes introduces drift. Where Bachelard constructs rooms, Barthes opens trapdoors and watches you fall.
This is where I start as a director.
I don’t think of imagination as something you do. I think of it as somewhere you go. A room with its own weather, its own quality of light. When I work on a play, I’m treating the theater itself as consciousness made physical, a space built to hold and transform psychological processes. A dramatic text isn’t some idea waiting to be illustrated, isn’t a thesis looking for visual aids. It’s a mind under pressure, organized by rhythm, obsession, what it can’t quite say, what it wants too badly. It’s not pure expression. It’s form doing damage control. It’s someone trying not to scream who screams anyway.
Directing is an act of assimilation. I absorb the virtual consciousness embedded in the text, but not through identification. Identification is narcissistic, a mirror game that kills everything interesting about difference. I’m not projecting myself onto the text like some bore at a party making everything about them. You know who you are. I’m creating space inside my own head for the text’s logic to operate. I open the door. I say, come in, burn the place down if that’s what needs to happen. In rehearsal, that logic mutates. It gets bodies, breath, resistance. What comes out the other end isn’t fidelity. It’s variation. A new consciousness assembled from the collision of playwright and director, warped further by designers, actors, the limitations of the room itself. What emerges is bastard consciousness. Hybrid and dangerous and beautiful.
The spectator comes last. If the ideal spectator even exists (I’m not convinced, though I’d love for you to prove me wrong), they don’t receive a message. They receive a situation. What lands isn’t the play but a layered transmission: the playwright’s consciousness filtered through mine, bent again through performance. Consciousness as turducken, excessive and unstable and impossible to fully process. You leave queasy, which means something worked.
Barthes gets closest to naming what happens to the spectator in Leaving the Movie Theater, which is, sidebar, my undergrad film theory students’ favorite essay every quarter. Spectatorship there isn’t about absorption or interpretation. It’s about residue. You don’t exit with meaning locked down. You exit with your consciousness slightly altered, dulled, overexposed, drifting back into the social world at a weird angle. What matters isn’t what you understood. What matters is what won’t leave you alone. What’s in your bloodstream now. Spectatorship as temporal fallout, as consciousness after impact instead of consciousness at attention. Theater, like cinema, does its real work not in the moment you’re focused but in the uneven dispersal afterward. You walk out into the street and the light’s different. Something shifted.
For clarity’s sake, I work with a stripped-down model: three subjects. Playwright, director, audience. This isn’t some ontological truth. It’s a heuristic, a way of tracking how consciousness moves through theatrical form. In reality, every pole fractures instantly. Playwrights are never singular, directors answer to institutions, audiences never cohere into anything unified. But the abstraction lets me ask one precise question: how does subjectivity travel? How does one consciousness reach another without colonizing it, without erasing what makes it separate, without pretending we’re not fundamentally alone in our skulls?
The question matters because I’m not interested in identification. Identification is safe. It’s a mirror game. It’s dead on arrival. Assimilation is riskier, requires hospitality, requires opening yourself to foreign psychological processes without any guarantee of harmony. Sometimes the text refuses entry. Sometimes it colonizes you. Sometimes it cracks open fault lines in your thinking you didn’t know existed. Failure isn’t the problem. Failure is proof something real is happening, proof you’re actually in the room with something that has its own life independent of you.
This is where contemporary theory gets complicated. Hans Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theater sees the collapse of unified perspective but often evacuates subjectivity completely, replaces consciousness with systems and effects. Structure with nobody home. Rancière gives us the emancipated spectator but still treats perception as political arrangement rather than phenomenological event. Blau, and I absolutely adore this guy, gets closest when he describes the audience as constitutively missing itself, always out of sync with its own experience. What these frameworks sometimes lack is an account of what it actually feels like for consciousness to move through theatrical time. The sensation. The vertigo. The fact of it in your body.
Phenomenology, for all its blind spots and limitations, gives us that account, especially when you let it be theatrical instead of forcing it to stay theoretical and pure. Theater doesn’t represent consciousness. It stages consciousness. It builds conditions where subjectivities collide without merging, where assimilation is temporary and unstable, where imagination becomes somewhere we enter together but never occupy the same way. We’re there together but we’re not having the same experience. Alone together, which might be the most honest thing two consciousnesses can be.
That instability is the entire point. It’s hospitable. It’s dangerous. It’s the only way any of this works. You have to risk getting lost. You have to risk the text changing you more than you change it. You walk into the darkness not knowing who you’ll be when the lights come up.
That’s not a flaw in the system.
That’s the whole fucking show.