Transcript

Michael Schweikardt

Odai Johnson is professor in theater history and head of the Ph. D. program at University of Washington School of Drama. Odai Johnson took his MFA from the University of Utah and his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His articles have appeared in Theater Journal, Theatre Survey, New England Theater Journal, Theatre Symposium, and the Virginia Magazine of History, as well as contributions to numerous anthologies. His books include Rehearsing the Revolution, The Colonial American Stage: A Documentary Calendar, Absence and Memory on the Colonial American Stage, London in a Box, and Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory. At University of Washington, Odai Johnson teaches a range of theater and performance history courses for the undergraduate program, and seminars in theater history for the doctoral students. Professor Johnson previously held the Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Professorship in the Arts, and has recently been honored as a distinguished alumnus from the University of Utah.

Odai Johnson, welcome to “Theory Speaks”, the podcast of Prompt: A Journal of Theater Theory, Practice and Teaching. We are truly delighted to have you with us today. And by us, I mean all of us at Prompt, but I'm especially delighted to have you here to speak with me today, because I'm a huge fan of your work, one of your books in particular, which I know we will talk about. But welcome. It's so nice to have you with us.

Odai Johnson

Well, thanks for the reach out. This is, this is fun. I, you know, as I said in our email exchange, people often just say politely, oh, great questions. Yes. But these were really remarkably thoughtful and, you know, some probing questions. And I feel that my responses are not up to the quality of the questions asked,

Michael Schweikardt

Well, I wouldn't worry about that. But you know, if it is true that there is quality to the questions, it is a direct, it's in direct relationship to how many times I have been through your book Ruins, which I love a great deal. I've read it from cover to cover twice. And I revisit the introduction over and over again, because I find it quite inspiring. And I always find new things to think about in terms of my own work. So before we jump into some questions about your research in your book, I was just wondering if you might tell us, how are you managing this particular moment in the pandemic. It's a moving target, right, and every moments different,

Odai Johnson

You know, it is sort of curious because this pandemic actually favors the loners and the cowboys. You know, being a sort of, I don't know, intensely independent person, I don't mind so much the sort of closure of large social institutions that way. It's great not going to campus. Teaching over zoom is miserable. And everybody is ready to throw this away like a dirty mask as soon as we can. Libraries are closed. And that's a huge thing. Theaters are closed. And that's, you know, a huge, but in terms of the kind of like, the igloo effect of everybody just kind of being snowed in to this endless winter and that. I'm a writer. This has been a lot of writing time. Yeah. And so that part is actually very productive. I have to say, honestly, I've, I've lost a lot of colleagues and I've gone too many virtual funerals. Yeah. And, and I'm sort of very aware of the loss and the misfortune elsewhere. Yeah, I just sort of think of the pandemic from my library. It has been profitable that way for writing time.

Michael Schweikardt

Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be, it's amazing to me this moment to see how things are turning around so quickly. It gives me a little bit of pause, you know, I'm a cautious person by nature. I feel cautiously optimistic. But I think, like you, I've enjoyed the, there's an element of be alone time that I have enjoyed. It seems to suit me well. I'm going out for a coffee date, if you will, for the first time, after we get through with the interview. And just the idea of, you know, sipping coffee in public without a mask on has got me a little bit nervous.

Odai Johnson

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and to be fair, I just got off of the, you know, the Zoom, kind of, what should we say, a working group, for the panel that I'm on and it's like, these are international people and it's like, it's only opening up here in the US. Yeah, you know, my colleagues in Germany, I mean, they've like 6% of the population is vaccinated, and they're still waiting for that availability. And that's, you know, we're not talking Jamaica here, we're talking Germany. I mean, they were behind part of the pharma project that, you know, help get the vaccine out. And so there's a sense like, the First World - Second World gap here is, is enormous and growing. Yeah, so I’m sort of cognizant of that. It's a cautious time.

Michael Schweikardt

It is, it is. So in your book, the book that I love so much, Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory, you argue that what is not present is not necessarily absent. And I think that this is a truly fascinating distinction that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, but I wonder if you would explain the difference between lack of presence and absence.

Odai Johnson

We know this, we know this in other emotional ranges. We know this is grief, that is a way that a thing that is not there anymore, is marked but not there anymore. The little set of rain boots on the gutter on the porch, the lost child, the hole in the ground, where the building once was, the frame on display of the stolen painting. Absence marks its missing parts, as opposed from the empty wall, or the empty porch, that there are markers left to sign the absence. And that is where I think theater making has some advantage that way. We work with signs and symbols all the time, and being able to sort of connote an object as a placeholder of an absent thing does require a material mark. The mark can be, you know, the hole, the cavity. Ruins has a couple of photos that are, that are useful for this, you know, obviously, the curated frames of stolen paintings. I mean, that's a marvelous idea to sort of pause, arrest the eye to look, to consider that not there is not the same as gone. Yeah. You know, that sort of optical concentration, that we'd look with greater density at this space? Technically, it's just an empty wall. But it isn't, there's a, there's a history of grief in there. And the willingness that we have to read the frame as a placeholder of the missing that's a handy metaphor to keep in mind. And it, you know, and it plays out in so many ways. I think curatorial teams at museums are doing you know, more and more of this. Ruins cites the example of the new Acropolis Museum, and the way they just sort of so poignantly mark all the missing pieces of the Parthenon frieze that is, you know, runs as a ribbon around the whole museum there, that they don't in any way try to fraud the missing parts, they aren't really sculpting it or anything. They're just giving a size to what was once there. But there's something just really fascinating about the way I find myself looking beyond the things that are there, another piece of a horse, to looking at trying to fill in the story between the pieces that are preserved. And there's actually a narrative capacity in these missing pieces. And I just I find that stuff really fascinating and more inviting than the material presence of the old work that is preserved.

Michael Schweikardt

Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, one has to be able to notice what's missing, or notice the mark that's left by what is gone. And you know, to me, you are an expert in reading absence, and then creating the narratives that sort of fill in those gaps. You find evidence in what is not there, the mark that is that left behind. So I'm thinking of your, at this moment, I'm thinking of your work in discovering that old Douglas Theatre in Colonial Williamsburg, which I think is a fascinating story, how, beginning from a posthole in the grounds, you are able to reconstruct this idea of an entire theater that, of course, is no longer there. And I wonder if maybe for our listeners, you would just tell us a little bit about that story? Because I think it's very instructive.

Odai Johnson

Yeah, that was very fortuitous, and a lot of different ways. If you had to look and, and, and hope for a site for America's oldest theater, it couldn't be a better site than at Colonial Williamsburg, which has nothing substantial built over it. I mean, it could have been in Philadelphia, right? They could, they could have found the John Street theater in Manhattan, right, and its like, well, good luck, you are never going to, you know, get under there and have a look at this. But this was, this was a sort of systematic dig that was being conducted. And there was, frankly, nothing over it. And so when they started their stratigraphy of moving down, they did find postholes. And so, there was a great team of archaeologists that was working there. For me, the fortuitous part was, one, I was already on sabbatical and so I was already in Virginia, I had been working at the Historical Society in Richmond and I got an email from the archeologic team. And they said, like, we have something here, we know that there was a theater, where was it? And I said, like, guys, I'm just up river. They said, well, okay, here, let's, so they sort of worked up, you know, a short research honoraria over that, and I just sort of shifted my digs from Richmond down to Williamsburg. And, and we just had this really intensive research team that was cobbled together and said, like, what do we know about these theaters? What do we know about, say, their leases, their ground plans, their dimensions from the other sites that we had in Charleston, and Philadelphia and New York. And, and so we were sort of like, Okay, this is a template, architecture, we have a sense, like, it would be this. And so if this is the theater, you are likely going to find a series of holes that are going to be like on 12 foot centers, it's going to have an overall dimension of, you know, maybe 66 feet, maybe 70 feet, somewhere like that. It's going to have a width of 36 feet, maybe 40 feet, something like that. There's going to be a division mark here, this is what it would look like. So if we just start, you know, pacing the ground out here, and see what we find then this. And over the course of a rather, you know, hasty dig, we were indeed able to confirm the dimensions of all that. And then once we had the dimensions, then it was a case of Okay, the entrance is likely to be here, the stage is likely to be here. And then they were able to sort of, really sort of work out and get some sense of what the interiority of this building looked like. From there, the stage divisions. Then that's where they actually found like, you know, bits of iron spikes that had lined the stage here. There was, we were able to get a sense of what the depth was, of the pit, to get a sense of where the stage was through the, you know, the whole building, sort of the ground plan of it came together fairly quickly with all that, and that was kind of marvelous. And and so when that was all documented, the book was called Absence in Memory over that. The book has a subtitle and I think this is a really great metaphor to have in mind is called Fiorelli’s Plaster. And the image behind that was the 18th century archaeologist at Pompeii, Giuseppe Fiorelli, and he was really the first serious archaeologists who sort of worked not as a treasure hunter, not as sink a shaft and grab the goods, but rather to make a systematic dig. And he sort of created this idea of stratigraphy, where you just sort of move down inch by inch. And you mark the entire plan to get a sense of what the city looked like, not just pulling out the golden stuff. And as he was working down, he would find holes. And at first, they didn't know what to do with it, they just sort of marked, well, there's nothing there, it was just simply gone. But then at a certain point, they noticed enough of them, they said, like, let's get a sense of what these holes were. And now we're in the world of absence, because he wanted to mark the size of the missing. And so he mixed up Plaster of Paris, poured them into the holes when they found these, let it set up, and then dug around. And these are, these really poignant images of the dead people in Pompeii. And they almost look like plaster sculptures, but it catches people in their last throes of asphyxiation. They're curled up, they're holding each other, the dog on the chain who's rolled up onto his back in a laugh sort of spasm, whole families huddled together, as the ash settled on the city, the bodies were encased, the bodies decomposed, the ashes hardened around them, and you have this frame of the stolen painting there. So that was the metaphor that we were working with.

Michael Schweikardt

Yeah, it's fascinating as an artist to think about how negative space was made into positive space in that process as a way to, as a way to, as you say, mark the absence. It's just remarkable, remarkable. I'm so I'm so drawn to so many thoughts about the nature of ruins. And in many ways, the idea of ruins is at the heart of Prompts current project, which is to revitalize ruined scenic models. And I wonder if I could get you to talk a little bit about ruins. I have a couple of just, leading questions, and we can just sort of see where it goes. But I guess I'm interested a little bit in like, classification, right? Like, when does something become a ruin? As opposed to being Rubble? Or, or just junk? Right? Where is the line? Where does it crossover from one to the other? And do you make distinctions between ruins that are material and ruins that are metaphorical? And are there times when ruins are just simply aesthetic?

Odai Johnson

Yeah, and it's a wonderful distinction to make. I was, there was a New York Times article about two weeks ago out about some Syrian refugees, who are living in the ruins of a Roman city, and who think of themselves as what better residency for us, our lives are ruins. And that's, that's a sort of intersection of the metaphor and the material where you have people who are essentially shells of who they were moving into buildings that were shells of what they were. And for those of us who can get trapped in metaphors that is that is a very, very prime and sad metaphor that way. Ruins. Rubble. We don't think about modern, you know, sort of bombed out buildings as ruins, we just think about them as rubble that needs to be replaced in some way. But we dare not touch the Acropolis or the Colosseum. There is a kind of charisma, that ruins actually is a classical aesthetic. And that if a bombed out building is old enough, it earns an entrance into an aesthetic. And there's a perverse kind of logic at stake there. But in the western imaginary, at least, there are solid credentials behind that logic. And then it was actually, there were two really critical periods in the sort of invention of the of the classical ruin. And the first was an older period. called the second sophistic, who were living in the kind of rabbles of a classical world that was no longer second century Rome. Rome occupied Athens. And there is an invention, a very, very concerted invention by a group of writers called the Second Sophistic Writers about creating an idea of an idealized Athens, a sort of golden age of classical. And so these people were really good about inventing the classical. And somehow there was a kind of mythic world where people were the out of time of all of this. And so if you come back to writers like Pausaneus, for example, travel guide, you know, any sort of walking through this world. And he's mapping what is essentially ruins, you know, there's monuments that are broken, these are pedestals of statues without figures on them anymore. And he is glorifying this, a static of the way that Athens refuses to recede, and that it just sort of instead moves out into the timelessness of some wonderful past. And so they were really very good. There's a whole host of writers that created this idea about a classical Athens. The second period is the one that I think we are most indebted to, and that is the 18th century grand tourist and their, you know, their mandatory tours to Rome, and then into Greece, and the creation of the aesthetic called the sublime. And that is the one that we are still, you know, in a way kind of heirs, to where we still do, we still do go to the Colosseum, we go to Athens to the Acropolis. And part of it is an utter resistance to rebuilding those buildings. We want them broken, because they are in their perfect form, when they can evoke a kind of glory they no longer can contain. And we would only be disappointed if they were reconstructed in any way. And so part of that longing, that part of that idea of the aesthetic of the sublime is a longing to be part of a past that never was that the jagged, broken building by moonlight ideally alone. That is the ideal moment of the sublime that these Romantic poets were so infatuated and these grand tourists are so infatuated with. And there's something that still isn't, our, what our imaginative legacy, that we still sort of in some way want to pursue that by the busload. Some small want to sort of consume that old, you know, romantic aesthetic of experiencing the sublime of the broken once was beautiful. And so the statues, I mean, they resist, like, they're never completed anymore, they must be maimed. And they are more beautiful in that condition. And that's, that's a sort of a lovely thing that modern buildings and modern work can't wholly imitate. Yeah,

Michael Schweikardt

Yeah. That resistance to, what would be the word, that resistance to being restored, I suppose, is so romantic,

Odai Johnson

Right, that I keep missing elbow of the statue makes it more perfect. With the missing parts. Mm hmm.

Michael Schweikardt

I'm interested in how memory maps itself onto objects. How memory contributes to the, to the aura of an object. And I'm sure there's some intersection between that interest and this idea of idealize ruins or, or resistance to restoration. I do know that in your book, you talk about ruins as repositories of memory, which is a phrase that I just absolutely love. And so this is a strange question, but my question to you is if that is true, and if what I feel, is there some validity to what I feel about how memory maps itself on on to objects, I mean, is this really, is this just a notion or does this really happen? Can objects really become containers for memories?

Odai Johnson

Yes, yeah. Sorry to be kind of morbid for a moment, but the urn of ashes on a mantelpiece is a family's vessel of memory. Yeah. That's, that's all that's left. That only extends to the family. Maybe to the extended family. Maybe it is handed down. And somehow, though the memories of that person are not handed down, there is a kind of second hand narrative that can still endow the vessel with memory. It will, you know, it's half life diminishes with each generation. But artifacts, relics, family mementos, they they work this way. This is what is left of grandma's tea set. This is what is left of your grandfather who fought in the Second World War. This is the flag of the gone veteran who was the sense that objects are endowed. I think I use the word charisma, you use the word aura. With this, I think we're talking about the same thing. And consider with this a couple of things. When these private vessels go public, I don't know if you have this. I don't know if this is a Seattle thing, if this is a local thing here. We're a very sort of, you know, bike friendly town here. But with that come fatalities, right? Yeah. And so all across Seattle, we have ghost bikes. Right. And so these white painted frames that are set up in intersections as sort of public memorials of private loss. We don't actually have access to the memory of those, but we do recognize them as vessels of memory. And yes, those things happen all the time. But think about the way when these vessels become sustainable, over not just generations, but over centuries, right. I mean, the Catholic faith was built around relics. Memorabilia are the kind of guidebooks to understanding relics. And so if you just presented somebody with a piece of fragment of small wood, it is just a fragment of wood. But if you accompany with the memorabilia that says when Oh, pilgrim, oh, Romeo, you go to Rome. These are the churches you need to visit. These are the shrines, these of the sacred relics. And this bit of wood is from the cross, this door is from the crowd, this bed is the crib, the the crib of baby Jesus, , and the way that those sort of, the charisma is sustained by that for 1000 years. It does indeed tell us that, you know, this is, possibly faith is built around that. Obviously, you can walk into some of these churches. Now, I spent a bit of time in Rome. A vial of mother Mary's breast milk still, you know, some of this, we become, you know, our post-enlightenment brains kind of run at odds with our pre-enlightenment sense of faith at that and yet, clearly, there is still a great deal of charisma that is invested in these objects. Yeah, that seems to me really sort of critical. That what sustains them is the willingness to invest in the belief in the miraculous. Now, we're quite good at that. So it's just really a case about like, how can we transfer this investment into theater making. And that part is really is cool at two levels, because it won. You know, there were practitioners who tried, you know, to actually bring the so called relics on to the stage - theater relics, not Catholic relics this way, at the Garrick Club in London has a small Museum and Library up above it. And it's absolutely full of these and so you can see like Garrick’s chair that Edmund King used, you know, 80 years later, he's still using Garrick’s chair in his, you know, productions of Richard the Third and everybody knows this is Garrick’s chair and there's a kind of relic we have about, that the actor, I can't remember his name, who played Hamlet donated his skull and the afterlife of Yorick lives on. And then it says like, that seems like a perfect translation of Catholic inspired relic. We are on to the stage. And so we have these sort of direct applications of using these vessels of memory known as relics being created on stage and then continued for generations after on stage with a kind of, you know, intensely charged charisma aura about them. Yeah. And those are direct uses. I think that there's the more prevalent and invitational inventive way, is to think of fabricating secondhand charisma.This way, by tapping into a kind of investment that we have all the time. And this, this, this is my example for, you know, any Holocaust Museum in America is going to have at the centerpiece of it, an authentic Polish boxcar. And this will be, you know, at the center of all of this stuff, and the kind of enormous charisma and the poignancy that this one item brings, is really the gravitational pull of the whole museum. Everything lives off of the gravity of this one piece of authenticity. No matter what else is around there, they don't necessarily need any other material artifacts, they could be renderings, paintings, they could be second hand narratives of that. But if there is a gravitational pull of the authentic someplace in there, and I think this is an idea that theaters can use, yeah, because the sets are not permanent. Sets will never be ruined, they're all by their nature temporary. They're going to end up in the dumpster at the end of the run. And there isn't enough life on them to generate the sense of the sublime, or enough investment to generate the sense of the relic worry about them. But if they are built around the premise of an authentic somewhere, then the whole set lives in the sunshine of this aura. And, and it seems to me with that in mind, I can imagine I've not, you know, seen or done or anything like this, but I could imagine a production of Anne Frank, for example, right? That sort of says, okay, people are going to come to this who will have some experience with Holocaust museums and someplace they will have some experience with that last iota of relic about this, this somewhere, this authentic thing. So, here's my, here's my scene design moment that I've been, I've envisioned here is that you can sit through it, you know, the entire production of this thing. You can have no kind of authentic artifact anywhere in that thing. And yet still know that somewhere behind here, your audience is waiting for an encounter with the authentic here. Right. Final moment gunshots, lights down, lights, black, lights do not come back on. There is a long silence. There is a long darkness, there is no curtain call. There is that and we see here in the house there is movement, there is something that's going on. And these are people who are placing things down the aisle that you will walk out on, and when slowly the lights come back up, there is no curtain call there is just that somber moment of incompleteness to all of this, that opening absence, that gulf, that gap that says like there is no closure to this experience yet. And now when the lights are up what the stagehands have done is to roll down the aisle, these long canvas strips all the way all the way down and glued on to these or not our shoes, small children's shoes and these things that you do see in the museums. The sort of mound of the artifacts, this use in one place, the you know the old coats, clothes or whatnot. And now they're all down the aisles here. And for us to leave that, we have to sort of walk in, around, step over, move slowly through the authentic. Now, are they authentic? No, no, no, we fully expect them to be. And because we we bring the investment to that. Yeah, yeah, we carry that story out. Our last tactile experience is actually very much like moving through the Museum of the authentic. And that's what the designers have replicated here. And that seems to me, a marvelously poignant way of evoking the, the absence here.

Michael Schweikardt

It's really, it's beautifully chilling to think about, you know, if you’d indulge me for two seconds about a story about a production of Diary of Anne Frank, it's quite different. It's quite different. But I feel like I, as a scenic designer, I have some connection to what it is you're talking about, but done in a more internal way, right, which is to say that some of the work that I've done that has to do with aura in set design was directed sort of internally towards what the rest of the creative team and especially the cast might get out of something happening in, in the scenic design. So for instance, you know, in a fairly recent production of Diary of Anne Frank, we worked very hard to reproduce what I thought was a very authentic wallpaper design for some of the interior rooms of that space, right. not authentic, not authentic, but it did carry something with it, that meant something to the performers who were on stage with it, like it endowed it with something that was quite special. And I'm also guilty of hiding family photos and, you know, other personal mementos on stage in the hope that somehow - again, you say charisma, I've been saying, aura - that that will transfer somehow into the experience to the people who are closest to it, which I just think is fascinating,

Odai Johnson

Right? And here I did, I'm so grateful that you brought in the idea of, of the actor is the vehicle of the aura here. You know, I said, when you're talking family photos, you're talking about the actor family photos. Yeah? Yeah. Right. Because, you know, ideally, what you were really asking, is that for the actor to be the conduit into the aura, yeah, and, and in a way, this is marvelous, and we don't see them here, you see these in Germany a lot. They're called memory rooms. And these are sort of like for memory care patients, right. And so what they have done is to create a kind of, like, in Germany, it's going to be a pre-wall, right? So there are East German memory rooms, in which the rooms look like they did before 1989, that isn't, there was a limited amount of goods, there were always these big glass ashtrays there, the tables look like this, the color looked like that. For us, it would be something like creating a kind of, you know, avocado, green appliance, you know, and it's to evoke kind of the 60s years. But the idea is that you bring memory care people, not into new spaces of which they have no memories, but you bring them into the spaces where their memories are still very strong. And now all of a sudden, they get reemerged in this. And here are magazines that they used to know, here are, you know, pottery and ashtrays and kinds of upholstery and wallpaper, these were the things that they used to know. And all of a sudden, there is no memory loss. It's very contained within this one sort of petri dish that they live in. But while they live there, they swim freely in the past. So if we can use it as a kind of metaphor, what we are asking is that the set designers are creating memory rooms, for the actors, and the actors need to sort of share that out with an audience. That's, that's rich, because that's a huge inhale of life.

Michael Schweikardt

Yeah. And remarkable to create all of that memory, charisma, aura within an artwork, as you said, which is totally ephemeral, right? It's going to be gone. It itself will be a memory tomorrow each and every time. And it's fascinating. Gosh, thank you so much for that. That was terrific.

Odai Johnson

Oh, no, they're really wonderful. And there's a lot of writing done around these memory rooms. And there's still a kind of German phenomenal, but they just seem to me like this is this is memory therapy for people. And there's a there's a theater metaphor there somewhere. For sure.

Michael Schweikardt

So okay, what are you working on currently?

Odai Johnson

Oh, gosh, another big book? Yeah, yeah, it's actually called The Size of All That's Missing. And it is about last performance traditions and the way that what they used to perform lived on long after the form itself has disappeared. And we know this and things like blackface minstrelsy, right? We don't do those, but the form of these, the damage, but there's a kind of toxic legacy that just continues to leach out of these. And that is just sort of one tradition of many as like, I don't know, 14 chapters of lost performance traditions that we use to engage in that still, in some way have an active afterlife, that shape culturally, in its in a sense of long term cultural identity that is still indebted somewhere to practices. Did they originate them? No, no, no, they simply express what was part of that culture, that culture has long since sort of moved on. But because of the potency of the performance traditions, the tropes, the types of that they have generated, even the narrative styles that has sort of lasted far longer than the performances itself. Yeah. So this is this is kind of what I'm working on right now.

Michael Schweikardt

It's fascinating. I can't wait to read it.

Odai Johnson

Huh? Well, it's you know, this is this requires more research and more travel of course.