A soothing and unsettling rite

The human species’ first theatrical performance: the alpha male of a hunting expedition, spot-lit by the moon, stands on a wide rock and re-enacts the thrilling narrative that ends with chunks of dripping flesh hissing on an open fire. He crouches, wide-eyed, slipping past recollected predators. Then he grips an invisible spear in his hand, leaps up in the air, and stabs his prey in an act of epic heroism. His audience is taken aback. But they can certainly tell he’s onto something. Then, the next day, his mate simultaneously invents the genres of sketch comedy and satire with her version of how the hunt probably went down. But that’s neither here nor there. Humans create theater; this is one of our defining characteristics. While it’s taken us a blink or two of eternity’s eye to progress from the hunter-gatherer campfire to the cup holder and the season ticket, the essential impulse remains the same. We use theater to tell stories, to communicate, to search together. And while we’ve set aside the experience of theater as a codified artistic genre, we channel this basic drive into all manner of things that aren’t recognized as theater. But strip the ritual down to its essentials, and you see it go off in all sorts of directions. The ingredients: An event set apart from its audience. A set time and place, which explicitly or otherwise generates a sacred otherness from mundane life. A program, a plan. Content to be communicated or, in some cases, set rules for the discovery of improvisation. And then, the most sublime aspect of all, the experience that unites the observer and the observed in collusion, conspiracy, shared will to express and acknowledge the ineffable, that thing behind the veil for which we have no words. Like a wrestling match. Or a Tea Party Rally. A fifteen-minute presentation slot at a cardiologists’ convention. Or, terrible as it might be to admit it, at a midwinter Timberwolves’ game at Target Center, a densely packed meta-narrative about faulty judgment, squandered opportunity, and the ultimate futility of all things. Theater is everywhere; not just of the all-the-world’s-a-stage variety (a discussion of the masks we wear would be worthy, but too weighty for where we’re going), but of the ritualized, transmitting, multi-sensory stew that resides in the deepest corners of where we live. We feed on it. Perhaps it’s this. We take all the things we do: think, act, yearn, symbolize, make, break, doubt, decide, communicate, interpret. Then we splinter and fragment, taking on the tasks to which we are best suited, finally reconvening at an appointed moment for an act of union, a soothing and unsettling rite that expresses the line that connects the prehistoric campfire with opening night, and the wedding, and the PowerPoint presentation. It banishes the void, or at least acknowledges its sway. In its intoxicating influence, it might even convince us that nothingness is the greatest illusion of which we have convinced ourselves.