Much has been written on the theater’s relation to cinema. Not long ago, André Bazin suggested that the connection is far older and closer than is generally admitted, and that if we hope to understand one form, we ought to understand the other. But today it is the divergence between theater and cinema that seems ineluctable: seldom do stage and screen occupy the same thought, except perhaps when one encounters a ghastly Broadway-to-Hollywood (or, worse, Hollywood-to-Broadway) remake, in which case all aesthetic concerns are banished and thoughts of artistic suicide prevail.   

It is heartening, then, that there still exists a small bunch of artists concerned with the confluence of theater and cinema. Among them is Andrew Gilchrist, a Brooklyn playwright who has lately begun to incorporate filmic and televisual elements into his stage productions. His newest, James V, which opens on May 13^th at the Tank Theater, is his second play to be preceded by an online video trailer. Gilchrist hopes not only that the trailer—viewable to anyone with a computer—will increase awareness of his theatrical work, but also that it will expand the show’s “landscape” beyond the theater. The former consideration is impressive for its savvy self-marketing, the latter for its artistic scope. Both, as it turns out, may play decisive roles in the reinvigoration of modern drama.

The theater of today is not dead, but it is gasping. The public’s hunger for human drama has long been satisfied by cinema and television, and it is by appealing to those twin sensibilities that a dramatist may now hope to attract his crowd. Gilchrist is not stooping, however—he is merely genuflecting before the mighty hold of contemporary media. Rather than selling out, he is mining film, TV, and the Internet for all they’re worth, and managing to say a thing or two about them in the process. If more playwrights followed Gilchrist’s lead and gave up their cloistral rejection of popular media, the theater as a whole might breathe easier.  

Not surprisingly, Gilchrist’s artistic influences are theatrical as well as cinematic. While one detects the fierce gloominess of Genet and Strindberg in his drama, there are equal parts Lynch and Fassbinder. Gilchrist’s plays delight in the bizarre, exploring that gray zone of dramatic imagination midway between comedy and horror. Lately, the playwright has been blending the two. In a recent work, an adaptation of Maeterlinck’s 1891 The Intruder, a family of slovenly southerners sits beside a flickering television set. The screen plays scenes from an imagined sitcom as banal as any found on network television, but infused with a grim tension that subtly affects the drama onstage. Mood is key, and there’s plenty of it. Like the family, we as audience are tired of knowing the world through 2-dimensional facsimiles—we are now more than ever interested in feeling life rather than watching it. The characters’ strange monologues, their exaggerated gestures, their eerie fixation on the natural world—all help to provoke a sense of dread that feels more real than mediated.

Dealing with film and television in art is a tricky business. No less an eminence grise than Bazin warned against the mixing of theater and cinema. Many have tried it, only to adopt the puerile clichés, hip irony, or superficial surfaces of the commercial screen. The difficulty is in incorporating a potentially salacious, ironic medium into one’s work while preserving the more profound human potentials of higher art. Gilchrist’s attempts have been nothing if not admirable.

James V is written and directed by Andrew Gilchrist, produced by Lucy Kaminsky and Andrew Gilchrist, and featuring Caleb Bark, Hallie Cooper-Novack, Andrew Gilchrist, Lucy Kaminsky, Benjamin Manglos, Richard Saudek and Patrick Vaill.  Designed by Kell Condon.  Video by Benjamin Manglos.  Costumes  by Joanna Spinks.

The play will show ­­­­­­­­­­­­­Wednesday, May 13^th and 27^th at 9:30, Sunday May 17^th at 6pm  and Sunday May 24^th at 7:30pm. The Tank is located at 354 West 45^th Street (between 8^th and 9^th Avenues).