Don’t dream it, be-e it…some short performances around the question of how to stage the Rocky Horror (Picture) Show

You can do the script (which I’ve never read) and let it inspire your decisions. But how can you be free from the film version? How could you be free from the film if you decided to do The Sound of Music?

RHPS is an interesting case since the fans tend to know every frame of the movie. And part of being a fan is being able to stage perfect lip-syncable facsimiles which run in tandem with the screen action. Any fan, therefore, could direct a great production if reproducing the film is the goal. And as a goal, why not?

Can you do an updated version? Some shows welcome updating, but I don’t think RH is one of them. Consider the opening song, which was written to reach an audience of people who could acknowledge the common experience of watching science fiction/horror films at either a theatre or drive-in (maybe not all of them consciously experiencing the perverse delight celebrated in the song, but more on that later…) and who would have a specific memory of specific films, all layered over with a certain nostalgia connected with the birth of Rock and Roll, which was happening concurrently with the youthful viewing of the films. The opening song has already passed into the category of trivia challenge for any audience member under the age of fifty. But do you update by changing the song, adding verses about Jason and Ripley and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, with a throbbing hip-hop beat box thing (yeeeeuh) going on? What in the musical would stay the same if you tried to reach a younger audience by altering references? Not much. Richard O’Brian, the composer, has to be close to sixty…

So we come back to the idea of the RH we all know and love. But consider, if we just leave it alone or if we try to re-create the familiar, part of the audience’s experience is going to be fixed on comparison. It’s unavoidable. And how many Martian audience members do we expect who have never even heard of RH? And that tendency to compare is not one I want to encourage. It should at least be kept to a minimum. I think you should try to capture an essence as close as possible to what the original musical and film were trying to do (and what the cult viewings did for that crowd). Or why not give seasoned fans some outrageous surprises?

So what might be some other options? You could keep everything more or less close to the original but make it “edge-ier,” a Broadway revival a number of years back probably went that route, with money in the budget for “more” of everything. And don’t misunderstand me if I roll my eyes a bit; I’m not a prude. If you want to have “sexier” costumes, more overtly copulatory dancing, cruder humor, more “intensiteeeeee,” you can. To my mind it’s the Las Vegas mindset and approach. How much more can you titillate? You want to serve drinks and get the crowd whooping, right? It’s a choice, certainly. And you could devote time in a rehearsal process finding newer, closer and sharper edges to hone.

But now let’s take ourselves through a thought experiment. What if you wanted to do the show (and use the book and songs, no re-writing), but you wanted to do something other than any of the options we’ve looked at so far? What if we took the show seriously? I don’t mean perform it seriously; after all, it’s supposed to be a hoot and a good time. But what if we asked ourselves why we enjoy it. Those answers, to me, are pretty interesting and could lead to an exciting production…

(I will continue with this soon…please go ahead and make comments)

Give yourself over to ab-so-lute plea-ea-sure

And what if we used a rehearsal process to ask those very questions as we begin to get to know the material?

RH is about transgression. RH plays at that border between what we acknowledge as kinky and what we register as properly (structurally) perverse.

(I should say here that when I use the word perverse, I am not making a value judgement or being perjorative. I am certainly not being homophobic. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, and a Lacanian one, which is my particular training, perverse is not a definition of homosexuality per se. You can be straight and be perverse; you can be gay and not be perverse. Perversity is a structure in which one can obtain a guaranteed absolute enjoyment beyond the social norms and regulations put in place tocontrol such things. Perverts don’t play by the rules most of us do to obtain sexual pleasure (whether we’re gay or straight); they set up their own systems which both acknowledge those norms the rest of us dutifully support (sometimes begrudgingly)and at the same timeignore them.)

Re-read that previous bit and ask yourself if we are starting to approach the world of RH.

So what is kinky? That’s what’s going on when we poor non-perverse smucks use the perverse traces at work in our deepest fantasies to stimulate desire. But we don’t get off on enacting the fantasy pure and simple, without a nod to a deeper relationship. Playing out the fantasy doesn’t guarantee our complete satisfaction regardless of what’s going on with any others involved. We usefantasy, rather,to approach acceptable sexual links (gay or straight)with others.

In the opening song of RH, we encounter someone who is telling us about how he (and could it also be a she? a good question…) got off watching the science fiction double feature. He does not say that he and Susie had so much fun getting turned on in the theatre and making out later. We are hearing the confession of a solitary fetishist…

More about fetishes in a minute. With all this talk of the perverse and the kinky one question that comes to mind is: should a production of RH come down more on the side of serious outrage and transgression or consist of acceptable kinks for the tourists and kids? The psychoanalytic wager is that at the root of all sexuality is an unconsciousperverse scenario consisting of a subject in a relationship (vacillating between passive and active)with some thing(other thanthe intrinsic personhood of the partner)which guarantees enjoyment. We are being teased and challenged with that possibility throughout RH. Could RHbe performedas if by a youth praise group and band at the One Light Tabernacle of Truth? As if they are doing it in church as a praise activity, not knowing what they are truly doing. What if the minister of the church plays the minister of the wedding at the beginning of RH, and then what if Frankenfurter’s first entrance involves the minister stripping out of his suit to reveal the teddy underneath? The opening song could be done by a girl sitting on a stoolwith just a guitar and love for the Lord in her heart. Much of the music of RH is consciously gospel. It could be fun and would be ironic since the idea of performing RH was at one time proposed by a local theatre linked in many ways with a local church. As if a midnight showing of RH would be jolly fun…and as ifa faith communitycould turnits head from the bare faced challenges to traditional values present in the show, not to mention the outright (or is it a joke) nihilistic ending.

More performances to come…and I promise to get back to fetishes.

It’s beyond me. Help me, mommy!

Depending on your point of view, it really could seem kind of bleak. Brad and Janet, the normative happy couple, are stripped down to the horror of their fantasies. The myth of the romantic bond is exploded. And so the audience is teased with the possibility of moving past their own illusions of love and touching their own horrifying fundamental fantasies. Their laughing enjoyment is prompted by anxiety.

There might be a bit of updating you could do which would enhance the events at the end of the show. Before Frankie comes in with “Don’t dream it, be it,” we have a series of solitary presentations in which characters reveal their newfound sexual “truths.” “I’ve been released,” etc. What if Frankie functioned like a master of ceremonies in the mode of a Rikki Lake or a Jerry Springer, eliciting these confessions from the characters for the sake of audience outrage and arousal?

I’m also tempted to play with Eddie, the image of the misunderstood rock and roll outlaw. The musical celebrates the image and then lets Frankie trash it. It, too, is a masquerade on which we can project our fantasies. Columbia as much as admits later that she used Eddie to do exactly that. It could be provocative to portray Eddie as a skin-head, white supremacist Nazi complete with swastika tatooed on his chest. Rock and Roll is the soundtrack of excess, but is ultimately politically neutral. It is fitting that Eddie was one of Frankie’s earlier attempts at “creation” which backfired. Frankie is having a grand time as master of the perverse universe, but by making “absolute pleasure” his experimental substance, he’s playing a dangerous game and can’t always control the results of his research. Perverse enjoyment is ultimately solitary. The Nazi propaganda machine in Germany during the war did not prudishly try to stamp out pornography; they allowed it to flourish because Goering believed it helped to isolate people (by inflaming solitary fantasies) and made them more controllable by the party machine.

I’ve been making a man with blond hair and a tan…

Matthew Bailey should play Rocky. Sure, it’s outrageous, which is a good enough reason to do it, but for me there’s also a kind of perverse logic to it. I can approach the idea both from the notion of fetish and using the notion of the return of the repressed. (Wait for it…)

RH is a hymn to the fetish. For those of you unfamiliar with Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, leather bars, or Karl Marx, a fetish is something which a pervert (structurally speaking, see above) puts in place of a desiring human sexual relationship and which allows him (generally speaking, a male) to get off. It is an object which allows you (if you’re inclined to do so)to follow your own private path to absolute satisfaction. I could go on and talk about the maternal phallus and jouissance and disavowal of castration, but we’d be wandering a bit.

Society says, “No, you can’t steal one of your mother’s shoes and use it to obtain anything other than a tight fit on your foot.” The fetishist replies, “I know it is a shoe, but nonetheless…” Anything can substitute for the shoe, which itself is a substitute for a certain twist in anearly relationship (usually with the mother). I know it is just a science fiction movie, but … The transvestite’s fetish is more general in that the thing that works is the wearing of the clothes. We might look at the transvestite and think he looks ridiculous (or fabulous), but…

“I see what it is, but nonetheless…” Nothing in the musical should change, no lines certainly. Rocky is still a muscle-bound piece of tan and blond man-flesh whomakes Frankie, Janet, and others all a-quiver. He’s just played by Matthew. The rest of the characters react to Rocky as usual. In fact, it seems to me Janet’s enjoyment of Rocky will have to be even more absolute and overwhelming to sell the conviction. And the stage does not need to be void of hunky man flesh (I’m not threatened by the fact that women drool); there can be rows of studs in every number humping and pumpingfor all they’re worth. Rocky, however, should be played by Matthew. The fetish opens a path to excess. We’re just trading one excessive entity for another. The fetish is substitution in action.

As for the return of the repressed. The music in RH ismostly Rock & Roll, with some R & B, and a surprisingly large helping of Gospel. The British Invasion consisted primarily of English youths discovering American Black “roots music.” Jazz, when it was popular dance music,was called”jungle music.” You see where I’m going. I don’t think it’sjust because Richard O’Brien is English that we don’t have any people of color in RH.He’s sneering at us and ourhypocritical white culture. We use the music to enjoy ourselves; we use the music to enjoy, in part, because we view those who invented itin a somewhat fetishistic way. If there were brother and sistersin the show, the rest of us wouldn’t be able to truly exploit our perverse enjoyment. Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian political philosopher who has written a good deal on the roots of racism and nationalism. According to him, at the root of racism is a fantasy (imaginary situation): the racist believes the object of hate–the Jew, the Black, the Armenian, the Gypsy, Arab, etc.–has priviledged access to an obscene and overwhelming enjoyment, a mode of pleasure that the whites or nationalists, etc., have renounced or sacrificed for the sake of civilization. A case of projection. Modern consumerist culture has embraced hip-hop because it knows it can sell the fantasy of enjoyment-beyond-the-boundaries. White youth culture has always looked to African Americans as holding the secret key to unlimited jouissance. And who can blame the ganstas for playing along if there’s going to be a royalty check involved. Rocky, too, is a symbol of a longed-for enjoyment beyond the boundaries. So have him played by an African American actor but don’t acknowledge that that is what’s going on. It will also be another ironic turn when Rocky, as Kong, climbs the tower carrying Frankie’s body.

To finish up

The essence of the move from fundamental fantasy to perverse reality is in the presence of the screen and in the question, Which side are you on? Everything which plays out in RH is rooted in something originally experienced on the movie screen. The idea of a fundamental fantasy at the root of each individual’s sexual reality implies that we each carry around a screen upon which plays a scene. Or behind which plays a scene. That’s the nice ambiguity of it all. Is the screen a projective surface or a liminal (big bucks academic po-mo word referring to the idea of a limit or boundary) tissue? To be perverse is to see it as a film (yes, punning here) through which you pass to reach the scene being played out on the other side. The fantasy scenario becomes the enacted scenario. “Don’t dream it–be it.” That’s the conceptual justification for using lots of screens in a production of RH–screens as projection surfaces, screens as boundaries, screens as discrete blockages, screens showing scenes and shadows. I also like the idea of a vertical screen,used to support projections and definea boundary, transforming into a horizontalhammockin which all manner of appetites can be indulged. Ultimately a wounded Frankie wraps himself in a screen of glowing light (“there’s a light,” after all, “glowing in the Frankenstein place”–and for that song the light would be the flickering of a film projector) and the light is replaced by blood, screen becoming shroud.

Then GinJenny wrote:

Interesting musings on Rocky–closely intertwined with themes in
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (both movie and stage presentations). Also
important to explore boundaries and transition areas, ie, male/female,
fantasy/reality, danger/safety, mask/vulnerability.
Am I being too pretentious?

And I respond:

I don’t think there’s such a thing as too pretentious. Talking about ideas is at least as old as Plato. And that’s staying within the Western funnel. And then finding a way to carry the discussions into events, and what is gained as surplus and what has to besacrificed in the transition; that’s part of the fun.