‘Life’s but a walking shadow,” Macbeth says in his most famous soliloquy, “a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more” (Act V, Scene 5). That, strangely, is how I see myself every time I perform “The Oven,” the one-man play I wrote. It has toured to numerous cities across the country. Today and this weekend I will performed it at the Holden Theater, as part of the Ko Festival.
The piece is about a shamanic ceremony I participated in, in the Amazon, with members of the Putumayo tribe a few years ago. The experience made me reconsider my views on faith and knowledge. After it took place, I thought it would become a short story or maybe a journalistic piece. The fact that it mutated into a play surprises me to this day.
I’m not an actor but a storyteller. Yet I grew up in a household where acting was a form of capital. My father, Abraham Stavans, is a theater star in Mexico. He has also done TV and movies, but the stage is his forum. When I was young, I would accompany him to his performances. The transformations he would undergo in the dressing room were enthralling: One moment my father would the loving man I knew, and the next he would be a hospital nurse, a hotel manager, or a concentration-camp prisoner.
Somehow, he would come up with the personality traits to even convince me that he was temporarily on vacation, that someone else — another persona — was inhabiting his body. I always found it bizarre that audiences would be ready to pay for him to undergo such metamorphoses.
This might explain why the stage, for me, is a place of mystery where things aren’t what they seem. But actually being on stage as an actor, and not simply looking at it through the invisible fourth wall, is something else. It fills me with awe and trepidation. Can I get out of myself, in front of others when I perform, like my father does? In the case of “The Oven,” I wonder: Will I be able to cease to be the Ilan Stavans of every day to become another Ilan Stavans, one that is a mirage, a concoction?
Given this conundrum, I am fascinated by what makes a stage a stage. Is any open space capable of becoming one? In his 1968 book “The Empty Space,” Peter Brook says that when one person walks while another one is watching, that’s all that is needed for theater to exist: an actor and a viewer. But I don’t think it’s true. There is a depth to the stage that reality doesn’t have; it isolates human behavior, inviting us to study it with a sensitive lens. No other artistic form is capable of that because no other artistic form is as complete. Live theater lives in the present and then is heard no more.
And it is elitist. Let’s be frank: To fully appreciate the ritual of theater-going as a viewer, you need training. You might enjoy a certain spectacle; children, in particular, do. But transformative theater is about epiphany. No wonder the Greeks invented it while paying tribute to Dionysius. The stage requires reverence, patience and dedication, as well as the capacity to suspend belief in order to regain it in other ways. Not everyone is granted this privilege.
In an iteration of a course I teach in prisons on Shakespeare’s late plays, an inmate in his 50s once told me that, while he was excited to discover “The Tempest,” I needed to know that, in his whole life, he had never seen a play. He had never been to a theater. I realized then the daunting task before me.
The inmate’s comment made me think of the 12th-century Islamic philosopher Averroes. Among other things, he is known for having written a treatise called “Tahafut al-Tahafut” (“The Incoherence of the Incoherence”). Averroes tried to explain Aristotelian concepts to the Muslim population of Spain.
At one point, he tried to understand the meaning of two of Aristotle’s terms: comedy and tragedy. Yet Averroes, too, had never been in a theater, as Islam had a prohibition against idolatry, and the stage was a threat, the site where idols took shape. Out of ignorance, he came up with two ridiculous definitions.
In some ways, the theater is also about ignorance. First you don’t know what you know until you experience it; but once you understand that magic, it sweeps you away. It teaches you to be vulnerable.
I think of this in connection with “The Oven” because it is about losing control. The play asks that I strut and fret for most of an hour while pretending to be a poor player and a worse decision-maker. In other words, I am supposed to descend into chaos as a character, but as an actor I can’t let that chaos take over. It’s a peculiar conundrum.
Then there’s the fact that every night, the show is different: The faces in the audience in front of me are new, and so am I. My father always says this to me: No two performances are alike because no two “yous” are the same. His recommendation is to surreptitiously dedicate each performance to whichever set of eyes I happen to land on, as I survey the crowd.
“That’s how one personalizes the stage,” he says.
Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American, and Latino Culture at Amherst College, will perform “The Oven” as part of this year’s Ko Festival, at Holden Theater, Amherst, tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m., and on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. Tickets are available at kofest.com.