Interpreting the Subtext

After a week that seemed like it took centuries to put behind me, I finally made it to Friday night, when I trekked to the Power Center to see Théâtre de la Ville’s production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The actors were superb, the set design was great, and the story itself had just the right amount of absurdism for the laywoman (me) to feel artistic, while still understand what was going on. What I really want to talk about today, though, is the use of subtitles in theatre.

First, to provide some context of the venue if you’ve never been there — the Power Center is large for a local or university theatre. According to the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance website, the proscenium (the area in front of the curtain) measures in at 55 feet, 3.75 inches by 28 feet. And this is where the subtitles were projected — at least 20 feet away from any of the actors’ faces.

If you look at this picture, the screens were hanging from the ceiling in the center and sitting on the stage on the left and right…

Although I was able to follow the French quite well last night, a couple of years ago, when I had considerably less education and work experience in the language, I went to see this same company perform Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinocéros. Throughout the production, I found myself staring at any one of these screens for about ninety percent of the two hour span. I walked out of the theatre really wanting to rave to the world about how much I loved the play and how it enlightened me, because I did love the writing, but I couldn’t. It took me a while to pinpoint why, but sooner or later, I realized that I was frustrated because I wasn’t seeing the movement on stage and the emotions on the faces of the actors. Of course, I could hear the notes of joy, pain, excitement, and terror in their voices; however, I didn’t feel immersed in the experience because I couldn’t rely on the sense upon which I depend most to read people in my everyday life — eyesight. The situation is different with film, I think, because the subtitles are right under the actors. If you read them quickly enough, you can usually switch your focus back to the images above and still catch the visual action unfolding. Twenty feet of distance to travel, though, was a bit too much for my eyes to handle.

After the play last night, the University Musical Society actually hosted a Question and Answer session with the director, Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota. Sitting in a folding chair on stage, this slight man embodied every positive stereotype of a Frenchman. Fitted navy blazer with black everything else. Chic. Check. Impeccable posture and only using his hands to accentuate the important details of his speech. Elegant. Check. His voice increasing to a vigorous tone whenever he really cared about something. Passionate. Check. And he really cared about those subtitles. He kept repeating that he loved how the author could be present through them, complementing the acting, how text can serve as a bridge between the literary and the theatrical worlds of a play. His argument was very fair, and he was very persuasive, but I was still not crazy about them in this venue.

At the same time, I have to admit that without subtitling, this show would have probably never come to the university. The people of the Ann Arbor community, bilingual or not, would not have had the opportunity to welcome a culture so beautifully unique to their own.

And that would have been a shame.