Stages: Corridor, Cube, and Pond

A staged photograph and a stage play can rely on a painted cloth backdrop. Campuses feel staged. Office parks feel staged: recently planted ornamental trees or shrubs, perhaps hydrangeas in the summer, perhaps tulips and daffodils in the spring. Staged photography reduces contingency. Maybe it is a dishonest photograph or simply not candid: family portraits, school pictures, pornography, hoaxes.     

I can imagine that I am sitting in a theater watching a play. I extend toward a single point, through a rectangle. I look at the backdrop and am stretched up to the tip of an imaginary pyramid, the base of which is my face.

 

Who isn't distracted by the painted backdrop? If the play is set in a room, I will look out of the staged room's windows at the painted trees in the garden. 

 

The pyramid is not really a pyramid. The corridor is just very long, so it seems to recede toward a point. It is a very long hall made of crystal reaching out to those trees, and it seems to break or pull me into the world behind or around the actors. I am transported into the scenery. 

 

I can be in the painted trees, behind a wall, or sunk in a pond.   

 

The staged photograph creates a double cube that I have to make or that is foisted on me when I look.

 

In this photograph, Georgiana Houghton stares directly at the camera. Her mouth is pulled into a small smile. Her hair is parted and pulled back into a braided bun. She is standing behind a boy, Tommy Guppy. Tommy sits on a round cushion, propped on a table. Houghton’s right hand is tucked under the boy's arm. Her left hand holds his left hand. Tommy’s face is turning toward the camera. A specter approaches.

 

We can stage a room or a play or a terrorist attack, an assassination, a photograph, or a coup. The staged space, like the theater or staged photograph, can depict any season. But I think spring and summer are the seasons most consonant with staging.  

 

The sky and trees in a play's backdrop are green and blue. There are white clouds. But staged spaces are quiet and warm and clouded even in their artificial midday sun. Staged spaces lack the peripheral: pushing my face deep into a dollhouse window, what can be seen? Seeing is always interrupted by a corner or a wall. 

 

When I look at the staged photograph, I am looking into the first cube. The second cube contains the first: the greenhouse, the yard in which the greenhouse sits, the chimney just beyond the neighbor’s roof. Unlike the long crystal corridor, the double cube causes me to step around the edge of the picture. The picture is the cube, and I can step around that cube, behind that cube.

 

A long white limousine is stretched down a long dark hole. The long white limousine turns at the waist. Inside of the limousine I can watch the gills open and close. Inside the limousine I am protected from the elements. Inside the limousine I am a ghost. The world outside is entirely staged.

 

In an empty parking lot on a cloudy day, the hydrangeas are blooming. The trees have been recently planted. The office park is staged, and it gives me the feeling of sinking into a pond.

 

These are the three kinds of staging that I am considering: when my face is a crystal corridor, when I can move between two cubes, and when I can sink into something heavy.

I have a very vague memory: 1981 or 1982. I was standing on a street in Colorado. When I open the Google Street View to look at this block, I am surprised by the unfamiliarity. Google Street View is the opposite of a staged photograph. Here, though, I can see the place where I was standing. On that quiet summer day the sky was overcast. It was raining. We four children were all huddled under a single umbrella. Our teenaged babysitter held an umbrella. And though it was raining all around us, we stayed dry. The hairs on my neck and arms stood up. The world felt like a soundstage.

 

When I stand in these staged places, I feel as if I am on a soundstage: the set of a television program, like Dark Shadows, Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, any sitcom at all.

 

I am sunk down there. I don't move. In an empty parking lot, an empty campus, in the rain, I can push my fingers into the gills, watch the ribs of the umbrella that are opening and closing.