When considering the idea of story, any story told anywhere in the world, the question of origin always comes into question. Every story ever told contains both a grain of truth and the seed of a lie. Human tells story, human hears story, human remembers story, human tells story. Between the time that the human changes from the hearer to the rememberer and finally to the teller, the story shifts, taking on characteristics of each subsequent tellers’ history; their own sense of self. Certain details are either emboldened or diminished, and the thrust of the story shifts. The identity of the teller comes into clearer focus as he becomes a summary of the stories he remembers and chooses to call his own. The tellers’ identity is revealed not only by the stories he chooses to tell, but how he chooses to tell them.
“Memory of Water” closed this weekend. In one of the funnier moments of the play, the three sisters bicker over the reliability of a prominent childhood memory. Catherine tells the story, and Mary claims actual ownership of the story’s circumstances. Teresa confirms Catherine’s inaccurate recollection of the story. Mystified, Catherine cannot fathom this new truth. “You appropriated it, because it fits,” Mary explains. In spite of the fact that the events of the story didn’t actually happen to her, the story had become a inextricable facet of Catherine’s identity.
This is the way story infiltrates our lives. For as long as there have been stories and a campfire to tell them around, human beings have used the strands of narrative to bring order and meaning to our own lives. Stories provide us with tangible identities and ground us in a chaotic world. In the course of a lifetime, we collect the stories that float around us and put them to use. The way we use those stories says more about our identities than the origin behind the stories themselves.
At its’ core, a theatre company is simply an organized collection of storytellers. A very wise father of a very wise friend observed that the function of storytellers in a community is to unlock the grip of broken stories and to engage the community in working ones. Soon, BackStage Theatre Company will present its’ final show of the 2008-2009 Season. John Kolvenbach’s “On An Average Day” directly addresses the dire consequences of living a life within the parameters of a broken story.
We, as storytellers and as human beings, need to constantly reexamine our universal stories. To endure, a community needs new stories, and it is our job as theatre artists to tell them. These days we light our campfires from the grid and color them with gels, but we still gather in the dark to hear a good story.
