Santino Ellwood and the Mockumentary Theater
Ben Sgerski on the American fringe playwright and director Santino Ellwood, who is considered by many to be the founder of the mockumentary theater genre.
When I received the assignment from Yigael Sachs to write about my very beloved genre of "mockumentary theater," my initial inclination was to simply write about the play I created with Yuval Steinberg - "Pre-quel and Se-quel Inherit a Cult"- which toys with the documentary aesthetic in favor of a completely outlandish story (and plays monthly at Tmuna Theater!). And just then Yigael added, in a flash of clear foresight- "But don't make it one big promotion piece for your show." Oh, well.
So, I told myself, I'll at least use this stage to bring to light one of my favorite theater creators, who in my opinion hasn't received the appreciation he deserves, and unfortunately is hardly ever performed in Israel, though he is one of the few creators who can be said to have truly created a theatrical genre. I'm talking, of course, about Santino Ellwood, the father of mockumentary theater. Ellwood started out as a lyricist for musicals, at the worst possible timing: after the decline of the golden age of the American musical, and just before the rise of the neo-musical of the mid-1960s.
Ellwood created several satirical cabarets for Off-Broadway, which, although they did not last long, received excellent reviews, and influenced many creators (Doug Brenton often cited him as his main influence), and there he was exposed to the growing American movement of social documentary theater, which received much media attention. While marginal creators of his generation sought to approach the movement in their work, and to incorporate documentary elements with varying degrees of success (Lynn Katz in "The Cockerel" or failure Murray Orlando Jay in "The Glove Factory" Elwood's satirical instinct pushed him to the opposition, as a counter culture to those who viewed themselves as the counter culture.
In 1966, he staged the parody play "Remember Flaherty" The term "mockumentary" did not yet exist at the time, so Elwood defined the style of the play as "masturbatim." This is a play on words that combines the English word "masturbation" with the "verbatim" theater movement, in which all lines of text are taken from protocols or testimonies given by real people. "Remember Flaherty" is a cutting, frenetic play, even by today's standards, whose name references a real-life anecdote- in which Robert Flaherty, the director of the first documentary feature, accidentally set fire to all of his raw footage after falling asleep in the editing booth with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
This anecdote was the only real detail in the play, which weaves together a series of fabricated testimonies and archive materials about a director who has a nervous breakdown and takes on a mission to set fire to all the film reels of his films, which are circulating all over New York. Depriving dozens of people of their lives in the process. The play ends with the director's decision to erase the last remaining evidence - the spectators of the play themselves. At the end of each performance, a stagehand behind the scenes would set fire to a fireboard, and more than once, spectators who were not privy to the events fled the theater in panic.
Although the show received mixed reviews in real time, and even sparked accusations of irresponsibility and scaremongering, in retrospect it is amazing how far Ellwood went in his satire of phenomena that would become increasingly prevalent in the 21st century: the connection between trauma and celebrity, and the obsession with self-documentation that gives rise to a person's addictive-alienating relationship with their own representations.
For Ellwood, "Remember Flaherty" was not just a black comedy, but a cultural mission. In the introduction to his collection of essays, "American Theater in the Wrong Century," he writes:
"The singularity of theater is in that it begins by admiting its deceit and then inviting the audience to join in on it " . Let's say that in order to tell the story we want to tell, our hero stumbles into the lost city of Atlantis. A sunken kingdom at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, where a parallel culture exists, similiar and different to ours, in which all of its residents breathe through gills in their necks. This city does not exist in reality, or at least is not known or accessible to us, therefore its creation requires a dimension of illusion. How could we handle the blatant lack of existence of a place such as this?
A film director would use all of the means available to them: make up, editing, lighting, illusions of perspective and pyrotechnics- to make Atlantis feel as real to the viewer as the Greek beach that was shot for the following scene. The goal of cinema is to tell a lie that is as believeable as possible. The theater is different. It doesn't pretend and is not required to deny the lie. it doesn;t try to hide the fact that we're not actually under the sea. It is candid with the audience, telling it: I'm showing you a curtain. I admit this is a curtain. Now, let's turn this curtain together, with the commitment of the actors and your imagination, into an ocean wave so big and thundering, that it evokes fear in you. The theater viewer is not steeped in illusion, but actively helps create it. Mockumentary theater incapacitates the medium in which it is taking place and the audience watching it. It flees honesty and makes the excuse- "This wave may be a curtain, but it represents a real wave, which sprayed foam in my face on springbreak when I was sixteen" It runs to tether itself on an experience is signals as realistic. Therefore betraying the ceremonial importance of the theater and gradually minimizing its boundaries".
Two years later, he created "Mr. Rag"—also a mockumentary-style performance—which presents what purport to be genuine monologues from each of the seven individuals in the United States whose first name is "Rag."
While the piece is commonly interpreted as a satire on unbridled American consumerism ("Mr. Rag" is the actual name of a successful American brand of cleaning cloths), I see an ironic commentary on the medium itself: the very act of constructing such an absurd category—in an attempt to derive from it an insight applicable to all its members—is destined to fail within the performance, and, in all likelihood, in real life as well.
Sadly, this was Elwood’s final performance; like many of his generation, he met his end in 1977 from an overdose in the storage room of a deli adjacent to the theater. Among his belongings, a cardboard binder was discovered containing preliminary sketches and scattered thoughts regarding a production titled "Werewolf Women, Neon Women." Little is known about Elwood’s plans for this production, though it is safe to assume that the plot had no connection whatsoever to the title.
This is due to the fact that the production folder also contained the following note, scribbled in pen on the back of one of the stage blueprints: "Just as the way to play a drunk person is to try to play a sober one, a 'mock-documentary' should emulate the sweaty effort of documentary theater to graft the trappings of narrative theater onto itself. It is a mistake to title a 'Masturbatim' production something like 'Testimonies from the Tulsa Massacre'—for had one of the creators of documentary theater been tasked with adapting testimonies from this historical event into a performance, they would have called it 'Strange Wine,' or 'Autumn Song on Caked Mud,' or some other poetic hodgepodge whose connection to the subject matter would only be revealed in the final ten minutes."
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