I have gone to "Live Theater" performances in New Haven for more years than I like to admit. Sitting in front row seats puts you so close to the ongoing human drama between living, breathing, perspiring actors and their facial and bodily idiosyncrasies that it catches you up in a way that a film can rarely bring about. There is an air of uncertainty regarding that single performance and whether a line may be forgotten or misspoken or a physical mishap my take place. In a theatrical performance there are no do-overs or retakes. The artificial perfection of film is missing and that makes it precious and recognizable in it's human fallibility.
I have mixed feelings still, over whether to read reviews and playbills before the experience. You risk viewing the event through the eyes of others. There is an offsetting advantage however. The anticipatory reading alerts you to features you might otherwise miss.
After the performance and in the absence of someone Else's opinion, how do you understand what it is you have just witnessed? I can only speak for myself. Immediately following my emergence from the audience and the theater and on the drive home my thoughts are a jumble of remembered fragments, of things for me which were highlights. But I can't seem to grasp how it all holds together and how things are connected one to the other. At those moments I don't seem to fully understand.
By the next morning however, everything has fallen into place and it all makes such obvious sense. For some reason, the connections can only be made after a nights sleep.
My hunch is that the difference between short term and long term memory explains why it works that way. Immediately following the play the fragmentary parts of that experience are temporarily stored in my short term memory. There they mix and match with everything else surrounding the event, like who I'm with, what we're drinking, random surrounding conversations, the appearance and behavior of other members of the audience, traveling to and from the theater and so on.
During a period of slumber and dreaming all the events of the day are transferred to my long term memory where it can be associated with things I know and important experiences I've had, with my values and beliefs. There the play is sorted through and made sense of. The next morning it all holds together and I believe I understand.
I'd be curious to know what has been your experience of such things.
6 comments on Live Theater: Understanding: Memory
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I have laways preferred going to previews and reading the reviews after--one of the main reasons, as much as I love the web site talkingbroadway/allthatchat I will skip any posts about shows coming to Broadway.
Thankfully, at 72, I still have my long and short term memory in hand![THUMBUP]
You're fortunate in having seen some of the best, and on Broadway. They will always be with you and I believe the plays we've seen can influence our future behavior. I always thought of you as a Floridian. When were you last in "The Big Apple"? I left the City in 1966. Still return there to visit my younger son. [THUMBUP]
"Buzzing bees", describes it well. So much is going on at once. It is my understanding that the "creative process" sometimes works in exactly that way. People who have been mulling over and over a problem all day will wake up the next morning with the fully formed solution. [THUMBUP][THUMBUP]
I lived in NYC in the 60s before moving to Memphis and then returning to Florida--except for theatre going I don't miss NYC at all and don't plan on ever going back!
In Connecticut I found substitutes for Broadway at Long Wharf Theater and Yale Rep. But now New Haven is becoming more like the worst that New York was. Shootings and crime have multiplied and holdups by teenagers with weapons on bikes are reminiscent of the lawless Old West.