Nov 18, 2021
Artist Interview: Director Charles McMahon
The director of THE PLAGUE on the resonance and lessons of the play
Streaming on demand October 7 through November 21, 2021, Lantern Theater Company’s U.S. premiere digital production of The Plague was directed by Charles McMahon, who is also the Lantern’s artistic director. When deciding what productions to film for the company’s fall digital season, Neil Barlett’s adaptation of the Albert Camus novel was a clear choice. “The obvious is the obvious,” McMahon says. “We were in this wretched situation, which is mirrored in the plot of the story.”
But The Plague does not just show us events with parallels to and resonance with our own time — it also asks us to interrogate our responses to the story and to our experiences. Theater is “is a training ground for the emotions, for the psyche, for the mind, both the individual mind and the social mind,” McMahon says. “I’ve always been interested in theater that puts people in extreme conditions and then says, ‘Okay, now what do you do?’”
Facing that question in the play are five characters who find themselves in a quarantined city during an outbreak of plague. While the subject matter may be bleak, McMahon is interested in the core of morality and community in Camus’ novel and the play as adapted by Bartlett. “The characters are not created as moral exemplars,” McMahon says. “I think a number of them behave ultimately in an exemplary manner, but you can see that they’re doing it because their character gives them no choice. They make what is, for them, the only rational decision they can make.” According to McMahon, they respond to their circumstances with equanimity and simplicity. “They’re not consciously trying to exemplify either individual or civic virtue,” he says. “They’re just asking the question, ‘What is the thing that I must do now?’ and then put one foot in front of the other and keep going.”
That steadfast commitment to carrying on, and to hopefully doing the right thing when options are limited, is depicted without graphic examples of the plague itself, which remains offstage. “We’re describing something that’s abstract, but the experience of the characters is not abstract to them,” McMahon says. That experience was particularly resonant in the character of Dr. Rieux, who spends the epidemic in the play caring for the sick and dying. “His response is to just keep grinding away, trying to help those he can and trying to protect those he can. But we see through his eyes the relentless toll that it takes on him to hopelessly or helplessly watch people die every day,” McMahon says. “It’s very bracing to listen to Rieux speaking about this in the play and realize that that is exactly what is going on two blocks from our theater, in a hospital where people are dying of Covid and have been for a year and a half as overwhelmed medical staff just do everything that they can. It felt like we had a great responsibility to try to be faithful to that sort of moment and depict it with truth and honesty.”
This feeling of responsibility and deep recognition of the characters’ fictional plights in our own real world affected the cast as a whole. “It certainly was clear in watching how the actors responded to it and in observing my own feelings and response to it that it struck us all at various different times and in different ways at an extremely deep emotional level,” McMahon says. “At one point or another, or several points for each person in the entire cast during the course of this, it just wiped us out. It took all of our emotional resolve just to stay with the material and be true to the experience of the characters, because it was so evocative of the most challenging moments in our own lives that we were living through. It helped us all create some deeper sense of meaning.”
That deep connection to the material shines through in the performances onscreen. “The work of the actors is wonderful. This is a group that gelled really nicely,” McMahon says. “They developed a great ensemble despite the fact that we spent more than half the rehearsal time on Zoom. We were a good ways into the process before we actually had people live in a room interacting. It was really terrific, disciplined work by the actors.”
That discipline and ensemble-building helped tell a story that is less about the dramatic moments of catastrophe and more about the ways in which humans respond to it. “I don’t think this play would be as affecting if we were depicting emergency room scenes. It might be scarier, but I think what moves us is when we see people emotionally and intellectually present to an event,” McMahon says. “It’s still there, living in their active memory and they’re trying to make sense of it, processing it.”
As such, the production was able to use the techniques of film to tell a nuanced, honest story. “There was very little theatricality in the performance style,” McMahon says. “The actors weren’t projecting, they were very closely miked. So things are in a much more conversational tone.” The filming style also enhanced this authentic tone. “The ability of the camera to change focus as the action is going on, sometimes in ways that underscore certain moments in an obvious way and other times in ways that that act as an oppositional counterpoint feels true to life,” McMahon says. “Luckily, I think we have a really talented filmmaker [Andrea Campbell, Natural Light Films] who has a deep appreciation of theater and a deep knowledge of how we experience things on a two-dimensional screen.”
This combination of film prowess, actor artistry, and emotional and historical resonance creates a piece that can do what Camus, Bartlett, and McMahon all hoped for when telling the story of The Plague. “I would say that what I think the project was most successful in doing is creating a deeper sense of empathy for the sufferings of the people going on around us,” McMahon says. “We would all benefit from understanding the necessity of doing that in the world, putting away childish things from time to time and just getting on with the simple business of trying to help each other.”
Related reading: Artist Interview: Playwright Neil Bartlett — The Plague playwright on adaptation, community, and what Camus can tell us about today
The Plague was filmed at St. Stephen’s Theater in Center City Philadelphia in July 2021 with strict adherence to all CDC, state, and local health and safety guidelines, and is streaming on demand October 7 through November 21, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
