Topic 134: Faces and Masks

Carol:

Who is that Masked Man?

 The other night PBS showed a 25th anniversary tribute to Les Miserables.  Watching the program on television couldn’t capture  the magic of attending a live performance. That sense of collective experience enhances the power of live theater. We are watching and hearing artifice, yet our emotions —fear, joy, sorrow, anger, frustration, pity-- are nevertheless authentic.  For two or three hours, the line between actor and  character, the “face”   and the “mask,” disappears. Theater is metamorphosis.
 

Theater’s  universal symbol  is the two masks of tragedy and comedy. In ancient Greece, the works of such great playwrights as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were performed in large outdoor theaters to audiences of up to 14,000 people. Everything about the staging had to be large, so the actors not only wore boots that elevated their height but they also wore giant masks with fixed, exaggerated expressions  that  could be seen from the furthest seats of the theater. The shape of the mask also helped amplify sound although the theaters of Greece were masterpieces of acoustic engineering.

 Another convention of Greek theater was the Chorus, which in early performances might be a group of 50 people but later was whittled down to 12. The Chorus represented a single voice or character, and they all wore identical masks. Individual actors often took several parts, so the masks allowed them to hide—mask—their real identities  as they re-entered the stage in a new role. An actor would also use several masks for the same character to represent a change. For example, the mask for the confident and proud young Oedipus would later be exchanged to represent the bloodied, blind and suffering King.
 

In Ancient Greece, the conventions of tragedy and comedy were distinct and the two genres separate, thus the stylized representation of the two faces of Theater as joy and sorrow. The notion of tragicomedy and melodrama are modern concepts. Theatrical conventions evolved over the centuries as performances moved indoors and became more intimate, masks were replaced with make-up and wigs, acoustics and lighting enhanced with modern technologies.
 

In modern performances, the mask serves a specific purpose. For example, a mask may hide the identity of one character from another rather than hide the identity of an actor from the audience.  The love story of Romeo and Juliet is set in motion at a masked ball. Romeo hides his face from the rival Capulets with a mask and is able to move around the party undetected.  As he becomes increasingly captivated by the masked Juliet, only the audience knows both their true identities and the dramatic effect becomes not only romantic but tragic. The power of the audience’s emotions is not in the least diminished by their familiarity with the outcome of a story about “star-crossed” lovers.
 

The most famous mask in modern theater hides a secret. Neither the young lovers Christine and Raoul  nor the audience knows what form that secret takes, creating a different kind of dramatic tension—a more complex combination of the seductive and the sinister. 
 

Ironically, the secret face behind the mask -- amplified by the collective imagination of the audience – becomes so horrific that when the Phantom is finally  unmasked and the “truth” revealed, the secret of the face itself is an anti-climax.
 

Theater, it’s about the audience. And, it’s about the mask.

Sources:
“Theater of Ancient Greece.” Wikipedia.
  TheatreHistory.com 

Image credit for Phantom mask:  Phantom.jpg‎ (250 × 363 pixels, file size: 13 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
         

Megan:

Beauty and the Mask

I’ve written before about my semi-reluctant relationship with make-up.  For as long as I’ve been wearing it, it’s felt like a mask. Makeup has just never felt natural to me. When I first started wearing it, my father tried to discourage me by saying that if people got used to seeing me made up they might think I was ugly on the days I didn’t wear it. His point was not that I was ugly, but that I was misrepresenting myself. In high school, I once left my makeup bag at a friend’s house and I panicked realizing that I wouldn’t have time to get it back before school. I asked my friend to meet me early so that I could apply it in the bathroom before my first class. I still remember the walk from the car to the bathroom, believing that everyone saw me naked and ugly.

I grew out of that.  In college, I often went to class on Monday with the residue of makeup from the Friday before. Since leaving my teens, I’ve had fairly clear skin. By clear, I mean no zits, although between the freckles, sun damage and overly pink cheeks and ginormous veins, I’m hardly a model for skin care.

Now, I occasionally I get a free sample of face-wash, or I put on one of those peel-off cucumber masks which supposedly clears your pores. The latter is fun because it peels off in one piece. It hurts but feels refreshing at the same time. The mask documents every line and imperfection – from the odd “mole” thing on my cheek to the scar where I once fainted and hit my chin on a grocery counter, to the mostly closed piercings in my nose and ears. I spend more time scrutinizing this facsimile of my face than applying makeup to the real thing.

I enjoy putting on makeup. I like the ritual, just like I enjoy coloring and styling my hair. When I was working, I used to schedule my time carefully to make sure I had the time and energy to adhere to my beauty regimen. But my interest fluctuated depending on whether I had a meeting (this was a prison after all, I wasn’t trying to impress my regular patrons). I often went in with wet hair in a bun or a braid, because it takes more than an hour to blow-dry my hair and even longer to straighten or curl it. If you ever see me in real life and think to yourself that my hair looks amazing… well, that’s true. It does look amazing. It also took at least 2 hours of continuous, physical labor.

Most of the time, I go around with slightly damp frizzy hair and almost no makeup, because what’s the point? When I was little I tried to save time by sleeping in the clothes I planned to wear the next day so that I could sleep a little longer. It didn’t work because of wrinkles and sweat (especially when I put them on UNDER my pajamas so my parents wouldn’t know). And as I learned in college, applying makeup the night before didn’t work either.

Still, I do enjoy the ritual of making myself up. I don’t know where it comes from, but it seems bred into us. On Friday, I babysat my cousin’s (nearly) 3 year old daughter. The child was determined that I paint her fingernails.  I remember asking my grandmother to paint my nails and she placated me with one swipe of the brush for each nail. She didn’t take me seriously and I noticed. And I did the same thing to my tiny cousin and she noticed too. We also had an argument about whether or not the polish was dry.  She attempted to prove me wrong by licking her nails. Turns out I was right, and the polish was still wet.