Nighttime is dreamtime.
And since theater – live theater, with nothing in the space between actors and audience but space for enchantment – since theater is the world of dreams, it’s only natural we put our theater performances at night, with the weekly matinées during sunlit hours accommodating those too scared to venture forth after sundown.
But it wasn’t always so.
In Elizabethan times, with the rowdy crowds filling the O of the famed Globe Theatre and its sister playhouses, there was no electricity obviously, to light the footlights and overhead spotlights, so the best way to see the players play was by sunlight, ergo theater was a daytime affair. Sure, the torches could burn bright as possible if the sun happened to go down during a particularly long Cymbeline or Macbeth, but daylight gave the best chance of seeing all that delicious Elizabethan blood and gore that those folks so loved….even though in Elizabethan times, most of that stuff was kept offstage…all the more fun to imagine it. What every audience truly loved to see were the human, alive faces of those actors up there on that stage in front of them.
I hasten to add: some things never change.
Audiences adore faces.
But to re-enforce my notion that theatrical presentations are as powerful as dreams themselves, I like to imagine that the sturdy wooden structures of those old theaters created some sorts of warm welcoming wombs for the people who chose to gather within them….safe spaces for them to receive the harsh news of imagined worlds apart from their everyday lives, tales of bravado and sadness they felt safe to face within the walls of the theaters, since anything within those walls seemed to be sprinkled with a kind of fairy dust, an enchantment, a magic that transformed even the bedraggled orange sellers ….in the old days, people could gather with their everyday neighbors who had the same harsh problems to face as they did….theirs was a family born each time an audience gathered….a family around the richest table in town, filled with all the foods that could possibly nourish and feed their souls.
Even when it was mid-afternoon, it was a sort of soothing, relaxed nighttime…that time when theater and the players who presented it could weave dreams with the most willing of fellow seekers: the audience…the rabble…the people who most needed the time to dream. And since it is safest, most comforting to dream under the soft blanket of night, naturally the theater, that powerful gathering of the whole village around the campfire hearing and seeing tales of the daily hunt, naturally, it was forever night ….even though the sun shone bright above.
For within the world of imagination, it is always dark enough to see the flicker of dreams.