An Oak Tree: An Actor’s Worst Nightmare Realized

It is a common dream: You are
forced onstage, in front of an audience of strangers, and must perform
a part you have not rehearsed. Last Wednesday, actor Aimee Bruneau
lived this nightmare, performing in Tim Crouch’s An Oak
Tree opposite Theater Schmeater’s artistic director David Gassner.
An Oak Tree demands a fresh victim each night: The theatrical
experiment was designed for one rehearsed actor and one unrehearsed
actor.

Gassner instructed Bruneau where to stand and what to say. He ran
the show and acted his half of the drama—though his performance
lay flat next to Bruneau’s freshness; her impulses, which brought her
almost to tears in one scene, were her best director. At times he
commanded her aloud or gave her a part to read, other times he
whispered into her ear or a microphone wired to headphones she wore.
“You’re a father,” he said as the play commenced. “Your name is Andy.
You have cracked lips, a bloodshot eye.” And he introduced himself, a
hypnotist who accidentally hit Andy’s daughter with a car, killing
her.

An Oak Tree is more driven by theme than narrative. The
actors play themselves, their characters, each other’s characters: At
one point, Andy is hypnotized, convinced that he is not only naked, but
defecating in front of a crowd. In other scenes, the actors pretend to
be themselves discussing the show, reading all the while from scripts.
They end the play by facing the audience, speaking in second person,
forcing us to become them. In this theatrical experiment, actor
maneuvers actor and the hypnotist controls the hypnotized, exploring
the boundary between puppeteer and puppet, and asking whether one is so
different from the other.