The Theater of Questions (Or Why I'm Allergic to Answers)

There's this recording I stumbled upon recently—Georgy Tovstonogov speaking to a crowd sometime in the Soviet era, his voice crackling through old tape. And suddenly he says something that makes me stop everything. He divides all theater into two categories: spectacles that give answers and spectacles that ask questions. "I am for spectacle-questions," he declares, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

And I'm sitting there thinking—yes, THIS. This is what's been burning in my chest all these years.

You know what happens when theater tries to give you answers? It dies. Right there on the stage. It becomes a "literal pulpit"—didactic, moralizing, telling you how to think, how to feel, what's right and what's wrong. Like we don't have enough of that already. Like the world isn't drowning in people who know exactly what you should believe.

But a question? A question is alive. It squirms. It keeps you up at night.

Tovstonogov said the highest joy for a theater maker is when someone tells you they couldn't go straight home after the show. They had to walk the streets. Something got under their skin and they can't even name it yet. That restlessness, that beautiful discomfort—that's theater doing what it's supposed to do. Not teaching. Not preaching. Just... troubling the waters of consciousness.

When we staged Our Class, I kept telling everyone—this isn't about teaching lessons from 1941. I don't believe in the lessons of the past. If they worked, would we be where we are today? This is about what's going to happen. With people like us. That's why they wear contemporary clothes, why they slip so easily from playing children to becoming monsters.

The question isn't "how could those people do such terrible things?" The question is "when will we?"

In rehearsals, I create problems for my actors. If they need to cross from here to there, I tell them—imagine there are puddles. You can't walk straight. You have to navigate around them, jump over them. The obstacles create the art. The questions create the oxygen.

And here's the thing about questions that Tovstonogov understood—they have to emerge from the audience, not from the director's ego. The director is just the one with enough skill to excavate what's already trembling in the collective unconscious of the crowd. You're not inventing the question. You're uncovering it. Like those layers of old drawings we found beneath the plaster at Vilna Shul—the questions were always there, waiting under the surface.

Sometimes people ask me what message I want to send with my work. Message? What message? Western Union sends messages. I'm trying to create a space where strangers breathe together in the dark and feel something shift. Where the familiar becomes foreign and the foreign becomes suddenly, devastatingly personal.

The moment you think you have the answer, you've lost the theater. You've got a corpse, well-preserved maybe, but still dead.

So yes, I'm with Tovstonogov. Give me the productions that end with question marks hanging in the air like smoke. Give me audiences who leave the theater arguing, unsettled, changed in ways they won't understand for days or years. Give me the plays that ask: who are we, really, when the ordinary world cracks open?

That's the only theater worth making. Everything else is just noise pretending to be music.