Chapter 4 - The Exercise

Oliver mounted his first play at age seventeen. He openly admitted that this was not a serious piece but an exercise, a way to find out how things worked before he began to make the play. “Because it is there” was already controversial before there had even been a rehearsal.

Oliver insisted in hiring only experienced sailors for his technical crew. Members of the local stagehands' union circulated rumors that Oliver was only interested in the sailor’s uniforms and as a consequence no one answered help wanted ad. But Oliver was not discouraged. He went down to the shipyard and recruited his stage hands personally. He talked to them about the revolutionary nature of the play in his mind. He openly criticized modern theatre as being in the hands of social misfits with nothing to say to real people. He said he wanted to start anew with true craftsmen. He told them about the history of sailors working in the theatre and showed them the complicated schematic of ropeworks he would need them to operate. Most effectively he emphasized how cool it was to hoist set pieces around the stage. It also helped that he paid the sailors more than the actors.

"Because it is there," has three acts but runs only forty three minutes. The action follows five acquaintances on a mountain climbing expedition. Early on, the characters get separated in such a way that each thinks he or she is the only one missing from the group. The characters spend most of the play climbing alone and philosophizing about whether to act as a group is better than acting individually until the end when they are all reunited at the mountain's summit and lament that they have no more mountains to climb.

The set consists entirely of twenty platforms of various dimensions, suspended from the fly space above the stage. Each of these platforms can be raised and lowered into different configurations by a complicated series of ropes, weights and pulleys. At least one platform is moving during any moment in the play and there are two occasions when all of them are moving at the same time. This precise choreography was achieved (after a lot of practice) in this manner: Each sailor was given a radio with headphones and a "script" for his particular platform. A series of ten ascending notes in equal time intervals was played over all of the headphones simultaneously and the script for each platform listed a level (indicated by a letter between A and J) for the platform at each interval.

For example, from the script for platform seven:
Platform 7
Start at I.
Wait six beats.
Move to H.
Wait sixteen beats.
Move to F.
Wait one hundred and sixteen beats.
And so On.

Being an actor in the play was slightly more complicated. To be in "Because it is there" one had to be able not only to act on a platform that moves up and down but to have such precise timing so that his or her movements coincided with the placement of the platforms.

It is probably not necessary to say that opening night was a disaster. The fault did not belong to any one person. Everyone involved was just a little bit nervous and the combination of twenty-six people being just slightly off with their timing led to quite a bit of falling. Luckily no one was hurt. Less luckily, though perhaps deservedly, the play received a reputation for being impossible to mount and only a small number of people were able to actually witness the stunning profundity of the work. Of course the play comes nowhere near the stunning profundity of Persephone but then nothing does.