From Sparse Beginnings, a Community Takes Shape on Stage
Simon Godwin, artistic director of Shakespeare Theatre Company, sees Jonathan Demme’s *Stop Making Sense* as a lesson in making performance visible: a lone performer with a guitar and boombox gradually becomes part of a fully populated, diverse ensemble. For Godwin, that public assembly makes the audience a participant in the creation of a shared world and raises a broader question about America’s capacity to begin with little and make room for greater possibility.
The point is not spectacle but its visible assembly
Simon Godwin reads Stop Making Sense as a performance world made in public rather than presented whole. Jonathan Demme’s film of a Talking Heads concert tour in the 1980s impressed him first through how little it appears to begin with.
Godwin recalls a man in a white suit walking onstage with a small ghetto blaster and a guitar to play the opening song, “Psycho Killer.” He describes an initially limited image: one performer, a few portable objects, and a stage not yet filled by a larger ensemble.
What follows, in Godwin’s account, is accumulation. Set pieces arrive. More band members arrive. The performance lets the audience see the stage acquire shape, personnel, and density.
and the stage becomes populated in a beautiful and profound way by a living, breathing, and highly diverse community.
Godwin’s emphasis is not simply the contrast between a small opening and a full stage. It is the way an ensemble becomes visible as an ensemble: people enter a shared space, the materials of the show arrive with them, and a collective presence takes form before the audience. What might otherwise remain backstage becomes part of the experience.
The audience shares in a world taking shape
For Godwin, this structure has become a professional lesson. He says it affected him as a director because it models beginning with “nothing up your sleeve”: starting from scratch and from zero before an audience rather than concealing the conditions from which a theatrical world is made.
starting with nothing up your sleeve, starting from scratch, starting from zero in front of an audience, and building a world with them
The phrase “in front of an audience” is central to his account. Godwin describes the audience as collaborating and participating in the act of creativity because it is present for the making of the world, not only its finished result. The small beginning makes later additions legible: more bodies, more musical presences, more elements of stage life.
For Godwin, then, the visible means of performance create a relationship between those making the work and those watching it. The audience encounters a community as something formed in shared time.
America is a question of possibility
Godwin does not offer Stop Making Sense as a settled account of American history. He puts the connection as a question: “Is this the history of a country growing from small steps to embrace more and more possibility?”
The question follows the movement he sees onstage, from a restricted opening to a populated and diverse community. That movement gives him a way to think about America as a place where people can begin with little and create something more expansive together.
The force of the image lies in its process. The larger world is not assumed at the outset; it depends on beginning from scratch and making room for more people and elements. For Godwin, possibility is not just a finished abundance. It is the act of forming a collective in view of others.
He says the idea of America as a place where one can “start from nothing and create everything” has stayed with him and influenced his directing career. What remains with him is the prospect of a performance that makes its beginning visible and lets an audience participate in the creation of a larger world.