[The final installment of Sarah Ruhl's garland of essays. See the "essays" category on the left for previous posts.]

13. The Scary

Mac Wellman has said that theater is so rarely scary anymore, that it is a terrible challenge now to write a scary play, a play that actually induces fear. Is this because of the rise of the cinematic imagination? What was scary about Hitchcock was what was just off screen. But in theater, what is just off stage is melodrama, which is not usually fearful. The Dreadful vs. the Fearful. And if Aristotle claimed that pity and fear are of primary importance (not that we have to believe Aristotle all the time or half of it) but if we are to agree with him about pity and fear, and fear is gone, then are we writing plays that only have pity—what are plays about now ? How to write a play that induces fear?

Why is it that Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is the longest running play? Because it induces fear? Do we like to be scared? Why do we like to be scared, and do we prefer now being scared at the movies because it is darker or because the blood looks so real? Or has being scared become so much its own genre—crime shows, detective novel, the procedural, the mystery, the thriller—that is there no place for it on the stage anymore partly because the stage is now suspicious of that literary genre as an art form? (more…)