[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?

14. The Lyric I and the American Musical

Why is the American musical not a Dionysian event? Is it because the “I”, the singing “I” in rock music creates the emotional event, the emotional logic? That is to say the singer is singing the song in rock music and appears to be singing their own life, their own words and passions, and the audience is swept into a frenzy by that complete identification between singer and song. Whereas the mimetic function in the American musical inherently prohibits a Dionysian event? We know someone is pretending to be a character who feels a certain way and so sings about it rather than being that character and having written the song themselves. And yet, and yet…the Dionysian event should go beyond identity into the mythic, into the notion that we all wrote the song or it doesn’t matter who wrote the song… What does the mimetic function do to the capacity for experience and event?

15. The place of rhyme in theater and is it banished forever?

The rise of prose in the theater and the banishment of rhyme…the theater is by and large now in the language of prose, deeply steeped in the language of prose. It would be folly to write an all-metered play now, or would it? Oh—the memory of rhyme and its populist primordial power…Shakespeare’s rhymes, his rhymes! Did the rise of the novel coincide with rhyme’s banishment from the stage? The leap of Ibsen from Peer Gynt to Hedda–and can we ever go back to Gynt, or only in musical theater? We like rhymes in our music, why not in our plays? Why has rhyme become an embarrassment? Homer used it to help remember his poetry. And so rhyme used to help actors remember their poetry, their parts. Do actors have better memories now? And what of audiences? We remember Shakespeare’s great couplets because they are rhymed. It is hard now to leave a play and remember great lines because they are all in prose. Hip-hop understands rhyme and memory and play. But it is an embarrassment now to rhyme in university poetry. But the meter of poetry used to be thought to have a curative effect—use certain meters to calm the breast and certain other meters to inflame them. Have we lost some of the medicinal power of language in the theater when we lost meter?

16. Gobos, Crickets, and False Exits–three hobgoblins of false mimesis

Why do gobos, the sound of crickets on stage, and false exits on stage make me sad? I think because they are borrowed from the repetitive memory of other mimetic plays. If the world might well be an illusion, and theater is definitely an illusion, then how sad or how strange are the sound of crickets on stage? (If they are representing crickets or the night.) A false exit means the body marks the refusal to relinquish repressed information. I say a thing, I turn, I leave to exit, and then I remember the real thing I want to say. The false exit is the received staging notation for denoting ambivalence. And the return to the room to speak the line underscores the line spoken before the exit, and as such, has an obligation to be profound. If one’s goal is to reveal what we think of as the world to be an illusion, then false exits, crickets and gobos won’t serve.

17. Being in a pure state vs. playing an action

Sometimes theater-makers in this country scoff at an actor who can be “in a state” and cannot or does not “perform an action.” I say bravo to the actor who can be stated, in a pure state of emotion, with no need of an action to justify the state. I find this interesting to watch on stage, a kind of ecstasy, a state of being, unqualified, unexplained. Anne Bogart thinks of it in terms of Ariane Mnouchkine and “l’etat”. That a player must begin in a state at the beginning and then the state transforms, but there is always a state on stage.

So this goes back to the question of subtext, for if one is playing subtext, in a classical sense, one is saying one thing and feeling another thing, so one is playing a sense of inner contradiction, or tension, or even of subterfuge. This makes one pure state impossible. Why do we want to watch people playing a sense of inner tension for two hours on stage, there is already enough tension in every day life. I prefer to watch people in rhapsodic states of pure emotion, which is possible only when the subtext comes to the surface.

Is it possible that the rise of the 19th century director corresponded with the rise of subtext because it gave the director a job, to help the actor find the hidden secret in the text, rather than have the actor merge with the text?

18. Should characters have first names and last names or only initials? And how do props departments conspire to create mimesis?

In some countries they do not have last names and they come to this country and have to pretend that their first name contains a last name too, as in the case of Tibet. The state of having a first name and last name is a cultural practice closely aligned to patriarchy, land rights, and the individuation of the self, one might say the illusion of the self. So before giving one’s character a first name and a last name one must consider whether the world one is creating on stage is a world of first and last names. I do not judge anyone for creating a character with a first and last name, sometimes the character emerges whole and with first and last name in tact. Are you writing a world of selves or a communal world? One should not cede automatically to the imposition to name one’s character with two or three names. The act of naming a character is sacred, and mysterious. One should not have to know the last name of a character for example because the props department wants to know the name of the character, as has happened to me many times when prop departments want to make hospital badges for the characters of Lane and Charles in The Clean House and I say you can’t because they don’t have last names. And they say, can’t you make up a last name for them? And I say no because they don’t have last names. Maybe initials are best.

19. And what of gut-roiling aesthetic hatred?

When I go to see a play I really hate, or end up hating, what is the nature of aesthetic hatred and is it at all useful? Is it possible that the people who truly hate my work the most, experience the most bile rising in their throats, are the most disgusted at others’ pleasure taken in the piece—are these people in fact my greatest treasures? On the one hand, how is it possible to get angry at an object—it is an animate object, but it is an object all the same, an object of illusion, and it was not created for your displeasure but instead for your pleasure. If it does not give pleasure, is that not a neutral fact rather than a cause for bilious, gut-wrenching hatred, the kind of hatred that makes you roll this way and that in your seat and come home and be unsatisfied until one has purged one’s hatred through language, that is senseless gossip, with a friend who might agree? And if the friend does not similarly roil with hatred, one has no relief from this demon? Is this useful? Does this advance the art form? Does this mean there are practicioners for whom the object, which is itself an illusion, does not seem to be an illusion at all but is a very thing-like thing which appears to be destroying them, does this enhance the there-ness, the actuality of the object, that it produces these passions? I went to the Dalai Lama this weekend and he inveighed against senseless gossip and I thought I am doomed in my profession, I am doomed, how will I ever live up to this advice. But what is the difference between senseless gossip and true dialogue about an object, an object that meant to please but gives no pleasure? Are we to believe with William Hazlitt that there is a pleasure in hating, otherwise why would we go to the theater, knowing that we will hate with as much frequency as we will love? And yet if we rise to that level of aesthetic hope and identification, and are disappointed, does that not fan the gut-roiling passion even higher? I would like to know what to do about this.

20. Chimpanzees and audiences

There was an experiment with chimpanzees and humans recently. Humans were asked to make absolutely no facial expressions as they watched the chimpanzees. The chimpanzees, without a facial response in their audience, would go crazy. It is proof that when the audience offers no affective response, it is well within the actors right and their DNA to go ape-shit. The audience actually creates the aesthetic object through a process of biofeedback. When the loop is disrupted, there is no art being made. This is why there needs to be a revolution in the concept of subscriber audiences.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.