Dramaturgy

I was rereading Provoking Theatre: Kama Ginkas Directs, and I happened to read a section of it that talks of Mamet, just around the time I was watching Race. Ginkas points his finger on a lot of what I don't like about Mamet's work. I wanted to share it and get your thoughts. (This section of the book is in the form of interview between John Freedman and Ginkas)

(John Freedman) I would like to quote from True and False, David Mamet's book on acting. It is a clear, straightforward polemic with Stanislavsky that is as easy to take issue with as it is to agree with it. In one place he writes, "The only reason to rehearse is to learn to perform the play. It is not to 'explore the meaning of the play' -- the play, for the actor, has no meaning beyond its performance." He follows that up by stating that rehearsal "is not to 'investigate the life of the character.' There is no character. There are just lines on the page."

This, it seems to me, is diametrically opposed to Russian theatre in general, and to your theatre in specific.

(Kama Ginkas) Well, Mamet may be an actor, too, but it is obvious a playwright wrote those sentences. That is a sore spot of an author who wrote words that are never spoken as he wrote them. Not because the actors are falsifying him, but because he wrote a specific intonation into his play. A bad writer will do this. You can always hear in their characters the specific intonation the author is trying to give them. But the surest way to a lousy production is to perform in the intonation the author wants. That is guaranteed failure.

Mamet's utterance reveals the painful complexities of an author who is never satisfied with the intonations his text is gives. When he says "play the text," he means, "I have given you the intonation, now just reproduce it."

When he says there is no character, that is a comment on the level of his plays. This is, of course, a case of arrogance on my part because I do not know all of his plays and I am taking it upon myself to pass judgment. But the works of his that I do know are "well-made plays." Neatly built texts in which there are no characters, no living people. There are lines and punchlines that must be spoken as written and then you wait for the audience to laugh or fall silent. He wants the spectator to heed the text.

That, in his opinion, is the key strength of his plays. In my opinion, the key strength of a play, his included, lies in the extent to which the author taps into a living person. Mamet is a talented writer. As such, from time to time, he scratches the surface of humans, of lifelike situations, captures the living language in which people speak. When he does, his characters are, to a proper extent, alive. They are not as alive as Shakespeare's characters, or Chekhov's. But they are alive enough for the American public, which does not like stylizations, to see in them a reflection of themselves. They are written for a public that wishes to see its own reflection. (76-77)

Thoughts?

The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.

for by plot I here mean the arrangement of the incidents.

A while back I was at a convening at a Tony-Award winning theatre. As we were discussing new plays and what can be done for foster them, I said that I would love to see more discussions on different aesthetic approaches. The associate artistic director of the theatre where the convening was being held, who was co-moderator of the gathering, looked up, "Well, that's hard."

End of discussion, new topic.

When I was younger, I thought aesthetic conversations were hard because artists just didn't want to take the time. As I get older I wonder if having aesthetic conversations is hard because we no longer know how?

I've been thinking of that a lot since. I was reminded of it when I came across this article that Travis Bedard shared on twitter at the #2amt hashtag. (Issac weighs in here as well.)

The political problems that narrative throws up are not so tough to recognize. Narratives must have   beginning, a middle, and an end. They must have a “controlling idea”, one main point (moral) we can take from the series of events that have unfolded. And they must have consistent characters with easily described natures – cowardly but kind, or irrational and insincere, for example. (Once a crook always a crook, etc. How much does this say for rehabilitation?) Narratives are psychologically comforting because they provide resolution, and often impose a logic onto a frustratingly fluid reality. As anybody who has ever had to edit a play or story can tell you, narratives are highly selective, shamelessly omitting facts and events in search of a coherent story. This is all well and good for Oscar bait – but when these rules are applied to a political situation (as in the media they often are) the omissions and cuts are real people with real experiences.

There's a lot I find problematic about the article. We have been telling complex, fluid narratives for thousands of years.  It also mistakes the nature of how many ways stories can be told. For ex. classical Indian dance could be written off as a rejection of story by someone unfamiliar with it when it's actually a highly complex, codified mode of storytelling. There is no set structure that narrative takes, let alone the extraordinarily narrow framework that Pearson claims narrative “must have”.

It reminds me of many conversations I've heard about narrative works vs. non-narrative works. Those conversations always make me cringe. I've seen and read thousands of works spanning all but one continent. (If there was ever a play written in Antarctica, I'd love to read it, if for no other reason than I could say “on every continent”) I have never seen or read a work devoid of narrative.

...most pieces I have seen seem to lie at one of two extremes – well made plays that place Story above all else, or performance and dance pieces that reject storytelling entirely. And then there are those pieces that sit somewhere in the middle – juggling the difficult job of telling a story while not telling a story, aware of narrative without pandering to it blindly. Two pieces that come to mind are Tim Crouch’s The Author and Ridiculusmus’ Tough Time, Nice Time. Both of these pieces have serious beef with narrative, and yet skillfully play its game.

Narrative is a recounting of events. It's the very nature of performance. Too often formal and aesthetic traits of aristotelian-based modes of performance get lumped together as "narrative" But that is inaccurate.  Pearson, among many others, confuses form and structure for narrative.

You cannot have a work of performance free from narrative. Something happens. That is an event. Our brains are hard wired to create them even if they may not exist. Even if you were hypothetically able to create a performance in a laboratory, where nothing happened. There were no events. The act of performing that work before an audience would create its own narrative.

We speak so infrequently of aesthetics as a field that our terms are a copy of a copy of a discussion, and we conflate aesthetic approaches with basic building blocks of story.

Ah story. Another one that's usually conflated. Story is not narrative, and story is not plot. They are connected but not interchangable.

More on that to come. Hopefully this is not the end of the conversation.

Yesterday, Polly Carl shared a link via twitter to a story that I loved, "White Space, Green Space: The Narrative of the City" Read it.

A couple parts got me thinking about the stage:

White space on the page is a breath, a break in the walls of gray text. Rather than the absence of content, white space gives meaning. It can propel the narrative forward, pause the narrative, open up a passage or a scene, invite the reader in. The reader enters the text through the white space and participates in the aesthetic process.

and

In the narrative of the city, the breath, the “respite from traffic and the sound of other voices” is in the green space. As a city resident, my imaginative act is to “alter my perception” and create a new definition of green space for Warren Park.

What is the stage version of white space? What takes the form of a breath for an audience member?

I wonder if 90 one-act formula tends to strip the stage of white space as it were? I don't know if jokes, while often tension releasing, are really white space. On the other hand, I think many musicals--especially those whose books are simply an excuse to get from song to song--are 90% whitespace. Also less than ideal.

I wonder if there's something we could rediscover from form of melodramas? Musical interludes etc. as white space?

I know, I'm supposed to be all, "melodramas, eww. They're terrible." But there is little terrible about the form. What is melodrama?  The word is borrowed from the French, mélodrame. Which in turn borrows from the greek melos, song--and the word for drama.  A melodrama is a play with songs.

Webster online has a pretty handy learners dictionary, for people learning English. It gives simple definitions of words. They have this for melodrama: "drama in which many exciting events happen and the characters have very strong or exaggerated emotions." That doesn't seem like a bad thing to me; exciting things, with strong emotions.

Most of what we tend to think is melodramatic, bad acting, shallow stock characters arent really the form, they're results of the historical era they lived in. But people loved them. They still do. I had a critic once tell me that August: Osage County was just a really tight melodrama, without the interludes. It wasn't meant to be an insult, either. he loved the show.

Either way, melodrama has plenty of whitespace. And often that whitespace is really enjoyable. Music, audiences openly reacting to characters onstage, etc. A lot of post-modern styled folks often use anachronistically random pop-songs, dance breaks etc, (read: fun) in a similar manner.

What do we have for white space in more mainstream theatres? The theatre that is seen by the most people? Have we pushed it aside in favor of an arbitrary running time? Does lack of white space make a work less enjoyable, as lack of green space makes a city less enjoyable? Are there other forms of white space I'm missing?

What do you think?