"A STUDENT VIEWS THE ART OF THEATER" The blurry image shows what life is all about!
By Daniel J. McCarthy
While taking a break from IONA College in 1979, I attended Dowling College in Oakdale. One of my courses was Sociology-2, and November 26, 1979, I composed this item for that class.
Now as an actor/archivist/genealogist who has been asked for years by patrons if I ever wrote about my View of the Art of Theater, I was thrilled to locate the copy and be able to place it "write here!"
However: In laying-out this article on linkedin - the fonts {letter sizes} were changed for some unknown reason. - & TOO - My original layout from the word document got so altered by the LINKEDIN.COM company. I SO APOLOGIZE IF EARLIER READERS HAD TO GO THROUGH THAT!
Here goes with my A Student Views The Art of Theater ...
"The purpose of art is to embody feeling in an expressive form where it can be conveyed to others." 1
Art is an activity of man, an activity which produces works of art. All works of art have this in common; each presents an image of feeling which is not materials this illusion serves to abstract the work from the everyday world.
Each work of art, then, is an objectification of feeling in an expressive form. It is expressive because it embodies and conveys feeling; it is illusory because its appearance, not the material (the paint spots on the canvas or the sound and movement of the actors on the stage), creates illusion. The work of art is not the materials but the appearance they are used to create, whether this is presented on a stage or on a screen. Closely related to a release of emotion is a release of fantasy. Expression of fantasy through the controlled medium of dramatic art distinguishes it from reality. A successful dramatic illusion is accepted as an illusion - not as reality.
“...Drama is the representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown living upon the stage there to struggle against fatality, against social law, against one of his fellow mortals, against himself, if need be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the male-volence of those who surround him."2
Why concern myself with drama rather than any other art form of communication? Drama is the most social of the art forms.
It is a collective creation; the playwright, the director, the actors, the designers, the costume-maker, the provider of props, the lighting engineer, and the audience by its very presence, all contribute.
There are four modes of dramatic presentations theater, cinema, television, radio. Stage drama, being "live", has the excitement of spontaneity. On the stage, the distance between spectator and actions is constant; in the media it varies; with a close-up or a monologue on radio, the audience experiences the intimacy with the action; in long-shots it is moved to a great distance. In television, the screen is relatively small and in long-distance shots much reduced; the most effective shots are close-ups or medium-distance shots. The strength in television drama rests in the intimacy with which it can bring a relatively small number of characters into contact with a viewer. One of the essential differences between mass media and the theatre and cinema is their continuousness. To see a play in the theater or even in the cinema is still an occasion. Drama on television and radio forms part of a continuous stream of news, information, entertainment. Perhaps the characteristic contribution of the electronic media to drama is the familiar fictional character (e.g. detective, doctor) or whole families or groups of characters who return regularly at fixed times every week (or every day in the case of the "soap-opera").
"Theater is an experiment on behalf of all the arts. Theatre holds a mirror to nature - but only so as to be able to examine the properties of the mirror." 3
Drama, theater, is an imitation of the meal world as play, as make-believe: the drama we see in the theater (and for that matter on the television screen or in the cinema) is an elaborately manufactured illusion.
Materials to study human relations are drawn from many sources: psychology, psychiatry, sociology, history, social work, education and many others. Drama is not just a recreational activity but also draws knowledge and deals with the dynamics of human behavior.
A dramatic text in performance contains a far greater element of reality. A play in performance contains a "fusion of the whole imaginary"4 - the products of a writer's imagination fixed once and for all, with an element of living reality of the actors, their costumes, the furniture which surrounds them, the things they handle (e.g., swords, fans, knives and forks). The more completely a playwright imagines a situation and the characters in it, the nearer the play will come to the complexity of the real world.
The theater and all drama can be seen as a mirror in which society looks at itself.
It is one thing for a scholar to say that a play is fascinatingly interesting and quite another to put it into production and offer it to a general public. Since a script is not a complete work in itself, playwriting is not an art in the strict sense. It is one of the creative activities (functions) of dramatic art which contributes to the creation of a dramatic work. This, of course, can also be said of acting, directing, and theatricals the major traditional creative functions of the art.
It is usually the director who takes over the series of choices from the playwright and continues them.
The artist creates in order to develop and articulate a conception of what it is like to be a human being. As he attempts to find means to objectify it, the conception itself is further developed. "When the work is finished, his conception has been articulated in a form which makes his conception available for others to understand - it has been expressed." 5 The actor is the audience's journeyer; we can entrust him with our inquiry. "Everybody sits in a circle and breathes positive energy." 6 He himself becomes aware of a better understanding of the conception in a way similar to that in which an essayist comes to better understand his ideas as he develops sentences and paragraphs to communicate them. While the artist creates a work in terms of himself or an ideal audience like himself, he also wants to convey
This conception of the human condition to others so that they come to understand what he understands. "His artistic formulations must be made to exist independently in the work; they cannot remain partly in his mind." 7 He is creating primarily for an ideal audience. However, the work must be such that it does not require the artist's experience in creating the work in order for its importance to be grasped. The artist does not comment on or make a comment. He shows the appearance of feeling as he conceives it without referring to things in the public world.
Usually when such things are mentioned they become part of the illusion of the work and momentarily lose their public significance; but if the artist were on them (e.g.: in a political speech) it is these things that would be in focus and not the work of art.
The literary part of the drama, the script, is fixed (a permanent entity); but each performance of each production of the text is different, because the actors react differently to different audiences as well as their own moods. The script is the source of the imaginary to be made present; the actor seeks out the imaginary in its source in order to make it present; the audience are those to whom the imaginary becomes present.
The dramatic form of expression leaves the spectator free to make up his own mind. It puts him into the same situation as the character. It makes it possible for him to experience the emotion of the character directly, rather than having to accept a mere description of it. A novelist has to describe what a character looks like. In a play the appearance of the character is instantly conveyed by the actor's body, costume, and make-up.
The other visual elements in drama, the setting (the environment in which the action takes place) can be equally instantly communicated by the sets, lighting, and grouping of characters on the stage (this also applies to the cinema and plays on television).
Drama is able to show several aspects of action simultaneously and convey several levels of action and emotion at the same time. Narration on the printed page is necessarily linear (moving in a single dimension) so that at any given moment only one segment of the action can be concentrated upon, only a single thing can be happening. In drama, the audience finds the meaning, we arrive at our own interpretation of the action from the events we witness. Drama is multi-dimensional; many things can happen at the same time.
For example, what a character says may be contradicted by his gestures; two different groups of people may be doing different things at opposite ends of the stage.
"Good night, my dear wife," may be spoken in a wide variety of tones of voice and expression] the audience might wonder whether the person who spoke these words meant them sincerely, sarcastically, or had a hint of hostility in them.
In a novel, the author would have to say something as:
“Good night, my dear wife," he said, but Irene had the impression that he did not really mean--it. Was he sarcastic, she asked herself, or was he suppressing some deeply felt hostility?...
So the spectator is made to experience what the character on stage undergoes. (S)he will very soon be able to judge whether the experience feels right. Anything that the author and the actors present to their audience will either carry conviction or not.
The basic task of anyone concerned with presenting any kind of drama to any audience consists in capturing their attention and holding it as long as required. If their attention is lost and they fail to concentrate on what is happening, what is being said, all is lost. Expectations must be aroused, but never wholly fulfilled until the last curtain; the action must seem to be getting nearer to the objective, and yet never reach it entirely before the end.
What is going to happen next? I know WHAT is going to happen next but HOW is it going to happen? I know WHAT is going to happen and I know HOW it is going to happen but HOW is my GUEST going to REACT to it? What is it that I see happening? These events seem to have a pattern - what kind of pattern will it turn out to be?
One might say that the major theme of play must become clear in good time.
If the audience all gasp in terror or disgust at the same moment, the actors experience a very powerful reaction. They can clearly feel the tension if the audience is tense, just as they can clearly feel its boredom when the audience loses concentration (e.g.: coughing, fidgeting). Positive reaction from the audience has a powerful effect on the actors, and so has negative reaction. If the audience fails to laugh at jokes, the actors will instinctively play them more broadly, underline them, signal more clearly that what they are saying is funny. If the audience responds, the actors will be inspired by the response and will in turn elicit more and more powerful responses from the audience. There is a feed-back effect between the individual members themselves. A few people in the audience, who are quicker than the others in seeing a joke, can set off gales of laughter in all the rest (e.g.: I remember in Sugar Babies, a current Broadway musical saluting the “burlesque” era, Mickey Rooney plays a student of six or seven years of age in a classroom skit. He is asked by the teacher, played by Ann Miller, to give a sentence using the word, "disaster". His response was a jokes "A girl walked backwards into a plane and the propeller "disaster". This brought on a few chuckles and quickly resulted in gales of laughter.)
Seeing my neighbor in the next seat roar with merriment will set me off and my merriment will in turn reinforce his.
People who are alone reading a book, or watching television, on the whole do not laugh uproariously (nor do they cheer wildly at patriotic sentiment they might find in the book or on the screen). Comedy shows in radio or on television are produced with a studio audience (or canned laughter), so the lone viewer or listener can experience something of the collective laughter.
"Horror produces quite a different effect in a crowd, which gives reassurance to each individual from that which ensues when a single, highly nervous spectator is exposed to it as a television viewer. For the isolated target of the electronic media, the possibility of looking around him and seeing others not as frightened as he is will be missing and the final result even if it does lead to panic, will be far less pleasant than the clearly understood fact that it is only a harmless entertainment."8
In Sweeney Todd, Mrs. Lovett bakes her partner's enemies along with the dough to make her meat pies. Recalling a February performance of that show, we gasped at the throat- slashings and were all horrified when a leading character was thrown in the oven unexpectedly. Feeling the response of others in the audience reinforced my frightened outburst.
The awakening and the holding of the audience's attention through expectation, interest, and suspense, is, as stressed, the most mundane aspect of the dramatic structure. "Only when the fundamental objective (holding their attention) has been achieved, can the more ambitious intentions be fulfilled the imparing of wisdom, insight, poetry, beauty, amusement, and relaxation, illumination and the purging of emotion." 9
If a character on stage loses his trousers and I "identify with" him, then I shall be embarrassed by his experience, I shall feel as embarrassed as he does. "To identify with" him means that the actors and the production have compelled me to look at the action from the character's point of view. I don't -10- think a character in a tragedy would ever lose his trousers; but in a gentle, realistic comedy, the embarrassment may well be experienced. If I did not "identify with" him, it was because the style of the production and writing made it clear to me that I am supposed to regard the character as someone to whom I am superior, at whom I am looking from the outside rather than the inside. I would then laugh out loud when I see him lose his trousers, when I see him embarrassed and humiliated.
Bernard Slade's new Broadway play, Romantic Comedy, relates to the embarrassing laughter in the sense that the leading male character, Jason Carmichael, expects to see his massager in the room, when, instead, the company is a female fan of his. He enters, nude, to discover his visitor. He was embarrassed and the laughter from the audience was uproarious.
The disappearance and changing of scenes is a thing which ordinarily arouses great delight and wonder among the spectators, particularly when the change is made so quickly that no one notices. In They’re Playing Our Song, the scenery moves about so fast and a new drop is planted just as quickly that the flow of the production is yielded through these exciting changes.
In Greek, the word, “drama” simply means action, an imitation or representation of human behavior. Drama is not simply a form of literature because it has to be seen as action or acted, in order for the author's concept to have its full value. -11-
The words, the script, the literary component, are secondary.
The real information conveyed in the scene when acted lies in the relationship, the interaction of characters, the way they react to each other and the audience and the way the audience reacts to the action and actors and themselves. What the acted scene will express points the importance of actors and directors in the art of drama.
Human beings have a sense of "drama": Play instinct involves children playing mother and father or cowboys and Indians - this in some sense involves improvising dramas in religious services, tribal dances, or great state occasions - they all contain strong dramatic elements. We all have observed and experienced incidences of dramatic impulse, to play-act, to act-out.
There is a form of drama called psychodrama (which does have therapy as its goal). This technique involves situations which are structured in such a way as to enable the patients to act out their own experiences directly. The roles relate to their own problems directly and they use words and lines of their own making. In play production, the actor does the opposite. He has to adapt himself to a role already set and learn the meanings of lines already created by the author.
"A man's behavior, the development of his character and personality, his will to live and his will to die, are influenced in many ways. His way of life and his destiny can also be turned by certain dramatic events that take place during his lifetime." 10
"In very practical terms, the theater reminds (the spectators) of codes of conduct, its rules of social coexistence. All drama is therefore a political event; it either reasserts or undermines the code of conduct of a given society." 11
"It may be possible to explain all conceptions of feeling in a work of dramatic art as the artists' attitude (feeling) toward some aspect of the human condition." 12
"Drama is multifaceted in, its images, as ambivalent in its meanings, as the world it mirrors. That is its main strength, its characteristic as a mode of expression - and its greatness." 13
Through the dramatic form of art, we can come to an understanding of individuals, races, societies, Contact with good plays introduces us to places and people different from ourselves.
People go to the theater because they desire a change, they wish to forget a little while the experiences of the day by having their minds carried to new faces and different adventures. "If he has his expectation sharpened and his affections awakened," 14 he receives the stimulation he went to the theater for in the first place. He sees a different character, story, and receives a comment from each dramatic performance. He will "persist in braving blizzards, strikes, congested highways, power failures, and all of the other urban hazards to spend an afternoon or evening in the theater." 15
FOOTNOTES
(1) The Art of Dramatic Art, Theodore Shank
page 33
(2) Social Growth Through Play Production, Jack Simos
pgs. 17-1
(3) The Theatrical Event, David Cole
(4) An Anatomy of Drama, Martin Esslin
(5) op cit, Shank
(6) op cit, Cole
(7) op cit, Shank
(8) op cit, Cole
(9) Ibid
(10) op cit, Simos
Lifted from the Preface, page V
(11) op cit , Cole
(12) op cit, Esslin
(13) op cit, Shank
(14) The Stage in Action, Samuel Selden
(15) The City and the Theatre, Mary C. Henderson
page 285
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(1) Cole, David
The Theatrical Event
Wesleyan Press, 1975
(2) Esslin, Martin
An Anatomy of Drama
Hill and Wang, New York, 1976-77
(3) Henderson, Mary C.
The City and the Theatre
James T. White, and Company, Clifton, New Jersey, 1973
(4) Selden, Samuel
The Stage in Action
Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., New York, 1941
(5) Shank, Theodore
The Art of Dramatic Art
Dickenson Publishing Co., Inc., Belmont, California,
1969?
(6) Simos, Jack
Social Growth Through Play Production
Associated Press, New York, 1957