| You Have to Know How
it Feels By Robert Bethune Why isn’t it
very helpful, when all is said and done, to understand
the play you’re working on? The theater schools all teach something called
something like “script analysis” to directors, intending thereby to teach
them how to understand the plays they direct. In the end, though, those
courses tend to be ticket-punches on the way to something else; people
who really do direct plays rarely find them to be very worthwhile. In
the end, it doesn’t really help all that much to understand a play intellectually.
It is much more important to be able to launch a combined attack: cognitive,
affective, and aesthetic. When I talk about the cognitive attack on a play, I
really don’t mean the same thing as an intellectual analysis of it. What
I mean is that you have to have a solid grasp of the realities of the
play. To build a house requires a solid grasp of the realities of wood
and brick and wiring and plumbing, not an intellectual grasp of the significance
of domestic architecture in the cultural development of the community.
To build a theater production requires a solid grasp of the fundamental
realities of the story, of who does what to whom and why, of what the
consequences of an action must be, of what deeds underlie the words. It
is much closer to carpentry than to engineering, much closer to farming
than to botany, much closer to natural history than to ecology. A good
director of Strindberg’s Miss Julie does not need to know the developmental
psychodynamics that drive Jean and Julie into each other’s arms and drive
each other’s razors into each other’s flesh; what must be known is that
every action they take, each action embodied in words, tends remorselessly
in that direction because that is the style of their love and hate. Lose
that and you lose the play — and it’s easy to do; people often make
the mistake of treating the play as a chess match rather than a knife
fight. From there it is but a short step to realizing that
you must also understand what the play is as a sensory experience. The
theater is a way of communicating, and the means of communication it uses
are all sensory. We hear the words; we see the bodies and objects move;
we may even get a whiff of scent or odor from them, and we probably can
grasp textures as well, at least visually. We respond to rhythm, timing,
pace, loudness, softness, silence, harmony, dissonance, color, line, shape,
texture — every kind of visual, auditory, sensory quality is what
we respond to. That’s why it’s fairly rare to find people who really enjoy
reading plays rather than seeing them; the experience is fundamentally
different. It is even processed in a different part of our brains. And from here we arrive at the heart of it. We must
grasp how the play feels. What is it like to see real, live, in-the-flesh
human beings enacting this play for us? How will we, the artists, evoke
the responses that add up to a full experience of the story and the characters?
What cognitive, aesthetic and emotional stimuli will we provide in the
attempt? To answer this when we produce a play, we have to use
our whole selves, not just our intellectual faculties. We can’t stop when
we think we know what it means. We have to know how it works, what it’s
like, and above all how it feels. We can’t get along with just our minds.
Our hearts, skin, eyes, ears, and souls have to be there too. |
