This book is pragmatic and aimed at earnest students: it seeks to set forth principles that are essential in writing, staging, rehearsing, and performing plays. My own “plot-bead” diagrams, for instance (and instructions for how to use them), have found wide circulation and are in use wherever my former students are teaching or practicing in the theatre. I wish I had named them something more elegant – in Spanish, they are known more poetically as diagramas de cuentas – but their utility has spread their use, and theatre practitioners have long since heard of them. If plot-bead diagrams become only a method of play analysis, something has been lost, for they diagram something more mysterious and philosophical than may at first meet the eye. The mystery of “sculpting in time” is not a simple concept, but it explains my first principle of dramaturgy: form. The second principle, action, is even more apt to be underestimated, probably because action is so common a word in English that it hides rather than reveals its full Aristotelian sense as a term of art. Action is not “a story,” it is not strenuous agitation (sword fights onstage, for instance). It is, in its deeper sense an inner essence of being alive, and it operates in every living moment until we die. Then it stops. Action is thus inescapable except that it inevitably will end. That catastrophe is inescapable. The theatre was invented to display this mystery, and to do so “live.” I have frequently wished we had a better word for it in English, and that is why I often substitute Aristotle’s praxis, as a way of signaling that the meaning is harder than you think. The term has nothing to do with Realism: abstract art is an action. Studied as a principle, action and its deep fusion with time, puts all theatre artists, musicians, dancers, and filmmakers on the right artistic path to be poets in its ancient meaning: makers, fabricators of art “objects.” Those entities are only metaphorically called “objects” in the case of the time-arts of performance.
My argument and my teaching are based on elemental underlying truths about playmaking (which is itself an action) and the medium of the drama (which is structured time). I use playmaking to include several disciplines usually differentiated from each other – especially in relation to dramaturgy. The term “playmaking” is chosen to include playwriting, directing (especially the important work of what have come to be known as “auteur– directors,” an interesting and telltale neologism), acting, stage management, and design in all its aspects: sets, costumes, lighting, props, and sound – all of them incongruously bundled into a single catch-all phrase. Each discipline is habitually separated from the larger collective task of “composing for the stage” – especially during training in schools and universities. But our terms reveal a subordination of disciplines, whose practitioners are marshaled like troops under the central authority usually of a director. Dramaturgy addresses the unifying goal all these specializations are supposed to share: the making of one thing – usually called “a play,” but as often in contemporary practice called a “performance piece.” Dramaturgy might well be defined as the unified field theory of playmaking in all its aspects, whether representational or presentational.
What I envision here for theatre art is analogous to what T.S. Eliot envisioned for poetry when he wrote, “real poetry survives not only a change of popular opinion but the complete extinction of interest in the issues with which the poet was passionately concerned” (Eliot, 1957, p. 17). The study of dramaturgy is not an end in itself, it is a means to full activation of capacity as a creative artist. “The aim of technique is to free the spirit,” said Martha Graham, speaking of dance; it is true of playmaking too. All technique is founded on arduously discovered principles.
Principles of Dramaturgy has been boiled down to two inescapable dramatic principles: action and form. It is my contention, as it was Aristotle’s, that action and form are the invariant bedrock of all dramatic art – and I would add something Aristotle had no reason to consider: that this is so regardless of style, historical period, subject matter, or culture. Action and form are presented as principles, and on these two principles, thoroughly understood, swift progress can be made toward the fully competent, flexible, and infinitely creative practice of theatrical art. Furthermore, in addressing what most frequently goes wrong in theatre practice, at whatever level of professionalism, I have found no serious error which cannot be traced to either one or the other of these principles: either a fogginess about action (what the term means and what one is), or a neglect of form – and underestimation of the artifactual nature of a play, or of any performance piece. This book seeks to gain maximum leverage on practice with a foundational discourse on the fewest possible principles. It also suggests methods for implementing these principles while composing for the stage, or writing the script for a play.
My book has little to do with “Realism,” but it does use many examples from the historical stock of plays that makes up the conventional catalogue of dramatic literature. When readers discern that I am not hostile to Realism, which I consider only one distinguishing style among many in the long history of the theatre, they should refrain from reaching the wrong conclusion. I am not expressing a preference so much as I am deliberately avoiding controversies about contemporary practices and plays. My contention is that there are principles that apply to all theatrical styles. I chose deliberately to draw examples from the whole gamut of past dramatic literature, from the ancient Greeks to Samuel Beckett. Discussions of action, especially when it gets around to the actions of characters within fictional settings, will (I suspect) sound at first distressingly “conventional” to many contemporary students, and also (perhaps especially) to their current teachers. Students of the theatre are understandably eager for a style in step with these rapidly shifting times – and there is a good argument to be made that the twenty-first century has already left not only postmodernism, but even the après-post era behind. The term “postdramatic” suggests a complete break with any previous culture, practice, or assumptions. The term seems to cement in a satisfying way a long, deep, often semi-conscious prejudice against Realism – a prejudice that is especially prevalent (for some strange reason) in America. The term Realism is often used side-by-side with the phrase “conventional theatre,” something that the defiant term “postdramatic” promises to break away from decisively. But nothing could be more alien and distorting than to impute such motives to the avant-garde artists Hans Thies Lehmann collected for his study of the “postdramatic” (Lehmann, 2006). Even the ShowBiz journal par excellence, Variety, reserves a taxonomic distinction for what it calls the “legit” theatre.
A difficulty arises if “postdramatic” has acquired the burden of meaning the polar opposite of “conventional.” It then misleads by suggesting that the “game” of theatre is now under an obligation to be played without rules. Every artist is supposed to hate rules, and “principles” sounds like “rules.” If one were building furniture (chairs and tables, for instance) a useful principle would be an appreciation of gravity, and its inevitable role in the craftsman’s art. The concepts of “level” and “vertical” or “square” are direct expressions of the single inescapable principle of gravity, and very specific tools – carpenter’s levels and carpenter’s squares – are basic tools that govern carpentry. Architecture has an identical foundational relation to gravity, and with it to strength of materials and principles of load bearing, and stability of structures. No one can practice either carpentry or architecture without a close compliance with principles of this kind (in this case all founded on gravity). Even (or especially) a Frank Gehry, whose buildings seem to have broken loose entirely from the “constraint” of gravity, and thus from any “conventional” architecture, is still operating within an inescapable principle. In fact and in practice, Frank Gehry’s buildings are monstrously obsessed with gravity, especially with the complicated construction that respects gravity (as it must) while giving the visual impression that gravity is irrelevant. Completely analogously, classical nineteenth-century ballet technique sought to give the impression that dancers were exempted from the “law” of gravity. So-called “modern” dance returned to a celebration of gravity, and a deep “organic” acknowledgment of its force on the human body. Is this a constraining conventional “rule,” or is it an underlying principle? The balletic gravity-defying convention was an aesthetic, and it can still elicit wonder when practiced by a trained master. But it has also been rebelled against as brutally anti-naturalistic, inorganic, and hatefully abusive of dancer’s bodies. A ballerina’s tutu conceals and disguises a musculature necessary for lifts and soaring bird-flight leaps, just as a Frank Gehry building conceals a huge armature of supporting frames and trompe-l’oeil reinforcements carrying the inevitable structural loads of any huge inhabited building. Aesthetic fashions and accepted conventions differ from principles, which if formulated accurately underlie all fashions of taste and habits of practice.
I worked with many so-called “postdramatic” practitioners who were supported and encouraged by Ellen Stewart at Cafe La MaMa E.T.C., Joe Papp at the Public Theater, Saint Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, and Bob Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds – in short the off-off-Broadway theatre in New York City. But I had also been raised in France, and “forced” to attend from an early age the Comédie Française and the Théâtre National Populaire. We also were obliged, in French public school, to memorize and recite famous passages and tirades from Corneille and Molière, from Beaumarchais and Edmond Rostand, along with longish poems by La Fontaine and Villon, Lamartine and Victor Hugo. I shared these European continental experiences with such New York avant-gardistes as Jean-Claude van Itallie (who was raised speaking French in Belgium) and the founding members of Mabou Mines, who had met each other while ex-pats in Paris. All of us were formed under the influence of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal and Jean Genet (all of whom I eventually met). Add to these cohorts Joe Chaikin, Richard Foreman, the young Sam Shepard… these were the American theatre artists who anchored my career and my own aesthetic. We were all strenuously differentiating ourselves not from “the dramatic,” but from the demoralizing commercialized Broadway ShowBiz. If anything, we thought of ourselves as rescuing the drama from the commodified (and debased) stage trade in big-money profit-seeking blockbusters. These young turks and their theatre practice clarified the principles I enunciate in this book. Nothing was more refreshing and inspiring, or more fundamentally dramatic, as I would use the term, than say Lee Breuer’s Shaggy Dog Animation, or Richard Foreman’s Pandering to the Masses. In addition, I trained deeply in the long history of the theatre, and the canonical classics: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, Terence, medieval Mysteries, the Commedia dell’arte, Shakespeare, Tirso de Molina, Racine, Molière, Goldoni, Beaumarchais, Goethe, Schiller, Victor Hugo, Ibsen, Strindberg.… I am not hostile to the historical tradition, even the late-nineteenth century’s “bourgeois” boulevard sex farces, against which the Modernist avant-gardistes rebelled so strenuously a century and a half ago. Jarry’s Ubu Roi is as welcome in my repertoire as is Feydeau’s Occupe-toi d’Amélie; Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae observes the same principles as does Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach.
In what follows, I stay by and large away from any discussion of specific contemporary American playwrights. The exception is Robert Wilson, and I use Einstein on the Beach (which incidentally exerted a huge personal influence on me) mainly to show that Bob’s work illustrates as well as Arthur Miller’s or Lope de Vega’s would have, principles that have nothing to do with Realism.
The distinction between “dramatic” and “postdramatic” which Professor Hans Thies Lehmann introduced into current discourse is really a distinction between representational and presentational uses of a theatre. Let me align such terms with the ensuing principles in this book. All theatre is presentational. That reality is the in-your-face reality of live performance. Some (historically, perhaps most) theatre has been and continues to be also representational. The relevant distinction has to do with adding a fictional layer to performance. An analogy to “abstract” and “realistic” painting might be helpful.
All painting is artifice. The subject in painting, and its treatment on the canvas, are what differentiate Realism from abstract painting. But both remain the application of a pigment ooze to a surface. The most meticulously photographic (or trompe-l’oeil) Realism in painting is still completely artifactual. Similarly, “abstract” painting invariably still has a subject. It simply shifts from a represented subject somewhere outside the painting to the presented world of the painting itself. The great twentieth-century painter Camille Souter (who is still painting strongly at ninety), has often been characterized – especially in her early work – as an “abstract” painter, but she has always contested the term. She once told me explicitly, “If it hasn’t subject matter, it simply doesn’t work.” She added, “I would call my paintings more symbols than abstracts.” There have been periods in artistic fashion when a surface verisimilitude has been very highly prized. That fashion and that taste are no longer dominant in the art world (yet they persist in innumerable individual art lovers), but they tended to coincide with the heyday of Realism in the theatre, an era now more than a century behind us. Starting with the late-nineteenth-century French Impressionists, a process of “abstraction” set in dramatically in the world of painting. The Picasso revolution that followed pushed the European world into cubism (where the “subject” was still distinctly legible) and beyond into “full abstraction” in the works of such artists as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. One might say that the “subject” became the painting itself, and the “action” was the action of the painter while making the painting. It is no mere coincidence that the critic Clement Greenberg coined the term “action painting” for these New York artists. So-called “abstract” paintings are a pure and open record of the visual–poetics of composition and painting. The canvas becomes the subject. These well-named “action painters” serve as our best analogies to the theatrical avant-garde and the increasingly presentational uses of performance spaces. For artists like Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Liz LeCompte, Lee Breuer, or Anne Bogart, the performance “canvas” is the subject. The action of the piece is their action, of composition and presentation. There is no supervening or displacing fiction involved.
This game of fiction, when it is played in the “conventional” theatre, is what calls for the famous suspension of disbelief, for going along with an illusion. But at its core, the theatre is never any other reality than itself. The fully presentational mode of theatre is not new, but ancient. It is the natural mode for this art form. Yet just because we have rediscovered a theatrical equivalent to abstract art, it would be foolish to discount theatre’s compelling capacity to impose the illusion of the real. As a cultural instrument, the theatre has allowed human beings to indulge in a safe “double-take” on lived experience. In tragedy, for instance, theatrical practice has allowed audiences to learn from (by witnessing) catastrophic experience that scapegoat–protagonists do not survive. But the actors survive. We have learned to take that “double-take” for granted.
Sacrificial victims have all-too literally played the scapegoat role since prehistoric times, when ritual killing fascinated those (like ourselves) who realized they were mortal, who were always frightened, under constant threat. The advent of “conventionalized” cultural locations in which to see such ritual enactments and re-enactments gave rise to elaborate sacred “seeing-places” which still survive from antiquity. The move from human victim to scapegoat, and again from a goat to a representation, is the history of the theatre. In what follows, I have sought to describe what has never changed in that theatron. There are principles by which the three plays of the Oresteia and Lee Breuer’s Red Horse Animation are firmly linked. The plot of Agamemnon’s homecoming from Troy is as necessary and unavoidable as is the plot of Hamm’s endgame. It is not a superficial resemblance that links the two plays to identical principles. Both works use the same canvas: a time-form that reveals itself in performance. Those bedrock connections are craft principles, and they can be used wrong, or ineptly. It is useful to learn them, and learn how to apply them. In this book they are addressed as dramaturgy. They apply identically to representational and presentational theatre modalities, for whenever you structure time, you perform an action. When I mention Aristotle (as I will frequently) I advise the reader not to jump to the conclusion that I mean “Realism” or “conventional dramaturgy.” Aristotle’s formal insights have been often misjudged, and his name has in many periods enraged those who feel compelled to question authority and break constraining “rules.” I endorse such rebellion, and I assure you at the outset there is no contradiction in teaching unapologetically from Aristotle.
Eliot, T.S. (1957) “The Social Function of Poetry” in On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber.
Lehmann, H.T. (2006) Post Dramatic Theatre. Translated from German by K. Jürs-Munby. New York: Routledge. (Originally published 1999.)