THE ELEMENTS OF THEATRICAL

EXPRESSION

The Elements of Theatrical Expression puts forward 14 essential elements that make
up the basic building blocks of theatre.
Is theatre a language? Does it have its own unique grammar? And if so, just
what would the elements of such a grammar be? Brian Kulick asks readers to
think of these elements as the rungs of a ladder, scaling one after the other to
arrive at an aerial view of the theatrical landscape. From such a vantage point,
one can begin to discern a line of development from the ancient Greeks,
through Shakespeare and Chekhov, to a host of our own contemporary authors.
He demonstrates how these elements may be transhistorical but are far from
static, marking out a rich and dynamic theatrical language for a new generation
of theatre makers to draw upon.
Suitable for directors, actors, writers, dramaturges, and all audiences who
yearn for a deeper understanding of theatre, The Elements of Theatrical Expression
equips its readers with the knowledge that they need to see and hear theatre in
new and more daring ways.

Brian Kulick is Chair of Columbia’s School of the Arts Theatre Program,

where he also teaches directing with Anne Bogart. In addition to staging the
works of the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Brecht, and Tony Kushner, he has
been the Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company and an Artistic Associate
for The Public Theatre.
THE ELEMENTS OF
THEATRICAL
EXPRESSION
Brian Kulick
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Brian Kulick
The right of Brian Kulick to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him/her/them in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kulick, Brian, author.
Title: The elements of theatrical expression / Brian Kulick.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019025099 | ISBN 9780367352578 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780367352585 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429330247 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Theater–Language. | Theater–Philosophy.
Classification: LCC PN2039 .K85 2020 | DDC 792.01–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025099

ISBN: 978-0-367-35257-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-35258-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-33024-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
To My Teachers:
Michael McClain, who taught me all the rules.
And
Mel Shapiro, who taught me how to break them.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix

1 Introduction 1

2 Questions 8

3 Truth 18

4 Moments 31

5 Change 46

6 World 65

7 Character 84

8 States 99

9 Intentions 112

10 Actions 125

11 Obstacles 147

12 Events 159
viii Contents

13 Cores 173

14 About-ness 188

15 Remanence 197

Index 205
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’ve spent the vast majority of my life in rehearsal rooms, classrooms, and theatres.
In other words, I am used to being surrounded by other human beings on a daily
basis; so, spending so much time alone in a room, attempting to fill a page like
this with a bunch of meaningful black markings, is still a somewhat terrifying task.
Therefore, I am deeply grateful to a handful of dedicated friends, colleagues, and
loved ones who have perused this manuscript at key intervals, given me much-
needed advice, and cajoled me to complete the damn thing. These brave and
saintly souls are: Arnold Aronson, Anne Bogart, Anna Brenner, Oskar Eustis,
Gisela Cardinas, Jeff Janisheski, Nancy Keystone, Carey Perloff, Alice Reagan,
Marike Splint, Rosemarie Tichler, Jonathan Vandenberg, and Kim Weild.
I am equally thankful for the input from the remarkable students in The
Graduate Directing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where
I have had the great good fortune to teach for the past decade and half. So
much of this book has grown out conversations with these extraordinary young
artists. It was with them that all of these concepts were first articulated, and it
was through them and their inspired work that these concepts were tested and
refined. I owe you all a huge debt of gratitude. This is very much our book.
I would also like to thank my editor, Ben Piggott, who I’ve come to think of as
a Marvel Comic Book Hero whose superpower is to always say three simple things
that make whatever you’re working on so much better. You cannot talk about
Ben, without moving on to sing the praises of his associate Laura Soppelsa. Laura is
always there to patiently explain the arcane ways of academic publishing and some-
how manages to inspire you to get your work in on time. I’m still not sure how she
does that last trick.
And finally, and most importantly, I must thank my wife, Naomi, and my son,
Noah, who are always there to say, “Really, you’re going to keep that bit in?” And
who still love me, even on those very rare occasions when I decide not to heed their
advice.
1
INTRODUCTION
Toward a theatrical grammar

Theatre as language
Theatre is a language. It possesses its own unique grammar, rules that govern how
its elements can be arranged to forge meaning. I suspect the mere mention of
a word like grammar might make many readers slam the cover of this book shut
in terror, but the word’s etymological origins are far more enticing. Grammatica,
as it was called in the Middle Ages, came to mean “secret knowledge” and had
more to do with magic than with subject/verb agreements. By the time the word
immigrates to Scotland in the 18th Century, it was understood as being a form of
“enchantment or spell.”1 This little book grows out of a desire to discover
the unique theatrical elements that have cast a spell on audiences from theatre’s
inception to today. It wants to know what constitutes such elements and how,
when they are combined, meaning emerges. The process of making such meaning
is similar to Wittgenstein’s depiction of builders at work:

A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and
beams. B has to pass him the stones and to do so in the order in which
A needs them. For this purpose they make use of a language consisting of
the words “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” “beam.” A calls them out; B brings
the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such call.2

It sounds simple enough. There’s just one problem: what if each person has
a different idea of what they are passing back and forth to one another? What if
everyone uses the terms “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” and “beam” but has a radically
different conception of each of these elements? This is part of the challenge of
making theatre in the early 21st Century; we are often using the same words,
but endowing them with a wide range of differing meanings. Every theatre
2 Introduction

practitioner understands “action” but often from the rather restricted view of their
distinct discipline. The aim of this book is to develop a 360-degree understanding
of certain key elements, attempting to uncover the common grammatical glue
that holds our ostensibly normative Western theatrical language together. It turns
to the beginnings of ancient Greek theatre, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and our own
contemporary authors to begin to tease out what these shared elements might be.
This is not to advocate that any of these elements are rules that must be strictly
adhered to; but rather, dynamics to be understood and then, if need be, broken
in informed and interesting ways. In this respect, this book believes that Picasso
becomes Picasso, or Schoenberg becomes Schoenberg, because they understood
the fundamentals of their respective mediums. This was an understanding on such
a deep cellular level that these artists could go on to dismantle and reassemble
their respective modes of expression in new and necessary ways. My somewhat
humble goal is to arrive at a similar sort of cellular knowledge with the belief that
it is only with such an understanding that we can cajole the medium of theatre
into more daring ways of making us see and hear anew.

The basic elements of theatrical grammar

And so, this little book is an attempt to understand the elements that make up the
grammar of normative Western theatre. Each of the following chapters looks at an
individual element and examines how it contributes to the forging of this theatrical
language. These elements are grouped in ascending order, with each organically
growing out of its predecessor. One could think of these elements as rungs in
a ladder, scale one after the other and the reader will arrive at an aerial view of the
theatrical landscape. These rungs are: The question, truth, moments, change, world,
character, states, intentions, actions, obstacles, events, cores, about-ness, and reman-
ence (a beautiful word for what remains of an experience long after it has passed).
The first element that steps forward for our inspection is the question. The-
atre, by its very nature, is fundamentally interrogative, it often begins with
a deep and abiding question. These questions can be as simple and direct as:
“Who’s to Blame?” (The Oresteia), “To be or not to be” (Hamlet); or even
“What difference does it make?” (The Three Sisters). The provisional answers to
these essential questions leads to the second element: the patient pursuit of truth.
Truth has had a difficult time in our beleaguered 20th and 21st Centuries and
yet, in theatre we still find audiences saying of a moment, “That was true.” This is
a very particular kind of truth, what one might call the truth of recognition. In the
case of theatre, it is usually the recognition of our behaviors as they are reflected
back to us by actors. The accuracy of that reflection becomes the criterion for our
conception of theatrical truth. Aristotle called such a process mimesis; it is a theatre
that, according to Shakespeare, is charged with “holding a mirror up to nature.”
Such truths are often imbedded in seemingly inconsequential details, what Tolstoy
called “the tiny bit,” a way of capturing reality which Chekhov and Stanislavsky
inherit and take to its furthest extremes.
Introduction 3

With these two foundational elements in place, we can turn to what Stanis-
lavsky called the moment. This is the fundamental building block of theatre.
The heart of a moment sits between what has just transpired and what is about
to be. It is the fleeting awareness of being caught between these two temporal
poles. For Shakespeare, this was “the interim” which exists on the threshold of
taking an action, just before the future is forever altered. From this basic under-
standing of time comes everything. The moment is the essential atom of theatre.
The theatrical experience is constructed moment by moment. These moments
become beats, units, scenes, acts, until an entire play emerges before our eyes;
leading to the next subatomic element: change.
Change happens within and about us, from one moment to the next. It is our
constant companion. Ours is a world of continual transformation. Theatre mirrors
this in the situations, characters, and tonalities it depicts; revealing how quickly we
can move from the sublime to the ridiculous, or the civil to the savage. The scale of
change can also change from play to play. Look at the difference between the grand
transformations found in a Greek tragedy and compare them to the almost micro-
scopic alterations that make up the fine weave of a Chekhov play; yet still, at the
center of each work, is a profound sensitivity to the consequences that change
exacts on the inhabitants of each of these worlds. This is where the poetics of
theatre becomes a kind of physics. This is the thermodynamics of being.
Having dwelt in the realm of the micro, our investigation moves to the
macro-level with an exploration of world and character. These two elements are
inextricably intertwined. In the theatre, the world is more a verb than a noun,
actively shaping the minds and bodies of its characters whose very comportment
can conjure an entire world without a stitch of scenery. The conjunction of
world and character leads to our next element: states. A state is not to be con-
fused with a mood (i.e., happiness, sadness, or nostalgia), although a mood can
be part of a state’s content. Moods join thought, feeling, associations, and drives
which are all bundled together to create a given state at a given time. Put
simply: states are the ways these linked thoughts, feelings, associations, and
drives happen to us. They are rarely static, almost always in flux, taking us from
state to state. Out of such states grow the more familiar elements of intentions,
actions, and obstacles. These are the nuts and bolts that occupy most actors and
directors as they go about assembling a performance of a play. It is through
a deep understanding of this tripartite process that we come to an understanding
of our next two essential elements: events and cores. The event is what happens
to change a given situation from scene to scene and the core is what each of
those events reveal (i.e., their subsequent meaning). Think of events and cores
as two sets of parallel dramatic integers. If we add up all the events of play, we
have its plot; if we add up all the cores of a play, we have its theme.
This takes us to the shores of about-ness, which deals with the slow accrual
of meaning over the arc of an entire theatrical unfolding. About-ness is how
a play slowly reveals its import to us through the implication of the play’s central
action. It is a meaning that is often more felt than thought. It is where thought
4 Introduction

and feeling meet and become one; a sort of synesthesia of understanding. This
lingering sensation leads us to the final and perhaps most elusive element of this
book: remanence. This, as we have said, is what remains in our hearts and minds
long after the actual experiencing of a work has passed. One could say that theatre
practitioners are in the remanence-making business, intent on leaving some trace
in the audience’s imagination, some often ineffable meaning that they can carry
with them into the future. Artaud likened this to a kind of infection; other, gentler,
theatre makers, have thought of it as a sort of sowing. Germ or seed, this is what
remains of the work. It has the capacity to continue to grow within us. Only time
will tell how such remanence might subtly re-script our inner life.

Same elements, different emphasis

I am equally interested in the genealogy of this grammar, how one can trace a line
from the ancient Greeks, through Shakespeare and Chekhov, to a host of our own
contemporary authors; in doing so, one begins to see how these elements are not
only present in each of the artists under investigation, but also how they transform
from artist to artist and epoch to epoch. These elements may, indeed, be transhistor-
ical in terms of normative Western theatre, but they are far from static. As a result,
one can see how these artists bequeath to us a rich theatrical grammar to draw
upon, augment, re-adapt, and even reject as we continue to dream of a theatre for
the future.
Tadashi Suzuki, the great modern theatre director, has observed how there is
a discernible current running across the time of the Greeks, through Shakespeare
and Chekhov, to us. Shakespeare may have known little Latin and less Greek,
but it is clear that he was a close reader of Seneca who was deeply devoted to
the tragedies of the Greeks. Similarly, Chekhov was very much a student of
Shakespeare, modeling plays like The Seagull after Hamlet, and Uncle Vanya after
Twelfth Night. As for now, Chekhov remains a dominant influence in the hearts
and minds of many contemporary playwrights and so these elements remain
alive and well in many of the works that find their way to the stages of today. It
is a lineage that becomes all the more legible as we begin to trace the play of
these select elements from author to author. What also becomes clear, when we
follow this genealogy, is how these elements are given a different emphasis with
each artist.
The land of the Greeks is the land of the foundational for Western theatre, it
is here that the basic DNA of our theatre was first discovered and articulated.
All of the elements we will grapple with in this book find their roots in the
Greek Moment. They stand before us like those giant stone heads found on
Easter Island, equal in their density and mystery. These are our origins writ large
and in spending time with them we can often catch a glimpse of those secret
necessities that lead to the creation of this unique form of human expression.
One such intimation is that theatre is an elaborate metaphor for the Greeks’
notion of Moira (Fate). Here theatre itself becomes the very machinery of this
Introduction 5

force, coming to life whenever humans rouse themselves to action. It is as

though Aeschylus and company were dramatizing the philosopher Heraclitus’
dictum: “ethos anthropoid daimon.” Novalis translated this subtle observation as:
“Character is Fate.”3 If character launches Greek tragedy, it is fate that always
seems to have the last word. Here, fate becomes plot and, as Aristotle tells us,
plot is everything to the Greek tragedians.
Shakespeare is the great hinge of theatre, he is the bridge that takes us from
the ancients to the moderns. Thanks to his historical position (a product of the
Renaissance) he draws from the past, but also points to the future. Here, all the
same principles are at play; only on a much broader temporal, spatial, and
experiential canvas. But, most significantly, Shakespeare shifts the emphasis of
the Heraclitus/Novalis equation. It is the interior of the character, rather than the
exterior of fate/plot, that interests him; or, as he says in Julius Caesar, “The cause
is not in the stars, but in ourselves.”4 Shakespeare maintains all the elements of
theatrical expression, but re-prioritizes them, character assumes pride of place in
his theatrical unfoldings.
With the advent of Chekhov, one senses the first incipient stirrings of modern-
ism. It is a dramaturgy that we are still, in many ways, both deeply indebted to
and guided by. What is it that makes Chekhov one of the exemplars of what we
are calling the modern impulse in theatre? Perhaps, we could define Chekhov’s
modernity as a kind of fundamental skepticism that enters into the understanding
and use of such notions as character or plot, calling both into question. His plays
beg the question: is there a real ground to the elements which we strive to
emphasize, or are they just phantoms of our imagination? This essential question-
ing of each element opens the door for Beckett, Pinter, Churchill, and a host of
other contemporary authors who take such doubts to the furthest extremes of
theatrical expression. In this respect, Chekhov is one of the first cracks in the
porcelain teacup of normative Western theatre.
The overall design of this book calls upon this transhistorical triumvirate of the
Greeks, Shakespeare, and Chekhov to help elucidate, from chapter to chapter,
the element under investigation; but at the end of each chapter, a different con-
temporary author is brought into the conversation so that one can see how these
moderns rhyme with their classical counterparts, further exemplifying the enduring
dynamics and possibilities of a given theatrical element. This constellation of
contemporary authors includes: Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee
Williams, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Caryl
Churchill, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Kane.

With a little help from my friends

Theatre, by its very nature, is a plural affair. The observations, theories, and tenta-
tive conclusions that make up this book are therefore collective in their origins.
They were discovered over the past 30 years in classrooms, rehearsal rooms, and
performance spaces across the country. They emerged through a ceaseless dialogue
6 Introduction

with teachers, students, fellow artists, and audiences. It is this community of

kindred spirits who have helped me to understand this strange vocation that we
call theatre. At certain points, when I fear this work veers too far into the realm
of the esoteric, I have tried to bring it back down to earth with a memory or
anecdote from such fellow practitioners who possess the gift of returning these
concepts to their direct and no-nonsense usage. One such reoccurring voice is
that of my teacher. He is both real and mythical, as all great teachers become in
their students’ imagination. His silhouette, intonation, and carriage remain so
very clear and fixed in my mind’s eye; but, through a trick of memory, what
he said has altered over the passage of time. Certain of his pronouncements
continue to magically expand, deepen, and transform; all on their own, in
unseen ways. It is like a garden that keeps growing long after its caretaker has
gone. It seemed right that my teacher and these other wise voices should find
a home here within these pages. It is to this extraordinary community, that
I am forever indebted.

How to read this book

Like most books, the reader can certainly benefit from reading this work
chronologically; and, indeed, much painstaking labor has gone into the precise
ordering of these elements so that they show how each organically grows out of
the other to create what we call theatre. Yet even though this book is con-
structed in such a fashion, it does not mean that it must be read that way. There
is no injunction to dutifully follow my argument, element by element, to the
end. The reader is free to graze, gravitating toward whatever element captures
his or her fancy. If one is obsessed with action, one can start there and feel free
to move onto whatever other element next pricks one’s curiosity. In this
respect, the book can be treated like a dictionary or encyclopedia where one is
encouraged to jump from entry to entry by whim or inner necessity, rather than
any obligation to adhere to some overall design on my part. The reader is also
welcome to construct their own book out of these elements. For those who are
interested in the nuts and bolts of theatre, say actors and directors, they may
want to focus on elements 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 (i.e., truth, moments,
change, character, states, intentions, actions, and obstacles). For those who
are interested in the larger architectonic nature of theatre, say directors and play-
wrights, they might want to concentrate on elements 2, 5, 6, 7, 12, and 13 (the
question, change, world, character, events, and cores). And for those who are
more philosophically inclined, say dramaturges, they can turn their attention
to elements 2, 3, 5, 14, and 15 (the question, truth, change, about-ness, and
remanence). As for those readers who are by nature deeply curious and harbor
a rapacious fascination for all things theatrical, there is absolutely no shame in
moving chapter by chapter from here to the end of this little book, just as it was
intended to be read. The choice, dear reader, is yours.
Introduction 7

Notes
1 David Crystal, Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar (Profile Books,
2017), xi
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophic Investigations, Revised 4th Edition, translated by G.E.
M. Ansombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 8
3 Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge University Press,
1979), 260–261
4 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, edited by David Daniell (Arden Shakespeare,
1998), 172 (I.2)
2
QUESTIONS

On the nature of questions

The world remains as it is—until we question it. The question is a way of unveil-
ing reality, getting it to show its secret self. If you do not enquire, the world will
rarely reveal anything on its own volition. The same is true of the literary text. In
the speed of being, it is easy to accept things as they are. A question is a kind of
bump in the road. It can slow us down or bring us to a full stop. Important
things happen when we find ourselves at a standstill. The much-neglected author
Cesare Pavese tells us, “A true revelation, I am convinced, can only emerge from
stubborn concentration on a single problem.”1 The question prepares the way for
such a task. Or, posed in a more familiar metaphor: a text is a series of locked
doors; the question, a potential key. Without the question, the text remains
locked. It shows only its exterior, its plot. But the question can open the door of
the plot and lead us within, to the work’s secret thematic core.
Inside every great work is a question. Think of Hamlet’s “To be or not to
be.” A question that will be paraphrased several centuries later by Beckett in his
famous conundrum of “Can’t go on, must go on.” Which do we choose? These
are the types of fundamental queries we struggle with; they drive us to sit before
certain texts, or in a variety of darkened theatres, all in an effort to help us
understand. Working in the theatre, is working with questions. When a theatre
person is asked, “What are you working on?” we tend to say, “A play.” But, in
reality, what we are actually, always, working on is a question.
Some artists circle back to the same question, it is rich enough to sustain
them for an entire lifetime. A great question exceeds its answer, leading to
a series of potential responses. An answer is a kind of home we choose to live
in. Some people are content to live their lives under the roof of one answer,
others outgrow their initial lodging, and require more space to move about.
Questions 9

There may be one central question, but a person can dwell in a variety of answers
to that question.

A brief taxonomy of our interrogative heritage

Why, What, Which, and How are the first questions we will attempt to unpack;
the questions of Who and When will have to wait for our later discussions.
The four questions of this chapter all enter the English language during the 13th
Century. All derive their lexical lineage from the Old English through Old Saxon,
Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, all the way back, through several centuries, to
a kind of Proto-Germanic. These words, even from their earliest linguistic origins,
have a blunt immediacy to them. Such simple and direct sounds will provoke
whole sagas, song cycles, runes, riddles, and discourses on the world at large.
There is a certain onomatopoetic genius to the “wh” sound that finds its way into
these words, forcing the mouth to expand like our imaginations as we grapple
with the mysteries of existence. “Why” and “how” have an open-voweled feel-
ing, the resulting sound seems as though it could extend for as long as we have
the breath to make it, a perfect expression for our capacity for wonder. As
a result, both of these interrogatives lend themselves to contemplation. The
“what,” on the other hand, has the consonant “t” at the end which short-
circuits both the sound and our sense of awe. In this respect, “what” is the most
impatient of our questions. It wants answers, now. The sounding of “which” sits
between the extended feeling of “why” and the clipped feeling of “what.” It
seems appropriate that the question of which has a sense of balance, since it is
constantly charged with weighing the differences between things.
Playing such games with ancient etymology can be somewhat dangerous, the
dividing line between science and fantasy is particularly porous. That said, it is
intriguing to note that these Proto-Germanic words share the same sounding as
the Indo-European root: wai, which is Old English for the word “alas” or the
sound of a human wail. It is as if such intimations of pain were the precursor to
the question. Perhaps interrogatives were born to quell a certain anguish.

The interrogative process

The Why, The What, The How, The Which, this quartet of questions are what
help us navigate our real and imaginary worlds. They have the potential of disclos-
ing great imaginative riches. We often use these interrogatives interchangeably;
even though they overlap in function, each question captures a unique state and
stage in our puzzling out of a given problem.

The why
The “why” is, in many ways, the largest and most all encompassing of questions.
It traffics in root causes, first principles, origins, motives, and purposes. It is very
10 Questions

hard to please, rarely is it satisfied with the answer it receives. Art is weary of
everything being reducible to “one thing.” The size of a question is measured by
the many answers it can engender: Why are we here? Why theatre? Why this
play? Why not another? Why now? Why even bother? These are the biggest,
widest questions that engender a legion of potential answers.

The what
The “what” is like a surgeon. It is the question that dissects, it opens
a phenomenon up so that we can look inside and examine it in detail. It is
interested in the identity of things. It wants to define them, name them, and
contain any spread of excess meaning. It is the great progenitor of dictionaries;
its DNA is to describe, differentiate. The “what” takes an interest in categories
and categorization. We might ask, “What is the difference between a play by
the ancient Greeks and a play by Shakespeare?” The question forces us to draw
distinctions. This leads us to the threshold of yet another question.

The how
This is, perhaps, the most dogged of interrogatives, like the gumshoe detectives of
Hammett or Chandler. It wants to know the conditions for things to be, the way
they get done, or simply unfold. It is the presiding spirit of cookbooks and motor-
cycle manuals, it is comfortable amongst the nuts and bolts, it is the chronicler of
things coming-into-being. There may be as many hows as there are paths through
a forest. These paths can be thought of as certain modalities of understanding (i.e.,
psychological, philosophical, sociological, political, spiritual, etc.). As a result, we
often come to a forked path and, with it, a new question emerges.

The which
When it comes to certain questions, particularly questions of the “human sciences,”
one answer may not necessarily be more correct than another; rather, each answer
becomes another way for us to live the question. In the arts, a question is an invitation
for us to experience a particular problem in a number of ways, each experiencing
becoming a different modality of understanding. This, as we said, can be psycho-
logical, philosophical, sociological, political, or spiritual. Each provides a new
vantage point, and no one modality is necessarily privileged. Once we have
explored these modalities, we must make a choice; selecting the modality that
speaks most directly to us and our time. The “which” is the question of differen-
tiation, discernment, and ultimately of choice making. It is, in many ways, one
of the most subjective of our interrogative endeavors.
Even though these questions work closely together to help us decipher the world
around us, we can also say that each has its particular province in which it reigns
supreme. We could say that Why is the penultimate question of philosophy; What,
Questions 11

the friend to all dictionaries; How, the handmaiden to the sciences; and Which, the
very heart of drama.

The primordiality of choice: or, at the heart of the theatrical

question, where “which” becomes the very stuff of drama
This question, as the great historian Jean-Pierre Vernant reminds us, is at the
very center of Greek tragedy. Two paths present themselves for our Greek
heroes, forcing them to make a hairesis or choice. Vernant tells us that a hairesis
is “reasoned calculation that is expressed in a decision that leads directly to
action. This aspect of choice in a practical domain, commits the subject to the
action, the very moment he has come to a decision.”2 The “which” is the stuff
of drama. It is the moment our hero must choose which path is best. Take, for
example, the decision that plagues both Orestes and Hamlet: to kill or not to
kill? For Orestes, the difficulty of choice is momentary; knife posed above his
murdering mother’s breast, he stops and asks his companion Pylades which is
better, “to be shamed or kill my mother?” Pylades evokes the necessity of
oracles and sworn oaths. Orestes agrees and plunges the knife into his mother’s
heart. For Hamlet the choice consumes most of the play, creating the dreaded
interim which, as Shakespeare tells us in Julius Caesar, is the interval between the
“first motion” (thought) and the “acting of the dreadful thing.”3 In such
moments, all can indeed feel like a hideous dream. It is a sensation that the war-
rior Arjuna of The Mahabharata also experiences as he looks out across the battle-
field and views the assembling enemy army. He turns to his chariot driver, the
great God Krishna, and asks the question of Orestes and Hamlet: to kill or not
to kill? Before him is his enemy but they are also his family, mentors, and
friends. Should he throw himself into battle? Or run from this dreadful place as
fast as he can? An interim opens up and threatens to swallow both Arjuna and
Krishna. It is during this, that Krishna expounds what will come to be known
as The Bhagavad-Gita, the great treatise on action in inaction and inaction in
action. The “which,” it seems, can engender whole tragedies and religious tracts.
Orestes, Hamlet, and Arjuna all choose to take action, this wakes the otherwise
slumbering “fate,” whose gum-stuck machinery begins to turn, moving our hero
and the story to their inextricable end. Just as the hero must choose which
action to take, we, as interpreters, must choose which way to tell the tale. At
that moment we become Orestes, Hamlet, Arjuna; faced with multiple paths, it
is our turn to choose. Let’s hope we choose wisely.

It’s not only “Greek to me” but also “Greek” to the ancient
Greeks. The nature of the question in Athenian theatre
“What does this have to do with Dionysus,” was the famous question on the lips
of most 5th Century Athenians as they left the theatron. This is the difference
between Greek myth and Greek drama (which grows out of the mythic impulse).
12 Questions

Greek myth is interested in giving its audience an answer; Greek drama traffics in
questions. The Greek myth, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously told us, is about the
resolution of “binary opposites.” In other words: giving us answers for things that
do not make sense (do not resolve themselves) in our given culture. The myth
explains away whatever perplexities we might encounter as we continue down
the road of life. Greek drama, in contrast to myth, is interested in when our
knowledge breaks at a fork in the road and we have to choose between paths of
understanding. Such forks come in the guise of questions that keep things open
for further contemplation. The discussion of a given play’s issues does not end
with the actor’s collective bow. For the Greeks, these issues are continued by the
playgoers on their way home, at elaborate after-play dinner parties (think Plato’s
Symposium), and ultimately on the floor of the Parthenon where the movement
from question to answer finally leads to the articulation of a point of law. All
thanks to this continued dialogic engagement that was begun in the theatre. The
famous catharsis that Aristotle talks about may actually happen weeks later, at the
kitchen table, after the problem of the particular play has been haggled out by
those who saw it. These plays dealt and reveled in insoluble problems; confronting
such conundrums as, “Who’s to blame?” (The Oresteia), “How can we help these
refugees?” (Children of Heracles), “What is the place of religion in the modern
world?” (The Bakkhai). One can find voluminous scholarly arguments over
whether Euripides is for or against religion in The Bakkhai. This may be a futile
quest since the dramatist’s obligation in ancient Greece was to bring the problem
to light, not necessarily to resolve it. That work was left to the audience.

The question of Shakespeare

Shakespeare inherits this Greek penchant for questions. One might argue, he
becomes the master of theatre-as-question. Hamlet, one of his most beloved plays,
begins with a question. A fearful night watchman asks, “Who’s there?” This simple
interrogative could be applied to every character we meet in the play. Who is
the Ghost? Claudius? Gertrude? Ophelia, her father, and most famously, Hamlet
himself. Shakespeare’s interest in the interrogative knows no bounds, he takes an
equal interest in all manner of questions, both large and small. They can be of
a profoundly all-encompassing nature or of a seemingly prosaic variety. The opera-
tive word in the previous sentence is “seemingly” since, upon closer inspection,
one discovers a certain “bottomless-ness” to even the most quotidian of questions.
Questions like: Why does Hamlet procrastinate? Why do Romeo and Juliet rush
into marriage? Why does Iago want to drive Othello into a jealous rage? Why does
Lear divvy up his kingdom? Each of Shakespeare’s plays has a very simple, funda-
mental question that is actually very hard to answer, provoking generation after
generation to try their hand at a better, deeper interpretation.
Do not look to Shakespeare’s characters for answers, they are often the most
actively withholding. Othello will ask Iago why “hath thou ensnared my soul
and body?” Iago’s reply to his former commander is sharp and to the point,
Questions 13

“Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never
will speak a word.”4 Shylock tells the court that is adjudicating his case, “You’ll ask
me why I rather choose to have/A weight of carrion flesh than to receive/Three
thousand ducats. I’ll not answer that,/But say it is my humor. Is’t answered?”5 And,
of course, Hamlet, the most famously enigmatic of Shakespeare’s dramatic person-
ages, chides his friend Guildenstern for trying to “… pluck out the heart of my
mystery … ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me
what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.”6
Later in the play, Hamlet sums up his philosophy of life as “The readiness is all.”7
When it comes to Shakespeare’s dramaturgy one could alter this line to “The
mystery is all.” Each production challenges us to arrive at our own unique answer,
knowing full well that all answers are provisional, with a life expectancy that is only
as long as the next production’s interpretation.

Chekhov: in the kingdom of accursed questions

The 19th Century Russian novelists had a special term for the big questions of
life, they called them proklyatye voprosy, which roughly translates as “the accursed
questions.” They were as large as the Russian landscape that inspired them. The
great Isaiah Berlin called them, “those central and moral issues which every
honest man, in particular every writer, must sooner or later become aware, and
then be faced with the choice of either entering the struggle or turning his back
upon his fellow men, conscious of his responsibility for what he was doing.”8
The questions these Russians asked themselves were as follows:

“What is to be done?”
“How should one live?”
“Why are we here?”
“What must we be and do?”

These were the questions that galvanized the 19th Century Russians. For Gorky
and much of his nation the answer to these questions was politics, for Dostoevsky
the answer was in a return to the Russian Orthodox Church, but for Chekhov, it
was simply to live fully within the tension of these questions. Like Tolstoy, his
mentor, Chekhov was allergic to simple causal answers to the problems that
besieged human existence. Both found many of the answers of the West reduc-
tive, based more in wish fulfillment than in an actual attention to the way reality
realizes itself. “That is not the way life works,” they would say. They sensed that
the world was ultimately too complicated for any one answer or system and that
there would never be a completely satisfying solution to these questions. To every
potential answer, there would always be an unspoken “and yet…” The pressure
of living a life without the assurance of answers is a difficult one, even for some-
one as intellectually robust as the Tolstoy of War and Peace and Anna Karenina; even
he ultimately fell under the spell of an answer in his own personal understanding of
14 Questions

Christianity. Chekhov would be one of the few artists of his generation that did not
succumb to the comfort of answers (religious or political), he was content to live
within the tension of these accursed questions. His plays, from The Seagull to The
Cherry Orchard, are a testament to posing such questions, leaving it to each audience
to ponder them for themselves. Chekhov’s first great play, The Seagull, begins with
one of the all-time-great questions of theatre. The young school teacher, Medve-
denko, asks Masha, the elusive love of his life, “Why do you always wear black?”
Her equally famous response, “I’m in mourning for my life,” sets up the entire
question of The Seagull: Why are these characters so unhappy in love and art? What
is the source of that unhappiness, how can its spell be broken? Between “continuing
on” and “calling an end to it,” which do we choose? These become the very
human, very impossible, accursed questions of Anton Chekhov. Or take the issue
of Moscow. Why can’t our three sisters ever reach Moscow? Both literally and
figuratively? That becomes the animating question of this great play: why can’t this
well-intentioned, well-educated family achieve their dreams? Each director and
company must attempt an answer. Many try to find it in Freud, Marx, or Darwin.
No matter what answer we attempt, the play demurs, as if it were saying, “Yes…
and yet.” This “and yet,” this excess of meaning, this question that keeps exceeding
its provisional answer, is the hallmark of any masterpiece.

The question of Angels in America

I remember many, many years ago having dinner with Tony Kushner before he
became the Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author. We were in the
midst of working on an adaptation of Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique (which, in
Tony’s masterful hands, became The Illusion). It was late at night and we found
ourselves in some diner getting a cup of coffee to fuel one more all-nighter.
I casually asked him what else he was working on at the moment. For the
next hour Tony regaled me with the epic story of what was to become his great
masterpiece, Angels in America. I was spellbound. Here was a play that was to
be in two parts, that mixed fictional characters with real historical figures like
Roy Cohen and Ethel Rosenberg, and even included—much to my absolute
amazement—an angel from a heaven that resembles a place “much like San
Francisco!” The play, even in this early articulation, dealt with the AIDS epi-
demic, the collateral damage of the Reagan years, Mormonism, good old lefty
politics, and a hefty dollop of Jewish mysticism. When he finished with his
recounting of this play-to-be, there was a moment of silence, I was completely
dumbstruck by the ambition and sweep of what I had just heard. I gathered my
wits (which you have to do when you’re with Tony) and asked, “How did all
this come to you?” He went on to explain that he was very moved by Larry
Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William Hoffman’s As Is. Both of these plays
had at their center a main character stricken with the AIDS and a faithful lover
who stayed with them, comforting them, to the bitter end. Pondering these
seminal plays, a question formed in Tony’s head, “What if that lover, didn’t stay
Questions 15

to care for his stricken partner? What if he ran away?” It was with this question
that Angels in America was born.
“What if he ran away?” This simple question resonated with Tony both personally
and politically; as something that was simultaneously very real and equally
metaphoric.
On the real/personal axis, the question spoke to a secret fear that many feel in
the face of another’s illness: that they might turn out to be incapable of meeting
the demands of being a caretaker; of being afraid, incompetent, or just plain self-
ish. We want to believe that in the face of a dire situation we will rise to the
occasion and do the right thing. This is often the lie we want to believe. Tony
was circling around a truth we would rather not hear. The question also resonates
in a larger metaphoric/political manner. For Tony, the idea of “running away”
from one’s responsibility was what many of the Left did in the nineteen eighties.
They ran away from the social ills of the times and turned to the Right by voting
for Ronald Reagan (what became oxymoronically known as: Reagan Democrats).
And so in Tony’s play, the left-leaning Louis Aronson leaves his AIDS-stricken
lover, Prior Walter, to sleep with the right-wing Joe Pitt. The result is both real
and metaphoric at the same time. The question of “running away” grounds the
play in something personal that the audience can relate to, while also pointing
toward a much larger political metaphor.

Full circle: the persistence of why. An autobiographical tangent

When I was a young, impressionable student I was assigned the task of assisting my
teacher. My first job was to arrive at the theatre to take notes for him on
a production he was seeing, directed by a colleague of his. I was very eager to
please. I brought with me several writing tablets: one for notes for the actors, one
for technical notes, and one for my own notes on my teacher’s notes. I also brought
a variety of well-sharpened pencils (multi-colored, if necessary) and a trusty pen
light so that I might be able to see what I was writing in the dark without disturbing
others. I did all of this to impress my teacher, who, as far as I and my fellow students
were concerned, might as well have been Zeus or King Solomon the Wise.
The show began, my pen was in hand, poised to write, for all posterity,
whatever words of wisdom fell from my teacher’s lips. There was only silence.
The next scene ensued and was met with the same impenetrable response. The
play went on and on and on and my teacher had nothing whatsoever to say
about any of it. When the actors had taken their collective bows and the house
lights were restored to the auditorium, I asked my teacher,
“Do you have any notes?”
“Just one.” He said.
I put pen to paper as my teacher uttered one single word:
“Why.”
Followed by a plaintive,
“Why, why, why???”
16 Questions

I wrote down his four whys. And then he said:

“If you don’t know why you are doing a play, there is no reason to do it, or
worse: subject others to it.”
My teacher’s colleague came cautiously down the aisle.
“What did you think?” The colleague asked.
“Your production gives art a bad name.” My teacher answered.
This was my first lesson in the making of theatre: the necessity of the Why.
That “Why” of my teacher has haunted me throughout my career as
a director, particularly the larger question of “Why Theatre?” At first, as
a young director I found myself giving the rather vague and hubristic answer of
“to advance the form”; by the middle of my journey, I had to admit to the less
grand and more honest answer of “to advance my career.”
I ultimately reached a point where I had lost all touch with the idealistic
answer of my youth and was repulsed by the reality of the latter, more pragmatic,
answer of my middle age. As a result, I found myself making the least interesting
work of my life. I knew better than ever how to do the work, but I had lost the
more important reason of why I should still be doing it. It wasn’t till my son was
born that I was able to reframe the question in a way that would reground my
directorial raison d’être. The overriding question became, “What plays can best
prepare my son to the huge challenges that would face him in this new and truly
terrifying century?” And that question became the guiding principle for all my
subsequent work, sustaining me over a 20-year period. Now that my son is
grown, with questions of his own, making theatre has stopped being an essential
part of my day-to-day life; but, thinking about theatre continues to be an abiding
passion. I’ve turned here, to this book, to reflect on the other questions that have
occupied my life in this strange and mysterious art form.

Conclusion
At the end of the day, or process, the best questions play hide and seek with us;
always, somehow, finding a way to elude our grasp. These are the questions one
wants to cultivate because they can occupy and enrich an entire lifetime. So for
me, it is the cultivation of the question and the mysterious and magical interim
before the question is answered that is so powerful. Because between the question
and its potential answer, life is lived in a way that is resolutely awake. At such
moments, we just might catch a glimpse of our next element: truth.

Notes
1 Cesare Pavese, Dialogues with Leuco, translated by William Arrowsmith (Eridanos Press,
1989), vii
2 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, translated by Janet
Lloyd (Zone Books, 1990), 57
3 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, edited by David Daniell (Arden Shakespeare,
1998), 172 (I.2)
Questions 17

4 William Shakespeare, Othello, edited by M.R. Ridley (Arden Shakespeare, 1962), 194
(V.2)
5 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, edited by John Russell Brown (Arden
Shakespeare, 1959), 105 (V.1)
6 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden
Shakespeare, 2006), 322–323 (III.3)
7 Ibid., 448 (V.2)
8 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 2nd Edition, edited by Henry Hardy (Princeton
University Press, 2013), 13
3
TRUTH

Theatrical truth: that which is arrived at by way of the familiar;

or, truth as recognition
How does truth happen in theatre? Western theatre, as we know, is a by-
product of the Greek Moment. We often speak of Greek ritual and democracy
as being the two major tributaries that flow into Greek tragedy. Another such
tributary, a by-product of Greek democracy, is the often overlooked influence
of rhetoric and how it could guide one toward certain shared truths. Truth, in
this case, being something of a handmaiden to consensus. A Greek citizen,
whether on the floor of the Parthenon or on the field of battle, needed to
know how to speak to his fellow Greeks when it came to casting a vote or in
determining the best line of attack. Such citizens/warriors therefore benefited
from adopting certain rhetorical strategies that would help them gain an audi-
ence’s attention, soften their hearts, and (most importantly) win their support.
Perhaps one of the most powerful rhetorical devices was known as paraiphasis,
which was a persuasion born of deep familiarity. The most famous example of
this can be found in Homer’s The Iliad where Nestor encourages Patroclus to
convince his friend Achilles to return to battle. Nestor says to Patroclus, “agathe
paraiphasis estin hetairou,” which roughly translates as “the persuasion from
a familiar (companion/friend) is a good thing.”1 The strength of such a friend is
that he can draw upon a vast repertory of past circumstances; what he and his
friend have both known and experienced together. They are bound to each
other by the intricate weave of such shared memories; as a result, they are able
to recognize the world from the same vantage point. The familiar, who is
a friend, is able to capitalize on his familiarity; for that which is familiar speaks
to our knowledge of how things are with us. It is an understanding that comes
through having a history with a given subject or situation. This history gives
Truth 19

way to an intimacy with the way things unfold; one can extrapolate and make
predictions based upon similar past experiences. And so we can be persuaded by
another, when he or she understands how to relate the unknown to our known;
transforming what might be alien into the familiar so that we might recognize
it. Such a recognition is the revelation of a kind of truth. A shared familiarity
with reality and how it works.
Mimesis (the mirroring of reality) is such a friend, it traffics in showing us
what we can recognize, aka the familiar. It is a very particular kind of familiar,
it persuades through detail; details that one would expect only a friend to know.
The artist feigns this intimate knowledge of us; believing that even though we
may not actually know one another, we still share a similar vantage point born
out of our common human condition. This is what passes as truth in the arts:
when we recognize ourselves (or our behavior) in the reflection of the artwork; when
what we see, rhymes with our experience of things. This rhyme or recognition often res-
ides in the telling detail. Ironically, often the tinier the detail, the more powerful
the recognition, since it is often the detail that has been lost or obscured due
to the speed of being. It is through the deployment of a multitude of details
that art has the capacity to restore the ever-elusive sense of totality that life
suggests. The detail is a kernel from which truth blossoms into recognition
and, in certain profound instances, can become a true re-cognition. We theatre
practitioners win over an audience through such patient attentiveness to
details. When an audience laughs or cries, they are telling us, “Yes,
I recognize this, life is like this. This is my life, or the life of someone I know,
or the life I’ve dreamt about.” This is the art of the detail which engenders
a truth through such recognitions. It gives seeming life to the artwork at hand.
Let us take a moment to look at how truth, the detail, and the life of a work
of art are all intricately intertwined.

Tolstoy and the “tiny bit”

Tolstoy tells us that truth resides in the “tiny bit.” This is his way of talking about
the power of tiny, infinitesimal details. He takes us to an art class. Here,
a constellation of students have assembled, each with their canvas, their charcoal,
and their ambition to capture a figure in the two dimensions that their art allots
them. They set up their easels around their goal: a model, seated in a simple,
straightforward pose. All they have to do is transfer this living figure through their
eyes and into their hand that holds the charcoal, that makes the dot, that becomes
the line, that shapes the figure, that they hope will capture the very quintessence
of the model that sits before them. One student finishes his rendering first. It is
quite a fine likeness. The teacher, Bryullov, a legend in his time, whose name
now means more to the history books than to us, stops and inspects the student’s
sketch. His face is inscrutable. What is he thinking? The student tries in vain to
read the future in the face of his teacher. It is to no avail. The teacher takes the
charcoal from the student and applies one, simple alteration. One small detail.
20 Truth

And suddenly, it is as if the portrait has come to life. The student looks at what
the teacher has done and exclaims, “Why, you only touched it a tiny bit, but it
is now quite another thing.” The teacher replies sagaciously, “Art begins
where the tiny bit begins.”
Tolstoy agrees with Bryullov:

That saying is strikingly true not only of art but of all life. One may say that
true life begins where the tiny bit begins—where what seems to us minute and
infinitely small alterations take place. True life is not lived where the great
external changes take place—where people move about, and clash, fight, and
slay one another.—it is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small
changes occur.2

For Stanislavsky, theatre was also indebted to the tiny bit (kousk). It is interesting
to note that Stanislavsky’s secretary, Leopold Sulerzhitsky, was previously
employed by none other than Leo Tolstoy. Perhaps it was Sulerzhitsky who
introduced Stanislavsky to his previous employer’s concept. Regardless, finding
the truth in the telling detail/bit becomes one of Stanislavsky’s great quests.

The tone of truth: or, the moment of the dog

There is a famous story of Stanislavsky and the dog. An actress in one of Stani-
slavsky’s productions had a dog which was not well and needed looking after. She
asked Stanislavsky if he wouldn’t mind if she brought the dog to rehearsal. She
assured Stanislavsky that the dog was well behaved, would stay in one place, and
never bark. Stanislavsky, being Stanislavsky, could not help but be sympathetic to
the plight of the actress and her dog. He allowed the dog to attend rehearsals and,
true to the actress’s word, the dog did not move, or bark, until the end of each
rehearsal. Now here was the strange part that puzzled Stanislavsky to no end: the
dog seemed to always know the exact moment when rehearsal was finished. It
knew before the actors had even reached for their coats. And, as if on cue, the
dog would run to its master and bark to its heart’s content. How could a dog
know of such things? Stanislavsky wondered in amazement. Does it understand
Russian? How can it know? Finally, one day, it dawned on Stanislavsky that the
dog could tell by when the actors went from an “acting voice” to their “real
voice.” Something that simple separated truth from artifice. Here tone becomes
Tolstoy’s “tiny bit.”
Nowadays we see actors talking on stage in such a way that their whole purpose
seems to be pointed toward creating a “real” as opposed to “actory” tone of voice.
As if this was the highest accomplishment of the actor’s art: to fool a dog. This is
the truth of the mimetic, a surface truth, but there are a myriad of other truths to be
found by way of the “tiny bit.” Unfortunately this surface effect “to fool the dog”
has become the most prized in our current pursuit of theatre, sometimes at the
expense of many of these other, deeper truths.
Truth 21

“Look how you got smaller”: truth and the scale of being in the
ancient Greek theatre
We often dismiss the ancient Greek theatre for being insensitive to the “tiny
bit.” But one sees it at work in all three of the great extant tragedians: beginning
with Aeschylus, running through Sophocles, and reaching its apotheosis in
Euripides. What often looks like a highly stylized form of presentation, upon
closer examination reveals extraordinary moments of simple, human truths.
Moments where the “tiny bit” shines forth. We can see this in the moment
between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra when she is trying to entrap her hus-
band by walking on precious crimson silks, an act that the gods view as hubris
and thereby punishable; but Clytemnestra deploys a series of fetes to get her
husband to ignore the potential wrath of the gods and show the world he is
worthy of such ostentatiousness. She tells him he can relax his principles, that the
gods would ordain it, that his enemy Priam would do such a thing had he won
the war, and that the people expect this. All of these religious and political reasons
fall on deaf ears. It is only when they move to the personal that Clytemnestra’s
words pierce Agamemnon’s heart:

AGAMEMNON
And you insist on this?
CLYTEMNESTRA
Yes! I do! Bend to me. Please.
AGAMEMNON
All right.3

It is a simple beat, no longer than the blink of an eye, often glossed over by
inattentive productions; but, played properly, the wound of Agamemnon and
Clytemnestra’s marriage opens up. These characters are suddenly no longer 2500
years old, or a King and a Queen; but, rather a husband and wife, like the
husbands and wives now watching this play. The distance of time collapses, and
they are us. In this one little “tiny bit” of a moment we can hear their subtext.
We can hear Agamemnon say, “And if I do this, will it heal the hurts I have
inflected on you, will it mend us?” Clytemnestra’s answer begins in
a commanding tone: “Bend to me,” followed by its exact opposite, a submissive
beseeching, a simple “Please.” It is this shift that does the trick. Agamemnon
acquiesces for her, to attempt to rectify all the pain he has caused her. A simple
moment that, recognized and played correctly, reveals a profound truth about
the ways in which we try to make amends to the ones we love.
Another moment where the “tiny bit” of Tolstoy shines forth in the Greeks
can be found in Electra’s great lament over the urn that she believes holds the
ashes of her dead brother, Orestes. This is one of the great laments in all of
extant Greek drama. Here, in this extraordinary speech we find many of the
22 Truth

responses we would expect from someone in mourning, there is the cry of pain
(in this case the Greek “OIMOI-TALAINA”) which is expressed when Electra
first learns the news of her brother’s alleged death. This is followed by such
expected behaviors as expressions of tenderness (“Oh my loved one”), remon-
strations (“I thought I could save you”), memories (“Into your child’s
fingers I put earth and sky/No mother did that for you”), and abject despair
(“Oh my love/take me there/Let me dwell where you are”).4 All of these
moments are immensely moving and relatable. All reflect the truth of mourning,
but it is one small observation, one “tiny bit,” that is the moment of absolute
devastation for Electra and the audience. It happens in the middle of the lament.
There is a pause. Electra looks once again at the urn that carries the supposed
ashes of her dead brother and speaks the following realization:

ELECTRA
Look how you got smaller, coming back.5

Seven simple, devastating words. The simplest of observations, one that might
go unacknowledged or unremarked, and it is this moment that brings Electra
and most audiences to tears. Why? Perhaps because such “tiny bits” are felt and
then lost to our memories, overshadowed by the grand cries and protestations
that take center stage.

Shakespeare: or, the readiness that is never quite all

One of Shakespeare’s greatest, grandest themes is death. Hamlet observes, “If it be,
it’s not to come. If it is not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will
come. The readiness is all.”6 But the fact of the matter is that most of us mere
mortals are never quite “ready” for a wide variety of realities. This is a truth that is
often missing from our fictions. The fact that we constantly surprise ourselves and
are surprised by reality. Or perhaps we should say, “the Real“that intrudes upon
our carefully constructed “reality.” Take Shakespeare’s monumental Antony and
Cleopatra. Cleopatra, upon learning of Antony’s death, decides to die herself. But
Cleopatra cannot just die a common death by knife or rope. No. Cleopatra, being
Cleopatra, must die by something more inspired. Something that will liven up the
dull and dusty books of history that are yet to be written. If Cleopatra is to take her
life, it must be by poisonous snakes. Now there is a grand endgame, befitting so
magnificent a queen. But the reality of the snakes is another matter. First there is
the business of procuring the proper snakes from a local snake charmer who, rather
than pass on any last sagacious advice, makes a series of crude double entendres that
evoke groans rather than laughs. Then there is the snake itself, which misses its cue
to bite Cleopatra’s breast. She must hit it on its head to get it to do its deadly job.
And then, finally, once Cleopatra is indeed dead, her Chambermaid must readjust
Cleopatra’s crown, which is now terribly askew and makes her look more like
a drunken fool than a majestic queen. This is the “tiny bit” of the moment.
Truth 23

Shakespeare is filled with such moments. He can bring an entire character to

life with something as simple as an ellipsis. It was T.S. Eliot who first made note
of this in another moment of Antony and Cleopatra. The passage in question
comes right on the heels of Cleopatra’s death. Two Roman Guards arrive to
discover all is amiss. A brief discussion ensues between a Guard and Charmain,
Cleopatra’s lady in attendance:

FIRST GUARD
What work is here! Charmain, is this well done?
CHARMAIN
It is well done, and fitting for a Princess
Descended of so many royal kings.
Ah, Soldier7

And Charmain dies, having sought the same end as her queen, death by snake.
Eliot is haunted by Charmain’s incomplete sentence. He believes that it is this
ellipsis that gives the fictive Charmain life. Eliot tries to complete the sentence for
her. Experimenting with lines such as, “Ah Soldier… If only I had more breath
left to tell you of my queen.” Or: “Ah Soldier… Even if I had the breath, my
Queen defies characterization.” Or, even, “Ah, Soldier… You are so handsome,
in another time and place, I could have loved such a man as you.” The possible
completion of the sentence is as seemingly bottomless as Bottom’s dream,
or Rosalind’s love for Orlando, which she compares to the depths of the Bay of
Portugal. And so, here, the very absence of speech speaks volumes. This intriguing
understanding is brought to its fullest expression in the four late plays of Anton
Chekhov. Let us take a brief moment to tease out a further ellipsis or two.

Mind the gap: truth and ellipses in Chekhov

Lacan, the great 20th Century psychoanalyst, lets us in on a little secret in his
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Early in this extraordinary treatise,
Lacan confesses that he never really listens to what his patients are saying, but
rather he listen for what he calls the gap.8 For Lacan, such moments are where
something remains raw and unprocessed in the patient. A truth that has not yet
been tamed or occluded by language. This seems to follow an observation of
Nietzsche where he tells us that what we can talk about is dead to us. What has
not yet been brought to language is still alive, still wild and undomesticated by
words. This, for Lacan, is where truth lies. No modern artist seems to understand
this better than Chekhov, whose plays are rife with characters whose language is
continually breaking down and thereby giving us glimpses of their otherwise
well-protected inner truths.
In The Seagull, the real answer to Medvedenko asking Masha why she wears
black comes at the very end of their first scene together. Her immediate answer
24 Truth

was, “I’m in mourning for my life.” This is certainly true in the most general
sense, but, it is at the end of the scene, when Masha’s speech devolves into an
ellipsis, that we get closer to the real truth of her deep melancholy:

MASHA
You know, you spend all your time philosophizing, or whining
about money. For you, there’s no greater tragedy than
poverty. But for me, it’s a thousand times easier to go
around in rags, begging than to… Oh, what’s the use, you
wouldn’t understand9

What wouldn’t he understand? What does the above ellipsis hide? Later it
becomes clear that Masha’s incomplete thought has to do with loving a person
(Treplev) your whole life who does not love you back. But that truth is still too
raw to bring into the light, to actually name. It will take the entire act for her
to finally confess this truth in her last scene with Doctor Dorn.
Uncle Vanya has two telling ellipses that are spread out over the course of the
play. The first ellipsis happens in the midst of the storm in Act Two. Vanya
imagines what life might be like if he and Yelena had actually married:

VANYA
Now we would be both awaken by the storm; she would
be frightened by the thunder, and I would hold her in my
arms and whisper, “Don’t be afraid, I’m here.”… but, my God,
how these thoughts get muddled in my head10

Compare this broken idea to Vanya’s later fractured rant at the end of Act Three:

VANYA
If I had lived a life, I might have been a Schopenhauer
or a Dostoyevsky… What am I saying? I’m raving! I’m
going out of my mind… Matushka!11

In both instances, language breaks down into ellipses when Vanya attempts to
think of himself as a successful lover (“And I would hold her in my arms and
whisper, ‘Don’t be afraid, I’m here’…”) or an intellectual (“I might have been
a Schopenhauer or a Dostoyevsky…”). He can sustain neither positive image of
himself without his language trailing off into searing pain (“How these thoughts
get muddled in my head…”), or negation (“I’m raving! I’m going out of my
mind…”). Lacan would see such ellipses as a door into Vanya’s wounded
psyche. The truth of Vanya is a man who never had the ability to envision him-
self as the hero of his own life. Such an image continually breaks down and
forces him to live vicariously through the Professor, who, Vanya informs us, is
both a great lover and famous scholar.
Truth 25

Another profound ellipsis can be found in Act Two of The Three Sisters.
Here Natasha is speaking non-stop to her husband, Andrei, about: their baby,
Andrei’s three sisters, someone who left a candle burning, canceling the
coming of the carnival people, the fact that their child has a cold, how Andrei
should eat yogurt to lose weight, and that one of the sisters should give up
their room for the baby. Finally, after this almost uninterrupted logorrhea of
Natasha, there is a pause and, on the other side of it, this question:

NATASHA
Andryusha, sweet, why are you so quiet?

And it is at this point we understand that everything Natasha has said is just an
attempt to get some sort of extended response, some moment of engagement,
from her husband. The diet, their child’s cold, taking over another room, all are
just excuses for communication. And her husband’s response?

ANDREI
What, oh, I was just thinking… No, nothing, really, what is there to say?12

This is usually followed by another pause, before Natasha responds with a rather
quotidian, “Right.” But it is in this pause, this “tiny bit” of a moment, that we
can feel the door to their marriage close, irrevocably. After this, Natasha will
entertain taking a late-night troika ride with her old lover. The seeds of that
decision and her ultimate infidelity are born in these ellipses of disappointment;
where nothing is said, but everything is ultimately decided.
And finally, in Chekhov’s last masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard, in Act Three
Lopakhin, the child of peasants who is now a businessman, returns from the
auction of the Ranyevskaya estate. Lyuba, its owner, asks:

LYUBA
Is the Cherry Orchard sold?
LOPAKHIN
It is sold.
LYUBA
Who bought it?
LOPAKHIN
I bought it.
(Pause)13

The pause seems to say everything they cannot say. It speaks to all the unspoken
truths they have avoided discussing: history, class, fate, thwarted love, ambition,
pride, betrayal, incomprehension, privilege and its eventual comeuppance. It
26 Truth

contains all the contradictory thoughts and feelings that have existed in every
encounter between Lopakhin and Lyuba from the beginning of the play till
now. One senses a profound, “this is what it has come to,” where a potentiality
that had always been present in every micro-ellipsis has now grown into this
final pause. A pause which speaks volumes.

Playing hide and seek with truth: or, welcome to

the world of Pinter
“Truth,” the old saying goes, “is like a black cat, it’s very hard to get ahold of.”
When it comes to truth in modern theatre, playwright Harold Pinter is very
much a black cat. He tells us in the introduction to his first volume of collected
plays that, “A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be true and
false.”14 Pinter seems quite happy in this no man’s land of ambiguity. Take his
first major play, The Birthday Party. This strange and mysterious play takes place
in Meg and Petey’s run-down bed and breakfast by the sea. When the play
opens, we learn that they have only one semi-long-term guest by the name of
Stanley Webber. Stanley is an odd duck who has holed himself up in this seedy
seaside establishment. Stanley tells Meg he’s a professional piano player: “I’ve
played piano all over the world. All over the country.”15 This continued until,
Stanley goes onto explain, some unidentified “they” played a trick on him and
this ended his career as a concert pianist. The story, as it develops, becomes
more and more suspect, leaving the audience to question its very veracity.
Whether Stanley is telling the truth or not is further exacerbated
with the arrival of Goldberg and McCann. These two strange figures have an
“assignment”, which seems to be to collect Stanley and bring him back to some
undisclosed location. Stanley, when alone with McCann, has another back story:
this time he is not a pianist, but a fellow with a small private income who
started a little private business. This unnamed business has brought him to the
seaside, but he intends to return home soon. Stanley cannot seem to maintain
this story for very long and quickly breaks down, imploring McCann to answer
whether or not Goldberg has “told you anything? Do you know what I’m here
for? Tell me. Or hasn’t he told you? … I’ve explained that all those years I lived
in Basingstoke I never stepped outside the door.”16
From this point on, we have found ourselves deep in the very ambiguous
thicket of Pinter’s dramaturgy, here everyone and everything is rarely what it
seems. A strange guessing game ensues with the audience: Is Stanley part of
an underworld gang and are these two hoods that have come to bring him
back to their unhappy boss? Is Stanley a rich kid on the run from an over-
protective father who has hired Goldberg and McCann to bring his wayward
son back? Is Stanley suspected of hurting someone and Goldberg and
McCann are detectives charged with bringing him in for questioning? Per-
haps Stanley has escaped from a psychiatric ward and Goldberg and McCann
are two attendants who have been charged with finding him and bringing
Truth 27

him back? Maybe all this is a product of Stanley’s paranoid mind? Or, per-
haps, Stanley is about to die and Goldberg and McCann are two angels of
death who are to bring him promptly to the underworld. Which, if any, is
true? Such ambiguity can be worrisome for a certain segment of the theatre-
going public. Pinter has insisted, “There’s nothing symbolic about anything
I write. If a character doesn’t immediately declare himself, some people
always want to put him on a shelf as a symbol.”17 Peter Hall, one of Pinter’s
many directors, agrees:

Underneath his confrontations, hidden in the enigmas of the back-stories of

his plays, there is always a perfectly credible and recognizable pattern of
human behavior. It may be disguised (it usually is), but beneath all the ambi-
guities is something utterly coherent and lifelike. Yet it is never obvious;
audiences delight in unravelling puzzles.18

He goes on to tell us that directors and actors “must always know very clearly
what they are hiding. Ambiguity can never be not knowing.”19 And, finally,
“The process of work on a Pinter play must therefore preserve the ambiguity,
while developing a clear understanding of what is to be hidden.”20 It is worth
noting that this certain ambiguity is also rooted in the specific reality of Pinter’s
time and class. It is not just some aesthetic game but also the very real Cockney
proclivity for what is called “the piss take.” Here is how Hall defines this “tiny
bit” of truth that Pinter smuggles from his own youthful origins and puts on stage:

The basis of much of Pinter is the cockney “piss-take”, much beloved of

London taxi drivers. To take a piss out of someone is to mock them, to
make them insecure. It is a primary weapon in the jungle of life. But the
successful piss-taker must not let those from whom he is taking a piss, know
that he is taking it. If this happens, he loses face.21

And so, what has often been mistaken as Pinter’s affinity with the theatre of the
absurd is actually rooted in a truth drawn from his childhood; the way of his
world as he was growing up. This is one of the many “tiny bits” that bring
Pinter uniquely to life, having been built on the buried foundation of observed
truth.

”What is it?” “What is it really?”

This was one of my teacher’s favorite questions. He would say:

when you ask, “what is it?” you usually come up with some cliché. Some-
thing you encountered in a movie you’ve seen, or a song you heard, or
maybe even from a book you half read and never finished. In other words, it
is once removed from a real experience.
28 Truth

Such moments, according to my teacher,

aren’t really real, they’re mediated and this mediation is so pervasive,

that we don’t even question it. That’s why after we come up with an
answer for “what is it,” we have to ask, “but what is it really?” To ask
“what is it really” is to go beyond the clichés of our pop culture and to
dig deeper into our own memories and experiences, or the experiences
of others.

This keeps us sensitive to the actual density and surprise of the real. It gives us
a kind of second draft of reality which is closer to truth because you, or someone
you know, has experienced this first hand. And so when we ask “what is it”
about Electra’s mourning the answer might be a grand theatrical wail-like,
“OIMOI-TALAINA.” But when we ask, “what is it, really?” The answer might
very well be Electra’s simple observation about the urn that holds what she thinks
is her brother’s ashes: “Look how you got smaller, coming back.”
The “what is this really” can also come from digging deeper into our imagin-
ations. One of my teacher’s favorite examples of “what is it really?” was drawn
from the 40 days and 40 nights on Noah’s Ark. He would say,

When we think of the “what is it” of this story, we think of the fairy-tale
-like nature of Noah and his family at sea with the world’s largest men-
agerie of animals. It seems like your standard-issue bedtime story. But
what is the “what is it really” of Noah’s Ark? Well, If there were only
two of each species, what did the animals eat during those 40 days and
40 nights? Were there additional animals brought on board just to feed
the chosen few? And what about their feeding schedule? How could six
people take care of all those creatures? When did Noah and his family
ever sleep? I mean, half of the animals needed tending to during the day
and the other half at night. And what about all that refuse? The oceans
of urine and mountains of shit? How did they go about disposing of
all of that!?

Suddenly, in the hands of my teacher, this charming fairy tale was turned into
a logistical nightmare of epic proportions. Asking “what is it really” is an invita-
tion to go beyond the obvious, the immediate, and the expected. It demands you
take the time to tease out all the other possible permutations that you might have
experienced, or that your fertile mind can imagine. It helps us retrieve all the
lost/forgotten tiny bits that lead us to the shores of truth.

Conclusion: the moment of truth

Reality, the ancient Chinese tell us, is made up of ten thousand things. It is
impossible for any one human to hold in their imagination all of these “tiny
Truth 29

bits.” Art steps in to help retrieve what is lost by our impoverished abilities of
observation and memory. Art has the power to restore a missing integer of
reality that would have otherwise remained lost to us due to the relentless
speed of life which allows us to gloss over so much of what constitutes our
existence.
I vividly remember a moment in the production of Slava Dolgachev’s The
Seagull which shows the power of retrieving such lost integers of our lived real-
ity. It is the scene where Arkadina is changing her son’s bandaged head. I have
seen this scene hundreds of times, in the classroom and in the theatre. All the
Arkadinas unwrap and rewrap their son’s wounded head as the scene progresses;
but here, in Dolgachev’s production, something unexpected happens. Arkadina,
played by the extraordinary Dianne Wiest, has come to the point where the
bandage and wound touch. She pauses, knowing that the wound has most likely
mistaken the bandage as part of her son’s skin and incorporated it into its healing
process. This means that when she removes this last bit of bandage, she risks re-
opening her son’s wound, which has now fused with the gauze. She holds the
remaining bit of bandage tight with one hand, in the other is a cotton swab
waiting to stop whatever bleeding might occur. She makes the final, fatal pull
and, with the speed and exactitude of a surgeon, applies the cotton swab to her
son’s now un-bandaged head to stop any subsequent bleeding. I had the oppor-
tunity to watch this scene numerous times over the course of the run of the
play. Every time we arrived at this moment, the audience would collectively
gasp. Afterwards, it was one of the first things audiences excitedly talked about.
Why? Because this little detail had been missed by other less attentive artists.
Such moments would have remained lost, dormant, or forgotten if it weren’t
for the patient attentiveness of such tireless artists. This is part of the art of the
detail. It restores one of the “ten thousand things” that makes up a moment of
our lives. Art, and its attentiveness to the details of being, gives life back to us. We
miss so much of our moment-to-moment existence due to the speed of life.
Theatre becomes one of the few places where the totality of an experience can
be recaptured for us; enabling us to see a little more of the “ten thousand
things” that go into making moments like falling in love, hurting another, or
enjoying the quietude of an early morning.
The process is a kind of restoration of truth which is part of the etymological
root of the early Greeks’ understanding of the word. For them, aletheia (aka
truth) literally meant “not to be hidden or forgotten.” The “a” prefix canceled
out the power of lethe, which sits in the center of this word, like a tumor.
Lethe, you will remember, is the river of the underworld that robs mortals of
their memories. For the Greeks, truth is what must evade oblivion. The search
for truth keeps what is essential forever in the light. Theatre is one of the many
handmaidens of such a noble and painstaking endeavor. With this in mind, we
can now move to a deeper investigation of “the moment,” which is the very
vessel of theatrical truth.
30 Truth

Notes
1 Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, translated by Janet Lloyd
(Zone Books, 1996), 99–100
2 Leo Tolstoy, Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves, translated by Aylmer Maude, New
England Review, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Middlebury College Publications, 1989), 142–154
3 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (Faber and Faber, 2009), 43
4 Ibid., 149
5 Ibid.
6 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson (Arden Shakespeare, 2006),
448 (V.2)
7 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, edited by M.R. Ridley (Arden Shakespeare,
1956), 232 (V.2)
8 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan
Sheridan (W.W. Norton Press, 1998), 22
9 Anton Chekhov, Four Plays, translated by Carol Rocamora (Smith & Kraus, 1996), 40
10 Ibid., 108–109
11 Ibid., 129
12 Ibid., 165
13 Ibid., 255
14 Harold Pinter, Complete Works, Volume One (Grove Press, 1976), 11
15 Ibid., 32
16 Ibid., 52
17 Mark Batty, About Pinter: The Playwright and the Work (Faber and Faber, 2005), 107
18 Peter Hall, Directing the Plays of Harold Pinter, in The Cambridge Companion to
Harold Pinter, edited by Peter Raby (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 145–147
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 148
4
MOMENTS

This very instant

What is a moment? Is it now? This instant? These words are often used inter-
changeably, synonyms for our experience of the present as it crashes into us. We
experience something as suddenly happening, what shall we call this discrete unit of
immediacy? Is attempting to differentiate between such terms just a matter of fruit-
less semantics? Or could such an investigation of temporal terminology lead us to
a better understanding of how the present presents itself to us? Is our inclination to
break time down into its tiniest bits, the way time actually goes about its business?
Or is it our perception of the temporal that tends toward slicing up time in such
a manner? For our purposes we will break theatrical time into three categories of
experience. They are, in order of increasing magnitude: nows, moments, and
unfoldings. We will give pride of place to the concept of the moment which sits at
the very center of this list of temporalities. The moment is a word that finds itself
the subject of endless classes and rehearsals. Just what is a moment and how is it
different from, say, the now that just passed?
We can start by observing that a now and a moment are two very different
awarenesses of time. Life is a wonderful, seemingly endless succession of nows
that begins from the instant we wake to the instant we stumble back to bed.
We will argue that such nows only become moments when an intention is elicited
by the now. For example: seeing a glass of water is a now; whereas wanting a glass
of water becomes the heart of a moment. The moment, as we will see, has
a tendency to link nows and organize them into distinct tenses. Suddenly time
becomes about having seen the glass of water (an observable now that has just
passed), wanting the water (a clear intention that occurs to us in our present
now), and ultimately drinking the water (the opening up of a future now that
will only happen if we take action). This tripartite structure of nows: seeing,
32 Moments

wanting, doing, is what constitutes a moment. The moment gives directionality

to time. Such a moment can be linked to further moments, all growing out of
the initial intention, which continues until that intention is either achieved or
dashed. We call the culmination of such a string of moments an unfolding. One
could say that a “story” about the water emerges, all because it activated our
intentionality. But none of this would have happened if we did not initially
want the glass of water. That now (seeing the water) would have gone nowhere,
it would have been stillborn, as so many of our day-to-day nows tend to be
(just passing us by). As a result, the seeing of water recedes in our memory and
ultimately disappears. This is the general tendency of the nows in our day-to-
day-life, they vanish unless they engage with our intentionality. Real life is
made up of nows that either coalesce into moments or pass us by. Theatre is
particularly interested in and seems to thrive on when nows activate our inten-
tional self and become a string of moments that culminate into an unfolding.
Let us, briefly, turn our attention to a deeper look at each temporal term in this
theatrical equation and then see how they further manifest themselves both in
life and on the stage.

Welcome to the land of now

A now, for our purposes, can be thought of as the smallest of discernible temporal
integers.
A now is exacting, referring to a specific point in time. There is the now of
saying “now.” Meaning this very instant. There is the “now” of what might directly
follow the present moment, an expectation of something transpiring immediately or
forthwith, usually expressed as, “and now.” Finally, there is the “now” of what dir-
ectly preceded this sentence; the “just now,” or “even now.” In short, the now is
an integer of time that can help us delineate its movement, point by point. Nows
can be a sudden occurrence, independent of what proceeded it, or they can be
linked together. These linkages can create a directionality that might be linear
(going somewhere) or circular (repeating in a loop). In life, many of our nows can
refuse to coalesce into anything significant, we could say that such nows are still-
born, leading to nothing. Our nows can also be so ingrained into the pattern of
our day-to-day lives that they actually recede from our view, leaving us lost in our
habitual doings. We can go through whole days in a kind of existential haze which
makes for low visibility in regards to our actual sense of being-in-the-world. And it
can stay like this—until, we sense something is about to happen, something new, or
out of ordinary, wished for, or feared. That kiss or, perhaps, a slap. Suddenly, the
now reassert itself. We become aware of all the nows between us and the event that
is about to occur. Now, we are present, now each now vibrates with anticipation.
Now we are a part of a stream or swarm of nows.
A now is not necessarily a regulated clock-like experiencing of time; in other
words, each now is not identical in duration as seconds. Each now can have its
own discernible length. Think of it as the duration it takes to sound out one
Moments 33

word from another; the word “ark” is shorter than the word “Constantinople,” but
both words constitute comprehensible nows of recognition. We could say that
a now is the recognition of a discrete instance of time. If nows were indeed like our
comprehension of words, we have experienced 12 nows since this sentence began.
Nows like words are independent of one another, and yet can link together to
make meaning. A now, for our purposes, is the recognition of an instance or
instances in time that occur to us in the form of an immediate feeling, thought, or
reaction.

A moment with moments

We will designate moments as tripartite in structure: the heart of a moment exists
between the now of something occurring to us and the now of our subsequent
action. Between these points in time is the interim, the being-in-the-midst. It is an
ever so brief, almost indiscernible caesura of being. The moment is the awareness of
this strange intermediary state between an occurrence and an action. It is right at
this mid-point that the intention is born. This can happen in the blink of an eye, or
feel like a brief eternity. If the occurrence and action are “in time,” then this inter-
mediate point where intention arises can often feel as though it is a fall out of time.
It is time as gestation. It is the time we take to arrive at an act, and once we do take
action, we are thrust back into the relentless flow of time. In most instances, this
temporal process is instantaneous, happening without thinking. The math of this is won-
derfully straightforward: occurrence + intention + action = a moment. A moment,
naturally, leads to a chain of moments (what we call the moment-to-moment life of
a scene). Each stage of a moment’s tripartite structure is made up of a now or
swarm of nows. These nows coalesce around occurrences, intentions, and actions
but they do not have to be evenly dispersed. The nows that make up an intentional
mid-point of a moment can swell to the breaking point (think Hamlet), before they
lead to the nows of an actual action or set of actions.
A moment is often defined in the very same way as a now. In temporal terms
it is described in our dictionaries as “brief,” “exact,” a “portion,” “instance,”
“particle,” or “increment” of time. In the Middle Ages the reckoning of
a moment was literally “a tenth part of a point—the fortieth or fiftieth part of
an hour.” On deeper etymological inspection, we learn that our word
“moment” comes from the Latin “momentum,” which also pushes the lexical
possibilities of the word further than our use of now. Momentum for the
Romans meant movement, moving power, and therefore it conjured a sense of
importance that adds mobility and weight to our usage of the word. A moment
tends to lead to other linked moments (i.e., moving across time). We can think
of it as a particular stage in a development or course of events, often it is seen as
a window in time in which something (an opportunity) could transpire. In
this respect, moments can become pregnant with possibility, where a conjunction
of circumstances can lead to a new development, thereby impacting on the current
state of affairs. Such a moment can be decisive, a definitive stage, period, or turning
34 Moments

point in the course of events. This is what gives moments their consequence and
weight. An example of moments as developments can be found in the Spanish
phrase el momento de la verdad, which is the final sword thrust in a bull fight.
Moments tend to cohere into such phases of development, whereas nows have
the ability to be independent of one another. Take, for example, a romantic
kiss. The intention to kiss another creates a moment out of the recognition of
a swarm of romantically inclined nows. The moment of the kiss suddenly gives
time a directionality. The kiss has the potential to lead to the development of
further linked moments of romance (i.e., more kissing, fondling, undressing…
you get the picture). The linking of all these moments becomes what we will
call an unfolding.

Unfoldings
When a chain of moments reaches their resolution, we call the totality of this
journey: an unfolding. Unfoldings are the discernible arc that begins with an
occurrence; say, an animal attraction between people. Such an occurrence might
end with our two lovers in bed smoking cigarettes. Between these two points
would be moments of intimacy that might have begun with a touch, followed
by an embrace, that lead to a kiss—etc. The consummation of all these romantic
moments to their conclusion (successful or otherwise) constitutes an unfolding.
An unfolding follows a trajectory of linked intentionality to its basic endpoint.
Such intentionality brings a sense of directionality to time. And so, we can
begin to discern a kind of grammar emerging from our temporal affairs.
And so, a swarm of nows coalesces into moments (units of intentionality) that
grow into an unfolding (the endpoint to the initial intention). One could argue that
the success or failure of a given performance rests on how these temporal integers
are first recognized (as nows), then acted upon (in moments), that ultimately resolve
themselves into a conclusion (the unfolding). These tiny pockets of time that recede
from our day-to-day consciousness must be in the very forefront of our minds as
we craft an evening of theatre. It all begins with a now.

The now of the dog. Our canine friend returns to teach us

another lesson on theatre
There is a story that circulates about an acting teacher that brought his dog to
class. “Today, we will watch the dog,” the teacher says in a thick Romanian
accent. Justifying such exercises helps when you have an accent, the accent lends
a certain gravitas, making the exercise seem all the more aesthetically life-altering.
The class forms a circle of chairs around the dog, they sit, and begin to watch.
A student raises his hand and says, “I see that the dog…” Before he can finish his
statement, the teacher shushes him and says with a Zen-like tone of voice, “Just…
watch… the dog.” They watch. Another student raises her hand and says, “I
notice that…” But before she can finish her sentence there is another shush from
Moments 35

the teacher, followed by his ever-sagacious entreaty to once again, “Just… watch…
the dog.” The students watch the dog for three hours in absolute silence. At the
end of the class the teacher says, “You see, the dog does not act. It just is.”
When I first heard this story I couldn’t help but think this was some sort of
pedagogic con, perpetuated by a teacher who was too lazy to teach that day.
But several years later a young director decided to stage a scene with a dog in
it. Watching this dog (which was the only thing the audience watched) was
indeed a masterclass in what we call “moment to moment work”; or, put in
philosophical terms, on the nature of being present. Why is this? Why is the
dog a better actor than the actors? To watch our canine friend is to learn about
present-ness. In such a state one is open to every fluctuation in the world that
draws their attention. Let us watch the dog in this scene. The dog enters on
a leash. The only thing that seems to exist for our canine friend is his master,
the world revolves around this brown-haired fellow who feeds him. The dog
loves his master, will follow him anywhere, even onto this stage which, as he
begins to look around, is awfully odd. Before our canine friend can continue to
formulate his dog theory on his surroundings, the other actor in the scene
begins yelling at the dog’s master. Suddenly the dog’s entire attention goes from
surveying the space, to the blond-haired fellow who is yelling. This is unheard
of to the dog, why would anyone yell at his master? He is the nicest man in the
world, the one that feeds him. The dog’s ears are at attention, his tail bolt
upright, his eyes widening at this strange blond-haired fellow. Someone in the
audience laughs, the dog immediately turns toward the source of the laugh, dis-
covering us, the audience. What are all these people doing here? It thinks, why
are they all sitting when they should be helping his poor master, don’t they hear
the blond-haired man yelling at him? The audience laughs louder, the sound is
a bit unnerving to the dog, who takes several steps back. He notices, from
between the legs of his master, that at least the blond-haired man is no longer
shouting at his master, what are they doing now? Oh, talking. The dog hates it
when humans do this “talking thing,” it can go on for ages. The dog begins to
look around the space again for anything of interest. Is that a toy over there? It
begins to move toward the toy-like thing on the floor. The master tugs at the
leash, but the dog wants to see that toy, it strains against the ever-tightening
leash with all its might, straining to get just… a… little… bit… closer. The
master tempts the dog with a treat. The dog sees the treat and forgets the toy.
Now it is all about eating the treat. The master wants to go upstage, but the
dog is still not finished with the treat. The master begins to drag the dog upstage
as the dog tries to gobble up the last stray crumbs… there… and… there… and
wait, wait… that one… right… over… there…
You get the idea.
The dog goes from one now to the next with complete and total involvement.
Whatever the dog encounters, it occupies every fiber of its being until the very
next encounter. There is his MASTER, then THE YELLING MAN, then the
AUDIENCE, then BOREDOM, then THE SPACE, then THE TOY, then
36 Moments

THE TREAT, then CRUMBS, then STRAY CRUMBS, then ONE… LAST…
CRUMB. The dog is open to what each and every now brings. In this respect, the
dog, has a very important advantage to the actors. The dog has not read the script
of the scene. Unlike the actor, it does not know what will come next. Everything is
a surprise, everything is a discovery. Every now is real for the dog, it has a first-ness
that is hard for the actor, who knows the text, to feign and keep fresh (this is why
improvisation is such an important tool for training an actor).
We might be tempted to describe the dog’s state in pseudo-Buddhist terms as
being “awake.” This might be too profound a coloring for what is happening,
perhaps we could say that the dog is “alert” to each successive now. The great
Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote that reality is never “just this; but
rather, this and this and this and this and this.” The this, is the now. These are
the infinitesimal degrees of being and we must be alert to each of them, we
must attune ourselves to each successive this, discovering it as it comes.
For our purposes, we will argue that what we have witnessed with the dog
breaks down into two types of present-ness. The first form of present-ness deals
with individual nows that do not coalesce (i.e., develop); this includes THE
MASTER, THE BLOND-HAIRED MAN, THE AUDIENCE, BOREDOM,
THE SPACE. This is in opposition to the last sequence of nows, THE TOY,
THE TREAT, and the CRUMBS, that provoke a series of intentional moments
all linked to either getting the TOY or getting the TREAT and its remaining
CRUMBS. Again, this is the distinction we want to make between nows and
moments. Nows happen (are recognized) but are empty (stillborn) unless acted upon;
nows become moments when intentionality (the question of whether or not to act) enters
into the perceptual equation. This gives time a sudden sense of directionality and thereby
creates what we call an unfolding. An unfolding concludes when the intentionality is
either achieved, lost through an action, or series of actions. In this respect, the dog’s
comportment is not that far from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Here, we will argue
that each new thought of Hamlet functions like a now, some of these nows will
short-circuit (going nowhere) and other nows will develop into distinct inten-
tional moments that lead to other, linked, moments of intention. Let us see how
Hamlet and our canine friend rhyme in the realm of the now.

Hamlet and the now of a new thought

The Traveling Players have just left Hamlet alone onstage. Fresh in Hamlet’s
mind is the Player King’s rendition of a speech by Hecuba mourning the death
of her beloved husband, Priam. This is what Hamlet has to say about the Player
King’s performance and his own “performance” as a son in mourning. As we
move through this speech, we want to look for the “nows” that make up
a new thought. These shifts will be delineated by an annotation in bold. And
so, without further ado, here is Hamlet in full brooding: keep an eye on his
shifts of thought; each new thought constitutes a new now, some of which will
begin to develop into moments of intentionality.
Moments 37

HAMLET
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion.
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanted,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
(new thought)
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
(new thought)
What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
(new thought)
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-nettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing. No, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made.
(new thought)
Am I a coward?
(new thought; to audience)
Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i’ th’ throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
(new thought)
Ha, ’sounds, I should take it, for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liveried and lack all gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should ha’ fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal.
(new thought)
Bloody, bawdy villain!
38 Moments

Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

O, vengeance!
(new thought)
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion!
(new thought)
Fie upon’t, fo!
(new thought)
About, my brains.
(new thought)
Hum—
(new thought)
I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play…1

Well, you know the rest, don’t you?

Each new thought constitute a now. Just as the dog’s consciousness moved
from TOY to TREAT, so, too, does Hamlet’s mind move from THE PLAYER
KING’S PERFORMANCE to HAMLET’S OWN “PERFORMANCE” AS
GRIEVING SON. Each shift constitutes the beginning of a new now. Some of
these nows will go nowhere, others will develop into intentional trajectories that
lead Hamlet to a kind of clarity. But for our purposes, let’s just look at the now
of each of Hamlet’s thoughts and see how they rhyme with the way our canine
friend comported himself in his scene. In each case, dog and Hamlet seem to leap
from one cognitive epiphany to the next, a series of mental discoveries which
overwhelm whatever preceded it. Let us compare leaps:

DOG HAMLET
MASTER O WHAT A ROGUE
YELLING MAN WHAT’S HECUBA TO HIM?
AUDIENCE WHAT WOULD HE DO?
BOREDOM YET I—
TOY AM I A COWARD?
TREAT WHO CALLS ME VILLAIN?
CRUMBS HA ’SOUNDS, I SHOULD TAKE IT—
STRAY CRUMBS BLOODY, BAWDY VILLAIN!
ONE LAST… WHY WHAT AN ASS AM I
CRUMB. FIE UPON IT.
ABOUT MY BRAINS.
HUM
Moments 39

The beginning of each new now can be independent (go nowhere) or develop into
a unified grouping of nows that leads to moments of intentionality that will develop
toward some sort of end. Every new thought of Hamlet is a now, but not all these
new thoughts develop into full-fledged moments of thinking or feeling one’s way
through something. Nows such as “O what a rogue,” “Who calls me villain,”
“Bloody, bawdy, villain,” and “Why what an ass am I,” function more as outbursts
than moments; whereas, “What’s Hecuba to him,” “What would he do?” “Yet I,”
“Am I a coward,” and “About my brains. Hum,” grow into moments of investiga-
tion that calm Hamlet and lead him to a plan. This becomes the unfolding of this
particular speech. This is part of the unique genius of Shakespeare, who seems to
intuitively understand how our minds move from nows to moments, and back to
new nows that threaten to take us from the moment at hand. This is particularly
true of characters like Leontes or Prospero, both of whom find themselves straying
from the moment and losing themselves in a thicket of nows with no discernible
path out (i.e., moments of intentionality that give time directionality). But let us
not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s stay focused on:

Whens nows coalesce into moments and moments become

movements
So, a now is an instance of recognition, a moment is when that recognition
develops into an intentional response that can lead to an action and from that
action to further linked moments of intentionality. Many of our canine friend’s
nows (seeing his master, then seeing a yelling man, then seeing the audience)
did not necessarily coalesce into fully developed moments of intentionality. This
changes when the dog sees the treat. At that juncture, an over-arching set of
actions were put into motion by the dog, creating a series of linked moments all
coalescing around the seeing, getting, and finishing of the treat. Let us say that
what constitutes a moment is a sequence of nows that are made up of:

1. Occurrence/Observation.
2. Intentions.
3. Actions.

This will lead to further moments of occurrence, intention, and action until
there is some sort of resolution to the initial intention. Lets see how the nows
of our canine friend create a sequence of moments that become movements in
an unfolding. Here is how we might break down movement one:

I.
OCCURRENCE
Now 1—“What’s that smell?”
Now 2—“Is that what I think it is?”
Now 3—“A treat!”
40 Moments

INTENTION
Now 4—“God, I’m hungry.”
Now 5—“Lemme just get one little bite.”

ACTION
Now 6—“I’ll just stand on my hind legs.”
Now 7—“Open my mouth.”
Now 8—“The treat is mine!”

But suddenly, the master wants to leave, he begins to pull the dog on the leash,
which leads us to our second moment:

II.
OCCURRENCE
Now 9—“Hey, wait a minute.”
Now 10—“Where are you going?”
Now 11—“There are all these crumbs on the floor.”

INTENTION
Now 12—“Hold on—”
Now 13—“I’m not going anywhere—”
Now 14—“Till I get those crumbs—”
ACTION
Now 15—“Got one.”
Now 16—“And that one.”
Now 17—“And that one.”
Now 18—“And—”

This leads to our final moment, the retrieval of the very last crumb:

III
OCCURRENCE
Now 17—“Wait, there’s one more—”

INTENTION
Now 18—“I just have to stick my tongue out—”
ACTION
Now 19—“And—”
Now 20—“It’s mine. All mine!”

Note how the nows that make up each phase of a moment can vary, this is part of
the free play of moment-to-moment work. The more present the actor is, the
more potential “nows” s/he may discover. Often a young actor will skip a now or
two, and the result is a less “detailed” performance. Such present-ness is part of
Moments 41

what we respond to in a great actor, someone who is open to all the nows that go
into a moment of stage time. The actor’s world is a world of nows; moving from
an occurrence, to intentions, that lead to actions without missing a beat. We may
need to break this down in rehearsal, like taking apart the innards of a clock to
understand how they work, but then we must ultimately put the parts back
together so that time can effortlessly flow again as it does in life.
The actor’s first obligation is to understand how nows become moments and
then how these moments can be thought of as movements in an overall unfold-
ing. Moments become movements when they reveal themselves to be the
beginning, middle, or end of a set of related intentions. In this example of the
dog and the treat, we can say that moment/movements break down in the fol-
lowing fashion:

Moment/Movement One: Seeing the treat and getting a bite.

Moment/Movement Two: Attempting to get all the crumbs.
Moment/Movement Three: Getting the very last crumb.

Each moment/movement has its own action and its own energy. When we add
these three moment/movements up, we arrive at:

The ABCs of an Unfolding

An Unfolding should be understood as the organization of moments into meaningful
movements (i.e., trajectories of action). These movements tend to fall into
a comprehensible three-part structure, what Aristotle designates as beginnings, mid-
dles, and ends; concepts which occupy much of his Poetics and his Physics. Let us
briefly return to Hamlet’s soliloquy to see how its moment-to-moment life creates an
ABC of Unfolding:

A.
(Beginning)
OCCURRENCE
(Hamlet is shamed at the occurrence of an actor
feeling more grief for a fictional character than he can
for the death of his father):
Now 1—“O what a rogue and peasant slave am I …”
Now 2—“Is it not monstrous…”
Now 3—“What’s Hecuba to him?”

INTENTION
(Hamlet initiates a “thought experiment” comparing
himself to the actor)
Now 4—“What would he do had he the motive and cue
for passion that I have?”
42 Moments

ACTION
(Hamlet plays out the thought experiment)
Now 5—“He would drown the stage with tears.”
all the way to “amaze all eyes and ears.”
Now 6—“Yet I—”
Now 7—“am dull”
all the way to “am I a coward?”

B.
(Development)
OCCURRENCE
(Hamlet thinks he hears someone in the audience
deride him; it makes him lash out at them, himself,
and than back to Claudius, and finally himself again)
Now 1—“Who calls me villain … who does me this?
Now 2—“Ha zounds, I should take it … for I am pigeon livered…”
Now 3—“Bloody, bawdy, villain.”
Now 4—“What an ass am I”

INTENTION
(Stop this senseless lashing out, attempts to clear his head)
Now 6—“fie about it, fo.”
Now 7—“about my brains.”

ACTION
(Begins to think of a new path)
Now 8—“Hum”

C.
(Conclusion)
OCCURRENCE
(A plan presents itself)
Now 1—“I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play.”

INTENTION
Now 2—“I’ll have these players …”

ACTION
(New resolve to move forward)
Now 3—“the play’s the thing to catch the conscience of
a king.”

The soliloquy begins with a sense of mock outrage in A, “Is it not monstrous
that this player here…” and ends (in C) with a cool, rational state of being,
Moments 43

where he can lay out his plan, “I have heard guilty creatures sitting at a play?”
How did it get there? Through B. B is a bridge of nows that brings us from
A to C. B is the passage from one state of mind to the next. The more
extreme the states are from each other, the longer the bridge will be to take us
to this new emotional destination. Hamlet must expel his sense of inadequacy.
He does so by attacking the Player King, himself, his audience, and Claudius.
This purges him, clears his mind, and lays the seeds for an idea, a plot, that has
been growing inside of him ever since the arrival of the Traveling Players.
This is the ABC’s of Hamlet’s unfolding. This three-part structure is delineated
by these three major shifts in states:

(A—beginning)
Shame/inadequacy leads Hamlet to play a thought experiment comparing himself
to the actor and question who would make a better revenger. Hamlet’s failure in
this thought experiment leads to:

(B—bridge/development)
An all-out attack, or lashing out at the audience, himself, Claudius, and himself
again; leaving him spent and attempting to rethink his situation.

(C—conclusion)
Out of this spent-ness, comes a new thought, a plan which brings with it
a certain newfound collectedness/purpose.

A key part of the actor’s and director’s job is being sensitive to the ABCs of an
unfolding, of being able to break down moments into beginnings, middles, and
ends. This is not only central to the likes of Aristotle, but to Zeami, the great
practitioner of Noh theatre. He called this fundamental dynamic: Jo Ha Kyu.
Each word stands for an essential part of an unfolding pattern of energy that
Zeami believed was the rhythmic paradigm of the universe itself. Jo is often
translated as “introduction” or “prelude,” suggesting a simple, direct, and under-
standable opening movement. Ha, or middle section of an unfolding, is often
translated as “development.” Its literal translation is “breaking,” suggesting
a sharp shift or increase of energy after the more simple Jo. Kyu, our final term,
is often translated as “climax” or “finale,” its literal translation is that of being
“rapid,” and pointing to the often quickened tempo of a resolution. My teacher
would say, “Understand the moment-to-moment development of things and
you will understand the basic nature of theatre.”

A moment with my teacher

I had just finished mounting one of my first full-length productions in school
and, like many student directors, I was rather despondent over the wide gap
between my great expectations for the show and its actual meager results. My
44 Moments

mind obsessively replayed the production over and over in my imagination, its
failure followed me everywhere like a black cloud.
“What’s the matter?” my teacher asked, as we met passing each other in the hall.
“Oh, it’s just my show.” I said.
“What about it?” He asked.
“It just wasn’t… what I hoped.”
“Well, there was that moment at the end, that was pretty amazing.”
“But it was just a moment.”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to actually discover one real moment.
I’ve gone through whole seasons of seeing shows where there wasn’t one damn
moment worth mentioning. But you discovered one. If you were a scientist,
that alone would be cause for celebration.”
“So now what?”
“Move onto your next show, discover another moment.”
“So directing is just the collecting of moments?”
“Look you can’t have a forest without trees. Right now you need to work on
seeing each tree; focus on that, tree by tree, and the forest will eventually emerge.”
My teacher would also say:

To discover a true moment in art is something of a miracle and a curse.

Because when one has finally discovered an actual “true moment,” one
immediately realizes that all the other moments one has made are actually
false. The true moment shows up the artifice of the rest of one’s endeavor.
It is the only living thing in a field of shadows. All other moments pale in
comparison. The true moment says, “there is more work to be done
here.” It forces us to rise to the occasion of the discovery we have made,
it shames the other moments around it, demanding that we find their sin-
gularity. Only then will we ignite the audience’s imagination and bring
the work, as a whole, to vivid life.

The quintessence of living moment to moment

When I got out of school I had the extraordinary opportunity to assist the great
Joseph Chaikin, an actor and director who singlehandedly changed my generation’s
understanding of what theatre could achieve with his company The Open Theatre.
By the time I met Joe he had suffered a stroke which left him grappling with apha-
sia, a condition which severely compromised his ability to use and comprehend
words. The doctors explained to him that he might never speak again; his first
words to them, after a year of speech therapy, were a simple “fuck you.” Joe
miraculously regained his ability to understand and make language. But it was
a broken language, a kind of dismembered syntax that turned everything he said
into a kind of haiku poem. My job, at the time, was to take notes for him during
run-throughs of a play that he was advising on. During one run-through, Joe
leaned over to me and whispered perhaps the most beautiful note I have ever heard:
Moments 45

Actor John:
Moment: Heaven.
Moment: Hell.

I’ve thought about this note of Joe’s for 30-odd years now. I’ve come to feel that it
captures the very quintessence of theatre which has so much to do with the
moment-to-moment life of the actor on stage. I’ve come to feel that this note is the
very definition of theatrical undertaking in a nutshell. Theatre is what happens in
the moment between heaven and hell. The moment in-between, the nanosecond
before everything in life shifts.

Conclusion
The trick of all this is to try not to skip nows as they form into moments. Skipping
nows is much like skipping steps. What distinguishes a great actor from
a journeyman is his or her ability to delineate all the intricate nows that make up
moments that become the movements of a given unfolding. Once you master the
moments/movements of a unit, you can move to mastering the units of a scene,
then to mastering the scenes of an act, and finally to the acts of an entire play. They
all operate from this same basic understanding of how nows become moments and
moments become movements in an unfolding. This is the principle of dramatic
development which means discerning how moments begin, develop, and conclude. We
must cultivate an innate relationship with such development, it must become second nature to
us. And once we have done this, we must move to our next element and explore
how these moments change.

Note
1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden
Shakespeare, 2006), 274–279 (II.2)
5
CHANGE

Creatures in a world of change

Ours is a world of change; from one moment to the next. Change surrounds us;
from the position of the stars to the shifting of the seasons. Change is within us;
working away at our bodies, our minds, our very beliefs, and our deepest loves.
We are creatures of change. We are wired for it, connoisseurs of it. Life is
change. If we do not change—or, are unaware of the changes around us—we
can, quite simply, perish. As a result we take change very seriously.
It occupies much of our consciousness and our art. We appreciate all manner
of changes: in pigments, notes, steps, tones, and tastes. We make up stories of
change, of people going from rags to riches, or from kings to paupers. We grow
impatient when things do not change, it is contrary to our fundamental under-
standing of life. We are deeply suspicious of stasis. It is too close to the outward
trappings of death. Between the quick and the dead we choose the quick. It
attracts our eye, keeps us occupied.
In the time-based arts of theatre, music, and dance, we become dis-engaged
when we sense no change. This is one of art’s fundamental secrets: since life is
change, so too is our art. Because it surrounds us, is us, we can become blind to
it in our day-to-day speed of Being. We need art to reacquaint us with this fun-
damental aspect of existence. Wittgenstein tells us, “The aspects of things that
are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes. And
this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and
powerful.”1 This is why theatre was invented, to remember such fundamentals
as change, to bring such things back into sight so we can learn more about
them. Our consciousness of change, the most extraordinary of phenomenon, the
very essence of creation, is dulled and often deadened by its all pervasiveness.
Change 47

Theatre’s job is to bring such a phenomenon back to us, in all its strangeness,
mystery, and meaning so that this fallen world of ours might become re-enchanted.
In terms of change, theatre teaches us it is an incessant process, the world is in the
midst of continual transformation. Some of these changes are visible; others, imper-
ceptible. This is the Physics of Being. All is forever shifting, transforming, altering.
Even something as simple and straightforward as:

The phenomenology of a scream

We tend to think of something like a scream as a relatively stable affair when
comes to its vocal production and aural reception. To the inattentive ear, the
scream can seem no more than a block of undifferentiated sound, an unwavering
explosion of human noise that is singular in its intention and intensity. The
ancient Greeks, who display a unique penchant for screams, litter their tragedies
with all manner of cries, wails, shrieks, and howls. Anne Carson in the introduc-
tion to her masterful translation of Sophocles’ Electra notes that in terms of “range
and diversity of aural constructions, Electra surpasses all other screamers.”2 This
runs the gamut from a simple and straightforward “O,” all the way to the some-
what baroque “OTOTOTOTOTOI TOTOI.” Let us take the simplest and
most straightforward of cries, “O.” Let us produce and try to sustain this sound
for as long as we have breath. The result, in typographical terms would be:

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

This vocalization, on the page, does indeed seem profoundly stable and resilient
to any discernible change. But we know from attempting to make this sound
that it actually goes through quite a precarious journey. When breaking down
its actual physical production we become aware of how varied this aural phe-
nomenon actually is:

1.
It can begin somewhat tentatively, since we are usually
uncertain about how full throated we can/should be. Screaming
(hopefully) being such a rare occurrence in our day-to-day
lives.
2.
Then, having begun, it can grow in volume and confidence.
But sustaining this, proves to be difficult. Our vocal chords
begin to strain, the sound to crack.
3.
The sound begins to break up and then, finally, ultimately,
breaks down. We are returned to the profound indifference
of the world’s silence.
48 Change

We can see in this initial description a basic Unfolding in three distinct parts: (A)
tentative start, (B) confident build to the limits of one’s ability (C) resulting decay
into silence. This is, in short, the second law of thermodynamics (aka entropy),
alive and well in the life span of a scream. What is true for the working of our
world, is true for the working of our vocal chords. All things come into being
and pass away, the rate of change may vary, but its occurrence is assured. All
things change, no matter how hard we might scream otherwise.
Between Electra’s simple O and baroque OTOTOTOTOTOTOI TOITOI,
Carson itemizes 12 more outbursts of grief for our heroine, they are as follows:
IO
PHEU
AIAI
TALAINA
OIMOI MOI
IO MOI MOI
E E IO
E E AIAI
IO GONAI
OIMOI TALAINA
OI ‘GO TALAINA
IO MOI MOI DYSTENOS.3
Carson evocatively calls these cries the “bones of sound.” Let us see if we can
arrange these bones into a recognizable figure of sorrow. To do so, we must listen
to the play of sounds, noting their phonic changes, and attempting to sense what
those changes do to us when we make or hear them. Take the change in the cry:

OIMOI

What happens to us when we create the sound OI? Its open vowel-ness is an
invitation to expiation. It is so easy to release our pain through this open-
voweled construction. It flows effortlessly, with an easy expansion and just as it
is about to dissipate, the change comes with the sounding out of MOI. The
“Mh” sound requires more work on our part to produce, thereby forcing the
release of more sound and more emotion. The first sound “OI” is effortless
grief; the second sound effortful, forcing the last vestiges of pain out of our
system. Notice the power of the change, of this antithesis of sounds (open
vowel O/closed consonant M). The energy of this two-syllable expressiveness is
in the change from open-voweled (OI) to closed-consonant sounding (Mh) that
returns us to the open-voweled state (OI). The very power of the cry happens
in this simple moment of change. Now, contrast this with:

E E IO
Change 49

Whereas the “O” of “OI” comes from deep within our chest (where the Greeks
located “thumos” or feeling), the “E” of “E E IO” is produced with our head
voice. It is a sound that begins at the back of our throat and travels quickly upward
to our nasal cavity where it completes its sounding. The sound itself requires much
more effort than any of the other open vowel sounds that we utilize. It creates
a pulsing sensation just behind the eyes. It is a painful sound to create and hear. Its
pitch is higher and therefore more piercing than its open-voweled siblings. The fact
that it happens twice makes it all the more unbearable. The “I” of “IO” creates the
first change in sound that we experience. Its vocal production is slightly less arduous
to make than the “E” sound. The origin of sound and its resulting pitch is placed
lower than the “E,” happening deeper within us but it is not until we get to the
“O” of “IO” that we find the sound emanating from deep within our breast. We
realize when we break down this lamenting that a deepening happens with the
change in producing each vowel. It is a journey which feels as though it begins in
the head and works its way down, burrowing into the depths of ourselves. There is
something comforting in this downward descent (the sounds becoming easier,
deeper, and more fulfilling to make).
Again, the important takeaway here is that, in both cases, it is the change in
vowels that creates the overall effect that the sound has on us. The change in
soundings has an increasing power and direction that works immediately on us.
We follow the changes in a non-rational way. These changes take us to
a variety of different emotive locations within ourselves, bypassing the necessity
of verbal understanding. We are in a different realm of meaning, a more primor-
dial realm. It is the language of change and it speaks to us in perhaps the most
direct and impactful fashion. This is the fundamental power of mastering and
playing changes.

The birth of the peripeteia

The Greek tragedians were interested in both screams and changes; the latter cat-
egory they would come to call a peripeteia. This word thinks of change as a kind of
turning, a reversal in the general state of affairs. For the Greeks such turnings were
usually for the worse. The idea of tragedy was to experience another’s peripeteia;
or, put in more familiar terms, their reversal of fortune. But Greek tragedy is littered
with peripeteias, we can find them in scenes, soliloquies, and choruses. Everywhere
we look we will find a peripeteia, a fundamental turn or change in the unfolding of
things. Let us look at the first scene from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Here we are intro-
duced to a beleaguered watchman, he tells us:

WATCHMAN
Gods! Free me from this grind.
It’s one long year I’m lying here watching
Waiting watching waiting—
propped on the roof of Atreus, chin on my
50 Change

Pass like a dog.

I’ve peered at the congregation of the
Nightly starts—bright powerful creatures
Blazing in air,
…
and I watch I watch I watch for this sign of
A torch,
a beacon light sending from Troy the news
That she is captured.4

This is the almost Beckettean existence of this poor fellow who has watched
away 10 years of his life for the sign of a light in the distance. And then some-
thing miraculous happens; finally, after 3006 nights, the longed-for light appears.
It is at that this moment that everything turns, we are in the gravitational pull of
a peripeteia. Here is what happens to our watchman:

WATCHMAN
Hold on! There you are! Fire in the night!
Blazing like day!
You make me dance with joy!
I must send news to Agamemnon’s wife to
Rise from bed, to shout aloud
for this amazing light—if Troy is really
Taken as the beacons seem to say.
I myself will start the dancing.
For if they are in luck, I am in luck—we’re
Throwing triple sixes!5

This is quite a reversal, from existential despair to complete joy. Everything has
changed, all in a moment, in the blink of an eye. The world is starkly delineated
by the peripeteia, there was before the seeing of the light and after seeing of the
light. A moment that forever bisects reality, cleaving it into two entirely oppos-
ite realms of being. This is the very DNA of theatre. In the Old Testament, the
beginning is light; in the New Testament, the beginning is the word; in the
testament of theatre which, to my mind, is Agamemnon, the beginning is the
peripeteia, the change. In this case, the change is sudden, bold, irreversible.
There is nothing subtle here. The world was bleak and now it is joyous. All it
takes is a flash of light to forever alter the reality of the Watchman. This first
peripeteia sets the template for all further changes throughout the play. This is
a world of sudden, irreversible shifts. Beware. This moment of joy will quickly
be eclipsed by the peripeteia of the Messenger’s recounting of the destruction of
the Argive Fleet, and so on, and so on. Each change, or reversal, brings us
closer to the truth of Aeschylus’ play.
Change 51

The key for theatre practitioners is to play these fundamental changes, since it
is through change (difference) that we understand things in general. Our lan-
guage is predicated on the changes from vowels to consonants; without these
micro-shifts in sound, comprehension would be very difficult. We only fully
understand the Watchman’s despair by seeing his subsequent joy; conversely, his
joy is made all the more comprehensible to us because we have seen his despair.
It is through change that we, retroactively, understand the depth of things, the
difference between the Watchman’s despair and his joy only makes total sense
when the two are placed side by side to illuminate one another. This is the job
of the director and actor, to fully embody these changes in all their registers:
tone, rhythm, energy, volume, etc. The more vivid we play the change, the
deeper our appreciation and understanding of each moment.

Shakespeare: the master of change

Shakespeare traffics in a particular type of change that has come to be known as
antithesis: this is the playing of one word, feeling, thought, or action, against its
very opposite. The great Argentine author Borges notes that Shakespeare’s
unique use of language is a “battle between the Latinate and the Anglo Saxon”
that is at the root of the English language. The Latinate impulse is polyphonic
by nature, an ever-undulating stream of multi-syllabic words in opposition to
the blunt, mono-syllabic nature of the Anglo Saxon temperament. The trick is
to play the change between these two modes of expression. Here is a quick
example of this dynamic in play: from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it is the morning
after the still undiscovered murder of King Duncan. A nobleman is speaking
with Macbeth. He says:

LENNOX/LATINATE
The night has been unruly. Where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of Death
And prophesying with accents terrible
of dire combustion and confused events
New hatched to th’ woeful time: the obscure bird
Clamored the livelong night. Some say, the earth
Was feverous and did shake.

MACBETH/ANGLO-SAXON
’Twas a rough night.6

From the ornate to the rough-hewn. The key is in celebrating the change (dif-
ference) between these two manners of speaking. Here is another example from
Much Ado About Nothing, where a similar battle between the Latinate (Flowery)
and the Anglo-Saxon (Firm) is fought; only this time, it is within the very same
52 Change

speech. Here we find Benedick, a devout bachelor, contemplating his sworn

enemy: love. See if you can follow the changes of antithesis:

BENEDICK
I do much wonder that one man, seeing how another man is
a fool when he dedicates his behaviors to love, will, after
he hath laughed at such shallow follies in others, become
the argument of his own scorn by falling in love; and such a
man is Claudio. I have known when there was no music in
him but the drum and the fife; and now he rather hear the
tabor and the pipe. I have known when he would have walked
ten mile afoot to see a good armor; and now he will lie ten
nights awake carving the fashion of a new doublet. He was
wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man
and a soldier; and now is he turned orthography; his words
are a very fantastical banquet—just so many strange dishes.7

Let’s see if we can break these changes down into the following two categories: those
phrases with a Latinate tendency and those with a preferred Anglo-Saxon bent.
Anglo-Saxon/Firm Latinate/Flowery
The drum and the fife. Tabor and pipe
To see a good armor. Carving the fashion of a new doublet
Plain and to the purpose. Turned orthography
Like an honest man. A very fantastical banquet
And a soldier. So many strange dishes.
The speech comes to life when the actor plays the changes between what Claudio
was and what Claudio has become. It is a transformation characterized in a shift
from the short, mono-syllabic sounds of the Anglo Saxon world to open, poly-
syllabic lilt of the Latinate. This is one of the many examples of Shakespeare’s
penchant for anthesis on the micro level of language; but, it can also be found at
work on the macro-level of a play’s given structure, playing one tone against
another as we move from scene to scene. Take for instances the first two scenes
of Act Three of Pericles. The first scene takes place aboard a ship in the midst of
a storm. Pericles tells us:

PERICLES
The God of this great vast, rebuke these
Surges
Which wash both heaven and hell; and thou that hast
Upon the winds command, bind them in brass,
Having called them from the deep! O, still
Thy deaf’ning dreadful thunders; gently quench
Thy nimble sulphurous flashes!8
Change 53

During this, we learn, that Pericles’ wife, Thaisa, has died in the midst of child
birth. His howls of grief “assist the storm” that rages on. Pericles holds the new-
born babe in his arms, rocking it as he muses, “Thou hast as chilling a nativity/
As fire, air, water, earth and heaven can make/To herald thee from the womb.”
But the worse is yet to come. Sailors confront Pericles and demand that his
dead wife be cast overboard, their reasoning that “the sea works high, the wind
is loud, and will not lie till the ship be cleared of the dead.”
Now, contrast this scene, with the one which follows. The stage directions
inform us that we are now in Ephesus, the isle known to all as the birthplace of
the cult of Demeter and her attendant rituals of renewal. Here we find the sage-
like Cerimon, well versed in the mystical practices of his homeland. The casket of
Thaisa has washed ashore and Cerimon, upon close examination, believes “they
were too rough/that threw her in the sea.” And through his magic art, he
attempts to restore her to life. Let us listen in on this sacred ritual as it unfolds:

CERIMON
The still and woeful music that we have,
Cause it to sound, beseech you.
(Music)
The viol once more! How thou stirr’st thou block!
The music there!~
(Music)
I pray you, give her air,
Gentlemen,
This Queen will live: nature awakes; a warmth
Breathes out of her. She hath not been entranced
Above five hours, See she ’gins to blow
Into life’s flower again.9

The gentlemen marvel at this resurrection and are met with Cerimon’s gentle
“Hush.” The perfect sound to encapsulate the entire feeling of this sequence.
These two scenes could not be more dissimilar from one another. We go from
the chaos of a tempest that brings death, to the harmony of music which harkens
a rebirth. This play of opposites continues beyond sentences and scenes and into
the entire construction of acts, the first three being devoted to Pericles’ picaresque
journey, followed by the last two acts that shift to the story of Pericles’ daughter,
Marina. Where the Pericles section is marked by constant movement, the Marina
sequence is notable for its relentless stasis. As though the personalities of each
character defined the very division of the story telling. This sort of larger architec-
tonic approach to antithesis reaches its apotheosis in The Winter’s Tale. Here Acts
One through Three take place in Sicilia and unfold as tragedy, whereas Acts Four
and Five shift to Bohemia and turn into a comedy. The changes between
sequences could not be more pronounced, encompassing differences in place,
tone, style. And so, we see—whether it is between words, sentences, scenes, or
54 Change

acts —Shakespeare revels in all manner of change. Perhaps nowhere is this more
evident than in Shakespeare’s conception of the arcs of his characters.

Changes of character: or, once more into the breach with

Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s gift for change is perhaps most pronounced in his unfolding of char-
acter. Again, we can see Shakespeare’s penchant for antithesis at work in the arcs
of his main characters whose emotional weather is ever shifting. Take King Lear:

1.
Lear is King
Lear is all powerful, unswayable, infallible. He is a King. The very
manifestation of majesty. Even though these are pagan times, he
might as well be the God of the Old Testament; he manifests
all the same traits. He is: Remote, demanding, intemperate, immodest,
and impossible.

2.
Lear is Mortal
Once he has given up his throne, he has given up his power. He is no
longer King, just a father, or worse: an annoying, tireless, bothersome,
useless, boorish old man. His words, that once had the power to alter
fates, are now just hot air. He makes the same sounds, but they seem
to lack meaning, no one seems to listen any more, or do as he says.

3.
Lear is Mad
Since his words no longer make sense to others, why should his mind?
Both have departed. Lear is mad, but still majestic in his madness.
Majesty is the last thing to go.

4.
Lear is Frail
But when his madness, like a fever, breaks, he is just a feeble old
man, on the verge of what Shakespeare elsewhere called,
his second infancy. This is the Lear who spends his last days with
the returned Cordelia. The one who wants to be God’s spy.

5.
Lear is Fire
And then Cordelia is dead. The world is pain. Where once he was
impenetrable now he is porous, pierced through, blighted, an
open wound. The pain rages like a wild fire, it illuminates
Change 55

something fundamental about our existential vulnerability. Like

flies to wanton boys. Howl, howl, howl.

Here we witness huge seismic transformations in Shakespeare’s characters like

the changes of the seasons, or the eclipse of the sun and moon. There is nothing
apologetic about these huge shifts in being, they are grand and unabashed in
their unfolding. It is the very “stuff” of theatre. Shakespeare, after all, was an
actor, he knew what they needed. His theatre is a banquet where change is the
main course.

The prosaic vs. the dramatic: or, Tolstoy contra Shakespeare.

Change as matter of scale
Changes, in life and art, are of two varieties: Those that are perceptible as in the
bold shifts found in Shakespeare, or those of more imperceptible nature that we
find best represented in the 19th Century Russian novel, as typified by a grand
master like Tolstoy. In Tolstoy’s narrative hands, change functions like a kind of
low-level white noise; it is there, but just out of the range of our conscious
grasp. Tolstoy, as it is famously known, was not a fan of Shakespeare, much of
this has to do with the nature and scale of change in Shakespeare’s work that goes
against Tolstoy’s novelistic instincts. This brings us back to Tolstoy’s celebration
of the painter Briullov and his celebration of “the tiny bit.” Tolstoy writes in his
late, seminal essay Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?:

One may say true life begins where the tiny bit begins—where what seem
to us minute and infinitely small alterations take place. True life is not
lived where great external changes take place—where people move about,
clash, fight, slay one another—but it is lived only where those tiny, tiny,
infinitesimally small changes occur.10

This is in direct opposition to Shakespeare’s unspoken sense of causality where

Shylock’s descent into villainy is triggered by the loss of his daughter, or Lear’s
restoration to sanity by the reappearance of Cordelia. It is not one thing that affects
change in Tolstoy’s universe, but a thousand tiny bits that incrementally add up,
over time, to the change of an individual. Tolstoy uses Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment as an example of this seemingly imperceptible phenomenon:

The question of whether Raskolnikov would or would not kill the old
woman was decided when he was doing nothing and was only thinking:
When only his consciousness was active, and in that consciousness tiny,
tiny alterations were taking place … tiny, tiny alterations—but on them
depend the most immense, the most terrible consequences … From the
most minute alterations occurring in the domain of consciousness come
results of unimaginable importance …11
56 Change

Whether this is an accurate depiction of Dostoevsky’s art is debatable. Many feel

that in the above passage, Tolstoy forces his novelistic rival, into rhyming with Tol-
stoy’s own worldview. But such an approach to the ineffable changes of life abound
in Tolstoy’s major works. Take this extraordinary passage from War and Peace:

And Prince Andrei, clasping his hands behind his back, paced back and
forth in the room for a long time, now frowning, now smiling, as he
reflected on all those irrational, inexpressible thoughts, secret as a crime,
that were connected with Pierre, with fame, with the girl at the window,
with the oak, with the woman’s beauty and with love, which had altered
his whole life. And if anyone came into the room at such moments he
was particularly curt … As if to punish someone for all the secret, illogical
work going on within him.12

Chekhov follows Tolstoy’s lead, continuing this rich tradition of “tiny bit” over
the grand theatrical effects that Tolstoy criticized Shakespeare of perpetuating,
although achieving such novelistic ends in drama proved to be a difficult transmu-
tation. The results of this became something of a long and arduous process for
Chekhov to achieve. Such a nuanced shift does not make itself readily manifest in
any of Tolstoy’s own forays into drama and also eluded Chekhov in his
early works. Tolstoy famously dismissed Chekhov’s own venturing into drama,
imploring him to stick to writing short stories, rather than trying his hand at play
writing. Legend has it that Tolstoy handed back a copy of one of Chekhov’s plays
with the following curt response, “This play of yours is complete and total
rubbish.” And then, as an afterthought, added, “Why it is almost as bad as Shake-
speare.” Chekhov supposedly smiled politely, found his way to his waiting troika,
and, after making sure he was far from Tolstoy’s estate, cried out to the vast Rus-
sian night, “Thank you God, I am almost as bad as Shakespeare!” Although,
Chekhov, no doubt, was bemused to be compared to his beloved Shakespeare, he
intuitively knew what Tolstoy was alluding to; in 1906 the elder Tolstoy wrote
a scathing critique of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. In this 20-page screed against the
Bard, Tolstoy notes with a novelist’s exasperation, “From Shakespeare’s first
words exaggeration is seen: exaggeration of events, exaggeration of feeling, and
exaggeration of expression.” Again, it is the scale that seems to trouble Tolstoy;
earlier in the same essay he writes, “Without a sense of proportion there cannot
be an artist, especially a dramatist.”13 Even though Chekhov had moved his
drama from the rarified courts of kings to the provincial estates of the landed
gentry, there were still vestiges of grand theatrics that favored titanic peripeteia’s
of emotional fortune in his characters, along with the provisional need for a gun
to go off at some point in Act Three. By the time Chekhov pens his immortal The
Cherry Orchard, he is relieved to write to a friend that he made it throughout an
entire play without a pistol being shot. One sees Chekhov, with each successive
play, trying to meet Tolstoy’s standard of the “tiny bit.” By the time he arrives at
The Three Sisters, he has managed to bring Tolstoy’s novelistic sensitivities to the
Change 57

realm of drama. Let us briefly compare Treplev of The Seagull to Lyuba Andreevna
of The Cherry Orchard. Here we see Chekhov moving from a Shakespearean dir-
ectness (and size) in The Seagull, and more indirect deployment of Tolstoy’s
“tiny bit” in The Cherry Orchard.

Treplev Lyuba Andreevna

1. 1.
The Rebel Vivacious Hostess
A Young Man who wants to break all Full of love and life
the rules of Bourgeois Art and Life. And grace (trying to over-
Full of Life, Hopes, and Fears. compensate for her attempted
Mr. Contrary. suicide). She hides her sadness.

2. 2.
Acting Out In a Bad Mood
Having Failed in his first forays Gone is her natural vivacious-
into Art and Love, ness, replaced with a low-grade
He lashes out. disagreeableness. (This is
He kills a seagull (symbol of aspiration). caused by secret letters that have
Wants to start a duel arrived from her former
with his supposed rival. lover who wants her to return).

3. 3.
The Needy One The Distracted One
Treplev, like a child, seeks the She flirts, dances, anything
love of his mother by hurting to take her mind off the potential,
himself. sale of the estate which she loses at the
end of the act.

4. 4.
The Empty One The Mysterious One
All hope seems to be She has receded, vanished before
to be extinguished. Nina our eyes. We can no longer read
returns, he tells her everything, but she her. She says she is relieved.,
will not stay. But is she just pretending?
With her gone, there is She is a cypher.
nothing left to live for She is as mysterious as the
He destroys his work. smile of the Mona Lisa or Hamlet
And suicides himself in the final act of his tragedy. All
is now silence. Will she survive?
Finally give over to suicide? We
simply do not know.
58 Change

As we can see, early Chekhov works in a direct Shakespearean mode, the

characters tell us, for the most part, what is directly on their minds. By the time
we reach The Cherry Orchard we have a drama of indirection. It is hard to know,
in the moment, why a character is behaving the way they are behaving. The
reasons why a character like Lyuba Andreevna behaves the way she behaves are
revealed after the fact, often changing our very view of what we thought we just
saw. This is a slow, effortful sea-change on Chekhov’s part. Finding a balance
between his two masters: Shakespeare and Tolstoy. The dialectic between these
two titans remains an important element of Chekhov’s evolving art.

Chekhov’s antithesis: between the poetic (Shakespeare) and the

quotidian (Tolstoy)
Perhaps one of clearest examples of Chekhov’s late artistry can be found in the final
encounter between Tusenbach and Irina, his bride to be. He, unbeknownst to her,
is about to fight a duel; what follows is their last conversation before he goes off to
his death. The scene masterfully shifts between the quotidian (Tolstoy) and the
poetic (Shakespeare) until the quotidian itself becomes the ultimate poetic moment.
The scene begins innocently enough with Tusenbach saying he has to go into town
to see some friends off, Irina knows this is not true and wants to know why Tusen-
bach is not himself today. Tusenbach demurs and continuing in a quasi Tolstoy
manner, attempts to talk about his love for Irina, a subject he has never been very
good at: how each day he finds her more beautiful, her hair, her eyes, everything
about her. His dream has come true: they’re getting married, going away to do real
work in a factory that will give their life meaning, they’ll live happily ever after.
“There’s just one thing,” says Tusenbach, “You don’t love me.”14 Irina confesses
that this is true, that she has never loved Tusenbach, or anyone, for that matter. She
strains for a poetic-Shakespearean-type metaphor, “my heart is like a priceless
piano, locked up tight, and the key is lost forever.” Tusenbach, following in her
awkward poetic footsteps, says, “nothing frightens me more than that lost key, it
torments my soul, it robs me of my sleep.” And then we move from this leaden
attempt at poetry back to a Tolstoy-like penchant for the quotidian:

TUSENBACH
… Say something.
(pause)
Say something.
IRINA
What? What can I say? What?
TUSENBACH
Anything.
IRINA
Enough.15
Change 59

Another pause ensues, the silence is too much for Tusenbach to bear, it forces
him to speak. But it is more what Kierkegaard called “chatter” than “speech,”
more an effort to overcome the silence than having to do with anything to say. He
talks about the nearby fir trees, the maples, the birches, how all these trees seem to
be watching him and wondering what is going to happen next. Tusenbach makes
one more strained poetic/Shakespearean allusion to a nearby dead tree: “It’s with-
ered, but it still sways in the breeze with the others. It’s the same with me.” He
starts to leave. Irina, suspecting something is not right, wants to come with him,
Tusenbach insists she must stay. He starts off, stops, turns to her and says:

TUSENBACH
Irina!
IRINA
What?
TUSENBACH
(Pause)
I haven’t had any coffee yet today. Tell them to make some for me…
(exits quickly)16

Tusenbach, in that terrible pause, was about to tell her the truth, to speak of his
sense of impending doom; but, being the gentle soul that he is, he does not want
to cause Irina a moment’s grief. Instead of being direct, he hides behind indirec-
tion, he asks for coffee. The scene is extraordinary in its shifts from the quotidian
to poetic and back again, until the quotidian itself acquires its own sense of poetic
grandeur. Who would ever think that a line like “I haven’t had any coffee today.
Tell them to make some for me…” would bring an audience to collective tears
and yet it does, night after night, audience after audience. It is ultimately as pier-
cing as Electra’s cry of “E E IO,” but done without even raising one’s voice. This
is, indeed, the theatre of the “tiny bit,” the small, almost infinitesimal detail that
reveals the true depths of Tusenbach’s love. A conversation which begins in an
outright fashion (“I love you”), then becomes somewhat melodramatic (“the
thought of the lost key torments me”), then metaphoric (“I am that dead tree”),
and finally, simply, prosaic (“I haven’t had any coffee today. Tell them to make
some for me”). This is the journey of the scene, these simple changes, from the
quotidian to poetic, until we discover the poetic in the prosaic. Change, in
Chekhov’s dramatic hands, happens on a subatomic level.

The purgatory of being: non change in Chekhov

Chekhov also begins to explore characters who, on the surface, do not change.
Perhaps his greatest example is Vershinin in The Three Sisters. We first hear
about Vershinin through Tusenbach, who tells us, “Our new battery com-
mander, has a wife and two little girls. He goes around calling on people and
60 Change

tells everyone he has a wife and two little girls. He’ll tell you the same thing.”
Which is true: Vershinin, a seemingly dashing battery commander, arrives and
does indeed, eventually inform everyone that he has “a wife and two little girls,
my wife is in poor health and so on and so forth—and, well, if I could start my
life again, I wouldn’t get married that is for sure.” But this is not the only thing
Vershinin repeats, there are also his theories of the future which he returns to in
each act of the play. Even though several of these acts are separated by as much
as a year, this does little to change his theory of life:

Vershinin/Act One
In two hundred, three hundred years, life on earth will become unimaginably
beautiful, astonishingly so.17

Vershinin/Act Two
(A year later)
After two hundred—three hundred years, after a thousand years, even—it’s
not the length of time that matters—a new life will finally dawn, a life of
happiness.18

Vershinin/Act Three
Time will pass, some three hundred years or so, again they will look back
upon us with terror and disdain, again our present lives will seem so dreadful
and so difficult, so painful, and so strange. Oh, what a life to come, yes,
surely, what a life!19

Vershinin/Act Four
What shall we philosophize about? Life is hard. For many of us, life is lonely
and hopeless, and yet, we know, that all the while, slowly but surely, it
grows clearer and brighter, and the time will not be distant when we shall
live in radiance and light.20

Now Vershinin’s opinion of life may not change, but our opinion of him keeps
changing each time we hear him, over the years, returning to the same theory
with very little advancement in his thinking. The first time we hear it, it sounds
grand. The second time we hear it, we wonder, didn’t he say all this before?
The third time we hear it, it has begun to sound terribly threadbare. And the
fourth and final time? Pathetic, meaningless, hot air.
Later 20th Century authors like Brecht in his Mother Courage and Beckett in
works like Waiting for Godot and Happy Days will also experiment with the idea
of the character not changing. This short-circuits one of the pillars of Greek
tragedy; anagnorisis, a moment of recognition where the character learns some-
thing essential about themselves in relation to the world around them. Again,
we see that such a state of recognition becomes comprehensible in relation to
change, whether that is manifested in differences, oppositions, or antithesis. We
understand things not only by what they are, but by how they change into their
Change 61

opposites. Human beings become the sum of their changes, we contain

a multitude of oppositions within us (Brecht would call them contradictions).

Change in Beckett’s early plays

If Chekhov is our Sir Isaac Newton of change, then Beckett is our Albert Einstein. It
is Beckett who develops a kind of general theory of relativity in the realm of theatrical
change. Change in Beckett’s world is observed from two distinct vantage points:
either up close, or from a significant distance. Here we are dealing with two pro-
foundly differing scales of change: the seismic and the incremental; or, put another
way, change that registers to us versus change that is either denied or escapes our com-
prehension. From up close, nothing seems to change very much. The habitual has
a way of dulling our senses to all the infinitesimal changes that are at work. Take, for
instance, observing our child from day to day and compare this to encountering
a child we have not seen for an entire year. Both children are the same age, and yet
we see more significant change in the child that has, until then, been out of sight and
out of mind. This makes us realize how profoundly blind we can be to the changes
that are happening to us day by day, blow by blow. It is like the old adage, death by
a thousand cuts, we become oblivious to the 998 cuts that transpire between the first
and the last. Only with the last stroke do we suddenly realize: we’ve gotten old.
Unfortunately, now it is too late to do all those things we wanted to do. How could
we let such a thing happen? Beckett shows that it has been happening all along;
his characters, like us, are just too close to see it; or, unconsciously avert their
eyes to the facts.
Take Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot: very little seems to change
for them from act to act; they are still preoccupied with the travails of their
shoes or hat. It is difficult to know how much time has actually elapsed
between acts. Has it been days, weeks, months, years, decades, an eternity?
We seem to be experiencing Nietzsche’s Curse of the Eternal Return where
everything is caught in a frightening recursive loop. That is, until, Pozzo and
Lucky return. When we last saw Pozzo in Act One he was bursting at the
seams with vigor and life; by Act Two he is blind and feeble. Suddenly, we
realize that a certain amount of time must have actually elapsed, and yet Estra-
gon and Vladimir are unaware of any significant change in themselves.
A similar inability to fully process change can be seen with Winnie in Happy
Days. Beckett introduces us to this seemingly surreal, post-apocalyptic world
with the following stage direction: “Expanse of scorched grass rising center to
a low mound … Embedded to above her waist in the exact center of the
mound, Winnie.”21 At the top of Act Two we learn from the opening stage
direction that: “Scene as before. Winnie embedded up to neck.”22 We can see
this massive change, and yet Winnie herself soldiers on, attempting to behave
as if everything were as it was before: same attitude, concerns, and thought
content. Beckett’s dramaturgy of change creates worlds where he lets us see
the change his characters cannot or will not see.
62 Change

Making change manifest

It is essential to remember that talking about and demarcating change is simply
not enough. As Miles Davis insists, changes must be played. That means that the
change must be made evident in some substantial fashion. Joe Chaikin would
often say in rehearsal, when a scene changed (shifted dynamics), that the actor
needed to find his or her “other voice.” What is one’s light-hearted voice?
What is one’s serious voice? What changes from one voice to the other? The
tone? The volume? The speed? The emphasis? All four? We have to hear the
change. Or see the change in the body, from formal to casual, nervous to calm,
kinetic to still. It must be made manifest. We have to play the difference that the
change brings into being. And we must revel in these changes. It is here where
virtuosity resides. in our ability to shift on a dime, from one thing, to its oppos-
ite. We could create a Book of Changes for the actor and director. It would be
like those five-finger exercises for piano that Bach created to build the dexterity
of his students. Such a book would include the playing of such changes as:

Spatial
Far/near
High/low
Center/off-center
Left/right
Horizontal/vertical
Temporal
Fast/slow
Long/short
Static/fluid
Rhythmic/a-rhythmic
Linear/circular
Aural
Noise/silence
Loud/quiet
Polyphony/monody
Harmony/dissonance
Ocular
Seen/unseen
Clear/occluded
Light/dark
Vibrant/monochromic
Tonal
Serious/ridiculous
Sacred/profane
Change 63

Poetic/prosaic
Romantic/pornographic
Appealing/repulsive
Emotive/detached
Sensorial
Warm/cold
Soft/hard
Smooth/rough
Wet/dry
Fluid/herky-jerky
Easy/difficult
Light/heavy
Psychological
Love/hate
Happy/sad
Head/heart
Mad/sane
Kind/cruel
Strong/weak
Simple/complex

Change 101
My teacher could always solve a problem by playing a change. Once he was
working on a scene from a modern adaptation of a sequence from Homer’s The
Iliad. The penultimate scene in the play had to do with Achilles learning about
the death of his friend Patroclus. The scene required the actor playing Achilles to
give a lengthy speech, mourning the death of his dearest friend. For whatever
reason, the scene wasn’t quite working. The speech fell flat. The actor blamed the
speech, the writer blamed the actor, neither could find common ground to make
the moment work to their satisfaction. Finally my teacher said to the actor, “John,
when you hear the news of Patroclus’ death, would you mind running in the
widest possible circle of the stage and just scream.” While the actor was doing
that, my teacher placed a chair downstage. When the actor finished his mad rota-
tion around the stage my teacher said, “Now, just sit and do the speech as simply
as you can with no need to act.” The actor sat, panting, out of breath from his
raging about the stage. He did the speech in complete stillness with no acting. It
was devastating. The power of the moment was due to the radical change:

From
A mad, kinetic Achilles,
To
An absolutely still, affectless Achilles.
64 Change

That became the staging for the scene and the moment everyone talked about in
terms of the entire show. “When in doubt,” my teacher confided in me, “find
a fundamental change of dynamic. It always works.”

Conclusion
The trick of theatre is to play these changes that are found in screams, scenes, acts,
soliloquies, and characters. The great Miles Davis was once asked about playing
music; before the interviewer could finish his question, Davis interrupted, “I don’t
play music, I play changes.” The same is true for us theatre folks, our goal: play the
changes. Tracking these changes we can begin to see how the slowly coalesce into
our next element: worlds.

Notes
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.
S Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Wiley, Blackwell Press, 2009), 56
2 Sophocles, Electra, translated by Anne Carson, in The Complete Sophocles Volume Two,
edited by Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro (Oxford University Press, 2010), 222
3 Ibid., 222–223
4 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (Faber and Faber 2009), 11
5 Ibid., 12
6 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, edited by Kenneth Muir (Arden Shakespeare, 1957),
64–65 (II.3)
7 William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, edited by A.R. Humphreys (Arden
Shakespeare, 1981), 132–133 (II.3)
8 William Shakespeare, Pericles, edited by F.D. Hoeniger (Arden Shakespeare, 1963),
78–79 (III.1)
9 Ibid., 91–92 (III.2)
10 Leo Tolstoy, Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves, translated by Aylmer Maude (New
England Review, Vol. 19, No. 1, Middlebury College Publications, 1989), 142–154
11 Ibid.
12 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky,
Reprint Edition (Vintage Classics, 2008), 424
13 Leo Tolstoy, Shakespeare and the Drama in Last Steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy,
edited by Jay Parini (Penguin Books, 2009), 207–269
14 Anton Chekhov, Four Plays, translated by Carol Rocamora (Smith & Kraus, 1996),
204–205
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 156
18 Ibid., 171
19 Ibid., 188
20 Ibid., 208
21 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (Faber and Faber, 2006), 138
22 Ibid., 160
6
WORLD

Time + space + us = world

The word world (or Worold, as it was first sounded when it came into the
English language) is built out of two sturdy lexical legs. The first, wer, refers to
man; the second, ald, to an age or epoch. Put them together and we have the
ungainly sounding “Man-Age.” We could alter this gloss a bit, with a little
philological finessing, and say that when our progenitors first introduced the
Worold into our language they were looking for a word that could capture
“The-time-of-human-kind.” The word was almost immediately torn into two
distinct meanings. There was still the world as a particular time or durée, but
there was also the world as the physical space humans occupy. And so the word,
from its inception, holds us, time, and space, all in its semantic embrace.
Shakespeare’s Jacques famously informs us that “All the world is a stage,” and if
that is so, it stands to reason that “all the stage can be a world” as well. Our job, as
theatre practitioners, is to make that transmutation. To drag the world as we know
it—or suspect it to be, or would like it become—up onto our stages, so that an
audience might get a better look at it. Or, as Shakespeare’s other famous melan-
cholic, Hamlet, tells us, “whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold
as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image,
and the very age and body of the time his form and pleasure.” These are our march-
ing orders. We must be world builders of our times: past, present, and even future.
Does this mean the deployment of a kind of maximalist mimesis? Are we talking
about a scenographic exactitude down to the very bricks and mortar, or flora and
fauna, of a given world? No. As we know from the Greeks and Shakespeare,
we can create entire worlds through nothing more than language and what that
language does to the people speaking it. Whole theatrical worlds can be conjured
in a tone of voice, a shrug of a shoulder, or the wink of an eye. A vast array of
66 World

behavioral ineffables ultimately go into the evocation of a theatrical world. The

secret behind this theatrical conjuring is to remember that a world is more than
just a noun. Or as the philosopher Heidegger would say:

It worlds: when the world becomes a verb

Heidegger would often take the word world and turn it into a verb; explaining,
in a language somewhere between philosophy and poetry, that, “the world
worlds,” or, “It worlds.” In other words, the world works on us; it creates, trans-
forms, and can even destroy us. The world, in short, is a force. The proof of this
is found in the mark it leaves on each of us, impacting on how we behave, what
we believe, fear, and care about. All this, shaped by the world we collectively
inhabit. We cannot escape its gravitational pull.
Since the world imbeds itself into our bodies and our minds, we can read it
through our behaviors. How we comport ourselves tells us a great deal about
what sort of world we occupy. We can walk into an office and know everything
about its culture by how people dress, carry themselves, keep up their workspaces,
avoid or embrace noise, smile or not. All of this is the behavioral math that we
add up to understand what world we are entering. This is a language that is often
more articulate than words, with its own grammar and syntax. We absorb all this
on an almost subliminal level.
The trick for us theatre practitioners is to turn the world-as-noun into the
world-as-verb. To ask ourselves what does the world of the play do to its dramatic
inhabitants. How has it shaped them and how does it continue to exert a certain
gravitational force on their disposition and actions. This, more than scenography,
orients an audience in terms of understanding the world they are encountering. It
is the courtiers’ behaviors rather than the physical trappings of the court that let us
know what kind of kingdom we have entered.
This means that a company of actors needs to build this imaginary world for
themselves, making it vivid in their mind’s eye, so that it will translate into their
bodies and their behaviors. The collective focus creates an aura which is not only
the outward signage of the world (how it manifests itself in their bodies) but also
in their collective energy or presence. It is this energy (the metabolic rate of
a company, how tightly they are wound) that, like a low-frequency sound, also
works on the audience’s imaginations. At its most successful, this energy becomes
a kind of rhythm that passes from the actors to the audience. One can think of this
energy as a kind of music or contagion that spreads during the course of a play’s
unfolding. It must spill out of the actor and into us. Let us turn our attention to
the ways in which the world-as-verb, or world-as-contagion, can be accomplished.

Ox on my tongue: the world of Agamemnon

The Watchman at the opening of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon tells us at the end of
the prologue:
World 67

WATCHMAN
Oh how I long to see the master of this
House and touch his hand.
For all the rest, I keep silent.
Ox on my tongue.
This house if it could talk would tell a tale.
But me—I talk to those who know
And then
I lose my memory.1

The Watchman’s silence is fine. We don’t need words to understand worlds.

Bodies will do. How they comport themselves, the sounds rather than the
words themselves, their very metabolic rate can tell us what we need to know,
often better and faster than the comprehension of finely wrought speech. Words
can lie, bodies too, but less so.
“This house,” also known as “The House of Atreus,” is our world. There are
other, far-off worlds like Troy, but they might as well be a fiction. The world
that consumes these characters in their sleep and in every waking moment is this
house of Atreus which, if it could talk, “would tell a tale.” What kind of tale?
The Watchman has already, inadvertently, told us much. It is, it seems, a place
where sleep is restless, dreamless. In fact it is so bad that our Watchman cannot
close his eyes, since:

WATCHMAN
—fear stands over me
Instead of sleep.
And whenever I think to sing or hum a
Tune to stay awake
Then my tears fall.
This house is in trouble.
The good days are gone.2

This is the verb-ness of the house. Where there should be sleep, there is fear; instead
of a tune, there are tears. This is the world Agamemnon and its dark secrets are
insinuating themselves not only in the mind and body of the Watchman but every-
one who lives under the roof he watches from; chorus and Clytemnestra alike.
What is it like to lose a night’s sleep? Two? Three? Where is the tipping point?
When does lack of sleep begin to irrevocably change our relationship to reality?
Can the actors who are representing these lost souls, begin to see the world
through such sleepless eyes? Ten years of restless nights. What kind of person does
that make? What kind of community? How does it manifest itself in their bodies?
With such questions we have begun the task of world building. So what do we
know so far? We have entered a world of fear. A world that no longer sleeps, or
speaks, and longs to forget. A world, it seems, to already be wary of.
68 World

The Chorus of Old Men appear and echo the Watchman’s state, telling us,
they are anxious—not sure what lurks in the dark. They commend themselves
for being restrained persons. Otherwise they fear their heart would race past
their tongue and “pour out everything.” There is safety in silence. Their way of
survival is simple: remain obscure, just keep their little life to themselves. This is
their secret creed, follow this path of least resistance and all will be well. Fate
will overlook you; after all, it’s too busy going after the big or famous. Notice
the dramatic genius of Aeschylus, he does not have the Watchman or the
Chorus play fear, but rather play fighting the fear. This means remaining silent,
restraining oneself, carrying on, keeping a low profile, watching oneself so one
doesn’t give in. There is a toll for such self-vigilance. We read through the toll
to its root cause: the fear. It is the thing they work, with all their strength and
cunning, to keep at bay. This is like the old adage that an actor who plays
someone with an illness should never play the illness, rather the fighting of the
illness, which is what most humans do when the world or our bodies turn
against us.
The arrival of The Messenger and then Agamemnon himself, gives the world
a reprieve from their fear, but it returns as soon as Agamemnon walks on Cly-
temnestra’s red fabrics and into the house. What little confidence they had
drains from the center of them. Their minds are now on fire. Kassandra adds
kindling to the blaze inside their heads with her intimations of the past, she sees
this house for what it actually is, a place of ancient sins:

KASSANDRA
… Evils. Evils long ago.
A chorus of singers broods upon this house,
They never leave,
Their tune is bad, they drink cocktails of
Human blood and party through the
Rooms.
You will not get them out.
They are kin to the Furies and sing of
Original evil,
Marriage beds that stink of life gone wrong.3

This, ultimately is the source of the fear, anxiety, and sleepless nights. These
unseen, unheard phantoms of the past, who haunt this place and its commu-
nity. Have you ever walked into an empty room and felt an immediate dis-
ease and later learned, just prior to your arrival, a terrible argument occurred?
How does one account for such moments of intimation? Is it the presence of
Kassandra’s unseen phantoms? A change in the electro-magnetic make-up of
the room? Or just a quirk of coincidence? However one wants to justify this
intimation of profound dis-ease, it is this that makes the world of Agamemnon
spin off its axis.
World 69

Shakespeare: when worlds collide

Perhaps the greatest of world builders is Shakespeare. Who but Shakespeare has
brought so many different worlds to his own Globe? Here are just a few: Agincourt,
Antioch, Aragon, Arden, Athens, Bohemia, Denmark, Ephesus, England, Egypt,
France, Illyria, Mytilene, Padua, Rome, Roussillon, Scotland, Tarsus, Troy, Tyre,
Venice, Verona, and Vienna. Each of these foreign locales is its own unique world
with its own rules and rhythms of being. It is most likely that Shakespeare’s multitu-
dinous depictions of foreign lands have less to do his wanderlust and more to do
with creating a shorthand for his audience in terms of what worlds they were about
to experience. A discerning Elizabethan audience member would know the imme-
diate differences between the hot-blooded populace of Verona versus the more
cool and calculating Venetians. They would know the Danes were prone to drink
and the Viennese to debauchery. Just the very mention of these distant lands would
conjure an entire world for Shakespeare’s audience. As a result, Shakespeare’s use of
such foreign locales is similar to a composer who aides in the comprehension of his
score with notations like Lento or Allegro. For Shakespeare, place names like
Aragon or Ephesus are just as expressive.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Shakespeare is interested in antithesis, when
worlds collide. He wants to know what happens when the world of Sicilia meets
the world of Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, or the world of the Montagues meets
the world of the Capulets in Romeo and Juliet, or the world of men meets the
world of women in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Perhaps the most consequential of colli-
sions happens in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, where we see how the real
world of the Rialto impacts (and ultimately infects) the almost fairy-tale-like land
of Belmont. Here, our understanding of a given world is through difference,
opposition. Often, in contemporary Shakespeare productions there is a tendency
to play down the differences in tone between the Rialto and Belmont in order to
create a more unified sense of overall production style. This impulse seems to go
against Shakespeare’s fundamental sense of antithesis as the basic building block of
being. For Shakespeare, all meaning grows out of the play between basic oppos-
ites. It is only through the differences between the Rialto and Belmont that we
understand each world, and, even more importantly, understand what happens
when the two come in contact with one another. This intermingling of worlds
becomes the entire thrust of the play, it leads to the play’s dramatic resolution and
shows the collateral damage of this intermingling. The return from the Rialto
brings a kind of virus of discontent to Belmont, its beauty and magic diminished
by its interactions with the world of commerce. Let us begin by looking at each
world in isolation.

”What news on the Rialto”

Antonio is sad. This is the first thing we learn about this man and the world he
inhabits. Antonio tells us immediately, from his very first line:
70 World

ANTONIO
In sooth I know not why I am so sad.
It wearied me, you say it wearied you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me
That I have much ado to know myself.4

His friends believe that his sadness is tied to the vagaries of being a merchant.
Where one never knows what might befall their investments thanks to the pre-
carious seas that taunt the ships that bear their goods. This is a world where
something is “now worth this” and then suddenly, “now worth nothing.”
A man may “lose it that do buy it with much care,” and perhaps, most tellingly,
where reason is “as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall
seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth
the search.” In short, a world where everything is viewed as investments, yields,
and shortfalls. These last three little words have many offspring who populate
the everyday speech of these men, words like “argosies,” “ventures,” “spices,”
“silks,” “merchandise,” “worth,” “fortune,” “estates,” “business,” “rates,”
“monies,” “thrift,” “debts,” and “credit.” Credit is the last of these mercantile
words to be uttered in the opening scene of the play. It is the last resort, a word
that they would rather not use, let alone put into practice.
Within this world of commerce enters Bassanio, who speaks of love; a state of
being that at first seems to be the very antithesis of this mercantile world. Yet, as
we will see, it too requires a certain investment, emotional rather than monetary,
and there is never any guarantee in one’s return. It would seem Bassanio is the
source of Antonio’s sadness; a young man in whom Antonio has clearly invested
too much money and emotion, with no immediate return in sight.
But the two men have a bond, which is different from the bond that Antonio
will enter into with Shylock in the following scene. Antonio longs for the
bonds of the old world, which hold people together by words, deeds, and
shared history. The modern-day bond that Antonio enters with Shylock is
purely predicated on business, based on one’s appetite for risk. Perhaps we could
say that risk is the god of this world. A dangerous and fickle deity. No wonder
Antonio’s friends are so skittish, so quick to lose themselves in carnival, tricks,
and seductions—all, undertaken, no doubt, to forget their constant, unspoken
worry. This is the world of the Rialto. And what about:

Belmont
Portia is weary of her world. This is what she tells us, in the opening lines of
the second scene, which takes place in Belmont. And even though she expresses
herself in prose, rather than the verse of Antonio and his fellow merchants,
World 71

there is something high fantastical about the world Portia inhabits. Hers seems
to be a world from the long-lost past, where marriages are still determined by
fathers (even from their graves) who devise elaborate tests for their daughter’s
future suitors. In this instance, three mysterious caskets of gold, silver, and lead
are presented to those that seek Portia’s hand. The man who chooses the correct
casket, wins Portia as his bride. Suitors from near and far have gathered to try
their luck at winning the much-coveted young lady. Just outside the door
awaits a Neapolitan Prince, the County Palatine, the Lord of Aragon, and news
has it that the grand Prince of Morocco is just moments away from arriving to
join the competition.
If the Rialto is a world of commerce, then Belmont is a land of culture. Here
there is no talk of “ventures,” “rates,” or “credit,” but instead, a steady flow of clas-
sical references. Here the likes of “Sibylla,” “Diana,” “Phoebus,” “Hercules,”
“Lichas,” the “Dardanian Wives,” and “the Hyrcanian deserts” are all effortlessly
evoked in passing conversation. Not to mention the music which is always close at
hand, ready to fill the air, and soothe the mind. Along with these mythical allusions
and melodious harmonies, there are also the theatrical trappings which surround the
winning of Portia. This is replete with curtains that are drawn to dramatically reveal
mysterious caskets, portraits, and riddles written with great calligraphic splendor. In
short: this is an enchanted realm, the stuff of fairy-tales and romance. A world as far
from the Rialto as humanly possible, not separated just by geography but by time
itself. We might as well be in an entirely different epoch. But the eco-system of this
world is quite delicate and, as we shall see, easily contaminated by the commingling
of those from Belmont with those of the Rialto. This begins with the arrival of
Bassanio and his subsequent winning of Portia. This contamination will continue
when Portia, now in disguise, follows Bassanio back to Venice to aide him and his
friend Antonio from the wrath of Shylock.

Fallen worlds: Act Five of Merchant

Antonio was sad, Portia weary; but, in Act Five, when we meet Lorenzo and
Jessica, who are now in Belmont, it feels as though their woes are deeper and
perhaps all the more irrevocable. The images they conjure are all of failed lovers
from classical mythology: “Troilus,” “Cressida,” “Thisbe,” “Dido,” “Medea,”
and now, Lorenzo adds Jessica’s name to this lamentable list of betrayed loves.
She who has left her father, Shylock, and his religion to be with her lover
Lorenzo, whose love she now doubts. Lorenzo attempts to lighten the mood by
relying on a favorite Belmont custom, music. Musicians appear and music
begins to fill the night air, but it seems to have lost its ability to work its charms
on the likes of Jessica. This sets the discordant note for the entire act, one that
can never quite seem to recover the harmony Lorenzo so praises. He warns that
one who is not moved by music finds “The motion of his spirit dull as night/
And his affections dark as Erebus.”5 Erebus being another name for the under-
world of the Greeks. Lorenzo should know such things; scholars believe this
72 World

role was performed by Shakespeare himself. The returning Portia is, indeed still
moved by the music she hears, but asks for it to cease, it seems she is more
affected by the “dull night” than “the concord of sweet sounds.” She hopes
against hope that the night that envelops her is not Lorenzo’s “dark night of
Erebus,” telling us that “This night methinks is but the daylight sick/It looks
a little paler. ’Tis day/Such as the day when the sun is hid.”6 But, try as she
might to use language to rewrite the night, it is darkness that does, indeed,
surround her.
Part of her melancholy is, in part, of her own making. She has set her newly
wed husband up to fail her own personal test: having insisted he never part with
the ring she has given him, she witnesses his prompt relinquishment, in Venice, to
her very self in disguise. Granted it was given in payment for her aiding Antonio
against the litigious wrath of Shylock, but still it has altered her faith in Bassanio.
Her fairy-tale world of Belmont has not prepared her for the complex human
interactions of Venice. One cannot help feeling it is more than the exchange of
rings that is unsettling this night. The harmony that has been talked about, has
been broken by the treatment of Shylock, who not only has lost his daughter, but
also, and perhaps just as devastating, the freedom to practice his faith. The latter
was taken from him by Portia herself. It was she, disguised as a judge, that outwit-
ted him from his exacting a pound of flesh from Antonio. But more than that, she
went one step further, demanding that Shylock must renounce his own religion.
Where is the “quality of mercy” that Portia spoke so highly of in this final action
of hers? It is almost impossible for the play to shake this off, let alone speak of it. It
weighs on the world of Belmont, even though no one is able to locate it as the
source of their dis-ease. It rhymes with Antonio’s untraceable sadness that begins
the play. Just as the “muddy gesture of decay” (our earthly bodies), cannot hear
“the harmony of our immortal souls,” it also cannot hear when that harmony has
been broken. They are sad and know not why. But we have begun to have an
inkling for what is at the root of this collective discontent. It would seem, in all
instances of the play, the sense of despair they feel is always a direct result of how
one individual has been mistreated by another. This is common to the world of
the Rialto, but new to Belmont.
In the end, the world of the Rialto and the world of Belmont merge, for
better or worse, in Portia’s final forgiveness of Bassanio: “Swear,” she tells him,
“by your double self/And there’s an oath of credit.”7 This is a strange new
word to be sounded in Belmont, a jarring discordant note in the “music” of this
fairy-tale kingdom. We might have expected a more elevated word like “faith.”
But in this newly fallen world, “credit” will have to do.

Making worlds manifest

These worlds, as we’ve said, are brought into focus through opposition. We begin
by converting Shakespeare’s verbal representation (allusions, motifs, and patterns)
into distinct energies which can be discerned through the following two dynamics:
World 73

1.
MOVEMENT
There seems something orderly and formal about how one moves through
the world of Belmont. Much of this is dictated by the ritual test which provides
such a structure to the life of household. Suitors arrive, are put through the
precise phases of the test, and dispatched. All of this functions like clockwork.
Here everyone is engaged in the rigors of presentation; comporting themselves
with the utmost grace and exactitude. Just like a solemn performance.

PORTIA
Let music sound while he doth take his choice;
Then if he lose he makes a swanlike end,
Fading in the music.8

Everything in Belmont seems orchestrated. Compare this with the Rialto,

one of Venice’s great thoroughfares, where everything is random and all
manner of people intermingle, haggle, gossip, jest, provoke, and move on
at their whim. This is urban life in all its excess, randomness, eccentricity,
and general spillage. There is no discernible order, bodies are alert, available,
ostentatious, anxious, as is:

2.
RHYTHM
The metabolic rate of the Rialto feels hurried or rushed as opposed to Bel-
mont, where things unfold in a slow and stately fashion. The Rialto is all
about being in- between where you come from and where you are going.
The Rialto is that distance between points that wants to be traversed as
quickly as possible, so that one can get on with one’s business, life, romance.
There is always something pulling at Antonio and his friends to move on.

SALERIO
I would have stayed till I had made you merry,
If worthier friends had not prevented me.

ANTONIO
Your worth is very dear in my regard.
I take it your own business calls on you,
And you embrace th’ occasion to depart.9

On the Rialto there is no time, there is always somewhere else to be, someone
else to meet. Everyone becomes a variation of the White Rabbit in Alice in
Wonderland, preternaturally late for everything. Compare this to Belmont
where
74 World

time slows to the point of ceasing to be. This is the time signature of deliber-
ation, the defining state of each suitor. Time stops and is only restored after
the decision is made. If one were a composer, and the Rialto and Belmont
were musical movements, rather than worlds with their own unique energies,
one might be inclined to notate them in the following fashion: Belmont,
stately; Rialto, scherzo.

These are some of the ways to begin to translate Shakespeare’s verbal indicators
into behaviors that can conjure worlds. Having established this, we can then see
what sort of impact each world might have on the other when they collide;
how we, as humans, are highly susceptible to the worlds we encounter; even
those that, on the surface, seem so radically other than our own. The key to
gaging that impact can be found in what is gained and lost after the collision.
This is a fundamental Shakespearean question. Shakespeare, in many ways was
what we could call, a hinge author. He was an artist who was living between
two worlds: the static world of the Medieval Times and the new dynamic world
of the Renaissance. Much of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is directly or indirectly
related to this huge transformation in civilization.

Worlds within worlds: Chekhov and Jakob von Uexküll

The characters of Shakespeare (and the characters of Greeks, as well) all exist in
the same worlds, they may each deal with the demands of that world differently
but they are all responding to the same atmosphere, stimuli, and realities that are
made manifest by the world at hand. This only changes when they change
worlds; say, moving from the Rialto to Belmont. But when we arrive at Chek-
hov, a new phenomenon emerges: everyone is inhabiting one world, but that
world is radically different from each person’s perspective. In Chekhov, we begin
to realize that there can be worlds within a world.
This view mirrors that of the great bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexküll
(1864–1944), who developed the theory of Umwelt, this is the belief that every
living thing is a subject that lives in its own world, of which it is the center.
They may inhabit the same space, but due to the radical differences in their
needs and perceptions, they might as well be existing in entirely different universes.
Uexküll explains:

We begin with a stroll on a sunny day before a flowering meadow in

which insects buzz and butterflies flutter, and we make a bubble around
each of the animals living in the meadow. The bubble represents each ani-
mal’s environment and contains all the features accessible to the subject.
As soon as we enter into such a bubble, the previous surroundings of the
subject are completely reconfigured. Many qualities of the colorful
meadow vanish completely, others lose their coherence with one another,
and new connections are created. A new world arises in each bubble.10
World 75

Such is also very much the case for late Chekhov (The Three Sisters and The
Cherry Orchard), where characters are occupying the same space but seem to be
behaving as though they were in completely different realities. Or, to put it in
terms of Uexküll, each in his or her own perceptual bubble that constitutes
their own world.
Take Chebutykin, the elderly army doctor who has known the three sisters since
they were children. In many ways Chebutykin’s situation resembles Uexküll’s
famous description of the Umwelt of a tick. This solitary insect climbs to the tip of
a protruding branch and waits to fall onto small mammals who might run beneath
it. Uexküll tells us:

This blind and deaf bandit becomes aware of the approach of its prey
through the sense of smell. The odor of bur rich acid, which is given off
by the skin glands of all mammals, gives the tick the signal to leave its
watch post and leap off … It only uses its sense of touch to find the spot
as free of hair as possible to bore past its own head and into the skin tissue
of the prey. Now, the tick pumps a stream of warm blood slowly into
itself.11

A tick can wait up to 17 years for the occurrence of a mammal passing beneath
him, otherwise it remains dormant, in a kind of half stupor, waiting to
become activated. This may sound a rather extreme metaphor for our seem-
ingly distractible doctor, but in the course of The Three Sisters, he only really
comes to life when Irina enters the room. Then, suddenly this man, whose
attention is otherwise given over to reading the newspaper, suddenly must be
near her. She enters the room and he immediately is kissing both of her white
hands, calling her his “little white bird.” After lavishing upon her a wildly
expensive gift he confesses:

CHEBUTYKIN
My darlings, my treasures, you are all I have, to me you are the most
precious creatures on the face of the earth. Soon I will be sixty, I am
an old man, a lonely insignificant old man… Without my love for you,
I am worthless…
(To Irina)
My darling, my child, I have known you since the day you were born…
I held you in my arms… how I loved your dear mama…12

It may very well be that Chebutykin had an affair with their mother and that
Irina is actually his illegitimate daughter. Be that as it may, Irina is everything to
Chebutykin; as for all the rest of life, he continually mutters, “What difference
does it make? It doesn’t make any difference at all.” Irina is his difference. Irina
is his world. It is all that he sees, all that matters. Whatever else recedes in the
background, just a blur and an occasional annoyance.
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What is true for Chebutykin is true of almost all the characters of The Three
Sisters; they may momentary inhabit the same location in space, but they are in
completely other worlds. This begins with the three sisters themselves who can
no longer tolerate their present world. The house they grew up in is now a ghost
of its former self. It once seemed as though it were the very center of the universe
and now it might as well be a distant, cold, dead planet drifting in space. Once it
was full of soldiers, suitors, parties, life. And now? A certain melancholy, like fine
dust, coats everything they touch. But for Natasha, their brother’s intended, this
same house might as well be a grand palace. She is Napoleon and this house is
her Europe. She will conquer it room by room until it is all hers. The
few suitor/soldiers who gather, from Tusenbach and Vershinin to Solyony and
Fedotik, see the living room that Natasha has just annexed as another kind of
battlefield where they attempt, night and day, to prove themselves before these
three sisters and each other; it is a hierarchal world where Vershinin is the undis-
puted alpha male. And so: same surroundings, different worlds. This is one of the
many dramatic innovations of Chekhov. With such a dramaturgy, a director and
a company of actors must first develop their sense of the world as objectively as
they can and then break that world down into smaller worlds that each character
or characters inhabit. This will give an audience the variegated density of Che-
khov’s sense of reality. A world of multiple perspectives which brings us ever
closer to a representation of how our own world actually works.

Worlds that are out of sight, but never quite out of mind
Then there are worlds that are out of sight, kept at bay, far from the seeming
domesticity that is represented onstage. Take Caryl Churchill’s aptly titled Far
Away where the real world, a world of violence and oppression, is kept well
hidden from immediate view. It is resolutely elsewhere; and yet, as we will
slowly learn, this does not stop it from entering into the imaginations of the
characters we meet and impacting upon their actions.
The play begins with the simplest of stage directions: “Harper’s house.
Night.” It is two in the morning and Harper is confronted by her visiting niece,
Joan, who cannot sleep. We learn that “It is hot in the daytime here, but cold
at night”13 and that the stars are brighter here because “there are no street
lights.”14 We also learn from Harper that this is a world where:

There are all sorts of birds here, you might see a golden oriole. People
come here specially to watch birds and we sometimes make tea or coffee
or sell bottles of water because there’s no cafe and people don’t expect
that they might get thirsty. You’ll see in the morning what a beautiful
place it is.15

In other words, we are in a remote region, far from the city and all its hustle
and bustle. It sounds bucolic, doesn’t it? There’s just one little problem. Joan
World 77

heard a scream. Harper says it was an owl. That may very well be, but Joan
wants to know what her uncle was doing carrying a sack that seemed to be
carrying a body into the nearby shed. Harper says that Joan’s uncle is throwing
a little party. Joan wants to know, if it was a party, why was there blood on the
ground? Harper explains their dog was accidentally run over earlier that day; but
this is not particularly convincing, since she has a somewhat difficult time
remembering the dog’s color and name. Nor is Harper ultimately able to explain
away why Joan’s uncle was beating a man and his children with, what Joan says
looked like, a metal pipe. By now this bucolic world, this world of simple
country pleasures, has slowly receded and another reality has asserted itself:
a world of shocking brutality.
This dynamic of a hidden world slowly revealing itself is repeated again in
the following scene. Now Joan is a grown woman, fresh out of college and
starting her first job at a factory that makes festive party hats for state-
sponsored parades. At first the audience, like Joan, is completely captivated by
the colorful fabrics and fantastic shapes that make up the various hats that she
and her colleague Todd are busy constructing. Between their seemingly incon-
sequential small talk, we hear about certain televised trials that occur every
night till four. Todd, we learn, obsessively watches them; while Joan, perhaps
having learned her lesson from Harper, avoids them. We are also told, through
Todd, that “there is a lot wrong with this place”16 but such things cannot be
talked about openly. Finally, it is revealed what the hats, late-night trials, and
state-sponsored parades all have in common. This time, instead of hearing
about these secret connections, Churchill brings them before our very eyes
with the following stage direction:

A procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on

their way to execution. The finished hats are even more enormous and
preposterous than in the previous scene.17

And so, the quaint world of making party hats is overturned, revealing an elaborate
and surreal dystopia. No amount of outlandish headwear can now hide this central
and unnerving fact. We see, retroactively, how this cleverly masked totalitarian state
exists on the periphery of our central characters’ lives. How, whether they like it or
not, their seeming innocent artistic endeavor is somehow complicit in this larger
state-wide oppression.
Finally, in the third and last scene, the world of normalcy and the world of
brutality are no longer separated from one another, now they co-exist in a new
nightmarish symbioses. Joan, who has returned to Harper’s far-off home, tells
Harper of her harrowing journey:

I went through towns I hadn’t been before. The rats are bleeding out of
their mouths and ears, which is good, and so were the girls at the side of
the road. It was tiring there because everything’s been recruited, there
78 World

were piles of bodies and if you stopped to find out there was one killed
by coffee or one killed by pins, they were killed by heroin, petrol, chain-
saws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, the smell of smoke was where we were
burning the grass that wouldn’t serve.18

We can take what Joan and the other characters say about this new world order
as some sort of actual post-apocalyptic reality; or, as a type of psychosis which
results from what Freud calls Verleugnung. This term, often translated as denial or
disavowal, is used by Freud to describe the “mode of defense which consists in
the subject’s refusal to recognize the reality of a traumatic situation.”19 When
the psychic pressure of such denial is sustained over long periods of time it can,
according to Freud, split the subject’s ego in two.20 This leads to the loss of
reality and a plunge into psychosis.21 Churchill leaves it to us to decide whether
the world we see at the end of the play is an actual intrusion of the real, or
a by-product of a kind of collective psychosis. In either scenario, it is impossible
for her characters to barricade themselves from the brutality and oppression of
the world that exists just on the periphery of their existence. There is no fortress
of domesticity strong enough to withhold the relentless onslaught of this actual
negativity. It will either break through literarily in the form of rebellion, or fig-
uratively in the guise of psychosis. No matter how far away we might try to
keep it, it will ultimately find us. There is, as the old saying goes, “no spoon
long enough to sup with the devil,” or, as Kafka warned in his 52nd Zurau
Aphorism. “In the battle between man and the world, bet on the world.”22

Building worlds bit by bit: the art of points of concentration

My teacher loved to continually change the staging of a scene from one rehearsal
to the next, for no discernible rhyme or reason. From the outside it seemed as
though he were interested in change for change sake, but when pressed on this
preference for such a process he would reply, “When you walk into an art gallery
do you go and buy the very first painting that meets your eye? No, you wander
about the entire gallery; then, having gotten a sense of what is available, you
choose.” This approach had two intriguing by-products: 1). It kept the actors
fresh and 2). It built the world of a given play bit by bit. This is very close to the
concept of points of concentration, a method of rehearsing which has become,
for me, an incredibly valuable way to build worlds.
The idea of points of concentration comes from the world of improvisation
(you can find the concept in Viola Spolin’s work which is where the term
might have first been coined). The idea behind what has become points of con-
centration is that reality is too complicated to capture all at once, and can only
be replicated one strata at a time. And so, each rehearsal of a scene is given over
to a different point of concentration. The most common point of concentration
is weather related. The director simply says, “this time when you do the scene,
all your concentration should go to how the weather is affecting you. Just
World 79

concentrate on the heat, what it does to you, how you try to relieve it and
whether or not that is working.” Afterwards, the company discusses what worked
and what didn’t work in the exercise, out of this a company member might find
one thing that is useful to hold onto as the work continues; but often, there is
nothing of seemingly discernible note and the company proceeds to the next
point of concentration. Another example of a point of concentration would be,
“Character X is the most important character in the room, concentrate on Char-
acter X throughout the entire course of the scene, see how everything you are
doing is in relation to Character X, to get Character X to notice you, etc., etc.,
etc.” These points of concentration become like the paint that is applied and
reapplied by an artist to ultimately resemble the density of a landscape. Such an
image is made up of a layering of pigments that gives the finished image its tex-
ture. You are building your world, bit by bit like a painting.
Again, it is important to stress, that in such work, one thing may emerge, or
nothing. Even if nothing emerges, the ghost of the point of concentration still haunts the
scene. All scenes are haunted by what has transpired in rehearsals, there is always
some trace that can be found, that is usually now unconscious on the part of the
actor, as it often is in life. The key is to accrue enough points of concentration to
recreate the density of life in the process of being lived. And so in doing a love
scene the points of concentration might move from, “do the scene and focus on
how beautiful your partner is,” then, “do the scene and concentrate on how inad-
equate you are,” then, “do the scene and question your love of your partner.”
Such shifting points of concentration give a scene its ultimate density.
I had the wonderful opportunity to watch the great actor/director Austin
Pendleton direct Chekhov’s Ivanov with Ethan Hawke. Austin is a true master
of points of concentration and takes this approach beyond rehearsal and into
performance itself. About three weeks into rehearsal Ethan Hawke asked Austin,
“Austin, this time I’d just like to the do the entire scene without ever once get-
ting out of the settee, I know it is a long scene, but I would just love to try it
once, is that all right with you?” There is no such thing as wrong in an Austin
Pendleton rehearsal and so Ethan played the entire 15-minute scene never
moving from the settee. Contrary to everyone’s fears it was mesmerizing. After
the scene was done, Ethan asked Austin, “What do you think?” There was
a pause and then Austin said, “I think it is magnificent, but only because we’ve
spent the past three weeks doing everything but just sitting on the settee.” Austin
was right, the ghost of a restless Ivanov pacing back and forth still haunted the
scene, even while Ethan was absolutely still. So many ghosts haunted this scene
that the scene was able to sustain itself even when it seemed as though, on the
surface, nothing was happening. This is the power of points of concentration.

Atmospheres: or, embodied world building

Another powerful tool for world building is Michael Chekhov’s notion of
Atmospheres. This is done through a more imaginative/intuitive fashion than
80 World

Stanislavsky’s analytical, fact gathering of Given Circumstances. Chekhov begins

by telling us that:

Atmospheres are limitless and to be found everywhere. Every landscape, every

street house, room; a library, a hospital, a cathedral, a noisy restaurant,
a museum; morning, noon, twilight, night; spring, summer, fall, winter—every
phenomenon and event has its own particular atmosphere … Atmospheres
exert an extremely strong influence upon your acting. Have you ever noticed
how, unwittingly, you change your movements, speech, behavior, thoughts
and feelings as soon as you create a strong, contagious atmosphere, and how it
increases its influence upon you if you accept it and succumb to it willingly?23

Now when I was a student, such thinking was deeply suspect, atmospheres were
strictly forbidden because they were felt to create a general wash of feeling over
a given scene, forever muting its true dynamics. Chekhov combats this critique
with a countervailing force that he calls “the individual feeling” of the character.
Chekhov asks us to imagine an accident on the street and the response of the
various witnesses which range from complete sympathy to total indifference. He
concludes that we must make a distinction between atmosphere and individual
feeling. To this end, he notes: “we must call atmospheres objective feelings as
opposed to individual subjective feelings.”24 Chekhov goes on to use the example
of a group of festive young people who enter a haunted house and how the
objective feeling of the house’s atmosphere ever so slowly overpowers the
groups festive mood, but this diminishment is still in varying degrees of individ-
ual subjective feeling, with one or two party goers still oblivious to profound
change in atmosphere. And so, one negotiates one’s comportment between the
“atmosphere” of the world and the “individual feeling” of each character.

From zip code to direct address

My teacher used to say:

Delivering a show is like delivering the mail. You need to know the zip code
of both, whether the world of your play is, say, 10002 (i.e., the Lower East
Side) or 10023 (i.e., the Upper West Side), and you need to know that the
actual distance between those 21 little digits is huge; it separates two entirely
different worlds. So, you want to enter a rehearsal room with a sense of the
play’s zip code and with each passing day you want to move closer and closer
to the play’s actual address, its final destination.

This, of course, begs the question, “What happens if you come into the rehearsal
room with the wrong zip code?”
I remember the first day of tech for a production of Euripides’ Orestes that
my teacher directed. When I arrived, bits and pieces of the set were being
World 81

hauled out of the theatre and thrown into a huge awaiting dumpster. My first
thought was that my teacher had cut some scenery from the production, little
did I know he had gone and cut the entire set and every single costume. When
I entered the theatre I discovered the stage now stripped bare and in the midst
of being painted white by a team of industrious stagehands.
“What’s going on?” I asked the stage manager.
“He walked in, took one look at the set and the costumes, and just said,
‘No.’ He hasn’t stopped saying that one word for the past half hour,” the stage
manager whispered with the quiet terror of someone who thought that the next
“no” would be directed at them.
My teacher’s original world for the production was based on images of the
1930s dust bowl depression, with Orestes and Electra dressed like the famous
bank-robbing couple Bonnie and Clyde. My teacher had explained this concept
on the first day of rehearsal, “Orestes and Electra aren’t these two great mythic
characters, not as far as Euripides is concerned. In Euripides’ reading, they’re
just two hooligans; anti-social misfits who just want to shoot up the place and
have a good time.” And so, to make this reading crystal clear, my teacher put
forward this Depression-era, gun-toting, bank-robbing version of Orestes. But
throughout the rehearsal process my teacher kept saying, “But who are the
Furies?” The Furies were traditionally depicted as fiends from the underworld
that were let loose to plague Orestes for having killed his mother. They formed
the chorus of the play. The question for my teacher became: what would these
Furies be in his Depression-era-Bonnie-and-Clyde-bank-robbing-analogy? At
first the Furies were re-conceived as a chain gang of prisoners that Orestes and
Electra escaped from; then, my teacher changed his mind, they became a part of
Orestes and Electra’s gang; finally, in the last week of rehearsal, they were re-
imagined as a gaggle of reporters who were constantly on the trail of the fleeing
Orestes and Electra. They took flash photos of various crime scenes, dictated
their stories of mayhem over the phone to their editors, and ran about the stage
brandishing newspapers with bold headlines of further misdeeds by this brother
and sister duo. But on the first day of tech, when my teacher saw all this vividly
brought to life, he realized he was in the wrong world.
“You see,” my teacher later explained, “The Furies are projections of Orestes’
broken mind, they are the manifestation of his guilt which has driven him
mad.” And when my teacher realized that, he realized the world of the play
wanted to be an insane asylum where Orestes had been committed and that the
Furies were simply his fellow inmates. The result made perfect sense and the
production which had been so terribly labored suddenly became effortless in its
unfolding, leading from one inspired idea to another. The world was indeed an
extension of Orestes’ madness. Setting the play in an asylum released this
dynamic in a direct, vivid, and theatrical way. My teacher had finally found the
right zip code for the world. At the time I had thought to myself, I’ll never
make a mistake like that. Cut to 16 years later when I was directing a show at
The Public Theatre, watching the stage hands dismantle the set of my show and
82 World

deposit into a nearby fleet of dumpsters. I remember asking George Wolfe, the
then artistic director of the Public, if it would be all right with my cutting the
entire set. He turned to me with a look of relief and said, “Thank God you said
that, I was afraid I was going to have to be the one to tell you to get rid of the
whole damn thing.” Sometimes you just don’t know about a world until you
see it all before your eyes.

Conclusion: on the significance of worlding the world of a play

If the actors can capture the specifics of a world in their imaginations, translate it
into their bodies, and let their bodies become the instruments for the realization
of this particular music-of-being, then we have begun the work necessary for an
audience to read the world they are encountering. From this basic evocation will
come everything else: character, action, event, etc. It all starts here, with the
verb-ness of the world. This low-frequency thrum of the world that secretly goes
about altering its inhabitants, imperceptibly, on an almost cellular level. Master
this, live this, and the rest will follow.
The power for us, as an audience, is the light these worlds shed on our own. It
allows us to return to our world with fresh eyes. It is a momentary gift of added
acuity. A gift with a somewhat limited life span, since the force of habit always
reasserts itself, dulling our perceptive capabilities, returning us from a moment of
seeing to our default stance of merely looking. But during the brief wattage of
this ocular gift, we glimpse our own world anew. A hard-won perspective, always
worth further investigation. Having examined the borders of such worlds, we can
now move to our next element, its inhabitants, aka character.

Notes
1 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (Faber and Faber, 2009) 12
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 54
4 William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, edited by John Russell Brown (Arden
Shakespeare, 1959), 4 (I.1)
5 Ibid., 130 (V.1)
6 Ibid., 132 (V.1)
7 Ibid., 136–137 (V.1)
8 Ibid., 79 (III.2)
9 Ibid., 7 (I.1)
10 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of
Meaning, translated by Joseph D. O’Neil (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 43
11 Ibid., 45
12 Anton Chekhov, Four Plays, translated by Carol Rocamora (Smith &Kraus, 1996), 151
13 Caryl Churchill, Far Away (Theatre Communications Group, 2000), 5
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.,6
16 Ibid., 17
17 Ibid., 24
World 83

18 Ibid., 37
19 J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, translated by Donald
Nicolson-Smith (W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), 118
20 Ibid., 119
21 Ibid.
22 Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, commentary by Roberto Calasso, translated by
Michael Hofmann (Schocken Books, 2006), 53
23 Michael Chekhov, To The Actor (Routledge, 2002), 51
24 Ibid., 48
7
CHARACTER

“Who’s there?”
These, as many may recognize, are the first words uttered in Hamlet. This
simple interrogative haunts every scene of Shakespeare’s play: Who is the ghost?
Who is Claudius? Who is my mother? My friend? My lover? And perhaps the
biggest mystery of all: Who is Hamlet? In the end, when all is said and done,
what we are really asking is, who are we? Or as Hamlet himself puts it:

HAMLET
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason,
how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how
express and admirable, in action how like an angel,
in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this
quintessence of dust?1

What indeed. Let us begin by exploring one of the more popular synonyms for
character: Identity. This little word comes from the Latin adverb Identidem,
which roughly translates as, “repeatedly.” Or, to get into the weeds of the
word’s etymology: “iden-t-idem,” which literally means “the same and the
same.” Both words, identity and identidem, also share the same rhythm, an
iambic repetition of de-dum-de-dum. All of this suggests, character itself is
nothing other than a repetition, a pattern of the same, that creates a kind of sta-
bility that we can then name. Hence when someone does something “out of
character,” we find ourselves saying, “That is not like you.” In other words,
that is not your pattern-of-being. How does this pattern-of-being come to be?
Some patterns we observe from infancy (nature); other patterns emerge slowly as
Character 85

a young person reaches maturity (nurture), but both coalesce at a certain point
into a stable set of repetitions that we come to recognize as making up a given
individual’s personality, these patterns-of-being ultimately become habits-of-being.
Such patterns and habits are not constructed in a horizontal fashion, like the
chain of words in this sentence, but rather vertically like a sheet of musical notation
for an orchestral piece. There are patterns atop of patterns that create the strata of
a personality. Character is a layered affair. We are a geology of selves. There is an
ur-self as infant, then child, adolescent, young adult, mature individual, etc. At
a certain point, a pattern-of-being emerges and dominates the others. In this respect,
a person is like modern-day Rome, beneath him/her are older Romes, one atop
another. The other, older selves, support the current iteration of self.
Drama is interested in the moment when this pattern-of-being is disrupted. In such
instances an existential window opens with a view of transformation. Much drama is
predicated on this simple moment when the window opens and a question enters the
room: Will the inhabitants change or remain shackled to their pattern-bearing ways?
King Lear changes, Mother Courage does not. Both are called tragedies. Drama’s
interest is rarely in what choice a character makes. Drama is really only interested in
what that choice reveals about the character. Underneath the patterns-of-being and
the layers of habit lies a secret ur-self. Drama’s job: to get to that ur-self. It is always,
ultimately, the Hamlet question of “Who’s there?” Or, as Heidegger puts it, in his
What is Metaphysics, “Tragedy is the journey from seeming to being.”2 The seeming is
the pattern, the being is what lies underneath. Drama is an excavation. One begins to
break ground when one breaks down a character’s pattern-of-being.

From seeming to being: or, through the play of mask, face, soul
This idea of moving from seeming to being, is also intimated in the work of the
marvelous French critic Alfred Simon in his writings on the theatre of Molière. It is
here Simon articulates a tripartite structure of identity that can be extrapolated
beyond Molière and put toward an understanding of dramatic characters in general.
Simon breaks down the revelation of character into three distinct phases of mask,
face, soul. Each phase is built vertically, one atop the other, giving us the archeology
of self that we began to tease out in the previous section of this chapter. Simon says,
“The Mask conceals the face, but in turn the face conceals the soul, and the soul
conceals itself. The universe of theatre, like the theatre of life, then becomes a vast
play of masks which the contemplator cannot accept as such. He must rip away
these disguises.”3 Let us break this down to make sure we understand the terms that
go into Simon’s understanding of how characters reveal themselves:

MASK
This is what we show the world. It is our public persona which
we share with strangers and acquaintances in an array of social
situations (i.e., the workplace). It is usually crafted in relationship
with our occupations and engenders certain desired responses
86 Character

from others (i.e., respect, fear, confidence, belief, etc.). Take the
character of a teacher: his mask is one of quiet authority. He is
serious, all knowing, and drops names like Heidegger and
Wittgenstein to impress his students.
FACE
Is what we show those closest to us, those who we trust
(wives, children, relatives, close friends). These are the people
with whom we can share our more vulnerable side. In this safe remove
from the world at large, the audience is granted access to this
other, often contradictory self. Take our teacher, he comes
home after a long day and sits down to read some
handy Heidegger which he actually can’t make head nor
tail of. He throws the book against a nearby wall and
switches on the television to enjoy some mindless sit-com.
This shift from mask to face is often comic.
SOUL
This is the most secretive side of ourselves, a side we keep from
even those closest to us. It is a trace of our earliest sense of self.
For our teacher, that first self was “The stupid one.” The one who
couldn’t read, the one who was always made fun of. The one who
one day said to himself, “I’ll show you.” And worked to become the
“one who knows.” But there is still a part of our teacher that will
always be “The stupid one.” In other words, a vulnerable child
that wanted, more than anything, to be loved. The shift from face
to soul is often tragic in nature.

In short: the mask is how we would like the world to see us, the face is how
we really are, and the soul is usually something about ourselves that we have
long forgotten or would like to forget. In most plays we find that characters
move through all three of these modalities. When we first meet them, they are
often showing us their mask, then as the play progresses we see more and
more of their face, and by the final act, the mask and face have dropped like
veils and we catch sight of their true soul. This does not mean that such rev-
elations are locked into such a rigid schematic unfolding. In almost every
given scene we can see how characters move from mask, face, soul, and back
again. In these instances, what we are often given are glimpses of one’s face
and soul which will grow more prolonged as the play continues to unfold. But
the movement between these three modalities of being—whether in the
course of a scene, or over the long unfolding of a play—is the way in which
dramatic characters tend to show ourselves; adjusting from one phase of being
to the other, depending on the circumstances. In short, this should be thought
of as a fluid affair.
Character 87

The playing of mask, face, soul also leads to a certain dimensionality and vir-
tuosity. This is a result of the fact that each modality of being is profoundly
antithetical to the other. It is almost as if we were dealing with three characters
rather than one unified self. The radical difference of these three phases (or
characters) can manifest itself in tone, rhythm, and intensity. It is, for the actor,
similar to playing scales; although, here she is playing modalities of being. The
audience should feel the shift from mask to face and face to soul. Learning more
about the character with each shift. The actor wants to investigate each modality
for what makes it unique in the quality of the playing. The audience must be
able to hear and feel the shift in character. That there is a tone of being for each
modality. It is this work that gives the character his or her dimensionality and
the actor the possibility of virtuosity.

Clytemnestra: mask, face, soul

What Simon sees in the work of Molière can also be applied to other authors and
their creations as well. The same tripartite structure is at work in Clytemnestra in Aes-
chylus’ Agamemnon. Her progression, is ultimately quite linear, moving from mask, to
face, to soul in large monolithic blocks of being. When we see Clytemnestra in mask-
mode, there are very few glimpses of her face and none of her soul until Aeschylus’
final revelation.
Clytemnestra, as you may recall, is King Agamemnon’s wife; the last time
they saw one another was on the island of Aulis. It was there that she had
brought her daughter to marry the warrior Achilles, only to learn this was
a ruse and that the real intention of having her daughter brought to this
island was so she might be sacrificed to please the gods and give Agamemnon
the wind his fleet desperately needed to sail to Troy. It has been 10 years
since that horrific day. Agamemnon has sailed off to Troy and Clytemnestra
has returned to their kingdom, to rule in his absence and secretly plot her
revenge upon her husband. Let us briefly look at Clytemnestra, as she reveals
herself to us:

MASK
Clytemnestra, The Inscrutable One
Clytemnestra plays the queen: regal, majestic, stately, steely, aloof, other-
worldly, all knowing, and all powerful. They call her a man-minded woman
which she must be if she wants to rule this world, and rule she does with
relentless discipline. There is never a doubt that she is in command, but her
words have a strange double-seeming meaning. There’s something under-
neath her speech, something that we can’t quite pinpoint. We sense another
secret subtext, whether she is speaking to the polis or her recently returned
husband. Later she will tell us: “I said a lot of things before that sounded
nice/I’m not ashamed to contradict them now.”4
88 Character

FACE
Clytemnestra, The Revenger
And so we learn, underneath all the public and wifely rhetoric lies a cold and
remorseless executioner who has never wavered from the justice she will exact
for her husband’s crime. She waits, with absolute patience, for the opportune
moment to murder him. She tells us, “It’s been a long long time I’ve been
pondering this/Crisis of an ancient feud/Finally, I say finally.”5 There are no
regrets for this, since according to her, Agamemnon “has the libation he
deserves/He filled this house like a mixing bowl/to the brim with evils/now
he has drunk it down.”6 If her mask seemed to suggest an ice queen, her
face reveals her to be burning with vengeance.

SOUL
Clytemnestra, A Mother Wronged
But in a final masterstroke, Aeschylus reveals Clytemnestra in an entirely
different light, giving us a brief glimpse of her soul. The Chorus accuses
her of transgressing the law. Clytemnestra’s response reminds us that
underneath the queen and the revenger lies the wronged mother. Listen to
Clytemnestra’s response to the Chorus’s accusation of evil:

Oh now you pull out your code of justice—

Call me accursed, demand my exile!
What about them. What about him?
This man who, without a second thought,
As if it were a goat dying,
sacrificed his own child,
My most beloved, my birth pang, my own—
And he had flocks of animals
to charm the winds of Thrace!7

This will be our only glimpse of Clytemnestra’s soul, but it is more than
enough; it does not necessarily justify her actions, but helps us begin to
understand them in concrete human terms.

After this, Clytemnestra has no more need for a mask, and what little soul is left
has been revealed. What emerges from the last sequence of events is a new face
which she is unafraid to show: the face of absolute authority.

Mask, face, soul: a Chekhovean encore

And what about Chekhov? Do his characters also conform to Simon’s tripartite
revelation of character? Let’s take a look at Uncle Vanya. Vanya, as you may
remember, spent his life working as a sort of clerk on the provincial estate of his
Character 89

late sister and her famous husband, the Professor. The Professor has recently
stepped down from his teaching at the university and has retired to the country
estate with his second wife, the beautiful Yelena. Suddenly, with the arrival of
the Professor, Vanya sees his life in a new and unfavorable light. He has lost all
belief in the Professor’s importance and now feels as though he squandered his
entire career in the service of a phony, an empty windbag, a nothing; all of this
makes Vanya feel even more than nothing. This is the Vanya we meet at the
play’s opening. Let us see how he unfolds:

MASK
Vanya, The Bitter Clown
Vanya plays the buffoon, constantly sending up “Herr Professor, the
‘perpetuum mobile’!”8 He is a clown-like-Robespierre, attempting
to lead a mock revolution, a palace coup on this forgotten country estate,
to overthrow the Professor’s authority and win the love and admiration
(but really just the love) of the professor’s second wife, Yelena. Here he goes
from clown Robespierre to clown Don Juan, cajoling her to have
an affair, telling her, “You’ve got mermaids blood coursing through your
veins, go, swim like a mermaid! Let yourself go for once in your life, fall
head over heels in love with another water sprite—dive head long into the
deep.”9

FACE
Vanya, The Thwarted Lover
But the real source of Vanya’s black clowning is his love for Yelena,
which becomes more real as the play progresses. This is where much
of his despondency comes from, not because the Professor is a
has-been, but because the Professor has Yelena. This is what is driving
poor Uncle Vanya mad. Listen to him speak to her, suddenly all
clowning falling by the wayside, “How else can I look at you, if I love
you! You’re my happiness, my life, my youth! I know my chances that
you’ll return my love are nil, nonexistent, but I need nothing, if only you’ll
let me look at you, listen to your voice…”10 This is the face of Vanya, that
of an unrequited lover.

SOUL
Vanya, Who Could Have Been
Another Schopenhauer Or is it? What we discover is the root of Vanya’s
pain is not the disappointment of the Professor, or the rejection by Yelena,
but a failed dream he has been hiding from throughout his whole adult
life, a dream whose absolute failure he has kept at bay, by by keeping busy,
by working for the Professor, and by pining for Yelena. It is a dream of
himself that he never had the courage or fortitude to realize. It spills out of
90 Character

him, unexpectedly, in the third act when he tells all assembled: “I might
have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoyevsky… What am I saying? I’m
raving! I’m going out of my mind!”11 It is not the Professor who is noth-
ing but Vanya. And now he must live with this nothingness for what he
calculates will be another 16 interminable years before he dies. His soul?
What soul? Is that what we should call the void he has discovered inside of
himself?

Mask/face/soul in August Wilson’s Fences

Let us take a look at August Wilson’s titanic Troy Maxson, a figure to rival
Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in the pantheon of great dramatic figures of the
20th Century theatre. Troy had much promise in baseball’s “Negro League,”
but came up the ranks at a time long before ball players like Jackie Robinson
who would break baseball’s color line. We find him in 1957, working as
a garbage man, standing up to his employers and demanding to know, “Why
you got the whites men driving and the colored lifting?”12

MASK
Fearless: “I ain’t afraid of them firing me.”13
Indomitable: “Death ain’t nothin’ … I wrestled with death for three days
and three nights and I am standing to tell you about it.”14
Devoted Husband: “See this woman … I love this woman. I love this
woman so much… I done run out of ways of loving her.”15
Self Reliant: “You ain’t gonna find me going and asking nobody for
nothing.”16
Tough Father: “Who the hell say I got to like you? … It’s my job. It’s my
responsibility… And liking your black ass wasn’t part of the bargain.”17

FACE
Guilt: confessing that he took advantage of his brother who suffered
brain damage in the war; secretly taking money from his brother’s vet-
eran’s pension, “that’s the only way I got a roof over my head.”18
Guilt: cheating on his wife with another woman who, “just stuck onto me
where I can’t shake her loose. I done wrestled with it, tried to throw her off
me … but she just stuck on tighter … I’m trying to figure out a way to
work it out.”19

A man who actually loves his sons and is trying to protect them
from the disappointments he experienced in his life. “The white man
ain’t gonna let you get nowhere with that football noway … You go on and
learn how to put your hands to some good use. Besides hauling people’s
garbage.”20
Character 91

SOUL
Tormented: A man eaten up by what he perceives of as a life of comprom-
ises. “I’ve been standing in the same place, then I got to thinking that if
I tried … I just might be able to steal second (base). Do you understand after
eighteen years I wanted to steal second … I stood on base for eighteen years
and I thought … well, goddamn it … go for it.”21

The goal? Reaching the soul of the character

The goal of theatre is to reach the soul of the character. Theatre is a kind of
metaphysical autopsy, where event upon event flushes the inner truth of
a character out into the light for all of us to see. Our insatiable desire, as an
audience, to get to the “soul of character,” is similar to the child in Baudelaire’s
famous essay on “The Philosophy of Toys”:

The overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of
their toys, some at the end of a certain period of use, others straightaway.
It is on the more or less swift invasion of this desire that depends the
length of life of a toy. I do not find it in me to blame this infantile mania:
it is a first metaphysical tendency. When this desire has implanted itself in
the child’s cerebral marrow, it fills his fingers and nails with an extraor-
dinary agility and strength. The child twists and turns his toy, scratches
it, shakes it, bumps it against the wall, throws it on the ground. From
time to time he makes it re-start its mechanical motions, sometimes in
the opposite direction. Its marvelous life comes to a stop. The child like
the populace besieging the Tuileries, makes a supreme effort; at last he
opens it up, he is the stronger. But where is the soul?22

This could pass as a perfect description of theatre, a machine whose whole pur-
pose is to produce such revelations. It does so through a sequence of dramatic
twists, turns, scratches, and shakes, until the dramatic character has been cracked
wide open. And what do we then discover? Clytemnestra revealed as a grief-
stricken mother; Vanya, a void; Troy, a man still yearning to hit a home run in
life. Here are each, as they really are, their very quintessence now shinning
forth. The question of “who’s there” that began Hamlet arrives in the end as the
lights fade or the final curtain falls. This is the nature and purpose of theatre in
a nutshell.

Shakespearean revelation of mask, face, soul

Let’s now follow Shakespeare’s Richard II’s movement of mask, face, and soul,
how these are revealed over the arc of an entire evening. When we first
encounter Richard, we meet his imperial mask. It is a work of regal art: cold,
distant, otherworldly, god-like. It is present in such pronouncements as:
92 Character

RICHARD II
We are amazed, and
thus long have we stood
To watch the feral bending of thy knee,
Because we thought ourself thy lawful king;
And if we be, how dare thy joints forget
To pay their awful duty to our presence?
If we are not, show us the hand of God
That hath dismissed us from our stewardship;
For well we know no hand of blood or bone
Can gripe the sacred handle of our scepter,
Unless he do profane, steal, or usurp.
And though you think that all, as you have done,
Have torn their souls by turning them from us,
And we are barren and bereft of friends,
Yet know: my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in His clouds our behalf
Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot
That lift your vassal hands against my head
And threat the glory of my precious crown.23

But behind this imperious mask of detached sovereignty, there is a royal face
that is shown to only his inner circle, it is a face that engenders complicity
between the King and his intimates, letting them in on his secret thoughts.
Where his mask is somewhat stern, his face reveals a lighter, more sardonic and
“naughty” or “wicked” cast of mind. When he learns that his Uncle Gaunt is
ill, he jokes with his inner circle of courtiers:

RICHARD II
Now put it, heaven, in his physician’s mind
To help him to his grave immediately!
The lining of his coffers shall make coats
To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars.
Come, gentlemen, let’s all go visit him.
Pray heaven we may make haste, and come too late.24

The same antic disposition is found when Richard learns of Gaunt’s actual
death. He begins in with his royal mask: “The ripest fruit first falls, and so
doth he/His time is spent, our pilgrimage must be.” And then, immediately
on the heels of this, he shows his face: “So much for that. Now for our
Irish Wars.”25
But, believe it or not, there is a poetic soul lurking in this seemingly detached
and idle king. We catch our first sustained glimpse of it when Richard returns
Character 93

from Ireland. At first it is hard to tell whether this is part of his mask or intim-
ations of something deeper. Let’s listen in:

RICHARD II
I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hooves.
As long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favor with my royal hands.26

Perhaps this is part of Richard’s mask, but it betrays a complicated knowledge

of his even more complicated feelings. When Richard learns a little later of his
massive defeat, this new Richard, who we’ve come to associate with his soul,
returns again for its first protracted visitation. It is the sad soul of a poet and
leads to one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches:

RICHARD II
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.27

He goes on to remind everyone that no king is able to escape death and con-
cludes this famous soliloquy with:

RICHARD II
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?28

This is Richard’s truest self, the self he hides from everyone, including himself.
In the past, when it gurgled up, he banished it just as he banished Bolingbroke.
Such humble sentiments did not help him rule. They only got in the way. And
so they were submerged. But over the remainder of the play he becomes reac-
quainted with this secret self until it becomes his new persona. We will see
Richard grappling with this secret self, after he has been completely defeated
and is brought before Bolingbroke to hand over his crown. Richard enters the
court, and tells all assembled:
94 Character

RICHARD II
(Begins perhaps with this new,
humbler persona)
Alack, why am I sent for to a king,
Before I have shook off the regal thoughts
Wherewith I reigned? I hardly yet have learned
To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my knee.
Give sorrow leave awhile to tutor me
To this submission.
(But the old catty and callow Richard cannot help but return)
Yet I well remember
The favors of these men: were they not mine?
Did they not sometime cry, “All hail!” to me?
So Judas did to Christ, but He in twelve
Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, none.
(And now, suddenly he has found his regal mask again)
God save the King! Will no man say, “Amen”?
Am I both priest and clerk? Well, then, “Amen.”
God save the King, although I be not he;
And yet Amen, if heaven do think him me.29

And so, throughout this remarkable scene, Richard’s three selves—his mask,
face, and newly regained soul—will battle for pride of place in Richard’s new
relationship with the world. Mask and face, which he has known for so long,
are not easily cast off, they will fight for their place at the table of Richard’s
consciousness until the very end; but slowly, scene by scene, soliloquy by
remaining soliloquy, Richard’s newly regained soul will grow and share itself
with Richard and those who encounter him. Listen to it speak, through Rich-
ard, to his long-suffering wife:

RICHARD II
Join not with grief, fair woman, do not so,
To make my end too sudden. Learn, good soul,
To think our former state a happy dream,
From which awaked, the truth of what we are
Shows us but this. I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death. Hie thee to France
And cloister thee in some religious house.
Our holy lives must win a new world’s crown,
Which our profane hours here have stricken down.30

In Richard’s final scene we find him, monk like; in deep meditation he tells us,
“I have been studying how to compare/This prison where I live to the world.”
Character 95

One thinks he has arrived at his new soul-sated self. He hears music but then,
his old self returns to criticize: “Ha, ha, keep time. How sour sweet music is/
When time is broke and no proportion kept.” The music “mads” him to the
point where he becomes the petulant king again and cries out, “let it sound no
more!” But, in the end, when the music stops, his soul subdues the last vestiges
of his regal mask. He blesses the offstage player, “For ’tis a sign of love, and
love to Richard/Is a strange broach in this all hating world.” Between the old
Richard who is quick to criticize and the new Richard who gives his blessing,
the soul of Richard that has been ever so gently schooling him, thinks these
following thoughts:

RICHARD II
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To hear time broke in a disordered string,
But for concord of my state of time
Had not ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me.31

This is Richard’s soul speaking, a soul that has returned and assumed its rightful
place in Richard’s consciousness. In this case, it has not only been revealed over
the course of the play, but allowed to grow. What we have witnessed is something
of a Shakespearean chrysalis.
Now, if we had to graph this journey of Richard, it might look something
like this:
RICHARD II

ACT I ACT II ACT III ACT IV ACT V

MASK FACE SOUL MASK SOUL
(King) (Wit) (Poet) FACE wins.
with glimpse emerges more emerges for SOUL
of face. and is shared the first time all
with moments in relation to BATTLE for
of mask. mask and dominance.
face.

In terms of this chart, it can be read horizontally with the dominate modality of
personality taking the top tier. We can see Richard II moving in a linear fashion
from predominately Mask, to Face, and eventually the Soul, which becomes
ascendant and tends to dominate the remainder of the play.
We can also discern in the chart a clear moment where all three modalities of
personality battle for ascendancy. In Richard II this battle reaches its zenith in
Act IV. The more the character relies on his or her soul, the more powerful it
becomes, until it stands forth as the primary feature of the character. In this
96 Character

respect, this progression mirrors Heidegger’s observation that tragedy moves

from seeming to being. Or, in our terminology: from mask to soul.

The addressee: or, it’s you, not me

Finally, we can do all the above work; we can understand the world, the char-
acter’s mask, face, or soul, and we will still be missing one essential, overriding
factor. Simply put, we must also know the other character or characters in
a given scene; without an equally intimate knowledge of these “others,” our
character will remain elusive and undefined. This, in many ways, is the final
piece of the puzzle when it comes to building characters.
My teacher was never interested in what an actor thought of his or her character.
He had very little patience for “working on an actor’s character.” “Character,” he
would say, “is highly overrated. Basically we’re just whoever we were last with;
that’s who we are, until we encounter someone else.” In this respect, you could say my
teacher had a certain affinity for Brecht’s thinking of the subject as situational. His
point of view was founded on the basic fact that we are social creatures and there-
fore adjust our selves to whoever is before us. If I am with my wife, then I am “her
husband”; with my child, then “the parent”; with my boss, “the employee”; with
the doctor, “the patient”; and so on, and so on. We are constantly shifting who we
are in relationship to who we are encountering. We could say that the work of
mask, face, soul is always in relationship to who we are turned toward. If we are
with a boss, we might very well display a mask; with our wife or child, we might
reveal our face; with our priest, our soul.
“I learn about the character by how s/he changes in relation to others. In life
you want to follow Socrates, ‘Know thyself’ but in theatre it’s more important
to ‘Know the Other.’” This point was driven home when I was working on
a scene which was yielding little results. I said to my teacher:
“I don’t understand it, the actor’s done his given circumstances, he knows his
intentions and his actions, he’s practically the character in real life and yet the
scene is flat, general.”
“He knows himself,” my teacher responded, “but not the character of his
scene partner.”
“But he’s never met this character before,” I counter defensively.
“That doesn’t mean he is devoid of opinions about him. He knows the other
character is from the city, that this fellow is well educated, from money, never
had to really work, he’s young, and idealistic, and most importantly he’s hand-
some, which means he’s good with the ladies. So, he knows, or thinks, he knows
a lot about this person. In short, this person is his rival. Now, how do you talk to
rival without letting him know he’s a rival? That’s what’s missing. How he is deal-
ing with this specific person before him. I don’t need to see ‘the character,’ whatever
the hell that is, I need to see the relationship. I learn about the character by how s/he
deals with others.”
On another occasion, my teacher commented that:
Character 97

The problem with most acting is that the actor decides his or her character is
warm and fuzzy and then plays warm and fuzzy with everyone s/he meets.
But that’s not way things work. Sure, we might be warm and fuzzy to our
child. But what about our boss who annoys us, our wife who disappoints us,
our co-worker who despises us, or the doctor who scares us? No, we treat
each of those individuals differently. A character is like a diamond, made up of
many facets, the only way you see those facets is through their different inter-
actions with others. Each interactions is a unique facet. This is how we ultim-
ately create a multi-faceted character. It is through the other, not through
yourself; you reveal your many selves through your interactions with others.

Conclusion
The word character, we are told, derives from the Greek kharakter, which referred
to a kind of stamping tool and went on to mean “a distinctive mark.” It is one of
etymology’s many ironies that so distinctive a word should now be used to name
so murky a concept as who we might be. Since time immemorial we have strug-
gled to understand this enigma, leaving us with such perennial questions as: What
constitutes character? Is character innate? Forever fixed or simply situational?
These are the fundamental questions we must return to as theatre makers.
Although recently, it feels as though the craft of acting has somewhat shirked its
responsibility to understand this complex phenomenon and decided to just focus
on the surface affect of being; constantly retrofitting this outward manifestation to
match our changing taste in what feels like relatable behavior (the variations of
naturalism from the 19th Century, all the way to today). All of this begins to feel
more like fashion, where the “size of being” becomes like each generation’s pref-
erence in the size of men’s ties. Thanks to such a particular focus, we often lose
sight of the larger picture of a dramatic character’s trajectory from seeming to
being. Two questions emerge: how to continue to make this legible and, of equal
importance, how to relate this to our next under-appreciated element: states.

Notes
1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden
Shakespeare, 2006), 257 (II.2)
2 Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt
(Yale, 2000), 112–113
3 Alfred Simon, The Elementary Rites of Molière’s Comedy, in Molière, A Collection of
Critical Essays, edited by Jacques Guicharnaud (Prentice-Hall, 1964), 34–36
4 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (Faber and Faber, 2009), 62
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 63
7 Ibid., 64
8 Anton Chekhov, Four Plays, translated by Carol Rocamora (Smith & Kraus, 1996), 99
9 Ibid., 119
10 Ibid., 102
98 Character

11 Ibid., 129
12 August Wilson, Fences (Plume Books, 1986), 2
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 12
15 Ibid., 20
16 Ibid., 19
17 Ibid., 37–38
18 Ibid., 28
19 Ibid., 63
20 Ibid., 3
21 Ibid., 70
22 Charles Baudelaire, The Philosophy of Toys, in On Dolls, edited by Kenneth Gross
(Notting Hill Editions, 2012), 20
23 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, edited by Peter Ure (Arden Shakespeare,
1959), 109–110 (III.3)
24 Ibid., 45 (I.4)
25 Ibid., 60 (II.1)
26 Ibid., 94–95 (III.2)
27 Ibid., 101–102 (III.2)
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 134–135 (IV.1)
30 Ibid., 147 (V.1)
31 Ibid., 171 (V.5)
8
STATES

States of being and their flow

States are the product of an interior self colliding with the exterior world. These
states are not to be confused with moods (i.e., happiness, sadness, nostalgia),
although moods can be a subset of states; sometimes one state can contain two
or more contradictory moods. Ultimately, states are a restless amalgam of
thoughts, feelings, moods, associations, and drives that constitute moments of
our interior life as we make our way through the course of a day. States are the
way these thoughts and feelings happen in us, their movement altering with our
ever-altering world. In this chapter we are less interested in the actual content
of a given state and more focused on the types of flow that a state can possesses.
We have designated three basic types of movement:

1.
Sequential
This type of state unfolds where one thought/feeling follows another, one
after the other. Such sequentiality can either be:
(a). Linear
Made up of the predictable movement from one experience or expression to
the next in a linear/logical fashion. Or:
(b). Quantum
Made up of the non-predictable movement from one experience or expres-
sion to the next. This is often, but not exclusively, triggered by a highly
charged situation which can result in a kind of mental or emotional turmoil.
It is still sequential in nature, but does not follow a linear/logical progression.
100 States

2.
Simultaneous
Where we experience or express two contrary states at the same exact time.
3.
Empty
A state often dulled by force of habit, where one’s mind is on auto-pilot.
Emotion is disengaged from thought and thought itself drifts in a more
random/associational manner (somewhere between linear and quantum).
The content of this state has been hollowed out to the shell of consciousness.

Sequential states are when we think, feel, and act moment by moment; where one
thought or feeling is followed by another, and so on, and so on, and so on. It can
be linear (one thought or emotion naturally growing out of another) or quantum-
like (the next thought or emotion seemingly disconnected from the previous one).
In either circumstance, the thought/emotion is its own isolated unit of experience
that follows another isolated unit of experience. This is juxtaposed with simultan-
eous states where one can experience several thoughts, feelings, or potential actions,
all at the same exact time. A sequential character is happy, then sad; a simultaneous
character is happy and sad at the same time. Most characters from the ancient
Greeks up to Molière, tend to function sequentially, moving from one thought or
emotional state to the next. Complexity is obtained by how varied their response
can be from one another (i.e., quantum rather than linear). Simultaneous characters
gain complexity by experiencing contradictory thoughts or feelings at the exact
same moment in time; they are, for example, laughing and crying in the very same
instant. Simultaneous characters begin with writers like Marivaux, Lenz, Buchner,
Ibsen, Strindberg, and grow to fruition with Chekhov and Pinter. These more
modern writers will also move their characters from simultaneous states-of-being to
empty states where the characters, for the first time in drama, begin to operate on
auto-pilot; a kind of low-level visibility of consciousness where a character’s mind
has been dulled by the force of habit; allowing it to wander, often untethered by
any real emotional response or intentional directionality. The words and actions are
there but the consciousness of the character is elsewhere, along with any actual feel-
ing. These modalities of being—sequential, simultaneous, or empty—are equally
valid ways of capturing how we experience experience. But they are very different
ways of Being-in-the-World-of-the-Play. Let us look at some examples of
sequential experiencing in Aeschylus and Shakespeare, followed by an example
of simultaneous being in Chekhov, and empty states in Buchner and Beckett.

Sequential states of a linear variety: or, being-in-the-Greeks

Sequential states which are linear unfold in a natural/logical fashion of one idea
or feeling after another. Here, the movement from idea/feeling number one
seems to organically lead to idea/feeling number two, and so on and so on. Let
States 101

us look at an example from Sophocles’ Electra. Clytemnestra is speaking to her

troublesome daughter about the murder of Agamemnon:

CLYTEMNESTRA
… your father got his death from me. From
me that’s right!
I make no denial.
It was Justice who took him, not I alone.
And you should have helped if you had any
conscience.
(new idea)
For this father of yours,
this one you bewail,
this unique Greek,
had the heart to sacrifice your own sister to
the gods.
(new idea)
And how was that? Did he have some share
in the pain of her birth? No—I did it
myself!
(new idea)
Tell me:
Why did he cut her throat? What was the
reason?
You say for the Argives?
But they had no business to kill what was
mine.
(new idea)
To save Menelaos?
Then I deserve recompense, wouldn’t you
say?
Did not Menelaos have children himself—
in fact two of them,
who ought to have died before mine
in all fairness?
Their mother, let’s not forget,
was the cause of the whole expedition!
Or was it that Hades conceived some
peculiar desire
to feast on my children instead?1

One could easily mistake this for the words of a prosecuting attorney rather than
that of a grieving mother. The speech has a driving, linear logic in its sequencing of
ideas that, again, might be more at home in the court room than between mother
102 States

and daughter and yet this how Sophocles has Clytemnestra speak. It is an example
of what the Greeks called agon-logon, a battle of rhetorical wits which is a mainstay
of genre, making at least one appearance in every extant Greek tragedy. It is
a perfectly logical, methodical argument; each point evolving naturally from the
previous point, growing like a perfect rhetorical tree. But a similar sequential linear-
ity can be found in the laments of characters as well (see any of Electra’s laments
throughout the play). This is the way Greek tragedians decided to represent their
characters’ thoughts and actions. Only in moments of madness do we see this
dynamic break down. Then the sequencing of thought and action becomes more
quantum-like than linear. In either case, the result remains sequential, one idea/feel-
ing following another, one after another. There seems to be very little room for
simultaneous states of feeling/being.
The question arises, does there need to be anything simultaneous (underneath)
this speech? A sense of guilt? Remorse? When we look at other key moments of
the play there seems to be very little beyond the desire for relief (in Clytemnestra’s
prayer), and actual, final relief, upon the (false) news that her potentially avenging
son is dead. This seems to suggest that there is no subtext underneath Clytemnestra’s
speech to her daughter. What she feels is expressed point by point, sequentially.
The points and her potential anger grow with each enumeration, giving the speech
its human velocity. Does this mean that there can be no simultaneous subtextual
playing/behavior in Clytemnestra? No. Certainly we can make a case for moments.
Our argument is just that the Greek tragedians tend to favor a sequential playing
over a simultaneous playing. Most of the time when their characters speak, they are
telling you exactly how they feel and that feeling develops as they move sequentially
from point to point. One could argue that since Clytemnestra lies throughout most
of Agamemnon that she is manifesting a kind of simultaneous playing but it is
a “performance” of absolute linear sequentiality. Here she is the consummate
actress, giving a singular performance that belies her secret desires. But for most
Greek characters, they say what they feel; word, thought, feeling, and action all
march in formation toward their inevitable destination.

Sequential states of a quantum variety: or, being-in-Shakespeare

We will argue that Shakespeare follows in this sequential development of
a character’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, but he develops and traffics in an
interesting balance between linear and quantum sequentiality to create a denser
semblance of how characters actually experience the world. In a quantum playing,
the thoughts, feelings, and actions remain sequential but are far less predictable
(i.e., linear) and often chaotic. Take this example from Hamlet; here Hamlet is
bemoaning his fate and his mother’s indiscretion:

HAMLET
Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
States 103

(new thought)
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter.
(explosive thought)
O God, O God!
(new thought)
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seems to me all the uses of this world!
(explosive thought)
Fie on’t!
(new thought)
O fie, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed: things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
(new thought)
That it should come to this!
But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two—
So excellent a king,
(tangent)
that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr,
(back to preceding thought)
so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly.
(explosive thought)
Heaven and earth,
(avoiding more thought)
Must I remember?
(remembers)
Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on.
(returns to old thought)
And yet within a month!
(new thought)
Let me not think on’t—
(new thought)
Frailty, thy name is Woman.
(back to old thought)
A little month, or e’er those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears. Why, she, even she—
(parenthetical)
104 States

O heaven, a beast that wants discourse of reason

Would have mourned longer!—
(back to original thought-line)
married with mine Uncle.
(parenthetical)
My father’s brother
(parenthetical within parenthetical)
(but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules).
(back to old idea/now a thought
motif)
Within a month!
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing of her galled eyes,
She married. O most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
(summation)
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
(and finally)
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.2

Although these thoughts do not always follow a linear thought process, they are
all still experienced sequentially, one after another. The complexity of the
thought/experiencing is created through the wild and unpredictable way in which
this sequencing unfolds. The thoughts and feelings, as they develop over the
course of the speech, become more quantum-like (i.e., unpredictable/extreme)
than linear in their development. We can see linear sequencing in the develop-
ment of ideas and feelings around the first three idea clusters of Hamlet’s speech:

1.
This too too solid flesh would dissolve
2.
The Everlasting had not fixed himself against
self-slaughter.
3.
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable the world
has become.
4.
An unweeded garden, gone to seed.

All these images of fruitlessness can be seen to grow rather organically from one
to the other, as in our Clytemnestra example. But there are also extraordinary
quantum moments of less predictable sequencing which can be seen later in the
speech where Hamlet moves back and forth between rival thoughts:
States 105

1.
Heaven and Earth!
2.
Must I remember.
3.
She would hang on him…
4.
And yet within a month!
5.
Let me not think on’t.
6.
Frailty thy name is woman.
7.
A little month.
8.
Oh, heavens a beast that wants discourse of reason
would have mourned longer.

This sequence feels less linear and predicable, more jagged and recursive in its
sequential unfolding. This gives us the impression of an actual human being
experiencing an experience in time. We could say that the speech shows us the
face behind Hamlet’s mask. The depths of his pain (the relentless motif of two
months between funeral and festivities that returns over and over as an emotional
refrain) bringing us to the shores of his soul. But even this revelation of self is
sequential in its unfolding.

Simultaneous states in Chekhov

Now let us turn to an equally distraught young man, Treplev, in Chekhov’s
The Seagull, who has a similar sense of pain but experiences it in a simultan-
eous rather than sequential fashion. Here he is, talking to his uncle about his
mother.

TREPLEV
(pulling petals off a flower)
She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me, she loves me not.
She loves me, she loves me not.
(Laughs)
You see, my Mother doesn’t love me. And why should she? She wants
romance and adventure, a whole new life to herself, a gay romantic life,
and here I am, twenty-five years old, a constant reminder that she’s not
so young anymore. When I’m not around, she’s only thirty-two, and when
I am, presto!—she’s forty-three, and she hates me for that.3
106 States

Now this sequence is usually done with great elan on the part of the actor playing
Treplev. He plays the game of “she loves me, loves me not.” Laughs when he
loses. Effortlessly mocks his mother and her kind of theatre. The general tone is
light, thrown away. But only a few moments from now Treplev will break down
and confide:

TREPLEV
I feel sorry for myself that I have a famous actress for a mother …
can you imagine a more desperate or pathetic situation: Here she
is holding court in her home, surrounded by all sorts of artists and
writers, and there, in the midst of these luminaries sits the only
nobody—me … how I suffer from the humiliation.4

Suddenly, we see that everything Treplev said before this was a ruse, a mask cover-
ing the pain of rejection. But, and this is the key to Chekhov, these latter sentiments
were present, just underneath Treplev’s earlier attempt to remain light-hearted in
his critique of his mother and her fame. Underneath this comic send-up of his
mother and her world are feelings of a darker hue that bedevil Treplev and drive
him to despair. Both were happening simultaneously. It is this subtext, happening
concurrently, just beneath the surface of his antics that gives Chekhov his unique
sense of character complexity. If Shakespeare’s characters move from:

this and this and this sequentially

Then Chekhov’s characters experience:

this
and
this
simultaneously

And so, for everything Treplev says in his first speech, there is a simultaneous/
parallel feeling that runs underneath like a magnetic current. When Treplev is
playing the “she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not-game” as a joke, he is also, simul-
taneously, dead serious. When he laughs at losing, he actually wants to cry.
When he mocks his mother and her theatre, he is secretly hiding his own sense
of inferiority until he cannot maintain the mask any longer and his true face
shows through. Here, the actor playing Treplev must maintain two contrary
emotional states simultaneously until it becomes too difficult to maintain and he
breaks down and goes from lording over his mother to confessing that he feels
like a total non-entity.
If, in Chekhov, we only play the subtext of Treplev’s first speech, the speech
will capsize under the weight of Treplev’s angst. It will also rob us of the surprise
revelation of that angst in the Treplev’s second speech. But, if we play Treplev’s
States 107

first speech without any hint of simultaneous angst, the speech will also capsize,
feeling oddly superficial. Chekhov requires a kind of simultaneous playing where
Treplev attempts to behave light-heartedly and mask his angst as best he can.
The tension between navigating these two simultaneous states is what gives
Chekhov characters their complexity. There is always a simultaneous conflict
between their public mask and their private face. Without this simultaneity
Chekhov becomes either too superficial (all mask, no face, i.e., no subtext); or
too heavy-handed (all face, i.e., all subtext). We watch to discern glimpses of
the face beneath the mask that are happening simultaneously rather than
sequentially. In the Greeks and Shakespeare a character might laugh and then
suddenly dissolve into tears; in Chekhov, the character can often laugh and cry
at the same time, not knowing which he or she actually feels at that given
moment. Part of the complexity of so many of Chekhov’s characters, rests in
the actor’s ability to keep both the surface and the subtext, simultaneously,
alive at the same time.
Another, even more extreme version of this simultaneity of playing can be
found in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard with the role of Lyuba Andreevna.
Lyuba, as you may remember from our chapter on Change, has just returned
home to her childhood Russian estate after an extended stay in Paris. Here are
her immediate, vivacious reactions to being back home:

LYUBA
I feel like jumping up and down, and waving my arms in the air!
… I can’t sit still, I’m in such a state, I simply can’t bear all this
joy … Go ahead, laugh at me, I’m being foolish, I know it…
My dear little bookcase … My own little table …5

But the past, we will learn, lives simultaneously, just underneath this outward
show of joy. We already know that the reason she first left Russia was due to
the death of her son, who tragically drowned in the nearby river. In Act Two,
we will also learn that she had an affair with another man who went on to
betray her, spending all of her remaining money and running off with another
woman. As a result of this we learn:

LYUBA
… I tried to poison myself… How stupid, how shameful.6

All of this, at various moments, must be alive in the Lyuba of Act One, as she
reconnects with her home and family, sees letters that have arrived from her
former lover, and tries to keep the tears from streaming down her face when
she is reunited with her son’s tutor. The complexity of this character, like so
many of Chekhov’s characters, rest in the actor’s ability to keep both the surface
and the subtext simultaneously alive at the same time.
108 States

My teacher always equated playing Chekhov to playing a sick person. He said:

sick people, you will notice, do not play sick. They fight playing sick with
every fiber of their being. That is what playing a Chekhov character is like.
And so, in Chekhov you never, ever, play boredom. How boring that would
be. You play people fighting boredom. Both dynamics have to be alive. First
you have to create the boredom or the pain, then you have to create the light
surface that tries to keep these darker emotions at bay. It is tricky, it is a little
like rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time; at first it is
difficult, but eventually you can master the simultaneity. It is this fight
between the positive and the negative that animates Chekhov. You have to
fight the tears for as long as you can with a smile, even though you know it is
an impossible battle, and tears will inevitably win.

It is through such a dual playing that Chekhov achieves his unique art of portraiture.
It is his way of creating depth and complexity in his characters.

The empty state: or, welcome to modernity

It is with the advent of such 19th Century German playwrights like Lenz and
Buchner that we arrive at a state of being that we could designate as empty or
contentless; where, as the old adage goes, “the lights are on, but no one is
home.” These are states in which a character goes through their days and nights
in something of a haze, a kind of low visibility of consciousness, not really aware
of either the world outside or the world within. It is a kind of affectless-ness that
knows neither sequentiality or simultaneity. There is little thought or feeling con-
tent. It is the human being on auto-pilot. This is a kind of comportment which
has existed since time immemorial, but does not find its representation on the
stage until these 19th Century authors. It first manifests itself in what Kierkegaard
designated as meaningless chatter, language that is used not so much to communi-
cate but to keep silence at bay. We can see this at work during the famous scene
in Buchner’s Woyzeck, where a military captain is chattering away as he is being
shaved by Buchner’s titular character. Here is a sampling of the Captain’s quasi-
stream-of-consciousness:

CAPTAIN
You’re going to finish early today—what am I supposed to do
with the extra ten minutes? Woyzeck, just think, you’ve still got a good
thirty years to live, thirty years! That’s 360 months, and days, hours,
minutes! What are you going to do with that ungodly amount of time?
…
I fear for the world when I think about eternity. Activity, Woyzeck,
activity!
Eternal—that’s eternal—that is—eternal— you realize that, of course.
States 109

But then again it’s not eternal, it’s only a moment, yes, a moment. Woyzeck,
it frightens me to think that the earth rotates in one day. What a waste of
time! What will come of that? Woyzeck, I can’t look at a mill wheel anymore
or I get melancholy.7

This is a state where one’s mental detritus seems to flow arbitrarily from one
image, thought, or mood to another without any discernible directionality. If
there is a governing mood for these transitory musings it would be ennui, bore-
dom, or fatigue; all of which allow the mind to wander aimlessly. This is mental
weather, thought-clouds gathering and dispersing. Such a mental disposition is not
new to humankind but its representation on stage is. In this respect, Buchner, the
dramatic poet/scientist, has made something of a discovery that feels both scien-
tific and aesthetic, capturing another type of mental state. It is a discovery that
will be further elucidated by the likes of Beckett, Pinter, Churchill, and Mamet.
Let’s listen to a variation of this dynamic in Beckett’s Happy Days:

WINNIE
… And the day goes by—quite by—without one’s having put up …
(Opens parasol)
Ah yes, so little to say, so little to do, and the fear is so great, certain
days, of finding oneself … left, with hours still to run, before the bell
for sleep, and nothing more to do, that the days go by, certain days
go by, quite by, the bell goes, and little or nothing said, little or nothing done.8

Here we find, once again, the same free-flowing effluvia of language. Its meager
goal: to pass the time. It floats on the surface of consciousness, like a buoy that
bobs about on the open sea of consciousness.

The empty state in action: rehearsing Woyzeck

Many years ago I was sitting in on a rehearsal of the great experimentalist Richard
Foreman, who was directing a production of Woyzeck. He was working on one of
the scenes between the two lowly foot soldiers, Woyzeck and Andrei. In these
scenes, the two were reprieved from their petty routines of cleaning the latrines and
having a moment of peace where they could both shoot the breeze. In the midst of
one of these scenes Richard stopped rehearsal to talk to the actor playing Andrei.

“Andrei,” Richard says, always calling the actor by the character he or she
was playing, “It is very interesting what you are doing here.”
“Really?” Says the actor playing Andrei, brightening under Richard’s attention,
since Richard rarely said anything in rehearsals and when he did, it was usually of
a critical nature.
“Yes,” says Richard, “you are listening in such a caring way, in an almost…
How shall I put it…
110 States

In an almost psycho-analytical fashion.”

“Am I?” Says the actor who was having a difficult time trying to conceal his
delight at the attention that Richard was lavishing on him.
“There’s just one little problem,” Richard murmurs, more to himself than to
the actor.
“What?” The actor says, suddenly concerned.
“You see, psycho-analysis won’t be invented for another one hundred and fifty years!”
“Oh.” The actor says, now completely dejected.
And then Richard said something that only Richard, being the great Richard
Foreman, could get away with: “You need to think of yourself as a cow.
You’re a cow and Woyzeck is a cow. You’re out in the field eating grass. Your
grass is green. Woyzeck’s grass is brown. But you don’t notice that Woyzeck’s
grass is brown because your grass is green.”
“My grass is green,” repeated the now confused actor.
“Yes. Your grass is green.” Richard repeated as though he were a Maharishi
bestowing a mantra on a young disciple. “Okay, now play the scene.”

This is another example of the empty state. Andrei is there, but not there, he is
forever elsewhere, his mind wandering freely, parallel to that of his friend Woyzeck.
They stand side by side, but are worlds apart.
Later Richard showed the company a painting of Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters
and directed their attention to the blank expressions of the people seated around the
table. “It is as if they are devoid of consciousness, one could say their consciousness
was just a degree more than the very potatoes they are eating. This is how the
upper class keeps the lower class in line, by depriving them of the means to fully
activate their minds.” This was the empty state in action. Suddenly a world began
to form in the collective imagination of the acting company, a world oppressed, not
just by the lack of material goods, but by consciousness itself.

Actor training: or the relaxed state

Much actor training these days revolves around relaxation exercises in voice,
speech, and movement. The idea behind such practice is that this is the ideal
preparation/foundation out of which all other states can grow. My teacher had
little patience for such pre-show endeavors. One day he came out on stage where
the actors were laying on their backs, warming up.

“What are you doing?” He asked, somewhat concerned.

“Warming up.” Responded a particularly blissed-out actor.
“Why?”
“To relax.”
“Relax!?” My teacher said, shocked. “Who said anything about being
relaxed? I don’t want you relaxed!”
“You don’t?”
States 111

“No! I mean, who do you know, in life, who is relaxed?”

“I don’t know.”
“No one! That’s who. No one, in life, is ever really relaxed. Tense, yes;
relaxed, no.”
“So you’d rather we were—what?”
“AWAKE!” He cried out in mock exasperation. “I want you Open! Present!
CAFFEINATED! So, please, everybody, get off the floor before you all fall asleep!”

To be awake was my teacher’s preferred state of being; he felt with this in place, an
actor could engage fully in the moment-to-moment life of a play. He wanted the
actor’s consciousness to be like bare feet on a kitchen floor strewn with shards of
broken glass. He wanted every step of our consciousness to be that awake to the
possible shards of reality that might cut us. In such a state one was ready to play
either sequentially, simultaneously, or whatever else the actor might experience.

Conclusion
And so, we have seen how the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett,
and my teacher each have their own unique way of capturing the movement of
thought and feeling within a given state-of-being. These differences in how
authors depict such movement are often overlooked in our analysis and realization
of their work. It can be immensely helpful to get a sense of whether an author
works with sequential, quantum, simultaneous, or empty states. It is out of such
a variety of mental music that our next set of elements emerge. These are the
intentions, actions, and obstacles of a given character. This better known trio
constitutes the nuts and bolts of theatre making, occupying most actors and
directors as they go about assembling the performance of a play.

Notes
1 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (Faber and Faber, 2009), 114–115
2 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden
Shakespeare, 2006), 175–179 (I.2)
3 Anton Chekhov, Four Plays, translated by Carol Rocamora (Smith & Kraus, 1996), 42
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 222
6 Ibid., 237
7 Georg Buchner, The Complete Collected Works, translated by Henry Schmidt (Bard
Books, 1977), 185–186
8 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Collected Works (Faber and Faber, 2006), 157
9
INTENTIONS

Our first lesson in intentions

Let’s imagine ourselves back in our crib, an infant. Suddenly, we feel this strange
sensation that begins to flutter about in our belly. It becomes a terrible ache that
grows until we find ourselves making a sound that somehow seems equivalent
to the pain we feel. As a result of this sound a large blurry figure arrives, makes
soothing sounds, and feeds us. Little by little, we discover an intriguing chain of
events: our belly aches, we make this loud piercing sound, and a blurry figure
returns to soothe and sate us. This constitutes our very first lesson in intentional-
ity. We have a want (hunger) which leads to action (a cry for help) that elicits
the desired end (blurry figures arrive to make things right). Later, we will learn
about another action, the opposite of crying, that will also elicit comfort from
these large blurry figures. We learn that if we make a certain face that they call
“smiling” we can get even more comfort and food and the blurry figures tend
to stay with us much longer. These are the two earliest faces of intentionality
(crying/smiling) and they are also, ironically, the iconic faces of tragedy and
comedy. Much of life and drama grow out of these two basic intentional states.
Eventually the fuzzy figures snap into focus and become our parents; along
with this realization come other intentional tricks that are more precise than
crying and smiling. There is the advent of pointing which further distinguishes
our specific needs (“No the teddy bear, not the stuffed giraffe!”). And finally,
and perhaps most profoundly, there are the sounds that we have been making
that can be forced into the shape of repeatable words. Armed with these specific
sounds we can articulate all of our ever-increasing needs. Who knew there
would be so many beyond that first simple need for food. At this point we have
graduated into complete intentional creatures. We will have desires, we will
give them names, and with these and other names, we will seek to satisfy them.
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The intention behind our usage of the word intention

Why do we chose the word intention? Why not Stanislavsky’s term: the object-
ive? Or a more down-to-earth word like want? Objective, to our ear, sounds
too premeditated, aren’t there times when we act on an impulse or a feeling?
Want is more to the point, but it feels like one part of a larger more complex
system of fulfillment. In short, the word intention casts a broader lexical net in
terms of the ways we go about responding to our wants, needs, and desires.
For our purposes an intention is a realization that will ultimately lead to an action.
It often grows out of the demand to fulfill an urge or lack (I am hungry, I am
lonely, I am poor) and forms into a mental aim, purpose, goal, plan, or design.
Intentions can be formed consciously or unconsciously. An intention usually directs
our attention and subsequent energies toward something we wish to address. Intentions
tend to grow out of biological drives (hunger, sex); or, culturally constructed
lacks (the absence of what we have been conditioned to expect from our social
situation and interactions).
Let us, momentarily, focus on the realm of lack. This sensation can manifest
itself as a feeling or a thought; it can be intuited or articulated. Either way, it
becomes a want, need, or desire. These three words are often used interchange-
ably but they actually reflect different degrees of how a given lack works on us.
A want is the simplest response: I want that toy. Once I have the toy, the want
goes away. But let’s say, after a week or two, I tire of the toy and yearn for
another. When a certain want cannot be sated, then we have moved from the
realm of wants to the realm of needs. Need is a deeper form of lack. It suggests,
in this case, that it is not about wanting a toy; but rather, needing a distraction.
Needs are less controllable, think addiction, when “the want” never seems to go
away. We often dream of extricating ourselves from the immense gravitational
pull of such needs, wishing to be freed from their vice-like grip. But, when we
find ourselves wanting to maintain the need in perpetuity, we have crossed into
the final and most intricate modality of intentionality: desire. It is with the
advent of desire that we find ourselves putting certain systems in place for the
perpetuation of our needs. Desire, in this respect, creates a grammar and syntax
of how one goes about maintaining a given fulfillment. It becomes the circuitry
we use to insure that fulfillment lasts forever. Each of these modalities grows in
complexity as we move from the Greeks (a world of wants), to Shakespeare (a
world of needs), to Molière and Chekhov (a world of desire).
Intentions grow out of these three terms, it is how we go about responding
or articulating our wants, needs, and desires. It is the unconscious or conscious
addressing of this triumvirate. Intentions are often the result of these three modal-
ities of lack. It moves us to the cusp of action. We want to begin with a simple,
direct, concrete level of wants; moving through the text and collecting them.
Having done so, we can evaluate whether these wants move into the territory
of needs and desires. In many, instances, a simple want can sustain a character
through the entire arc of a play. What follows is a basic list of wants:
114 Intentions

I Want: The Greatest Hits:

I want love.
I want success.
I want power.
I want justice.
I want freedom.
I want happiness.
I want revenge.
I want fame.
I want security.
I want help.
I want more.
I want to know.
I want to believe.
I want to transgress.
I want to escape.
I want to return.
I want to forget.
I want to reject.
I want to die.
I want to live.
I want to rest.
I want to risk.
I want to give up.
I want to maintain the status quo.

The ancient Greeks in the land of wants

Greek characters seem to live comfortably in the land of wants; it is not until
we reach Euripides, who is, in many ways, the most psychologically complex of
the Greek tragedians, that we begin to see these characters cross the border of
want and enter the terra incognito of need and desire (think Phaedra). Let us
take a quick tour of the Greek tragic pantheon and their various wants:

I want revenge (Clytemnestra/Electra)

I want fairness/justice (Antigone)
I want security (Ismene/Chrysothemis)
I want control (Creon/Pentheus)
I want love (Medea/Phaedra)
I want more (Jason)
I want help (The Children of Heracles)
I want freedom (The Suppliant Women)
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I want happiness (Helen)

I want fame (Agamemnon)
I want to survive (The Trojan Women)
I want to live (Admetus)
I want to die (Alceste)
I want to know (Oedipus)
I want to forget (The Chorus of Electra)
I want to reject (Philoctetes)
I want to risk (Hercules)
I want to punish (Menelaus)
I want to aid (Pylades)
I want to return (Orestes in Electra)
I want to escape (Orestes in Iphigenia in Tauris)
I want to provoke (Dionysus)
I want to transgress (Pentheus/secretly)
I want to rest (Oedipus at Colonus)

The singularity of “I want” works well for the Greeks. Many of these characters
are content to pursue such a monomaniacal want to its inevitable end, satisfied
with either achieving it or dying in the process. This is not to say such trajectories
cannot complicate themselves. We can see characters “jumping” wants, moving
from one want to the next. Medea can move from wanting happiness (Jason’s
love), to wanting revenge (against a now love-less Jason), to wanting to bring
about the end of the world as she knows it (the death of her children which,
even though it will grieve her, will destroy Jason). Certainly here, and when we
examine the intentionality of Phaedra and Pentheus, we begin to see these wants,
growing beyond themselves into needs, and on the cusp of a kind of circuitry of
desire. Here, characters begin to get lost in a labyrinth of longing that future
dramatists will follow and develop.

Shakespeare: on the border between wants and needs

Shakespeare’s characters seem to exist on the border between wants and needs.
We can see this perhaps best exemplified in the portraits of tyrants like Richard
III and jealous lovers like Othello. Let us begin with the usurper, Richard III. It
is clear that what he wants more than anything is to be king, he tells us so right
at the beginning of the play, and keeps us abreast of his plan, every bloody step of
the way. One would suspect, that having gotten what he wanted, Richard would
be content, and yet that seems to be far from the case. Richard is anything but
content, it leads him to an almost paranoid fear of being usurped and prompts
him to continue his reign of murder and mayhem beyond all reason. What is
going on here? Richard’s want is not satiated by becoming king. His want seems
to mask a deeper need. The joy is not the crown, but the getting of the crown, and
now that he has gotten the crown, what next? This dynamic, as you may
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remember, is also a favorite theme of Marlowe and his dramatic gallery of over-
strivers: Tamburlaine, Barabas (aka Jew of Malta), and, of course, the infamous
Doctor Faustus. Perhaps this is the great Elizabethan social trope, a byproduct of an
overly acquisitive age. The want becomes an insatiable need, and now that the need
is made manifest, it must be relentlessly fed. In the case of Richard III, this is
accomplished through further mayhem under the name of protection. In the end,
Richard is propelled not by a want, but rather by a nexus of need. When there is
no one left to destroy, he will destroy himself. It is destruction that he needs.
The same is true with a well-intentioned character like Othello, who dearly
loves his Desdemona. Once jealousy is injected into the relationship, his wants
exceed their obtainment and are replaced with an endless need to know. Othello
wants “ocular proof” but when he receives it, it still is not enough to quell his
tormented mind. When wants cannot be sated, we find ourselves in the realm of needs.
The “proof of a handkerchief” is not enough, nor are Desdemona’s entreaties
that she knows not what grieves her husband so. Othello wants to know; but
what he really needs, is to put an end to the cause of his unknowing. In other words,
he needs to kill Desdemona. Even this does not stop his pain, and so, he needs to
kill himself. This is the only way to end his torment. In these two plays we
begin in the world of seeming wants and end in a world of bottomless needs.

Molière: the impossible object, and the invention of

theatrical desire
Molière is the master of what we will call the pursuit of the impossible object.
What is an impossible object? Something that we desperately want, but is forever
out of grasp. Ironically, the thought of such a thing being perpetually out of grasp
does not dissuade us in the least and actually makes us only want the impossible
object all the more. We will see this dynamic played out to perfection in
Molière’s masterpiece The Misanthrope, where Alceste choses Célimène as his
lover; a woman who is the very embodiment of the impossible object. Their tryst
develops into an endless game of cat and mouse, with Célimène always slipping
effortlessly from Alceste’s hands. This of course begs the question: why do we
want what is impossible to have.? And: if we are so fortunate to ultimately obtain
it, why then do we often long for something other?
To attempt to answer this question, let us momentarily return to our crib, the
one we found ourselves in at the beginning of this chapter. Here we are, infants
again, feeling that rumble in our collective tummies. We make that high piercing
sound that works so well, but for some strange reason, the blurry people do not
come. We try the cry again, but still to no avail. A brief eternity seems to ensue.
Our want has, by now, grown into a terrible need, we cry out in a louder,
higher-pitched cry than ever before. The cry becomes sobs, the sobs inconsolable
and then, finally, apologetically, one of the blurry people comes to feed and
soothe us and in this moment of sated-ness, we discover something highly
unusual: the longer it took to be gratified, the greater the ultimate gratification became. At
Intentions 117

this point, many of us begin to confuse the gratification of “the-thing-we-want”

with its deferral. In other words, what we become conditioned to yearn for is not
the thing-itself, but the yearning-for-it. When we actively create situations where
we can recapitulate this circuitry of need into a seemingly infinite feedback loop,
we have passed the realm of need and entered into the world of desire. It is
a world of our creation, whose sole reason for being is the cultivation and preser-
vation of our desire.
And so Alceste, a talented, spirited, idealist who cannot abide the hypocrisy of
his time, finds himself head over heels in love with the very embodiment of the
societal and romantic duplicity that he so disdains, aka Célimène. When his
friend points out this contradiction and suggests a companion more suitable,
Alceste merely shrugs his shoulders and says, “True, true: each day my reason
tells me so/But reason doesn’t rule in love, you know.” But once we see
Alceste and Célimène in action, we begin to question if it is love for Célimène
that Alceste feels or rather something approaching the desire for an impossible
object. Célimène exhibits many of the qualities of the impossible; she is, by
turns, unreadable, un-pin-down-able, and ultimately, wholly unreliable. Here is
the climax of their first scene together. One suspects this is not the first time
they’ve had a discussion over Célimène’s flirtatious nature; nor, based on their
cat-and-mouse enjoyment of it, will it be their last:

ALCESTE
But how can I be sure that you don’t tell
The selfsame thing to other men as well?

CÉLIMÈNE
What a gallant speech! How flattering to me!
What a sweet creature you make me out to be!
Well then, to save you from the pangs of doubt,
All that I have said I hereby cancel out;
Now, none but yourself shall make a monkey of you;
Are you content?

ALCESTE
Why, why am I doomed to love you?
I swear that I shall bless the blissful hour
When this poor heart’s no longer in your power!
I make no secret of it: I’ve done my best
To exercise this passion from my breast;
But thus far all in vain; it will not go;
It is for my sins that I must love you so.1

This is the very stuff of desire: whenever the impossible object becomes too
impossible, Alceste threatens to break things off. Célimène indulges such a gambit
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wholeheartedly, knowing that Alceste cannot live without the possibility of obtain-
ing her. And so the “game” is “re-set” for another round. Who knows, perhaps this
next time Alceste will win; with each re-setting, the stakes in “the game” increase.
Look at how the “ante” rises to a new height when Alceste once again confronts
Célimène, this time with proof of her infidelities. Célimène feigns innocence and
then, when backed into a corner, she “condescends” to Alceste’s jealousy and
makes a mock admission of her betrayal in the hopes that this will put an end to
what she now sees as a hopeless romance. Here is Alceste’s response:

ALCESTE
Defend this letter and your innocence,
And I, poor fool, will aid in your defense.
Pretend, pretend that you are just and true,
And I shall make myself believe in you.2

Alceste concludes this scene exclaiming, “I’ll love you to the bitter end, and see/
How false and treacherous you dare to be.” Célimène soberly responds to this mad
proclamation, “No, you don’t really love me as you ought.”3 Indeed. Perhaps no
truer words were ever spoken. This is not love, but a labyrinth of desire; except at
the very center of this maze sits an impossible object rather than a minotaur. And
what of our Alceste, who plays a kind of 17th Century Theseus? He seems ever
content in not finding his prey so he may maintain the game for as long as possible.
This is true, even after he definitively learns of Célimène’s deceit. Here is Alceste,
once again, attempting to keep the game from never ending:

ALCESTE
Ah, traitress—how,
How should I cease to love you, even now?
Though mind and will were passionately bent
On hating you, my heart would not consent.
(To his friends)
Be witness to my madness, both of you;
See what infatuation drives one to;
But wait; my folly’s only just begun,
And I shall prove to you before I’m done
How strange the human heart is, and how far
From rational we sorry creatures are.4

Where Othello needs to end his pain, Alceste desires to perpetuate it. Both are
jealous, but their jealousy masks radically opposite forms of intentionality. It is
clear Alceste never wants to leave the labyrinth of his desire, he is perfectly con-
tent to add another series of walls to his ever-expanding maze, the better to
continue his mad and impossible pursuit. This is desire at its most extreme;
intentionality gone mad.
Intentions 119

Chekhov and the culture of desire

Chekhov understands this circuitry and shows how it can grow into an entire
culture of desire. Take, for example, The Seagull, where all the main characters
suffer from the pursuit of impossible objects that takes on the algebraic-like for-
mula of A loves B but B loves C. And so:

1.
Medvedenko loves Masha but Masha loves Treplev
2.
Treplev loves Nina but Nina loves Trigorin
3.
Arkadina loves Trigorin but Trigorin loves Nina
4.
Polina loves Dorn but Dorn loves everyone.

The result is a culture completely held in the throes of desire. We have shifted
from an individual lost in a labyrinth to a community engaged in an endless
dance with alternating partners. Here the dance creates a giddy pattern of being.
The question for Chekhov’s characters is, can they break from the pulse of this
intoxicating music and free themselves from this purgatorial system? Or will
they allow themselves to be held forever captive by it? A duality of conflicting
desires emerges: to remain enmeshed in this infernal system or to break free.
This dilemma is also mirrored in the main characters’ relationship to creating
art, which becomes another pursuit for an impossible object, forcing them to
chase after the muse of genius which continually eludes all four central charac-
ters. Satisfaction in both realms is continually deferred. This is the machinery of
desire, allowing itself to replicate itself endlessly—until that is, the machine
buckles under the strain and, like Treplev, breaks down.

When desire goes rogue: the transformation of the impossible

object into the forbidden object. Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love
Sarah Kane, the extraordinary and groundbreaking author, chose the myth of Phaedra
as the material for her second major play. Phaedra, as you may remember, is the
Greek queen who is erotically drawn to her stepson, Hippolytus. Kane’s Phaedra
dispatches with the perfectly ordered alexandrines of Racine and gets right to
the vernacular heart of the matter:

PHAEDRA
Can feel him through the walls. Sense him. Feel his heartbeat from a mile…
There’s a thing between us, an awesome fucking thing, can you feel it? It
burns…
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Can’t switch this off. Can’t crush it. Can’t. Wake up with it, burning me.
Think I’ll crack open I want him so much.5

What accounts for the intensity of this erotic obsession? Let’s go back to the crib
one last time, to that moment where the infant discovers that the longer pleasure
is delayed, the more pleasurable it becomes when it is finally arrives. This pain of
delay, as we have seen, can lead to an appetite for impossible objects, the more
impossible, the better. The question arises, if this is the case, then what is the
most impossible of impossible objects? The answer: that which is forbidden. In
such cases, the pleasure of the impossible object is often quadrupled when it
becomes the forbidden object. Hippolytus is such an object. Strophe, Phaedra’s
daughter warns: “He’s family…” and insists, “You can’t do it. Can’t even think
of it.”6 This, of course, only makes Hippolytus all the more desirable to Phaedra.
Kane commented in an interview, “Phaedra completely pursues what she
wants. She’s not actually very in touch with herself about what she wants but she
does pursue it completely, honestly. To the point where she’s prepared to die for
it.” In this, Phaedra proves herself to be “true.”7 Truth is Hippolytus’ impossible
object, the thing he has been searching for throughout the play. Kane tells us in
another interview, “My Hippolytus pursues honesty, both physically and morally—
even when that means he has to destroy himself and everyone else.”8 This quest for
honesty drives all his sexual interactions where he tests the truth of a lover by
degrading the very act of love. If the lover can withstand such degradation than, in
Hippolytus’ way of reasoning, perhaps the love is true. Phaedra dies over the loss of
him, this death becomes the litmus test of truth. This moves Hippolytus from
a fixation on the impossible object of honesty and toward the forbidden object of
death, which he now sees as promising his long sought for truth. Hippolytus says of
Phaedra, “This is her present to me.”9 She has shown him that taking her own life
is the ultimate truth. With this, he turns himself in to be executed. His last words
sound more like a man in the throes of love rather than death, “If there could have
been more moments like this.”10 We will return to this enigmatic dance between
Eros and Thanatos when we turn to a later investigation of Molière’s Don Juan in
our chapter on Cores. For now, it is enough to observe that the various threads of
desire are often difficult to untangle.

Dangerous knowledge: the difficulty of even the very best

of intentions
Socrates enjoins us to “know thyself.” And yet we rarely do. This creates an
intriguing challenge for actors and directors who must understand the characters
they are working on, but also understand that these characters rarely/fully understand
themselves. The danger becomes that we know too much, we become self-
conscious and that this self-consciousness can kill all the spontaneity and surprise
of the character. Such knowledge, in short, can have a crippling effect on the
freshness of a given performance, robbing the actor of his or her natural way of
Intentions 121

being in the world. As a result, we need to use this knowledge sparingly. It is

helpful to know if our character’s intentionality operates basically through wants,
needs, or networks of elaborate desire. But characters are rarely aware of their
intentionality beyond an immediate want. They rarely understand their wants can
turn into needs, unless the need is so loud that it manifests itself like an addiction.
And even then, we find such addicts in denial of their condition (whether it is
alcohol or gambling). The same is true of being caught in a network of desire.
The seducer believes he is in control, the one pulling the erotic strings, but it is
actually the laws of desire which are secretly manipulating him/her. We must
understand this as actors and yet not let this understanding contaminate the inno-
cence of our characters. It is also important to understand that intentionality, of
any variety, is difficult for an actor to play and the audience to read. Remember,
all wants, needs, and desires grow out of an essential lack. Lacks are extremely
general, no matter what name you give them, they always end up just reading as
lack. To play a lack, flattens out the scene into varying degrees of generalized
neediness. It is the action that one takes that makes the intention visible; without
the action (being voiced, or acted upon) intentions are very hard to read. Like the
meaning behind the smile of the Mona Lisa, it is hard to understand this expres-
sion without an action preceding or following it. Until such an action is put in
motion, the smile of the Mona Lisa continues to float in a world of infinite read-
ings. As a result, our understanding of a character is more through his or her
actions than intentions. If we cannot see what the character is doing, we do not
ultimately understand what the character wants. This leads theatre to favor action
over intention, even though intention precedes action and gives it its direction.
Action’s propensity toward legibility, exactitude, and velocity makes a strong case
for its priority even when compared to a force as seminal as intentionality. Allow
me a brief digression, to better explain this essential point.

The difference between intentions and actions: or, learning this

the hard way. A brief digression
When I was a student we were involved in a production of Euripides’ Iphigenia
in Aulis. It was our first day of rehearsal and my teacher, who was directing, put
us immediately up on our feet. My teacher, not being one to waste time around
a table talking, thought it better to learn the intricacies of the text while staging.
We were two lines into the scene when the actor playing Agamemnon asked
our teacher, “What do you think Agamemnon wants?” There was a long,
uncomfortable pause, as though the actor had somehow committed some ter-
rible offense to the gods of theatre and the result had somehow stopped time
itself. Finally my teacher spoke, “What do you mean what does your character
want? In the scene? In Life? Does anyone really know what they want? I could
say that Agamemnon ultimately wants to challenge the gods to see who is the
stronger. But how do you play that? How do you show that?” My teacher
paused for a moment and asked the actor,
122 Intentions

Let me put it another way: Do you know what you want by wanting to
know what Agamemnon wants? Does your want-to-know mean that you
want to be a good actor? Or do you want to know this just because some
teacher told you, you should know what you want? Or do you just want
to be in dialogue with me? Maybe you want all those things? And let’s say
you try all of these possibilities, we’ll never distinguish any of them from
the other, because all wants look the same on stage! Wants are even flatter
than moods, they just make the character look needy for the entirety of
a scene. So, at the end of the day, it is better not to think about wants
and think, instead, about doings. What are you doing. Figure that out and
this will ultimately tell you and the audience what you want. Your legibility is
always through the action, the doing of the thing! So… What are you doing?

There was another pause as the actor slowly realized this was not a rhetorical ques-
tion on the part of my teacher and he was expected to give some semblance of an
answer. His face was bright red, his eyes downcast, and his voice almost inaudible.
Words, like dead leafs, fell from his mouth to the floor, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Asked my teacher again.
“No.”
“Does anyone here know what Agamemnon might be doing?”
Silence.
“I take it by this silence that no one knows?”
Silence.
“Do you know what your own characters are doing in this play?”
Silence.
We go around the room, each actor expresses what they think their character
is doing.
“No,” says our teacher to one explanation.
“No,” to another.
“No,” to yet a third.
And so on and so on until everyone has been asked and failed.
Silence.
“Go home,” says our teacher, “We can’t accomplish anything until you
know what you’re doing. Go home, figure it out. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
This constituted our first rehearsal, it lasted 32 minutes. The next day we all
arrived. My teacher went around the room asking each of us what we were
doing in the play. Every one had an answer. Everyone’s answer was wrong. “Go
home,” says my teacher, “Go home, try again, I’ll see you tomorrow.” This
rehearsal lasted 15 minutes.
On the third day, myself and my fellow classmates had not slept, or bathed,
many of us were questioning our very futures in theatre. My teacher arrives,
goes around the room with his question, everyone has a new answer, everyone
is still wrong. “What have we been teaching you all these years? My God,
maybe we need to refund you your money. All right,” he said with a sigh, and
Intentions 123

then went around the room and gave everyone a shockingly simple action to
play and for Agamemnon, it is the simplest of all: “Try to get the letter.”
“Get the letter?” Our Agamemnon repeats dumbfounded. In the scene Aga-
memnon has written a letter, lying to his wife about why she should bring their
daughter to Aulis. He promises in the letter a marriage to the warrior Achilles;
but, in reality, it is not a wedding but a sacrifice that is required of his daughter.
In order to get a wind to sail to Troy, he must sacrifice his beloved little girl.
“You’ve changed your mind,” my teacher says.

You can’t lie to your wife, you can’t do this to your daughter. Get the
letter back, you’re the king: command, reason, threaten, entreat, implore, plead,
beg, grovel, do anything and everything you can think of to get that letter back
in your hands so you can rip it up. If you do that, I will see everything
I need to see, your intention will become legible by the actions you
deploy to get the letter, play the actions and I will see the intention. I will
see that you want to be a king, a husband, a father, a good human being,
just an average joe, and a non-entity that the gods will not recognize.

“So I want the letter?” Our poor actor asks, still unclear.
“No! You don’t want the letter. You want to get the letter,” our teacher says in
mock exasperation. “Put your energy into all the ways you try to get the letter and
that will show me all the Agamemnons that are within you; it will show me all
your wants, dreams and desires; many of which you are not even aware of!”
I realize all of this, on the surface, sounds like semantics. What is the ultimate
difference between wanting the letter and what one is doing to get the letter?
The first problem as my teacher said, is that wants are like moods, they’re terribly
general. They create, in the theatre, a wash. In addition, wants are harder to dis-
tinguish from one another than actions. Let us take three very different wants:
I want money, I want respect, I want love. Although each want derives from
a very specific point of origin, they all read to an audience as varying degrees of
seemingly indistinguishable need. When we shift from what we want to what we
are doing to get what we want, such indistinguishableness disappears; what I am
doing to get money, respect, or love becomes much more differentiated. I can
finagle for money, impress for respect, and seduce for love. Each of these actions are
immediately legible from one another. Wants, like moods and attitudes, are less
differentiated and often flatten out the dynamics of a given scene.
It is ultimately easier to play getting the letter than wanting the letter. Want-
ing the letter is tied up in a wonderful complex nexus of Agamemnon’s feelings
about being a king and father and husband, and other reasons that Agamemnon
may not even be conscious of, all firing at the same time. This is a tremendous
amount of intellectual, interior work, to connect with, it is good to know, but
impossible to fully play. What you can play is the ways one goes about getting
the letter. This also takes the actor out of his own head (what the letter means
to me) and out toward the other actor (“give me the letter or else”). And so,
124 Intentions

again, it is easier to play, and more importantly, for my teacher, truer to life.
“Most of the time,” according to my teacher,

we don’t know what we want and are acting on an impulse or a vague

feeling; but the ways we unconsciously go about trying to get something
shows the depth of its actual meaning to the audience; we learn about the
want and its depth, through the array of actions that the actor deploys
over the course of a scene.

Conclusion
It is important to stress that all of this is not to discard or even discount wants,
needs, or desires; but to understand that the emphasis should be on the action.
Many times an actor will only truly discover what his or her character is really
after, not by a preconceived notion of what the character intends, but by adding
up all the actions and seeing where they ultimately lead. In short, my teacher was
trying to save us a certain amount of pain and wasted energy. The lesson: “Keep
your eye on the action, it will lead you back to the character’s multi-faceted
intentions.” And with this, we can delve even deeper into the fertile soil of
actions, which is the central subject of our next chapter.

Notes
1 Moliere, The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilbur (Harvest Books, 1965), 52 (II.1)
2 Ibid., 117–118 (IV.3)
3 Ibid., 149 (V.7)
4 Ibid.
5 Sarah Kane, Complete Plays (Methuen Contemporary Dramatists, 2001), 70–71
6 Ibid., 77
7 Graham Saunders, ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of the Extremes
(Manchester University Press, 2002), 77
8 Ibid., 76
9 Ibid., 76
10 Ibid., 103
10
ACTIONS

What is an action? Or, how human beings become legible

Action is to theatre what a note is to music. If authors deal in words and paint-
ers in pigments, than theatre practitioners traffic in actions. It is the essential
atom of theatre that we attempt to split with each production. What is an
action? It is a doing. From Western drama’s inception, action has been at the
very center of the theatrical endeavor. The word itself lives on, secretly, in our
modern-day usage of drama, a word built from the Doric dram, meaning to take
action. It is at the center of Aristotle’s notion of theatre as mimesis praxis, where
characters are engaged in the life-like unfolding of action. What Aristotle called
prattontes (to act), an Attic term which corresponds to the Doric dram. Our
English word, action, comes to us by way of Old French and the Latin actionem
(nominative actio), from the stem agere (to do). The earliest origins of agere are
in relation to working the land, where the word literally meant to push forward
(i.e., tilling the soil), or to move a herd forward (leading cattle). This concept of
moving things is later transferred to the actio of rhetoric, where words can
move an argument or meaning to a certain destination. And so, there is language
as action, as well as a language of action.
Where do actions come from? What begins as a vague feeling crystalizes into
a clear want, need, or desire. When we can find a name for these yearnings, we
have moved one step closer from the realm of sensation to intention. The inten-
tion is the articulation of a lack and its potential resolution (i.e., what action to
take). Action is the will in motion. It is intention made visible. We see colors,
hear music, but also perceive actions. Hegel tells us, “Action is the clearest reve-
lation of the individual, of his temperament as well as his aims: what a man is at
bottom and in his inmost being comes into actuality only by his actions.”1 In
theatre we understand things retroactively; in other words, from the action back
126 Actions

to the intention and finally returning to that first ineffable stirring at the center
of our being, what we call a sensation or feeling. The face of the Mona Lisa is
difficult to read, how are we to interpret that smile upon her lips? Let us say,
following the emergence of this smile, the Mona Lisa were to lean out of the
picture frame and kiss us. We would retroactively understand the Mona Lisa’s
smile as one of attraction toward us. Now let us contemplate another brief scen-
ario, this time, just prior to the Mona Lisa’s smile, we showed her a portrait of an
infant child. Now her smile shifts from being seen as romantic to maternal. It is
the action that proceeds or follows her smile that helps us understand it. In short:
we read people through a nexus of actions. It is through actions that they become
legible, or “meaningful” as Rudiger Bittner believes. “The doings of a person,”
he tells us, “coalesce into individual actions discrete by virtue of separately making
sense. One action is what you get if you cut a person’s doings into the smallest
still meaningful parts. One action is the unit of meaningful activity.”2

Action vs. mood: or, action as exactitude

To be in a mood is to be melancholy, wrathful, guilty, nostalgic, or just plain
disappointed. It Is like a stain on a white tablecloth, it spreads slowly and is
often difficult to get out. Christophe Andre, a professor of psychiatry at the Uni-
versity of Paris in Nanterre, likens moods to “a mental climate, fine or
gloomy.”3 He notes that where an emotion is fleeting, a mood is enduring, and
uses the intriguing term “remanence” to explain their effect on us:

Remanence is the partial persistence of a phenomenon once its

cause has disappeared. Essentially, moods outlive the situations
which justified or triggered them… They are everything left in us
once the bustle of life has passed by.4

Other terms attempt to capture the nature of moods: states of mind, humors,
sentiments, or the more current, scientific-sounding “background feelings.”
Whatever you may want to call it, moods tend to be static; actions remain
dynamic. Moods also have a tendency to feel like a wash of reality. A grey day
dulls our sense of the true variegated nature of the terrain. This is the danger
with moods on the stage, they can flatten things out into one aspect. They have
a certain gradation, but not much differentiation. Sadness can grow or diminish
over time but the difference is only in intensity; again, this dulls our sense of
the actual variety of our reality. In theatrical terms moods have a generalizing
effect on things, whereas actions are extraordinarily precise. Take the difference
between teasing and taunting: in life we think of them as synonyms but, on the
stage, they are amazingly distinct from one another, immediately conjuring two
very different types of antagonisms. The distance in meaning between these two
words is not much and yet we can immediately comprehend the fundamental
difference between them. One is light and the other dark and dangerous. We
Actions 127

instantaneously grasp the distinction between these two actions. We can feel/see
the difference, sense the clear border between the two. It is this immediate
understanding that makes actions so useful and comprehensible to the actor in
conveying the complexity of his/her interior life and being equally legible to
the audience watching him. This is what distinguishes actions from feelings or
moods. Both moods and actions are powerful tools, but actions have a greater
level of precision. There is an exactitude to actions that moods lack. Let us
return to our two actions of teasing and taunting and develop a string of like-
actions that might continue to grow from their instigation. This family tree of
actions might look like the following, from:

Teasing
to
Taunting
to
Threatening
to
Terrorizing
to
Terminating

This string of actions shows us distinct units of legible intentionality. Compare

this with the mood of wrath:
Action Mood
(To attack) (Wrath)
To Tease W
To Taunt R
To Threaten A
To Terrorize T
To Terminate H

What we see is that these actions “to attack” are vividly differentiated, like
a series of notes or a range of pigments; whereas, the mood of wrath remains
one note, one color. Moods only change in terms of intensity (growing or
diminishing); actions can also change in terms of intensity but also give us more
clarity of intention, variety, and basic articulation in the moment-to-moment
life of an individual.

Action as the velocity of being

If we think of mood as a state, actions have the ability to move us from one
state to the next. A mood is a starting point, or a destination; action is what
transports us. We, as humans, are ultimately drawn to movement. It captures
our attention. This is particularly important in relation to making theatre, since
128 Actions

behavioral scientists tell us our concentration span ebbs every 20 or so seconds,

meaning if there is not a discernible change in our state of affairs, we tend to
disengage. This may have been a saving grace in our evolutionary development,
but it is a sword of Damocles for those of us working in time-based arts.
And so we can say that actions have velocity, each comes with its own
unique thermodynamics. A verb is not only an action but also a time signature
as well. Let us return to our string of actions from teasing to taunting to threat-
ening to terrorizing to terminating. This string of actions not only accomplishes
distinct units of legible intentionality and increased intensity (which happens
when the initial and subsequent actions are met with resistance); but, of equal
importance, each verb carries with it, its own unique sense of the time it takes
to accomplish its pre-ordained task. Another way of thinking about this could
be in terms of weights and measures. Each of the verbs in our string of actions
increases in heaviness, requiring the exertion of more energy from actor. Suddenly
we find ourselves moving from the realm of Aristotle’s Poetics to his lesser-read
Physics.
In short, a unit of action is also a unit of time. We can see this on a micro-
level as we move from teasing (quick) to taunting (slower) to threatening
(which picks up momentum), from there we seem to snowball into terrorizing
(faster) and terminating (which is perhaps more open-ended, it could be the
blink of an eye, or a brief eternity). Let us say that each action takes five
seconds, it is five seconds experienced differently from what came before or
after. In this respect we are no longer in clock time, but rather felt time. Perhaps
it is wiser to say Action=Duration. It is these micro-fluctuations of actions that
gives theatrical time its dynamic feel.

Intention precedes action: but action trumps intentions

As we discussed in the previous chapter, intentions are often best gleaned retro-
actively; after examining the full array of actions that a character exhibits. These
actions, like breadcrumbs, will ultimately lead us back to the house of intentions.
Many actors are encouraged to find a character’s Super-Objective (their big
over-arching intention) right at the beginning of their process. This should
never be imposed or intuited too quickly; but rather, grow organically out of
the string of actions deployed over the course of a play by a character. One
wants to be careful with intentions, especially in the land of super-objectives.
We don’t want to rush such a process of discovery, the danger here is that we
might impose a misguided concept of our character’s intention (i.e., is it a want,
a need, or a desire) before we really understand them; such an understanding
grows out of examining the totality of the character’s actions. With this in
mind, we can begin to explore a series of scenes by looking to the actions to
inform our understanding of the intentions of the characters. In our work, an
intention should begin as surmise that is always tested by the subsequent string of actions.
If the actions do not line up with our speculative intention, we should come up
Actions 129

with another surmise, until intention and action feel of a piece. The actions are
the facts that provide us with the theory for the intention.

From intention and action to wanting and doing

My teacher was allergic to any sort of fancy, specialized acting nomenclature. In
his world an intention was a want and action was a doing. End of discussion.
All acting, as far as he was concerned, could be boiled down into four simple
questions, the first three being:

1.
What do I want?
2.
What am I doing to get it?
3.
Did I get it?

My teacher rarely strayed from these three essential questions when dealing with
any issues of acting. He was particularly interested in the third question: “Did
I get it?” Because nine times out of ten, the character never gets what they want
without a struggle. Which would lead my teacher to his final question,
a question that fascinated him no end:

4.
Now what am I going to do to get it?

He would whisper, with impish delight, “What is your character willing to do now,
to get what he or she wants? Now that’s what’s dramatic, how far will you go?” Most
acting, as far as my teacher was concerned, broke down between question 3 and 4.
Why? Because usually one (or both) of the scene partners are not being honest
enough about whether or not they really got what they wanted. In life, we learn
quickly that if something isn’t working, we change. Sadly, we often forget this
the minute we walk onstage. Such shifts often go by the nomenclature of tactics
(again, my teacher hated these terms because they sounded too premeditated, too
calculated, which went against his sense of how naturally and unconsciously we
engage with the world). Let’s take these questions and put them in relation to our
stream of actions that began with “to tease” and ended with “to terminate”:

What do I want? To provoke another.

What am I doing? Teasing.
Is it working? No.
What else can I do? Taunt.
Is it working? No.
What next? Threaten.
130 Actions

Is it working? No.
Next? Terrorize.
Is it working? No.
Next? Terminate.

Through the fusing of these basic questions with our string of actions, we see that
the want/intention is “to provoke.” The string of actions that follow from this
occur because the initial action does not achieve our desired aim. We must try
something else from the “family tree” of “provoking.” What follows: “Taunt,
Threaten, Terrorize,” all grow out of this tree of actional siblings. These actions
are often called “tactics” (i.e., subsidiary actions tied to the initial intention). Now
why did we start with an action like “tease?” Why not go straight to “terrorize?”
Why do these actions have to build so nice and neatly? There is no reason why
we couldn’t scramble these actions up; after all, life is never as nice and neat as
we would like it. Except for the fact that society, by its very nature, has put cer-
tain speed bumps to our wants, needs, and desires; conditioning us to behave
within certain circumscribed boundaries. These predetermined avenues of what is
considered proper comportment keep society from spiraling out of control. This
comportment is instilled in us from childhood and is often not as easy to break
free of as we would like to believe. We may want to taunt but we must work
within the confines of teasing. We will discuss these issues further in the following
chapter on “Obstacles.” For now, let us turn our attention to the terminus of
a given string of actions. Such a conclusion is achieved when our over-arching
action has either succeeded, failed, or been stalemated. When an action is won,
lost, or stalemated, we designate that sequence as:

A unit of action: the building blocks of scenes

And so, our simple “to tease, to taunt, to threaten, to terrorize, to terminate,”
constitutes a basic unit of action. This string of subsidiary actions/verbs (often
called tactics or beats) are performed by Actor A, who, in this case is attacking
Actor B. This unit is seen as belonging to Actor A since s/he is the one who
is taking action. Actor B, in this unit, is reacting to what Actor A is doing.
This reaction forces another subsidiary action/verb from Actor A, each of
which escalates in intensity. We could characterize the playing of this unit as
follows:

Actor A. Actor B.
To Tease. To Tease Back.
To Taunt To Ignore.
To Threaten. To Dismiss.
To Terrorize. To Resist.
To Terminate. ….
Actions 131

The resistance of Actor A’s actions by B is what drives A to the point of “termin-
ating.” This unit (which should be true of all units) can be broken into Aristotle’s
familiar abc of development with Teasing as the beginning and Terminating as
the ending. Taunting, threatening, and terrorizing form the middle bridge that
carries us from teasing to its endpoint: terminating.
A scene is usually made up of three units with the same three-part structure
(beginning, middle, and end). This goes back to the ancient Greeks, where
many scenes were built around what they called an “agon-logon,” which
roughly translates as a battle (agon) of wits (logon). We could think of these
three units as rounds in a sporting event. Let us take a look at an example from
Sophocles’ Electra.5 Electra’s father, Agamemnon, as you may remember, was
murdered by her mother, Clytemnestra. Since that day Electra’s entire life has
been a continual protest against her mother’s action. The scene we will examine
is between Electra and her sister, Chrysothemis. In this scene, Chrysothemis has
come to warn Electra that unless she changes her ways their mother, Clytemnestra,
plans to imprison Electra for good.

Unit 1
The scene begins with two set speeches, one from Chrysothemis and one
from Electra, both reiterating their age-old differences with one another.
Chrysothemis claims that Electra’s radical opposition accomplishes nothing.
Electra counters by claiming that Chrysothemis is just as guilty as their
mother, since Chrysothemis has not outwardly condemned Clytemnestra’s
murder of their father. It seems as though nothing will change either sister’s
mind. Even the news that their mother plans to imprison Electra falls on
deaf ears. The only thing that catches Electra’s attention is why Chrysothemis carries
offerings. Let us follow this first unit of action:

CHRYSOTHEMIS ELECTRA
Chides Electra for being stuck in Denounces Chrysothemis for being
her ways. complicit.
Warns her of imprisonment. Downplays the news.
Questions Electra’s sanity. Mocks the gravity of the situation.
Implores Electra to take this Castigates Chrysothemis for her
seriously. presumption to know what is best
for E.
Reassures Electra that their dead Rejects this as what Chrysothemis
father would understand. would want to hear.
Challenges her sister one last time. Refuses to budge an inch.
132 Actions

At this point, Chrysothemis gives up and tells Electra, “Well then, I will be on
my way.” Chrysothemis’ intention (which we can see from her actions) was to
get Electra to change her ways before she is imprisoned. The unit ends when
Chrysothemis concedes defeat and leaves empty-handed. This will be the most
discordant of the three units, due to both sisters’ attack upon one another, these
combative actions give the unit a very distinct jagged tone and rhythm. If actions
are notes, then the music of these actions is dissonant in nature.

Unit 2
If Chrysothemis was driving Unit 1 with her intention to change Electra’s
ways, it is Electra who now drives Unit 2 with the intention of learning where
Chrysothemis is going and why.
In this unit, Electra meets very little resistance from Chrysothemis, who
explains that she has been asked by their mother to go to the graveside of their
dead father and leave offerings from Clytemnestra. This makes no sense to Elec-
tra. Why would Clytemnestra, who killed their father in cold blood, do such
a thing? Chrysothemis reveals that Clytemnestra has had a prophetic dream.
Electra gets Chrysothemis to relay the dream.

ELECTRA CHRYSOTHEMIS
Inquires where Chrysothemis is going? Explains.
Doubts that this could be so. Confirms it is so.
Beseeches C to understand Complies. But is confused why
what this means. E is interested in all of this.
Promises to explain her reasons, if C Demurs, not being an expert in
will relate the dream. dreams.
Encourages C to go on. Consents to E’s wishes.

CHRYSOTHEMIS
Shares the dream. Her intention in telling her mother’s dream
is to gain clarity and understanding from Electra, who she hopes will
elucidate what it means. This intention should color the telling.

Electra wins this unit by getting her sister to tell her everything. Notice how
the shift in actions shifts the tone of this middle unit. Gone are such combative
actions as chiding or castigating, replaced with beseeching and demurring. This
radically changes the music of the second unit, reducing its jagged feel. Like
music, we need to hear this change through the new notes/actions of the sisters.
Actions 133

Unit 3
Chrysothemis relates the dream, followed by Electra’s interpretation. For Electra,
the dream is a sign that Clytemnestra will be revenged and that Chrysothemis
should join Electra in her fight against their mother. Chrysothemis agrees. This
is how these actions unfold:

ELECTRA CHRYSOTHEMIS
Pleads w/ E to heed her
words.
Entreats her sister to not follow their
mother’s plan.
Vents her outrage at Clytemnestra’s
audacity.
Guides her sister in what she must do
instead.
Promises they will be triumphant.
Questions if Agamemnon’s ghost had
a hand in all of this.
Dismisses this last thought.
Rallies her sister to join her. Agrees to follow E.

This concludes the scene between Electra and Chrysothemis. What started as
two sisters at complete odds with one another, ends with the sisters reunited.
What brings this change about? The revelation of the dream, which is the
centerpiece (literally and figuratively) of the scene.
The mystery and interpretation of the dream brings them both together,
leading to this final unit where harmony between the sisters is achieved. It is
as though the clouds of an overcast day have finally cleared and the sisters are
bathed in a beatific summer light. And so, each unit of action has its own time
signature, its own feel, its own music, depending on interplay of actions
within the unit. The unit of action is defined by who dominates, or drives the
given unit.

UNIT 1
Is dominated by Chrysothemis, we could call it “Change or Else.” The
struggle of the unit, will Electra change or not. The result, Electra will
not change. (Dissonant)
UNIT 2
Is dominated by Electra, we could call it, “What are you doing?”
Where Electra tries to discover what Chrysothemis is doing with the
funeral offerings in her hands. Chrysothemis (unlike Electra in the
134 Actions

previous unit) complies with Electra’s entreaties and shares the

dream with her sister. (Dissonance gives way to harmony)
UNIT 3
Electra, having heard the dream, interprets it as a good omen, and
entreats her sister to follow the urging of the dream. This is the very
turning point of the scene, with the dream as the hinge. Our title for this
the scene is “Join me” since it is this is the new action that the
dream invokes. (Harmony builds to a crescendo of shared sisterly
feeling).

We cannot stress enough the centrality of actions. As we said earlier, they are for
theatre what notes are to music, or ballet positions are for classical dance.
A musician reads a musical score, theatre practitioners read an actional score. This
is a thermodynamics (release of energy) that has its own rhythm and intensity;
played properly, an audience can feel these micro- and macro-shifts in the dynamics
of the scene as it unfolds. This is the music of actions.

The how of the action

The How of an action is the action’s weight or emphasis. Here we are dealing
with the quality of an action. We can imagine each action existing on a spec-
trum that moves from lightness to heaviness. The question becomes, where does
the action of a given character sit on such a spectrum? Once we set the action,
we can begin to play with its how, moving it along this given spectrum until we
find its proper placement. Such placements can shift depending upon the specific
circumstance surrounding each rehearsal or performance.
Much of our rehearsal work is a matter of first finding the proper action
and then moving on to discovering its how. Where the actual actions of
a character tend to stay constant throughout the process (once they are dis-
covered and agreed upon), the how of the action can change from rehearsal
to rehearsal and performance to performance. This keeps the action from
running the risk of becoming stale. In such instances, we can either decide
to alter the how of our action, or we may respond to the change in the
how of our scene partners’ action. There should be a symbiosis between
scene partners in terms of responding to these shifting hows. And so, one
night our action to attack might be done in a lighter fashion than the night
before. This not only shifts the how of our action, but also the how of our
scene partners’ response to it.
To change an action in performance can be destabilizing, because it can
alter the very structure or DNA of the scene. The actions are the notes of the
scene’s score. The how of the action is the way in which the actor plays those
notes. The how is part of the interpretation. An early rehearsal process is
about making sure we understand the notes of the score, that we have the
Actions 135

proper sequencing to ensure the right rhythm and build. Once the score of
actions are clear, we can turn to how they can be played and that playing can
and should alter. And so, the action is the score, the how of the action is its
playing.
Let us look at the established actions for Electra and Chrysothemis in Unit 1
of their scene:

CHRYSOTHEMIS’ ACTIONS: ELECTRA’S ACTIONS:

Chide Denounce
Warn Downplay
Question Mock

Now, on one night, these actions might be played earnestly (i.e., heavy) or
sarcastically (light). Chrysothemis’ change in the how of her actions does not
alter Electra’s action, but it does offer the opportunity for Electra to readjust her
how in relation to that of Chrysothemis.
As a result, Electra may decide to meet Chrysothemis’ sudden sarcasm with equal
sarcasm; or hold to a more earnest approach. The action gives us the foundation; the
how gives us the ability for variation. So that we have a certain degree of structure
and freedom that is at work in each night-to-night performance of a scene. In this
respect we could play the opening actions:

ironically
emphatically
off-handedly
savagely
surgically
scaldingly
indifferently
incomprehensibly
uncompromisingly
for the first time in a long time
for the hundredth time
for the very last time

This is, in many ways, the adverbial nature of actions that can be further refined
and articulated during the realization of the scene at hand. The key remains:
same actions, different emphasis. The introduction of a new how is an invitation
or gift to the other actor, offering them the opportunity to play without depart-
ing from the deep structure of the scene. Accepting the invitation of a new how
can lead to a lively reanimation of the scene, forcing the actors to stay “awake”
to these slight variations and to respond in kind. They have to “listen anew”
136 Actions

which can give the scene a fresh sense of spontaneity since neither actor knows
what shifts might happen next. This returns the scene to the realm of surprise;
such an openness in shifting hows can make the difference between a lively or
deadly rendering of a given scene.

Actionality. The nature of actional motifs: or, when actions rhyme

Just as there are image patterns in a novel or musical motifs in a symphony,
there are also actional motifs in a theatre piece. This is perhaps one of the most
important and overlooked aspects of theatrical practice. The failure to appreciate this is
understandable, we don’t technically “see” or “hear” an action, and yet we still
sense it when it happens, we “feel” it. We take the use of language, grain of
voice, comportment, and overall engagement of an individual and somehow
ferret out their actions based on these different registers of expression. It is
a wonderfully tricky, mysterious affair. Actions are indeed legible, but their legi-
bility is made up of a kind of micro-signage that we, as humans, intuit more
than interpret. And so, because we basically feel an action, it often goes unnamed,
working on us in a subliminal fashion.
This becomes all the harder when we are dealing with words on a page.
Often a play does not reveal itself to us until we move from the reading of
a text to the playing of it. Then we begin to discern the swarm of actions that
thrum just behind the surface of the words. Our work begins by attempting to
discern each action on its own and in conjunction with the action that follows
it. We want to understand how each organically grows from one to the other,
becoming a chain of linked actions. Just as we must learn a musical score note
by note, we must learn a dramatic text action by action. Then we can hear the
music of the work. For the musician, the notes are there in the score on day
one; for the actor, the notes (actions) are hidden behind a given line of dialogue.
In music, understanding a score is a matter of reading the notes; in theatre,
understanding a play is a matter of deciphering the actions. This decipherment
can take weeks of trial and error. As a result, one may not “hear” the play (the
music of its actions) until very late in the rehearsal process; when the actors
have discovered, delineated, and mastered the proper chain of actions to such
a degree that the dormant energy of a piece is finally released. In doing such
work, we are able to identify certain actions that often occur and reoccur within a given
act of a play. We want to keep our eye on these patterns of repeating actions,
what we will call actional rhymes or motifs. Such development is like the patterns
of imagery in a literary text or the leitmotifs in a Wagner opera, they give the
work its unique feel and particular time signature. One of the greatest authors of
such actional patterning was Molière. Let’s take a look at his Don Juan, which
boasts a rather sophisticated deployment of actional motifs, giving a distinct feel
and movement to each of its five acts. Thanks to Molière’s rigorous use of such
actional motifs, we can begin to see how a dramatic score can be as intricate as
a Bach sonata.
Actions 137

Molière, Don Juan, and the art of actional motifs

Molière’s Don Juan is constructed entirely through the use of actional motifs (or
rhymes) that run throughout a given act. Molière fashions a sequence of over-
arching actions that repeat and build from scene to scene, endowing each act
with its own unique, energistic musicality. These actional motifs are the secret
glue that holds each act together, giving them their unique time signature, tone,
and subliminal meaning.

Scene 1
In this first scene we meet Sganarelle (servant to Don Juan) and Gusman (the
servant to Donna Elvira). We learn, rather immediately, that Don Juan was
romantically involved with Donna Elvira, wed her, and has subsequently left
her. Gusman’s action becomes the motif for the entire act. He wants to know
why Don Juan would do such a thing? Where he has gone? And will he ever
return? This is the central action of the scene. It immediately creates a world of
those who know (Sganarelle) and those who do not (Gusman). We could
go a step further and say it is a world where those that know have the power
(Sganarelle; top dog) and those who do not know are powerless (Gusman;
underdog). Hence, Gusman desires to know. Sganarelle toys with revealing
what he knows, torturing Gusman with tidbits. His forestalling of knowledge
becomes a kind of sexual foreplay where such delays makes the consummation
all the more satisfying. The scene ends in a climax of information where Sganar-
elle tells Gusman everything he could ever want to know about Don Juan. And
so, in this first scene, the theme of the entire play is hidden in Gusman’s action
“to know.” This is the secret theme of Don Juan, and this scene, like an over-
ture, introduces this motif subliminally to the audience.

Scene 2
Don Juan appears, Gusman flees, what ensues is a scene between Don Juan
and Sganarelle where now the power dynamic, established in the first scene, is
completely reversed. Now, Sganarelle seeks to know what his master will do
next, in doing so Don Juan becomes the top dog (the one who knows) and
Sganarelle is reduced to underdog (the one who knows nothing). Don Juan
lords over Sganarelle’s ignorance. But as this extraordinary scene develops we
realize that Don Juan is also caught in the thrall of this action, to know. We
see that he wants to know just how far he himself can go, how far he can
transgress before he brings down the wrath of a God he says he does not
believe in. This sets the seeds for a suspicion that what Don Juan secretly or
unconsciously wants to know is if there is indeed a God. His transgressions
being an attempt to bring God out of hiding. Don Juan wants to know the
greatest unknowable.
138 Actions

Scene 3
Donna Elvira appears and once again the power dynamic is reshuffled. She
becomes top dog, even though it is now she who wants to know why Don
Juan left her. The new pecking order becomes Donna Elvira, Don Juan, and
finally Sganarelle. But, interestingly enough—unlike Gusman, Sganarelle, and
Don Juan—Donna Elvira actually does not want to know and would rather
be lied to by Don Juan. Often the point of a pattern, in Molière, is not how it
continues to replicate itself, but where it breaks down. This also happens noticeably at
the end of Don Juan where the actional pattern is lying. Don Juan lies to his father,
he lies to Donna Elvira’s brothers but he can ultimately cannot lie to the God who
judges him. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, let us take a brief look
at the tapestry of actional motifs that makes up each act of Moliere’s
masterpiece.

Larger actional architectonics in Molière’s Don Juan

And so, each act of Don Juan is built upon the foundation of a particular
actional theme (i.e., to know). This actional theme is then subject to a series
of variations from scene to scene with the final scene usually being some sort
of complete inversion of the established pattern. What follows is a quick cheat
sheet of Moliere’s actional motifs:

Act One: To Know

(The truth about Don Juan)
Gusman wants to know Don Juan’s motives.
Sganarelle wants to know Don Juan’s plans.
Donna Elvira wants to know Don Juan’s heart.
Donna Elvira decides not to know Don Juan’s heart.

Act Two: To Dissemble

(To hide one’s true intentions)
Charlotte dissembles with Pierre.
Charlotte dissembles with Don Juan.
Don Juan dissembles with Charlotte.
Don Juan dissembles with Charlotte and Mathurine.

Act Three: To Test

(Challenging one’s beliefs)
Sganarelle tests Don Juan’s morals.
Don Juan tests the Old Man’s piety.
Don Carlos tests Don Juan’s courage.
Don Carlos tests Don Alonzo’s code of honor.
The Statue tests Don Juan’s atheism.
Actions 139

Act Four: To Warn

(Don Juan has used up his literal, familial, and spiritual credit)
Dimanche warns Don Juan has used up his credit.
Father warns Don Juan has tried his family’s patience.
Donna Elvira warns Don Juan has tried the patience of God.
The Statue warns Don Juan is about to meet his end.

Act Five: To Lie

(Until Don Juan finds he can lie no longer)
Don Juan lies to his Father.
Don Juan lies to Don Carlos and Don Alonzo.
Don Juan cannot lie in the last moments of his life.

This is the actional math/music of each act of Don Juan. Again, the overarch-
ing actional theme gives each act its structure: beginning with the introduction
of the central action in the first scene, which is followed by a series of
variations from scene to scene. Each actional variation builds in intensity from
the previous variation, thereby creating a unique tempo and feel for the act;
turning these acts into movements in a dramatic symphony. We are dealing
with the theme and variation of repeating actions which creates a certain
mounting tension. Remember each action has its own weight, dynamic, and
time signature. As a result, an act that is about the ways to know something
suggest a very specific kind of energy/music, especially when it is followed by
an act that celebrates dissembling. The virtuosic nature of such a strategy is
to see how each character in their own unique way may dissemble in Act
Two, test in Act Three, or warn in Act Four; giving us the opportunity to
hear the music of the scene played/interpreted by another actor/instrument in
a new and surprising register. Playing these actional motifs is playing the music
of the act. It is a music created out of the energy that is released in playing
a given sequence of rhyming actions. This energy, its repetition, and intensifi-
cation is the particular music of Molière’s Don Juan. It works on us in almost
subliminal fashion. Our job: play the music of the actions, they are the notes that
make up the score of Don Juan.

Actional motifs in the first act of Uncle Vanya

Let us now, briefly turn our attention to Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which also
exhibits the same actional rigor of theme and variation from act to act. This
actional approach is at work in all four of Chekhov’s major plays (from The
Seagull to The Cherry Orchard), but is perhaps clearest in Vanya. The story of
Uncle Vanya, as you may remember, takes place on a country estate where the
Professor and his relatively young wife, Yelena, have come to live. Their arrival
and subsequent stay disrupts the otherwise peaceful life of Uncle Vanya and his
niece Sonya who have devoted their lives to supporting the Professor’s academic
140 Actions

aspirations. At the start of Act One we find Vanya’s friend, Astrov, pacing
about (in need of a drink) while Marina, the housekeeper, calmly knits in a chair.
Let us take a closer look at this act, and see if we can tease out Chekhov’s actional
music:

Astrov and the man who upped and died on him

It is mid-afternoon and Dr. Astrov is in need of a drink; instead, he paces.
Marina, sensing his disquiet, inquires if he might like a little vodka. Astrov
declines, since accepting a drink in the middle of the day (no matter how much
he desires it) would signal that he is an alcoholic and the last thing Astrov wants
is for the world to know about his drinking problem. He declines and tells
a story instead. The story, which takes up the heart of the scene, is about the
recent death of patient on the operating table. This is a rather indirect attempt
(Chekhov’s preferred mode of expression) to explain his reason for drinking.
This story sets up the major actional motif of the act: characters unburdening them-
selves through indirection in order to give voice to their secret dilemma. He is talking
about the dead patient, but what he is really talking about is why he now needs
to drink. And so, by the end of the first scene, the actional motif of unburden-
ing through indirection has been introduced. Let us now watch how it devel-
ops through the act.

Vanya and the man who let him down

Vanya wakes from his afternoon nap and launches into a lengthy diatribe against
the Professor, how the Professor has betrayed him, how the Professor is a fake,
how the Professor is the luckiest man in the world when it comes to women,
take for example the Professor’s beautiful young wife, Yelena. Here, Vanya, like
Astrov, has unburdened himself through indirection by attacking the work
and status of the Professor. This is a man he has, until recently, idolized. Astrov,
who knows a thing or two about deflection, says that Vanya sounds envious.
Vanya dismisses this, but Astrov is correct. It isn’t the Professor’s lack of aca-
demic significance that drives Vanya to distraction, but that the Professor has
a beautiful wife like Yelena. A pattern is emerging, where people unburden them-
selves through indirection, revealing only a part of the truth of the matter.

Sonya and the man who saves forests

We are nearing the end of Chekhov’s first act. Astrov clearly has, like Vanya,
eyes for the Professor’s wife, Yelena. He invites her to see the forest he has
taken great pains to help preserve. Suddenly, Sonya, Vanya’s niece, launches
into a passionate paean to the life of the forest. As with previous monologues,
Sonya is indirectly talking about one thing but meaning something else
entirely. The ostensible subject of her talk is the importance of forests, but the
Actions 141

real intension is to express her boundless love for Astrov. Through talking about the forest
she can both deflect and unburden herself of the all the pent-up love she feels and has
kept hidden. Her indirection functions like that of Vanya and Astrov, it allows
her the necessary release from the weight of carrying this secret inside of her for
so long. Although, notice how here the unburdening has a positive tincture,
unlike the negative ruminations of Astrov and Vanya.
Here, Chekhov, like Molière, enjoys setting up an actional pattern, only to sub-
vert in its final variation. And so we have three actional variations of unburden-
ing through indirection in three distinct registers: beginning with Astrov’s
lament, followed by Vanya’s diatribe, and culminating with Sonya’s tribute.

The actional architectonics of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya

Now let us place the first act of Uncle Vanya within the larger architectonics of
the play, beginning with a schematic recapitulation of the first act and then
seeing how it relates to the actional unfolding of the entire play.

Act One
(Unburdening)
Astrov unburdens his guilt over drinking by talking about the patient who
died on him.
Vanya unburdens his thwarted love for Yelena by attacking the Professor.
Sonya unburdens her secret love for Astrov by celebrating his forest.

In the next act the characters will go a step further, testing one another to say
what they really feel sans any deflection or indirection. This leads to a new
actional motif that is the very antithesis of the previous act. If the first act was to
indirectly unburden oneself, Act Two becomes about the countervailing desire
to withhold:

Act Two
(Withholding)
Yelena withholds her true feelings from the Professor.
Vanya withholds his true feelings about Yelena from Astrov.
Sonya withholds her true feelings toward Astrov.
Astrov almost withholds his possible feelings about Yelena to Sonya.

This actional pattern is only broken at the very end of the act when Yelena and
Sonya agree, in almost game-like fashion, to tell one another the truth. The
two become drunk on truth telling, going further and further until all has been
revealed. In this instance, the truth sets them free.
142 Actions

Act Three
(Taking a leap)
Finds our characters with the truth now within reach and grasping to seize it.
The act begins with Any enticing Yelena telling her, “You have mermaid’s
blood within you, go and find a merman to love.” This becomes the actional
motif of the act, where each character takes a wild leap to seize what they are
really after.

Sonia takes a leap, having Yelena find out about Astrov’s love.
Astrov takes a leap, making a sexual advance at Yelena.
The Professor takes a leap, announcing his desire to sell the estate.
Vanya takes a leap, attempting to shoot the Professor with a gun.

All of these actions by the characters exist under the same actional influence
of taking a leap to seize what they truly want. One could argue that the after-
math of these failures leads the characters to:

Act Four
(Resignation)
Where the dominant actional motif becomes resigning oneself to their fate.
This actional theme of resignation dominates the act with each character grap-
pling, in radically different degrees, with the impossibility of achieving their hopes
and dreams.

Vanya resigns himself to a return to his meaningless life.

Astrov resigns himself to bachelorhood and a life of drink.
Yelena resigns herself to a continued loveless life with the Professor.
Sonya resigns herself to life without Astrov.

Our central characters attempted to unburden themselves throughout the

course of the play; getting closer and closer to truth that they were hiding
from others; or, in the case of Vanya, from himself. But unlike in Freud,
there is no “talking cure” here. In Chekhov’s tragic universe, giving voice to
an unspoken truth does not necessary set these poor souls free. The larger
architectonic actionality is one of expansion and contraction: Acts One finds
the central characters attempting to unburden/free themselves. Act Two
finds them retreating/withholding only to find themselves attempting one
last mad leap that ends in failure and resignation. This is the very respira-
tory system of the play.

Actional rhymes in Shakespeare

Shakespeare often employs a rhyming of actions within the A plot and the
B plot of his plays. Examples of this can be found in King Lear and Hamlet.
Actions 143

Even though these plays could not be more different in style, tone, or intent,
they both reveal their thematics through the use of actional rhymes. The
actional rhyme for both Lear and Gloucester is neglect. These two fathers
favor one child (Cordelia and Edgar respectively) at the expense of their other
children (Regan, Goneril, Edmund). This results in engendering an all-pervasive
envy that ultimately curdles into malice. We could chart this actional rhyme in
the following fashion:

LEAR GLOUCESTER
Favors Cordelia and neglects Favors Edgar (his legitimate son) and
Regan and Goneril. neglects Edmond (his bastard son).

Which results in the following

actional response from their children:

REGAN, GONERIL, EDMOND

Reject and punish their fathers for their lack of being
properly cared for.

By understanding the actional rhymes of a play, we can begin to tease out the
larger issue which is the ultimate implication of the action (a subject we will
continue to discuss in our chapter on About-ness). For now, we will simply
argue that the implication of the action of neglect has devastating consequences
for Lear’s and Gloucester’s respective families and for their nation as a whole.
Later we see that Lear has favored his court at the expense of his people. By
following the actional rhymes we are able to begin to discern the over-arching
authorial intention behind the action.
We can discern this in an even more complicated actional rhyming that happens
in Hamlet where we find four sons who are all asked to do the will of their
fathers. We could chart this rhyme in the following fashion:

HAMLET LAERTES FORTINBRAS PYRRHUS

To do the will To do the will To do the will To do the will
of his father of his father of his father of his father
by killing by killing by regaining (Achilles) by
Claudius. Hamlet. the lands his killing Priam.
father lost.

Having established this actional pattern, we can begin to discern who deviates
from the rhyme. In this respect our chart suddenly shifts to:
144 Actions

FORTINBRAS PYRRHUS LAERTES HAMLET

Over the entire Pauses for a Restrains his Takes the entire
course of the brief moment desire to play to fulfill
play never before he fulfill the will the will of his
seems to waver fulfills the will of his father father.
in fulfilling the of his father. to the most
will of his father. opportune time.

Suddenly the variation in the actional pattern begins to tell us something about
the potential implication of the action in Hamlet. The pattern begs the ques-
tion: what are we to make of Hamlet’s procrastination? Particularly in light of this
actional spectrum between Fortinbras, who never seems to waver in his duty, and Hamlet,
who waits until the final moments of the final act to do his father’s bidding? How are we
to read these two men who are tasked with the same action and yet execute it on such
radically different timetables? Suddenly Hamlet’s comments to Horatio take on an
added significance:

HAMLET
There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now.
If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all, since
no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes.6

With the aide of this actional pattern we begin to tease out one possible reading
of the play where the concern becomes one of the readiness necessary to take
right action. The play, based on such a reading, seems to ask: how does someone
arrive at the necessary preparedness to act accordingly? This becomes a way of under-
standing Hamlet’s progression through the play, a journey toward readiness. The
tragedy of this specific journey is perhaps that Hamlet arrives at this ability too
late, making the play a cautionary tale for young-princes-in-the-making, like the
soon-to-be King James. This is, of course, one potential reading of an
immensely mysterious play. But it shows how actionality can be a way toward
making sense of a play’s overall dramatic intention.

Actional rhymes in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A similar form of actional rhyming can be found running throughout Edward
Albee’s masterful Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We get an immediate intimation
of this in the titles of each act:
Act One, Fun and Games; Act Two, Walpurgisnacht; Act Three, Exorcism.
Each title points to an imbedded actional rhyme. For Act One the over-
arching action is that of game playing. It begins immediately with Martha’s
Actions 145

guessing game, where she attempts to cajole her husband, George, into identi-
fying which movie contains the line, “What a dump.” This delight in games-
manship continues with the arrival of Nick and Honey, who are subsequently
subjected to George and Martha’s game of “Get the Guests.” The entire act is
organized around the playing of such games. In fact, the act can be seen as an
encapsulation of what philosopher Roger Caillos7 calls the four fundamental
types of play: Agon (which pits one player’s strength/skill against another, as
in the constant one-upmanship of George and Martha); Alea, (where certain
aspects of a game are left open to chance, as in George and Martha’s proclivity
for improvisation); Illynx (when the player is rendered unbalanced or incapaci-
tated and then expected to accomplish a given task, think of the continued
drinking of our foursome); and finally mimesis (like children playing “Cowboys
and Indians,” think of Martha’s invoking of her imaginary child).
From here we move to Act Two, Walpurgisnacht. The allusion is to the
Goethe’s Faust and the German tradition of a witches’ sabbath. On such a night,
these infernal figures gather to hold their Satanic festivities. Here, the same action
“to play” returns, but with a much darker and more sinister intent. The actional
dynamics have increased from innocent play to a more infernal form of revelry.
In this case, the party becomes louder, more drunken, debauched, and dangerous
as it continues burrowing into the night. All of this culminates in Act Three,
which Albee calls The Exorcism. Here, we arrive at a rather surreal form of per-
sonal ritual. Our overall actional journey has been one that began with play,
grew to revelry, and ended in a rite (in this case the rite of a quasi-exorcism).
Although each act has its own distinct thermodynamics and time signatures,
all three deal with varying degrees of the expenditure (i.e., the release of surplus
psychic energy; the exorcism being the most extreme form of release). Each act, therefore,
requires our four actors to expel more and more energy. This “expelling” is at
the very heart of play, it is part of the overall actional rhyme that runs like an elec-
tric current throughout the entire event until each actor has exhausted themselves;
expiating each other of their pent-up negative/repressed energy. In this respect,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? becomes another example of the musical nature of
actionality.

Conclusion: actualizing the actional

It is at this juncture that our actional analysis breaks with literary criticism. Yes,
we can write a paper about the actional rhymes that structure Don Juan or Uncle
Vanya and many of the works of Shakespeare, but this is not the point of such an
investigation. This goes beyond interpretation and becomes primarily about
orchestration. It is about becoming sensitive to the music of actions, how they
carry their own time signatures, how they are arranged, how that arrangement
gives a scene its unique feel and movement. The words evoke an action which
captures an energy. At the end of the day, it is the flow of this energy that
actional work reveals to us. This is how a text moves, what happens when certain
146 Actions

energies are released and re-released. It is what happens to us as we experience

these energies over time. Our work is the work of actions. We must become as
adept at employing them as an author does with words, a painter with pigments,
or a dancer with steps. From the ancient Greeks to Stanislavsky and beyond, the
action is the foundation upon which the entire edifice of drama is built. With this
in mind, we can move to action’s chief foe: the obstacle.

Notes
1 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, Volume One, translated by T.M. Knox (Oxford University
Press, 2010), 219
2 Rudiger Bittner, One Action, in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, edited by Amelie Oksenberg
Rorty (Princeton University Press, 1992), 99
3 Christopher Andre, Feelings and Moods, translated by Helen Morrison (Polity, 2012), 9
4 Ibid.
5 I have based this scene breakdown on Anne Carson’s translation of Electra, which can
be found in her An Oresteia (Faber and Faber, 2009), 103–111
6 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden
Shakespeare, 2006), 448 (V.2)
7 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, translated by Meyer Barash (University of Illinois
Press, 2001), 71–81
11
OBSTACLES

The XYZ of being: welcome to the land of obstacles

Intentions and actions do not happen in a vacuum. They have, as we have seen, an
addressee. As a result of this, our actions must be properly calibrated to achieve our
desired ends. I want to do (X) to obtain a certain end (Z) but (Y) stands in the
way and won’t let me get it. What do I have to do to work around or win over Y?
Y = the obstacle. Y can be another person, an institution, a belief system, or
a perceived limit within one’s very self. Y can be anything that stands between
my intention (X) and its desired end (Z). Theatre is about how we negotiate or
mediate the power of all the various Y’s that govern our lives. This is one of the
fundamental equations of drama. Y creates the context within which we attempt to
achieve our intentions (i.e., wants, needs, and desires). It determines the nature,
deployment, quality, and degree of each of our actions. We may wish to do X to
get Z but Y won’t let us, and so we must employ one of the other “23 letters” of
our actional alphabet to arrive at our intended end. Let’s take a closer look at this
dramatic algebra. Let’s say we are not getting Z so our X becomes:

X = to yell
But Y = library.
Or:
X = to yell
But Y = is a judge
Or:
X = to yell.
But Y = I was raised in culture where
yelling is just not done.
Or:
148 Obstacles

X = to yell
But Y = I’m not good at yelling.
Or:
X = to yell.
But Y = I have never yelled before.

In all these cases X (the intention to yell) is circumscribed by a powerful Y.

This resistance/restriction can be external: you are not suppose to yell in
a library or at a judge. The resistance/restriction can also be internal: I was
never very good at yelling, or have never yelled in my entire life, and therefore
am not sure that I can actually accomplish the very thing that I want to do.
These external and internal iterations of Y can often be seen as cultural incur-
sions into our otherwise primal disposition, demanding that we put aside our
innate beast-like inclinations when attempting to achieve our desired ends. In
such a reading, Y begins to resemble Freud’s concept of the super-ego, which
keeps a watch over our ever-rebellious id, making sure it stays in check. In all
of these examples, Y forces us to try other ways to fulfill our intentions. The result of
this imposed obstacle leads to what the ancient Greeks called an agon (i.e.,
a struggle with oneself or others to win what we want, need, or desire). The
word still looks vaguely familiar even to those of us who are not fluent
in ancient Greek. Just add a y to those four existing letters and you have our Eng-
lish word: Agony. We also find the word hiding in our names for heroes and
villains that we still refer to as protagonists and antagonists. The Greeks created
two forms of agon that we still practice today: The Olympics and Tragedy. Most
people would argue that when we go to the Olympics we are interested in those
who win; when we go to a Tragedy we are fascinated by those who lose. Before
moving forward with our modern-day understanding of obstacles, let’s look at its
first dramatic progeny: the agon of ancient Greek tragedy.

Agon (i.e., struggle): an etymological tour of the word

The lexical beginnings of agon are first found in Homer where the word designates
a meeting or meeting place. It goes on to be characterized as a council, assembly,
field, or arena. It is within this environment that the word continues to stretch its
lexical limbs and intriguingly becomes a place for competition. By the time Pindar
picks the word up, it refers to a contest, or games with prizes. The tragedians
define these dynamics as struggle, combat, test, or trial. Aristotle and Demos-
thenes wrest the term from the playing field, bringing it back indoors and using it to
name such activities as discussion, discourse, oration, debate, and harangue.
Euripides will also, in passing, equate agon with suffering. The Early Christian
writers, who seem to be keen readers of Euripides, find this gloss on the word
immensely helpful in discussing the nature of martyrdom.
Aristotle, intriguingly, has very little to say about agon in his Poetics. Aristotle
gives pride of place to plot, followed by character, and then thought. It is under
Obstacles 149

the concept of thought that agon makes its first appearance in Poetics where
a character tries to prove their argument through persuasive speech. This
becomes what is known as an agon-logon, or battle of wits between two char-
acters. The agon-logon was one modality of expression among many that
found their way into Greek tragedy, it exists alongside choral odes, and mes-
senger rhesis (stories) that harken back to Homeric tale-telling. Early Greek
tragedy, being something of a Frankenstein-like creature, is made up of many
different popular aesthetic strands; all of which are stitched together for
a Greek audience’s pleasure. Every extant Greek tragedy that we possess has at
least one instance of an agon-logon transpiring between central characters.
Such agon-logons usually elucidate the central thematic struggle of the play
itself. Euripides would become famous for these episodes. The centrality of
these agon-logons in Euripides’ tragedies may be the key reasons that more
of his works survive than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. It seems the
Hellenistic age had a penchant for such arguments and used them to teach not
drama but rather rhetoric. As we will shortly see, there are other types of agon
that are intrinsically employed by our three great tragedians that go unnoticed
by Aristotle. These other deployments of agon expand the use of this term
beyond Aristotle’s definition of rhetorical debate and speak to other struggles
that are inherent in drama from the Greeks to our own modern renderings
of plays.
It is Plutarch, not Aristotle, that links agon to a larger idea of dramatic action.
Such an enhancement of the role of agon encourages a reading of a play like
The Bacchae as an agon between Dionysius and Pentheus; or, Antigone as an agon
between this extraordinary titular character and her uncle Creon. Such an
expansive view of the nature of agon will eventually grow into our modern
theory of conflict that has become so central to normative conceptions of what
constitutes the heart of the dramatic enterprise and experience.

From agon to conflictus: or, why this whole chapter isn’t just
entitled: Conflict?
When we move from Greek to Latin, agon is ultimately replaced by the word
conflictus, which is the past participle of configere, which literally translates as
to strike against one another (con = together and fligere = to strike). The
word enters into our language in the early 15th Century as conflict and is
related to a clash of arms, fight, or battle. One of the problems with conflict
is that it does not have the lexical elasticity of agon and can never quite seem to
shake loose its sense of warrior-like associations. At the end of the lexical day, the
word conflict feels somewhat linguistically reductive and rather shrill when it
comes to what tragedy seems to be after.
Be that as it may, today we think of drama almost solely in terms of conflict,
a term that has no real corollary in Aristotle’s Poetics, save for linguistic progenitor
agon (which is mentioned once in the entire treatise). Not that Aristotle is the end
150 Obstacles

all or be all on what drama is (far from it); but he is astute enough to sense
that something like agon is just one small part of the dramatic picture. It is
interesting to note that Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy has much more
to do with plots where a character’s actions result in a reversal (peripeteia) of
fortune which leads to the character’s subsequent recognition (anagnorisis) of
his/her true self. In Oedipus Rex, Aristotle’s go-to dramatic example, there is
no conflict with an antagonist, so to speak, that leads to this journey. Just
Oedipus, primarily on his own, moving toward his inevitable fate. Certainly
we can look at many Greek tragedies and read them as straight-up stories of
conflict: Clytemnestra vs. Agamemnon, Electra vs. Clytemnestra, Iphigenia vs.
Orestes, Antigone vs. Creon, Dionysus vs. Pentheus, and so on. It is not by
accident that this has become the dominant way of looking at the mechanics
of tragedy (and drama in general). But it eschews various mysteries that are at
the heart of all these plays. For Aristotle the emphasis is in the casual trajectory
that ensues from the taking of a certain action, to the reversal of fortune, and
ends in some resulting recognition. Such a journey becomes a kind of metaphor
for our own experience of being-in-the-world.
Both conflict and agon are by-products of a larger problem that grows out of
what we are calling obstacles, i.e., that which stops or stands in the way of what
we want. It is the obstacle that is the key. The obstacle can certainly lead to an
agon, or a conflict; but it can also induce mystery, wonder, adventure, or
romance. It is the obstacle that engenders such possibilities. The obstacle is the
cause of drama; conflict is just one of the obstacle’s many resulting effects. This is why
we want to keep our eye on the variety of obstacles that characters face and see
what ensues from such encounters. This leads to a broader, more expansive
array of possibilities when it comes to the unfolding of drama. Clytemnestra,
Agamemnon, Electra, Antigone, Creon, Dionysus, and Pentheus—just to name
a few of our Greek heroes—are not conflictual by nature, but only conflictual because
of a given obstacle. The obstacle sets or re-sets the terms of the relationship. What
is the obstacle between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon from remaining a loving
couple? The murder of their daughter by Agamemnon. What is the obstacle
between Clytemnestra and Electra that keeps them from maintaining their
mother/daughter relationship? The murder of Electra’s father, Agamemnon, by
Clytemnestra. What is the obstacle at the root of Creon and Antigone’s rivalry?
The proper burial of their nephew/brother. Or Dionysus and Pentheus?
Pentheus’ refusal to believe Dionysus is a God. The obstacle creates the ensuing
story. It is the point of origin, its resolution is what we should tracking.
Obstacles do not have to have to result, axiomatically, into straight-up con-
flicts. Oedipus’ obstacle is in finding out who is to blame for the plague that
ravages Thebes. Here, the obstacle to Oedipus’ search for truth creates a sense
of mystery. The obstacle in Alcestis is how can Admetus continue living happily
in light of his wife Alcestis’ death? The obstacle between Orestes and his Furies
in The Eumenides and Orestes concerns the question of converting revenge into
Obstacles 151

justice. In short, stories are not necessarily about agons or conflicts; but rather,
obstacles that create a multitude of human outcomes. This includes and tran-
scends the purely conflictual. With this in mind, let us return to:

The dynamics of obstacles: a brief look at the Greeks

Obstacles breed further obstacles. In the case of Agamemnon, the obstacle that stands
between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon remaining a loving couple is Agamem-
non’s sacrifice of their daughter. This has put in motion a desire for revenge on
the part of Clytemnestra. This desire for revenge meets with a new set of obstacles
that further define Clytemnestra’s character and actions. The new obstacle, for Cly-
temnestra, is the very real fear of being found out before her act of vengeance is
executed. This leads Clytemnestra to a series of calculated actions such as: hiding
her true feelings, maintaining the illusion of being a loving wife, and biding her
time until the opportune moment arises for her to enact her revenge. All of this
is done in a dissembling fashion that hopes to defy the obstacle of being found
out. A tension ensues, how good is Clytemnestra at dealing with this obstacle?
Will she make a mistake, accidentally reveal her true self and thereby undo her
own plan? Or, will her love of irony and insinuation get the better of her? How
far can she insinuate what she is going to do without being caught? This, in
many ways, becomes the real test of this character. How brazen can she be with
this act of being a devoted wife without overplaying her hand? The obstacle
always complicates our intentions, forces us to work harder to obtain our ends.
Understanding the full extent of the obstacles we must navigate gives
a performance its reality and specificity. It is the obstacle which gives our inten-
tions and actions their very unique tincture.
And so, for every action, one should ask oneself, what are the external or
internal obstacles that give specificity and weight to my actions? The intention
determines the action, but the obstacle determines the how of the action: How
deeply or how fully it is ultimately played. One cannot underestimate the
importance of obstacles in terms of actions. It is what moves actions from the
realm of generality and gives them their unique particularity. How to properly
characterize such particularity? The Renaissance, which placed its faith in astrol-
ogy, believed that each individual’s soul was fashioned in heaven and then sent
to earth, but what gave each soul its particularity was its path through the ever-
changing constellations. The stars became like chisels, sculpting the soul as it
made its way from heaven to earth, thereby giving each soul its unique form.
Think of actions as souls and the stars as obstacles. From our intention to its
realization, the action must pass through a series of external and internal obs-
tacles that ultimately sculpt the action into a particular and recognizable form.
As a result, the action ends up having a certain set of attributes, an astrological
inflection, if you will; it could be Scorpio or Cancer-like, all depending on its
initial and singular path.
152 Obstacles

External and internal obstacles in the works of Aeschylus

and Sophocles
As we have seen with our example of Clytemnestra, she must navigate a series
of external and internal obstacles to achieve her goal of revenge. The external
obstacle remains the fear of being found out by others. The internal obstacle is
whether or not Clytemnestra is up to the task. Ironically, Clytemnestra’s internal
obstacle actually turns out to be that she is too good an actress and enjoys play-
ing her part to the point of overdoing it. In this respect, Clytemnestra may be
the first dramatic character worthy of the suspicion that, “the lady doth protest
too much.” As a result of this, she must make sure she does not get so carried
away with the joy of playing her part that she, inadvertently, gives herself away.
That said, if we had to choose which obstacle was primary to Clytemnestra, we
would say that it is the external obstacle of being found out by the inquisitive
chorus or her husband that supersedes all else.
Let us turn to the first scene of Sophocles’ Antigone, where the primary obstacle is
more internal. It is the scene between Antigone and her sister, Ismene. The external
obstacle that they confront is their uncle Creon’s declaration that the dead body of
their rebel brother Polynices should be left unburied. Antigone and Ismene find
themselves on opposite sides of this issue. Both sisters believe this edict to be
wrong, but only one sister, Antigone, is willing to risk her own life to go against
the rule of law. In many ways, this scene mirrors Sophocles’ Electra where, once
again, two sisters are on either side of an issue. One is willing to risk all to take
action, the other rejects it. The situation for both sets of sisters is similar,
but the manner in which the argument unfolds is radically different. The Electra
scene between sisters is truly combative from the get go; whereas, in the Antigone
scene both sisters try as hard as possible to avoid such emotive fireworks. Why?
One argument for this is that there is an internal obstacle of the closeness between
Antigone and Ismene that is absent with Electra and Chrysothemis. Their love for
one another, as sisters, creates an obstacle for Antigone and Ismene; no matter how
much these two sisters disagree with one another, they do not want to break the
bonds of sisterhood that have been such a defining aspect of their relationship. The
threat of damaging this love keeps their ideological attacks in check. Even when
they disagree radically, they respect each other; not wanting to threaten their
unique family bond. Antigone says to Ismene, late in the scene, “You must be as
you believe.”1 Ismene shows her concern for Antigone’s unyielding path, saying,
“Antigone, I’m afraid for you.”2 Later Antigone warns Ismene that “Talk like that,
and you will make me hate you.”3 Ismene concludes, “Since you believe you must,
go on/You are wrong. But we who love you/are right in loving you.”4 Through-
out the scene it is this love that becomes the obstacle, keeping them from tearing
each other apart like Electra and Chrysothemis do in their encounter. And so, even
though these two scenes share tremendous similarities, there remains a fundamental
difference. The internal obstacle that is present in the Antigone and Ismene scene
determines the very manner in which the argument is conducted.
Obstacles 153

Moving back to external obstacles, we can look at the first agon-logon scene
between Antigone and her uncle Creon. Here both must keep their heated emo-
tions in check because their confrontation is public. This is true of many Greek
scenes, where the public nature of the argument creates an obstacle, constraining
those in opposition from giving full vent to their feelings. The pressure of being
before the public forces them to constantly recalibrate what they are doing in
order to “look good” in the eyes of those watching. This translates into remaining
cool and rational in one’s argumentation. Under these circumstances we see that
Creon, who has all the power at the top of the scene, begins to lose that power
when he loses his poise in relation to Antigone. Both are navigating the scene
through the external obstacle of those who are watching and judging them. It
demands that they work within the boundaries of an expected decorum.
There is, no doubt, a certain vicarious satisfaction when such deep-seated
decorum is denied; when a character breaks certain norms and behaves as we all,
sometimes, wish we could behave: yell at the boss, carry on in the library as we
please. But the thrill of this wears thin rather quickly since it is simply not reflect-
ive of the world most of us live in; worlds where we must, day by day, navigate
a variety of restraints that are placed on our natural impulses. Our world, like that
of our Greek predecessors, is ultimately more complicated, more nuanced, more
consequential than a world where everyone can express themselves as they feel,
without potential repercussions. Because of this, we are more prone to be engaged
with characters who must navigate the same sort of obstacles we face. Let us now
turn our attention to how external and internal obstacles manifest themselves in:

Shakespeare’s Hamlet
What is the obstacle that keeps Hamlet from immediately killing Claudius? It is
doubt. Both external and internal. Hamlet seems to doubt everyone and every-
thing. The question at the beginning of the play, “Who’s there,” is a question
Hamlet is inadvertently asking of everyone he encounters, including the ghost of
his father, who, as he tells us in one of his many soliloquies:

HAMLET
… The spirit I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me! I’ll have grounds
more relative than this …5

Later, and more famously, Hamlet brings up perhaps humankind’s greatest external
obstacle: death. An immediate destination that could very well be Hamlet’s if he is
not careful. After all, the dread of death, “that undiscovered country,” goes and
154 Obstacles

HAMLET
… puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus conscience does make cowards—
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sickled o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.6

The external obstacle of doubting others and death is met with an internal
doubt that we can tease out between the lines of the play. The first clue of this
internal doubt can be found in a seemingly off-handed comment by Hamlet: we
are in the thick of his plan to expose the king, when Hamlet suddenly stops to
compliment Horatio, telling him:

HAMLET
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish her election
Sh’ath sealed thee for herself. For thou hast been
As one in suffering all that suffers nothing—
A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks. And blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well co-mingled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave and I will wear him
In my heart’s core—ay, in my heart of heart—
As I do thee.7

It is this balance that Hamlet himself lacks. He careens from over-thoughtful (the
plan to catch the conscience of a king by showing him a play that mirrors his
alleged foul deeds) to over-rash (stabbing a man hidden behind an arras without
checking first to see who it might be). The same young man who, in Act Five,
speaks so philosophically about the advent of death and then, a scene later, finds
him at Ophelia’s graveside making the ridiculous claim, “I loved Ophelia—forty
thousand brothers/Could not with all their quality of love/Make up my sum.”
A juvenile outburst made all the more offensive by being said in front of Ophe-
lia’s surviving brother. Clearly this is a young man who swings violently from one
extreme to another, or, to use his earlier metaphor, “a pipe for Fortune’s finger to
sound what stop she pleases.” And so, we begin to discern an inner obstacle
which is Hamlet’s doubting of his very self. A man bereft of any sense of balance,
the very quality he demands of the acting troupe where he insists that in “the
Obstacles 155

whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may
give it smoothness” and to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action,
with the special observance—that you overstep not the modesty of nature.” His
last words to them are, “Go, make you ready.” But Hamlet’s own internal obs-
tacle may be that he does not feel himself ready for the deed that has been asked
of him. This brings us to the very end of the play where Hamlet tells us:

HAMLET
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be,
’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not
now, yet it will come. The readiness is all, since no man of aught
he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be.8

And so, a case can be made that our poor Hamlet’s procrastination in acting is the
result of external obstacle of doubting the verity of the ghost, as well as a set of
inner obstacles which have to do with his own readiness in terms of taking right
action. The actor of Hamlet can use these obstacles as one way to help him navi-
gate his performance, grounding and particularizing these moments of internal and
external doubt which seem, at times, to cripple our otherwise “sweet prince.”

Internal obstacles in Chekhov

Perhaps one of the more intriguing obstacles in Chekhov is what keeps the
Ranyevskaya family from maintaining their cherry orchard. In terms of an exter-
nal obstacle it is clear that they have been so profligate in their spending that
they simply have no way out of selling their estate to save themselves from
financial ruin. But Chekhov, being Chekhov, seems much more interested in
the internal obstacles that are keeping the family from dealing effectively with
the reality. The internal obstacles, in this instance, are numerous and a part of
Chekhov’s deep understanding of how human nature works. The first inner
obstacle for the family is their infantilization, a theme that is driven home by
the fact that first scene takes place in the nursery which dramatically winks at
the fact that none of this family, no matter what their age, seems to have grown
up. One of the ways this manifests itself is in the family’s inability to even stay
focused on any given problem, how easily distractible they are. An important
conversation will be derailed when one of the interlocutors will notice another’s
brooch and suddenly exclaim, “what a lovely pin.” This will lead to a tangent
about Paris and a ride in a balloon. The problem at hand is now long forgotten,
as far from our conversationalists’ minds as that balloon was from the ground.
Similarly, Lyuba and her brother simply cannot concentrate when Lopakin
speaks business to the family. Lyuba, like an absent-minded child, will find her-
self losing the thread of the argument and asking over and over for things to
repeated. Such behavior becomes a kind of defense mechanism from reality
which is simply too difficult for her to keep track of in the rush of life.
156 Obstacles

Another internal obstacle is their own aristocracy, which makes them prideful
and stops them from asking for help. It never crosses their mind to ask Lopakhin,
who ultimately buys the estate, for assistance. But, perhaps, there is a deeper reason-
ing behind the inability of the family to deal with the impending loss of the cherry
orchard. They seem to suffer from a kind of temporal illness. If the problem with
Chekhov’s three sisters is that they live in the future and cannot deal with the actual
present, than the Ranyevskaya family is the complete inversion of this problem:
they live in a perpetual present and refuse to see the future or the past because both
are so bleak. Chekhov seems to suggest that the people who succeed, the Natashas
and Lopakhins of the world, do so because they have a fluid sense of time. They
know where they came from, where they are now, and how far they still are from
where they would like to ultimately be. This holistic sense of time keeps them
moving forward, whereas the three sisters or the Ranyevskaya family are temporally
stuck in time. As problematic or limited as Natasha and Lopakhin seem to be, they
succeed because of their healthy relationship toward time.
Chekhov, perhaps more than the Greeks or Shakespeare, is interested in the
internal obstacles that stop us from our goals. The plural nature of this is also
important. Here we are not dealing with just one obstacle but multiple hin-
drances. Because of this, it is difficult to discern what might be the root cause. It
all seems shrouded in a mystery that can take the entire play to unravel. This is
a significant part of Chekhov’s art.

External obstacles in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

One could argue that O’Neill’s masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night, is
one long series of obstacles that stops the family from doing and saying what
they really want. They must wait for night when the cumulative fatigue and
variety of intoxicants free each from their particular constraints, allowing them
to give full vent to what had been previously pent up. This release is all the
more seismic for having been contained for so long.
What are some of the obstacles that keep this family from giving over to their
secret demons? The first obstacle is the day itself, which, out of habit and societal
pressure, demands a certain maintaining of decorum. In the light of day, in the
full view of others, one must try to at least give the illusion of normalcy.
The second obstacle becomes the very notion of family; that deeply ingrained
sense of boundaries, of what one can or cannot say to a parent, and what a parent
should and should not say to a child. A shared history has taught the family what
is permissible to express, what is off-limits, and what is forever forbidden to men-
tion. And so a whole host of truths must, for the sake of the family, be repressed,
kept hidden under lock and key. We want to try to spare ourselves and our
family certain pains, we know better than to attack their foibles, or remind them
of their human failings, or distress them with our own issues (whether that is alco-
holism, tuberculosis, or morphine addiction). And if that isn’t enough to stop us,
there’s always the need of looking good in the eyes of servants and neighbors. All
Obstacles 157

of these obstacles conspire to keep the Tyrone family from giving over to their
internal demons; but as the day gives way to night, these already fraying obstacles
recede and their demons grow ever more restless. The night beckons them, calling
on the family’s endless reserves of anger, resentment, recrimination, need, terror,
abandon, and contempt; all of which rise until the cumulative force spills over into
the evening. There is one basic law of obstacles: the greater the obstacle, the greater
the force that is finally released. In the case of a figure like Jamie Tyrone, that
release is volcanic.

My teacher and physical obstacles

My teacher loved obstacles. The bigger the obstacle, as far as he was concerned,
the more interesting the acting challenge was and the more creative you had to
be. He would announce to our class, “Obstacles are the greatest gift an author
or director can give an actor.” One day, we were in rehearsal for Euripides’
Hecuba. And my teacher said to the young actress playing Hecuba:
“Laura, my darling, I have a gift for you.”
“A gift?” The actress said, her eyes widening in delight, “For me?”
“Well, for your character.” He said.
“What is it?” The actress said with all the impatience of a child on Christmas
morning.
“I think your character…”
“Yes…?”
“Should have a…”
“…What?”
“A Stroke.” My teacher said as though he had just given her a brand new car
“A Stroke?” The actress said, as though she, herself, had just been diagnosed
with one.
“A Stroke!” My teacher repeated, beaming with mischievous creativity.
“Like in the brain?” The actress said, no doubt hoping there was another
meaning for the word.
“Exactly. But this isn’t just any stroke.” He said to encourage her.
“It isn’t?” She brightened.
“No. This is a massive stroke.”
“Massive?”
“Yes, it’s affected your speech, and your walk.”
“I can’t walk or talk?”
“No, no… you can talk… it’s just hard to make yourself understood because
of all the slurring.”
“I slur?”
“On account of the massive stroke.”
“And my walk?”
“Oh, you can still walk.”
“I can!?” She said, so relieved.
158 Obstacles

“You just need two canes to do so.”

“Two?”
“Trust me, you’re going to love it.”
“I will?”
And she did. Suddenly what had seemed like a rather uninspired playing of
Hecuba came to life, resulting in a spectacular and very moving performance. In
the midst of all this, I asked my teacher what made him decide that Hecuba
should have had such a physical impairment. He smiled and said:

Hecuba is an impossible role. There’s a reason nobody wants to play it.

I mean how do you deal with all that grief and madness? How do you do
that when, hopefully, there is no actual corollary to such catastrophe in your
own life? What magic “as if” is going to make up for the great good fortune
you have had? How do you begin to imagine a world where everyone you
love has been either slaughtered or enslaved? Sometimes, when confronted
with such challenges to the imagination, the best one can do is create an
inner obstacle that you know you can play and where you can put all your
energy. And so, with an internal obstacle like a stroke, you don’t have to
worry about having to “act” all those “Greek” passions, all you have to do is
just try to form a sentence; instead of having to partake in some rarified form
of physical supplication before the gods, you just have to try to get from stage
right to stage left with two canes. This is a tangible, actable struggle, especially
for a young actress who grew up in some sleepy little suburb of Connecticut.

Conclusion
The obstacle is essential in giving the action its proper specificity and force. Without
the obstacles, actions tend to become general and run the risk of melodrama. It is an
essential part of the dramatic equation, joining intention and action as the funda-
mental dynamics that are at work within each scene. It is this triangulation of
intention/action/obstacle that leads to our next element: events.

Notes
1 Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Richard Emil Braun (Oxford University Press,
1973), 23
2 Ibid., 24
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 25
5 Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden Shakespeare,
2006), 278–279 (II.2)
6 Ibid., 286–289 (III.1)
7 Ibid., 300–301 (III.2)
8 Ibid., 448 (V.2)
12
EVENTS

Shaping time: on the nature of events

We have several ways of delineating time. There is: our relation to the sun and
the moon, our various clocks, and events. Each are ways of demarcating our days,
our lives, and our epochs. Without these tools, time would spool out in an undif-
ferentiated fashion, one day indistinguishable from the next. Planets, clocks, and
events break time into discernible bits of being. Of these tools, events are perhaps
the most ephemeral when compared to the astrological or mathematical rigor of
our other time-telling means. And yet, events are ultimately the most persuasive
demarcation that we have at our disposal. But what exactly constitutes an event?
A first kiss, World War One, and Christmas are all events, but what is the
common denominator that holds these seemingly dissimilar occurrences together?
In a way, we are back to Aristotle and his interest in when things come-into-
being. An event marks the emergence of something new; something that, on the
simplest of levels, was not there a moment ago and now suddenly is. The event is
the manifestation of a something that enters our world and, upon its entrance,
changes our basic situation in some significant fashion. This something can be as
real as a tornado or as ineffable as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, both of these
occurrences radically change our world in one way or another. Let us look at
three types of events and see what else they can tell us about the nature of this
phenomenon.

The earthquake, the slap, and the French Revolution

It is a morning, like any other morning, same alarm, same shower, same getting
dressed, same coffee, same everything, to the point where you can’t remember
if this is a Tuesday morning, or Wednesday morning, or perhaps a Thursday
160 Events

morning. But this morning something different occurs, something that separates
this day from all the other seemingly indistinguishable days. The room begins to
rock, the ceiling cracks, and the sound of myriad car alarms fills the air from the
street below. It is an earthquake. Suddenly this swath of undifferentiated time is
irrevocably broken into three significant and unalterable temporal units: before
the earthquake, the earthquake, and after the earthquake. We will remember
that summer as the summer of the Earthquake and we will organize our mem-
ories on either side of this momentous Event. Such events have a powerful way
of demarcating time for us.
Now let us move from the elemental to the personal. Let’s say, someone sud-
denly slaps you across the face. This sudden gesture, like the earthquake,
reorganizes our sense of time. Now our day is thought of in terms of: before
the slap, the slap, and after the slap. The slap defines this moment of time,
marks it in our memories long after the sting of slap itself has ceased. Such an
event happened to my niece when she was a little girl. This one gesture became
one of the life-defining moments of her childhood. Being slapped, by another
little girl, forever altered my niece’s sense of the world. Before she was slapped,
the world was a veritable paradise, all beauty and light; after the slap, the world
had become a dark, fallen place where bad things were just waiting to happen.
And even though she ultimately recovered from this radical disenchantment,
a little part of her childlike buoyancy seemed to have been forever taken from
her. It was her expulsion from the Eden of childhood. A childhood now forever
divided by that slap. On one side innocence; on the other side, the fall into
knowingness. Events have a power to not only demarcate time, but also to
radically change our outlook on life.
Moving from the personal to the historical, we find, for example, from as far
back as humankind can remember, there have been Kings. Even when human-
kind begins to doubt the gods, Kings (who derive their authority from the
divine) still persisted. They continued their relatively unquestioned existence
well into the European Enlightenment and then? A radical event: Revolution,
the guillotine, and Year One of the new French Republic. One day the world
was ruled by kings, the next day by the will of the people. These historic events
can become mythic, as though the severing of the King’s head somehow magic-
ally ushers in an entire new era. We organize our lives around such larger than
life events: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We believe we are
who we are thanks to the shock waves of these historical happenings that reach
us even at the distance of a brand new century. Events such as these become
culturally totemic, transcending the personal and leaving a trace in our collective
unconscious. Finally such events, once coming-into-being, can create an entire
chain of future events. And so the event of the French Revolution will lead to
the event of Napoleon, which will lead to the event of Waterloo.
And so, we see that events can demarcate time, radically alter our outlook on
life, accrue mythic meanings, and breed further events.
Events 161

The basic criterion for events

We can apply the following criterion to determine when a moment constitutes
being an event:

A.
Events create, as we already noted, clear temporal demarcations,
a distinct before and after, thanks to the event’s emergence.
For many the birth of Jesus is such an event, dividing all human history
into either “Before Christ” and “After Death.”
B.
Events create polarity shifts. A polarity shift is a discernible change
in tone or energy as a result of the event’s emergence.
C.
Events tend be irreversible. Scenes are forever altered by the
emergence of the event. It is difficult for them to return to their
earlier polarity.
D.
Events engender further events, creating a chain of happenings.

If a moment meets the criterion of these dynamics then it constitutes being an

event. There is usually one event per scene, although there are many scenes in
Shakespeare that possess sometimes two and, in some rare instances, three
events. The more events a scene possesses, the more it runs the risk of feeling
melodramatic. We shall designate three types of events and list them in terms of
magnitude, from smallest to largest:

1. Micro-Events: Which account for the shift within a given scene.

2. Macro-Events: Which define the major shift in a given act.
3. Architectonic Events: Which define the major shifts in the arc of the play.

Let us begin to unpack these terms one at a time. Beginning with the smallest
building block:

The micro-events: the light from Troy and Clytemnestra’s dream

The shift that we call a micro-event can also be found in the ancient Greeks’ concept
of the peripeteia (or turning). The peripeteia, like the event, also creates a before and
after, with the peripeteia as hinge between the two states. Take our Watchman in
Agamemnon who has waited 10 long years for a light in the night sky. Suddenly, out
of the darkness, it arrives. This is, as we noted earlier, what the Greeks would call
162 Events

a peripeteia, but it also meets our criterion for an event. First, it demarcates the
scene, there was before-the-event-of-the-light and after-the-event-of-the-light.
Second, it radically alters the outlook of our Watchman; before-the-light he was in
the depths of depression, after-the-light he is suddenly filled with jubilation. Third,
light takes on a certain totemic meaning, signaling the end of the war. And finally,
like many events, it is part of a chain of events, beginning with the fall of Troy, fol-
lowed by the return of Agamemnon, and his soon-to-be-consummated murder.
Events, as we’ve seen, have a way of engendering further events.
The same “eventfulness” is at play in our scene between Electra and Chrysothemis.
In this case the event is Chrysothemis’ relating of Clytemnestra’s dream. Before the
relating of the dream, the sisters were at odds with one another; after the relating of
the dream the sisters begin to work together to understand the dream and act on it.
Had the event of the relating of the dream not occurred, none of this would have
happened; the sisters would have stayed at odds with one another, as they have been
ever since the death of their father. Without the event, there would be no further
progress. The event propels the story forward to the next event.
In both instances, the event of the light and the event of the recounting of
the dream structure the scene itself. The event gives the scene its beginning
(before-the-event), middle (the event), and end (after-the-event). One could
argue that a scene is not a scene without at least one event, since the event
gives the scene its development.
Other examples of micro-events would be when the ghost of Hamlet’s father
enters the first scene of the play. Talk of his previous arrival would be described
as an architectonic event (the initiating event of the play that gets the story roll-
ing) and later his encounter with Hamlet will become the macro-event of the first
act of the play (marking the first major turning point in the arc of the act and in
Hamlet’s behavior). But here, in this first scene, the ghost’s actual arrival functions
as a micro-event. It meets all our criteria for micro-event status: it demarcates
time (there is before-the-entrance-of-the-ghost and after the-entrance-of-the-
ghost), it creates a polarity shift (the night watchmen go from being circumspect
to terrorized), and it is difficult for the scene to recover from this event (i.e., for
the watchmen to return to their previous state of composure).
This same eventfulness is also true in Horatio’s first scene with Hamlet where
the event of this scene is not the appearance of the ghost but the mention of the
ghost. This has the same power to demarcate time (the scene cleanly breaks
between before the mention of the ghost/and after the mention of the ghost),
shifts the polarity of the scene (the men go from light conversation to serious
disputation), and the scene never recovers from this moment (the mention of
the ghost becomes the subject matter for the rest of the scene).
It is important to note that an event does not have to be the actual seeing of
a ghost, or a gunshot going off, it can be the revelation of some sort, like the
dream that Chrysothemis relates to Electra. News, itself, is eventful. In both
cases we see that the event becomes a hinge that takes us from one polarity to
the next. Perhaps one of the easiest ways of discerning the emergence of an
Events 163

event is through examining the polarity shift in the scene. Take for example the
first scene in Chekhov’s The Seagull between Medvedenko and Masha. The
polarity goes from an over-talkative Medvedenko to a Medvedenko of monosyl-
lables. The question becomes, “What accounts for this shift in polarity?” The
answer, Masha’s response to Medvedenko’s protestation of love, where she says,
quite bluntly, that she does not love him back. This statement is the hinge for
the whole scene, the event that shifts the polarity and divides the scene into
before Masha-rejects-Medvedenko and after-Masha-rejects-Medvedenko.
And so, the appearance of the ghost, the mention of the ghost, or Masha’s
rejection of Medvedenko’s protestation of love all constitute micro-events; an
occurrence in the scene that irrevocably changes the scene’s polarity. Most
scenes present at least one such event. We, as theatre practitioners, must not
only note this, but play this for all it is worth. This is what we do; like Miles
Davis, we play the changes. Whether that is through tone, rhythm, or energy. We
play the change so the audience understands the consequence of the event. It is only
through such differentiation that we begin to understand things.

“Is not that strange”: when scenes possess more than one
micro-event
As we noted above, most scenes possess one micro-event per scene, although with
Shakespeare we find that he will, on occasion, give a scene two or three events.
One such example of this can be found in Act IV, Scene 1 of Much Ado About Noth-
ing between Beatrice and Benedick. The scene takes place after Claudio has spurned
Hero at the wedding altar. Beatrice and Benedick are left alone onstage, she is over-
whelmed by the wrongful treatment of her cousin, he wants to help and express his
love for Beatrice. Benedick attempts to draw Beatrice out of her fury and into
conversation with little success. Finally, he has no choice but to say:

I do love nothing in the world so well as you.

Is not that strange.1

For most authors, this would be more than enough of an event for a scene,
especially since Beatrice and Benedick have been at odds with one another since
the very beginning of the play and much of the plot has been devoted to bring-
ing this warring couple together. But, as we know, Shakespeare is no ordinary
author and so this major event lasts a mere 11 lines before Shakespeare throws
another huge event at us. This is the moment when Benedick says, to prove his
love, “Come, bid me do anything for thee.” And Beatrice famously replies:

Kill Claudio.2

The result, no matter how many times I have encountered this scene, is always
something of a jolt to the system. The dual events one atop the other have
164 Events

a kind of one-two punch that destabilizes the audience, almost knocking the
wind out of them. It reminds us that both drama and reality are often kinder
than Shakespeare and usually dole out only one event at a time for us mere
mortals to deal with. Not so with Shakespeare. Just when we are cognitively
reeling from one event, he throws another at us. The events are particularly
jarring by how they impact on time. The revelation of love quickens the
scene between the two, the injunction to “kill Claudio” brings the scene to
a dead standstill and then puts the scene in overdrive with Beatrice’s attack
on Benedick. The shift from love to vehemence is so strong that we suffer
a kind of emotional whiplash. In short, it is a masterful moment.
Shakespeare goes a step further in Act III, Scene Two of The Winter’s Tale.
Here he gives us three events in one scene. King Leontes has brought his wife
Hermione before a court of law to convict her of the act of adultery. The first
event is the news from the Oracle of Delphi that Hermione is indeed innocent.
The second event comes fast on the heels of this: news of the death of their son,
who has died of grief over his father’s falling out with his mother. Hermione
faints, and is taken offstage, this leads to the third and final event: Hermione’s
death at the news of the loss of their son. These events, one atop another, have
a similar disorienting effect as Much Ado, but they also begin to strain an audi-
ence’s willing suspension of disbelief. The piling on of events carries a powerful
punch, but it also runs the risk of becoming melodramatic.
This is the danger with too many events in one scene. To Shakespeare’s
credit, we will learn that the last of these events, the death of Hermione, was
actually a ruse perpetrated by Paulina, to protect her friend from her mentally
unstable husband. In both cases, we learn the power of multiple events which,
when properly orchestrated, can have tremendous impact upon an audience. Just
as there are micro-events that give a scene its energy and dynamic, there are
macro-events that impact the unfolding of whole acts. Let’s turn our attention
to these moments:

Macro-events: Treplev’s play, Vanya’s rain, a fire, and the train

that leaves “in precisely forty-six minutes”
Macro-events deal with a major event that organizes the actions of an entire act.
It is an event that, by its very nature, must impact on everyone in the world of the
play. Chekhov is the master of such macro-events. Let us take a brief look at
four macro-events from Chekhov’s four undisputed masterpieces.

Treplev’s play. The Seagull, Act One

Treplev is putting on a play. This singular event impacts on the entire world of
the country estate from Nina, who is going to be in it, to Arkadina and her
friends and family who are going to watch it, to the Yakov the servant, who is
in charge of the “smoke effect” that happens in the middle of the performance.
Events 165

Like a micro-event, the macro-event delineates time (what happens before,

during, and after the event of Treplev’s play), changes the polarity of the act
(from whimsical to consequential), and is ultimately irrevocable; the act never
quite recovers from the failure of Treplev’s play.

It’s going to rain. Uncle Vanya, Act Two

It is an absolutely stultifying night in the country, everyone is undone by the
oppressive heat, all are waiting for the rain (the event of the act). “There’s
going to be a storm soon,” we hear throughout the beginning of this act. With
rain finally falling in the middle of the act. Before the rain all is discord. Every-
one is attacking the other for the most superfluous reasons; on the other side of
the rain, everyone is momentarily released from weight of their existential
burden, momentarily free, they reach out to one another for solace. All of this is
keyed off by the event of the rain, it both literally and figuratively changes the
very atmosphere of Vanya’s world. Before the rain it seemed as though there
was no air; after the rain, everyone seems able to breathe.

The fire. The Three Sisters, Act Three

A fire rages, engulfing much of the town where the Prozorov sisters live. Every-
one is impacted by this event. There is Tusenbach, Vershinin, and Vershinin’s
enlisted men who fight the fire; there is Vershinin’s family and the soldier Fedo-
tik who are devastated by it; there is Olga and the servants who are trying to
help those who are now devastated and destitute; there is Chebutykin, who is
actively avoiding getting involved in the fire, and Masha, who will use the ensu-
ing chaos as the perfect opportunity to carry out a tryst with Vershinin. The fire
impacts on the collective psyche of the town, everyone is feverish, out of sorts,
as though it were their very hopes and dreams that were in flames, rather than
their immediate world.

The train. The Cherry Orchard, Act Four

“Only forty-six minutes left until the train departs,”3 so Lopakhin informs us at
the beginning of the fourth and final act of The Cherry Orchard. Their leave
taking becomes the event of the act, impacting on everyone in the Ranyevskaya
household from the masters to every last servant, forcing them all to rush their
goodbyes, search for their galoshes, and take one last look at the estate that is no
longer theirs. The event of their ensuing departure pulls them along as though
they were a brightly colored toy animal on wheels, pulled by an invisible string.
There is the chaos of before they leave, their actual leaving, and Chekhov’s
extraordinary coda where the ancient servant Firs is left behind. The polarity
shift from chaos to pathos arrives when Firs, now all alone, realizes he has been
inadvertently left behind to die.
166 Events

This same macro-structuring can be found in Agamemnon where the macro-

event would be Agamemnon’s arrival; or, in Shakespeare where there is the
macro-event of Hamlet’s play The Mousetrap. The macro-event conforms to all
the rules of the micro-event, the only fundamental difference is that its coming-
into-being must impact everyone on stage. This is what accounts for the shift in
scale from micro to macro.

Architectonic events
Finally, there are architectonic events, which organize the unfolding of the play
as a whole. There are four fundamental architectonic events:

The inciting event. This event starts the motor of the plot
- Creon decrees that Antigone’s brother will go unburied as a punishment for
his treason.
- Romeo meets Juliet.
- The Professor and his wife come to live on the country estate with Vanya and
Sonya.

The irrevocable event. This event radically changes the world and the
very course of the play
- Antigone knowingly breaks Creon’s law, buries her brother, and is sentenced
to death.
- Romeo kills Tybalt, leading to his banishment and separation from Juliet.
- Astrov will attempt to seduce Yelena, this will force Yelena to demand that
she and the Professor leave.

The penultimate event.The second-to-last major event that forces

things to their final conclusion
- Antigone is buried alive as punishment by Creon.
- The Friar plots Juliet’s false death, believing it will reunite the lovers, but the
plan backfires.
- Vanya, overwhelmed by all that has happened, takes a gun and attempts to
shoot the Professor.

The culminating event. This event is the terminus for all previous events
- Creon’s wife commits suicide, inducing Creon to see his failure as a ruler.
- The mutual deaths of Romeo and Juliet.
- The departure of the Professor and Yelena, which leads to the dashed hopes
and dreams of Vanya, Sonya, and Astrov.
Events 167

In the weights and measures of events, these architectonic events possess the
most thermodynamic heft. As theatre practitioners, we need to be aware of the
weights and measures of all three levels of events, whether they are scenes
(micro-events), acts (macro-events), or the arcs of the play as a whole (archi-
tectonic events). In this respect, events are like Russian dolls with each event
nestled within another, ultimately leading to that final culminating doll-like
event. Inscribed in the very DNA of the inciting event is its own terminus.
There is a certain inevitability that begins to reveal itself from event to event;
a direction that intimates, early on, its potential destination. We ride these
events to their end, often hoping against hope that it will not lead to the destination
we suspect.

Lopakhin’s proposal: or, the non-event as event

This perfectly ordered understanding of events goes through a slow metamor-
phosis over Chekhov’s career as a playwright. It begins with the same classical
precision that is found in the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare, but in the later
plays, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, it begins to morph in fascinating
ways. The events are still there but on an almost imperceptible subatomic level.
It is as if we have been somehow been transported from the clockwork cosmos
of Newton or even the relative world of Einstein and thrown into the madden-
ingly unpredictable world of quantum mechanics. Here effect seems to often
uncouple itself from its cause and go off in unanticipated directions. In this
brave new world, the event of the scene can be that the event never happens, as is the
case in the final encounter between Lopakhin and Varya where he is suppose to
propose marriage to her and never manages to get around to it. Here is perhaps one
of the most devastating scenes in Western literature, made all the more so by
the utter mundanity of moments like this:

LOPAKHIN
Last year at this time it was already snowing, if you remember,
and now it’s so sunny and calm. Only it’s quite cold… Three
degrees of frost, almost.
VARYA
I hadn’t noticed.
(Pause)
Anyway, our thermometer’s broken.
(Pause)
A Voice from outside calls, “Yermolai Alekseich!”
LOPAKHIN
(As if expecting this)
Coming.4
168 Events

And so, the true intended event of scene, the proposal, never happens and it is this
not happening that is so terribly devastating. Chekhov, the master of events, can
even make a non-event eventful.

Contemporary events
In terms of events in contemporary work, let us review several of the plays we
have been circling around in the previous chapters, beginning with micro-
events. Two exquisite examples of micro events can be found in Angels in Amer-
ica and Far Away:

ANGELS IN AMERICA
Micro-Event: Prior tells Louis he has AIDS.

FAR AWAY
Micro-Event: Joan tells her Aunt Harper she heard a scream.

Both of these examples fit our criterion for micro-events. First, each of these
events creates a clear temporal division: there was before Prior tells Louis about
having AIDS and after; just as there is before Joan tells her Aunt about the scream
she heard and after. Second, there is a profound polarity shift in both scenes
thanks to this event; with Prior and Louis they go from joking and making small
talk, to trying to deal with the serious ramifications of Prior’s illness; with Joan
and her Aunt Harper, they go from talking about quotidian things like the wea-
ther and the stars in the sky, to the more troubling intimations of torture that is
happening in the nearby shed. In both scenes the event is irreversible. Once Prior
confesses he is ill, or Joan reveals she heard a scream, neither scene can return to
the seeming normalcy of its beginning. Finally, the event of each of these two
scenes will engender a string of further, deeper, and more consequential events.
As for macro-events, even as radical a play as Harold Pinter’s The Birthday
Party relies upon their stealth-like deployment:

Act One
The dreaded arrival of Goldberg and McCann.

Act Two
The birthday party.

Act Three
Stanley’s departure.

In the realm of architectonic events, we can turn to Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? as a sophisticated structuring of events to create the larger dramatic scaffold-
ing of the play. These would be:
Events 169

Inciting Event
The arrival of their guests, Nick and Honey.

Irrevocable Event
Martha’s introducing the subject of their absent son.

Penultimate Event
The revelation that there is no son.

Culminating Event
How facing this bitter truth brings George and Martha closer together.

Even plays which seem to eschew events often prove, on closer examination, to
still rely on some sort of re-purposing of the expectations audiences have for
events. Take Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which utilizes the imminent arrival of
Godot as the macro-event of each act. Beckett also takes a page from the Chekhov
playbook and makes the non-event of Godot’s never arriving as the larger archi-
tectonic events of Acts One and Two of the play.

Events and time

Our sense of how time moves in the theatre has very little to do with speed.
We can act a play with great speed and it can still feel slow; speed, having the
tendency to flatten things out, leading to an overall generalized feeling. In the
theatre, what is general or undifferentiated quickly becomes boring and inter-
minable; as a result, we begin to disengage. So if speed does not move theatrical
time along, what does?
Events. Theatrical time is determined by events; or, more precisely, the
rhythm from one event to the next. The more events, the faster theatrical time
moves. Two hours of an “eventful play” can speed by; whereas 90 uneventful
minutes can feel like a lifetime. Our sense of time (duration) depends on the
magnitude of the event and how that leads us to the next event. Look at how
the quick sequence of events drives a play like Shakespeare’s Macbeth. We move
from Macbeth’s first encounter with the witches, through the murder of King
Duncan, to Macbeth’s own inevitable downfall as though the play itself were an
express train. The work is driven onward by the relentlessness flow of event
upon event, giving audiences little time to breathe. Compare this to Beckett’s
Happy Days, which is approximately the same actual running time as Macbeth
and yet, thanks to the absence of events, seems to take twice as long when
performed.
A world where only events occurred would be like our modern-day electronic
games which are structured from event to event with no need for cores (revelation/
reflection) whatsoever. We go from destroying one thing to destroying a bigger
thing and so on and so on. These wall-to-wall events create an ever-present present.
170 Events

Often, when we stop playing such games, we are shocked to learn that three and half
hours elapsed! It seemed to us, we had only been playing for 20 or so minutes. This
is the all-consuming spell-like power of events.
And so theatrical time is felt time rather than clock time, driven by the
power and frequency of events as they unfold over the course of the play. Most
plays are made up of a sophisticated deployment of events that exist somewhere
between Macbeth and Happy Days, which is more reflective of how time ebbs
and flows in the experiencing of our lives. Theatrical temporality, if anything, is
most like water. It can flow or it can be still; it can move at a somewhat sluggish
rate, or carry us away with tremendous force; it can swallow us up and drain
away. Theatrical time, in short, has its own unique liquidity.

The rhythmic nature of events

Micro- and macro-events are like black holes, they draw all energy into them.
One wants, in directing/acting terms, to: play-to-the-event. The event is pulling
the actors irrevocably toward it. If it is a love scene, the possibility of consum-
mation draws the actors irrevocably toward this potential event. If it is a murder
scene, the possibility of the killing has a similar driving force. If a character is
going to lose his job or become king, the event of termination or coronation
pulls one along to the cusp of the event. The rhythm of a play happens by
moving from event to event to event. This is the play’s music, determined by
the arrangement of events.
When you look at Greek plays you find that events have a tendency to happen
at the center of each scene, giving the plays a kind of balanced, stately feeling.
Think of // a signifying the boundary of a scene and think of . (Dot) as the
event. With this in place, we can score a Greek play in the following fashion:

/././././././

Each event of a Greek play (particularly those of Sophocles) falls at the center
of each scene. The result is a predictable, stately rhythm to the work; whereas,
in a Chekhov play, the events are far less regular. Chekhov’s events happen at
radically different points in a given scene, giving it a kind of unstable, more
surprising, life-like feeling. The score of a Chekhov act might resemble the
following:

/ . /. / ./. /. / . /. / ./

Where the event falls in a scene is much like where the stress falls in verse.
Suddenly scenes feel like iambic pentameter where they can shift from the
reassuring regularity of iambs to the more unpredictable use of trochees, spondees,
or pyrrhics. There is, in short, a kind of scansion that can be applied to the flow
of events.
Events 171

A personal event of sorts

It is hard to write this chapter on theatrical events and not think about the events
in one’s own actual life. One such event, in particular, stands out for me. It was
the exact moment that I saw my teacher in a new and necessary light. Before this
event my teacher could do no wrong; but after this event, my teacher fell from
grace. As I said, this is, no doubt, a necessary event in the maturation of all dis-
ciples. If it doesn’t actually happen, the student or the teacher must invent it. It is,
I suppose, part of the individuation process that young people need in order to
become autonomous selves. And so, without further ado, here is my experience
of this singular event:
We were in acting class. My teacher asked the students to walk about the
room. At a certain moment my teacher said,
“Everyone stop.”
We all stopped.
He said, “Close your eyes.”
We closed our eyes.
He said, “Now move carefully about the room with your eyes closed.”
We did as we were told.
He said, “Stop.”
Everyone stopped again.
He said, “Everyone open your eyes except for Kevin.”
Everyone opened their eyes while Kevin kept his closed.
“Kevin,” my teacher said, “without opening your eyes, go about the room,
and find the person you dislike the most.”
“How do I that?” A stunned Kevin asked.
“By touching their faces.”
Suddenly the room became very still. Time seemed to stop and in that stop-
page we became aware of an imaginary line that existed between the worlds we
created in this room and the real world that existed outside of this space.
Worlds we kept separate, a demarcation that we realized we had never crossed.
And now, suddenly, Kevin was poised to step over this line and bring the real
world into what had been our domain of make-believe.
Would Kevin do it? Or would he respect the division between these two worlds?
There was, what seemed like, an interminable pause and then Kevin crossed
the line. He went around the room, with his eyes closed, feeling the faces of his
classmates, one by one, until he finally found the person he disliked the most in
the room. He had felt her face, just as he had felt all the other faces in the
room; moving his hand gently from his classmate’s brow, over the bridge of the
nose, across the lips, and ending at the tip of their chin. Kevin’s hand remained
touching this one student’s face. His face turning bright red.
“Is this the person you dislike the most?” My teacher asked.
Kevin nodded. The classmate cried. Kevin cried. We all cried. My teacher
said, abruptly, “End of class.”
172 Events

That day, it was actually my teacher, not Kevin, who had crossed a line, a line
which respects what emotional baggage is permissible to bring into a classroom set-
ting, and what emotional baggage is the domain of therapists, not acting teachers.
These are separate professions although I believe both should adhere to the Hippo-
cratic oath, which begins, “First do no harm.” That day, harm was done in the
rehearsal room and I could never quite forgive my teacher for doing this.

Conclusion
Events, as we have seen, are huge decisive moments that forever alter the circum-
stances of the characters and the worlds they inhabit. Events change, demarcate, and
give us the time signature of scenes, acts, and plays. But events are equally crucial
for the existence of our next element, what we call cores. Cores are the revelations
of a given character or moment that are brought about by the event. If you add up
the events, you will get the plot of the play; but, as we shall soon see, when you
add up the cores that they reveal, you get the play’s theme.

Notes
1 William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, edited by A.R. Humphreys (Arden
Shakespeare, 1981), 183 (IV.1)
2 Ibid., 184 (IV. 1)
3 Anton Chekhov, Four Plays, translated by Carol Rocamora (Smith & Kraus, 1996), 259
4 Ibid., 266
13
CORES

Threshold of revelation
Events, as we said, demarcate turning points, they change polarities, and shape
time; but, perhaps most importantly, they have a propensity toward bringing
certain hidden things to light. Things that would otherwise go unseen are
made visible by events. We call such visibility and the meanings they engen-
der: core moments. If an event is plot driven, then the core is thematically
inclined. Events traffic in happenings, cores with their meanings. With core
moments, we are given insight into the hidden motivations or potentialities of
Others. Much of this possibility can lay dormant for the lifetime of a character,
waiting for a certain event to make it manifest. Oftentimes, these moments
can be a revelation to the characters themselves, Events are what help us move
from Heidegger’s “seeming” to “being.” The core is a moment where being is
fleetingly glimpsed. Think of a being as a reclusive deer. The event flushes the
deer out into the open for us to momentarily catch sight of it. It is the chain
of events that ultimately brings a character into full view, whether that is Aes-
chylus’ Clytemnestra, Shakespeare’s Lear, or Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Cores
are not restricted to the hidden characteristics of others, but can also elucidate
a buried history, or an over-arching dynamic (i.e., bourgeois tendencies) that
are secretly at work on those who inhabit the world of a play. All of these
things, by the pressure of events, can be forced to reveal themselves. Cores are
those moments of revelation.

Back to earthquakes, slaps, and revolutions

Let us return, briefly, to our two previous examples of events, beginning with
the earthquake. We are back in that shaking room with the crack appearing on
174 Cores

the ceiling above and the blare of car horns on the street below. Suddenly, all
our assuredness drains from our senses, panic sets in, what do we do? We try to
remember that pamphlet we read in school, and while we are straining to do
this, we notice our guest, who’s never been one to take the initiative, is telling
us to stay calm and ushering us to the nearest doorframe, explaining that this
will provide the most structural integrity necessary to weather the earthquake. It
is this same person, who we never took seriously, who is telling people to
immediately extinguish their cigarettes in case a gas line has broken, and to get
our shoes on to protect against broken glass and other debris. We follow his
orders like a group of heavily sedated patients in a psychiatric ward. In the brief
76 seconds of the earthquake, our entire social hierarchy has been reordered
with our meek and unprepossessing friend emerging as a firm and capable
leader. Who knew? None of us. It took the event of the earthquake to see this.
This is the core moment brought about by the event. Now, what about the
slap? There we were, A slapped B, ushering in an event. The core becomes
how B will respond. Will B break down into tears? Will B, without flinching,
slap A back? Or, will B stoically maintain his/her composure until A leaves and
then break down into inconsolable sobs? The response to the slap is the core
moment, the moment of revelation, where we learn something about the char-
acter we might not otherwise see. Or, in terms of the event of the French
Revolution, we can see the emergence of what will become known as “The
Terror.” The French Revolution may be born out the Age of Enlightenment,
but it reveals, at its core, an irrational strain; a protracted period of paranoid
bloodshed that was unleashed to stem the tide of a feared counter-revolution.
In all three examples the event yields hidden characteristics of a group, an indi-
vidual, or an epoch; all of which would have remained dormant without the
emergence of the event. The same is true in dramatic terms. Let us turn quickly
to our examples drawn from Aeschylus and Sophocles. The event of the light in
Agamemnon showed that the Watchman has another life hidden away; a life of
laughter, song, dance, festivities—all waiting to be released by the event of the
light from Troy. The event of the dream reveals that Electra and Chrysothemis
are still, at base, no matter what has transpired, sisters who have a deep and
abiding love for one another.
And so events will not only forward a plot but deepen our understanding
of those involved in the ever-unfolding story. We can argue that events are
ultimately mechanical, they are plot points constructed to bring forth cores
that reveal character, or theme, or both. Cores are at their most revelatory
just before and after the event occurs. There is meaning to be found on
either side of the event. A core can reveal why A slapped B (perhaps
B revealed that he/she never loved A); or, in its aftermath, can reveal the
true nature A and B (i.e., he-who-gets-slapped is much stronger than we
ever thought). Most of the time it is the aftermath of an event which
becomes the focus of a core, but it is important to remember that an event
casts potential meaning in either direction.
Cores 175

Rhythmic dynamics of cores

Cores like events have their own rhythm. As a general rule, we play to the
event. Events are like black holes, they draw energy into them, we cannot resist
their extraordinary gravitational pull. The event, like a magnet, pulls the scene
ever forward; having done so, it gives way to the core.
A comment one often hears in the theatre is “Such-and-such actor earned that
moment.” What this means is that the actor played to the event so that they
could take their time with a moment that is meaningful to them, that reveals
something about the character or the theme of the play. In other words, they
earned a core. Events are, in some ways, excuses to get to cores. Think of an
event as a car and the core as the destination. You want to get to that destination
as soon as you can to savor your time there.
So, if the event speeds us along, then cores allows us to slow down, pause,
show the impact of the event. To say that, “such and such is a core moment” is
like a composer saying to a musician, “This is legato.” Or, it is like a director
explaining to a camera man that, “This moment is a close up.” When one
thinks of a core, one should think: “Slow down/close up.”
In other words, how can I make this moment stand out? There are two
immediate ways: put air (silence) on either side of the core and/or bring the
core moment in closer proximity to the audience (downstage). These are the
ways an audience can begin to feel the impact of cores. Some directors, to
insure the maximum clarity of a core moment, will not allow any pause in
a scene until just before or just after an event.
Events are ultimately less significant than the cores they produce. Events are
mechanical plot points that propel the story forward. They are gunshots, slaps,
fainting spells; whereas, cores are the realization or truth that ensues. The event
is a cause; the core, the effect.

The science of events vs. the free play of cores

Events have a tendency to be more rigorously defined. This may have to do
with their Russian origins, begun by Stanislavsky. Late in his life, he gathered
a group of young students to his apartment to explore Molière’s Tartuffe. It was
there that the basic criteria for events were first hammered out; to reiterate,
these became:

1. Events change the polarity of a scene.

2. Events demarcate what is before and what is after.
3. It is difficult for the scene to recover from the event.

Cores are much more open, less rule bound. Cores are interpretational. Events,
which are singular, have the ability to open up a wide array of cores. It is up to
each interpreter to choose what is the most meaningful core on either side of an
176 Cores

event. In this respect the event is constant from production to production (it is the
provenance of the playwright), but the core can vary (which is the provenance of
each actor/director).
Let us take a moment to look at the potential cores to be found in Sophocles’
Electra. The scene where Orestes, disguised as a messenger, hands Electra an urn
and lies to her, telling her it contains the ashes of her dead brother. This leads us
to one of the most beautiful passages of mourning in all of extant Greek tragedy.
Here the entire speech feels core to its very core. But we cannot necessarily play
it all as core. If everything becomes core then nothing stands out. If everything is
played as core, it begins to resemble the problematics of mood, reducing every-
thing to a wash of feeling rather than something significant and specific. If we
were to play this entire speech as core, it would also be like having too many
events in the scene, it would flip the speech into melodrama. We must choose
what to make stand out. But unlike events, the choice of core is rule based. We
must use our intuition to determine what is most meaningful to us and hope that
it will be equally meaningful to an audience. This is where interpretation enters,
what do I slow down to single out and share with an audience? What, in all this
terrible pain, must you the audience feel the most vividly? This is what core work
is about. Events are science, cores are interpretation. There is no wrong answer
here, you must simply choose what speaks most to you. So, in this embarrassment
of riches, if you were only allowed to choose one thing to stand out, What would
it be? What would you want an audience to remember for a lifetime? We might tend
toward a moment in the speech where Electra remembers:

Days of my love, years of my love,

Into your child’s fingers I put the earth and
the sky.
No mother did that for you.
No nurse.
No slave.
I. Your sister
without letting go,
day after day, year after year,
and you my own sweet child.1

This is a worthy a candidate for a core moment, showing a loving side of Electra that
we have not seen in the entire play, showing who she was before her father was taken
from her. But for me, the line that always pierces my heart, every time I encounter it,
is when Electra holds the urn of her brother’s alleged ashes and observes:

Look, how much smaller you got coming back2

It is such an extraordinarily simple, awkward, child-like observation. Gone is

Electra the protester, the naysayer, the warrior, the discordant note, the one who
Cores 177

holds the flame of truth even though it is burning her alive. In this moment we
see Electra as a sister, as a human being, reduced to a child’s incomprehension
over the profound indifference of death. Behind all of Electra’s rage and political
agitation is a little girl who lost her father and now has lost her brother. It is the
depth of this inexplicable loss that is underneath all the scar tissue that hides
Electra’s heart. In this moment we see Electra as she might have been, all
those years ago, when she first heard of her father’s death. Death that makes all
of us small. This would be my core moment.
Again, there is no right or wrong with choosing cores, the only criterion is
that it is meaningful to you and something you feel compelled to share with an
audience. This is why we can see multiple Electras or Hamlets; we enjoy watch-
ing and feeling these other facets come to life through a new actor’s specific
connection to the text and its potential cores.
Let’s look at Shylock in Shakespeare’s Act Three, Scene One of The Merchant
of Venice. Here we are dealing with the macro-event of Shylock learning that his
daughter has run away from home. This event brings forth Shylock’s famous
“Hath not a Jew” speech. Another core moment, but is there a core to this
core? Laurence Olivier in his performance of this extraordinary speech centered
it all on one word: passions. All of his rage, grief, humiliation, and loss com-
pacted into one tiny word, to the point where its utterance was like
a supernova. Here is how it unfolds in the speech itself:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew

hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?—3

The words preceding passions, “organs, dimensions, senses, affections,” were

delivered with a slow and steady gait, as though Shylock were carefully climbing to
the top of a precarious mountain, and once there, out of his very being came this
cry of injustice for all to hear. For underneath his business dealings and his religious
observations there lies an archaic self, an Old Testament self, a sleeping giant that
has been awoken. Many actors turn the entire speech into a core moment; Olivier
in his performance is selective, singling out a series of disparate moments like shards
of broken glass; some draw blood, others do not. The speech, in Olivier’s hands,
moves to one final core moment that will explain Shylock’s subsequent actions:

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us,

do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are
like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his
sufferance be by Christian example? Why revenge!
The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall
go hard but I will better the instruction.4
178 Cores

In Electra’s speech, the core gave way to a revelation of character; whereas in

Shylock’s speech they point to an important thematic concern on the part of
Shakespeare. This point is often missed by hasty readers of Merchant who dismiss
Shakespeare’s characterization of Shylock as a stereotyped monster. But what
Shakespeare wants to make clear is that this desire for revenge does not stem
from a Jewish nature, but human nature. Shylock’s argument is Jews mirror the
villainy that the Christians teach them every day. The only thing out of the
ordinary here, is that Shylock is determined to best his teachers. Here core is not
only character driven but also thematically based.
Let us now turn our attention to the core of the first scene of Chekhov’s The
Seagull. In the previous chapter, we found that the event in the scene between
Masha and Medvedenko was the moment Masha refused Medvedenko’s protest-
ations of love with the simple and blunt: “Your love is touching, really it is, but
the feeling’s not mutual, and that’s that.” On the other side of the event is a rich
series of potential cores to choose from; here is the remainder of the scene:

MASHA
(Offers him the snuff box)
Here you go, have some.
MEDVEDENKO
No, I don’t feel like it.
(Pause)
MASHA
It’s stifling out… there’ll be a storm tonight for sure. You know,
you spend all your time philosophizing, or whining about money.
For you, there’s no greater tragedy than poverty. But for me,
it’s a thousand times easier to go around in rags, begging, than
to… Oh, what’s the use, you wouldn’t understand…5

In reading the second part of the scene, three dynamic core possibilities immedi-
ately come to the fore after the event of Masha’s rejection:

1. The sudden pause/silence. The first in the entire scene.

2. Masha’s attempt to make amends by offering Medvedenko snuff.
3. Masha’s ellipses between “it’s a thousand times easier to go around in rags…”
and, “you wouldn’t understand.”

All are cores, all carry meaning, but playing all of them at once has
a tendency for each to cancel the other out, making everything feel suddenly
too consequential (remember: too many cores, like too many events, runs
the risk of becoming melodramatic). It is not that we are going to ignore
any of these three moments, just that we are going to privilege one, give it
the emphasis or stress so that it stands out as slightly more significant than
Cores 179

the other moments. Let us see if we can plumb the depth of each of these
moments to see which might strike us as more consequential in the grand
scheme of the play.

1. The Pause is like a character who speaks in the silences through key
moments of the play, suggesting an undertow to the otherwise light tone of
these early scenes. The pause, like a discordant note, allows us to begin to
hear the darker music of the piece. Perhaps now is the time to to set this
motif up.
2. Masha’s attempt to make amends, captures another dynamic of the play
where a negative action by a character (specifically Arkadina) is always
followed by a feeble attempt to make up for the hurt that has been
inflicted.
3. The ellipses, another dynamic, like the pause, that will be deployed
throughout the play, are also highly consequential. If we were to try to fill
in the missing lines of Masha, they might be something to the effect of,
“Spending your whole life loving someone, like Treplev, who will never
love you back, is a far worse fate.” Pointing to what is unsaid can be more
important than what is said.

My tendency would be to favor the ellipses, since it carries a thematic strand

that runs through the entirety of the first act where everyone falls under the
emotional rubric of A loves B but B loves C. Medvedenko loves Masha but
Masha loves Treplev; Treplev loves Nina but Nina loves Trigorin, etc.
In all three examples we see how much powerful material there is to draw from
the other side of a significant event. This material can be one of character or
thematic revelation and, most importantly, is open to the interpretation of the
artist at work on the play. Other material is not ignored, just not given the same
emphasis or stress. This is why we can return multiple times to a great work for
there are multiple things to emphasize.

Doing the math: adding up events and cores

Add up all the events of a play and it will equal the plot, add up all the cores
and it will equal the theme. But, remember, plot and theme equal two very dif-
ferent things. The plot of Richard II is that he loses his kingdom; the theme of
Richard II is he finds his true self. The math of this should reveal a pattern. The
events reveal a grinding down of Richard, first he loses his kingdom, then is
imprisoned, and finally executed, but the cores reveal that with each material
diminishing of Richard, comes an enhanced understanding of his true self.
These core moments begin to rhyme in such a way that a theme emerges from
the pattern they make. Let’s take a look at events and cores that make up Act
One of Chekhov’s The Seagull:
180 Cores

ACT ONE
Macro-Event: Treplev is putting on a play for his mother and friends.
Inciting Event: Trigorin will meet Nina, a spark of desire will grow into
an affair that impacts on everyone.

Scene One: Masha and Medvedenko

Micro-Event: Masha rejects Medvedenko: “I just don’t love you
back.”
Core: “It is far worse… Oh, you wouldn’t understand.” Masha
desires Treplev.

Scene Two: Treplev and Sorin

Micro-Event: Treplev feels rejected by his mother, who’s “taken up
with this author of hers” (i.e., loves Trigorin).
Core: Treplev confesses “I am a non-entity… When all these
actors and writers notice me, they look as though they
were wondering how anyone can be such a worm.”
Treplev desires the love of his mother and the recogni-
tion of others.

Scene Three: Nina and Treplev

Micro-Event: Nina gushes, “Trigorin is here.” Revealing her desire
for him.
Core: Nina confesses to Treplev: “Your play’s hard to act.”
Rejecting him as an artist.

Scene Four: Polina and Dorn

Micro-Event: Polina accuses Dorn of rejecting her: “You were so
busy talking to Irina … You find her attractive don’t
you?”
Core: Polina: “Oh my darling. …” Polina desires Dorn, no
matter what.

Scene Five: Treplev’s Play

Macro-Event: Everyone assembles for the play, Arkadina makes fun of
(rejects) it, Treplev stops the show and runs off in
despair.
Macro-Core: They hear music across the lake, everyone is caught up
in the nostalgia of past desires, when there were “all
those many love affairs.”
Cores 181

Architectonic/ Out of this general atmosphere Trigorin meets Nina.

Inciting Event:
Architectonic A spark of desire is felt between the two of them.
Core:
Scene Six: Dorn and Treplev
Micro-Event: Dorn tells Treplev, “I liked your play.” Finally,
a moment of acceptance but…
Core: Treplev ultimately rejects this and asks “where’s
Nina?” Treplev’s desire for Nina is what ultimately
matters most.

Scene Seven: Dorn and Masha

Micro-Event: Masha confesses “She can’t go on,” due to Treplev’s
rejection of her.
Core: Dorn says, “What a state they’re all in. So much love.
Oh, it must be that Magic lake. But what can I do, my
child? What can I do?” It’s all about desire.

Now if we add up all the events, we have a series of rejections and thwarted-ness; if
we add up all the cores, we see that there is a profound desire for love and accept-
ance. This is true whether one is engaged in love or in art. This pattern of cores
begins to explain the underlining thematic concerns of The Seagull where love and
art are elusive and always just out of reach. The cores of Act One function like
breadcrumbs of meaning, leading us to the question: how do we survive a world
where true love and art are forever beyond our grasp? How do we keep on going?
Each act will sound out a variation of this essential question through its sequencing
of events and cores until we reach the final act where the cores are at their most
pointed, moving us to the existential situation of being caught between the contra-
dictory feelings, “can’t go on, must go on.” With Treplev opting for the former,
and Nina for the latter. As you can see, when we move from events to cores, we
move to the secret math of a given play.

2+2=4 and 4+4=8. Rhyming cores in Molière’s Don Juan

Just as actions and events can rhyme from scene to scene or across acts, so too
can cores. The patterns that ensue begin a trail of potential breadcrumbs, leading
to a certain meaning. Remember that cores are interpretative as opposed to the
rule-bound nature of events. This means that the cores an actor and director
choose, tells us just as much about the interpreter as it does the play.
Let us turn our attention to a series of cores in Molière’s Don Juan that
rhyme across acts. Let us see what these rhymes might tells us in terms of the
themes and character of Don Juan. We could call this particular pattern of
182 Cores

cores: The-Unanswered-Question-Motif. This particular set of cores begins in

Act One, Scene Two of the play. The event of the scene is Sganarelle, the
servant of Don Juan, who is given “permission to speak freely.” This allows
Sganarelle the following line of questioning:

SGANARELLE
…But Sir, to trifle so with the holy sacrament—
DON JUAN
Enough, enough. That’s a matter between myself and
Heaven, and Heaven and I will settle it very nicely
without your fretting about it.
SGANARELLE
But, Sir, for mercy’s sake! I’ve always heard that it’s
dangerous to make light of Heaven, and that free-
thinkers never come to a good end…
Learn from me, your valet, that, sooner or later,
Heaven will punish the impious man, that an evil
life leads to an evil death, and that—
DON JUAN
6
Quiet!

I would place the core of this scene at Don Juan’s “Quiet” and his ensuing speech
about seducing a young girl away from her first love. It is interesting to note that
Don Juan is willing to talk about everything and anything except heaven (aka God).
Remember psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s anecdote of only listening to patients
when their language broke down, giving way to pockets of silence. It was there that
he believed the unprocessed psychic issues lurk. This theory follows on the heels of
the philosopher Nietsche, who believed that if you could talk about an issue then
the issue was “dead” or “processed.” Those issues that you cannot find words for
are, therefore, still alive and troublesome. It is with this psychological and philo-
sophical justification in our back pocket, that we can venture forth the following
surmise: that Don Juan’s pursuit of “carnal knowledge” masks the desire for another
kind of knowledge, “the knowledge of God.” If love, as Don Juan states earlier in
this scene, is the pursuit of the impossible object, then what object is more impos-
sible than the knowing of God? This begs the question, “Is all of Don Juan’s
increasing transgressive behavior a conscious or unconscious desire to provoke God
into showing himself, even if that self is only with the face of wrath?” Let us look at
how, on the other side of Don Juan’s “Quiet,” Don Juan ups the ante of his trans-
gressive villainy with his plans to undo the bond of two young lovers:
Cores 183

DON JUAN
Never had I seen two people so enchanted by each other,
so radiantly in love. Their open tenderness and mutual
delight moved me deeply, it pierced me to the heart, and
aroused in me a love that was rooted in jealousy…
I began to consider how I would mar their
felicity, and disrupt a union which it pained my heart
to behold.7

Is this the action of a man addicted to ever more impossible objects of desire?
Or, a man consciously, or unconsciously, attempting to tempt his God to inter-
vene? This question/tension runs through the core moments of the play. The
issue of heaven returns in Act Three, Scene One, where Sganarelle resumes his
conversation about these matters with Don Juan, reminding him:

SGANARELLE
But one has to believe in something; what is it that you believe?
DON JUAN
What do I believe?
SGANARELLE
Yes.
DON JUAN
That two and two are four, Sganarelle, and that four and four are eight. 8

Don Juan’s answer is, in many ways, another evasion. It seems to suggest, with-
out saying outright, that Don Juan is a man of the Enlightenment and men of
the Enlightenment do not believe in God. But the phrase toys with us, the way
Don Juan toys with his lovers.
It implies many things. It can also mean, “I believe in addition,” i.e., of adding
more and more lovers to my love life; it can mean “I believe in increase,” i.e., making
my transgressions greater and greater; it can also mean, “I believe in inevitability; i.e.,
that life is subject to certain unseen laws (like the soon to be discovered Second Law
of Thermodynamics) and such things are simply inescapable.” In short, I am on
a mysterious path. A mysterious path of provocation that just might end with that old
grey-haired celestial creature showing his disapproving face.
In many respects, Don Juan himself is a mystery, his (core) secrecy makes him
as much an impossible object as the one he seeks. Mystery provokes both him
and us onward. Don Juan follows his own formula of addition, increase, and
inevitability; always upping the ante, tempting fate, which is an indirect way of
tempting God. This is especially true when he decides (in order to survive) to
become a religious hypocrite. In true Don Juan fashion he decides not only to
pose as one of the pious while continuing in his transgressive way; but, also,
184 Cores

going one step further, to set himself as the ultimate avenger of heaven who is
eager to censor the conduct of others; by adapting to the hypocrisy of the age,
he will be able to continue to pursue his debauchery in private and destroy his
opponents. Sganarelle is justly horrified by this ungodly metamorphosis:

SGANARELLE
Great Heavens! What do I hear you say? All that was
needed to perfect your immorality was that you become
a hypocrite, and now it’s happened—you’ve embraced
the very worst of iniquities. Sir, this crowning horror is
too much for me, and I can’t keep silent about it.9

Here, as Sganarelle suspects, Don Juan has taken his transgression to the limits.
This will surely bring down the wrath of heaven, aka God. In fact, the Heavens,
through the mouthpiece of a statue, inform Don Juan, “Obstinacy is a sin, Don
Juan, it leads to a terrible death. Those who disregard the mercy of Heaven
invite its thunderbolts.” Don Juan’s last words are addressed to the God he has
been provoking from the beginning of the play:

DON JUAN
O God, what’s this I feel? An invisible fire consumes me;
I can’t bear any more of this; my whole body’s become a
blazing furnace. Oh….10

Is this the cries of sinner in the depths of despair? A lover in the height of
ecstasy? Or both? What he will say next, we will never know for thunder, light-
ning, flames, and the very earth itself, consume him. Here, our cores mingle
heaven and transgression/love and death into a powerful and complex trajectory
that makes up the infinite mystery of Don Juan; a character who has continued
to fascinate us throughout the ages. These over-arching cores suggest more than
a revelation of character or theme, and begin to touch the shores of a larger
human complex that Freud defined as “drives,” powerfully constructed desires
that pull the strings of our puppet-like passions.

Contemporary cores
Let’s return to the events drawn from contemporary plays that we discussed in
the preceding chapter and now attach a series of potential cores to them:

ANGELS IN AMERICA
Micro-Event: Prior tells Louis he has AIDS.
Micro-Core: The first crack in Louis’ ability to face this new reality.
Cores 185

FAR AWAY
Micro-Event: Joan tells Harper she heard a scream.
Micro-Core: First glimpse of Harper as complicit in torture.

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Act One Macro-Event: Act One Macro-Core:

The arrival of Goldberg and Stanley is a liar.
McCann.
Act Two Macro-Event: Act Two Macro-Core:
The birthday party. Stanley can be irrationally violent.
Act Three Macro-Event: Act Three Micro-Core:
Stanley’s departure. Stanley is no more; a shell of his
former self.

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

Inciting Event Core

Arrival of Nick and Honey An excuse for George and Martha
to continue their battle between
themselves.
Irrevocable Event Core
The mention of the child. Martha ups the ante.
Penultimate Event Core
The revelation that there is no George puts an end to the game.
child.
Culminating Event Core
George and Martha The deep love that lies beneath
come together. George and Martha’s surface
acrimony.

A core moment from life

Let me return to the story about the event that changed my relationship to my
teacher. What was the core of this event? For me, it was what ensued between
my teacher and myself after the class had been dismissed. The room was empty.
My teacher was putting on his coat and was about to leave when I asked him:
“Can you tell me what the point of that exercise was?”
“What do you think?” My teacher asked.
“I have no idea.” I said.
My teacher looked up at me, his natural curiosity awakened.
“You’re angry at me?” He said, rather surprised.
186 Cores

“Yes.” I said, equally surprised at my sudden rage and disappointment.

“Because of the exercise?”
“Because I don’t see its point. What was its point?”
“Does every exercise have to have a point?”
“Isn’t that what you taught us?”
“I suppose.”
“So what was the point of this one?”
There was a pause and then he said,
“Everything that happens in this room isn’t all make-believe, you know. It is
also about real things. Real emotions. Real pain.”
“And you have the right to intrude into our real pain?”
“No, but I have an obligation to remind you that that is what it’s all about,
that is why we are all here in this room together.”
“And you get to demand this from us?”
“Until you learn how to demand it from yourself.”
“To be in pain?”
“To be real, even if it is painful, especially if it is painful.”
“So I’m only good if I am in or cause pain?”
“No, but where there is pain, there is usually truth.”
“That’s your truth?”
“Yes, I suppose it is. What’s yours?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s what you have to figure out. That’s what brought you to this
room, that’s what brought all of us to this room. A search for certain truths. And
when you find it, you want to share it, like a proud cat with a bird in its mouth;
bringing it to your master, the audience, and laying it at their feet. It is a hard-
won trophy. I don’t think you can do that without spilling a little blood.”
I think about this conversation that transpired some 36 years ago. I think about it
a lot. I think about my teacher’s conviction of not being able to find truth without
spilling a little blood. I suppose this brief conversation was the core of that
eventful day, where I got a glimpse of my teacher’s truth. A relentless hunger for
the real, sometimes ugly truth that exists just beneath the surface of our staid pieties;
our otherwise safe little bourgeois world. I suddenly realized that it is was this
hunger to get behind this benign facade of existence that animated all my teacher’s
investigations, whether in the classroom or onstage. I saw the rebel in this otherwise
quiet, unassuming, middle-aged/middle-class man who cared about one thing and
one thing only: about-ness, which is our next and penultimate element.

Notes
1 Anne Carson, An Oresteia (Faber and Faber, 1996), 148
2 Ibid., 149
3 William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, edited by John Russell Brown (Arden
Shakespeare, 1959), 72–73
Cores 187

4 Ibid.
5 Anton Chekhov, Four Plays, translated by Carol Rocamora (Smith & Kraus, 1996), 40
6 Molière, Don Juan, translated by Richard Wilbur (Harvest Books, 2001), 17–18 (I.2)
7 Ibid., 19 (I.2)
8 Ibid., 72–73 (III.1)
9 Ibid., 136 (IV.2)
10 Ibid., 146 (V.6)
14
ABOUT-NESS

The gift
When I was a student, my teacher would talk about the play we were bringing
to the stage, he would liken it to a gift intended for the audience. It could bring
joy or awareness, but something had to be given in return for the audience’s
generous bestowal of their attention. His question to us: What gift are you
giving your audience?
In class we attempted to follow my teacher’s instructions and make gifts of
our scene presentations. My teacher would commend us on the wrapping, the
vibrancy of the color, the ornateness of the bow, the placement of the card. But
when he would open our gifts, he would find them empty. All this effort, he
would say, for what? Why are you telling me this? What does it mean? What is
its purpose? What’s it all about?
For my teacher the wrapping of a drama was the plot (what happens), but the
gift was in the drama’s story (what the plot means). We were so engaged with the
rhythm, atmosphere, style, and impact of the plot, that we forgot about the story
(its theme). It is the story that should inform all the choices we were making. Know-
ing the gift of the story, its meaning, will help us know what to emphasize in the
plot. It gives the work its proper grounding, its purpose, or better yet, its about-ness.
And so whenever I begin working on a play I ask myself what is the gift the
author intended to give us. I start with that. What is the work secretly pointing
toward? Or put another way, finding:

The allegory of the story

For my teacher a theatre piece should be a two-fold experience. There is the
plot and there is the story which is the plot’s secret allegory. The plot is what
About-ness 189

happens, how it unfolds; but the story is an allegory, the author’s secret, for
what the plot really means. Take, for example, C.S. Lewis’ beautiful The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe; the plot is, indeed, about a lion, a witch, and
a wardrobe—but, the story/allegory is about Lewis’ relationship to Christianity.
This is what the book is really about, his devotion to this deep and abiding
vision.
Allegory hails from the ancient Greek and literally translates as: to speak
(agoreuein), otherwise (allos) in the public square (agora). It is saying one thing,
while meaning another. It is code. It is heard one way by those in the market-
place and a completely other way by those who are in the know.
Now this begs the simple question, “Why do we feel the need to speak
otherwise?” The reasons for such a mode of expression can be, “Because if we
say what we actually feel, we might get in trouble,” or, “Because what we have
to say is not for everyone, just those of a select group,” and finally, and perhaps
most intriguingly, “Because certain things are hidden in other things and their
subsequent uncovering is rewarding.” All are true, but the third reason is closest
to what concerns those of us in the arts.
When all is said and done, we love the thrill of discovery, it is what we spend
the first five years of our cognitive lives doing. We learn that this mysterious
shape is my mother, that this sound names her, and these black marks form the
word that represents that sound. Each of these basic epistemological revelations
opens up entire new worlds for the child. But perhaps the most magnificent and
most mysterious moment in the cognitive development of a child, is when they
discover that what they have been calling a stick can also be called a horse and
ridden around the house. The-stick-that-becomes-horse, also known as metaphor,
is one of the great gifts bestowed on humankind. It is an invitation for linguistic
transmutation, carrying meaning over from one thing and conferring it onto
another. It is one of the essential building blocks of allegory, out of this magical
impulse comes entire palaces of alternative meanings constructed by our imagin-
ation for our further collective edification.
This is more than just an ability to see resemblances between disparate things,
but to acknowledge a deep-seated human suspicion that there is a fundamental
“more-ness” to the world and the things that we encounter in it. Things have
the propensity to exceed their perfunctory meaning, and allegory is one way of
capturing this. It uses what we know, but points this knowledge toward
a broader usage and understanding. It also returns us to that moment in child-
hood when the world is still a mystery to be unlocked; it allows us to feel, once
again, the thrill of discovery. And then, there is the effort itself. It means more,
because it was not given to us directly, we had to work to uncover the mean-
ing, which means we have a stake in its being brought to light. We blend with
the meaning since it happened between us and the work itself, it is partly ours.
The result of such a process is that we become more sensitive to the things we
come in contact with, aware that there is usually more there than may meet the
eye. It encourages a way of being-in-the-world that favors a certain attentiveness
190 About-ness

to things, making sure they do not get obscured due to the speed of life. Here
are two examples of modern theatre that engender such an approach:

Of streetcars and angels: in the realm of the allegorical

Let us begin with Tennessee Williams’ much-beloved A Streetcar Named Desire.
The story of the play is that Blanche Dubois comes to stay with her sister, Stella,
and Stella’s husband, Stanley; as a result of this, Stanley and Blanche vie for Stella’s
affection; Stanley wins and Blanche is ousted. But the allegory of the story,
according to Williams himself, is a battle between Philistinism and Civilization. In
such a reading, Stanley represents the modern philistine and Blanche becomes the
old ways of the civilized South. Stella is us, the audience, who Stanley and
Blanche battle over. Stanley wins, heralding the triumph of the philistine. This
could come off as terribly reductive if Stanley and Blanche weren’t so tremen-
dously complicated as characters. It is their dimensionality that keeps the allegory
from becoming didactic. Our relationship with Stanley and Blanche keeps shifting
throughout the unfolding of the story, so that at one moment we find ourselves
sympathetic and then critical of each. It is this back and forth that enriches the
allegory, making us rethink such abstractions in concrete human terms; seeing the
allure and traps of both ways of life. It is this human element that gives this age-
old argument a denser and more rounded understanding than one might find in
a work of history or journalism.
Tony Kushner’s magisterial Angels in America works in a similar fashion. The
story of this epic play is, as we discussed earlier, wonderfully straightforward:
Louis loves Prior, who has AIDS, this proves to be too much for Louis to
handle. He leaves Prior and ends up in a romantic affair with Joe, who repre-
sents everything Louis despises. Louis eventually realizes he was wrong to leave
Prior, but it is too late, Prior will not take him back. The allegory of the story
can be read as Louis representing the Left, who during the 1980s (the timeframe
of the play) ran away from the difficult issues of the era and “went to bed” with
the Right (as represented by Joe). By the time the Left realized its mistake, it
was too late, there was no way to reverse the historical damage that was done.
Again, it is the complexity of Kushner’s characters that deepens this allegorical
reading, grounding it in the mess of human interactions rather than in the rarified
air of abstraction.
In both instances, the allegory of the story gives each play its size and grandeur
beyond the personal, while the plot makes sure that the allegory remains complex
and dimensional in its unfolding. When both the plot and the allegory of the story
are informing one another, then the work expands and deepens at the same time.

Allegory and the implication of the action

But after we have made the allegorical conversion, where exactly does the mean-
ing of the work reside? The answer to this usually lies in the implication of the
About-ness 191

action. Action, in this instance, can be thought of as the movement of the piece,
where it takes us, where we land.
In the case of Streetcar, Blanche has been raped by Stanley. The trauma of this
horrific incident has resulted in Blanche’s mental breakdown. Here Philistinism
is shown in its full primordial light, as a kind of brutal animalism. Stanley is no
longer a man, or a philistine, but a kind of beast. Yelling for his Stella, who has
run upstairs to her neighbors for safety. Stanley, the victor, cries out for his lost
Stella, who, much to our horror, relents and returns to his beastly embrace.
Even after this violent act, Stanley’s animal magnetism is too much for Stella to
resist. She/we cannot quite escape the erotic/animal/gravitational pull of Stanley.
Stella may stand for star, but she and we are easily pulled back down to the
animal. This becomes the implication of the action. We want to reside in the
celestial heavens, but our animal self keeps pulling us back down to earth.
In the case of Angels, the implication of the action begins with Louis “running
out” on a lover who is ill. This, in and of itself, is a huge moral and ethical fail-
ure. In Kushner’s extraordinary dramatic imagination it becomes more than just
an individual human failing and becomes an intimation of a much larger societal
condition. Louis’ story becomes his generation’s story, a tale of the Left’s failure
to face the difficult issues of their time. The implication of action reaches its con-
clusion with the hard truth that even if one realizes one’s made a mistake, history
does not necessarily forgive. The chapter has been written, the suffering that
ensued cannot be so easily erased, it has left its mark forever on the bodies of
those that were neglected. In the realm of history, there is no such thing as a “do
over” that can undo such irreparable collateral damage. In the end Louis may
want to return to Prior, but Prior (unlike Stella) remains apart. For Prior, what
Louis did can be forgiven (humans being kinder than history), but not forgotten.
There can not be a full reconciliation after what Louis has done. This is the sober
ethical awareness at the center of this remarkable play.
In both cases, the meaning of the allegory is found through the playing out of
the central action of the play. In this way, the implication of the action is the
metaphor. Its trajectory is its meaning. Its endpoint points toward something
that we may not be able to articulate but at least feel. We take that feeling
home with us, allowing it to grow within our imagination like a seed. The
author has a feeling, he creates a work to convey it to us. That is what we take
away, this feeling or intimation, that leads to further work on our part. First to
tease it out and then perhaps to make it part of our life and our outlook.

Three sisters and a professor: when allegory verges on parable

But there are also theatrical works whose meaning seem to multiply. Take for
example a man who has spent his entire life working for “The Professor,” his
whole sense of self-worth, meaning, and happiness is tied to the modest role he
has played in “The Professor’s” success. Now suppose, he wakes up one day and
sees that “The Professor” is nothing more than a fraud, an intellectual poseur,
192 About-ness

whose work will be forgotten in a fortnight. With this revelation also comes the
realization that our hero has wasted the best years of his life in service to an illusion.
Suddenly, everything around him seems useless, ridiculous, devoid of meaning.
What is he to do? Many of you will recognize this brief synopses as the basic story-
line of Chekhov’s ferocious Uncle Vanya. Chekhov’s play, like those of Williams
and Kushner, is rooted in reality and yet there is something about the idea of “The
Professor” that captures our imagination, that seems to exceed its meaning in this
specific dramatic circumstance and begins to point us toward a richer reading. We
could think of “The Professor” as the human embodiment of any belief system
which, after the passage of time, we find ourselves no longer capable of believing.
In this respect, Chekhov has tapped into a potent and fundamental nightmare that
we all keep at bay: What if the thing that gives life our meaning were to stop doing
so? What then? We have seen such a thing happen to friends, parents, relatives.
“The Professor” becomes a kind of dramatic integer, an X, that can be imagina-
tively replaced by any number of things that humans could lose faith in, whether
that is one’s vocation, religion, political party, philosophy, country. The list of
potential disappointments is, sadly, infinite. The open-ended-ness of what “The
Professor” can signify pushes the work from the land of allegory into the shores of
parable. The difference between the two is a matter of degree. The allegory suggests
there is a one-to-one correlation between a character and its secret signification.
Stanley equals a philistine, but “The Professor” is harder to localize, he represents
a kind of false hope that can be represented in many guises.
Let’s take a look at another Chekhov work that pushes us further into the
realm of parable.
Meet three sisters: Olga, Masha, Irina. Their brother, Andre, brings Natasha
into their charmed circle. Andre marries Natasha even though she is beneath
their station. Scene by scene, act by act, we watch as Natasha slowly takes over
their household. By the fourth and final act, the three sisters find themselves
literally expelled from their home, they have become outcasts. How is this pos-
sible? How can a woman of “lower status” accomplish such an act? Even more
to the point, how and why do these three sisters allow such a thing to happen
to them? It is this last question that puts us squarely in the realm of parable since
there is no direct answer, just a series of potential answers. We could give this
a psychological reading, where the three sisters have not been raised with
a sense of agency that allows them to stand up to Natasha. We could apply
a political reading, where the three sisters represent the atrophied upper class
and Natasha the more historically robust Bourgeoisie. We could even put forth
an evolutionary reading where the three sisters are like the dinosaurs, unable to
adapt like the more able Natasha. Each reading changes the feel of the play,
each bringing different dynamics to the foreground, shedding a different light
across the dramatic landscape of the play. Both plays exhibit aspects of the para-
bolic that lends to each a more open range of readings and meanings. The
difference between a parable and an allegory might best be summed up in terms
of space. There is more imaginative room to move about in a parable. It’s
About-ness 193

a mystery luring us deeper and deeper inside the work as we search for its ultimate
meaning.

The prince and the parable

Perhaps no play or playwright achieves such parabolic expansiveness as Shakespeare
and his Hamlet. As stated early, this work taps into a powerful image of making an
impossible choice. It is a dilemma that confronts not just Hamlet, but other
towering dramatic figures as Orestes and Arjuna. Each is caught at the crossroads
of choice, not knowing which path to take. Perhaps this is the quintessential or
archetypal dramatic situation, the ultimate parable for the human condition.
But in Hamlet’s case, the question is why is it taking him so long to decide?
For Orestes it just takes a sentence from Pylades to persuade him; for Arjuna, it
only takes the recitation of the entire Bhagavad-Gita by Krishna. What is stop-
ping Hamlet? And is such a stoppage ultimately a good thing? And how do we
compare this to Hamlet’s doppelgänger, Fortinbras? Another prince, also charged
with following in his father’s footsteps; nothing seems to be stopping him. What
are we ultimately to make of Hamlet’s halting pace compared to Fortinbras’
relentless march forward? Is this the dramatic equivalent of Zeno’s Tortoise and
the Hare? The implication of the action seems to suggest that Hamlet, who
struggles to enact his father’s wishes, ends the play with a great deal of collateral
damage, including his own death; meanwhile, Fortinbras, Hamlet’s rival, who
never wavers, arrives to put Hamlet’s Denmark under the yoke of Norway.
What does Hamlet’s failure and Fortinbras’ success tell us? What is the meaning
behind these two trajectories? As with Chekhov, we can apply a variety of read-
ings to tease out what the “about-ness” or implication of what this action might
be. There is a psychological, a political, religious, and even meta-theatrical reading
at our disposal. This is part of the unique and mysterious aspect of Hamlet whose
meaning seems to exceed all readings.
It is helpful to remind ourselves that Hamlet was one among many Revenge
plays that were a vital part of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Where the other
Revenge plays have, for the most part, become footnotes to theatre history,
Hamlet remains. Why? Perhaps because Hamlet is about more than revenge.
Underneath this plot lurks something else, something more, something other
that keeps slipping through our interpretative fingertips. Its “about-ness” keeps
eluding us, suggesting that it means even more than we first anticipated. It lures
us deeper and deeper into its dramatic interior. As a result, every production
becomes a kind of exploration with each generation returning from their voyage
to share their hard-won discoveries.

On meaning more
What begins to emerge from this quick tour of theatrical “about-ness” is
theatre’s tendency toward the alchemical. Its ability to transmute common
194 About-ness

things into something wholly other. This something may not always be golden;
but nevertheless, it shimmers with an excess meaning. When we put an element
of life on stage, whether that is a thing, person, situation, or story, it has the
tendency to mean more. This surplus of meaning comes, in part, from that elem-
ent of life being ripped from the realm of reality and placed on stage before the
collective gaze of a given community. Something happens thanks to this trans-
plantation and the pressure of the collective gaze which goes on to endow such
elements with a dual or polyphonic resonance. This is true of art in general, the
same excess of meaning can be found in a novel or a painting. But how this
excess of meaning is experienced in the theatre is unique to its sister arts. In
theatre we are not just responding to words or images, but to actual presences. In
the novel or in paintings words or images stand in for a given thing; but in the
theatre, we are presented with the presence of the actual thing-itself in all its concrete-
ness (whether this is objects or people). The truly unnerving aspect of theatre is
when we sense this actual concreteness of the thing-itself begin to leak other
meanings; when we catch a glimpse of other significations that exist beyond the
thing-itself’s generally accepted quotidian boundaries. In life a salesman like
Willy Loman may carry two suitcases of his wares, but on the stage those two
suitcases become the very manifestation of his existential fate. Their weight is no
longer just physical but somehow meta-physical. Willy Loman, the unprepossessing
salesman, becomes a kind of modern-day Sisyphus, his suitcases obtaining the
same sort of mythic status as Sisyphus’ rock. Here, the material (suitcases) begins
to intimate something immaterial (fate). Suddenly we feel an element of what the
Germans call unheimlich. The word is usually translated as uncanny, but its literal
meaning is to be “un-housed.” When we perceive the un-housing of the concrete
thing-itself, it simultaneously un-houses us. And in that un-housing we perceive
a shiver of other-worldliness that hides in the shadows of our day-to-day quotid-
ian ways. It is easier to perceive the meta-meaning of Willy Loman’s suitcases
from the remove of the stage than when we encounter them in the midst of life.
All of this brings us to:

Theoros and Theoria: or, the spectator and the theory

It is not by accident that theoros (the spectator in the theatre) is so close to the
Greek word theoria, which means theory. Both theatre and theory hold
a person in a certain form of suspense until the plot or idea becomes clear to
them. The Greeks add another term for interim between looking and seeing,
they called it theasthai, which roughly translates into, “to gawk with your
mouth open. Theasthai, for Hans-Thies Lehmann, is the mode of seeing that
underlies both theoria (theory) and theoros (spectator), it is on a certain level, “to
marvel from a standpoint far from meaning, gawking without understanding.”1
And then there is the moment when what was mysterious reveals itself and
becomes self-evident. Perhaps we could say that the power of theatre is that it
About-ness 195

gives us the opportunity of a sustained gaze where we can move slowly from
looking to seeing. In such moments of ocular transmutation, we catch a glimpse of
something other, something deeper; a second reality that tells us more about our-
selves and the world we inhabit. This is the gift of theatre, allowing us to see
through things to their core, where things are brought to light that might otherwise
remain hidden.
This is also true of anamorphic painting, which Shakespeare likens to our
understanding of tragedy. Anamorphosis is a distorted optical image. When
viewed straight on, the given image can seem like nothing more than a jumble
of chaotic lines; but, when we re-position ourselves to the left or the right of
the image, it suddenly snaps into focus, revealing its true form. The most
famous example of this phenomenon can be found in Holbein’s painting The
Ambassadors. In this work we find two imposing 17th Century gentlemen of
the world surrounded by all their significant possessions, including a strange
fossil-like figure that lays before them on the ground. But, when we shift our
position to the left of the image, the fossil transmogrifies into a human skull.
Suddenly our whole understanding of the painting has been altered, what we
thought was a celebration of these men’s good fortune, becomes a sober
reminder that all is vanity. Shakespeare suggests in Richard II that a similar sort of
anamorphic transformation of meaning happens in the experiencing of tragedy.
What first seems a chaos of contradictory lines of action can also suddenly
coalesces into a meaningful event. How does this meaning suddenly materialize?
Shakespeare tells us:

For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,

Divides one thing entire to many objects;
Like perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon,
Show nothing but confusion, ey’d awry,
Distinguish form…2

To “eye something awry” is to experience the world from the vantage point of
Richard’s fall. Only when Richard shifts from King to Commoner does new
meaning begin to reveal itself. It can only happen once Richard has been dis-
lodged from his habitual point of view, once this repositioning happens he can
begin to see himself and the world anew. As he falls, we fall with him, seeing
what he sees. Such changes in position open up a new view, a new understand-
ing. Again, to re-position oneself leads to re-cognition. Anamorphoses becomes
anagnorisis (Greek for recognition). Queen Elizabeth I famously commented at
the end of a performance of Richard II that, “I am Richard.” In a way, everyone at
the end of the play should feel this way, as though Richard’s story turned out to be
our story in disguise. At some point in the course of the performance the mask of
the character falls, and the face that is revealed is our own. Theatre at the end of
the day, in some way, should always be about us.
196 About-ness

My teacher’s favourite song

During a critique by my teacher, we were certain of two things:

1. He would have wise things to say.

2. He would always sing a song.

The words of wisdom were always new and surprising, but the song was always the
same. It was Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s What’s It All About, Alfie? About-ness
is tricky, but at the end of the day, for my teacher, it was all about about-ness.
Period. This profound need to communicate something essential was the core
concern of my teacher. It was the central issue he would return to over and over
again in his and our work. It went back to the very first day I took notes for him
and the only burning question he had of what he saw was, “Why?”
Every time I come to the end of the play I ask my teacher’s question: What’s it all
about? I can still hear him in my memory. Our session with him would end and he
would stroll out of the class room and down the hallway, half-singing, half-
humming Bacharach and David’s Alfie in his best Dionne Warwick voice:

What’s it all about, Alfie?

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da
What’s it all about da-da-da-da-da-Alfie?
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da…

This moment stays with me, after all these years, a perfect example of our final
and most ephemeral element of theatre: remanence.

Notes
1 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, translated by Erik Butler (Routledge,
2016), 27
2 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, edited by Peter Ure (Arden Shakespeare, 1956),
70–71 (II.2)
15
REMANENCE

What remains
And afterward? After the lights have dimmed, the actors have taken their last set
of bows, and the audience have all departed for their homes? What remains? The
show is over for good. What is left? A review, a photo or two, a grainy videotape
shot from the back of the theatre for archival purposes? Is this all we have of
a production that has meant so much to us? No matter how fine a review, photo,
or archival video, the theatrical experience is ultimately beyond the grasp of even
the most well-intentioned pen or the finest lens. Neither of these trusty instru-
ments seems capable of capturing the quintessence of our theatrical encounter.
There is always something missing from their documentation, no matter how
earnest or sensitive they might be. They can never quite replicate the force of life
that was lived on stage for the benefit of other living beings. This is an intriguing
combination of what I will call presence and remanence. I shall try, in these next
few paragraphs, to explain.
What happens in the two hours of a theatrical performance is beyond language
and beyond images; it traffics in words and images, but only insofar as they can be
used to return us to a state of wonder or terror at our common human condition;
or what has often been called presence; that sheer, majestic, ineffable power of
simply being. Theatre doesn’t just want us to hear about this condition, or see it, it
demands that we feel it. Now the trick is, how do we capture or translate that
feeling of presence? Not just the feeling of presence evoked by the show. But the
feeling of presence that the show invoked in you. Only you know that. Every-
thing else, photos or reviews, are just approximations of what you felt.
And so we must trust in our memory. Even though this is perhaps the most
fallible of recording devices, memory still has the capability of capturing some-
thing that no one else’s pen or lens can. What Christopher Andre calls the
198 Remanence

remanence of an event; a continuance, of sorts, which lives on inside of us; or, as

he puts it, it is the “partial persistence of a phenomenon once its cause has
disappeared.”1 It is a vague sensation that outlives its initial situation. This is the
real repository of theatrical experiences. The remanence is an intimation of one
of the many manifestations of presence.

Making memories
In the end, we are the makers of memories. We use words to create actions that
release energies that we hope will leave their traces on the imagination of our
audiences. Once we’ve captured an audience’s imagination, there is a good
chance that we can eventually make our way to the most coveted of mental
residencies: their memory.
But what makes something unforgettable? There are some shows that I have seen
where I can barely remember having attended them, nothing remains in my
memory. For most shows, there is a vague feeling of mild amusement, or complete
boredom, coupled with a handful of images and sensations. But then there are those
rare shows that I remember in such vivid detail, it is as though the entire perform-
ance has been etched into some remote pathway of my brain. Why, what causes me
to remember those shows and not the others? What separates the two?
I think this goes back to something my teacher said to us about necessity.
The play, the performance, even the very scene shifts must seem to possess the
force of necessity. We are back to the first principles that we spoke of in the first
chapter of this book. What is the question of the play? What is it about? What
truth or truths does it have to tell? My friend and colleague Anne Bogart always
says the ingredients for an impactful evening of theatre are very straightforward,
“You have to have something to say, you have to have the need to say it, and
you have to have the craft to say it well.” When these elements are alive in
a production of Agamemnon, Hamlet, The Three Sisters, Angels in America, or some
yet to be written masterpiece, then all else seems to follow and the play’s neces-
sity is transferred from the actors (through the release of their actions) and into
the audience who receives it. This can come in the manner of a gift (like the
one my teacher advocated for), or an infection (as Artaud warned); either way,
it stays with an audience and goes to work on them. What that work does and
how it reveals itself in the future is a matter of how each audience member
processes the spark or germ that came from this initial theatrical encounter.
But, in considering this concept of “the force of necessity,” it is worth taking
a moment to consider which word in this phrase is more important to memory.
Force or necessity? What if the necessity is only remembered due to the force in
which it enters our consciousness? Think of George Steiner’s theory of the
power of art. Great works, he tells us:

Pass through us like storm winds, flinging open the doors of

perception, pressing upon the architecture of our beliefs with
Remanence 199

their transformative powers. We seek to record their impact,

to convey to others the quality and force of the experience.
We would persuade them to lay themselves open to it.2

Delay
Late in his life, the great Marcel Duchamp stopped calling his works art and
began referring to them as delays.3 The reasoning behind this was that truly great
works of art rarely reveal themselves in our very first encounter with them. They
have much more to tell us than the time allotted to our first encounter; therefore,
great works grow, slowly inside us like a seed, we water it with our memory,
returning to it again and again until it has grown into a strange and magnificent
garden of its own. Often, the work that is the easiest to consume, is the least
likely to be remembered. Art is not a synonym for entertainment. It is not inter-
ested in instant gratification; but rather, the long term. We have lost our appetite
for difficulty, but difficulty is an important part of art. It says that the work is not
over just because you have read the last page of the book or stayed until the final
curtain. The true work of an art work continues, long after that art work has been
experienced. This is part of the beauty of remanence, something stays with you,
the work continues to work on you. This is the power of the Greeks, Kalidasa,
Zeami, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and so on. A chance encounter with a work of
art, can lead to a lifetime of revelation.

Our town, our remanence

Throughout much of Thornton Wilder’s luminous Our Town, we learn about
the imaginary New England town of Grover’s Corners from the fictional Stage
Manager of the play. It is he that tells the audience about the town’s inhabitants,
geography, and history. At one point this kindly Stage Manager informs us of “the
Cartwright interest,” which has begun to erect a new bank in Grover’s Corners.
A friend of his has been asked what they should put in the cornerstone of the build-
ing for people to dig up a thousand years from now. Here is the Stage Manager’s
description of what they’ve placed in this makeshift time capsule, he begins with
such items as The New York Times, the local newspaper, the Bible, the Constitution,
and a copy of Shakespeare’s collected works. Then he muses:

Y’know—Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know
about’ed is the names of kings and some copies of wheat contracts—and con-
tracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to
supper, and the father came home from his work, and smoke went up the
chimney—same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about
the real life of the people is what we can piece together from the joking
poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. So I’m going
200 Remanence

to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people
of a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us—.4

Our Town, like this impromptu remanence-machine, captures a small fraction

of what constitutes the day-to-day reality of our lives; our memory of play,
captures a fraction of that fraction. The play reduces our lives to, say, ten
thousand moments and our memory of the play reduces this even further,
leaving us with perhaps nine or ten fragments. There is something Darwinian
about the survival of these remaining moments, something, dare we say,
quintessential. It is a mixture of what is particularly meaningful to the play
combined with what is particularly meaningful to us. Add up the sum of
these moments that have survived our feeble memories and the vicissitudes
of indifferent time and you have the play’s personal remanence. So what,
you ask, are the remaining moments of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town that
are left with me? Here is a partial list:

1.
The theatre space exposed: its bare brick back wall, hemp rope pulley system,
worn wooden floor. It is as if this were some strange abandoned factory for
the production of what? Wonder? Terror? Everyday quiddities? Oh, and
the fine layer of dust that no broom ever seems capable of fully eradicating.
2.
The voice of the Stage Manger, constrained by the exacting nature of a New
England accent whose vowels and consonants seem shaped to protect
one from the region’s relentless winters; and yet, the grain of the voice
remains warm, inviting, saturated with a deep wisdom born out of the
accumulation of days and nights suffused with the simple joys and sorrows of
human existence.
3.
The time capsule.
4.
The letter to a child with the following address: “To Jane Crofut; The Crofut
Farm, Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; the United
States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the
Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.”5
5.
Dr. Gibbs confessing to his wife that he was afraid that after their
wedding day they “wouldn’t have material for conversation more’n’d last us
a few weeks” and discovering, to his relief and wonderment, that they went
on to converse for twenty years without “any noticeable barren spells.”6
Remanence 201

6.
The land of the dead as a group of people seated in two rows of wooden
chairs, dressed in black and holding black umbrellas above their heads,
despite the fact that there is no rain. The unearthly stillness of it all.
7.
Discovering young Emily amongst them, a new inhabitant to the land of
the dead.
8.
Emily’s momentary reprieve from the land of the dead to relive an
inconsequential day of her life. What was to be a consolation turns to
devastation. It is simply too painful to be amongst the living since they are
constitutionally incapable of appreciating the gift of each singular moment
that life bestows upon them.
9.
Her cry, “I can’t, I can’t go on.”7 And her realization that “It goes so fast.
We don’t have time to look at one another.” And perhaps most devastating
of all, her conclusion: “That’s all human beings are! Just blind people.”8

All of this leads to the survival of a cumulative sensation, the trace of which is
the overarching remanence of Our Town to me. How to describe this feeling,
how to put it in words? Or rather, why do words suddenly escape me? The
feeling is there, but the words are not. Why are the words suddenly so very
hard to find? The sensation does not so much defy language as precede it. It is
like a strange melody in search of the proper lyrics to sit atop of it. It is an
indwelling that emerges whenever the title Our Town is now mentioned. Is this
the same indwelling that first provoked Wilder to write this work? Of what is
this sensation made of? A strange and specific mixture of wonder, sadness,
appreciation, yearning, fear, tenderness, love, quiddity, and… ultimately…
(could it be?)… acceptance. All blended together like the elements that make up
a particular perfume, as though a remanence were the fragrance of a memory.
Put these elements together and it evokes Our Town. In this respect, these are
no longer nine separate linguistic integers (i.e., wonder, sadness, appreciation,
yearning, fear, tenderness, love, quiddity, and acceptance); but, rather, an
entirely new word:

wondersadnessappreciationyearningfeartendernesslovequiddityandacceptence.

This is the unique remanence of Our Town to me and it is tied to a production

I saw almost 45 years ago. It was one of my very first encounters with professional
theatre and a production that, among many other things, first taught me about the
possibility of theatre as an art form.
202 Remanence

My “Our Town”
I must have been 12 or 13 and I had just become interested in this thing called
theatre. My mother, who always encouraged any inkling of an artistic inclination
in her children, immediately got us season tickets to The Terrence Theatre.
This was a brand new theatre company in Long Beach California where we
lived. The first production of their first season was to be Our Town with the
actor Eddie Albert. Mr. Albert was known, at the time, primarily for his acting
in television. He was slated to play the Stage Manager and it is was clear that his
name was the main attraction for the event. I remember my mother being par-
ticularly excited to see Eddie Albert live. We arrived at the theatre, got into our
seats, and learned that Eddie Albert, due to an over-extended movie shoot, was
unable to perform that night. My father, happy for any excuse to spare himself
an evening of theatre, suggested we leave and ask for our money back. But my
mother insisted that we stay. She was curious to see what was going to happen
without Mr. Albert.
The lights dimmed and out came Eddie Albert’s son, Edward Albert
Jr., who was quite an accomplished actor in his own right. He came to the
edge of the stage with a prompt book in his hand and addressed the audience.
He wanted us to know that his father was terribly sorry that he couldn’t be
there that night and that he was going to take on his father’s role for this
evening’s show. He explained he had just gotten the script that afternoon so
he was unable to memorize the lines and would have to read his part from the
real Stage Manager’s prompt book since it also contained notes on all of his
father’s blocking. And with that, the show began. He opened the Stage Man-
ager’s book and began to read his lines, haltingly at first and with a certain
understandable trepidation; but there was something so beautiful, so honest, so
of the moment, it didn’t seem to matter. The most moving thing about his
performance was that he was as surprised as we were by the story he
was tasked with narrating. At one point he missed his cue because he was so
terribly taken by a scene between the young lovers; having run out lines, they
turned and gave him a helpless look that signaled, in no uncertain terms, that
it was his turn to speak. “Oh, sorry ’bout that,” he said blushing and then
continued on. Intermission came and my father said, “Not half bad.” After
intermission Edward Albert Jr. came out and was met with the thunderous
applause of a deeply appreciative audience. He smiled an awkward smile,
opened the book, and returned to reading aloud. It was as if he was as eager as
we were to know what was going to happen next.
And then we came to the funeral and the revelation that Emily, our heroine,
was among the dead. And in that moment, as Edward Albert Jr. was reading
this, his voice began to crack and tears, real-honest-to-God tears, began to
stream down his face. He turned to the audience and apologized, “I’m so…
so… sorry…” he stammered, “I didn’t think… I didn’t know… it would be
like this… that I would feel… so…” he trailed off into silence, taking
Remanence 203

a moment to try and properly compose himself. And in that moment, a brief
eternity opened up and the entire audience seemed to realize that what he was
feeling was what everyone else in the auditorium was feeling, even my father!
For that one moment several hundred strangers suddenly were emotionally
rhyming with one another. It was one of the most beautiful moments I had
yet experienced in my life, the first time I sensed what the anthropologists
Victor and Edith Turner call “communitas,” that sudden collective upsurge of
fellow feeling that they tell us “Often appears unexpectedly. It has to do with
the sense felt by a group of people when their life together takes on full mean-
ing. It could be called a collective satori or unio mystica, but the phenomenon is
far more common than the mystical states.”9 William James speaks of such
moments as a collective soul stirring, something that the East is much better at
describing than the West. For the East, James suggests, the soul becomes
a succession of fields of consciousness, and within each field there is a sub-
field, or focal point. He tells us that we apply certain words of perspective to
distinguish these focal points from one another. These are words like, “here,”
“this,” “now,” “me,” and we ascribe other focal points and positions as
“there,” “then,” “that,” “his,” “thine,” “it,” “not me.” And yet there are these
quasi-mystical moments of what the Turners call “communitas” where “there”
can change to “here” and “yours” becomes somehow part of “mine.”10 In other
words, we can change places without moving. This is the work of theatre and it hap-
pens on a collective level; where what began as a sea of isolated “I’s” becomes
a unified “we”; individual, audience, and event become one. This is the alchemy of
theatrical sympathy and I felt its full force in that moment when Edward Albert
Jr. was too “shook up” to continue. This immense and overwhelming sensation
was followed by another equally powerful intimation which hit me afterward in
our silent car ride home. It was then, while each of us was lost in our own
thoughts of what we had just seen, that I had my first inkling of this concept of
remanence. I did not know, at the time, that there was a word for this feeling,
but I sensed the need for one; some word that could capture this lingering thrum
of fellow-feeling. Much later I learned this vestigial indwelling could be called the
remanence of communitas. It is a feeling that has lasted some 45 years and counting!
I’m pretty certain that it was in that silent car ride home that the idea began to
form in my unconscious of a life in the theatre, a place where I could re-create
this remanence of communitas over and over again.
I often wonder what would have happened if we had followed my father’s
prompting and left the show that night. Would I have encountered a similar
life-altering feeling elsewhere? Would I still have found my way to a life in the
theatre? Would I have written this book you now hold in your hands? How
wonderful and strange life is. How defining one moment can seem to be, and
how marvelous that it can continue to live on at the intersection of your
memory and your imagination, growing and sustaining you. The remanence of
that evening merges with that of my education; I hope you will indulge me one
last anecdote:
204 Remanence

The end of class

Coming to the end of this book sends me back, across all these many years, to the
classroom of my teacher. Our three hours with him would be up and he would
always say with a sigh, “Well, that’s that.” We would linger for one more pearl of
wisdom, which would only provoke him to exclaim, “What are you all waiting
for?” And then would come the following almost Old Testament-like injunction:
“Get to work!” I didn’t realize it then, but those three little words, “Get to Work,”
were the greatest words of advice ever. So, what are you waiting for?

Notes
1 Christopher Andre, Feeling and Moods, translated by Helen Morrison (Polity, 2012), 9
2 George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Second Edition (Yale University Press, 1996), 3
3 Thomas Girst, The Duchamp Dictionary (Thames and Hudson, 2014), 58
4 Thornton Wilder, Collected Plays and Writings on Theatre (American Library, 2007),
165–166
5 Ibid., 173
6 Ibid., 178
7 Ibid., 207
8 Ibid.
9 Edith Turner, Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy (Palgrave, 2012), 1
10 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in William James: Writings
1902–1910, edited by Bruce Kuklick (The Library of America, 1987), 184
INDEX

about-ness 3–4, 188; allegory and Albert, Edward Jr. 202–203

implication of the action 190–191; Alcestis (Euripides) 150
allegory of the story 188–190; author’s Alea 145
experience 196; and Chekhov 191–192; aletheia (truth) 29
meaning more 193–194; and Shakespeare allegory: and the implication of the action
193; spectator and the theory 194–195; 190–191; and parable 191–193; of the
and Williams 190 story 188–190
“accursed questions” (proklyatye voprosy) 13 Ambassadors, The (Holbein) 195
actional motifs 136; in Chekhov 139–142; anagnorisis 60, 150, 195
in Molière 136–139 anamorphic painting 195
actional rhymes: in Albee 144–145; in Andre, Christopher 126, 197–198
Shakespeare 142–144 Angels in America (Kushner) 14–15, 168,
actions 3, 4, 39, 40; actualization of 184, 190, 191, 198
145–146; how of 134–136, 151; Anglo-Saxon language, in Shakespeare
implication of, and allegory 190–191; 51–52
and intentions 121–124, 125–126, Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 13
128–129; linguistic origins 125; vs. Anthony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 21–22
mood 126–127; origins of 125–126; Antigone (Sophocles) 149, 150,
units of 130–134; as the velocity of being 152–153, 166
127–128; wanting and doing 129–130; architectonic events 161, 166–167; and
see also actional motifs; actional rhymes Chekhov 181
Aeschylus 5, 21, 49–51, 66–68, 87, 149, Aristotle 2, 5, 12, 41, 43, 125, 128,
173, 174; see also Eumenides, The 148–149, 149–150, 159; see also Poetics
(Aeschylus); Oresteia, The (Aeschylus) (Aristotle)
Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 21, 49–51, 66–68, As Is (Hoffman) 14
151, 152, 161–162, 166, 173, 174, 198; As You Like It (Shakespeare) 23, 65
mask, face, soul 87–88; and obstacles Atmospheres 79–80
151, 152; sequential states 101–102
agere (to do) 125 Bacchae, The (Euripides) 12, 115, 149, 150
agon 145, 148, 150; etymology of 148–149 Baudelaire, Charles 91
agon-logon 102, 131, 149 Beckett, Samuel 5, 8, 60–61, 109, 169; see
Albee, Edward 5, 144–145, 168–169, 185 also Happy Days (Beckett); Waiting for
Albert, Eddie 202 Godot (Beckett)
206 Index

Berlin, Isaiah 13 Corneille, Pierre 14

Bhagavad-Gita, The 11, 193 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) 55–56
Birthday Party, The (Pinter) 26, culminating events 166, 169; and Albee
168, 185 185; see also events
Bittner, Rudiger 126
Bogart, Anne 198 Davis, Miles 60, 63–64, 163
Borges, Jorges Louis 51 Death of a Salesman (Miller)
Brecht, Bertolt 60, 96 90, 194
Buchner, Georg 108–110 delay 199
Demosthenes 148
Caillos, Roger 145 desire 113, 121; and Chekhov 113, 119;
Carson, Anne 47, 48 and Molière 113, 116–118; see also
Chaikin, Joseph 44–45, 61 intentions
change 3, 46–47, 63–64; author’s details, and truth 19
experience 63; and Beckett 60–61; and Dolgachev, Slava 28–29
Chekhov 56–60; Greek drama 47–51; Don Juan (Molière) 120; actional motifs
manifestation of 61–63; and Shakespeare 136–139; and cores 181–184
51–55, 56, 58; and Tolstoy 55–56 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 13, 55–56
character 3, 84–85; author’s experience drama, linguistic origins of 125
96–97; and Chekhov 88–90; and Greek Duchamp, Marcel 199
drama 87–88; mask, face, soul 85–87;
and Shakespeare 91–96; and Wilson Electra (Sophocles) 21–22, 27, 47, 48, 59,
90–91 81, 101, 102, 104, 115, 150, 152, 162,
Chekhov, Anton: and about-ness 191–193; 174, 176; actions 131–134, 135; and
actional motifs 139–142; and change 3, cores 176–177
56–59; and character 88–90; and cores Eliot, T.S. 21
173, 178–179, 179–181; and desire 119; Elizabeth I, Queen 195
and events 163, 164–166, 170; and the Eumenides, The (Aeschylus) 150–151
genealogy of theatrical grammar 4, 5; Euripides 12, 80–81, 114, 121–123,
influence of Shakespeare on 4; and 148, 149; see also Alcestis (Euripides);
non-change 59–60; and non-events Bacchae, The (Euripides); Children of
167; and obstacles 155–156; and Heracles (Euripides); Hecuba (Euripides);
questions 13–14; states in 105–108; Iphgenia in Aulis (Euripides); Orestes
and truth 2, 23–25, 28–29; and world (Euripides)
75–76; see also Cherry Orchard, The events 3, 159–160, 172; architectonic
(Chekhov); Ivanov (Chekhov); Seagull, events 161, 166–167; author’s experience
The (Chekhov); Three Sisters, The 170–172; basic criteria for 161, 175;
(Chekhov); Uncle Vanya (Chekhov) contemporary 168–169; macro-events
Chekhov, Michael 79–80 161, 164–166, 170, 180, 185;
Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov) 56, 57, micro-events 161–164, 170, 180,
58, 75, 139, 167; and events 165; 181, 184, 185; nature of 159; non-events
and obstacles 155–156; and questions 167; relationship to cores 175–181;
14; states in 107–108; and truth 25 rhythmic nature of 170; and time
Children of Heracles (Euripides) 12 169–170
Churchill, Caryl 5, 76–78, 168, 185
“communitas” 203
conflict 149–151 Far Away (Churchill) 76–78,
cores 3, 173–174; author’s experience 168, 185
185–186; and Chekhov 173, 178–179, Faust (Goethe) 116, 145
179–181; contemporary 184–185; and Fences (Wilson) 90–91
Greek drama 173, 176–177; and Molière Foreman, Richard 109–110
181–184; relationship to events 175–181; Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
rhythmic dynamics of 175; and (Lacan) 23
Shakespeare 173, 177–178 Freud, Sigmund 78
Index 207

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 145 irrevocable events 161, 166, 169, 175; and
Gorky, Maxim 13 Albee 185; see also events
Greek drama: and actions 131; and change Ivanov (Chekhov) 79
3, 47–51, 60; and character 87–88; and
cores 173, 176–177; and events 161–162, James, William 203
170; and the genealogy of theatrical Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe) 116
grammar 4–5; and the Greek Moment 4, Jo Ha Kyu 43
18; and intentions 114–115; and obstacles Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 5, 11
148, 151–153; and questions 11–12;
states in 100–102; and truth 18, 21–22, Kafka, Franz 78
29; and world 66–68 Kane, Sarah 5, 119–120
Greek myth 11–12 Kierkegaard, Søren 58
King Lear (Shakespeare) 173; actional
Hall, Peter 26–27 rhymes 142–143; and change 54–55;
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 4, 11, 65, 198; and questions 12
actional rhymes 142, 143–144; and Kramer, Larry 14
character 84; and choice 11; and death Kushner, Tony 5, 14–15, 168, 184, 190,
22, 153–154; and events 162, 165; and 191; see also Angels in America (Kushner)
moments 36–39, 41–43; and obstacles
153–155; and parable 193; and questions Lacan, Jacques 23, 24, 182
2, 8, 12, 13; and states 102–105 lack 113, 121; see also intentions
Happy Days (Beckett) 60, 61, 109, Lehmann, Hans-Thies 194
169, 170 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 12
Hawke, Ethan 79 Lewis, C.S. 189
Hecuba (Euripides) 157–158 L’Illision Comique (Corneille) 14
Hegel, G.W.F. 125 linear states 99, 100
Heidegger, Martin 66, 85, 96, 173 Long Day’s Journey into Night
Heraclitus 5 (O’Neill) 156–157
Hoffman, William 14 Love’s Labours Lost (Shakespeare) 69
Holbein, Hans 195
Homer 18, 63, 148 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 51, 169, 170
macro-events 161, 164–166, 170; and
Iliad, The (Homer) 18, 63, 87, 123 Chekhov 180; and Pinter 185
Illusion, The (Corneille) 14 Mahabharata, The 11, 193
illynx 145 Marlowe, Christopher 116
impossible object, the 116; and Kane memory 197–198; making of 198–199
119–120 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) 13,
inciting events 166, 168; and Albee 185; 55, 70, 71, 72; and cores 177–178; and
and Chekhov 181; see also events world 69–74
Indo-European languages 9 metaphor 189
intentions 3, 39, 40, 41, 42, 112, 124; and micro-events 161–163, 170; and
actions 121–124, 125–126, 128–129; Chekhov 180, 181; and Churchill
author’s experience 121–124; and 185; and Kushner 184; multiple
Chekhov 119; and dangerous knowledge 163–164; see also events
120–121; definition 113; and Greek Midsummer Night’s Dream,
drama 114–115; and Kane 119–120; and A (Shakespeare) 23
Molière 116–118; and Shakespeare Miller, Arthur 5, 90, 194
115–116; usage of word 113–114 mimesis 2, 19, 145
internal obstacles 148; and The Cherry mimesis praxis, theatre as 125
Orchard (Chekhov) 155–156; see also Misanthrope, The (Molière)
obstacles 116–118
Iphgenia in Aulis (Euripides) 115, modernism 5
121–123, 150 Moira (Fate) 4–5
208 Index

Molière 85, 87, 120; actional motifs penultimate events 166, 169; and Albee
136–139; and cores 175, 181–184; and 185; see also events
desire 113, 116–118; see also Don Juan Pericles (Shakespeare) 52–53
(Molière); Misanthrope, The (Molière); peripeteia 49–51, 150, 161
Tartuffe (Molière) Phaedra’s Love (Kane) 115, 119–120
moments 3; author’s experience 43–44; “Philosophy of Troy, The” (Baudelaire) 91
characteristics and structure of 33–34; physical obstacles 157–158; see also obstacles
the now of the dog 34–36, 38; and nows Pinter, Harold 5, 168, 185; and truth
31–33; nows-moments-movements 25–27; see also Birthday Party, The
sequence 39–41; quintessence of 44–45; (Pinter)
and Shakespeare 36–39; unfoldings 34, Plato 12
41–43 plot 179
momentum 33 Plutarch 149
moods 3, 99; vs. actions 126–127 Poetics (Aristotle) 148–149, 149–150
Mother Courage (Brecht) 60 points of concentration 78–79
movements: and actions 127–128; polarity shifts, and events 161, 163,
nows-moments-movements sequence 168, 175
39–41; and world 73 Potato Eaters, The (Van Gogh) 110
Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) prattontes (to act) 125
51–52, 163–164 present-ness 36, 40–41
proklyatye voprosy (“accursed questions”) 13
needs 113, 121; and Shakespeare 113, Public Theatre, The 81–82
115–116; see also intentions
Nietzsche, Friedrich 23, 182 quantum-like states 99, 100; Greek drama
Noh theatre 43 102; in Shakespeare 102, 104–105
Normal Heart, The (Kramer) 14 questions 2; “accursed questions”
Novalis 5 (proklyatye voprosy) 13; author’s
nows 31–33, 40, 41; the now of the dog experience 15–16; and Chekhov 13–14;
34–36; nows-moments-movements and choice 11; and Greek drama 11–12;
sequence 39–41 interrogative process 9–11; and Kushner
14–15; nature of 8–9; and Shakespeare
obstacles 3, 147–148; and Chekhov 12–13; taxonomy of 9
155–156; and conflict 149–151;
etymology of agon 148–149; and Greek remanence 4, 126, 197–198; author’s
drama 148, 151–153; and O’Neill experience 202–203; delay 199; making
156–157; physical obstacles 157–158; memories 198–199; and Wilder 199–204
and Shakespeare 153–155 Renaissance 151
occurrence 39, 40, 41, 42 Revenge plays 193
Oedipus Rex (Aristotle) 150 rhetorical devices, in Greek drama 18
Olivier, Laurence 177 rhythm, and world 73–74
O’Neill, Eugene 5, 156–157 Rialto, Venice 69–70, 72, 73
Open Theatre 44 Richard II (Shakespeare) 91–96, 179, 195
Oresteia, The (Aeschylus) 2, 12 Richard III (Shakespeare) 115–116
Orestes (Euripides) 80–81, 150–151 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 12, 69, 166
Othello (Shakespeare) 12–13, 115,
116, 118 Seagull, The (Chekhov) 4, 18, 28–29, 57,
Our Town (Wilder) 199–203 139, 192; and cores 178–179, 179–181;
Dolgachev’s production 28–29; and
parable: and allegory 191–193; and Hamlet events 163, 164–165; and questions 14;
(Shakespeare) 193 states in 105–107; and truth 23–24
paraiphasis 18 sensorial change 62–63
Pavese, Cesare 8 sequential states 99, 100; Greek drama
Pendleton, Austin 79 100–102; in Shakespeare 102–105
Index 209

Shakespeare, William: and about-ness 195; temporal demarcations, and events

actional rhymes 142–144; and change 161, 162, 175
51–55, 56, 58; and character 91–96; and theasthai 194
cores 173, 177–178; and events 162, theatrical grammar: basic elements of 2–4;
163–164, 165; and the genealogy of genealogy of 4–5
theatrical grammar 4, 5; influence on theme 179
Chekhov 4; and intentions 115–116; theoria (theory) 194–195
and moments 36–39, 41–43; and parable theoros (spectator) 194–195
193; and questions 2, 12–13; states in Three Sisters, The (Chekhov) 56–57,
102–105; Tolstoy’s critique of 56; and 109–110, 156, 167, 192–193, 198;
truth 2, 22–23; use of language 51–52; and change 58–59; and events 165; and
and world 65, 69–74; see also Anthony and non-change 59–60; and questions 2; and
Cleopatra (Shakespeare); As You Like It truth 24–25; and world 75–76
(Shakespeare); Julius Caesar time: and events 169–170; temporal change
(Shakespeare); King Lear (Shakespeare); 62; temporal demarcations, and events
Love’s Labours Lost (Shakespeare); Macbeth 161, 162, 175
(Shakespeare); Merchant of Venice, The “tiny bit” (Tolstoy) 2, 19–20, 55
(Shakespeare); Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tolstoy, Leo 13, 58; and change 55–56;
A (Shakespeare); Much Ado About Nothing critique of Shakespeare 56; “tiny bit” 2,
(Shakespeare); Othello (Shakespeare); 19–20, 55
Pericles (Shakespeare); Richard II truth 2, 28–29; author’s experience 27–28;
(Shakespeare); Romeo and Juliet and Chekhov 23–25; and Greek drama
(Shakespeare); Tempest, The 21–22; and Pinter 25–27; as recognition
(Shakespeare); Twelfth Night 18–19; and Shakespeare 22–23; and
(Shakespeare); Winter’s Tale, The Tolstoy’s “tiny bit” 19–20; tone of 20
(Shakespeare) Tsvetaeva, Marina 36
Simon, Alfred 85, 87 Turner, Edith 203
simultaneous states 100; in Chekhov Turner, Victor 203
105–108; in Greek drama 102 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 4
Sophocles 149, 170, 174; and truth 21; see
also Antigone (Sophocles); Electra Uexküll, Jakob von 74, 75
(Sophocles) Umwelt 74, 75
Spolin, Viola 78 Unanswered-Question-Motif 182
Stanislavsky, Konstantin 3, 80, 113, Uncle Vanya (Chekhov) 4, 88–90, 166, 173,
175; and truth 2, 20 191–192; actional motifs 139–142; and
states 3, 99–100, 127; in Chekhov events 165; and truth 24
105–108; empty states in modernity unfoldings 34; ABCs of 41–43
108–110; in Greek drama 100–102; unheimlich 194
relaxed state 110–111; in Shakespeare
102–105 Van Gogh, Vincent 110
Steiner, George 198–199 Verleugnung 78
Streetcar Named Desire, A. (Williams) Vernant, Jean-Pierre 11
190, 191
Sulerzhitsky, Leopold 20 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 60, 61, 169
Super-Objectives of characters 128 wants 113–114, 121, 123–124; and Greek
Suzuki, Tadashi 4 drama 113, 114–115; wanting and doing
Symposium (Plato) 12 129–130; see also intentions
War and Peace (Tolstoy) 13, 56
Tartuffe (Molière) 175 What is Metaphysics (Heidegger) 85
teacher (author’s) 6, 15–16, 27–28, 43–44, What’s It All ABout, Alfie? (Bacharach
63, 78, 80–81, 96, 108, 110–111, and David) 196
121–124, 129, 157–158, 171–172, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee)
185–186, 188, 196, 198, 204 144–145, 168–169, 185
Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 39 Wiest, Dianne 28–29
210 Index

Wilder, Thornton 5, 199–203 75–76; and Churchill 76–78; and Greek

Williams, Tennessee 5, 190, 191 drama 66–68; points of concentration
Wilson, August 5, 90–91 78–79; and Shakespeare 65, 69–74;
Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare) 39, as a verb 66
53–54, 69, 164 Woyzeck (Buchner) 108–110
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1, 46
Wolfe, George 82 Zeno 193
world 3, 65–66; and atmospheres 79–80; Zürau Aphorisms (Kafka) 78
author’s experience 80–82; and Chekhov