Re: RAT, The dramaturgy of...

["Elizabeth Ware" <coreperformance@hotmail.com>]

Rats,

I am not the most experienced of theater artists, but I've worked on pieces 
that were "willfully obscure" and on pieces that are not.

Recently, I directed was Mac Wellman's "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field" 
and I am directing a nice, traditional version of Pride & Prejudice now.

I have hopes that the audiences of each piece will have an equal chance of 
"understanding" the work.  But "understanding" is different for each.

In the Jane Austen, I want the audiences to follow the plot, and connect 
with the characters, and root for everything to turn out ok for everybody.  
On an intellectual level, they may note how the world today is the same, and 
how the world today is different.  And how people are always the same.  If 
the production is really successful, the beauty of the story will stay with 
them for a while.  I do not expect heated discussions of its meaning at the 
bar afterwards.

In "Difficulty," the plot was not entirely clear.  I had ideas of "what 
happened," and each of the cast members had ideas, and most of the audience 
members had ideas.  No two alike.  The audience left that show with 
questions.  Some of them came to see the show again, only to have more 
questions, and more clearly defined questions.

Some people just left the show bewildered, and did not have anything to take 
with them when they left.

I dragged my father to one of Erik Ehn's plays years ago.  Afterwards, he 
told me he didn't get it at all, it didn't make any sense.  But over the 
next several years, he would continue to bring it up.  He was still thinking 
about it, and still trying to understand it.

If the play is just a muddle, you forget about it.  If the play's mystery 
has its own internal logic, you continue to seek the "secret decoder ring" 
of the play.

I would argue that if you are still puzzling over it years later, or if you 
go back to see it again, to clarify your questions, Then the show makes 
sense.  It may not make sense on an intellectual level, it may make a kind 
of sense that is impossible to articulate.  Some audience members will 
envigorated by that, and some will shut down.

I've also done "willfully obscure" shows where only a small percentage of 
the audience left with good questions.  In these shows, the window into the 
work was too tiny to let very many people in.  Those are the ones I consider 
failures.

It sounds as though we are all discussing this window, trying to decide:

"How small is too small?"


- Elizabeth Ware




>From: Robert Faires <onstage@auschron.com>
>Reply-To: rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com
>To: rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com
>Subject: Re: RAT, The dramaturgy of...
>Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2001 10:59:55 -0600
>
>
>Not because I think the artists have to explain everything they do onstage
>or off, to serve every work with explanatory footnotes, the ol' spoonful of
>sugar (or bedful of Red Vines, if you're Joel McKean), to make sure
>everybody "gets" what they're trying to do. People who make art, whether
>it's theatre or dance or visual art or whatever, ought to be able to draw
>on whatever inspiration they need to in the process of creation, and
>willful obscurity doesn't bother me. Well, in principle. In practice, I've
>been bugged by it on numerous occasions. But that's about me responding to
>the individual work and not condemning the work because the artists didn't
>give me the secret decoder ring for unscrambling their cryptic artistic
>message.
>
>No, it's usually because that "Fuck 'em" means that on some level these
>artists believe that the audience doesn't matter. And I can't accept that.
>The audience always matters, whether they understand the work or not,
>whether they love it or hate it or are disturbed by it or enlightened by
>it. They matter because part of the heart of theatre lies in communion.
>People together in a space to share a story or a feeling or a mystery. It's
>the folks who already have the story or feeling or mystery sharing it with
>those who don't and sometimes with those who do but who want to have it
>shared with them again. And without those latter folks, it just can't work.



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