Theatre 130B Foundations of Fine Arts: Theatre

Instructor: Howard R Martin, Ph.D.
Department of Theatre
University of Missouri --Kansas City
4949 Cherry St.
Kansas City, MO 64110                                                              To open this as an adobe file click here.

Introduction: Tilting the Balance in our Favor

Ernest Becker said: "For twenty five hundred years, we have hoped and believed that if mankind could reveal itself to itself, could widely come to know its own cherished motives, then somehow it could tilt the balance of things in its favor." What’s he talking about? He’s saying something that we must surely by now accept as a self-evident truth: that the more we know about our own cherished motives--our deepest hopes and fears--and the more we learn about what makes us act the way we do--both for the better and for the worse--the more likely we are to be able to create healthy lives for ourselves and for our children.

Becker is making the assumption here that often what gets in the way of our becoming fully human as individuals and communities is our ignorance of ourselves and that the solution lies in revealing ourselves to ourselves. It’s like the old fairy tale of the neglected poverty-stricken child who doesn’t yet know she’s a princess and can never become her true self until she discovers who she is. How different would your life be if you somehow discovered that you were a long-lost child of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco or the hidden love-child of Bill Gates? Let me restate Becker’s words this way: "For 2500 years, theatre has provided a means whereby mankind could come to know its own cherished motives and helped human beings reveal themselves to themselves. In this way it can help us make our lives more healthy and whole"

Let me give you and example. The Jellybean Conspiracy is a theatre-based community education program that helps kids with disabilities and mental retardation get connected with other kids in school and helps kids without disabilities to act with kindness and hospitality towards them. At the center of the program is a theatre Show which tells the story of a teenage girl named Cricket and her brother Tom, who has Down Syndrome, a common developmental disability. After the Show was over at one school, a student wrote:

"The Jellybean Conspiracy was a life-changing experience for me as an actor as well as a human being. ….It changed my views of special needs children and adults. I had previously believed talking to a special needs person was like talking to a toddler. I would speak very slowly and try to hold "simple" conversations. However, as soon as I started working with Ricky I realized he was a teenager who loved electronics, candy and friends just as much as I did. I soon felt drawn to Ricky; I felt I had a special connection with him that no-one else did."

To me that’s an example of someone who has had a glimpse into his own cherished motives and has, to a significant degree, tilted the balance of his own life in his favor.

All this leads me to propose three ways the theatre can help tilt the balance of life in our favor:

(1) The Theatre’s wisdom has endured. For more than 2500 years it has been an important part of our cultural heritage. If you go to the site of the ancient city of Epidavros in Greece you will find a beautifully preserved theatre built in the 4th century BC and alongside it, as if to signify the primal connection of the art of theatre with the arts of healing, the ruins of the Temple of Asclepius—the legendary God of Medicine. The theatre has influenced our architecture, our literature, our entertainment, and our language. Listen to the following list of phrases that have become part of our everyday communication that owe their origin to the theatre: playing a role, acting up. acting out, staging a comeback, projecting our personality, making a scene.

We speak of writing our own script, creating a dialog, masking or feelings, stepping into the limelight, drawing focus, taking the spotlight, plotting a crime, taking a cue, being in the pits.

And there are many more: the drama of life, the stage of history, the farce of a situation, the tragedy of life, the human comedy, lead actors and bit players.

Since theatre is uniquely the art of human relationship, it provides many metaphors to help us define aspects of human behavior: Oedipus complex, the Hamlet Syndrome, the Medea-type, the Willy Loman problem, the voice of Everyman, a comedy of errors, a summer of discontent, the madness of Ophelia, the kindness of strangers.

(2) Theatre has the capacity to nurture soul--the deeper aspects being where meaning is sought and made. One of the ways it does this is by unlocking the power of the imagination. In a book entitled Blue Fire, psychologist James Hillman says that imagination is foundational to our humanity. Without a healthy imagination, he says, we will become psychopathic. Without imagination we become trapped by what other psychologists call our "cultures of embeddedness." "To be free, to be whole, we must find ways to unfreeze the imagination." The theatre calls on us to examine our humanity through the lens of imagination and thus enable us to live free and whole.

(3) Theatre help us name our experiences of relationship. In our dealings with other people--the people who are most near to us and the people who are part of our wider community--we often act unconsciously, without awareness or insight.

Through a theatre experience--the outdoor drama at Cherokee North Carolina--I became aware of my own hidden mis-judgments not only with respect to the American Indian but also with respect to the Maori, the primal inhabitants of my own country of New Zealand. I became aware that I had carried into adulthood a childhood prejudice against the language, stories, songs, myths and art of these Polynesian tribal peoples. Without consciously intending to do so, I had come to regard Maori culture less important to the work than my own and that in essence I had something to teach the Maori but the Maori had nothing to teach me.

Theatre was a means whereby I gained an insight into my own shortcomings of vision and imagination and sought to become more open to a wider world of human experience.

The novelist and playwright, Thornton Wilder once said: "I regard theatre as the most immediate way in which one human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be human. We live in what is, but we find a thousand reasons not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to see reality and to face it."

With some important qualifications that we’ll explore as we go along, I believe there is truth in that statement, and I have planned this course to help you discover some of the ways in which theatre can teach us to what it means to be more fully alive and more deeply human.

Further Reading:
Grudin, Robert. The Grace of Great Things. Ticknor & Fields, 1990.
Hillman, James. A Blue Fire . Harper and Row, 1989
Tuan, Yi-fu. Passing Strange and Wonderful. Kodansha, 1995.

Lecture 1 - Why Study Theatre?

When we study an art like theatre, we do much more than study a subject or a set of skills--we discover a way of looking at life. In math and science we learn to observe, discriminate, calculate, deduce and apply. In the humanities we learn to analyze, compare, critique and discern. In the arts, however, we learn to appreciate. to value, and to care. And it is in this respect, that the arts are irreplaceable. For it is through appreciation that life comes to sustaining fullness. Without it, as I shall try to point out, life withers and fades, and almost invariably turns sour.

To get some idea of what a life is like without appreciation and caring , I would like you to consider the case of Harry Angstrom, the central figure in John Updike’s novel Rabbit at Rest (1990). Harry Angstrom, otherwise known as Rabbit, is a retired car dealer from Pennsylvania now living in a retirement village somewhere in Southern Florida. Separated from his family, he lives out his days in a muddle of aimless activity, weak desire, and vague regret. The following scene is taken from near the end of the book:

"Alone in his condominium, Harry is terrified by the prospect of an entire evening in these rooms. It is seven thirty, plenty of time to make the buffet. He will just go down and pick a few lo-cal items off the buffet table. In the half empty Mead Hall, under the berserk gaze of Viking warriors in big ceramic mural, he helps himself generously to, among other items, the scallops wrapped in bacon. The mix of textures, of crisp curved bacon and rubbery yielding scallops, in his sensitive mouth feels so delicious his appetite becomes bottomless. He goes back for more and more creamed asparagus and potato pancakes, then suddenly his heart feels squeezed. He takes a Nitrostat, and skips desert and coffee, even decaf. Carefully he treads across the alien texture of Bermuda grass and the carpeted traffic island beneath the warm dome of stars. He feels stuffed and dizzy.

He gets back to the condo in time for the last 15 minutes of "Growing Pains", the only show on TV where every member of the family is repulsive, if you count Roseanne’s good old boy husband as not repulsive. Then he flips back and forth between "Unsolved Mysteries" on Channel 20 and an old Abbott and Costello on 36 that must have been funnier when it came out, the same year he graduated from high school. Among the commercials that keep interrupting is that Nissan Infiniti one of crickets and lily ponds, no car at all, just pure snob nature.  (He thinks:) Can the Japanese establish a luxury image? Or will people with thirty five thousand to burn prefer to buy European? Thank God, Harry no longer has to care. (His son) Jake down toward Pottstown has to care, but not Harry."

Updike’s character is a man who has all but lost his awareness of the world around him: the food on the buffet, the people in the food-line, the art on the walls, the grass underfoot, the stars in the sky--all are matters of mere indifference. 0ccupying his time surfing the TV channels, his appetites jaded and his thoughts clichéd, he sees nothing to wonder at, hears nothing that brings him delight.

Rabbit consumes the things of the world passively, without gratitude, and he gives nothing back. He cares little for his wife and family, little for his health, little for the food, little for the news of the day, little for the old car business. In the end, it turns out, he cares little even for his own life. A few days after the events described in this scene, Harry Angstrom has a heart attack playing a game of pick up basketball against a few street kids he never met before.

Long before succumbing to his fatal attack, however, Rabbit had already died of something else more terrible-- a terminal failure of the imagination. He had lost his loving courageous connection to life. He had lost his ability to appreciate the gifts of the world. He no longer has to care.

For an example of a person who has, by contrast to Harry Angstrom, kept alive his ability to care, we now turn to Zorba, the central character in Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, Zorba, the Greek.

Kazantzakis’s Zorba-- is an uncomplicated whole-hearted man, honest, passionate and resourceful. For some weeks now he has been working with a friend he calls "Boss" to construct a cable railway to transport lumber from the top of a mountain on the island of Crete to the site of a lignite mine at its base.
Towards the end of the book, there is a scene where Zorba and the Boss sit pensively on the shores of the island. Zorba’s lover and companion, Bouboulina, has recently died, and though it is late, neither of the men is able to sleep:

We sat down by the sea. Zorba put the (parrot’s) cage between his knees and remained silent for a time. A disturbing constellation appeared in the sky from behind the mountain, a monster with countless eyes and spiral tail. From time to time, a star detached itself and fell away.
Zorba looked at the sky with open mouth in a sort of ecstasy, as though he were seeing it for the first time. "What can be happening up there?" he murmured.

A moment later he began to speak. "Can you tell me, boss," he said, and his voice sounded earnest and deep in the warm night, "what all these things mean? Who made them? And why? And above all"

--here Zorba’s voice trembled with anger and fear--"why do people die?"
Here is a man whose soul is healthy, a zesty man who is radically aware of the world around him, and one who responds to things in a way that transforms them--the events of the night, the memory of a lover, the presence of the stars--into an experience of mystery, complexity and depth. His resonant, heartfelt questions are in themselves acts of imagination.

In those moments on the shore, Zorba is following the way of the artist--not because he crafts a any notable work of art-- but because he is radically open to life and lives into its mystery. He is a man who has learned to care for his life and all life on the planet.

What does a person who cares for life look like? I’d like to suggest three qualities that seem to be shared by the Zorbas of the world and seem absent from the Rabbits:

The three qualities are: (1) attentiveness, (2) responsiveness, (c) generosity.

(1) Attentiveness--openness to the gifts of the world.
Zorba appreciates life first through a deep and original sensitivity to the world. Rabbit looks at the sky and sees nothing of consequence; Zorba looks at the sky and sees the wonder of the stars. In Rabbit’s looking there is a sense of boredom and distraction; in Zorba’s looking there is a loving kind of concentration that opens him up to wonder and surprise. He peers into the darkness beyond the horizon of "in a sort of ecstasy, as though he were seeing it for the first time."

To be attentive is to look at the world as if seeing it for the first time. It is to see mystery everywhere and to peer into the depths of things. It is to see the world for what it is and to allow it to reveal itself to us on its own terms.

All true artists possess this quality of attentiveness. Beethoven, the composer whose music has inspired the world for six generations, is described as a man "who was fully alive to the countless lovely and tender things in life."

Vincent van Gogh once wrote to his brother that to be successful in his art he needed to look calmly through his window at the things in nature and draw them "faithfully and lovingly."
Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the great lyric poets of the twentieth century, once advised a young aspiring writer to cling always to the simplest things in nature--"the little things that hardly anyone sees."
Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer, spoke of the necessity of looking at the world for its "unwrapped gifts and free surprises":

"The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But--and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny?... It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty so that finding a penny will literally make your day then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. What you see is what you get" (PTC. p.16)

Every artist is rich in "pennies." And every art form is but a predisposition to pick up certain kinds of pennies. Painters paint from what they see; musicians compose or play from what they hear; dancers dance from what they sense of movement through space; poets write from what they sense of their own feeling selves; playwrights from what they sense of being in relationship with other human beings.

Whatever the medium of their creativity, artists are those who allow the world in its particularity to be fully present to them. The mystics call it mindfulness, or readiness of heart. To use the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the artist like the mystic "keeps his heart in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced" (1992:4)

We study the arts to keep our hearts in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced. That "readiness" requires that we learn the habit of attentiveness.

(2) Responsiveness--allowing ourselves to be changed by the gifts.
Let me take you back to Zorba for the moment. Kazantzakis’s hero not only looks intently at the stars in the dark night sky; he recognizes something personal in them. He murmurs "What can be happening there?" He hears them speak of vastness and infinity and loneliness and inexplicable mystery and he replies with an anguished heartfelt question of his own that in some sense is commensurate with the vastness and loneliness he feels. He allows himself to be changed by the gifts he has received.

The important thing is that his response comes out of his own freedom. The great twentieth century philosopher, Martin Buber, once wrote:

"In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a new-born child, a new face that has never been before. It demands of you a reaction (an answer) that you cannot prepare beforehand." (1947:143)

At its deepest existential core, all true art is the singular response of a healthy imagination to the eventful world. To respond, as Buber puts it, is to answer from our own depths the callings implicit in the world. Proust would call it avoiding clichés.

The effect of this response is to transform the gift from a mere commodity or item of exchange to a token of relationship. Heschel calls it gratefulness and says "It is gratitude that makes the great. "
To study the arts means learning to recognize the gifts behind the gifts of life and to allow those gifts to change us in some way so that the responses we make are truly our own .

(3) Generosity-- Passing on the gifts we have received.
Let me tell you a story from one of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry. In his book, Fidelity, Berry describes how an old Kentucky farmer--Burley Coulter-- is lying on life-support in a Louisville hospital. He is drifting in and out of consciousness as his son Danny and the rest of the family look on.
For most of his 82 years, Burley has been working the land in the blue grass country, a man of the woods and streams, whole-hearted, self-sufficient, eagle eyed, sun-drenched, windblown and free. Now, in his last hours, he is trapped inside what Berry describes as a "season-less, sunless, moonless world, hooked up to monitors and drip bags, his body a mere passive addition to the complicated machines that keep it minimally alive."

As he looks on, Danny becomes more and more uneasy. How can he let his father die like this? Why should a man who all his life knew the freedom of the meadows be subjected to the bondage of wires and tubes in his death? Where is the symmetry in such an end.

Stealing back into his father’s room after visiting hours, he disconnects the IV tubes from his arms, carries him down the back stairs to his pick-up, and drives him back over country roads to the family farm deep in the Kentucky hills.

He lays his body down on a pallet in a well-remembered barn and leaning in close he whispers, "You’re in a good place, dad. You’ve been here before and you’re all right.... Do you know where you are? Barely audible, the old man answers "Right here" and moments later slips into his final unconsciousness.

That is generosity. It is the completing the cycle of the gift by the return of another gift. Danny had received many gifts through his father and had made them his own. He too loved the woods and the streams and the freedom of the wind. And now, in Burley’s final hours, he gave his father those gifts back.

Under the canopy of the woods and the open sky, Danny lowers his father’s body into a freshly dug grave. Down by the creek he gathers bouquets of sweet smelling flowers, golden-rod, farewell-summer, lavender, asper, and the deep blue flower of the great lobelia. He covers the body with the blossoms then fills the grave with dark, most Kentucky earth.

Danny’s act is a work of art-- a giving back of gifts. Artists do this. Their work is a gift back to the world. A poet offers his poems. The singer his songs. The storyteller his stories. The actor his characters. And when we study the arts, we learn this aspect of the gifting cycle, too--that the world is kept alive by generosity, the giving back of gifts received.

Now for a few concluding thoughts:

(1) Every situation and every moment--not just those framed by the classroom walls--can be the context for learning to care.
Zen Master Tich Naht Hanh, author of Touching Peace, gives the following suggestion: "Please take the hand of your little boy or little girl" he writes," "and walk slowly to the park. You may be surprised to notice that while you are enjoying the sunshine, the trees, and the birds, your child feels a little bored. Young people today get easily bored. They are used to television, Nintendo, war toys, loud music, and other kinds of excitement. As they get older, they ride in fast cars, or experiment with alcohol, drugs, sexuality, or other things that tax their bodies and minds. We adults too try to fill our loneliness with these kinds of things, and all of us suffer. We have to teach ourselves and our children how to appreciate the simple joys that are available. This may not be easy in our complex, distracted society, but it is essential for our survival. Sitting on the grass with your little boy or girl, point the tiny yellow and blue flowers that grow among the grasses and contemplate these miracles together."

(2) To care for life is also to care for the life that is one’s own.
Many people in our time--both young old--live without appreciating their own uniqueness and worth and therein lies much of the personal anguish of our times. School shootings, hate crimes, addictions, suicides and family violence all stem to some degree from a lack of adequate self-care.
What area of school-life can do more to nurture an appreciation of one’s own life than the arts classroom where students can learn to pay attention the unique particularities of their own selves, to answer the callings implicit in their own beings, and to care for their own heart’s image? In the arts classroom, we have an unparalleled opportunity to introduce the idea that when it comes to the essence of an individual’s life, there is no such thing as mediocrity. In his book The Soul’s Code, (1996) James Hillman writes: "There is no mediocrity of soul. Each person bears a genius like no other--a uniqueness that asks to be lived --(a calling that the world cannot do without)." (p12)

Further Reading:
Berry, Wendell What are People For? North Point, 1990
de Botton, Alain How Proust Can Change Your Life Pantheon,1997
Kazantzakis, Nikos Zorba the Greek, Touchstone, 1952
Updike, John Rabbit at Rest, Knopf, 1990

Lecture 2 - Art and the Naming of Experience

In the early 1970s, Roberta Flack recorded a song, recently revived by the Fugees, called "Killing Me Softly." Its a song about a young artist and the power of his art. The storyteller tells how she was drawn to listen as a young boy played his guitar and sang a simple song. She recalls being curiously affected by the sound of his voice and by the words he was singing. She remembers feeling strongly that his words were addressed to her and leaving her in some sense changed forever.

I heard he sang a good song,
I heard he had a style,
And so I came to see him,
To listen for a while.
And there he was, this young boy,
A stranger to my eyes...
Strumming my fate with his fingers,
Singing my life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song,
Killing me softly with his song.

By means of these strong images--so strong they strike us as hyperbole--Roberta Flack identifies one of the most vital functions of art in human experience. She reminds us that, under certain conditions, a work of art--a song, a poem, a dance, a story, a visual image--possesses the power to identify the deeper realities of our lives and become a revelation. It can, like the young boy’s melody, strum our fate or sing our life. It can stimulate our imagination, identify hidden thoughts and feelings, and tell us things we might not otherwise have consciously known, or print some things forever in our memories.

Shakespeare touches the same idea in Romeo and Juliet (3.2):

Some word there was
That murdered me, I would forget it fain;
But O it presses to my memory
Like damned guilty deed to sinners’ minds.
Naming our Experience

The human condition is such that we need to have our experience of it identified in some way. There is knowledge within us we have not claimed. The ancient classic play Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles, tells of a man who, like all of us, who possesses his experience in ignorance, knowing much but unaware that he knows it. King Oedipus knows certain facts about his life but knows nothing of their true significance. He knows he has killed several men, but does not know that one of them was his own father. He knows he has married a woman--the recently widowed queen of Thebes-- but he does not know that she is his own mother. He knows there is a plague in Thebes but does not know that, according to the gods, his own actions have been the cause.

What he needs is to have his experience identified and interpreted--and this is accomplished for him by the prophecies of Tiresias and the reports of the Corinthian shepherds.

The story of the ancient King of Thebes is a warning that ignorance is not bliss. Without an ever-expanding knowledge of the mysterious ways of life, human beings can come to great harm and bring great harm upon others. The knowledge we need is in part supplied by the naming of our experience. What Honor Ford-Smith says about the oppressed women of Jamaica could also be said, to a greater or lesser degree, about every individual on the planet:

There exists among the women of the Caribbean a need for naming of experience and a need for communal support of that process. In the past, silence has surrounded our experience. We have not been named in literature or history. The discovery through dialog, through encounter with others, of the possibilities of our power can help us to shape the forces which, at present, still name us. (Kahn and Neumaier 1985:85)

Our experience can be named for us in a number of ways. We’ll look at five. The first and most obvious is the example and instruction of our primary caregivers. Much of what we know about the world--especially in the matters of relationship and morality e.g. the importance of keeping a promise-- we learn from the those closest to us during our formative years. The second is law. The law reveals to us, for example, that life is not just a matter of my own personal survival but also concerns my relationship with my neighbors. The third is myth. Myth is that body of wisdom inherited from ancient times--preserved in the form of stories, poems and songs,-- that in Joseph Campbell’s words "teaches you about your own life." (Campbell 1988: 11) Myth helps us see our lives in a wider context and thus helps us in our search for meaning. Another way our experience is named is history. The stories of the past can help us be wise about the present. And finally our experience can be named for us is through art.

Art, whether in the form of songs, poems, visual images, dances, or stories, contains the power to reflect and clarify vital aspects of our lives. In Shakespeare’s words, it can "hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature; show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." (Hamlet III, ii, 25).

In the history of civilization there are many instances people who found in art a revealing mirror to the uniqueness, possibilities and shadows of their selves. The agitation in the breast of King Saul is soothed by the sweet tones of David’s harp. Dante is taken on his journey towards Paradise not by a philosopher or theologian or cartographer but by a poet. King Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is stricken in conscience by a play. The contemporary playwright Maria Irene Fornes speaks of her perceptions of herself and of the theatre being "upset"--radically changed--by the 1955 production of Waiting for Godot. As Honor Ford-Smith testifies, the women of Sistren found a way to uncover the uniqueness of their lives in the revealing mirror of plays in the theatre. The Sistren ("sisters") created theatrical works to publicly identify their experience of oppression and to share it with others.

By naming their experience in art they found a measure of freedom: "The process of working in drama for women involves the creating of a community in which some of the hidden or taboo subjects about women can be exposed-- and the audience confronted with them. Sistren brings to the public the voices of women from the laboring poor and in so doing helps to pressure for change. (Ford-Smith 1985:90)

Lecture 3 - Theatre and Show Business

To understand the role of theatre in the naming of experience, we must draw a distinction between the art of theatre and what we often think of as "show business." The art of theatre is guided by one set of norms, show business by another, and while the two may overlap at certain points, they should not be confused with each other. This is an important matter because, as social critic, Neil Postman, says, we are living in an age increasingly controlled by the laws of the electronic media--speed, size, brightness, and novelty. Because of the pervasiveness of the new technology, especially television, the norms of show business have now become the norms of communication in many other spheres of life, including journalism, business, education, politics, law, and the arts. In this brave new world of technology, we tend to lose sight of the alternative visions of life communicated through the quiet beauty of nature and the subtle disclosures of life. Question: What happens when you go shooting elephants from a jeep at 100mph? Answer: You miss seeing the daisies.

Art speaks gently of life. It names our experience in the subtleties of line and color and movement and rhythm, in the softness of story and song and dance and melody. Arthur Miller once described a play as "airs and whispers," made up of quiet things, infinitely subtle and complex. If this is so, then how can we hear them? How can we listen to airs and whispers if our minds are constantly bedazzled by speed and size and brightness and novelty? The answer must surely lie in approaching art the way it approaches us--with sensitivity to nuance and an infinite patience.

As a traditional art, with its roots going back beyond recorded time, the theatre preserves our civilized traditions of wisdom concerning the nature of human life, the powers that bind us together into healthy communities, and the forces that threaten us with disaster. Unlike "show business", which is by definition concerned with distraction, it is an art of serious discourse about essential things. This is not to say that it isn’t fun or lacks the instinct to entertain. It is simply to say that it’s much more than mere diversion. In its best moments, it is a place of insight and revelation--a place where we learn to bring the gift of imagination to the essential tasks of living.

True versus Degraded Art
Our quest, therefore, is to define and explore the true art of theatre, drawing distinctions, where we can, with the degraded forms of the art. In an essay entitled "In Defense of the Word", Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano distinguishes between true art and degraded art by observing the difference in their effects. The effect of true art, he writes, is to open consciousness, reveal what is true, and stimulate the creative imagination. By contrast, degraded art manipulates the consciousness, conceals reality, and stifles the creative imagination. (Simonson and Walker 1988:116)

According to Galeano’s definition, a true art of the theatre will in the first place be one that opens the mind, allowing it to be receptive to new ideas, freeing it from the stale formulas of ignorance and prejudice, rendering it sensitive to the nuances of human experience. It will be an art that "reveals the hidden wonder that persists in all great human events and enables us to experience the transforming presence of beauty." (Grudin 1990: 189)

Then secondly, a true art of theatre will be one that challenges us to see ourselves differently. It will hold up the mirror to our hidden thoughts and feelings and out of its subtle blend of content and form yield up to us potentially transforming insights. To adapt a remark once made by Clifton Fadiman: When you go for a second time to see a classic play you do not see more in the play than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.

Finally, a true art of theatre will be one that stimulates the creative imagination. We must not diminish the importance of the creative faculty in the ever-unfolding process of human liberation. So much that holds us back as a race derives not from malice or evil but from a failure to dream of alternative possibilities. To accomplish new things, we must first be able to imagine new things. A true art of theatre liberates the mind to venture into hitherto untried places and to make hitherto inconceivable leaps. A degraded art of theatre, on the other hand, tends to seduce the mind by mere fantasy, leading it down paths most traveled by, and causing real acts of imagination to become less likely. By allowing the receptive faculties to become hard and brittle, degraded art has the effect over time of closing the mind to new ideas, leaving it unreceptive to airs and whispers, choked with the dry husks of falsehood and preconception, unavailable to the experience of wonder.

Rediscovering True Art
For the reasons given above, it is important that we rediscover the irreplaceable function of true art in a fully human personal and social order and acquire the necessary skills for the appreciation of particular works that have been widely acknowledged over time as works of art. Keeping in mind what Thomas Merton once said, that what is most old is often what is most young, we will refer back often to the great traditions of theatre --to the theatres of ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, Elizabethan England, Renaissance Italy, 17th century France, 19th Century Norway and Russia, and 20th century America, as well as to the theatres of primal cultures around the world. In order to seek out the riches in store for us in such traditions, we will try to approach them without hurry or crippling preconceptions, seeking where we can to attend to the rich detail in quiet hidden things.

Above all we will attempt look at the theatre as a place where our own experience can be named, and where we can, as Thornton Wilder suggested, "learn to see the way things really are". The response we make when we "believe" a work of the imagination is that of saying "This is the way things are. I have always known it without being fully aware that I knew it. Now in the presence of this play or novel or poem (or picture or piece of music) I know that I know it." (Wilder 1957:vii-viii)

Further Reading:
Galeano, E. "In Defense of the Word" in Simonson and Walker, 1988
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Penguin, 1986.

Lecture 4 - Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder’s play, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938, is one of the most popular plays in the American Theatre. It has been praised by critics for its "rare simplicity and truth" and for sixty years has been loved by audiences for its optimistic view of the human condition and its moving depiction of simpler times and less complicated places. Other people have criticized it as too rosy in its view of life and too sentimental in its subject matter--seeing the play very much as many see a Norman Rockwell painting--too sweet and too idealistic. Other people like Harold Clurman--a director and drama critic in New York for six decades--sees both sides-- he views it as a classic American play--"a formal masterpiece"-- that strikes a chord deep in the American psyche yet at the same time seems too weak in dramatic substance to fully carry out its intentions.

The play was written just before the outbreak of World War II by Thornton Wilder--a novelist, essayist, translator, and teacher. He was born in 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin, and gained early recognition as a writer with his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. Like Our Town the book is a meditation on the meaning of life in the light of death.  He began writing plays while a student at Oberlin and Yale and achieved his first major success as a playwright with Our Town in 1938. This was the play that made him famous and he followed it with two others also critically acclaimed--The Merchant of Yonkers (later renamed The Matchmaker) and The Skin of our Teeth. In 1964, The Matchmaker was turned into a musical called Hello Dolly and with Carol Channing in the role of Dolly Levi, became a huge hit on Broadway.

Our Town is divided into three acts:

Act 1: "Daily Life."
The first act presents a series of vignettes (short scenes) set in a small New England town called Grover’s Corners, at the beginning of the 20th century. As the play begins, a "narrator"--The Stage Manager"-- walks out onto an almost bare stage and gives the audience some facts about life in Grover’s Corners--what it looks like, what it sounds like, who lives there, and what folk do on an ordinary day. As he speaks, the town starts coming to life before our eyes--the milkman delivers the milk, the paper boy throws his papers onto front porches, the doctor comes in from delivering an early morning baby, two families (the Gibbs and the Webbs) have breakfast, and the children get ready for school. Later in the day, women exchange small-talk across the fence and deal with the small crises of family life while the men become pre-occupied with the affairs of town and business. In the evening, members of the choir practice at the Methodist Church and share town gossip as they return home. Then late at night, people look up into the night sky and wonder at the moon.

           In the midst of all this, our attention begins to focus increasingly goes to two of the children of the town--George Gibbs--son of the town doctor-- and Emily Webb daughter of the editor of the town newspaper. By the end of Act 1 it is clear that the neighborly friendship between the two is turning to love.

Act 2: "Love and Marriage."
Three years later. More babies have been born, people have grown a little older, some have moved away, some have fallen ill, others have died and been buried in the cemetery on the hill. George and Emily have decided to get married and in the Gibbs and Webb households preparations are being made for the wedding. In the midst of the pre-wedding excitement, the narrator takes us back to scenes from the preceding three years as George and Emily move from first love to the promise of commitment. One of the most touching of the scenes is a flashback to the moment when George, in a heartwarmingly clumsy and tentative fashion, makes his proposal of marriage.

           Back in the Stage Manager’s present, we proceed to the marriage ceremony--to the nervous bride and groom making last minute preparations, the parents giving each the best advice they can, the crowd gathering in the church, the minister leading the service, the local yokels making snide remarks, the other guests offering their observations about how wonderful it all is. Before the end of the Act, the Stage Manager offers his own thoughts about the ordinariness of such an event--only one time in a thousand is it interesting.

Act 3 "Dying"
Nine years later. Several of the people we have met in the course of the play have now died. Among them, tragically, is Emily. We learn has died giving birth to her second child and has been buried in the cemetery on the hill. The next scenes are pure fantasy. Emily takes her place in an unspecified place where the dead from Grover’s Corners are gathered. As she thinks back to her old life, she expresses a desire to do back and visit the place once more. She is given permission to return to the town for one day--and the day she chooses is the day of her 12th birthday. But it is not at all what she expected. People seem oppressed by life, distracted by trivialities, and blind to the wonder of the things around them. Emily now realizes that the place she can be most herself is in the world beyond the grave and she asks to be allowed to go back. As she prepares to leave she speaks the following lines that in essence sum up the main idea of the play:
"I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back-- up the hill--to may grave. But first--wait! One more look.

           "Goodbye. Goodbye world. Goodbye Grover’s Corners.... Mama, Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking...and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. (She looks toward the Stage Manager and asks abruptly through her tears): Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?

The Stage Manager says "No. The saints and poets maybe--they do some." Emily replies: "I’m ready to go back." And as she goes back to her world beyond time, the people of Grover’s Corners go back to their world in time--a world of very ordinary things--and to their simple forgetful lives. In his Preface to the 1957 version of his three major plays, Wilder speaks about he hoped his play--like any good play--might do for us: (1) awaken recollection (2) reveal the two truths and (3) help us find the true value of ordinary things. "Recollection" is the capacity to recognize the experience of others within ourselves. The "two truths" are: particularity and universality: every experience both unique to us and common to all humanity. "True value" is a value that cannot be measured in dollars and cents. Wilder writes: "Our Town is an attempt to find value above price for the smallest events of our daily life."

Further Reading:
Breyer, J. (ed.) Conversations with Thornton Wilder. U. Miss.:1972
Wilder, Thornton. Three Plays. Harper & Row, 1986.

Lecture 5 - Elements of Theatre

If, after seeing a play like Our Town performed on stage, you stop to analyze it as a work of art, you will find that it is made up of three distinct yet organically interdependent elements. Taken together, these three elements constitute the very essence of theatre; considered separately, they mark it out as an art uniquely different from all others. The elements are: (1) story, (2) spectacle, and (3) living relationship.

(1)       The Element of Story:

a.  Story is "the artful recounting of the events of human life."

b.  Arts built on story, or have story as a primary constituting element are: the novel, short-story, cinema, epic poetry, and theatre.

c.  Story is the basis of all (or nearly all) plays in the theatre. Thornton Wilder once said, "The playwright is, by instinct, a story-teller. The myth, the parable, the fable, are the fountainhead of all dramatic fiction."

d.  Stories in the theatre can be simple or complex. An example of a simple story is Our Town which is based on a single relationship--that of George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Examples of complex stories are Hamlet or King Lear or Peer Gynt. Each of these presents multiple relationships. For example King Lear is about the intersecting relationships of Lear and his daughters, Gloucester and his sons, and Lear and the Fool.

e.  The telling of stories has always been an important part of human social life. All cultures provide occasions and places for the telling of stories. All cultures praise and honor their story tellers. The ancient Greeks honored Homer; we, in our own day, honor John Grisham or Stephen Spielberg. In every culture, people have taken great pains to preserve their myths: committing them to memory, binding them into sacred books, spending millions to put them on film, and creating institutions--such as opera houses and theatres--dedicated to retelling them for each generation.

f.   Stories also have an important place in our own personal experience: they help us recollect the stories of our own lives. In The Call of Stories, Robert Coles (Harvard Child Psychiatrist) recounts numerous instances of people finding their personal circumstances so telling reflected in stories: A dying physicist is comforted by Tolstoy’s "The Death of Ivan Ilych’’.  A college student is strengthened in his battle with cancer by Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. An undergraduate becomes aware of the cost of social invisibility by Ellison’s Invisible Man.  Coles writes that "stories are renderings of life; they can not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisers--offer us other eyes through which we might see, other ears that we might make soundings." (1989: 159-60) While the stories told in the theatre have a similar power, their impact is further enhanced by the fact that they are shared in the context of a living relationship between teller and listener.

g.  The theatre’s stories are almost always about a conflict of some kind. A conflict is a clash between opposing forces. The most obvious kind of conflict, of course, is physical, and many plays have been written about the struggle for physical supremacy. Other types of conflict include:

Psychological: Example: Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie: conflict between need for love and the fear of love
Political: Example: Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons: conflict of individual conscience and political power.
Social: Example: Sophocles’ Antigone: law of the family versus the law of the state.
Philosophical: Example: Our Town. The conflict here is between to contrasting views of life: the materialist view and the inclusive. The materialist view, represented by the good folks of Grovers’ Corners, holds that life is a matter of getting and spending, being born, growing up, marrying, surviving the succession of ordinary days, and dying. The inclusive view, represented by the returning Emily, sees in the ordinary a hint of wonder and in the everyday an element of surprise.

(2)       The Element of Spectacle

a.  "Spectacle" refers to those elements that appeal directly to the senses and are calculated to attract and hold the attention of an audience.

b.  Arts that require spectacle include cinema, dance, and music; those that do not include poetry and fiction.

c.  The Greek philosopher Aristotle used the word "spectacle" to refer to the visual and aural aspects of tragedy, specifically costume, music and singing. In the modern theatre, we use it to describe everything that contributes to the presentation of a work --acting, architecture, scenery, costumes, lighting, sound, properties, dancing, and singing.

d.  A story without spectacle is not theatre; it is literature. By the same token, a spectacle without story is not theatre either--it might be a light or sound show, or a circus, or a rock concert, or a game, or a performance event of some kind, but in the sense we are defining it here, it is not theatre.

e.  We can observe four kinds of spectacle in theatrical production: minimal, metaphoric, realistic, and complex.

                           (i)  Minimal: Example: Our Town. Thornton Wilder’s stage directions call for a virtually bare stage--two tables, a few chairs, a couple of arched trellises, covered with vines and flowers, a few simple props, and a couple of sound effects--a rooster crowing and a train whistle blowing. Wilder wanted to increase what he called "the heart’s participation" --imaginative engagement of the audience.

                          (ii)  Metaphoric: Example: Waiting for Godot. The metaphoric occurs when you have one dominant scenic element that bears a symbolic relationship to the themes of the play. Waiting for Godot is a play about the bleakness of human experience in the face of death and the constant search for signs of hope. The central scenic image for many productions of this play is a large withered tree set in a barren wilderness.

                         (iii)  Realistic: Example: A Dolls House Realistic spectacle involves creating the illusion of a real time and place. A Doll’s House, for example, calls for single realistic scenic environment--the inside of Nora and Torvald’s home in Oslo.

                         (iv)  Complex: Example: Les Miserables Complex spectacle involves multiple sets and many scenic devices as in large contemporary musicals like Les Miserables.

f.   Spectacle follows the principle of balance. A good production strikes a balance between the story and the means used to tell it. When the spectacle is insufficient or poorly executed, the play is diminished and the audience loses interest; when it is overdone or becomes and end in itself, the story is lost and the play’s airs and whispers drowned out by noise.

(3)       The Element of Living Relationship

a.  A "living relationship" is one that involves a reciprocal relationship between actually present artists and an actually present audience.

b.  Arts that involve living relationship include dance and music; those that do not are: poetry, novel, short-story, painting, and sculpture. Some art forms are different from others because of the living presence of the artist. In cinema, for example, the encounter takes place between person and object--the images on screen. In theatre, the encounter is a living event between person and person. Cinema stimulates solitary reflection; theatre engenders dialog.

c.  The engendering of dialog is one of the irreplaceable contributions theatre can make to human social life. In a high-tech age like ours, when machines have in many ways undertaken the functions once performed by human beings, we need to be reminded of the theatre potential for developing interpersonal relationships and community. Kenneth Branagh’s film A Midwinter’s Tale shows how a how a theatrical company can, and occasionally does, operate like an extended family--a social context in which talents can be realized, stories told, friendships sustained, and private grief’s shared.

Further Reading:
Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories Houghton, 1989.
McKee, Robert. Story. Regan, 1997.

Lecture 6 - Tragedy and the Tragic Experience I

William Nicholson’s play Shadowlands (1989) tells the story of a love-affair between an Oxford University professor, Jack Lewis, widely known for his popular writings and radio talks on theology, and an American poet named Joy Gresham.

The professor meets Joy her for tea in the dining room of an Oxford hotel: a friendship grows. Jack agrees to a paper marriage to enable Joy to return to England and live in Oxford with her young son. After one of Jack’s regular visits to her house for tea, Joy feels a sudden pain and calls for help. Her doctors discover that she has advanced bone cancer and give her a grim prognosis--most likely a very short time to live. Jack asks Joy to marry him again--this time as an act of loving commitment. Joy’s cancer goes into temporary remission. The cancer returns, and in a few short weeks Joy dies. Heart-broken and bewildered, Jack holds Joy’s son in his arms, and cries bitter, bitter tears. In the final scene, Jack is back in the classroom talking to his students about love and suffering, only this time his words are more personal in tone, much less assured: "I have been given the choice twice in my life," he says. "The boy chose safety. The man chooses suffering."

The best way to classify this play, it seems to me, is to call it a tragedy. Jack Lewis suffers a series of losses. Joy’s physical presence in his life, her feminine grace in his home, the fire of life she has kindled in him, a certain innocence with respect to the ways of God. Dogmatic proposition, no matter how finely argued, gives way to the mystery of Providence.

The Experience of Loss
We all experience loss--and this universal experience of loss is the essential subject of tragic drama. Tragic plays name our experiences of leaving and letting go.

In her book, Necessary Losses (1986), Judith Viorst describes loss as a sustained note running through all of our experience:

"When we think of loss," she writes, "we think of the loss through death of people we love. But loss is a far more encompassing theme in our life. For we lose not only through death, but in other ways as well: by leaving and being left, by changing and moving on in our lives, by consciously or unconsciously giving up our impossible romantic dreams, by losing our illusions of freedom and safety and by losing, in the process of the years, our own younger self."

At each stage of our lives, Viorst observes, we seem to be required to let go of certain things, either because they are, quite simply, ours no longer, or because we must release our grasp on what is old in order to take up what is new.

A more sophisticated analysis of loss in human experience is provided by Robert Kegan in his
book The Evolving Self (1982)--a study of the stages by which we change our relationship with the world. As we grow in maturity, Kegan argues, some things are born and others we must lose.

(1) In infancy, we lose the safety of our imbeddedness in our mother’s womb;
(2) In early childhood, we lose our sense that the world belongs exclusively to us;
(3) In adolescence we lose our sense of the world’s predictability;
(4) in early adulthood, we lose our feeling of autonomy or self-sufficiency; and so on.

Since the losses we experience at each stage of life are common to us all, we should not be surprised to find them reflected in our tragic stories. We’ll look, therefore, at selected instances of loss and how they are reflected in some of the recognized tragic plays of our tradition.

The Experience of Loss in Tragic Plays
We experience some of our most significant losses when we are children and adolescents: A pet dies, a friend moves out of town, a parent leaves home, our family relocates (5)loss of our caregiver’s exclusive love.

Some psychologists, including Viorst, believe this helps explain the common phenomenon of sibling rivalry. Knowing at some level of awareness that he/she has lost the undivided attentions of the parent, the child blames a brother or a sister for stealing it.

Sibling rivalry often occurs as a theme in the theatre’s tragic stories. Consider Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956).

There are four main characters in the play. James Tyrone, a disillusioned matinee idol, now languishes in second-rate melodramas, drinking heavily to compensate for his lack of achievement by wild living. His wife, Mary, easily overburdened by the world, has been taking drugs she got hooked on when her younger son, Edmund, was born. Their elder son, Jamie, is a cynical hard-drinking actor like his dad. His younger brother, Edmund, Mary’s favorite, is fragile, sensitive, and studious.

For a long time Jamie has been harboring thoughts that his mother has always paid more attention to his younger brother and that it was Edmund that caused his mothers addiction to drugs. The play follows the course of a long night of drinking and conversation during which family secrets are revealed and hidden emotions come to the surface. At some point deep in the early morning hours, well before sunrise, Jamie speaks the following bitter words:

Never wanted you to succeed and make me look even
worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous
of you. Mama’s baby. Papa’s pet. (IV)

The play ends with what seems to be a final breakdown of the family, with Jamie talking of revenge in the form of suicide and Mary wandering insanely through the house with her wedding dress in her arms.

One loss has led to another and ends in the complete breakdown of a family. In a way, it’s a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel--and a reminder of what happens when our sense of loss is not attended to and healed in some way.

The play is a study of the destructive power of one kind of loss--the loss of a caregivers exclusive love-- that does not find its balance in some form of hope or positive change.

Losses of Young Adulthood
The losses of early adulthood--roughly the years 20-35--include the following:
(1) The sense that the world will always look after us.
(2) The idea that old habits, old friends, old patterns of behavior, will always be the same.
(3) The childhood and adolescent dreams of the future: the young boy’s dream of being a great sports star; the young girl’s dream of being a beautiful actress; he adolescent’s dreams of perfection--a perfect marriage, a perfect job, a perfect place to live.
The experience of losing our dreams of perfection is often named in tragic drama.
Take, for example, the dream of a perfect marriage. Numerous tragic plays take as their theme the loss of innocence that accompanies married relationships, contributing in some cases to a greater level of maturity, in others to fragmentation or dissolution. Among such plays we might list Shakespeare’s Othello, Ibsens’ A Doll’s House, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Lorca’s Blood Wedding, Strindberg’s The Father, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, William Inge’s Picnic, Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie or his Desire under the Elms.

Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) tells the story of a marriage that begins with a love that defies all expectations and overcomes all barriers yet ends within a bare three weeks in a blast of murderous passion.

The central figure in the play, Othello, is a great Moorish general, the Colin Powell of his time, respected, admired, and honored. His new wife, Desdemona, is the fairest woman of the court, a woman of great beauty and accomplishment, the Elizabeth Vargas or Gwyneth Paltrow of her day. They believe --as do most of the people around them-- that theirs is a perfect match.

But the couple’s strength is also its weakness. Othello thinks of his wife as perfectly pure and she thinks of him as perfectly wise and reasonable. When Othello is tricked by Iago into believing that she has been unfaithful, he acts rashly and impulsively and murders her in her bed. The couple does not survive the loss of their hopes for perfection. The innocence of marriage is shattered in another way in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879)

When we first meet Torvald Helmer and his wife Nora we have every reason to believe that they have a good marriage. Torvald appear as to have taken care of his Nora--in the traditional way a middle class husband would do in 19th c Norway. Nora appears happy. In the course of the play, however, it becomes clear that Torvald’s care, indeed his love, is merely conditional: he will play the game of marriage only so long as Nora plays by his rules. Through a terrible betrayal, Nora discovers that Torvald had never truly been loved her for herself, and she leaves him and the children behind.

The loss of love’s innocence need not, of course, spell the end of a relationship. In the case of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1920), it gives love a foundation in another reality. When Mat Burke, the stoker on board a coal barge, falls in love with Anna Christie, the captain’s daughter, and marries her. At the time, however, he is unaware of her former life as a prostitute. When he finds out, his is outraged and feels humiliated--and leaves the ship. Anna waits for him, however, for many months-- and eventually he returns. They now face the future together-- ALL THEIR ILLUSIONS GONE.

Further Reading:
Kegan, Robert The Evolving Self. Harvard, 1982.
Miller, Arthur. "Tragedy and the Common Man" in Robert A. Martin (ed) Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, Penguin, 1982. Also in Barnet (1989), pp 744-746.
Nicholson, William. Shadowlands. Various versions.
Viorst, Judith. Necessary Losses. Fawcett, 1986.

Lecture 7 - Tragedy and the Tragic Experience II

Losses of Middle Age
During the middle years of life, roughly from age 35-55, people face other kinds of losses.
(1)The physical characteristics of their youth, strong bones, firm chests, flat stomachs, thick hair, and healthy muscle tone. (2) Their mental and sensory powers-- the acuity of their eyes, and the reliability of their memories. (3) Their children who grow up who leave home to make their own way. (4) Sometime, their dreams for their children’s success. Some people must deal with children who have disappointed them in some way or choose life styles they find difficult to accept.

One of the repeated themes of tragic drama is that of parents whose children have disappointed them. A play that deals with this experience is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman(1949). Willy Loman is a father who believes his son can succeed where he has failed. Willy is a small man with big dreams. He languishes in a modest traveling salesman’s job, troubled by failing health, and increasingly aware of his own inadequacies. As he ages, he becomes threatened by the accomplishments of others and nostalgic about opportunities lost.

In this state of spiritual decline, he places his hopes upon his younger son, Biff, who was at one time the star quarterback of his high school football team.  Willy’s confidence in Biff is misplaced, however, partly because the boy has never developed the moral or intellectual integrity to succeed either in his studies or in the workplace. For these failings, his father is partly to blame.
The more Willy tries to coax his son to become what he believes can become, the more Biff realizes that he is just an ordinary guy who will never realize the unrealistic dreams his father has for him. In a final showdown, he confronts his father with his agony:

I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash-can like all the rest of them. I’m one dollar an hour, Willy. I tried seven states and couldn’t raise it a buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I’m not bringing home any prizes any more, and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!... I’m nothing, pop! Can’t you understand that? There’s spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all.... Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? (II)

But Willy cannot burn his phony dream; he’d rather destroy himself in order to keep it intact. And this is exactly what he does. His story is the enactment of the tragedy of all those who have the wrong dreams, or who suffer the acute agony of realizing, in the failure of their progeny, the failure of their dreams for themselves.

Losses of Old Age
Those who think of others living into their older years--beyond the age of seventy--may euphemize the golden years but for those who live them, they are years whose gold is often tarnished by painful diminishment. These last decades are marked by:
***the loss of spouses, siblings, and friends,
***the loss through of recognized roles in society,
***the loss of economic independence,
***the loss of physical mobility.
***loss of those capacities which made life ultimately worth living
Shakespeare describes the final scene of human life as "second childishness, and mere oblivion/ Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." (As You Like It II,vii, 139)
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death (1973), Ernest Becker describes the situation like this:

A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned--finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as Andre Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. (268-9)

Malraux’s grim summation of the human condition is often borne out in tragic plays.
Look at the end of the life of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605). As a direct consequence of his own rash folly and the malevolence of others whom he trusted, the King loses all that had once made him great--his household, his land, his dignity, his sanity, and the truest thing in his life, his youngest daughter, Cordelia. Stripped of all that made him nobly human, Lear is now good only for dying. He is, in a sense, already dead.

Some people die because they are in sense already dead. Others die at the peak of their powers and success. Take as an example The Master Builder (1892) by Henrik Ibsen 30.

After many years of constructing impressively-designed church towers, Halvard Solness had earned a reputation as a pre-eminent master builder. To increase his profits, he has turned more recently to building houses and, at his too, he had been extremely successful. As the capstone to his career he builds a magnificent tower on top of his own new home. Encouraged by a young woman who had inspired the idea, he climbs to the top of the tower to crown it with a wreath. In his moment of triumph, however, he succumbs to a spell of dizziness, and falls to his death.

The irony of Solness’s death is that it comes even when life seems to be most flourishing. The reality of death, however, is that it comes to us all. As the philosopher in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio said: "Everyone in the world is Christ, and they are all crucified."

The Tragic Power of the Past
Tragedies show our human frailty in the face of powers we cannot control, powers often identified with the past. One of the universal facts of experience is that we have no capacity to influence what happened yesterday. What is done is done. We can change our present attitudes to it or alter some of its future effects; but we cannot change the thing itself. It has vanished in the mist of time. In the tragic theatre we acknowledge the power of the past to influence our life, and we call it Fate.

The idea of Fate is somewhat akin to the Christianity of original sin, which asserts that we inherit from our historical past a tendency towards transgression of the Divine law and a preference for the powers of dissolution. It is also akin to the law of revenge acted out in traditional societies, where crimes committed in one generation continue to have repercussions for the generations that follow. The law of revenge is the source of the feuds between families like the Hatfields and McCoys, the reciprocal murders executed by competing factions in organized crime, and the seemingly endless struggle between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland or between the Palestinians and the Israelis in the Middle East Tragic playwrights see this kind of law at work in all human affairs--in children, for example, who without realizing it, carry out destructive patterns established by parents and grandparents before them.

Eugene O’Neill, one of the most autobiographical of tragic playwrights, saw the workings of this law in his own family and explored its implications in many of his plays. His tragic drama Morning Becomes Electra, for example, was intended to be "a working out of psychic fate from the past--fate springing out of family." It is perhaps most vividly expressed by Christine, the guilt-wracked wife of General Ezra Mannon, when she says to a neighbor’s daughter:

"I was like you once, long ago. If only I could have stayed as I was then. Why can’t all of us remain innocent, and loving, and trusting? But God won’t leave us alone. He wrings and tortures us with other’s lives--until we poison each other to death."

The other lives she speaks of, the lives that wring and torture us, are the lives connected to us from the past.

As another of O’Neill’s characters--Simon Mannon in More Stately Mansions--puts it: "the past is never dead so long as we live because all we are is past." And Mary Tyrone in the Long Day’s Journey into Night echoes the theme: "The past is present isn’t it? It’s the future too." 

Tennessee Williams is another playwright who connects our tragic fate to our past. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois attempts to cling to a once-upon-a-time world that will redeem her--the world of Southern gentility--but is instead is doomed by a personal history of sexual indiscretion that destroys her. In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda suffers agonies in large part derived from her own sad past--the loss of the privileges once enjoyed on a wealthy Southern plantation; her ill-fated marriage to a man who "fell in love with long distance" and abandoned her to a precarious existence with two shattered and wounded children. Tom evokes the theme of the play when, in the very act of trying to escape the plague on the house of Wingfield, he confesses: "Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be."

The Positive Side of Tragedy
Despite appearances to the contrary, the tragic vision of life is not a purely negative one. It is an expression of agony but not of despair.

(1)Tragedy can sharpen our awareness of the fragile mystery of life and prepares us to appreciate its value. Eugene O’Neill once said "The Greeks and the Elizabethans felt a tremendous lift in tragedy. It roused them spiritually to a deeper understanding of life. Through it they found release from the petty considerations of everyday existence....They saw their lives ennobled by it." Tragedy ennobles life by showing its worth. We do not grieve over that which has no value. We grieve for what is important to us--and thus we prove its worth.

(2)Tragedies show the heroism of men and women living courageously in the face of loss and death. Robert Corrigan writes: "The spirit of tragedy," "is not passive. It is a grappling spirit. Tragic characters may win or lose, but the struggle itself is the source of the dramatic significance. It is out of this struggle with necessity that heroes are born."

Courage in the face of loss--especially in the face of death--is the greatest heroism we can imagine. The two guides on Mount Everest who in the early summer of 1996 gave up their lives in an effort to save their companions during a fierce blizzard just below the 29000 foot summit. Capt John Oates of the Scott Antarctic Expedition, who in an attempt to increase the odds that his friends would survive, walked out into the bitter polar night. As he left his tent on the blizzard stricken ice, he said to his comrades: "I’m going outside. I may be some time" and he never returned. The policemen in NY on Sept 11 who ran towards disaster at the World Trade Center.

Ernest Becker wrote:

We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction, we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine." (Becker 1973: )

Tragedy recognizes this courage in both the great and small events of human life.

Further Reading:
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. Free Press, 1973.
Sewell, Richard. The Vision of Tragedy. Yale, 1959

Lecture 8 - Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

The playwright, Arthur Miller has long been regarded as one of America’s leading playwrights. His best work, completed in the 1940s-50s includes All My Sons, about a man corrupted by the quest for profit, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials, and View from the Bridge, set in the Italian Immigrant community in mid twentieth century Brooklyn.

Death of Salesman won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize, the prestigious national award for writers. The play is the story of two tragic losses: a father’s loss of his hopes for his son, and a son’s loss of his trust in his father.

The film version was produced in 1986 and starred Dustin Hoffman (Willy), Charles Durning (Charley), Kate Reid (Linda) and John Malkovich (Biff) was produced in 1986.

Historically, the story is set in a middle class neighborhood of Brooklyn during the 1940s. There was a time, within living memory, when the Loman’s house was surrounded by trees and open fields. Now, it is closed in by blocks of apartments--all sterile bricks and windows--and nature is almost completely shut out.

The main characters of the story are the four Lomans--Willy, Linda, Biff and Hap, and their neighbors Charley and Bernard. Another important character, Willy’s older brother Ben, appears as a kind of ghost in Willy’s weakening mind.

The action of the play takes place during the last few days of Willy Loman’s life.

The Character of Willy
Willy is a traveling salesman in his 60s, who for many years has been driving to Boston and other parts of New England, selling we know not what--possibly a line of women’s clothing.

(1)  He is a man of old fashioned family values--he believes in the traditional role of the father as breadwinner and head of the house, and he expects unwavering loyalty from his wife and his two sons.

(2)  Willy is a also man of glaring contradictions. He was always skillful with his hands and should have been carpenter or cabinet maker; he chose instead to follow a vocation for which he was not particularly suited and in which he was never really happy. He pretends to be big and to be the life of the party; but he is plagued by smallness--and loneliness. He expects his sons to be successful; in himself he feels a failure.

(3)  Willy is also opportunistic, a man apparently without moral compass who will do anything to make himself look like a winner. He ignores the rules of cards, encourages his boys to steal and lie, and cheats on his wife. He expects much of life but gives very little to it.

(4)  Despite these moral failings, Willy is also a man of admirable resiliency. Even though he is many times disappointed and humiliated, he nevertheless keeps trying to re-assert his sense of dignity.

The Character of Biff

(1)  Once the star quarter-back of the high-school football team, he now a dreamer and a drifter. He talks of success but fails to achieve it. He knows what is required to hold down a good job but he cannot do it.

(2)  He is compulsive, undisciplined, and irresponsible. e.g. steals a pen while waiting for a job interview.

(3)  He carries a lot of Willy’s hopes for the future but in the final analysis cannot bear the burden.

(4)  He is also the only character in the play who appears to change significantly in the course of the two acts.

Two Dramatic Techniques: Flashbacks and Hallucinations
Flashbacks are memories of times past--in this case 15 years past.

(1)  One of these gives us a glimpse of the day the family went off to see Biff play in a big football game. The family is making a huge fuss over their star football player. Charlie, their neighbor, keeps life in perspective and refuses to be taken in by all the hype.

(2)  Another shows a time when Bernard comes over to remind Biff to get ready for a test at school and is ridiculed for taking his studies so seriously.