Theatre as Action: 
What do we do when we do Drama?

What does a play do?  Lots of things. But not always the same ones in the same production. In reflecting on this question you can start with four very frequently invoked functions, or (one might say) realms of action: 

            The Personal Function.  One thing plays can do is enact a range of psychological functions, creating effects that people locate with words like beauty, amusement, entertainment, or escape.  We take a certain sort of pleasure from each of these effects, or fulfill some kind of very deep inner need.  Sometimes it’s a need to feel a sense of completeness in the world, sometimes it is to intuit powerful patterns that are in some sense bigger and deeper than anything we ourselves can create.  Or maybe our response feels like a need to divert ourselves from the reality we struggle with each day and to spend time in a parallel universe that can with its successes re-inspire us when we return to the real world we left as we entered the theatre.  Each of these effects seem to be in some sense quite simple, though each can also be further investigated.  Why, for example, does the display of order so please us?  What is it about the way we navigate our existence that makes moments of beauty so pleasurable?  Not every play asks us to think about these issues; indeed many (Mamma Mia, for example) may seem to urge us not to think much at all.  But whatever we are thinking consciously, our minds are busy nevertheless, even if at a level well below (or beyond) our conscious thought. 

            The Teaching Function.  This function accounts for the way plays can attempt to inform us about life’s various experiences or issues.  A play may offer insight into a particular sort of  character, for example, suggesting what a person of such and such a type would do under this or that set of circumstances.  Or it may attempt to unveil what it takes to be truths about the way we live, or the way the world is structured, that we may or may not already understand.  Maybe it will make an argument about social or political power and how it is distributed. 

Or maybe it wants to teach us about how the world might be, or how it should be.  In The Apology for Poetry Sir Philip Sidney talks about the “Golden World” that art creates—that which has never before been seen or thought of, something to aim for, to model ourselves upon and work towards.  Other writers, by contrast, may give you an anti-world, a kind of model of what we fear or shun, or seek blindly to our own detriment.  In any of these cases, however, the function of such art is to inform us, warn us, move us, always to be teaching us something, and it is our job in such circumstances to evaluate the work the play does—to ask into its motives.  Do we really learn something of value here?  What?  or are this work’s “truths” mere sentimentality or (worse) propaganda?

            The Forum Function.   In this mode the theatre creates space for conversation and argument about issues that the playwright feels to matter.  It’s related to the teaching function, but with an important difference.  For here the job is not so much to make an argument about the world as to raise a question in a provocative way, to invite or tease or incite in us a will to engage.  David Mamet’s play Oleanna, of a few years back, was such a play, as are most (all?) of Shakespeare’s.  Here the fact that art works by indirection (we are given a story about kings, for example, and not a story about our very own lives) has both an advantage and a disadvantage over more conventional means of public argument. 

For there are many things we don’t want to talk about publicly.  We have taboos, restrictions, fears about offending others when we mention sex, class, gender, race—and basic politics.  When we try to talk about these things directly we may too quickly lose our equanimities.  But when we put the same issue into story we can talk as it were “at a distance.”  We can discuss the way Hamlet abuses Ophelia, or how he seems sexually attracted to his mother, much more easily than we can talk out loud about our own gender or our own mothers.  We can discuss the racism represented in Ellison’s Invisible Man much more easily than we can discuss our own difficulties in keeping our minds free from stereotype and prejudice. 

            Of course, there is also a price to be paid for this liberty:  because it is indirect it is also a relatively weak form of action.  It may very often be the ONLY form of action available to us, but because it is only indirectly related, the real connection to the lives we lead is not necessarily obvious.  We can see, for example,  how Ophelia is talked down to by her father, her brother, her lover, the King, the Queen—everyone.  But can we see in our own lives—or are we even willing to see—how frequently we repeat this cultural stereotype of seeing women—and especially young women—as unable to think and act for themselves? 

            The Community Function.  Here the role of drama is to define, invoke, celebrate, rehearse the common wisdom or vision or history of a culture.  Here the play may not say anything either new or different, but instead works to affirm or celebrate what already is.  In this mode drama helps to build or shape a culture, to produce coherence, even solidarity.  Its capacity for this is not always positive—one reason art can be used as propaganda is precisely its capacity to bring minds together in a particularly powerful way.  But rightly used it can contribute to the sense of well being any community needs if it is to grow and prosper. 

            Obviously, these four functions are not mutually exclusive.  A play can very easily please us as it teaches (probably better had, in fact!), or establish community as it preaches, or offer escape in such a way as to lead us to think new thoughts about how things might or should be.  But you can rest assured that any play must be doing SOMETHING if it’s going to be even trivially successful, and as a sophisticated playgoer it’s your task to sort that “something” out. 

Elements of Drama

Whether walking London, or going to a play, the basic theme of this course centers on “Seeing.”  For we can imagine two very different ways of seeing—the difference being a level of both attention and understanding.

Ordinary "Seeing" is, well, ordinary—what we do when we look out a car window. But "Informed Seeing" is special. It is looking to see when you already have something of an agenda set for that seeing. It should be obvious that you can see more and more interestingly when you have things to look for—you can date a building better when you know how to look for the arches, for example.  Similarly for drama, you’ll see more, and you’ll see what you see better, if you approach the production in terms of its necessary elements.  So, herewith a rough and ready guide to the elements of drama, with just a few words about each. 

Frame:  That dimension of the work that sets it off from the ordinary and invites from its audience special attention; that which declares, “Look at me, and attend!”  In many theatres it is the proscenium arch, drawing our attention even before the play begins.  But it is also the theatre itself, and the experience of getting to it, entering it, locating ourselves in its surrounding.  All of this is a way (not always or in all ways intentional) of marking off the dramatic experience as “something different.”  So reflect on the frame and its experience for you.  What does the theatre look like?  How do they create the frame, and what do they do with it? 

Text:  The words, the script.  For most plays this is the chief raw material, the thing that is enacted, represented, brought to life, shaped, varied, interpreted. 

1. Acting:

Delivery:  How the text is spoken by its actors.  Clarity, precision, expression, dynamics. 

Facial Expression:  How well does facial expression make meaning manifest?  In what ways?

Gesture:  Body movements and stance.  How well does the actor use her body to make meaning manifest?  In what ways? 

2. Direction/Movement within the acting space:  This is a product of direction (blocking) and acting.  A director can tell an actor where to move, but only the actor can do the moving.  There is thus both a logic of movement, and a performance of movement. 

3. Properties/Make-up/Costume. What props are used?  How do they fit the text?  The actor?  The movement?  How are they used?  Period?  Realistic?  Abstract?  Contemporary? 

4. Sets and Stage Set-up. Period?  Realistic?  Abstract?  Open?   Stage set-up:  proscenium, thrust, in the round, mixed forms? 

5. Lighting. Where, how and when are lights used in the show?  What do they seem to be designed to add? (And they are designed—you'll see a credit for lighting design in the program.)

6. Music/Sound. Where, how and when are sounds or music used in the show?  What do they seem designed to add? 

Theatre Terms

I realize that some of the theatre terms we will use here are not commonly known, and few of you have easy access to dictionaries.  So herewith some terms basic to theatre studies, along with short definitions.

Block (v.):  To establish actors’ movements throughout the course of a play. 
Blocking:  The movement plan for a play.
Business:  Use of a prop.  “The business with the drink glasses was brilliant.” 
Circle:  The front rows of the first balcony.  Excellent and expensive seats. 
Cross (v.):  To move on stage from one stage area to another. 
Curtain:  That big thick heavy thing that most theatres have, but many no longer use. 
Deus ex machina:  “A god from the machine”:  (often figurative) a device lowered from
above to solve a problem, usually when the playwright can’t think of a better way. 
Ellipsoidal spots:  Focus spot lights used to light particular spots on the stage. 
Flies:  The storage area in the fly tower.  “The set is in the flies.”
Flood lights:  Lights used to “flood” a space, often used against a sky. 
Fly (v.):  To raise sets or any other staging element up out of audience view into the flies.
Fly tower:  A storage area directly above the stage up into which sets can be “flown.”
Fresnels:  A spotlight with a diffusion lens for general area lighting.
Gel:  A sheet of colored plastic (originally gelatin) placed in a frame in front of a spotlight. 
Go dry:  Forget one’s line.  Also, “drop a line.”
Gods:  The very highest balcony seating, as in “we were sitting in the gods.”
Interval:  British term for our “Intermission.”
Pace:  General term to describe the speed with which a production or a scene within a production unfolds.
Pick up the cue:  To speak one’s line immediately upon the end of the preceding line.
Prismatic spot:  Ellipsoidal spotlight with automatic color shifting.  
Project (v.):  To speak in such a manner as to be audible well beyond ordinary range. 
Promenade performance:  Staging in which actors mingle with the audience.
Prompt box:  The hidden place from which the prompter tracks the play. 
Properties (props):  Any object on stage that can be picked up and handled. 
Proscenium stage:  The traditional picture frame, fourth-wall stage. 
Revolve (or Drum Revolve) :  Part of a stage floor that can turn, used to speed scene changes or for special effects.
Scrim:  A thin, gauze-like curtain that can be made transparent by backlighting.
Sky:  Term for a white background curtain against which lighting effects can be employed.
Soliloquy:  A speech by a character alone on stage, often addressed to the audience. 
Safety Curtain:  A fireproof curtain to isolate stage fires from the audience.  In London, it is required to be lowered at least once in every performance (usually at the interval).   
Stage areas:  USL, USC, USR / SL, CS, SR / DSL, DSC, DSR.   (actor’s [not your] left/right) (cf. Stage right vs. House right)
Stage fright:  A condition in which actors forget their lines completely.  A mini-panic attack. 
Stalls:  In London's theatres the seats on the main floor.  Usually the most expensive. 
Teasers:  The curtains at the top of the stage screening audience view from the flies. 
Theatre in the round:  Staging where the audience is seated all around the acting space. 
Thrust stage:  A stage that “thrusts” forward into the audience area of the stalls.
Timing:  General term for how well the cast picks up cues.
Top a laugh:  To come in with your line precisely at the peak of audience laughter for a preceding line.  A delivery technique for keeping up the proper pace. 
Upstage (v.):  To distract attention from the speaker; sometimes done purposefully by another actor, and sometimes done unintentionally by sets, props, or directorial decisions.
Wings:  The sides of the stage, protected from prying eyes by side curtains. 

The English 244 Portfolio

Fully responsive and thoughtfully undertaken = 30
Responsive but less completely thought through = 20
Marginally responsive, or not well thought through = 10
Unresponsive = 0

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