Visual & Spatial Structure In Theater And Dance

[About five years ago, I posted a two-part article called “Theatrical Structure” (15 and 18 February 2011) which was my attempt to introduce and explain the analytical system of Michael Kirby (1931-97), a professor of mine at NYU who was a Structuralist.  He published “Manifesto of Structuralism” in The Drama Review in 1975 and taught a course in the Department of Performance Studies called Theatrical Structure, which I took.  My 2011 post is a description of Michael's analytical method, using Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead as a model.  In “Theatrical Structure,” I posit that Kirby’s Structural Theory is useful, both in analysis and in creation, to playwrights—Michael wrote Structuralist plays; I even did a staged reading of one—directors, designers, and teachers of theater and drama, not to mention practitioners of other disciplines such as dance, opera, vaudeville, and, even, circus.  As an illustration of the system’s applicability, below are two articles I wrote for Michael 33 years ago, one examining structure of a dance performance and the other looking at the performance structure (as distinguished from literary structure) of a play.  (For detailed explanations of some structural terminology, it’s easiest to refer to the 2011 post which includes definitions of all the structural devices Michael identified.)]

STRUCTURE IN DANCE: SIN CHA HONG’S LAUGHING STONE

7 December 1983

In The Art of Making Dances, Doris Humphrey identifies the ingredients of dance as a design in space, dynamics or energy flow, a rhythm, and a motivation. To make a dance from these elements, she says, “the creator must then know how to put the parts together . . . .”  The “technique for sewing them together” is the structure of the dance, and it’s what we see as spectators that unifies the performance in our minds so that we recognize it as a whole dance, and not a series of “broken fragments.”

So much for theory.  On the stage at La MaMa E.T.C. in the East Village, the performance of Sin Cha Hong’s Laughing Stone troupe in Here/Now (viewed Friday night, 2 December 1983) frequently proved structurally ambiguous.  This was most true if one attempted, as I did, to identify structural connections among the three pieces—“Two-in-One,” “Tripterous,” and the title piece, “Here/Now”—all of which were choreographed by Miss Hong.  Whereas individual dances evidenced several strong structural elements, those common to all three dances were few in number and minimal in effect.

Formally, the three pieces all seemed to fall into what Miss Humphrey calls “the ‘broken’ form, deliberately illogical, in which lack of continuity in idea is the point.”  She further describes this dance form as one in which “all the movement is disconnected from its natural sources.  Small parts of the body, such as hands and feet, move independently of the trunk and of each other.”  The result of this is to make structural analysis very difficult because the movements, gestures, and designs incorporated in the dances are purposely disorienting—even anti-structural.  Structure, nonetheless, exists, though perhaps in a vaguer manifestation than in more regular or classical choreography.

The areas of design, rhythm, and dynamics formed the structural common ground in the program.  Those few elements which connected the three separate pieces into a somewhat unified whole—identifying them as part of one choreographer’s oeuvre—occurred in these fields.

Though there were incidents of Contrasting rhythms, the dominant tempo of all Miss Hong’s pieces was slow—almost excruciatingly so.  Occasionally this alternated with a rapid, jiggling rhythm and, more frequently, near or absolute stillness—but the dancers always returned to a slow-motion walking rhythm in which the dynamics were smooth, rounded, often circular.  In fact, Miss Hong’s uses of sharp angles in gesture or movement were rare and stood out in Contrast when they occurred.

Circularity in one form or another was by far the most common technique in the design of the program.  Though the La MaMa performing space is rectangular—almost square—Miss Hong’s pieces were frequently lit by round pools of light from overhead spots.  (Lighting was by Blu, the professional name of William Lambert.)  One such pool was a perfect light circle in the center of the stage within which, in one significant example, Miss Hong performed her entire solo piece, “Here/Now,” which itself was circular in movement design.  Even though the light circle spread out ambiguously during the dance, Miss Hong never strayed beyond that circle’s original boundaries.

This light circle also occurred, less markedly and more briefly, in “Tripterous” and “Two-in-One.”  Even David Simons, the composer-musician for “Tripterous,” seated on his square rug down right, was lit by a perfect circle of light.

But circularity was also apparent in movement design as well.  I have already mentioned that Miss Hong moved in a circle in her solo, rotating as if around a fulcrum in the center of the light spot.  In “Tripterous,” the four dancers (Monique Ernst, Nadine Helstroffer, Phyllis Jacobs, and Margueritte Johnson) frequently formed a large circle, and individual circles occurred as performers in the three pieces danced in small circles or curled their bodies, carrying the smooth, curved dynamics to the extreme.

Lighting also played another structural part in unifying the performance.  All three numbers began and ended with the same lighting sequence.  The dancers entered in darkness and took positions to be “discovered” as the lights faded up slowly.  Movement started long before the lights were fully up, and stopped before the final slow fade-out was complete.  At the end of the piece the performers exited in darkness as they had entered.  (The only exception to this routine was the entrance of the performers in “Tripterous,” which was dimly lit, presumably to allow Mr. Simons to enter down left and cross to his rug down right without stepping on his instruments in the dark.) 

Aside from the rhythmical Continuity (i.e., exaggerated slowness), the most noticeable stylistic repetition in the program was the total lack of expression on the dancers’ faces.  Except in one phrase of “Tripterous” in which the quartet sat in a circle and laughed, their faces were mask-like and immobile.  Even in “Two-in-One” where the two dancers (Jacobs and Karen Cahoon) faced one another and interacted physically, there was no “eye contact” as we know it in theater—the pair’s facial expressions did not change in reaction to this interaction.  There was, therefore, no suggestion of emotional or psychological interaction and, consequently, no discernible Action, Aristotelian or Stanislavskian, indicated in the pieces.  Structurally, however, this absence was itself a Thematic and unifying device.

A Pattern of pairing was another unifying element in Miss Hong’s work at La MaMa.  An alteration of an action and its opposite recurred a number of times in the performance.  This was least obvious in the solo piece, where it only showed up as stretching upwards and then contracting back down again and as regularly reversing the direction of rotation.  In the other two pieces, however, there were many variations of this action-reaction routine: separation-coming together, stretching-collapsing and, most basic perhaps, movement-stillness.  (This last occurred as a true regular Pattern in “Two-in-One,” where the periods of movement and stillness each measured approximately 12 to 15 seconds during one segment.)  In addition to these paired physical Actions, there was an auditory pairing that occurred in all three pieces when the voices in “Two-in-One,” the music in “Tripterous” and the sound effects in “Here/Now” alternated with silent passages.

The last element I found among all three pieces was less dynamic than the others, but no less common.  In many of Miss Hong’s motionless passages (and a few of her very slow ones), each performer balanced on some part of her body—a knee, one leg, her toes, her buttocks, her head (in a three-point head-stand).  In her final solo piece, since Miss Hong never rose higher than to her knees, there were only a few instances of balancing, but in the first two pieces, as with the action-reaction pairing, balancing occurred often and in a variety of forms.

Overall, then, what sewed Sin Cha Hong’s program together structurally was to be found for the most part in the areas of spatial design, rhythm, and dynamics.  The program Here/Now was primarily circular, slow-paced, curved and smooth.  In the individual pieces there were other structural devices, such as Contrasting rhythms, Parallelism, Echo, and Expectancy, but they did not recur in all three dances or work structurally to unite them across the entire performance into a whole. 

*  *  *  *

VISUAL AND SPATIAL STRUCTURE IN THE MAIDS

23 November 1983

  

“Structure” is defined as “the arrangement or interrelation of all the parts of a whole.”  Performance structure, by extension, is the arrangement or interrelation of the parts of a theatrical production as perceived by the spectator.  If we restrict our perception to the visual or spatial structure of the piece, then the parts in whose arrangement and interrelation we are interested become limited to the nonverbal elements of the performance, specifically the stage setting, the costume and props, and the gestures and movements of the actors.  The arrangements and interrelations that are visually structural are those that, in the spectator’s mind, create a connection across not only time, but space, uniting two distinct points on the stage as well as two isolated moments in time.

In the White Light Productions presentation of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the New Vic Theatre on Second Avenue in the East Village (viewed Friday night, 18 November 1983), a number of visual connections were obvious from the moment we entered the auditorium.  The set (by Mike Vesea) was stylistically unified by both its color Theme—entirely black with white trim—and construction medium—wire mesh throughout, including walls, furniture and two hanging “mirrors.”  The Thematic color combination was repeated again in the costume (uncredited) of the maids Claire (Mim Solberg) and Solange (Shelley Volk).

Within the dichromatic set, movement, gesture, and pose created several striking connections.  (The staging was by Peter Scangarello.)  A physical Parallelism connected two areas of the stage when Claire was seated at the secretary down right using Madame’s cosmetics to apply her toilette, while Solange knelt up center left, behind the mesh “wall” that divided the set into two rooms, ritually lighting a pair of candles on either side of a statue of the Virgin Mary.  The two women moved their heads in unison: as Claire examined her face both right and left in the mirror, behind her, Solange lit the candles first right then left, turning her head in each direction as she did so.  The two women put on half-masks simultaneously, and as Claire rose from her seat, Solange raised her head from its bowed position.  Both actresses froze at that moment and held their poses for several seconds.

In more isolated instances, three repeated Actions connected moments across time.  The least frequent of these was a repeated gesture, or posture—standing, usually center stage, with arms stretched out to the sides.  Claire struck this pose early in the play, first when she demanded Madame’s dress from Solange, and shortly afterwards, standing down center in an attitude of ecstasy, stating that she was being carried away “By the devil!  He’s carrying me away in his fragrant arms.  He’s lifting me up, I leave the ground, I’m off . . .”  Much later in the play, after Madame (George Sutton) had returned and left, Claire, again as “Madame,” uses this stance when she was waiting for Solange to bring her her tea: “Madame must have her tea.”  Finally, in her closing monologue, Solange repeated the gesture, this time far up right at the window in the adjoining room.

The second visual Theme was a frequent juxtaposition of the women on stage in which one stood down center with the other (and, in one case two others) kneeling in front of her.  During Claire’s first masquerade as Madame, Solange, while dressing her sister in Madame’s purple gown, knelt to arrange the fall of the dress.  Later, after Solange had assumed the dominant role in the masquerade, she grabbed Claire around the neck and forced her sister to kneel in front of her.

During the second masquerade, Solange, using a wire whip, again forced Claire to her knees before her—this time onto all fours.  But the most striking variation of this repetition occurred while the maids were undressing Madame.  Both servants ended on their knees down center facing Madame standing up stage of them. 

The third and most pervasive blocking Theme in the production was the use of the two hanging wire mesh “mirrors.”  All of the characters spoke into the mirrors frequently, using them as a means of communication in three different ways.  In the two most direct ways in which the mirrors were used, characters talked to themselves or referred to someone not on stage.  In the most dynamic use of the mirrors, one character talked to another who was on stage by addressing her reflection in the mirror.  However it was used, the repeated business of talking into the mirror was common throughout the production, starting with Claire’s opening lines to Solange: “Those gloves!  Those eternal gloves!”  There were some dozen or more instances following this opening moment, involving all three characters in all three uses at one time or another.  Here is a sample of the more outstanding moments where the technique was used:

  

 CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): Am I to be at your mercy for having denounced Monsieur to the police, for having sold him? . . .

 CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): I see the marks of a slap, but now I’m more beautiful than ever! . . .  Danger is my halo, Claire, and you, you dwell in darkness . . . .

SOLANGE (referring to Madame who is not present): . . . . Look, just look how she suffers.  How she suffers in Beauty.  Grief transforms her, doesn’t I?  Beautifies her? . . .

CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): . . . . I’m capable of anything, you know.

MADAME (referring to Monsieur): . . . . I’d follow him from place to place, from prison to prison, on foot if need be, as far as the penal colony.

MADAME (to herself): . . . . And what about you, you fool, will you be beautiful enough to receive him?  No wrinkles, eh? . . .

MADAME (to Claire behind her): You’re trying to kill me with your tea and your flowers and your suggestions . . . .

CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): I said the insults!  Let them come, let them unfurl, let them drown me, for, as you well know, I loathe servants . . . .

SOLANGE (referring to Madame who has left):  . . . . What?  Oh, Madame needn’t feel sorry for me.  I’m Madame’s equal and I hold my head up high    . . . .

CLAIRE (to Solange behind her): You’re talking too much, my child.  Far too much.  Shut the window.  Draw the curtains.  Very good, Claire!

As we saw a clear example of visual Parallelism in the opening moment, the closing moment contained an instance of another visual structure.  Combining Memory and Expectancy, it harked back to the opening ritual Solange performed before the dialogue even started.  At the beginning of the second masquerade sequence, Solange knelt again at her “altar” and lit her candles.  This was immediately reminiscent of the opening sequence (Memory structure) and also led us to expect her to mask herself as she had done at the beginning in order to play “Claire” to Claire’s “Madame” (Expectancy structure).  In fact, Solange did not remask, but the Expectation was nonetheless strong, and, because she held the mask in her hand for several minutes after Claire’s masked re-entrance, we kept waiting for her to put it on and enter the game as she did in the first scene.

Though there appeared to be some significance to the use of color (the flowers, the purple gown, Solange’s red slip, and Madame’s brown suit and fur cape), it seemed more connected to the meaning than the structure of the production.  And though the masks themselves were indicative of Levels in the performance, that seemed to belong more to the realm of verbal structure than to the purely visual.  The masks in this case merely aided in distinguishing the Levels in acting style, but did not create those Levels themselves by visual means.  Aside from the two salient examples of nonthematic structure, the major structural dynamics in the production, then, were those of repeated gesture, pose and blocking, which, in the three types mentioned, gave a unified—or structured—style to the performance.

Theatrical Structure II

[I return to the description of Michael Kirby’s system of structural analysis with part two. The first part of the discussion ended with a demonstration of various types of Action Structure; we start now with Information Structure.]

The piecing together of the clues evident in the Character Action of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is also a mechanism of the play as a whole. There are several of these Information Structures operating in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. (Don’t confuse Kirby’s term “informational structure,” which I used earlier and which refers to elements that affect a work’s meaning or interpretation, and “Information Structure,” the particular structural device described here. Like all the names of the devices, Information Structure will always be capitalized in this discussion.) They are, in a way, integral to the “superobjective” of the main characters since they deal with piecing together details of the situation surrounding the courtiers and why they’ve come to Elsinore at all. The smallest Information Structure is the Hamlet history—that is, the background of Shakespeare’s plot. Presuming a spectator who doesn’t already know Hamlet, all the information regarding King Hamlet’s murder, Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius, Claudius’s usurpation of the throne, and Hamlet’s return from abroad is missing. The story of the usurpation and marriage is provided in a role-play in which Guildenstern answers for Hamlet while Rosencrantz “gleans what afflicts him.” The earlier part of the story, the murder and hasty courtship, is related in the Tragedians’ dumbshow rehearsal of The Murder of Gonzago, which more directly parallels the court intrigue in Stoppard than it does in Shakespeare. Even to a naïve spectator, enough of this mime is a recognizable portrayal of events already witnessed that the connection’s unshakable.

In Act Three, another piece of information is put together in a similar fashion. The audience discovers that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bear “a letter from one king to another.”. Subsequently it learns that the letter’s for the King of England and that it “explains everything.” Finally, the letter’s contents are revealed. It may be considered part of this same structure that Hamlet subsequently switches letters with his sleeping companions and it’s eventually revealed that they are carrying orders for their own deaths. In this extended case, the structure isn’t determining the contents and import of the letter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are carrying, but how they end up with their own death warrant, which the spectator’s learned from the dumbshow. I prefer, however, to look at the latter part as the fulfillment of an Expectancy Structure and treat the first letter separately as an Information Structure.

Both the Hamlet history and the England letter are surrounded by a larger, more pervasive Information Structure. Early in the play, the viewer learns that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “were sent for” by “a messenger.” Little by little, throughout the rest of the play, the spectator learns more about the messenger, his message, how he delivered it, and who sent him. Some of these details are unimportant to the plot, but they function as Information Structure, and the audience accumulates the data across the whole piece, reinforcing its structural unity.

Usually, Information Structure is discontinuous, with the bits of information pieced together by the spectator coming at isolated moments of the performance. In these cases, clearly the dynamic is retrospective, since the spectator thinks back to the part of the puzzle already assembled as each new piece is revealed and adds the new data to the information he’s accumulated. Occasionally, such as in a mystery story, the search for information becomes such an ongoing process that it’s continuous, working forward as the audience anticipates the discovery of each new clue. Since they don’t know what the next bit of information will be, however, the audience isn’t awaiting a specific event, unlike in a true Expectancy. Kirby made a distinction between generalized expectancy—a feeling that something unspecified’s going to happen—and Structural Expectancy which creates the anticipation that something specific will happen (even if it doesn’t).

I’ve referred to the Tragedians’ performance of The Murder of Gonzago as a Parallel Structure. With a prior knowledge of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this is immediately obvious, since Stoppard’s expanded the play-within-the-play by inserting much of the Hamlet background and plot. However, since I’m assuming an audience with no such familiarity, this Parallelism may not be so immediately striking. Certain elements in the mime are portrayals of things which the spectator’s already seen, or which are in front of her as the mime’s being presented. The accumulation of these bits will make a reasonably astute audience connect the events and characters of the dumbshow to the events and characters in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. Among the most salient of these elements are the hasty courtship of the King’s widow by his brother/murderer and the fact that he subsequently appears as the King, which parallel the story related by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern during their role-play. An unmistakable Parallel occurs at the end of the mime, when the Spies are uncloaked, revealing that they are costumed in “coats identical to those worn by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.” I believe that an audience would likely expand the Parallel in retrospect to include the whole mime, which in fact does predict the remaining plot of Stoppard’s play.

In addition to this structural Parallel, two incidents of physical Parallelism also occur. At the end of the play-within-the-play, the Spies’ bodies are lying on stage covered by their cloaks as the lights go out. When the lights come back on, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are lying, also covered, in the same positions. Later, just before the end of Stoppard’s play, the Tragedians demonstrate their skill at “dying,” and each player portrays a different death (out of Shakespeare’s last scene). When the play itself is over, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have “disappeared,” the stage lights reveal “arranged in the approximate positions last held by the dead Tragedians, the tableau of court and corpses which is the last scene of Hamlet.”

The existence of these Parallels suggests another structural force at work in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern—that of various Levels. Kirby drew the analogy with a painting in which the foreground, Level A, is painted in front of the background, Level B. Everything in one Level relates to everything else in the same Level. There are, by my count, four Levels on which the characters relate to each other and the audience differently from the established style of the play. The briefest of these, occurring only in one extended scene, is the above-mentioned rehearsal/performance of The Murder of Gonzago in which the Tragedians perform as mime-actors. According to the stage directions, the style of performance within Gonzago is different from that outside it, and the Tragedians relate to one another as characters (that is, “The King,” “The Queen”) rather than as colleagues and companions. Furthermore, while they are performing they don’t relate to those outside Gonzago at all.

In a somewhat similar situation, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern role-play with one another (as a method of finding out what’s happening around them). I’ve already mentioned the occasion on which Rosencrantz questions Guildenstern, who answers for Hamlet. Later in the play, first Rosencrantz then Guildenstern play the King of England as they explore what would happen when they arrive with the letter. In all three cases, the two men deal with each other differently from their usual relationship. There’s unquestionably a different dynamic during the role-plays which sets them on a different Level.

A third Level occurs in small moments scattered throughout the performance. It’s the least substantial Level, but nonetheless distinctive when it occurs. When Rosencrantz or Guildenstern quote or paraphrase Shakespeare (outside those whole Shakespearean scenes which are a fourth Level), they display a certain self-consciousness. In some cases, the borrowings are recognizable from scenes within the play, but a number belong to Hamlet scenes Stoppard doesn’t use. Even without knowing that the words or phrases are borrowed from Shakespeare, a spectator can “hear” the quotation marks. The language doesn’t quite fit with the usual dialogue, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to know it.

The fourth Level, as I mentioned, is the easiest to recognize. These are the scenes which Stoppard’s lifted from Shakespeare and in which the characters all use Shakespeare’s dialogue. Some are quite extensive, while others are very brief. Some even have no dialogue, such as Hamlet’s “words, words, words” scene. Only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and, rarely, the Tragedians cross over from Shakespeare to Stoppard—Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, and Ophelia never enter the Stoppard world, and Hamlet does so only briefly in the very end. Undeniably, this creates another Level in the performance since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern relate to these characters in a way different from their relationship to each other and to the Tragedians.

A by-product of the Parallelism in the Gonzago performance is a series of Expectancies set up in the spectator’s mind. If the Parallels are recognized, the viewer’s led to expect that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will accompany Hamlet to England on a boat with a letter to the English king and that this letter will order their deaths. The final scene of Gonzago, in which the Spies, dressed like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are killed, leads the audience to expect the courtiers to die. Gonzago also predicts that Hamlet will kill Polonius. All these Expectancies are fulfilled by the end of the play, though for this structure to work it’s not necessary for the specific event anticipated to happen—as long as the spectator keeps waiting for it.

Expectancy Structure is evident in a great variety of other examples, including the Tragedians’ entrances, which are always preceded by their music from off stage; Hamlet’s entrances, which are frequently preceded by Guildenstern ordering Rosencrantz to “go and see if he’s there,” followed by a conversation which always includes the phrase “What’s he doing?”; Rosencrantz’s disappearance, predicting Guildenstern’s, and the Player’s repeated statement that his play could hardly end “with practically everyone on his feet,” which suggests that Stoppard’s play will end with nearly everyone dead.

There are dozens of other examples, but one more that’s most interesting is really three nested Expectancies. It starts with Rosencrantz’s announcement that Hamlet’s met with the Tragedians and “they have already order/This night to play before him” (play expectancy established). Shortly afterwards, Claudius explains to Gertrude that he’s “closely sent for Hamlet hither,/That he . . . may here/Affront Ophelia” (Hamlet-Ophelia meeting anticipated). Hamlet’s arrival is expected when Rosencrantz announces, “He’s coming” (Hamlet arrival anticipated), whereupon Hamlet arrives (Hamlet arrival resolved), leaving the spectator to expect Ophelia and the “affrontation.” This occurs in the Hamlet, Act Three, scene one cutting (Hamlet-Ophelia meeting resolved), and the spectator now awaits the performance of the play (play performed).

The converse of Expectancy Structure, where the spectator’s attention’s continuously directed forward to a specific event in the future of the performance, is Memory Structure, where her attention’s directed back to an earlier incident in the performance. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern provides a great number of such structural connections—far too many to list here. One of the more interesting ones occurs when Rosencrantz, replying to Gertrude’s questions about their encounter with Hamlet, says Hamlet was “Niggard of question, but of our demands most free in reply.” This is an outright lie, and the spectator will remember that Rosencrantz had said earlier, just after the scene with Hamlet, “Twenty-seven questions he got out in ten minutes, and answered three.” Another interesting Memory Structure deals with a description of Hamlet’s appearance. Guildenstern describes him as “. . . appearing hatless in public—knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy.” Hamlet’s first appearance in the play is described by the stage directions this way: “Hamlet [enters], . . . no hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, ungartered and down-gyved to his ankles, . . . his knees knocking each other . . . and . . . he raises a sigh so piteous and profound that it does seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.” When the Tragedians show up on the boat carrying Hamlet and his friends to England in Act Three, the Player explains that “Our play offended the King.” This will remind the spectator that the performance of Gonzago was ended by “Shouts . . . ‘The King rises!’ . . . ‘Give o’er the play!’”

Each of these mechanisms, and the many others, work to connect moments in the performance to earlier ones, reinforcing for the spectator that all the elements are interconnected. Another common connective force that binds the play together in a similar way, this time continually moving forward, is Thematic Structure, or repetitions. I identified over two dozen Thematic repetitions in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, a number of them structurally very significant. The two courtiers, for instance, are constantly playing games. They flip coins, bet that double the year of someone’s birth is even, guess which fist hides a coin, and play at “questions.” Rosencrantz’s failing memory recurs as does the reference to or discussion of death. One repeated joke is the inability of anyone, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves, to tell the two courtiers apart. There’s also a blocking Theme in which several characters break the “fourth wall” by crossing front and staring out at the audience. And there’s a literary Theme in the form of rhymed nonsense couplets:

ROSENCRANTZ: Consistency is all I ask!
GUILDENSTERN: Give us this day our daily mask.

ROSENCRANTZ: Immortality is all I seek . . . .
GUILDENSTERN: Give us this day our daily week . . . .

ROSENCRANTZ: All I ask is our common due!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
GUILDENSTERN: Give us this day our daily cue.

ROSENCRANTZ: Plausibility is all I presume!
GUILDENSTERN: Call us this day our daily tune . . . .

A mechanism that’s related to Thematic Structure is Echoes—repetitions which occur only once. Again, there were a large number of these in the play; here are a few examples from the dialogue:

GUILDENSTERN: I mean you wouldn’t bet on it. I mean I would, but you wouldn’t.
PLAYER: . . . if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.

ROSENCRANTZ: We haven’t got there yet.
PLAYER: Of course, we haven’t got there yet.

ROSENCRANTZ: You made me look ridiculous.
ROSENCRANTZ: I think we can say he made us look ridiculous.

PLAYER: There’s nothing more unconvincing than an unconvincing death.
PLAYER: . . . he just wasn’t convincing.

Several Echoes are physical: After trying to get Guildenstern to guess which fist hides the coin, “Rosencrantz inadvertently shows that both are empty,” then, after the same game, “Rosencrantz inadvertently reveals that he has a coin in both fists.” While speculating about being alive in a box, Rosencrantz bangs the floor with his fists; on the boat, “Rosencrantz considers the floor: slaps it.”

There’s one extraordinary situation which echoes a Theme. When Rosencrantz asks, “We didn’t harm anyone. Did we?” Guildenstern replies, “I can’t remember”—Guildenstern has echoed Rosencrantz’s memory Theme.

The last unifying agent in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Present Reference, connects the characters on stage with their immediate surroundings by acknowledging people, objects, or actions on stage with them. With frequent greetings and introductions, characters are often referring to each other on stage; other references to the Present Moment include:

References to people:

PLAYER: An audience.

ROSENCRANTZ: Tumblers, are you?

HAMLET enters upstage . . . .
ROS and GUIL watch him.

GUILDENSTERN: Are you there?

References to the setting or props:

ROSENCRANTZ: It’s coming up through the floor.

ROSENCRANTZ: We’re on a boat.

GUILDENSTERN: . . . Tie up the letter—there—neatly—like that.

References to action:

PLAYER: Get your skirt off, Alfred.

GUILDENSTERN: . . . aren’t you going to change into your costume?

PLAYER: I beg your pardon.
GUILDENSTERN: What did he do?
PLAYER: I put my foot down.
ROSENCRANTZ: My hand was on the floor!
GUILDENSTERN: You put your hand under his foot?

GUILDENSTERN: . . . a pipe is heard.

With thirteen of fifteen structural forces operating, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is unquestionably tightly laced together. The fact that a number of the structural connections overlap or operate in tandem only strengthens the unity. Perhaps a play as logically absurd as Stoppard’s requires a stronger structure than more conventional plays. Certainly, all this added to the stylistically unified set and whatever other stylistic unity the director, designers, and actors contribute in production would make a firmly structured performance.

[If Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead can be so well described using Structural Theory, the usefulness of the system to playwrights, directors, designers, and teachers of theater and drama, not to mention other disciplines, seems clear. As a theater teacher and sometime director and dramaturg, I can affirm that Michael’s ideas have provided me with insights and solutions I’d never otherwise have found. I’m confident, too, that he’d be pleased to see his Structural Analysis more widely applied.

[I remonstrated with Michael about calling his course “Theatrical” Structure, since his theory applies equally to dance (indeed, one class assignment was to analyze a dance performance) and other performance forms such as opera, vaudeville, and, even, circus. I suggested it should be more accurately called “Performance” Structure, a more inclusive term. He insisted simply that in his use, “theater” wasn’t restricted to “drama,” but included all these other genres as well. I hope that readers will all note that anything useful revealed here can be applied, either in analysis or in creation, elsewhere than plays.]

Theatrical Structure I

[In the fall of 1983, I took a course called Theatrical Structure from the late Michael Kirby, who died in 1997, at NYU’s Department of Performance Studies. Michael was a Structuralist; his own definition of Structuralism, which he capitalized as an aesthetic movement to distinguish it from a general philosophical concept, is an “esthetic theory that emphasizes and gives primary importance to Structure.” He described the Structuralist philosophy in detail in his essay “Manifesto of Structuralism” (Drama Review 19.4 [Dec. 1975]) and several Structuralist plays by him and by other formalists in “Structural Analysis/Structural Theory” (Drama Review 20.4 [Dec. 1976]). As far as I can determine, no one, including Michael, ever explained his system in print; it was transmitted only orally to his NYU students. I’m going to try to present a model of Michael’s structural analysis here, divided into two sections, using Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Grove Press, 1967). The names of the structural devices Michael identified are from his NYU class; they don’t appear in “Structural Analysis,” though several are defined or described there. My definitions are derived from Michael’s explanations in class as I understood and learned to apply them when I took the course.]

“Nothing exists without structure,” Michael Kirby admonished. “There are only people who are not aware of perceiving structure.” Kirby had been a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and wrote extensively about such genres as Happenings and Futurist theater, but he was also a sculptor—and, therefore, something of a formalist. He was also the composer of Structuralist plays which he directed or oversaw worldwide. As a Structuralist, he developed a unique method of analyzing performances from the perspective of the way they’re held together across time in the mind of the spectator. Since Kirby, aside from writing Structuralist plays based on his theory, could describe non-Structuralist performances using his analytical system, directors and designers of even non-formalist scripts should find much in it to use in production work. Despite Kirby’s insistence that structural theory “relegates any and all other aspects of a performance”—including meaning or interpretation—”to lesser positions,” there’s nothing to prevent directors or designers from applying it to create or enhance their narrative or dramatic points at the same time as they strengthen their productions’ theatrical unity. Even non-Structuralist authors can find useful application of Structural Theory to strengthen the unity of a diffuse or discursive text. Furthermore, that the analysis that follows is based on a text rather than a performance indicates that it’s also a useful tool for textual analysis alongside Aristotelian dramatic structure. In fact, I submit that this analytical method can be revealing even when applied to non-dramatic texts such as poetry and novels.

“Analysis,” according to Webster, is “a separation or breaking up of any whole into its parts so as to find out their nature, proportion, function, relationship, etc.” Theatrical structure, in Kirby’s terms, is “the way the parts of a work relate to each other, how they ‘fit together’ in the mind to form a particular configuration.” The structural analysis of a performance, then, is the identification of those elements which make it appear a unified whole in the mind of the spectator, often despite the disparate elements that compose it. This isn’t the same as traditional dramatic structure, which is usually a literary analysis of a text, though it may be seen as a companion to such analysis. Structural analysis is entirely subjective and will necessarily vary from spectator to spectator, even at the same performance.

Because structural analysis deals with the perception of someone watching the performance, elements determined to unify the production may or may not be intentionally put there by the writer, director, designers, or performers. Their significance isn’t less because a single spectator identifies them, or because two spectators identify them differently. In short, if you see a unifying device, then it’s there, whether or not anyone else sees it. Even accidents, if they can be seen to unite a performance over time, are legitimate structural devices. “[S]tructure,” Kirby asserted, “becomes manifest in the workings of the mind” because “time is crossed by mental connections.” Indeed, structure needn’t even be consciously noted to be present. Audiences need only sense “certain reflections, certain echoes, certain premonitions, certain answers, certain frustrations, certain fulfillments.” Since we’re talking here about psychological connections, it’s also true that even unrecognized structures will serve to unite moments of the performance.

Kirby identified 15 structural devices, each of which works to connect parts of a performance in a different way. Not all fifteen need appear in any given work and, of those that do, not all will appear with equal frequency or force. Of course, which devices appear and their significance is entirely in the perception of the spectator. It’s of no consequence whether a structure’s seen as weak or strong, useful or trivial. Structural analysis doesn’t imply a value judgment and the quality of a perceived structure’s entirely a matter of the spectator’s individual assessment. Certainly, not all will be equally significant to the meaning or interpretation of the play; however, for our purposes, structural analysis isn’t concerned with meaning, which Kirby referred to as “informational” or “semantic” structures, but deals exclusively with form, that is, the “formal” or “non-semantic” structures.

To see what could be learned both about the analytical system and about a conventional, albeit logically diffuse, play, I analyzed Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead structurally. In my analysis of Tom Stoppard’s absurdist play, I’ve made two assumptions. The first is that the text’s a fair representation of a performance and, thus, that the stage directions are true indications of performance behavior. This assumption, however, necessitates omitting those structural elements that can be added in production by designers, directors, and actors, though these will considerably enhance the unity of the performance. Since most, if not all, of these structural devices are applicable to sound, movement, set and props, and costumes, as well as text, there are a great many ways these artists can increase the occurrence and impact of the devices. The second assumption is that the model spectator’s totally naïve with regard to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern in that he’s never seen a production before and doesn’t know Shakespeare’s Hamlet, from which Stoppard’s play is derived.

The analysis of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead which follows is my own interpretation of the structural devices and how they function in the play. It’s offered as a model for the application of Kirby’s analysis technique, not a definitive structural analysis of Stoppard’s play. Other observers will certainly see different structures and will attribute different significance to them. Additionally, as I’ve noted, I’ve used the text for this analysis, not a performance. A spectator doesn’t have the ability to “reread” parts of a production that have passed by in time and will necessarily miss many structures or note them only subliminally. This doesn’t invalidate the system or my model.

The 15 devices considered in analyzing Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Progression, Framing, Character Structure, Contrast, Patterns, Action, Episodic Structure, Information Structure, Parallelism, Levels, Expectancy, Memory, Thematic Structure, Echoes, and Present Reference. Of these, I find no evidence in the play of Progression or Framing. The most vivid illustration of Progression—where something’s accumulated or stripped away by degrees throughout the play—occurs in the film Little Big Man in which Allardyce T. Merriweather, the snake-oil salesman played by Martin Balsam, keeps appearing with fewer and fewer body parts.

Framing—where a distinctive performance element brackets the play, a scene, or a series of scenes at the beginning and the end—may be exemplified by the simple mechanism of raising the curtain at the beginning of a performance and lowering it at the end, joining together everything that happens in between. This is, of course, useful in vaudeville and music hall performances whose components have no narrative or logical link. Peter Shaffer employs a more dramatic instance of Framing in Amadeus. Most of the play takes place in the eighteenth century, but Act One opens with accusatory whispering voices, then shifts to Antonio Salieri’s apartment in 1823 and Act Two ends with the reverse of this sequence.

The remaining 13 structural devices in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern provide a great number of examples of psychological connections. Perhaps the most obvious unifying force is the omnipresence of the two title characters. Except for an exit at the end of Act Two and their “disappearance” at the end of the play, these two characters are always on stage. Thus Character Structure holds the performance together by the constant presence of the two main figures, regardless of who else may enter and exit, or what locations or settings may be employed. Reinforcing this structure, the Tragedians reappear at regular and extensive intervals, further tying the play together by the presence of key characters.

Character Structure can have variants, particularly in contemporary performance. For instance, a character’s presence may be felt throughout the performance even though no actor portrays him. Godot comes to mind, of course, though Vladimir and Estragon are always on stage themselves. In Horton Foote’s The Young Man from Atlanta, the title figure never appears but he’s nevertheless a constant presence. In some performances no single character remains on stage, but one actor does, as in the stage works of Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, and Anna Deavere Smith. In still other performances, many actors may come and go on the stage, all representing a single character, say at different ages or stages of life. In The Yellow House, a play about Vincent van Gogh by Leonardo Shapiro and The Shaliko Company, four actors (including a woman) portrayed various avatars of the artist, at least one of whom was always on stage.

If Character Structure is reinterpreted more generally as Continuity Structure, aspects of performance other than characters or actors can function as unifying devices. Setting—”a place without any visible character” in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern; Waiting for Godot’s “A country road. A tree. Evening”—or other design elements can operate structurally. (Ironically, the 1990 film version of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern lost this unifying structure by the cinematic technique of “opening up” the text, depicting realistically and literally the locations only suggested in the stage script.) In Brecht’s The Measures Taken, different members of a group portray one of their number who was killed. In a 1974 production by The Shaliko Company, each actor in turn donned a red bandana as a distinguishing emblem so that a costume element formed a connective thread through the scenes.

Another device, Contrast, highlights the Character Structure in the constant presence of the two courtiers. The juxtaposition of two elements can create an effect that wouldn’t exist if either element were absent as in Vincent van Gogh’s belief that one painting shows up more vividly when hung next to another in a complimentary color, say a blue one beside an orange one or a red one beside a green one. In performance, a comic scene may make surrounding tragic ones seem graver; a brightly lit scene emphasizes the darkness of dimly lit ones before or after it. As mentioned, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do make an exit at the end of Act Two just as the stage blacks out. This is their only exit in view of the audience, and it points up the fact that they’ve never been out of the spectator’s sight for two acts. Additionally, at the end of the play, first Rosencrantz then Guildenstern “dies” by disappearing from view. (They don’t actually exit, but are blacked out by the stage lights.) The only occasion on which dialogue and action take place without Rosencrantz and Guildenstern being present, this Contrast makes the preceding Character Structure appear stronger in retrospect.

This is an opportune juncture to point out that many structural mechanisms work “backwards.” When a spectator recognizes a structural element, she usually recalls something earlier in the performance. Structures that connect moments distant in time—always retrospectively—are “discontinuous.” A Frame, for example, is clearly discontinuous: each instance exists discretely. Framing only emerges as a structural element with the second instance, when the spectator’s reminded of the first occurrence, connecting the two and integrating in her mind everything that happened in between. Structures that steadily carry the spectator forward as they flow through the performance, such as Character Structure, are “continuous” structures.

In addition to its function as a subsidiary Character Structure, the Tragedians’ reappearances are so regular that they form a discernible Pattern of entrances and exits. After the first appearance—and certainly after the second—the spectator can predict when they’ll appear again. The Pattern of off-stage and on-stage time is as follows:

• Act I: 11 pages off – 14 pages on – 19 pages off.
• Act II: 7 pages off – 8 pages on – 6 pages off – 9 pages on – 11 pages off.
• Act III: 17 pages off – 12 pages on – 2 pages off.

Taking into consideration that the time it takes to perform a page of script will vary, only the last, very short scene would be noticeably different in stage time. (The longer passages include a good deal of short dialogue and long stage directions.) This predictability psychologically connects the passing events of the performance for the spectator and engenders an Expectancy that the elements of the Pattern will reappear.

Like the presence of characters, their Actions and the Action of the play itself also unite the performance into a whole. Aristotle considered Action to be Physical Action, such as “bringing a murderer to justice” or “ascending the throne,” within which each scene causes the next to happen in a chain that inevitably results in the play’s climax. In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, there’s certainly a physical act toward which the play’s tending: the courtiers’ deaths. That’s where the path the title characters are following leads, but neither they nor the spectator (if he’s truly naïve as I’ve assumed) knows this—at least until the broad hint’s dropped during the Tragedians’ dress rehearsal of The Murder of Gonzago late in Act Two. There’s certainly no cause-and-effect relationship among most of the scenes. The games Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play aren’t caused by any Action that comes before, nor do they cause any subsequent Actions. The Tragedians, whom the courtiers encounter first on the road to Elsinore, don’t further the Action, nor are they propelled by it in any way. Yet there’s a feeling of continuity; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are headed toward some fate which they don’t know and can’t escape. This Reflexive Action—one the spectator doesn’t recognize until it’s nearly been fulfilled—is, however non-Aristotelian, a continuous presence holding the performance together. In fact, the spectator needn’t be able to name the Action for it to be structurally effective. He need only sense that something’s going on and be pulled along with this unspecified Action.

Action can also be psychological—what Stanislavsky called the “superobjective.” This is the principle goal or aim toward which the characters strive—what they want. It may not be the same as the Physical Action of the play and, indeed, in modern theater, both may not even exist in the script—though either may be created by the director and cast. In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, there’s a clear Psychological Action that both the title characters have in common. They both want to know what’s happening around them, and they actively seek out clues and piece together information to figure this out. That they never succeed is inconsequential in terms of the validity of the Action; it’s still what drives them through the play and keeps the spectator connected to the performance. Success or failure in accomplishing an Action within the bounds of the play has no bearing on the effectiveness of Action as a structural device since, as long as the characters pursue it, the audience is drawn along with that pursuit.

Either Physical Action or Psychological Action may be a reflection of Plot Action, a semantic function of the work’s narrative if it has one. Plot Action is certainly a component of the text, but it can still serve as a powerful unifying performance force as spectators follow the story and anticipate events down the road. In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, the Plot Action is related to the courtiers’ Character Actions. The play’s the story of two lost men trying to figure out what’s going on around them. As long as the audience watches them gather clues and try to put information together, even if the information’s misleading and the clues never add up, the play holds together both as text and as performance. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the audience will want to know what’s going on and what’ll happen next.

(Stoppard’s later play, Arcadia, also tells a story of piecing together information. We watch as the characters gather clues about what happened in the house 150 years ago and we add up the pieces with them. At the end of the play, we discover that their conclusions are entirely wrong—but the cohesive function of the Action carries us along nonetheless.)

Despite the strong Psychological Action evident in the play, the physical act toward which the play tends has no cause-and-effect connection in the scenes. They stand apart as separate episodes, each with its own small Action. Though some of the scenes have causal ties—Claudius and Gertrude’s instructions that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find out what afflicts Hamlet cause the courtiers to play at questioning Hamlet—most don’t have such obvious links. Not only are their games not causally bound to the scenes surrounding them, neither are the scenes with the Tragedians. Each of these scenes also has its own brief Action—to win the game, to see a play, to find the coin—which somehow relates to the overall Action, but neither causes it nor is caused by it. In fact, it seems that only the Shakespearean scenes cause subsequent scenes to happen. Scenes which propel Rosencrantz and Guildenstern toward their deaths are principally these. This Episodic Structure, which presents Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as wanderers through life, reinforces the strength of their omnipresence and their search for answers. The courtiers are inexorably impelled toward their fate, regardless of the fact that the scenes themselves aren’t causally connected. Episodic Structure—the classic “string of beads” configuration best exemplified by Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Büchner’s Woyzeck, or Brecht’s Mother Courage—depends heavily on a strong “string” to unite the “beads.” In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the uninterrupted presence of the two main characters forms the string, reinforced by their pursuit of their Action, to understand what’s happening around them. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s Action in each scene’s a manifestation of their overall Action. The regular arrivals of the Tragedians also helps bond the episodes.

[This is the first part of my discussion of Michael Kirby’s structural analysis technique. I’ll pick up with part two in a few days, starting with the next structural device, Information Structure.]

Writing

I don’t remember ever having been taught anything about writing when I was in school. We learned grammar in elementary and middle school in those days, of course, but composition courses weren’t part of the curriculum. In high school and college lit classes we studied writers, but not writing. If someone did, in fact, teach me to write, I certainly didn’t learn very well, and I set about (re)learning.

It wasn’t until I was in grad school the first time, for a Master of Fine Arts in Acting at Rutgers’ School of Creative and Performing Arts (the predecessor to the Mason Gross School of the Arts), that I began to look at my writing with any kind of critical eye and to take an interest in improving my prose. 

The process of learning to write has essentially been a matter of teaching myself. The path of this self-teaching hasn’t been direct, and there were several influences on the way I examine and reexamine what I think about writing.

My awareness of writing with a purpose began to solidify when I started to work on my master’s thesis 34 years ago. Other than personal letters, the only writing I did after college was in the army. God knows, its literary demands were not very great—except, perhaps, in a negative sense because of the formulaic style of military documents. 

My MFA courses demanded very little writing of any consequence; actors and directors aren’t expected to write very much, and we weren’t often asked to. For the thesis, however, I had to write about the performance of my thesis role in a way that would both document it and explain the process by which I arrived at it, and I had to do it not for myself, but for a committee of faculty members who would cross-question me on what I said. 

Furthermore, the thesis would be put in the university library for posterity. I would be “on record” for anyone to read. (The paper is, indeed, in the Rutgers University library. I also published an edited version of the thesis on ROT: “Johann Rall: A Historical Portrait,” 10 and 15 December 2009.)

Even though the written thesis wasn’t the important part of the thesis work—the performance itself was, and the written thesis was not intended to stand alone without it—I was constrained to write a readable document, if not by departmental or scholarly pressure, then by my own desire to do the best damn thesis the department had seen. 

The problem was, I didn’t have any idea how to go about doing that. I didn’t know how to write the way I thought I wanted to. I had to learn for myself how to do it.  It’s probably dumb luck that I succeeded at all. 

I don’t know exactly what I did while I was writing the paper, but I do remember two things. The first was that I was terribly blocked at first—I didn’t know how to start. I finally convinced myself that I had to get started somehow, and I decided I would just begin. 

I would just start putting words on paper (no word processors yet) as swiftly as I could and worry later about whether they made sense and were grammatical. I didn’t know it then, but what I was doing was free-writing about the role and my performance, a strategy I later learned is called focused free-writing [see “Peter Elbow and Freewriting” (12 March 2025) and “Two Passings: Peter Elbow and Athol Fugard” (17 March 2025)]. 

Very soon, it all just began to gush out. I’m sure, once the dam was broken, the flood of words was mostly due to the subject, which was necessarily very close to me emotionally, and the intensity of the work that led to the performance. But the words did come, and they were surprisingly lucid. 

I was actually writing a master’s thesis, and, finally having started, I found I couldn’t stop. (In fact, the finished thesis was 44 pages—not long by academic standards, but three to four times as long as the usual written acting thesis, as the department chairman remarked at my defense session.)

The second thing that I remember noticing about my writing was a concern for style: I wanted to write “trippingly on the tongue.” I’d never considered such a thing before, and I have no idea why the idea popped into my head then. 

My college writing, between seven and eleven years before, had always sounded pompous and pretentious. I used to describe my own writing style, when I thought about it, as “pedantic”; I had what I now call The William F. Buckley Syndrome—deliberately choosing a $50 word when a $5 one was available, just to show off. 

No one ever told me to write more conversationally; I just began to want to. I can only guess that I’d been subtly and insidiously influenced by whatever I’d been reading. I have no idea what that might have been: most of my reading for school at the time—and virtually all I had time for—was play scripts. I don’t think I took my cue from them because the styles were too varied to have made me so aware of conversational prose as a desirable style for my writing. 

The subliminal influence “to acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness” might have come from such periodicals as Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine, which I did read then. Some of the writers I admired at that time were Times columnists Russell Baker and Anna Quindlen and essayists E. B. White and James Thurber, who all wrote in conversational prose. (I also liked the breeziness and surprising diction of Mark Twain and the clarity and specificity of Bernard Shaw, but their 19th-century floweriness made them unlikely models for my needs.) 

I certainly didn’t imitate the style of those publications or writers, but they were less formal than the kind of academic reading a student usually encounters, and they were easy to read. In any case, something put the idea in my head, and it wasn’t a teacher or any other acknowledgeable human being.

I finished the thesis and defended it and went off in pursuit of an acting career. I didn’t consider myself a writer of any kind—it wasn’t a thought that even entered my head. I don’t think I did any appreciable writing between finishing the MFA thesis in 1976 and the next stage in this attenuated process.

The next thing that happened, when I decided the acting career was unlikely to be successful, was returning to school about seven years later, ending up in NYU's Department of Performance Studies. 

One of the main emphases at DPS when I was there was a clear, readable writing style. All the faculty specifically stressed it in their classes—my instructors Michael Kirby, Brooks McNamara, and Richard Schechner in particular. 

These men all were editors or former editors of The Drama Review and presumably the staffs of both TDR and Women in Performance, journals published by the department, focused on it, too. All our written work was expected to be of publishable quality whether or not we intended to submit it to a journal and though I never received written remarks on my papers concerning this, I saw it clearly criticized on classmates' work from time to time. 

A required course at DPS, Resources and Methods for the Study of Performance, was essentially a graduate-level writing course and our Qualifying Exams (the DPS equivalent of “comps”) were three ten-page essays of publishable quality which we had to write in ten days. (I have, in fact, had two of them published: "Dramaturgy: The Conscience of the Theatre," TheatreInsight 1.2 [Spring 1989]: 34-37 and "Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism," The Players’ Journal 2.1 [2008]: 15-22.) The constant emphasis on our writing by the faculty couldn’t help but make us conscious of our prose.

At the same time that I started at Performance Studies, I also began teaching writing to undergrads. NYU required all undergraduates who hadn’t had an equivalent course in a previous school to take a two-semester Writing Workshop and pass a proficiency exam at the end. 

One of the country’s largest private universities, NYU had far too few regular faculty to teach a required, university-wide course to all the students mandated to take it, so grad students were hired to teach most of the WW classes. 

Shortly after I matriculated, I was offered a position as a preceptor (what the program called its TA’s) in the Expository Writing Program, teaching two sections of the twice-weekly course. (I learned later that Performance Studies grad students were considered a prime pool for prospective EWP preceptors because of the department’s emphasis on writing.) 

Having the responsibility to guide and train students in a field in which I never before considered myself even a practitioner, much less an expert, made me examine and question my own writing even more critically.

(As an adjunct to teaching in the EWP, preceptors were required to take a class in the ed school [SEHNAP – School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions; now the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development] on teaching writing. Because of scheduling, I didn’t take the course until my third semester. 

(One assignment in the course was to write about our “writing process.” For this class, in the Resources and Methods course, and from my awakened interest in the craft of composition, I began to read “words on words”—writers who wrote about writing: William Zinsser, Peter Elbow, and William Safire—who wrote not so much about writing as language—and the old standbys Fowler and Strunk and White. That was the first time I had actually analyzed how I wrote and how I learned—or was learning—to write.)

In my first semester at Performance Studies, I took the late Michael Kirby’s class in Theatrical Structure, my first course with Michael. After I turned in my final paper for the course, the structural analysis of a play (I used Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead [posted on Rick On Theater as “Theatrical Structure I” (15 February 2011) and “Theatrical Structure II” (18 February 2011), a favorite of mine), Michael said something to me that I remember to this day as having been a huge compliment at the time. 

He singled my paper out as unique in the class—which is pretty great in itself—because I had been the only student who didn’t hand in a list of structural devices but an actual essay discussing and describing the appearances and uses of the devices which had been the subject of the course. 

What really got me, though, is that it had never occurred to me to do the paper any other way—or even that there was any other way it could be done. I mean, I hadn't struggled with the idea of taking a tack that I suspected was clever or unusual—in my mind, I just did the assignment. As well as I could, of course—given the department’s insistence that our writing should be of publishable quality all the time. 

I had spent some effort polishing the prose as I always did (or was learning to do—this was still new to me), but I never stopped to think, ‘I've got to come up with a way to do this that's different and special.’ That Michael thought it was anyway was an immense ego-boost.

In the spring term, I took Michael’s 20th-Century Mise-en-Scène, an examination of the staging techniques of modern Western theater. 

At the start of the term, Michael, then the editor of TDR, announced in all his classes (I began auditing his other classes, so I was in two each term sometimes—though I didn't do the assignments for both) that he was planning an issue on the Group Theatre. If any student wished to do the course paper on a Group Theatre topic, it could be considered for publication in TDR. 

I simply dismissed the offer because I figured I'd have enough work just to make my paper acceptable for classwork, let alone publication; I didn't want to take on the extra burden—real or psychological. 

There was a meeting for anyone who was considering submitting a Group Theatre paper, but I hadn't planned to attend. That's when I got a surprise phone call. It was Michael and he asked if I was thinking of doing my paper for TDR; I said I wasn't. He asked me why not, and I explained that I thought it would be more work than I was able to handle. 

He tried to persuade me that it wouldn't be more work and asked me to think it over and come to the meeting on spec, just in case I changed my mind. I asked Michael why he’d called me and why he wanted me to consider this. I figured he must either be desperate or was trying to round up as many prospects as he could in order to have a larger selection in the end. 

His answer, which I will never forget, has in a way affected the rest of my life. "I think you can write," he said. I was flabbergasted at the compliment, and the fact that he had reached out to me specifically that way! Believe me, no one had ever said anything like that to me in my life. It wasn't even anything I had ever thought about myself.

I actually hadn't even chosen a topic yet, so I didn't know if I would do a Group Theatre paper or not. In fact, I didn't know much about the Group except in very general terms. On the other hand, I had nothing else in mind so I went to that meeting and Michael had some suggestions for those of us who hadn't selected a topic—things he would like to have as part of the issue. 

My term paper for the mise-en-scène course ended up being a reconstruction of the Group Theatre's Johnny Johnson. I didn't know anything about the play before I started the research—I'd never even heard of it—but JJ was the Group's only musical, so it was on Michael’s list; that uniqueness was what attracted me to it. 

The reconstruction part was the focus of the course—this was still a term paper for class, after all. I think, though, that I did it more because Michael had said what he said to me, and because he’d sought me out to say it, than for any other reason. "The Group Theatre's Johnny Johnson” did, in the end, appear in TDR (28.4 [T104: Winter 1984]: 49-60)—my first published essay.

The whole process was a revelation to me—from the actual research I did on JJ (I even turned up a little historical coup and got to interview a few surviving Group members and associates) through the writing and editing of the paper (a great deal of what I learned from that class and that paper has turned up in later work) to publication (it's a narcotic—as addictive as heroin).

From then on, I’ve thought of myself as a writer. (Well, that’s what I put on my tax returns and other forms where there’s a space for “occupation.” Sometimes it’s “writer-teacher,” sometimes “writer-researcher,” and sometimes “freelance writer,” but writer’s always in there now.) I make no claim regarding quality or significance, but words are what I pay attention to—both when I craft them and when I read some crafted by others. All because Michael Kirby called me at home one evening.

[I admired and respected Michael Kirby a great deal. Aside from what he did for me with that phone call, he had a unique and unpredictable view of performance and theater which always revealed something new and surprising to me. Michael was a sculptor and I always figured that his distinctive view of theater was the result of this background in a three-dimensional visual art. Michael died of leukemia on 24 February 1997 at the age of 66.]