"The Pieces Don’t Fit!"

Sitting in the Rectory living room, ostensibly working on a picture puzzle, Mrs. Winemiller, wife of the Episcopal minister of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, and mother of Alma, suddenly throws a piece on the floor and shouts in frustration, “The pieces don’t fit!”  That’s a moment from scene two of part one of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, but I’ve always felt that it’s a kind of clue to Williams’s dramaturgy—the answer, if you will, to why some readers and viewers of his plays have trouble with the dramatist’s writing. 

There are still people, both theatergoers and theater pros like directors and reviewers, who view Williams as a Realist.  Sometimes they modify that characterization by calling him a romantic Realist or a lyric Realist, but he’s usually categorized, however informally, with Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and his own contemporary Arthur Miller.  But the label doesn’t actually correspond to the dramaturgy so there’s a lot of equivocating, explaining, noting exceptions—and complaining.  There are too many symbols, some object.  The dialogue is too flowery and ornate.  The action is extreme, the characters are overdrawn, the situations are contrived.  Like Mrs. Winemiller’s picture puzzle, in other words, the pieces don’t fit. 

The problem with this common view of Williams’s playwriting is that it’s off-base.  He isn’t a Realist—and he never was.  As City University of New York English professor Roger Boxill bluntly stated: “[T]he fact is that Williams is never a realist in the photographic or journalistic sense.”  When someone sees his plays, from Glass Menagerie in 1944, his first major success, to A House Not Meant to Stand and In Masks Outrageous and Austere, his last plays in the 1980s, through the lens of Realism, it’s exactly like trying to force square pegs into round holes.  Some shapes tessellate, other’s don’t; the tiles of Williams’s creations aren’t designed to.  Even a cursory examination of certain Williams plays like the 1953 Camino Real, Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? of 1969, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow from 1970, or 1984’s The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. LeMonde, will make that very clear.  (The playwright’s one-acts are nearly all strikingly non-realistic, ranging from Expressionistic to Surrealistic to Brechtian to Absurdist.  Many of his short stories, too, contain salient non-realistic elements.)  The pieces just won’t fit, no matter how much you try to jigger and force them.  They weren’t meant to.

First let’s remind ourselves that Williams was, first (and always), a poet.  Before he adopted the identity of Tennessee Williams, playwright from New Orleans, he was Thomas Lanier Williams III, poet from St. Louis.  Poetry was his first love, and he published volumes of poems throughout his career, even when he was a famous and successful playwright.  When Williams turned his hand to writing plays, he didn’t leave his poetry behind or set it aside.  Williams biographer Lyle Leverich, who called his subject “a unique American phenomenon: the poet-playwright,” insisted that the dramatist “was never able to reconcile the diametric pull in being both a poet and a playwright” so that “it was the fusion of poet with playwright that gave him his uniqueness in the American theatre.”   In his 1987 criticism of the dramatist’s work, Boxill asserted that Williams “is not a poet in the theatre but a theatre poet.”  In his discussion of the plays, Boxill invoked the writer’s “poetic detail,” “the natural poetry of Southern American speech” in which Williams composed, and “his poetic temperament.”  Poetry, in other words, infuses the very essence of Williams’s dramaturgy.  Indeed, Williams’s friend from St. Louis, college schoolmate, and fellow poet Clark Mills McBurney, affirmed, “I think he has more poetry in his plays than in his poetry.” 

If poetry depicts emotionally and sensuously charged human experience, usually in heightened language, then what Williams wrote is surely distinct from Realism—which by definition portrays the world on stage, including the speech, as a refection of actual life.  (In another argument I would submit that the most renowned realistic playwrights, such as Ibsen—who introduced the form to theater—Strindberg, Chekhov—an inspiration for Williams—and Shaw, are not entirely Realists either.  But that’s a discussion for another time.)  Known as Clark Mills, Williams’s hometown friend went on to expand his sense of the dramatist’s writing:

I would say there is a quality that I think is unique to him.  It has to do with the flow of his language and dialogue: It has some kind of a poetic quality to it.  I don’t know of any other American playwright, living or dead, who has it. . . .  [I]t wasn’t the language or the words or the sentences or the way they were put together; it was the “sound” of the voice that came through somehow.  He seemed to “hear” the voice as much as he heard the words.  And I think when you hear the voice like that, you’re in the realm of poetry.

In his biography of the writer, Leverich quoted the playwright from his journal: “The tragedy of a poet writing drama is that when he writes well—from the dramaturgic, technical pt. [sic] of view he is often writing badly.  One must learn—(that is the craft, I suppose)—to fuse lyricism and realism into a congruous unit.”  In other words, if you insist on judging by the prescribed criteria of dramaturgy (or, conversely, poetry), well . . . the pieces won’t fit.  Because, as Leverich saw, the “antithetical pull of the poet, his truer self, against that of the dramatist,” can’t be reconciled.  And I’ll argue that they aren’t meant to be.

In her analysis of Williams’s playwriting, Alice Griffin noted that playwright David Mamet described the esteemed artist’s plays as “the greatest dramatic poetry in the American language.”  Griffin, a prolific theater scholar and noted educator, posited that Williams didn’t compose “poetic plays” in the vein of Maxwell Anderson (Elizabeth the Queen, Mary of Scotland, Winterset), but rather “dramatic poetry.”  But though Griffin relied on Williams’s heightened speech to distinguish his writing, there was far more to the distinction than poetic language.

We should remember that, among his other important interests and preoccupations, Williams was also a painter and student of visual art.  (He invoked many famous artists in his plays and in his commentary, from El Greco, an intuitive and subjective painter, to Giorgio de Chirico, a metaphysical artist and proto-Surrealist, to Hans Hofmann, an Abstract Expressionist.  In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel features an artist who resembles Williams’s friend Jackson Pollock, another Abstract Expressionist.)  Boxill noted that the playwright “plans his sets, costumes, and lighting with a painter’s eye,” for instance, and English and theater professor Signi Falk wrote that “Williams makes full use of light and color as if he himself were a painter.” 

The playwright “employs a highly articulate visual language through which he gives concrete shape to his poetic perception,” asserted Esther Merle Jackson, “transposing the interpretive forms of the painting arts into the theatre.”  In addition to the writer’s painterly style, she remarked that Williams “gives to the composition of scenes a more sculptural quality as he manipulates form, volume, texture, line, color, light, shade, and space.”  The writer’s plays, longtime University of Wisconsin-Madison drama professor Jackson  explained, are “conceived . . . as a visual composition.” 

There was yet another visual medium that was influential on Williams’s dramaturgy.  As a boy, the incipient poet was enamored of movies, the escape he needed from his often burdensome childhood and the strictures of growing up in a small-town church rectory.  (The young writer had also done a stint as screenwriter at MGM where his first stage success, The Glass Menagerie, was conceived as a screenplay.)  “Throughout the canon, film techniques undermine the conventions of stage realism,” wrote Boxill.  In his essay “Cinematic Structure in the Work of Tennessee Williams,” George Brandt, a British professor of theater and film, pointed out the movie techniques Williams adapted for his stage writing.  Brandt asserted that Williams, “of all American playwrights has most effectively learnt the lessons in freedom that the cinema has to teach.”  The plays reveal “strong cinematic features” which add “a degree of stylization imposed on more or less naturalistic material.”

Williams’s “attempt to turn the playhouse into a picture theatre,” Brandt added, is an aspect of the playwright’s “frequent experiment aimed at overcoming the leaden immobility of the naturalistic set.”  But Williams use of cinematic techniques isn’t just relegated to the visual effects it generates.  As Brandt also observed, “Williams’s careful orchestration of sound—music as well as effects—is almost as deeply indebted to the cinema,” which took the theater’s consciousness of sound effects much further, and the playwright employed “sound as he does light, i.e. atmospherically.” 

Williams’s use of lyrical language is embedded in his scripts, of course, and you can hear it whether you simply read the plays from the page or see them on the screen or stage.  It’s unmistakable, especially among the many characters whom the playwright endowed with artistic or poetic temperaments.  As for the other aspects of his dramatic structure, reading the notes he almost always appended to the beginning of his published texts will reveal his focus on non-realistic elements of the production he envisions.  Take, for example, this excerpt from his instructions concerning the setting of Summer and Smoke (noting the painterly allusions):

There must be a great expanse of sky so that the entire action of the play takes place against it.  This is true of interior as well as exterior scenes.  In fact, there are no really interior scenes, for the walls are omitted or just barely suggested by certain necessary fragments, such as might be needed to hang a picture or to contain a door-frame.

During the day scenes the sky should be a pure and intense blue (like the sky of Italy as it is so faithfully represented in the religious paintings of the Renaissance) and costumes should be selected to form a dramatic color contrast to this intense blue which the figures stand against.  (Color harmonics and other visual effects are tremendously important.)

In the night scenes, the more familiar constellations, such as Orion and the Great Bear and the Pleiades, are clearly projected on the night sky, and above them, splashed across the top of the cyclorama, is the nebulous radiance of the Milky Way.  Fleecy cloud forms may also be projected on this cyclorama and made to drift across it.

A few paragraphs further on, Williams makes direct reference to a specific artist and one of his canvasses: “[Giorgio de] Chirico has used fragmentary walls and interiors in a very evocative way in his painting called ‘Conversation among the Ruins’ [1927].”  In an addendum to Williams’s production notes, the text’s publisher remarks:  “The play as originally produced had a good deal of incidental music, especially composed [by Williams’s friend Paul Bowles], and more selected from the popular music of the period.  Because it has been practically impossible to secure the texts and necessary legal clearances of such music, the author urges that such music as may be used by nonprofessionals be chosen from music already available—which should be compositions originally published at least 56 years ago [i.e., 1890s]—or that music should be especially composed or arranged.”  Both statements demonstrate how integral to his plays Williams considered the so-called production aspects of the performance, and how delicate and careful his considerations were.  Note, of course, that these are not realistic elements of a production—fragmentary scenery inspired by a nearly surrealistic painting and music effects more akin to a film soundtrack than a live stage presentation.

Now, many writers include production notes in their scripts, some more detailed and specific than others, especially in the theater of post-World War II.  But I don’t think any author has focused his attention on the production elements of the script as closely as Tennessee Williams—and that wasn’t just an accident of his temperament.  It was purposeful and deliberate, and Williams intended to compose his plays as composites of all the arts and technologies available in the contemporary theater.  Williams, in a way, was just harking back to the etymology of the word ‘playwright,’ which means more than a mere writer of plays.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘wright’ as “a constructive workman”; the obsolete verb ‘wright’ means “to build” or “to construct.”  In other words, Williams envisioned dramatists who, rather than just writing scripts, wrought them from all available materials—not to be limited to the realistic and naturalistic realm.  As he advised fellow dramatists, the so-called production elements of a performance should be the métier of the playwright, not left to the directors and designers, who may not share the same vision as the writer, to apply after the script has been written.  (As we’ll see, many of Williams’s interpreters haven’t complied with the author’s overall conception.) 

This idea was something the writer had begun to conceptualize even before his first successful Broadway production, The Glass Menagerie in 1944.  Longtime followers of this blog may know already that I’m referring to Williams notion of “plastic theater,” which he publicly discussed first in his “Production Notes” to every published version of Glass Menagerie from the 1945 first edition on.  (In a journal entry composed between January and April 1942, three years before the publication of Menagerie, the playwright discussed what he then called “sculptural drama” in terms that are very similar to his concept of plastic theater.  I wrote an article on this subject entitled “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre” for the Tennessee Williams Annual Review and republished it on ROT on 9 May 2012.)  It is in this technique that Williams explained his rationale for paying such close attention to the non-literary parts of a play, the ones usually left to the director and the designers, and directly expressed his deviation from stage Realism. 

It’s significant to note here that not all stagings of Williams plays hewed to his production wishes.  Eddie Dowling, who co-produced and co-directed the Broadway première of Menagerie, ignored all the distinctly Brechtian production elements Williams included in that play’s stage directions—including dozens of slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, and lighting dissolves and fades—presenting an essentially realistic stage picture of the Wingfield home.  So seeing the plays may not always reveal Williams’s non-, even anti-realistic bent.  Reading the texts (particularly the front matter) can, and Williams’s notes to Menagerie are a dead giveaway:

Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth.  When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are.  The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness.  Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

Just to be certain there was no misunderstanding that this concept was a consistent part of Williams’s dramaturgy, he continued:

These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play.  They have to do with a conception of new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.

To be sure, a plastic production could probably end up being essentially realistic if the creator selects elements to collate that are in themselves predominantly realistic and naturalistic.  Where Williams included carefully chosen music used atmospherically, other playwrights could incorporate only real-world sounds and even music heard over radios and phonographs.  But that’s clearly not what Williams conceived for his plastic theater.  This is once again why many critics and analysts complain that the pieces of some Tennessee Williams plays don’t fit.  But I think this is a misreading of Williams’s concept of dramatic structure.  Let’s go back to the term “plastic theater” (and the argument I made for its derivation in my TWAR and ROT article, which I won’t recap here).  In the novella Moise and the World of Reason, Williams specifically credited artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, whom the writer knew, with an idea Williams called “plastic space.”  I posited that the playwright coined his term “plastic theater” based on his understanding of plasticity as expressed by Hofmann.

Hofmann defined plasticity as the communication of a three-dimensional experience in the two-dimensional medium of a painting.  He contended that plasticity derives from the tension between the forces and counter-forces—which he called “push-pull”—created by the separate elements of the painting.  (The juxtaposition of empty space and filled space in a painting, sculpture, or installation of objects, for instance, creates this kind of tension.)  The tension creates the sensation in the viewer that the painting breathes, even seems to move.  Hofmann also believed that an artist mustn’t simply copy nature, but must create an artistically imagined reality which requires the careful and deliberate manipulation and juxtaposition of the elements of the artwork.  We may posit, then, that the tension among the disparate arts and techniques employed by Williams—the “push-pull” of the parts that don’t seem to fit—would create the plasticity of the theatrical experience.  Just as the viewer of a plastic painting has a three-dimensional experience from a two-dimensional work of art, the audience of a plastic theater work has a theatrical experience beyond the mere image of actual life.  All because the pieces aren’t quite meant to fit. 

It’s Not Real – It’s Art

When I recently wrote my performance report on Red (4 March on ROT), the revival of the John Logan Tony-winner about painter Mark Rothko and his assistant, Ken, that I saw in Washington in February, I added a short coda about a column written by New York Times art reviewer Roberta Smith called “What’s True in Art Studios and Onstage.” I’d originally considered appending a longer statement on Smith’s article, but as it had little to do with the performance of Red in Washington—or anywhere, really—I decided to reserve it and present it as a separate article on ROT. The column, published on 5 April 2010, four days after Red had opened on Broadway, is about the play itself and, more broadly, about the nature of theater and art. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I get a little exercised here because this really bothers me, and the source is shocking.

Smith, an art reporter for the Times since 1986, writes that she was put off because the stage world of Red “clashed so violently with my memories of the studio visits I experienced in the two decades after the action of the play.” (The play’s set in 1958-59, so Smith’s alluding to a period up to the late ’70s.) As a consequence, Smith says that at times she wished “my seat had an ejection lever.” What disturbed Smith most, she explains, was “the noise, speed and off notes” of the script; in her experience over decades of involvement with art and artists as a student, a museum intern and employee, and an art journalist, the opportunities she had for examining art and coming to understand it “were quiet, slow, often awkward experiences,” not the fast-paced and verbal exchanges Logan imagined for the stage Rothko and Ken. While Smith conceded that for the theater it’s necessary to speed up and condense time, she still insisted that “the studio, not the play, was the thing for me.” The play came most alive for her, Smith writes, “whenever the actors stopped talking and turned to the business of moving the big (surprisingly convincing) ‘Rothkos’ around, preparing stretchers and canvases, mixing colors.” The “magic” of the play came when the “wordless choreography of the wheeling, turning canvases brought back the ephemeral intimacy of one artist’s inner sanctum 50 years on, verifying the often profound accuracy of silence.”

Let’s look at Smith’s criticism. What she’s objecting to is that the world of Logan’s play doesn’t line up with her own real-world experience. It’s too fast and loud, she says. First, let me note that Smith never says she visited Rothko’s studio—or ever met the painter herself; she acknowledges that her understanding of Rothko’s “worldview” comes from the James E. B. Breslin 1993 bio, Mark Rothko: A Biography (the same one which Logan read and which Edward Gero, the actor I saw play Rothko in Washington, said he used as a resource as well). So, assuming that every artist works differently (like people in nearly every other profession), there’s no reason to believe that Logan’s imagination is any less truthful than Smith’s assumptions. (As a side comment here, I want to note also that Logan didn’t just invent the environment of an artist’s workspace out of whole cloth; he knew painters in Los Angeles and went to their studios to learn how they worked, “getting into the studio, getting paint under my fingernails.”) Second, when Smith visited an artist, she was changing the dynamic of the workspace to one of observation and scrutiny—the Heisenberg principle at work. What an artist does when a journalist-cum-museum representative is present isn’t necessarily the same as he does when he’s working alone or in the company of an assistant whom he trusts or takes for granted. Third, what Smith saw as apparently unnecessary “noise” in the play isn’t really conversation. What the stage characters of Rothko and Ken are voicing for us to hear are the thoughts Smith suggests were going through the minds of those seeing the art in the studios, speaking aloud so we can hear—because complete silence, despite some experiments, doesn’t work so well in theater—what the characters would otherwise keep to themselves. Because Red is a drama, which implies a level of conflict, those thoughts are expressed as dialogue because a series of related monologues would be frankly boring on stage.

Fourth, of course, is the fact that Logan never pretended that he’s presenting a slice of Rothko’s actual life in Red. He says quite frankly that he isn’t: “[T]his was the way to explore the themes I thought were interesting, which really didn't have much to do with Mark Rothko. It had more to do with my feelings about art and theatre and mentors and fathers. Mark Rothko became the vessel for things I wanted to explore." Ken, the young assistant, isn’t a real person or even a composite but a completely fictional character Logan invented for the play. If someone wants to see a true-to-life portrayal of the workings of some artist’s studio, the theater is probably not the place to go. Try a documentary: there are many, including one remarkable film of Rothko’s contemporary and fellow Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock, at work on his famous drip paintings. With all Smith’s experience of the art world, I’m shocked that she’d have gone into a theater to see a play and expected real life to unfold on the stage. And was disappointed—no “disturbed,” she says—that her world isn’t reflected in the play.

The bigger problem, as I see it, is that there apparently are people like Smith who apparently don’t get that art and life aren’t the same. Back on 15 December 1974, for example, there was another Times article, “Psychoanalyst Says Nay to ‘Equus’” by Dr. Sanford Gifford, taking Peter Shaffer’s play to task for inaccuracies in its portrayal of Martin Dysart's practices. Gifford declares that “the play paints a picture of the psychoanalytic process that demands a professional response.” He complains that “Shaffer presents us with a fictitious piece of psychopathology.” After describing the play’s conceit, Gifford asserts, “As the play’s imagery becomes murkier and more portentous, however, and the clever theatrical devices multiply, we begin to suspect that we, the spectators, are being tricked by the playwright.” Gifford calls all this “a spurious air of importance” and adds, “Perhaps in Shaffer’s skillful mixture of truth, banality and pretension there is something for us all, for doctor and patient alike, something that gratifies our universal fantasies about our therapists (and most psychiatrists were once patients).” Gifford, a Harvard Medical School faculty member, goes on to list what he sees as three “fantasies” in Equus, two of which he labels “familiar wishes, entertaining or tedious according to taste.” The first is the wish to ask the therapist personal questions so that, in Shaffer’s play, we learn that Dysart is ”unhappy, weak and fallible, like everyone else.” Second is the “familiar” desire to be “our therapist’s favorite child, his only patient, or at least his most interesting one.”

Gifford saves his greatest disapproval for what he sees as “the principal ‘message’ that Shaffer seems to have written out for us most explicitly”: that “psychopathology and the creative imagination are inseparable.” The psychoanalyst believes that Shaffer is perpetuating the notion that creativity and madness are connected in a “version of the mad artist theme” because “insanity was the price paid by the artist, in a kind of Faustian bargain, for the use of his creative powers.” In Equus, Gifford asserts, Shaffer presents the “delusional world” of Alan Strang, “a half-illiterate stable boy” as “itself a work of art.” The doctor points out that Alan isn’t an artist, but that the play treats his ”productions” as worthy of “respect, even reverence” because without Alan’s “psychotic rituals he would remain a mere village yokel capable of nothing more creative than watching TV.” Shaffer’s point, Gifford declares, “is that if we give up our symptoms, we lose our imaginative powers and must accept a bleak, plastic ‘normality,’ without color or passion.” This concept, the psychoanalyst insists, is “a pernicious fallacy” because “many of us—the ordinary and untalented as well as the artistic and creative—use just this fallacy to avoid treatment or to justify holding on to our symptoms.”

The author of the column offers that Shaffer “may know better than to believe” what he’s presented in the play, but that the playwright’s “chosen to exploit its theatrical effectiveness, or allowed himself to be carried away by his own bravura as a dramatic technician.” In that case, Gifford asserts, “we feel all the more ‘manipulated’ by the play.” Plays like Equus, he continues, “leave us feeling cheated, that we have been promised some significant glimpse of the truth and left with a bogus or trivial message.” The psychoanalyst refers to “the remarkably little compassion we feel for either the psychiatrist or his patient.” He adds, “Even as we leave the theater we have forgotten them both as human beings, suggesting . . . that we have been forcibly and mechanically ‘entertained’ rather than enlightened.” Gifford concludes his commentary by remonstrating that “surely we are entitled to a higher grade of banality from a playwright as accomplished and psychologically knowledgeable as Peter Shaffer.”

Confronting Gifford’s complaints, we may see that they’re a little harder to disarm than were Smith’s. If, in fact, Shaffer had been intent on presenting a treatment of psychiatry in action, a real-life portrait of a psychotherapist and a patient at work, Gifford might even have a valid argument, assuming that the play is wrong on the facts and the truth as the columnist says it is. (I’ll defer to Gifford on this issue, since I don’t have the expertise to dispute him. I’ll add, though, that Shaffer called on “a distinguished child psychiatrist” for advice in his work.) The question is, however, whether Shaffer, or any playwright—or artist in any medium, for that matter—should be held accountable for the factual details of his creations when compared to actual practitioners in some profession or other. (I wonder if there are bank robbers and burglars who object to the way their TV and film counterparts practice their dirty work.) The cornerstone of Gifford’s position on Equus and of my counterargument is the psychoanalyst’s assertion that Shaffer’s presenting the idea that insanity and creativity are linked or that “madness is the price of genius,” as Gifford phrases it. That’s not the play I saw (or read). Yes, Dysart debates with himself whether or not to treat Alan. But what’s at stake for Dysart isn’t Alan’s sanity versus his “creativity”—his passion, really, is the way Shaffer puts it—but Dysart’s own peace of mind, his integrity. Like Antonio Salieri in Shaffer’s other hit play, Amadeus, Dysart’s in fundamental doubt. His dilemma is that he can “cure” Alan—he does cure Alan: “I’ll heal the rash on his body. I’ll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes”—but it’s the consequences of the “cure” that make Dysart question his purpose: “When that’s done, I’ll set him on a nice mini-scooter and send him puttering off into the Normal world . . . . I doubt, however, with much passion! . . . Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.”

A few years after I saw Equus, I came across a situation that reflects the play’s theme in microcosm. I adopted a year-old dog, a beautiful, loving, and playful mixed breed. A couple of weeks after I brought him home, I discovered that he hated other dogs and became almost uncontrollably hostile when he was around them. I was taking the dog through obedience training at the time and I approached the trainer with the problem and she took my dog home with her for a weekend to diagnose it. When the trainer returned the dog to me, she explained the alternatives: she could make him manageable and controllable but he’d still have behavior problems around other dogs, or she could render him docile and calm, though he’d have no personality left. Now, I don’t mean to equate Shaffer’s characters with a dog and his trainer, but the situations are similar enough, the dilemma is parallel enough to help me understand what Shaffer’s writing about. Do I make the dog compliant enough to live quietly in society, but without passion, or do I allow him his passion but leave him with self-control problems? That’s precisely the question Dysart faces with Alan. And as with me and my dog analogy, the consequences of the answer are Dysart’s, not Alan’s.

Gifford is wrong about the play’s point: it’s not Alan who’s mind is in jeopardy—it’s Dysart’s soul. Equus isn’t about whether Alan Strang must sacrifice his passion for normalcy—but whether Martin Dysart can keep on making that God-like decision with impunity. See, the play’s not only not about psychiatry, it’s not about Alan, either. It’s about Dysart who’s having a secular crisis of faith (another parallel this play has with Amadeus). In the last scene, the doctor says, “Essentially I cannot know what I do—yet I do essential things. Irreversible, terminal things. I stand in the dark with a pick in my hand, striking at heads!”

Gifford engages in some writing tactics that aren’t very even-handed, on top of the erroneous argument he makes. First, he does something that always aggravates me when reviewers do it: he speaks throughout his article of “we” and “us,” as if he knew what was in the minds of all the other spectators in the theater. Unless psychoanalysis has made some advances of which I’m unaware, he can’t possibly. For instance, he avers that “we feel” little compassion for Dysart and Alan. Well, I, for one, felt immense compassion for Dysart; Equus had a profound effect on me after I saw it. I sympathized with Alan, but Dysart’s crisis tore me up and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks afterward. (For years I wanted to play Dysart in that show.) Gifford can speak for himself and say what he felt and thought, but he can’t attribute his notions to anyone else. If he conducted a survey, then he must say so; otherwise, he’s assuming knowledge he can’t have.

In addition to that rhetorical fault, Gifford never uses the characters’ names in his column. It’s a way of diminishing them so that they don’t take on the dimensions of individuals: they have no names, so they can’t be people. Therefore we can’t attribute to them human characteristics and personalities. If they take on human dimensions, as Shaffer clearly intended—that’s what playwrights do—then we can see them as individuals not as whole classes of people. Dr. Dysart is one man, one doctor—not all psychiatrists or, worse, psychiatry the profession. Gifford goes further, though. He uses many loaded words, like “murky,” “spurious,” “pretension,” “Faustian,” and “pernicious,” to poison the well. He chooses words to describe Alan and Dysart that denigrate them, words Shaffer doesn’t use in the play. He calls Alan a “yokel,” “half-illiterate,” and a “stable boy”—all ways of dismissing him so we won’t empathize with him. The fact that Alan doesn’t read—though it’s not necessarily true that he can’t—and that he does work part time in a stable doesn’t alter the reality that this is diction intended to demean Alan so we won’t care about him as Dysart is supposed to have.

Gifford also writes of Alan’s “creativity,” styling the boy as an artist and calling his life a work of art, though that’s not how Shaffer characterizes his character. Though the dramatist has Dysart speak of the boy’s passion, Gifford seems to want to be sure we see the play’s psychiatrist as aggrandizing Alan, puffing up his significance, portraying him as a martyr. Shaffer doesn’t do that: he presents Alan as a boy trying to recapture his freedom to “gallop,” to live life with fervor. Here, Gifford writes of Alan’s “perverse passion for horses,” but it’s not his feelings for horses that Dysart envies; it’s the boy’s passion for living. And it’s not Alan’s passion that’s at the center of Equus; it’s Dysart’s. Gifford sets Alan up as a straw man so he can knock him down and appear to weaken Shaffer’s point. These tactics are why I said that Gifford’s objections are harder to dispute than Smith’s: she’s far more honest in her statements than Gifford is. Then, she’s a reporter—he’s a headshrinker. And he has the temerity to object to Shaffer’s having Dysart confess to using tricks!

Art and life aren’t supposed to be the same. Realism, the art style that is still the form of most Western theater, isn’t reality. Art may reflect life or be informed by reality, but it isn’t a replication of real life. Hell, if it were, we wouldn’t need artists at all. We’d only need a bunch of photocopiers and those Star Trek-type replicators and holodecks. Technicians would do the job. The result wouldn’t be art, of course, it’d be programming. Now, there are a lot of things about which someone can complain and criticize in a piece of art, including that it’s factually incorrect (though that one may be misguided, too, as Gifford’s objections to Equus suggest—though I don’t advocate outright lying, of course) or that the reality on which it comments isn’t worth the effort, or that it’s ineffective and meaningless, and so on. But I reject that it’s even legitimate to criticize an artwork because it’s not like reality. As if to make my point for me, Gabe McKinley, author of CQ/CX (see my report on ROT, 9 March), a fact-based play that recently ran at the Atlantic Theater Company, stated: “It’s important to remember that as a playwright, sometimes getting away from the facts, you actually get closer to the truth. . . . It’s not a historical document; it’s a play.” Playwright Logan didn’t want to recreate Rothko’s studio or the life that went on in it. He had something he wanted to say about relationships—specifically father-son relationships—and he found the character of Mark Rothko as he gleaned it, both from the painter’s art and from his biography, an apt vehicle through which to make his point. Shaffer wasn’t writing about the practice of psychiatry but the dilemma faced by one man when confronted by one situation. As in Amadeus, Shaffer’s looking at a crisis of the soul, a professional doubt so deep that it effects one person’s very being. The writers’ scripts aren’t reality—but they’re informed by reality and they make comments on reality. Reality as the playwrights see it and understand it—but that’s why they’re artists, not reporters or documentarists. There’s a difference, hard to define perhaps, between photography that’s intended to record and preserve and photography that’s art.

Maybe there’s an insoluble difficulty when practitioners in a field see plays about their profession. Not only do they know too much, sort of like jurors with special knowledge not shared by their fellow panelists, but they may suffer from tunnel vision. They may see the play as about the profession, and lose sight of the fact that the playwright is writing about the people. When I see plays (or movies and TV shows) about theater and acting, I spot all the inaccuracies and misrepresentations—a friend and I have been sharing some objections about the current series Smash which is about actors, singers, dancers, directors, producers, writers, and composers—but of course, those are seldom the point of the drama. Plays like The Royal Family, Light Up the Sky, Noises Off, A Life in the Theater, or The Dresser aren’t really about theater: they’re about the characters, their conflicts, and their interrelationships. Red isn’t about painting and Equus isn’t about psychotherapy. Since I think both plays are magnificent theater pieces, I can’t help but feel that Roberta Smith and Sanford Gifford, and others like them, have missed something wonderful because they misdirected their focus.

Reading Smith’s and Gifford’s columns, I couldn’t help wonder what someone with a reality fetish must make of Shakespeare’s plays. Even if you overlook 20th- and 21st-century knowledge and just focus on what folks in 16th- and 17th-century England would have known, his plays are chock full of breaches of reality. The Bard fudged a lot of what were even then known as facts to make dramatic points. The great Realist playwright, Henrik Ibsen, has all kinds of untruths in his plays. He believed, for instance, that moral transgressions will have physical repercussions—a bad life will give you cancer, say. He also believed that a child can inherit his father’s syphilis. No? Well, that dispenses with Doll House, Ghosts, and The Master Builder. Smith admits to having been “an art critic for longer than she cares to recall who before that held various small-time jobs around the art world.” How would she react, I wonder, if some dancer or choreographer wrote a criticism of one of Degas's paintings because it wasn't an accurate portrayal of a dance studio or a ballet class? Ridiculous! It's art, I’d imagine she’d cry, not real life! Precisely. QED.

Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism

Michael Chekhov, the nephew of the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, met Konstantin Stanislavsky, the famous acting theorist, teacher, and director, in St. Petersburg in 1911. Chekhov, an aspiring actor, was just twenty, but he had already been studying acting for four years. Introduced to Stanislavsky by Olga Knipper-Chekhova, the playwright’s widow, the young Chekhov auditioned for the man who had founded the Moscow Art Theater, and was accepted as a member. In 1912, he joined the First MAT Studio where Stanislavsky personally taught the young actor the basics of his System. By 1924, the First Studio had become the Second Moscow Art Theater with Chekhov as the direc­tor. In only a dozen years, Michael Chekhov had risen from obscurity to a position almost in competition with the man who started the whole business.

Though Chekhov started as a disciple of the Stanislavsky System, he soon found himself rejecting some of his teacher’s principles. By the time he became head of the the Second MAT, he had developed the base of the Technique which he subsequently taught at the Chekhov Theatre Studio in England and the United States and which he outlined in his 1953 book, To The Actor.

(To distinguish between the two men’s theories and principles, I’ll refer to Stanislavsky’s as the System and Chekhov’s as the Technique. This appears to be the way they, themselves, referred to their work. The famous Method, it must be pointed out, is not Stanislavsky’s at all, but the American version of his ideas as translated in the 1930s by former members of the Group Theatre: Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, Harold Clurman, and, most particularly, Lee Strasberg. It was the last who popularized the Method at the Actors’ Studio in the ‘40s and ‘50s.)

The areas in which the two men differ are interesting not only in themselves, but as a comment on the theatrical worlds they inhabited, for although Stanislavsky was less than thirty years older than Chekhov, much had changed on the European stage during a very short time.

Stanislavsky began his search for a System of actor training in the late nineteenth century. An actor and director, he became dissatisfied with the undisciplined, narcissistic performances he saw on the stages of Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1897, Stanislavsky met with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, one of Russia’s most famous directors and playwrights, and laid the foundations for the Moscow Art Theater. In his autobiography, My Life in Art, Stanislavsky gives an idea what he disliked about his contemporary theater:

“Take actor A,” we examined each other. “Do you consider him talented?”
“To a high degree.”
“Will you take him into the troupe?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because he has adapted himself to his career, his talents to the demands of the public, his character to the caprices of the manager, and all of himself to theatrical cheapness. A man who is so poisoned cannot be cured.”
“And what will you say about actress B?”
“She is a good actress, but not for us.”
“Why?”
“She does not love art, but herself in art.”
“And actress C?”
“She won’t do. She is incurably given to hokum.”
“What about actor D?”
“We must pay a great deal of attention to him.”
“Why?”
“He has ideals for which he is fighting. He is not at peace with present conditions. He is a man of his ideals.”

The MAT opened its first production, Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor, in October 1898, and Stanislavsky began his search to bring “inner truth to the art of the stage” which led to the development of his famous System. He started experimenting with the newly discovered science of psychology as a basis for stage truth. Though he never taught a specific style of performance, developing his System to train actors to work truthfully in whatever style the role, play, and production demands, he was personally most comfortable with Naturalism. In the conclusion of his autobiography, Stanislavsky writes,

Nature cannot be outwitted. Its true organic creativeness cannot be supplanted either by poverty-stricken or luxurious theatricality. A time will come when the evolution of art shall have completed its predestined circle and nature itself will teach us methods and technique for the interpretation of the sharpness of the new life.

In this evolutionary process of art we can help the new generation, for much that we have experienced is being repeated at present, and only differs in name from what we knew. The grotesque, synthesis, generalization, are not new phenomena in art; in one or another form they have lived always, at all times, among all innovators and revolutionists. . . . Did not the radical movement of the past which was called impressionism move art along the very same path which has brought it to futurism and the absolute? The forms and names are new, but the nature of evolution and its chief laws are the same.

Obviously, Stanislavsky had a strong prejudice against anything non-realistic, as his pejoration of Impressionism, one of the most active and creative movements in Western art, clearly indicates.

In 1906, after becoming disappointed with his own recent performances, Stanislavsky took a vacation in Finland. Relaxing on a cliff overlooking the sea, he tried to discover why he had become so lifeless on stage. He determined that he had lost the “creative mood,” but he didn’t know how to generate it at will. How, he wondered, could he “make this condition no longer a matter of mere accident . . .”? This was the germ of the System he devised to train an actor not only in stage craft, but in creativity. By 1911, when he founded the First Studio, the System had become accepted.

Stanislavsky’s System is founded on one major principle: “organic nature.” By this, Stanislavsky means “a psychic [i.e., psychological] technique which enables [the actor] to evoke a creative state of mind during which inspiration descends on him more easily.” The actor’s work on himself, however, isn’t the only place in the System for psychology. The other half of it, the actor’s work on his role, also requires this “psycho-technique.” In order to portray life on stage truthfully, an actor has to study the play and, in effect, psychoanalyze the character he’ll play. It’s Stanislavsky’s theory that all the character’s physical actions are manifestations of his psyche, and since an actor can only play physical actions, he must under­stand the character’s psyche. In order to give his theories a scientific basis, Stanislavsky actually studied psychology, par­ticularly the teachings of Ivan Pavlov concerning conditioned reflexes, and neurophysiology.

Chekhov, who was judged a brilliant actor by critics and peers alike, began to feel hemmed in by Stanislavsky’s System. His performances, beginning in 1921 with the part of Khlestakov in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, became less realistic and more complex. His portrayal of the title role in August Strindberg’s Erik XIV, directed in 1921 by Evgenii Vakhtangov, was a major triumph in which Chekhov portrayed a highly complex character in a non-representational way. Vakhtangov said of this production,

This is an experiment of the Studio in its search for theatrical forms. Up until now the Studio, true to Stanislavski’s teaching, has doggedly aimed at obtaining mastery of inner experience; now the Studio is entering a period of search for new forms. This is the first experiment.

The stylized nature of the production is easily seen from Nikolai Gorchakov’s description of the set:

The twisted columns of the palace, the spots of gold, the rust-spotted bronzes, gave an impression of Erik’s decline and impending death. There were huge columns of straight lines, broken off here and there; these were fragments not of a palace, but of a prison for Erik. There was a labyrinth of passages, stairways, and small platforms that created a distinct deception in relation to perspectives.

The Vakhtangov-Chekhov production of Erik XIV gave an indi­cation where the First Studio and its new director were heading. In 1924, the Second MAT presented Shakespeare’s Hamlet, directed by Chekhov who also played the leading role. The production was Expressionistic, and more like the work of the experimental director Vsevelod Meyerhold than that of Stanislavsky. Chekhov reinterpreted the play for an audience that had experienced revolution and war. He made large cuts in the script and trimmed the cast, focusing on what he saw as Hamlet’s examination of good and evil in human nature.

The time was shifted to the Middle Ages, with a set that was “very stylized, almost nightmarishly phantasmagorical. Both lighting and music . . . were used to create its mystical atmos­phere.” The stylized costumes were Constructivistic and “[e]xag­gerated, mask-like make-up emphasized the spiritual hollowness of the court’s world, which was further underscored by the court­iers’ mincing gaits and artificial voices . . . .” This pro­duction marked a nearly complete artistic break between Chekhov and Stanislavsky, whose System Chekhov felt led inevitably to Naturalism. That genre, Chekhov writes, “is not art, for the artist can add nothing of his own to the naturalistic ‘work of art’ since his task is limited to knowing how to copy ‘nature’ more or less accurately.” Three years later, he left the Soviet Union for good.

Many people saw the Hamlet production as an allegory for Chekhov’s own life. Having gone through a terrible period of emotional and psychological troubles requiring psychiatry and hypnosis, he turned to Eastern philosophy for comfort. In 1922, he began studying the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, a German “spiritual scientist.” Steiner’s theories of Anthroposophy, which posits that man has an innate spiritual nature operating independently of the will and the senses, and Eurythmy, “the science of visible speech,” found their way into Chekhov’s workshops. As a result of this influence, much of Chekhov’s Technique has a distinct mystical cachet.

In general, then, the two men differed in both form and philosophy, though, in a very real sense, their goals remained the same. Both aimed for truth on stage and a dedicated, disci­plined company of well-trained actors. Stanislavsky, however, relied on psychology and science as the prime resources for gaining control over the work. He also applied his practices most avidly to Realistic and Naturalistic plays, not being happy with the MAT’s attempts at Symbolism or Expressionism. Chekhov, on the other hand, taught his students to rely first on imagina­tion and inspiration long before any analysis of their roles, and he encouraged non-realistic, imagistic performances. Taking Steiner’s words as a credo, Chekhov notes in To the Actor, “Not that which is inspires the creation, but that which may be; not the actual, but the possible.”

(It’s important to emphasize that the matter of style wasn’t actually part of the two men’s theories. Stanislavsky may not have liked non-Realistic material, but his System can prepare actors for roles in non-Realistic plays and guide their work in rehearsal. I’ve written an extensive essay, "The Natyasastra and Stanislavsky: Points of Contact" (Theatre Studies [1991]), which I believe proves that the System itself isn’t innately Realistic-Naturalistic. The converse is certainly true of Chekhov’s Technique, which is used by a number of actors in realistic roles. Chekhov, himself, had a successful Hollywood film career during which he performed quite realistically.)

We’ve already seen briefly that while Stanislavsky empha­sizes that an actor must analyze his role in order to justify his behavior on stage, Chekhov stresses imagination. In order to permit his imagination to function fully, the actor must find the credulity and naïveté of a child or a primitive man. In pre­paring a role, Stanislavsky’s System dictates that the actor first study the script to understand “its fundamentals, its essence, its literary merit.” The second step for this actor is to analyze the part before he goes on to the external circum­stances and then the inner circumstances of the character. Only after all that study’s accomplished does the Stanislavsky actor move on to the the “Emotional Experience,” which includes the creative and imaginative work on the role.

Chekhov’s Technique mandates a different path. The actor’s first obligation is to allow her imagination to draw a picture of the character. Instead of seeing herself as the character, as the Stanislavsky actor should do, she must conjure up an image of the character. The second step in Chekhov’s Technique is inspi­ration, which occurs when the image has disappeared, but remains “somewhere” working within the actor. Stanislavsky would never trust such vague tactics, which leave the psychological analysis until well after the imaginary work’s begun.

Curiously, despite his stress on the ephemeral imagination, it’s Chekhov who puts the greater stress on physical characteri­zation. In Stanislavsky’s view, the character’s physical life develops slowly as the actor works on his part, becoming more specific as the actor learns the character’s motivations and objectives. For the Chekhov actor, physical characterization is developed almost right away, based on a choice made from inspiration rather than analysis.

Chekhov developed a theory concerning a character’s center, the locus of all her movements and energy. By selecting a center for the character that’s different from her own, the actor immediately begins to create a physical character who has her own way of moving, sitting, waving, drinking, and so on. According to the Technique, this choice is made early in rehearsal—even before the first day. It may change as the work progresses, but the actor starts with some choice.

Another item of difference between the Stanislavsky and Chekhov approaches is “Affective Memory,” which is sometimes called “Emotional Memory.” This is the technique of the System by which an actor summons up a response to an imaginary situation by remembering a similar one from his real past. By extension, this is the same as Uta Hagen’s “Substitution,” which can also be used for people, objects, and places. Chekhov felt that this was dangerous for the actor. “If we take the real image of our real [dying] grandfather,” he says to a student asking about the impulse to cry, “it becomes too personal in the wrong sense. You will get certain feelings, perhaps strong ones, but they will be of a different kind than we are aiming at in our work . . . .”

Chekhov’s alternative is what he calls the “Archetype.” By creating the image of the archetypal grandfather—her image of all grandfathers—the actor can draw on that image instead of a personal one. The availability of an Archetype for an actor depends entirely on the flexibility of her daily emotional life. She must have been open to experiencing all the grandfathers she ever met, read about, or heard about, storing up the images in her imagination to be called upon later. Never, in the Technique, does the actor use a real person or event to create an emotional reaction. Stanislavsky would most likely deem this device far too unreliable, despite the dangers inherent in Substitution.

There are several more specific differences in the way a Stanislavsky actor prepares a role and the way a Chekhov actor does, but, in a sense, the real difference is that Chekhov adapted the System to a more intuitive and inspirational approach. He actually kept most of the fundamentals of his old teacher’s program, reinterpreting some of the points and opening it up to less rigid application. He did, however, add a few devices that make his Technique more than just a restatement of the System. The most interesting by far, and the most telling in terms of Chekhov’s own life, is the Psychological Gesture. It’s very closely related to the idea of the Archetype and to Steiner’s Eurythmy. Chekhov’s own description of the PG, as it’s usually called, states,

Imagine that you are going to play a character which . . . has a strong and unbending will, is possessed by dominating, despotic desires, and is filled with hatred and disgust.

You look for a suitable over-all gesture which can express all this in the character, and perhaps after a few attempts you find it . . . .

It is strong and well shaped. When repeated several times it will tend to strengthen your will. The direction of each limb, the final position of the whole body as well as the inclination of the head are such that they are bound to call up a definite desire for dominating and despotic conduct. The qualities which fill and permeate each muscle of the entire body, will provoke within you feelings of hatred and disgust. Thus, through the gesture, you penetrate and stimulate the depths of your own psychology.

The gesture is seldom actually performed on stage, though it may be. It’s merely an archetypal physicalization that serves as a metaphor for the character as the actor sees her. It is, of course, a secret for the actor; neither her fellow actors, the director, nor the audience are aware of it, but they can sense that something’s working within the character that isn’t on the surface. According to Chekhov, however, a gesture isn’t just a movement of the body. Objects, feelings, and other elements are also gestures in his terms, opening up the possibilities of this device infinitely.

Taken together, Stanislavsky’s System and Chekhov’s Technique can offer an actor a rich variety of artistic strategies which can suit most needs in any production style. The System’s preference for psychological Realism is possibly a function of the nineteenth-century interest in depicting real life in literature and on the stage. By the time Chekhov reached maturity, in the early decades of this century, movements such as Symbolism, Constructivism, and Expressionism had made a mark in the artistic community of Europe. Realism and Naturalism had become the conservative style of the mainstream, while more experimental styles were the preference of the younger, more daring artists. Both programs can work for either camp; you simply take your choice: Realism or un-Realism.

[A version of this article was published in The Players’ Journal (2008). I’ve also drawn on this same material in articles I’ve published on ROT before; see “Psychological Gesture & Leading Center,” 27 October 2009, and “An Actor’s Homework, Part 2,” 22 April 2010.]