“Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?”

by Robert Brustein

[Twenty-four years ago, I read this column by Robert Brustein, an almost-legendary man of the theater for my generation. I’ve found it endlessly provocative and useful and I’ve drawn on it many, many times in the ensuing years. I’ve published a commentary on classic theater based on Brustein’s analysis (see “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage,” ROT, 18 September 2009); now I find it appropriate to republish Brustein’s original essay, which appeared in the New York Times on 6 November 1988 (sec. 2 ["Arts and Leisure"]: 5, 16).]

The most controversial issue in the theater today continues to be the reinterpretation or “deconstruction” of celebrated classical plays. There is no theatrical activity that more inflames purist sensibilities in criticism and the academy—nothing that stimulates as many caustic generalizations about the debasements of modern culture. Perhaps because “deconstruction” as an assonant noun if not as a method, is so perilously close to “destruction” and “desecra­tion,” the standard purist posture is like that of Switzers before the gates of the Vatican, defending sacred texts against the barbarians. The paradox is that both sides are really devoted to the same esthetic purpose, which is the deeper penetration of significant dramatic literature. The difference is in the attitude. Is classical reinterpretation a reinforcing or a defiling act—a benign or a malignant development in the history of modern theater?

My own position is a qualified vote of support for conceptual directing. I have long be­lieved that if dramatic classics are not seen with fresh eyes they grow fossilized—candidates for taxidermy. Even the most harebrained textual reworking may open up new corridors into a play, while the more “faithful” version is often a listless recycling of stilted conventions. That is why I continue to echo Artaud’s call for “No More Masterpieces”—great plays can be “desecrated” by excessive piety as much as by excessive irreverence. Although I champion a radical auteurism in directing, however, not all examples of this process have the same integrity of purpose. One can support the idea of classical reinterpretation without defending all its forms or ignoring the fact that what passes for originality is sometimes merely another kind of ego-tripping.

Let me refine my position by distinguish­ing between two common methods of reworking the classics—one that depends largely on external physical changes and another that changes our whole notion of the play. It is a distinction that can be illustrated through analogies with figures of speech—the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor. Directors who are fond of similes assume that because a play’s action is like something from a later period, its environment can be changed accordingly. Directors with a feeling for metaphor are more interested in generating provocative theatrical images—visually expressed through physical production, histrionically through character and relationships—that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.

Simile directing is a prose technique. Its in­novations are basically analogical—provid­ing at best a platform for ideas, at worst an occasion for pranks. Metaphorical directing attempts to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equiv­alent—a process considerably more radical in its interpretive risks, since the directo­r “authors” the production much as the au­thor writes the text. Naturally, this process is controversial: critics—though somewhat more tolerant of simile directors, who only change the period—often accuse metaphorical directors of arrogance and distortion. Nevertheless, it is the metaphorical approach, I believe, that has the greater potential for rediscovering the original impulses and energies of the material. Which is not to say that all simile directing is without value, or that metaphorical directing doesn’t have its meretricious side.

The simile approach is the more familiar, at least to New Yorkers, because it is often used by visiting British companies and over the years in Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare productions. But the tradition extends back at least as far as the 30’s. Orson Welles’s celebrated “Julius Caesar” was an early exam­ple, being the transformation of Shakespeare’s tragedy of assassination and retribution into an indictment of totalitarianism. Welles accomplished this by updating the text—always the hallmark of simile theater—exchanging Roman togas for Italian black shirts and turning Caesar into a Fascist leader. Tyrone Guthrie was also a proponent of simile directing long before he inaugurated the Guthrie Theater with a Victorian “Hamlet.” I still have vivid memories of his Old Vic production of “Troilus and Cressida,” set in the American Civil War with Helen reinterpreted as a seductive torch singer and Thersites as a Brady-like photographer of the battlefield. The Old Vic also staged an updated “Much Ado About Nothing” (directed by Franco Zefferilli), complete with peanut vendors, carabinieri and Italian accents, while the R.S.C. and the National Theater produced a variety of modernized classics, including “Taming of the Shrew” on motorcycles. Perhaps the most consistent updating was done at the now defunct American Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut: a “Much Ado” set in Spanish Texas during the time of the Alamo, a “Measure for Measure” in 19th-century Vienna, and a “Twelfth Night” in Brighton at the time of Horatio Hornblower.

All these productions were known inside the trade as “jollying Shakespeare up,” a practice much admired by directors who (overdosed on the Bard) streamlined their assignments with decorative environments as an antidote to creative fatigue. But it was rarely more than a novelty of surfaces, skin-deep, and marred by traces of voguishness; critics were right to carp. Recently, A. J. Antoon staged an attractive example of the genre with a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the New York Public Theater set in the Bahia province of Brazil and featuring priests and priestesses of the Umbanda cult. And this summer Gerald Freedman jollied up the much jollied-up “Much Ado About Nothing” in Central Park by updating it to the Napoleonic wars. Freedman’s “Much Ado” had the advantage of a fine cast, including Kevin Kline and Blythe Danner as a ripening Benedick and Beatrice; but its novel setting lent nothing especially original to the interpretation, apart from a few cannon blasts, Empire clothes, and Kline’s grenadier mustaches.

Directors found operas as convenient to modernize as plays. Peter Sellars, for example, has often used the metaphorical approach in his theater work, but his productions of Handel and Mozart were clear-cut examples of simile directing. Setting “Orlando” in Cape Canaveral and “Julius Caesar” near the Nile Hilton, transporting “Cosi Fan Tutte” to a modern diner (his trump Tower “Marriage of Figaro” I didn’t see), Sellars managed to coat the original libretti with a visual varnish that created more flash than clarity. Sellars’s operatic work is usually spirited and impish, but what he tends to substitute for any deep probing of the material is technical dazzle and anachronistic high jinks—inventions that distract attention from the composer and librettist while attracting it to the director. (Sellars’s work with contemporary opera—“Nixon in China,” for example—is, by contrast, considerably more forthright and simple).

Updating is a shorthand way of showing how the material of a classical play has topical meaning for contemporary audiences. And when directors use this approach for thematic rather than ornamental purposes, it can be valuable and illuminating. But simile productions are rarely as powerful as those that try to capture the imaginative life of a classic through radical leaps into its hidden, sometimes invisible, depths. And while updating is sometimes a component of metaphorical theater, it is rarely the basic device. It may be that what I am trying to describe is a difference in national temperament. Whereas simile theater originally comes from England, metaphorical directing—which originated with the Russian Meyerhold—is usually associated with continental Europe. It is true that the English-born Peter Brook devised at least two fine examples of metaphorical theater with his Beckettian “King Lear” and his circus-oriented “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But Brook’s chief influences in those days were Brecht, Beckett and Artaud, and his subsequent work was largely prepared in Paris. Brecht himself, though celebrated as playwright, was also a metaphorical auteur director as daring as any who today raises purist hackles. His work is virtually a pastiche of plundered literature (“In literature as in life,” he admitted, “I do not recognize the concept of private property”). These thefts, paradoxically, were authorized by Shakespeare, a writer also notable less for originality of plot than of conception. And just as “Hamlet” was a reworking of an earlier play, probably by Kyd, so the great bulk of Brecht’s dramas were conceptual revisions of classical material—“The Threepenny Opera,” to take just the most famous example, being an adaptation of John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera.”

Brecht revised these plays in order to make them conform to a political purpose: he even began an adaptation of “Coriolanus” in which the emphasis was shifted from a story of human fallibility to a study of the economic problems caused by the price of corn. The completed “Coriolan” at the Berliner Ensemble was a brilliant example of metaphorical theater where Marcius and Audifidus stalked each other like Kabuki warriors and Menenius visibly aged before our eyes.

Partly under the influence of Brecht, partly under the influence of Meyerhold, a horde of metaphorical directors soon arose in Rumania—among them Liviu Ciulei and Andrei Serban (both of whom later had associations with my own theater) and Lucian Pintilie. Each of these men turned to the great classical tradition in their efforts to reinvent the modern theater, each doing much of his work in the United States. Ciulei’s reworking of Shakespeare, Buechner, Ibsen and Wedekind—Serban’s of the Greeks, Molière, Beaumarchais, Gozzi, Chekhov and Brecht—Pintilie’s of Molière, lbsen and Chekhov—are among the most powerful and controversial classical productions of our time. And it is possible to argue that, for all their liberties with texts and deviations from received notions, they come closest to the spiritual core of the plays.

Lucian Pintilie’s recent “Cherry Orchard” at the Arena Stage in Washington, for example, dispensed entirely with orthodox Stanislavski furniture and canvas flats, taking place in an environment that brought this familiar play to vibrant new life. The design was basically a bare, painted floor and ramps, with an armoire at one corner that served as bookcase, storage area and crèche. In the second act, sheaves of golden wheat appeared through the floor, presided over by an ominous scarecrow. After the family’s departure in the final scene, as stage tremors rattled the glass of Lopahin’s champagne, the ghost of Ranevsky’s child Grisha materialized to hover over the house as a rebuke to his mother’s irresponsibility. At Firs’s death, the glass rattled more violently, and wheat rose again to gather his body into the artifice of eternity. Thus the metaphysical quality that is always implicit in Chekhov’s work became tangible and manifest through spiritual presences.

Rumanian productions invariably impress us with vivid memories of similar tableaux: Serban’s “Cherry Orchard” with its circular images of confusion and disorder, and his maze-like “Uncle Vanya” with its sense of mechanization and imprisonment; Ciulei’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with its themes of sexual strife and contention emotionally reinforced by an angry Chinese-red surround; Pintilie’s “Wild Duck” with its climactic scene of eggs falling from the loft above, followed by Hedwig’s body smashing to the floor—each provided suggestive visual stimulations in order to generate strong new visions of the play.

Not all metaphorical productions offer equal satisfactions. Lee Breuer’s rendering of Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus”—located in a pentacostal black church and retitled “The Gospel at Colonus” (perhaps more a simile than a metaphor)—featured some rousing gospel music by Bob Telson but vitiated the power of the original by adapting a Greek dramatic myth to Christian sacraments and Afro-American rituals. Similarly, Peter Brooks’s [sic] celebrated production of “The Cherry Orchard” done last season at Brooklyn’s beautiful Majestic Theater was the first Chekhov without walls, being located in an abstract space furnished with lovely Persian carpets, bleached and aged is if by Clorox. But the atmosphere was too penumbral, the interpretation too denatured, to capture Checkhov’s [sic] unheard music, and the acting (with notable exceptions—Erland Josephson’s Gaev, Roberts Blossom’s Firs, Linda Hunt’s Charlotta) alternated between British staginess and American clumsiness. In fact, if there is a generic weakness in metaphorical production, it is usually found in the acting performances, which are sometimes neglected in the directorial concern with visual elements.

For me, the most brilliant recent expression of metaphorical reinterpretation was Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish-language “Hamlet” during its brief run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this summer. Rethinking every character, every scene, every moment of the text Bergman managed to invent not just a fresh approach to the title role reflecting the current style of a generation (the actor-oriented pattern of English Hamlets), but rather a comprehensive and original reading of the entire work that prophesied the nightmare of the future. Performed on a bare stage decorated only with an arc of lights, the action followed the disintegration of a completely depraved, in which even Hamlet— sulky, sullen, entirely self-absorbed—was part of the brutalization process. Only Ophelia preserved her innocence. A witness to every vicious action, including Hamlet’s premeditated murder of her father, she fell into a degenerative psychosis—mutilating her hair with a dangerous pair shears and distributing heavy iron nails as if they were flowers. She ultimately appeared as an angelic presence at her own funeral.

The final scene, a stunning coup de théâtre, superimposed a simile coda on an essentially metaphorical conception. Up to that point, the action had occurred in an unknown European country during an indeterminate period. With the entrance of Fortinbras, accompanied by the earsplitting sounds of rock music from a ghetto blaster, the setting became site specific. Outfitted as a Central American military leader in beret and jackboots, and leading soldiers wearing Korean riot helmets and brandishing machine guns, Fortinbras ordered his men to throw all the stage corpses into a pit and take Horatio off and shoot him. His speech over Hamlet’s body—lying on a crude platform—became a photo opportunity in front of Kleig lights, a microphone, a hand-held video camera. The final line of the play—“Go bid the soldiers shoot”—was punctuated by deafening machine gun blasts.

It was a scene of ferocious intensity that penetrated the audience’s soul like a stab wound. It also managed to reinvent the meaning of catharsis for our time. It is true that Bergman’s “Hamlet” evoked more terror than pity, but then so does our century. By reconceiving Shakespeare’s tragedy as a bleak prophecy of the totalitarian future, Bergman managed to shake his audience to its very being while preserving the basic outline of the play.

One cannot argue that such interpolations are faithful to Shakespeare’s original intentions—and it is glib to use the familiar defense that we don’t have the playwright’s telephone number. Still, charges of “desecration” are meaningful only if you subscribe to the idea of a “definitive” production. I don’t. The specialness of theater—alas, the poignance of the theater, too—is its impermanence. Culture is a series of echoes and responses, and a “desecrated” classical text can always be reproduced again on stage in versions closer to the purist’s heart. Texts develop fullness of being only through continuing intervention of collective minds. They are not frozen in time but rather subject to discovery, and each new production generates others in response. It is the proper role of theater to let us look at plays through a variety of perspectives rather than in a single authorized form. It is also the function of criticism. Both act as prisms through which to view the limitless facets of great works of art.

Obviously, metaphorical reinterpretation is a process more appropri­ate for classics than for new plays, and living playwrights—Beckett, for example, who was outraged when Jo­Anne Akalaitis set his “Endgame” in an abandoned subway station—are often resentful of the director’s grow­ing privileges. Still, it was a play­wright, Luigi Pirandello, who put the matter best: “The Theater is not archeology,” he wrote. “Unwilling­ness to take up old works, to modern­ize and streamline them for fresh production, betrays indifference, not praiseworthy caution. The Theater welcomes such modernization and has profited by it throughout the ages when it was most alive.” If our own theater is once again showing signs of life, it is partly because of such bold investigation and daring interpretation.

[Robert Brustein was the founding artistic director of the American Repertory Theater in Cam­bridge, Massachusetts, where he remains Creative Consultant, and the Yale Repertory Theatre; he is the long-time drama critic of the New Republic. His most recent books are The Tainted Muse (2009), Millennial Stages (2006), Letters to a Young Actor (2005), and The Siege of the Arts (2001).]

"Uninhabitable Country: 'Five by Tenn'"

[Tennessee Williams’s 100th birthday will be this 26 March, and among the many observances, Pace University Drama will present Three From Tennessee at La MaMa E.T.C., 4-6 March. One of the one-acts in on the bill is And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, “the first known Tennessee Williams play set in the gay world,” which was also in the repertoire seven years ago when I reviewed the opening production of the Kennedy Center’s season-long celebration of Williams, “Tennessee Williams Explored” (April-July 2004). Five by Tenn was produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company; the rest of “Tennessee Williams Explored,” which included productions of A Streetcar Named Desire (8-31 May), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (12 June-4 July), The Glass Menagerie (17 July-8 August), and A Distant Country Called Youth, a one-man performance based on some of Williams’s early letters (11-13 June), was a production of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. (By coincidence, the letters in Distant Country are drawn from The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, a publication on which I assisted the editors.) Parallel to these events, but not formally part of “Tennessee Williams Explored,” the Washington National Opera presented the East Coast premiere of André Previn and Philip Littell’s opera adaptation of Streetcar (15 May-2 June). (The Arena Stage also produced Orpheus Descending at the Kreeger Theatre from 14 May through 27 June independently of the Kennedy Center celebration.) My review, solicited by Philip C. Kolin, review editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review (Robert Bray, editor), appeared in the 2004 issue (no. 7) of TWAR, on line at http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2004/r1kramer.htm. I’m republishing it below, with some emendations from another account, to coincide with Pace Drama’s presentation at La MaMa, a fitting venue since, as David Crespy, author of Off-Off-Broadway Explosion, told me “Williams was very, very important to the off-off-Broadway scene . . . . In many ways, I think he was the inspiration for off-off-Broadway.” La MaMa’s first production in 1962 was an adaptation of Williams’s short story “One Arm.”

[The other plays in the Pace Drama presentation are The Remarkable Rooming-house of Mme. Le Monde and The Pink Bedroom. Curious readers can find an essay, “The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde:Tennessee Williams's Little Shop of Comic Horrors” by Philip C. Kolin, a Williams authority, on line at http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2001/3kolin.htm, the same publication that ran my review three years later.]

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Five by Tenn

An evening of one-act plays by Tennessee Williams (with additional material compiled by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel); directed by Michael Kahn; sets by Andrew Jackness; lighting by Howell Binkley; costumes by Catherine Zuber; sound by Martin Desjardins; music composed by Adam Wernick. Produced by The Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, D.C., Michael Kahn, artistic director. Presented as part of “Tennessee Williams Explored” at the Terrace Theatre, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., Michael M. Kaiser, president.

WITH: Edward Boroevich, Kathleen Chalfant, Joshua Drew, Cameron Folmar, John Joseph Gallagher, Hunter Gilmore, Jeremy Lawrence, Brian McMonagle, Janet Patton, Thomas Jay Ryan, Carrie Specksgoor, Joan van Ark, Myk Watford

For the opening production of “Tennessee Williams Explored,” the Kennedy Center’s celebration of the man director Michael Kahn calls “the great writer in American literature,” Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre presented Five by Tenn, a selection of Williams one-acts (21 April-9 May 2004, Terrace Theater). Four of the five plays had never been previously staged and three have not been published; three—These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch, Escape, And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens . . .—were recently rediscovered by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel in archives at UCLA and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Williams had left the fourth “new” play, The Municipal Abattoir, at the home of Lee Hoiby, composer of 1971’s Summer and Smoke opera, who sent it to Kahn. The last play on the bill, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, has been staged several times, including on PBS (NET at the time) as part of a double Williams bill called Dragon Country (1970) and once, also directed by Kahn, for the Acting Company’s Ten From Tennessee (1986).

Kahn staged the plays more or less in order of composition, stitching them together with an avatar of Williams called The Writer (Jeremy Lawrence) who introduced the plays (and covered the scene changes) with patter drawn from Williams’s Memoirs and stage directions from the scripts. Even though several of the plays are very short, five together make a full evening—three hours—and this device only attenuated it without really adding anything. (At his first appearance, for instance, The Writer said, “A play only exists on a stage”—something of a truism.) Not that Lawrence did a bad job—he has his own one-man Williams performance—though he seemed overly effeminate, as if he were channeling Truman Capote more than Williams. Perhaps Kahn needed a connective device because the plays’ styles and themes are so different; I just wish he had thought of something simpler—and quicker.

Many of Williams’s recurrent focuses are apparent in the one-acts—“I have only one major theme for all my work,” wrote Williams to Audrey Wood, “which is the destructive impact of society on the sensitive, non-conformist individual”—but each deals with one or two topics in its own style—some quite unexpected. They do not so much tessellate as demonstrate the span of Williams’s theatrical interest and exploration over time. This is not to say that all are equally strong stage dramas. The slightest—and, perhaps, sweetest—is These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch (ca. 1941), set in a seedy, decaying New Orleans movie theater. Williams, of course, loved movies—he and his sister went often when he was little; it was obviously an escape, but he absorbed film techniques and they show up in all his plays in various ways. He also worked briefly for MGM, where he first started Glass Menagerie as a screenplay called The Gentleman Caller. (When the play was a huge success, MGM tried to sue Williams on the grounds that, as a studio employee when he began the script, they had an ownership claim to the property. The stalwart Audrey Wood fended off the suit in one of her many services to Williams during the years she represented him.) One of his early bread-and-butter jobs in New York was movie usher and in this tale of loss of innocence, a teenaged usher (Hunter Gilmore), newly hired, is charged with keeping stealthy patrons from sneaking up to the closed balcony for illicit purposes. We hear snippets of a Hollywood romance screening in the auditorium whenever the door is opened, and while the young usher and his older colleague (Thomas Jay Ryan) are drawn to it, a young woman (Carrie Specksgoor) manages to sneak up the stairs. When the manager (John Joseph Gallagher) detects the intrusion, the unpleasant, mean-spirited (and possibly dirty old) man berates the ushers. The older one, who is leaving for an adult job, declares that he “came into this place clean” but is “going out dirty” and, peeling off his uniform, ascends the stairs himself. Police retrieve him, but the first girl’s friend (Janet Patton) entices the teen up to the balcony. For Williams, the movies and their whole milieu—the films, the stars, the theaters, the employees—are both a source of romance, intrigue, fantasy, and delight—and of danger, experience, and rebellion. (I am reminded that Nancy Tischler's '61 book about Williams, the first real study of his work, was called Rebellious Puritan because Williams always used to say that his family background encompassed both the Puritan spirit—he was descended from a saint—and that of the Cavalier. This dual imagery often figures in his symbolism. All this is way too heavy for Stairs, of course, but nonetheless . . . .) However sweet, Stairs is hardly revelatory and the cast, though perfectly credible, are never required to take the characters beyond their one-dimensional foundations.

Escape (1930’s) is unmistakably a Glass Menagerie precursor in that it prefigures the relationship between Tom and Amanda. Suggesting that this is more than a coincidental treatment of the same theme is the fact that the ‘escape’ of the title refers, along with the sense of getting away, to the fire escape outside the family’s city apartment. We remember that Tom is discovered on the fire escape of the Wingfield apartment when Menagerie opens and that fire escapes figure symbolically in that play. In Escape, the son, Donald Fenway, wonders if anyone understands that some people yearn to “escape from anything except fire.” Mrs. Fenway, played with adamant lassitude by a virtually unrecognizable Joan van Ark, is fluttery and obsessive about her son’s behavior and future, but she has some reason to be: Donald is brooding and morose, clearly suffocating and depressed. The mother and son (Cameron Folmar) are vacationing in a shore cottage—the musician father and husband is playing the summer concert season—and Donald gazes ceaselessly out the large windows of the sun porch towards the lake. (There is almost no furniture on this glassed-in porch: just Mrs. Fenway’s wicker chaise, a small table upstage, and a pair of wicker chairs with a table between them; the most prominent element of Andrew Jackness’s set is the wing-to-wing expanse of window across the back, looking out at the lake.) I do not know if it was obvious to everyone that suicide is on Donald’s mind from the very beginning, or if it was only because I was reminded that Williams’s literary hero Hart Crane drowned himself in an act with which Williams was preoccupied. (He even left instructions, which were ignored, that his body should be buried at sea near where Crane is believed to have drowned. The title Summer and Smoke is a line from a Crane poem.) Donald also obsesses about time: as Mrs. Fenway says, “Time is one thing that nobody ever gets away from.” (The original title of the one-act version of Sweet Bird was The Enemy: Time, an expression of Williams's feeling about the passage of time and the inevitable decay that comes with age.) While Mrs. Fenway reclines in her chaise as if she is unable to get up, Donald goes out to swim. When he does not return to shore—the maid watches out the window, reporting to Mrs. Fenway—we understand that he has swum out to his death. Escape, for all its obviousness as an apprentice effort, has the hallmarks of the plays from Williams’s most successful period and was well played by the trio (which included Kathleen Chalfant as an Irish maid so ancient she can barely cross the porch).

The only two-parter on the bill, And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens . . . (1960’s) is also Williams’s only play to feature an actual drag queen. Candy Delaney (the extraordinarily versatile Folmar again) is almost 35 and her “husband” has just left her. The décor of Candy’s French Quarter apartment is faux-Japanese and she has a penchant for both kimonos and 1940’s Hollywood attire in the mode of Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn (delightfully designed by Catherine Zuber). In her loneliness and desperation—she declares that she has a “damaged heart”—she picks up rough straight men, and this time she has brought home Karl, a merchant sailor, and invites him to live with her. Over the weeks of their relationship, Karl (Myk Watford) becomes increasingly violent, finally beating Candy ferociously. The young gay couple upstairs finds her, and while the play closes on the trio together on Candy’s couch, they essentially joke about her near-fatal encounter as one rescuer quips, “Now let us sit upon a rumpled bed and tell sad stories of the deaths of queens.” Though Candy may be a take on Alma Winemiller or Blanche DuBois and Karl is surely an avatar of Stanley Kowalski, Williams confronts an aspect of gay life directly here so that Sad Stories, the only Williams play (according to his own declaration) that openly treats gay themes, does not line up directly with anything else he wrote. Of course, the themes of alienation and loneliness—which embrace Karl as well as Candy—are the central focus of Sad Stories as they are of all Williams’s plays and Folmar and Watford, though their relationship is predictable, create characters who are both believable and poignantly sympathetic. It is a mark of both Williams’s writing as well as Kahn’s directing and Watford’s acting that Karl, too, is someone with whom we empathize for, with all his homophobic brutality, he is as lost and needy as Candy.

The similarity of the name Candy Delaney with that of a real-life drag performer whom Williams knew is striking—Candy Darling. (It is further coincidental that Candy Delaney likes to prepare a special drink of absinthe and vodka which she calls a "violet." Violet is the name of the character Candy Darling played in Small Craft Warnings.) The problem occurs because the press materials date Sad Stories as having been composed in the '60s, before Williams did SCW and appeared on stage with Candy Darling. That makes all this quite an amazing coincidence, unless the date of the play is incorrect (which I suspect) or Williams knew Candy Darling years before he wrote—much less performed in—SCW. (Or Williams reworked Sad Stories after he met Candy Darling in SCW in '72.) I wrote to a Williams authority I know to ask if he knew anything bearing on this coincidence, but he didn't know anything for sure—though he suspected that Williams knew Darling earlier.

The most different in the program from Williams’s other known pieces, The Municipal Abattoir (late 1960’s-early 1970’s), the first piece after the intermission, is set in a totalitarian (and apparently Latin American—though that may have been Kahn’s contribution) country with overtones of 1984. The set, representing a city street, consists entirely of an up-stage wall with huge posters of a military officer inscribed with the single word “Viva.” A young man carrying a banner (Folmar) is on his way to a rally and his girlfriend (Specksgoor) pleads with him not to go. It becomes clear that he plans to assassinate the dictator and he sends the girl away. Before he can get on with his task, however, a man approaches to ask directions to the municipal abattoir. The boy pretends not to understand, suspecting an agent provocateur is trying to entrap him. It soon becomes evident, however, that the man (Ryan) is just a hapless clerk and he explains that he must report to the municipal abattoir: If you are late, he explains, it goes harder on you. Though no one spells it out, we understand that the municipal abattoir is the regime’s killing ground for political undesirables. (Here an element of an old Star Trek episode comes to mind: “A Taste of Armageddon” from 1967.) The boy tries to convince the man to resist his own death sentence, but the clerk, played with deadpan simplemindedness, has been so conditioned that he sees only that he must comply. Finally, the boy seems to persuade the clerk to take the banner and gun and perform the boy’s act of defiance before reporting to the municipal abattoir. After the boy leaves, however, the old man turns and asks another, unseen passerby for directions to the municipal abattoir—and the play ends. There is nothing subtle in Abattoir, but it is interesting that it so unmistakably takes as its models Absurdists like Eugène Ionesco—or maybe Vaclav Havel, just becoming known in the mid-1960s—and non-realistic polemicists like Brecht. There are no Brechtian devices on display, but his stamp seems all over the little play. If Sad Stories is Williams’s only openly gay play, Abattoir may be his most openly political one. (The Writer introduced this play by insisting, “Artist is synonymous with revolutionary.”)

The last play on the bill was I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow (first published in 1966), which, aside from the television airing, premiered on stage at the 1971 Maine Theater Arts Festival in Bar Harbor. (It has had several other stagings over the years—I saw it Off-Off-Broadway in 1975 and it has haunted me ever since—including, as noted, Kahn’s Acting Company production.) It is also the most substantial piece of theater in the program, denser and more thoughtful, less obvious and superficial. Also bearing the influence of the Absurdists, mostly Ionesco and, to my ear, Pinter (with undertones of Japanese Noh in Williams’s construction of the dialogue), Tomorrow deals with fear, aging, pain, and failure. A middle-aged woman and man (Chalfant and Ryan as simply One and Two, respectively) are in the living room of her home—she has let him in because he has no place else to go—where they have an elliptical conversation about fear and death. He is a teacher but has not met his classes in days because he can no longer talk to anyone but her. He lives in a seedy hotel—she calls it a “mortuary of a hotel”—where derelict women haunt the lobby; she will not go out—or allow anyone in except him. Both One and Two seldom complete a sentence, but there is a visceral connection between them that is not verbally expressed. (The Pinteresque aspects of Tomorrow reside in the silences at the ends of the uncompleted sentences and the ambiguous nature of the pair’s relationship and the circumstances of the “backstory.”) Even the setting is minimal: a fragmentary room—there are no walls in Jackness’s set—with a sofa and end table at one side, a card table and two chairs in the center, and a staircase at the left. There is another chair on the landing midway up the staircase for the woman has trouble—she is in unspecified pain but the condition is also psychological and emotional—going all the way up the stairs. We glean the theme of the play from bits of the dialogue (if you can really call it that) as the pair are reduced to writing down their thoughts: “I love you and I am afraid,” writes Two, and One offers, “Time . . . is sweeping us out of the way.” Kahn called Tomorrow a masterpiece; I do not know about that, but it is a gem. The “facts” of the story are mysterious (à la Pinter), but the struggle of the two is palpable even if we cannot describe what they are going through. Like the connection between One and Two, the connection between them and us is visceral. (An acting teacher of mine explained that one particular technique makes the audience sense that the character is “up to something” even if they do not know what that is. Tomorrow is like that—it is up to something, even if we cannot articulate it.) The acting was superb here—given especially that Chalfant and Ryan had to develop an intuitive connection to each other (or superlative technical mastery) much like the characters’. That's also Pinteresque, I think.

Taken together, the five plays are a fascinating tour of Williams terrain. In Tomorrow, One describes not only the world of that play but the universe of Five by Tenn: it is a “country of pain, . . . an uninhabitable country which is inhabited, though,” by people who are entirely alone.

[Not all of the previously unproduced plays are still unpublished. And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens . . . appears in Political Stages: Plays That Shaped a Century (edited by Emily Mann and David Roessel; Applause Theatre Books, 2002). Kahn also presented a reading of the play (along with Escape) at the Shakespeare Theatre as part of its ReDiscovery Series on 10 December 2001. Years later, These Are The Stairs You Got to Watch, Escape, And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, and The Municipal Abattoir were published in Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays (edited by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel; New Directions, 2005). (I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, the only other play in the program to have been published before Five by Tenn, is available in Dragon Country [New Directions, 1970]. Of the Pace Drama bill, The Pink Bedroom is in Mr. Paradise and The Remarkable Rooming-house appears in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays [edited by Annette J. Saddik; New Directions, 2008].)

[By coincidence, Food For Thought presented Williams's Pinteresque I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow on 24 February at the Paley Center for the Media with a cast of Penny Fuller and Tony Roberts as One and Two.

[The one-acts presented by the Kennedy Center under the title Five by Tenn were revived by the Manhattan Theatre Club that fall with a slightly different bill than the one staged in Washington. Two pays were dropped and two different ones substituted: These Are the Stairs You Got to Watch and The Municipal Abattoir weren’t restaged and, in their stead, The Fat Man's Wife and Adam and Eve on a Ferry (both world premières) were added. Also, the play called Escape was presented under a different title, Summer at the Lake (New York première). (Apparently that was Kahn's idea—he thought it was closer to what Williams would have called it.) The dates of the production were 19 October through 19 December 2004; the cast was substantially the same as Washington, with the major exception of Joan van Ark.]

TFANA’s 'Merchant of Venice' (2007)

[From 6 January to 11 March 2007, the Theatre for a New Audience presented a repertory of two classic plays at the Duke on 42nd Street starring F. Murray Abraham. The respected actor played Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. I saw both shows near the end of the run and reported on them later that month. Since TFANA’s scheduled a revival of Merchant with the same star and director (27 February-13 March, at Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center in lower Manhattan), I’m posting my original report of the 2007 production for readers of ROT.

[Contrasts with Abraham’s turn in Marlowe’s Jew as directed by David Herskovits were inevitable—even expected in 2007. But there could, of course, be no comparative discussion of Abraham and Darko Tresnjak's Shylock and the Al Pacino version of the current Broadway production; it hadn’t happened yet, of course.]

My friend Diana and I saw The Merchant of Venice on Friday, 2 March 2007, at TFANA's season’s abode (it's itinerant), the Duke Theatre on 42nd Street. (It's one of those theater spaces in a highrise that was either built or renovated during the revival of 42nd Street, right in the center of the honky-tonk.) I'd never been to anything here, and it’s a rather nice space. A little high-tech in decor, perhaps, but functional, with good sightlines—it's a thrust configuration—and no obstructions. It's a small enough theater that no seat’s far from the stage—even the little balconies that run around three sides of the auditorium. We were in the last row ('F,' mind you!) of the "orchestra," if that's what they call it there, and we had perfect views and no hearing problems.

I didn't know Serbian-born director Darko Tresnjak's work, though he had been the artistic director at San Diego's Old Globe and had directed in several theaters around the country. He'd done a lot of Shakespeare, which showed, but I didn't know if he'd approached them with a similar eye. In Merchant, he turned Venice into Wall Street 2007 (sets by John Lee Beatty, lighting by David Weiner, sound by Jane Shaw)—all high-tech (to fit nicely with the theater's atmosphere, fortuitously—or maybe not) and high fashion. (Costume designer Linda Cho must have had a ball shopping at all the high-end stores for her costumes—all at least resembling the top designers. Fashion Week at TFANA!) The set was minimal: a few slim tables (mostly for three laptops which took the places of Portia's three caskets—rather cleverly, too) were the only permanent pieces, then the occasional chair or such, all in a glass-and-steel shell like one of those postmodern office buildings of lower Manhattan and elsewhere. Three flat video screens hung over the stage on a balustrade across the back, serving as a stock ticker, the labels on Portia's caskets, and other varying visual images. (The atmosphere was partially set before the show started as the screens displayed the usual anti-cellphone warning in Italian, English, and Yiddish or Hebrew respectively.) Everyone on stage came equipped with a cellphone—one servant had an earpiece receiver permanently attached to his temple as if he’d just escaped from a Borg collective—and there were laptops, PDA's, cellphone and digital cameras (with which all Portia's suitors got their servants to take their pictures with the lady, as if they'd been stopped by paparazzi on the red carpet at some Hollywood event), and other gear all over the set. I felt that Tresnjak may have fallen a little too in love with the notion of the 21st-century update and it was really a gimmick, but it did no damage and was often kind of fun. Many of the messengers were enhanced (instead of standing in front of the other actor, they were in some other part of the set)—or replaced—with cellphone calls, and the casket bits worked rather nicely with a computer-animated image voicing the messages for each suitor—like the end of some computer game melded with one of those TV game shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. One of the best bits—a tiny one, but one that worked very well—happened during Portia and Nerissa's run-through of the prospective suitors they were awaiting. When Nerissa named the English baron and Portia ran him down until she said, "He is a proper man's picture," Nerissa had just showed her his photo on her cellphone! All in all, it was a tad precious, but it was no Hamlet on rollerskates. Strictly speaking, it wasn't really necessary for making new points about the play or its characters—but it did no harm. And the kind of mercenary soullessness of the Wall Street milieu worked well with Tresnjak's bleak vision.

At first I thought the attempt to marry a 21st-century look and behavior to the 16th-century language and situation wasn't working and the actors were self-conscious and forced, but I later decided it was just one actor who somehow just didn't ring true—John Lavelle's Gratiano. It was as if he was trying to play a poseur but couldn't pull it off credibly—a poseur poseur, you might say. Otherwise I thought the cast was all quite good, though there were no real standouts among the ensemble. (One possible exception would be Arnie Burton, who played Balthazar, Portia's servant-cum-personal assistant. As he ushered in the series of suitors, he eyed their posse for potential hook-ups—and silently signaled one to call him after the guy's master lost his marriage gamble. But even Burton's little characterization was more the result of amusing choices he and Tresnjak made than an extraordinary quality of his acting.)

The true exception was, as you might have guessed, Abraham. Everything he did on stage was solid, real, believable, anchored. This was a man who knew what he was up to, had total confidence in his choices and preparation, his art. Next to the rest of the cast, as good as they were, he was an adult working with adolescents. In terms of his character, he didn't apologize for Shylock or soften him. He demanded his "bond," a word he emphasized so often it became a litany—unabashedly, knowing what his insistence made him seem. He didn't care. Even when he was beaten in court, he simply acquiesced—even as he cowered beneath a table, his yarmulke having been snatched off his head in an act of humiliation. He knew where he stood in this society, and he was just not going to beg or play the fool for them. Abraham and Tresnjak's Shylock, though often moving and righteously defiant, wasn’t a pleasant man, not a tragic hero, not an undeserving victim, not a sympathetic figure. Circumstances (that is, casual, societal, and deliberate anti-Semitism) had made him what he was, but Shylock refused to play the game even when it would have been to his advantage. Abraham let the contradictions in Shylock show, as when Antonio (Tom Nelis) viciously spat at him in court, after having won his case, and Shylock unhesitantly spat right back. In the end, however defeated, this Shylock was the equal in savagery of his Christian abusers—not a positive character trait, but a worthy theatrical achievement.

Shylock's relentless pursuit of money (Did he care more about the loss of his daughter, Jessica, or the loss of the ducats she took when she left?) might have made him a stereotype, except that everyone in this play was out for money one way or another. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. In fact, nothing in this play was given away: it was all bartered, sold, traded, leveraged, or gambled—even love (filial or romantic). Money did, indeed, make this world go 'round. And everyone suspected he was being (or about to be) cheated—even if only romantically, if not financially.

Abraham was stunning as Shylock, reaching down into his depths to find the force of his basest feelings while at the same time recognizing that that's what they are. I don't know if his hands are actually exceptionally large, but they seemed so here. When he raised his arms or extended a hand to shake Antonio's (who refused), Abraham's palms and fingers looked immense. They weren't long-fingered and bony, like the classic image of Fagin; and he didn't make ham-fists like some over-the-hill fighter. The image I kept having was of 1962's horror flick, Hands of a Stranger. In any case, for me, Abraham's hands, which he seemed to flourish often, consistently drew my focus. For the rest of his characterization, his Shylock was never overtly impassioned; with all the strong emotions swirling around him—hatred, love, greed, generosity, vengeance, loyalty, friendship, fear—even in Shakespeare’s words, Abraham is composed, as if it all meant little to him (until his daughter betrays him, that is). Other Shylocks may seem like Jewish Lears, blustering and blowing in anger and revenge (like, perhaps Al Pacino’s 2004 film rendition), but Abraham was cool. For me, this made him all the more powerful—he was a stealth avenger. The rattlesnake lets you know he’s preparing to strike. The copperhead gives no signal. The venom of the one may be as strong as that of the other—but consider which is the more sinister threat.

Tresnjak made sure we saw the anti-Semitism and other kinds of bigoted behavior—it wasn’t soft-pedaled or lightened; indeed, the program had three pages of notes on anti-Semitism to make sure we knew what his theme was. Antonio, otherwise the stalwart friend, made no bones about his unreasoning hatred of Shylock and Jews; Portia (Kate Forbes) made pointed racist remarks about a Moorish suitor—to the silent consternation of Nerissa, who was black (Christen Simon); Lancelot Gobbo, also played by a black actor (Kenajuan Bentley), left the wealthy Shylock's employment for that of the impoverished Bassanio with a torrent of anti-Semitic curses (raising, intentionally I'm sure, the specter of the black anti-Semitism of contemporary America). And Shylock wasn’t immune from vicious hatred, either: Rather than the "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech, it’s his courtroom exegesis of the unreasonableness of human hate that was the key text in this production: "It is my humour." (Time Out New York’s review by Adam Feldman included a photo caption that read: “Trial by Jewry.”) Tresnjak’s Merchant stressed Shylock's equality in vehemence and bloodthirstiness with the Venetians who provoke him—no side was seen to better effect than the other—they’re all nasty pieces of work.

[This report, originally written on 13 March 2007, was part of a longer discussion of both plays in the TFANA rep. It included a little comparison of the two plays and the two productions (which had the same casts and, mostly, design teams, but different directors). In fact, the plays were intended to be juxtaposed, and most of the published reviews contrasted both the scripts and lead characters and the productions and performances. In order to present the report on Merchant as a stand-alone article, I’ve had to excise the references to The Jew of Malta, and the resulting report’s been edited slightly for continuity. Otherwise, it’s essentially my evaluation of the experience I had four years ago.

[TFANA’s Merchant sold out in its original 2007 OB run and in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2006-7 Complete Works Festival at its home in Stratford-on-Avon, a year-long celebration of the Bard presenting all his works, including his poetry. After its return to New York, the TFANA production of Merchant will be embarking on the company's first national tour, stopping in Chicago (15-27 March, Bank of America Theatre), Boston (29 March–10 April, Majestic Theatre), and L.A. (14-24 April, Broad Stage, Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center).]

'Gruesome Playground Injuries'

My frequent theater companion, Diana, and I saw the new play by Rajiv Joseph, Gruesome Playground Injuries, at the Second Stage Theatre on Friday evening, 18 February. The 2ST production, directed by Scott Ellis and starring Jennifer Carpenter and Pablo Schreiber, was the New York première, but the play had been staged twice before: Houston’s Alley Theatre, 16 October-15 November 2009, and the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., 17 May-19 June 2010. (Everett Evans in the Houston Chronicle wrote, “GPI reveals an original voice with a knack for blending quirky humor and unexpected poignancy,” and in the Washington Post, Peter Marks said that Joseph takes a “jaunty, quirkily amusing tone” with the characters’ relationship.)

I’ve never seen any of Joseph’s work before, though this is his third show for 2ST (All This Intimacy, 2006; Animals Out of Paper, 2008) and his dark comedy Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer, will open on Broadway in March. Another new play, The North Pool, will première in Palo Alto, California, in March and the Alley will début The Monster at the Door in May. The playwright, who currently writes for the cable series Nurse Jackie, recounts that the play was inspired when he was in a bar talking with a friend who told Joseph about “terrifying and bizarre” childhood injuries he’d suffered. Later, while his friend went to replenish their drinks, Joseph wrote the title of his new play on a slip of paper. “I thought it would be an interesting way of charting one’s life—through one’s history of physical trauma,” said the playwright. “When I began to work on it, I figured a relationship could be measured the same way . . . .”

The 80-minute play’s structure is a little reminiscent of that oldie Same Time, Next Year, as the two characters, Kayleen and Doug, meet when they’re 8 and run into one another in the school nurse’s office. (In fact, the New York Times’s Ben Brantley quipped that the play could be renamed Same Time, Next Scar, though GPI’s vignettes aren’t in chronological order.) The two continue to meet at intervals for the next 30 years at the infirmary, a funeral parlor, and several hospitals. (The same actors, Carpenter, 31, and Schreiber, 32, play the two characters from childhood to adulthood.) Each time they meet, they compare wounds, scars, and hurts, finding that the injuries draw them together. Why and what it all means is the real subject under Joseph’s examination in GPI. The playwright confessed, “I’ve always been interested in . . . how primal forces like longing, or desire or a hunger for faith can take us to wild places,” and Patrick Healy of the New York Times reported that Joseph’s “wrestling with whether [Kayleen’s and Doug’s] continued pattern of—and attraction to—physical harm reflected brokenness in their souls.”

The reviews were mixed, both across the spectrum and within each notice. Almost all of them included elements of both intrigue and disappointment, mostly with Joseph’s script, which is episodic by design and jumps back and forth in time (15 years forward, then 10 years back); but there were comments placing some of the blame on the two actors for not being able to overcome the problems Joseph’s script hands them. (Both actors are currently working in cable TV series, Carpenter on Showtime’s Dexter as a serial killer’s sister, and Schreiber, who’s Liev Schreiber’s younger half-brother, on the FX show Lights Out as the brother and manager of a boxer. But both have also had considerable stage experience, including Schreiber’s Tony-nominated appearance in Lincoln Center’s Awake and Sing in 2006 and Carpenter’s turn in the Roundabout’s Crucible in 2002.) Some reviewers leaned more toward the positive (AP’s Jocelyn Noveck on ABCNews.com called the play a “strange but absorbing journey of pain” and Marilyn Stasio called it “wondrous strange” in Variety), others the negative (Elisabeth Vincentelli described GPI as “uneven” in the New York Post and Brantley called it “a blood-spattered twig of a play”), but they all suggested Gruesome Playground Injuries isn’t a play for the faint-hearted or squeamish. (Of course, the play’s title is a pretty clear warning.)

To be honest, the injuries, while ghastly enough in the abstract (a lost eye, a lightning strike), really end up seeming more cartoon-like than truly disturbing. Most, of course, are only described or named, often in the language of kids, and those that are visible . . . well, let’s just say we’re not in Sam Peckinpah territory here. I’m not going to catalogue the mishaps and damage (as most of the reviews did to some degree); I don’t want to give that much of the concept away. I won’t try to psychoanalyze the characters’ frequent encounters with harm, either, whether deliberate or accidental, as several of the published reviewers have done. I’m not qualified, in the first place, and Joseph has left too many possibilities open. In fact, this is emblematic of the whole play, as I’ll try to explain in a moment.

There are many shortcomings in GPI, some more significant than others. But first, let me outline what was good—even very good—about the 2ST production. First, and foremost, the acting was top-notch. There aren’t a lot of pyrotechnics called for in the script, but both Schreiber and Carpenter executed the shifts between ages nicely and believably. The trick is that they don’t get to age successively from eight to 38, which makes the transitions harder for them, I’d think; the scenes jump from eight to 23, then back to 13, up to 28, and so on, so the two actors must age up then drop back to a child or teen without being able to ease into the next scene. (Alexis Soloski of the Village Voice says the pattern is “elegant” in its contrast with the “messiness” of the characters’ lives, but I found it mostly a contrivance.) Okay, I’m twice Schreiber’s age now, so maybe I don’t remember what it was like to be eight or 13—or even 18; but I’ve taught teens within living memory and I’ve watched my cousins’ kids pass through those ages, and Carpenter and Schreiber were mighty convincing without being showy or clichéd. As adults, too, they embodied the kind of despair you might expect from people whose prospects are few and dispiriting—waiting tables and (ironically) claims-adjusting, for example. The emptiness increases as they get older, and since the actors don’t get simply to slide up the scale, the accomplishment was even more laudable. It was very nice work.

Schreiber’s Doug has more to do than Carpenter’s Kayleen, and he made the best of the possibilities. Doug’s an athlete as well as a daredevil. (In the first scene, where he’s “split his face open” from riding his bike off the school’s roof, he says he was emulating Evel Knievel.) So he’s more physical in the little set, giving Schreiber a chance to show the teenager’s gangly energy and the twenty-something’s careless physicality. Carpenter was more physically restrained, her arms often tight against her sides like those Irish dancers that were popular a couple of decades ago or so. (Both kids are products of Catholic parochial education, like Joseph himself—who in eighth grade was voted Most Likely to Become a Priest.) Carpenter was also more vocally restrained, though she let loose once or twice—but, again, her character isn’t boisterous or outwardly demonstrative. (As we’ll see, Kayleen has deep emotional problems; her turmoil is inner.) I will also venture that Schreiber, with his greater stage experience as well as the range of film and TV characters he’s played, may have more of a repertoire of physical and emotional behaviors on which to draw than Carpenter, but she was never false or hesitant, and I never felt as if the two were in different plays.

Scott Ellis’s direction on Neil Patel’s minimalist set was strong on character and pacing; the eight scenes moved along quickly and without fussy scene changes. Patel devised a unit set for all the scenes, basically a lucite runway (there were spectators on the opposite side—“upstage,” if you will—of the platform) with white, modular walls at each end. Vincentelli called it “antiseptic,” but I find that overstated; I’d agree, though, with Stasio’s characterization of “austere.” Neutral is most apt. The edges of the platform, which was lighted from beneath, were a line of clear plastic boxes illuminated and filled with water from which the actors washed off old makeup between scenes. Costume changes were performed, as Joseph’s script demands, on stage in dim light, but not dark. (Actually, I was thinking that it might be more fun—not to say dramatically more impactful—to see the actors make their changes, the way Salieri changes before us in Amadeus. It’s not in the least significant in terms of the play; it’s just a druther. The serviceable costumes were designed by Jeff Mashie and the stark lighting was by Donald Holder.) Patel set drawers and cabinets into the end walls for the new clothes to come out of and the old ones to go into. Carpenter and Schreiber helped one another make the changes if necessary, and the few set pieces—almost always including a hospital bed or gurney—were rolled on from the wings and the actors set them for the new scene. Then, when everything was ready, if one actor had an entrance in the new vignette, she or he exited while the other took the correct position on stage. The new scene was then announced by a lighted projection on the rear wall pronouncing the characters’ ages and the title of the scene (“Thirteen: Limbo”; “Eighteen: Pink Eye”; “Twenty-three: Tooth and Nail”) It's a gimmick, mostly intended to cover the scene breaks, since the actors would still have had to make the changes and we’d otherwise have been staring at an empty stage for several minutes since there was virtually no set to shift.

Playwright Joseph has written some nicely speakable dialogue. Like Carpenter and Schreiber, he’s evoked the age progression credibly, capturing the awkwardness and bravado of youngsters as they test the sensitivities and pressure points of themselves and others. The actors were able to carry through their characterizations as well as they did because Joseph wrote actable dialogue. It’s not poetic, like Williams, or tough naturalism like Miller, but it sounded true and faithful to the characters. One on-line reviewer found this very attribute was a drawback because such “ineloquence, . . . though natural, lose[s] . . . potency as the play progresses.” I totally disagree: Joseph’s unaffected dialogue is one of the charms of the play. It’s also one of the characteristics of the script that underlies the aging of the characters—their speech grows up as they do. (Joseph is currently writing for a cable TV series, as I noted, and before he turned to playwriting, he was heading for a career as a screenwriter. TV and film writing may have informed this quality in his stage writing.) The playwright also has a nice way with a catch phrase: In the first scene, when Kayleen and Doug are eight, she keeps asking him, “Does it hurt?” and he replies perfunctorily, “A little,” as if he’d never say it did even if the pain were excruciating. Later, in many of the other vignettes, she asks him the same question, and gets a variation of his answer; in one scene, he asks the question. It is one way to remind us that these two have a connection—which, we’ll see, needs reinforcement.

All of this adds up to only half a show, though. The scenes are blackouts in that they have a beginning, but they have no end—they just stop. Nothing’s resolved, developed, or concluded. One scene doesn’t lead to another (even if you straighten them out chronologically) though previous history is acknowledged. (In the case of the only two scenes set in the same year, we get a bit of a flashback. The second of the vignettes actually takes place before the earlier one, so we see the set-up of the accident the results of which we’ve already witnessed. The first of the two scenes also makes mention of the circumstances we see played out in scene two. But these are only verbal links, not dramatic ones—and they’re pretty contrived to boot.) Joseph has said he’s looking at how a relationship might develop through shared disasters and hurts, but there’s no real relationship between Kayleen and Doug. They say there is one: they say they are each other’s “best friend” and Doug calls Kayleen his guardian angel who can “mend” his wounds—but they seldom really see each other outside the meetings every five years when one or the other—usually Doug—is injured. (Kind of ironically, Kayleen can’t heal Doug’s wounds, but the actress helps create them for her partner by doing his makeup for each new scene.) Doug says he looked for Kayleen when he came back from college, but he did see her father and they had friends or acquaintances in common, so how hard could it have been to find her? (We don’t know where the play is set, but the sense I got is that it’s a small city, not a huge metropolis—Joseph is from Cleveland—and both families had been lifelong residents.) Kayleen doesn’t seem to care much, between encounters, what Doug is up to. After one meeting in the hospital, after Doug had been hit by lightning, she says later she thought he’d died. She didn’t even bother to find out! Doug finds Kayleen as an 18-year-old holed up in her room at home and learns that she’s been cutting herself (and submitting to unwelcome sex because she thought it might stop her). He gets angry at her then, but then he doesn’t see her again for five more years. This is a developing relationship? These are people who care about one another?

Joseph recounted that his first intention for what became GPI was to write only a few scenes in which adult actors could work on playing children. I assume that he meant for them to be used in studios and classrooms, and not for public performance. (David Sheward of Back Stage, which calls itself “The Actor’s Resource,” directly identified the play as “material for scene-study class.”) The unfinished nature of the vignettes is perhaps the result of the playwright having never gone back when he changed his goal to complete the scenes by filling out the actual relationship between the two characters so that the actors would have somewhere to go. As they stand now, the episodes are much like technique exercises, the kind of thing Uta Hagen might have included in her Object Exercises which actors are meant to use to explore elements, what I used to call the building blocks, of a character or a scene (“Three Entrances”; “Immediacy”; “History”), but which alone aren’t stageworthy, any more than an artist’s exploratory brush strokes or media experiments are ready to be seen by viewers. In light of this acknowledgement, what I saw was sort of like one of those studies an artist does before working on a complete painting—a practice run of bits and pieces for the whole work. It’s tantalizing, maybe even promising—but unsatisfying.

There’s also no context for the quinquennial scenes we get to see. Joseph provides no information about the characters’ lives outside the medical facilities in which we meet them—at least not until near the end of the 80 minutes, and then only a few details. We don’t know why Doug and Kayleen behave the way they do or why Joseph tells us they need each other. Soloski precisely characterized the characters as “at once overdrawn and insufficiently inhabited” in the Voice and ascribed the fault largely to Joseph, but then added that “the actors can't quite overcome” the problem. I don’t see what Soloski could have expected Schreiber and Carpenter to have done with roles that end before they get anywhere. As a former actor myself, I can’t put any blame on them for that; not even Ellis can be answerable for not solving material that’s not in the script. As Back Stage’s Sheward attested, the production shows “what a strong director and cast can do with a skimpy play.”

The playwright’s theme, he says, is to explore how “primal forces” can drive us to extreme acts. Well, yes, if you get to arrange the actions and set up the forces at work! Joseph has made these two hurt themselves, either deliberately (Kayleen) or through reckless actions (Doug), and they keep repeating the behavior over and over. Then Joseph contrives to put them in each other’s paths at intervals even though there’s no dramatic reason for them to seek one another out. They hear about one another’s injuries, but they don’t seem to write each other during their separations, call one another, ask their friends about one another. There’s no contact for five years. (Like the location, we don’t know when the action takes place, but if the last scene is the year Joseph completed the play, it spans 1979 to 2009, mostly within the age of e-mail, Facebook, and Google.) I’m no psychologist, but my guess is that the way these two proceed untreated and without an intervention, one or both of them would have been dead before the end of the play. (In fact, I’d guess that if you really rode a bike off the roof of a school, even a two-story building, you’d more likely be killed or busted into a thousand pieces than merely get your face cut open. Then there’d have been no play at all!) Joseph got to make the characters come back each time and then repeat their behavior once again.

I can’t imagine what either of these two would be like—or how much of them would be left—after the last scene at 38. Could they even survive to 43? (Kayleen seems to have the more serious, deeper problem, and her troubles do increase in intensity—although it’s Doug who becomes more and more maimed as the years go by.) And that’s another failing here. The scenes have no ending, and neither does the play. (How could it? The last scene has no more of a conclusion than the first.) We learn little about Doug or Kayleen and they learn little about themselves. We know some factoids of their lives, but what do they want? What drives them to it? Of that we have no hint. Neither makes a move to resolve their own problems, much less the other’s. What do they take away? What do we take away? Do we assume they go on repeating their destructive behavior? Does anyone reach out to help them, to stop them? They don’t really help one another, despite what Doug believes—they feed off one another. It’s hardly a healthy association—or one with much of a future.

As I said, I don’t know Joseph’s work beyond GPI. Most of the reviewers praised his past writing and say they’re looking forward to the Broadway début of Bengal Tiger. I can say, from this one sample, that the dramatist has a quirky imagination—the only thing I know about Bengal Tiger is that the main character is the big cat!—and can write interesting and actable dialogue. As for whether he’s got real playwriting chops, I guess I’ll have to wait to find out. My dad used to say he disliked mixed grills because there were too many things on the plate and not enough of any of them. That’s what Gruesome Playground Injuries was like for me—a theatrical mixed grill, a tasting platter. It wasn’t unpleasant or distasteful—but it wasn’t filling.

[The 2ST run of Gruesome Playground Injuries, which started previews on 5 January and opened on 1 February, closed on 20 February. Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo will open on 31 March at the Richard Rogers Theatre with Robin Williams as the title character under Moisés Kaufman’s direction. It had its world première at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California, with Kevin Tighe, 10 May-7 June 2009; the production, also staged by Kaufman, moved to the Mark Taper Forum in L.A., 14 April -30 May 2010. The North Pool will première in a production of TheatreWorks at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto from 9 March to 3 April, and Houston’s Alley will début The Monster at the Door, 4-29 May. After a revival in January and February this year at the Public Theatre in Lewiston, Maine, Animals Out of Paper will be restaged by Amphibian Stage Productions at the Betty Sanders Theatre in Ft. Worth, Texas, 11-27 March.]

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.]