“ENGINEERING
AN ARTISTIC SCIENTIFIC METHOD”
by
Martine Kei Green-Rogers
[The following article was published in American Theatre, vol. 40, no. 4 (Summer 2024) as part of the Theatre Futures series sponsored by the Ford Foundation, which continued through the fall of 2024. American Theatre asked leading theatre thinkers to envision the future of this art form and industry as it stands at a historic crossroads; Martine Kei Green-Rogers’s piece is on the theme of Content and Form which explores innovation and new-work development. It was posted on the AT website on 14 August 2024.]
The key to a thriving theatre education is space for experimentation.
I have always been interested in new ways of thinking about the world around us. In an Elinor Fuchs [theater scholar, critic, playwright, and dramaturg; 1933-2024] “Visit to a Small Planet” kind of way [see below], I have always put the world in front of me and tried my best to figure out how to shape it so that it tells the story I want to tell.
For example, “digiturgy,” which Allison Koch [an educator who works to maintain, create, and develop digital experiences and services for clients] defines as “the art, technique, theory, and practice of composition for digital storytelling,” was my way of life for years. But it sat on the fringes of mainstream dramaturgy—until the pandemic. Prior to 2020, I found ways to incorporate digiturgy into my “traditional” work, but that usually meant me experimenting and poking lightly at the way things have always been done. But the pandemic moved digiturgy squarely from the fringes and directly to the center of storytelling for the foreseeable future. My journey toward embracing digiturgy early on had been a direct result of thinking about dramaturgy from a space of sustainability and experimentation; now this kind of thinking, thankfully, is on more folks’ minds.
That outlook on experimentation has pros and cons; I give myself the permission to investigate, formulate, implement and sometimes, fail, in a society that values positive outcomes only. As such, in thinking about new models for 21st century conservatory training, I translated the spirit of inquiry that I use for my artistry into the way I think about education. Essentially, I have taken the scientific method (question, research, hypothesis, experiment, data analysis, conclusion, and communication) and reformulated it to use in theatre training.
As dean of the Theatre School at DePaul University, I am at a conservatory struggling to find the path away from “the way things have always been done,” which does not serve us anymore, and toward something new and innovative. The question of how we meet the needs of students in an ever changing [sic] performing arts industry looms large—especially as the dreaded “demographic cliff” approaches and the competition for the best of the best artistic young adults sharpens. Acknowledging and balancing the fear of the unknown with the excitement of the potential of the future is hard. Yet when I see the original ways our students are processing the world through art, it gives me the strength to keep going forward, and to research the ways to serve them best.
What I found in my research was that my students want to be in conversation with other artists and art forms. The thought of the conservatory being a place where we conserve the way things have always been done is gone and we need a new hypothesis on how to move forward. Hence, we are embarking on some ambitious plans. Not everyone is on board. Change always has its detractors with a palpable fear of change. I do not dismiss their fears, but I come from a place of “yes, and” as opposed to “no, but.” Change says yes to the ideas that live on the fringes of the mainstream but have the potential to solve the issues of our field (more 10-minute play festivals, anyone?).
I am curious, along with many of the students, faculty, and staff in the building, about all the potential applications of the skill sets they are learning. How can we use art to be in and of community with those around us? Where can we make something new for us out of the theatre of the past? Some of these plans won’t feel revolutionary to some of you, but as an organization that is about to celebrate its 100-year anniversary in 2025, these partnerships are huge steps in our evolution. [The Goodman School of Drama, which became the Theatre School at DePaul University, was established in 1925.]
So, we are moving into the experimentation phase. We are partnering with other arts organizations at DePaul and within Chicago to figure out what it means to be in conversation with another art form as a conservatory. For example, in February, four of our students participated in Christian McBride’s [jazz bassist, composer, and arranger, b. 1972] The Movement Revisited [concert event, 2 February 2024] at the Chicago Symphony as the four speakers in the performance who represent great figures of the Civil Rights Movement [Rosa Parks (1913-2005); Malcolm X (1925-65); Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68); Muhammad Ali (1942-2016); and President Barack Obama (b. 1961)]. Those students had the opportunity to learn about performing with an orchestra and how their processes around technical rehearsals are different from those of the theatre. We also devised a piece that opened in May [Memo, 12-19 May 2024] as a response to an exhibition by Selva Aparicio [Spanish, based in Chicago; b. 1987; interdisciplinary artist working across installation and sculpture] at the DePaul Art Museum [Selva Aparicio: In Memory Of, 14 March-4 August 2024] and will run in the museum alongside the exhibit. Creating something of this scale in an art museum is an example of the kind of change we desperately need. At this moment of crisis for all of the arts, we are stronger in our art-making community and can survive the weather of poor funding and general scarcity when we collaborate with others.
As we define the future, I see the conservatory encouraging other art forms, such as film, digital art, dance and more, to join us and incorporate the best of what they have discovered in their own processes, and apply that to our work. This is a place where, for example, short-form content becomes the “yes, and[.]” Also, I see it is the place where we can fail miserably, pick ourselves up, and start again. This process will provide measurable outcomes we can analyze, and help us draw stronger conclusions about what works and doesn’t work and share that with the community. With this method, partnerships between artistic units within a university (or across universities) can become the genesis for works that then can go on to producing houses and have a future artistic life (and, hopefully, create pathways for the students who worked on them to get a professional artistic credit).
The future of theatre lies in our ability to be flexible, to bring us back to being in community with one another, to help future generations learn how to process the world around them through art, and to, as Hamlet says to the players, hold a mirror up to nature.
[Martine Kei Green-Rogers, PhD (she/her) is the dean of Chicago’s Theatre School at DePaul University (formerly the Goodman School of Drama). She is a dramaturg, director, and adapter, and her writing includes “Productions: The Theory and Practice" in Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (2014), “A New Noble Kinsmen: The Play On! Project and Making New Plays Out of Old” in Theatre History Studies (2017), and “The Dramaturgy of Black Culture: The Court Theatre’s Productions of August Wilson’s Century Cycle” in On Dramaturgy: Unpacking Diversity and Inclusion, Case Studies From the Field (2020).]
* *
* *
“ELINOR
FUCHS, PEERLESS GUIDE TO THEATRE’S ‘SMALL PLANET’”
by
David Bruin
[When theater scholar and teacher Elinor Fuchs died in May, David Bruin, a former student of Fuchs’s, penned this homage for American Theatre. It ran under the heading “In Memoriam” on the website on 7 June 2024.]
A lively and perceptive watcher and thinker, she helped generations of artists and critics view theatre as a kind of space and time travel.
The best theatre critic in the 2,500-year history of the profession—that’s how I describe Elinor Fuchs when the occasion arises, as it has often since she passed away at the age of 91 on May 28. I confess that my claim rests more on love than rigor—something she would have protested—and superlatives are always cause for suspicion. Nonetheless, the phrase speaks to what I want to tell you here, which is that Elinor changed the way I read, watch, and write about theatre, as she did for so many others.
For Shakespeare, all the world’s a stage; for Elinor, every stage is a world unto itself. This insight animates her famous essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet” [see below]. “A play is not a flat work of literature,” she writes, “not a description in poetry of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space.”
Honed over decades of teaching and published by Theater [Yale School of Drama; see below] in 2004, the essay gives anyone the tools to make sense of what is happening onstage, whether they are reading a script or watching a performance. Rather than focusing on the dialogue of individual characters, she encourages readers to “mold the play into a medium-sized ball” and “squint.” Now you are ready, as the essay’s subtitle suggests, to ask the play some questions about space, time, weather, light, power, and much more.
In class, she would do this literally. As an MFA student in her criticism workshop [at Yale], I remember her discussing Adrienne Kennedy’s [b. 1931] Funnyhouse of a Negro [1964; see “Signature Plays” (3 June 2016) on this blog for a report on a production of Kennedy’s one-act] and putting her two hands in front of her face to form a small orb, then bringing it into a soft focus as she asked about the play’s color palette of jet black, ghastly white, blood red, and sickly yellow.
“Small Planet” turns reading plays into space travel—time travel, too. With a simple squint, one can stand before avalanches of text and images undaunted. Black boxes unlock before you. The harder the text, the better. Her syllabi speak to her desire for intensity, density, and lucidity, comprised as they were of [Henrik] Ibsen [Norwegian; 1828-1906], [August] Strindberg [Swedish; 1849-1912], [Getrude] Stein [ex-patriot American in Paris; 1874-1946], [Bertolt] Brecht [German; 1898-1956], [Antonin] Artaud [French; 1896-1948], Witkacy [(StanisÅ‚aw Ignacy Witkiewicz) Polish; 1885-1939], [Samuel] Beckett [Irish living in Paris (wrote in both French and English); 1906-89], MarÃa Irene Fornés [Cuban-born American; 1930-2018], Suzan-Lori Parks [African American; b. 1963], and Reza Abdoh [Iranian-born American; 1963-95], whom she introduced to many students, me included, who became die-hard fans. These plays require pilgrimages, and Elinor blazed the trails.
The essay also demonstrates some of her unparalleled skills, such as her penchant for pattern recognition. “Find the pattern first!” she tells readers. Ancient Greek tragedies are reversal-recognition-suffering. The Medieval Mystery Cycles are reversal-suffering-recognition. Those lucky enough to number among her students know exactly what that means, as well as the economy of insight that she could bring to millennia of theatre history. (For those who don’t, I encourage you to read “Waiting for Recognition,” in which she offers the only reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, which inaugurated drama criticism, you will ever need.
[Interested readers will need access to Project Muse through some institution, such as a library or university, or pay a fee to read the recommended essay at the linked site. (Cardholders at the New York Public Library can access Project Muse though its website or at a NYPL branch.) The article was published in Modern Drama 50.4 (Winter 2007), and many university and large public libraries collect that journal.]
But Elinor was no mechanical engineer of interpretation. As a critic, perhaps her greatest gift was her ability to make sense of the odd and the obscure. “Warning,” she writes in “Small Planet”: “Don’t permit yourself to construct a pattern that omits ‘singularities,’ puzzling events, objects, figures, or scenes that ‘do not fit.’ Remember, there is nothing in the world of a play by accident. The puzzles may hold the key.” The emphasis is all hers, and her writing proves it.
In just five pages, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet” captures the sensibility of a critic whose abiding concerns read like a list of contradictions: patterns and puzzles. Repetition and singularity. The legible and the ineffable. Onstage and offstage. She was exacting about ambiguity and could peer into the unseen. She encouraged attention, precision, and wit, and she was at home in ironies, enigmas, and mysteries. She shied away from nothing so long as it was on a stage.
At some point, an essay must be written that chronicles Elinor’s achievements as a scholar. To turn a grand narrative into a short story, beginning in the 1970s, she brought French critical theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism to bear on theatre studies, particularly the historical avant-garde and the work being created by the most advanced theater artists in New York City, including Robert Wilson [b. 1941], Richard Foreman [1937-2025], Mabou Mines [experimental theater company founded in 1970 and based in New York City], the Wooster Group [experimental theater company based in New York City’s SoHo, successor in 1975 of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group], and others. Remarkably, she kept her theory light on its feet, deploying it nimbly in service to her true calling, which was, as she writes in her book The Death of Character [Indiana University Press, 1996], “a theatre critic in search of a language in which to describe new forms.”
Elinor was not unique in this, but she did it with a degree of clarity that inaugurated a new kind of theatre studies. At the very least, she set a new standard. Or maybe it’s just that when I read “Play as Landscape” ([Theater 25.1 (Spring/Summer 1994)] about landscape plays and staging in Stein, Wilson, Parks, and others) or “The Apocalyptic Century” ([special issue of Theater. 29.3 (Winter 1999)] about apocalypse and millennium in twentieth century [sic] theatrical avant-gardes), I wonder, How? How did she do this?
What I’m saying is that there will never be another like her.
Elinor’s approach to theatre offers not only rigor but pleasure. She could taste, smell, and touch a play. For her, there is no semiotics without sensuality. In remarks she wrote upon receiving the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research [2018], she calls theatre people the “most semiotically aroused people in the world.”
A theatre person—that is, above all else, how I think of Elinor. She loved the theatre. She was in her 80s when I met her, and she was still pulling two-show weekends, everything from Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns at Playwrights Horizons [15 September-20 October 2013] to Thomas Hirschorn’s Gramsci Monument in the Bronx [Forest Houses (Morrisania), 1 July-15 September 2013]. She recalled her time as an actor fondly. She taught her final theory course (an astonishing saga) in a room that doubled as the dressing room of Yale Cabaret. She didn’t seem to mind discussing Italian futurism surrounded by costumes that the night before had been soaked in sweat and sprayed with watered-down vodka.
I think this is one reason why she made the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale her academic home. Her students include not only tenured professors and prolific writers but dramaturgs, producers, playwrights, and directors. Her mark on the field is everywhere.
She is gone, and I am still learning from her. No bother; she was suspicious of presence anyway. Her writing is a gift. Avail yourself of it.
There is an end to every life, but, as the final sentence of “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet” reminds us, so long as there is theatre upon this earth, “There will still be more to see.”
[David Bruin is the executive artistic director of Celebration Barn, “Maine’s Center for Physical Theater Training and Performance” in South Paris. He is the co-editor of A Moment on the Clock of the World (Haymarket Books, 2019) and teaches in the department of drama at New York University.
[I knew Elinor Fuchs slightly. She was one of the founding members of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now . . . of the Americas) in the mid-1980s when I was taking Production Dramaturgy at New York University from Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, one of the two dramaturgs spearheading the launch of the organization. Part of the course was to attend meetings of the New York City dramaturgs and lit managers and talk with the working members of the profession.
[The class included an internship and I ended up working with Cynthia on the final steps of forming LMDA and I eventually went on to serve as her assistant when she became LMDA’s first president and ultimately filled the post of Vice President for Communications on the Executive Committee, editing the quarterly newsletter, when the incumbent had to resign.
[Of all the members and
other professionals with whom I dealt in that time—and some were not only
working dramaturgs and lit managers in major Off-Broadway and regional companies,
but critics and reviewers, published authors, produced playwrights, and even
artistic directors—one of the few who intimidated me with her deep knowledge
and understanding of this field was Elinor Fuchs.]
* *
* *
"EF’S
VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET: SOME QUESTIONS TO ASK A PLAY”
by
Elinor Fuchs
[The title of this essay, mentioned in passing in Martine Kei Green-Rogers’s article at the top of this collection and more substantially in David Bruin’s tribute to the essayist that followed, is a reference to a television play by Gore Vidal (1925-2012) which debuted live (as most television was at the time) on 8 May 1955 on Goodyear Playhouse on the National Broadcasting Company network, one of the Big Three of the day.
[Visit to a Small Planet starred Cyril Ritchard (Australian; 1898-1977) as Kreton, a visitor from another planet who arrives on Earth and seems anxious to provoke a war, “one thing you people do really well.” Vidal reworked the teleplay for the Broadway stage, where it again starred Ritchard and ran 388 performances between 7 February 1957 and 11 January 1958, getting Ritchard a Tony nomination as Best Actor in a Play.
[In 1960, the play was revised again, this time for Hollywood. The black and white film, released on 4 February, was directed for Paramount Pictures by Norman Taurog (1899-1981). Jerry Lewis (1926-2017), the low-brow comedian (but a big star at the time), was cast as Kreton and the play became a film filled with slapstick humor and hijinks.
[In the film, Kreton is fascinated by human beings. Instead of trying to spark a war for his amusement as he did on TV and in the play, he decides to stay on Earth and study the humans and their world.
[Fuchs’s essay was published in the Yale School of Drama (now David Geffen School of Drama at Yale) journal Theater, vol. 34, no. 2 (Summer 2004).]
Since its origination as a classroom tool
in the early 1990s, Elinor Fuchs’s essay has acquired a devoted following, with
tattered photocopies circulating in literary offices and university
departments. More recently it has inspired discussions in Internet chat rooms
and garnered citations in scholarly journals, despite remaining unavailable to
a broad readership. The time has come to publish “EF’s Visit to a Small
Planet,” an essay that widens our perception of dramatic worlds. Like good
plays, it grows more meaningful with each reading.
—Editors
The following walk through dramatic structure is a teaching tool. For the past several years I have used it at the Yale School of Drama as an entry to Reading Theater, a critical writing course for students in the MFA Dramaturgy Program.
The “Questions” below are in part designed to forestall the immediate (and crippling) leap to character and normative psychology that underwrites much dramatic criticism. Aside from that corrective bias, the approach offered here is not a “system” intended to replace other approaches to play analysis; I often use it together with Aristotle’s unparalleled insight into plot structure [primarily found in chapters 6-11 of his Poetics]. Rather, it could be thought of as a template for the critical imagination.
In a fine article on Hedda Gabler
[Henrik Ibsen – published, 1890; produced, 1891], Philip E. Larson [1941-2013; longtime
member of the Ibsen Society of America and contributor to Ibsen conferences and
Ibsen News and Comment, the ISA journal] described the nature of “a genuine
performance criticism.” If criticism “is unwilling to rest content with the
evaluation of ephemera,” he wrote, “[it] must attempt to describe a potential
object, one that neither the dramatist, the critics, nor the reader has ever
seen, or will see.”* These “Questions” are intended to light up some of the
dark matter in dramatic worlds, to illuminate the potentialities Larson points
to. No matter what answers come, the very act of questioning makes an essential
contribution to the enterprise of criticism.
—Elinor Fuchs
*Philip E. Larson, “French Farce Conventions and the Mythic Story Pattern in Hedda Gabler: A Performance Criticism,” Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget AS, 1985), 202.
We must make the assumption that in the world of the play there are no accidents. Nothing occurs “by chance,” not even chance. In that case, nothing in the play is without significance. Correspondingly, the play asks us to focus upon it a total awareness, to bring our attention and curiosity without the censorship of selective interpretation, “good taste,” or “correct form.” Before making judgments, we must ask questions. This is the deepest meaning of the idea, often-repeated but little understood, that the study of art shows us how to live.
I. The World of the Play: First Things First
A play is not a flat work of literature, not a description in poetry of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space. Language is only one part of this world. Those who think too exclusively in terms of language find it hard to read plays. When you “see” this other world, when you experience its space-time dynamics, its architectonics, then you can figure out the role of language in it.
If too tight a focus on language makes it hard to read plays, too tight a focus on character creates the opposite problem: it makes the reading too easy. To look at dramatic structures narrowly in terms of characters risks unproblematically collapsing this strange world into our own world. The stage world never obeys the same rules as ours, because in its world, nothing else is possible besides what is there: no one else lives there; no other geography is available; no alternative actions can be taken.
To see this entire world, do this literally: Mold the play into a medium-sized ball, set it before you in the middle distance, and squint your eyes. Make the ball small enough that you can see the entire planet, not so small that you lose detail, and not so large that detail overwhelms the whole.
Before you is the “world of the play.” Still squinting, ask about the space. What is space like on this planet? Interior or exterior, built or natural? Is space here confined or wide open? Do you see a long passage with many “stations”? Do you see a landscape of valleys and mountains? Sea and land? Are we on an island? In a cave? In a desert or a jungle? On a country road?
Now ask about the time. How does time behave on this planet? Does “time stand still”? Is time frantic and staccato on this planet? Is it leisurely, easy-going time? How is time marked on this planet? By clock? By the sun? By the sound of footsteps? What kind of time are we in? Cyclical time? Eternal time? Linear time? What kind of line? One day? One lifetime?
Ask about the climate on this planet. Do we have storms? Eclipses of the sun and moon? Do we have extreme heat? Paralyzing cold? Is the environment on this planet lush and abundant, sere and life-denying, airless and suffocating? What is the seasonal “feel” of this world? Autumnal? Wintry?
What is the mood on this planet? Jolly? Serious? Sad? Ironic? Sepulchral? The mood is not just a question of plot (comedies are “happy,” etc.), “tone” also contributes to mood. What is the tone of this planet? Delicate or coarse? Cerebral or passionate? Restrained or violent? How are mood and tone created on this planet? Through music? Light, sound, color, shape? What shapes? Curves? Angles?
Remember, you can’t just decide the planet is wintry or dark because you think it would look more interesting in snow or smog, at least not yet. Make sure you’re alert to what’s there; there should be actual evidence on the planet for what you report.
You’re not done. In most dramatic worlds there are hidden, or at least unseen, spaces. Ask questions about them as well. What are their characteristics of space, time, tone, and mood? How do they relate to the represented world, the world you can see?
Finally, while you’re looking at this planet, listen to its “music.” Every dramatic world will have, or suggest, characteristic sounds—of mourning, celebration, children’s patter, incantation. It will alternate sounds of human and landscape, or sound and silence. Listen for the pattern of the sound.
II. The Social World of the Play: A Closer Look
You are still not ready to examine the beings who inhabit this world. Before you inquire into their individual traits and motives, there are other things you need to know.
Keep squinting at the planet. Is this a public world, or private? What are its class rules? Aristocratic? Popular? Mixed?
In what kinds of patterns do the figures on this planet arrange themselves? Do you see groups in action, isolated individuals, both? Is there a single central figure, surrounded by a group? Are figures matched off in conflicting pairs? Are you seeing (and feeling) the tension of interlocking triangles?
How do figures appear on this planet? Are they inward or two-dimensional? Subtle? Exaggerated? Are they like puppets? Like clowns? Like you? (Are you sure?) How do figures dress on this planet? In rags, in gowns, in cardboard cutouts? Like us? (Are you sure?)
How do figures interact? By fighting? Reasoned discussion?
Who has power on this planet? How is it achieved? Over whom is it exercised? To what ends is it exercised?
What are the language habits on this planet? Verse or prose, dialogue or monologue, certainly. But also, what kinds of language predominate—of thoughts or of feelings? And what kinds of feelings? Is language colorful or flat, clipped or flowing, metaphorical or logical? Exuberant or deliberate? And what about silences?
III. What Changes?
You have gotten a feel for this world. Now look at it dynamically, because it moves in time. Within the “rules” of its operation, nothing stays the same. What changes in this world?
Look at the first image. Now look at the last. Then locate some striking image near the center of the play (the empty box in [Thomas] Kyd’s [English; 1558-95] The Spanish Tragedy [published, 1592] is a good example). To give an account of destiny on this planet range over these three markers. Why was it essential to pass through the gate of the central image to get from the first to the last?
What changes in the landscape of this world? Does it move from inside to outside? From valleys to mountains? From town to wilderness?
What changes in time? Does time move from dusk to night? Night to dawn? Morning to midnight? Through four seasons of a year? Through the stages of a human life? Or the stages of eternal life, from Creation to Last Judgment?
What changes in language? In tone, mood, dress?
All of the changes you discover will of course contribute to and reflect on character, but each trajectory should be seen as a signifying system on its own.
What changes in the action? Have we moved from confusion to wedding (the basic plot of romantic comedy)? From threat to peaceful celebration (the basic plot of [traditional] tragicomedy)? From threat to disaster (the basic plot of tragedy)? From suffering to rebirth (the plot of the Passion play)? From threat to dual outcome, suffering for evil persons and vindication for good (the basic plot of melodrama)?
What doesn’t change? Is there a stable or fixed point in this world? An absolute reality? God? The grave?
Squint one last time. Putting together space, time, the natural world and the social world, elements that change and those that don’t, you are discovering the “myth.” Plays are full of archetypal places—castles, gardens, forests, roads, islands, green worlds, dream worlds, storms, night scenes, and on and on. If the play starts in a palace, goes on to a moonlit forest, and returns to the palace the next day or night (which is it? day or night?), what does that progression tell you? How is the final palace scene conditioned by the night journey into the forest? Is the world of the play at the end of the play a transformed world? Or is it the same world returned to “normal,” with minor adjustments? Worlds stand or fall on your answer.
IV. Don’t Forget Yourself
Seeking what changes, don’t forget to ask what changes in you, the imaginer of worlds. Ask, what has this world demanded of me? Does it ask me for pity and fear? Does it ask me to reason? To physically participate in the action on the stage? Does it ask me to interact with other spectators? To leave the theater and take political action? To search my ethical being to the core? Maybe this world means only to entertain me, why not? But how does it make this intention known?
V. Theatrical Mirrors
Important as these internal systems are, dramatic worlds don’t just speak to and within themselves; they also speak to each other. How many performances are signaling to you from inside this world? How many echoes of other dramatic worlds do they suggest? How do these additional layers of theatricality comment on what you have already discovered?
VI. The Character Fits the Pattern
Only now are you really ready to examine the figures who inhabit this world. Every assumption you make about a character must reflect the conditions of its world, including the way psychology functions in that world. You can arrive at the most interesting version of any question about character by first exploring the features of her theatrical planet. Characters mean only as they inhabit, enact, fulfill, engage a succession of sites, actions, and objects under a specific set of conditions. They are constituents of a complex artistic pattern. Find the pattern first!
Warning: Don’t permit yourself to construct a pattern that omits “singularities,” puzzling events, objects, figures, or scenes that “do not fit.” Remember, there is nothing in the world of a play by accident. The puzzles may hold the key. Assume that the dramatic world is entirely conscious, determinate, limited. Give an account of that world that attempts to consider the role of every element in that world—visual, aural, temporal, tonal, figural. Become curious as each element is revealed as a player in the play. Be someone who is aroused to meaning.
Of course you can construct meaning in this world in many different ways. Construct it in the most inclusive way you can. There will still be more to see.
[I think you can see why Fuchs used Visit to a Small Planet as the eponym for her analytical technique. Just as Kreton, the extraterrestrial, endeavors to study humans and their Earth, the critic or dramaturg (or director, designers, and even the actors) must examine the world of the play, which is different from the world in we ordinarily live.
[I do find it astounding, though, that Fuchs has found this parallel in the much-less-admired Jerry Lewis movie version of Vidal’s play (with which he was said to have been displeased), but even a stopped clock is right twice a day . . . . (The French, apparently, loved the film . . . but they had an incomprehensible relationship with Lewis. To paraphrase Astérix le Gaulois: “Ils sont fous, ces français!”
[One more comment on Visit: many TV critics and analysts assert that the movie version of Vidal’s play was the inspiration, perhaps even the source of the 1978-82 sitcom Mork & Mindy, which starred Robin Williams (1951-2014) as an alien visitor to Earth and Pam Dawber (b. 1951) as the human who takes him in.
[A good deal of Fuchs’s background and credits are scattered through these three articles, but let me end with a brief bio to finish it up. She wrote or edited several seminal books, notably Year One of the Empire: A Play of American Politics, War, and Protest Taken From the Historical Record (1973), which premièred in Los Angeles at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in 1980; The Death of Character: Reflections on Theater After Modernism (1996), winner of the George Jean Nathan Award in Dramatic Criticism; and Land/Scape/Theater (2002; co-edited with Una Chaudhuri).
[A good deal of Fuchs’s
background and credits are scattered through these three articles, but let me
end with a brief bio to finish it up. She
wrote or edited several seminal books, notably Year One of the Empire:
A Play of American Politics, War, and Protest Taken From the Historical Record
(1973), which premièred in Los Angeles at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in 1980;
The Death of Character: Reflections on Theater After Modernism (1996),
winner of the George Jean Nathan Award in Dramatic Criticism; and Land/Scape/Theater
(2002; co-edited with Una Chaudhuri).
[Her 2005 memoir, Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama With Alzheimer's, Machine Tools, and Laughter meditated on the difficulties of aging and dementia. (Fuchs’s mother, Lillian “Lil” Kessler, b. 1908, died in 1993, having lived the last ten years of her life with Alzheimer’s Disease. Fuchs, herself, died on 28 May 2024 of complications of Lewy body dementia.)
[Her work has won numerous awards, in addition to the George Jean Nathan Award, she also won the Excellence in Editing Award of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Los Angeles Drama-Logue Best Play award. Fuchs was the recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation awards and a Bunting Fellowship; she was awarded the 2009 Betty Jean Jones Teaching Award by the American Theatre and Drama Society.]
