The Elements of Theatrical Expression

Brian Kulick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000708462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

The Elements of Theatrical Expression puts forward 14 essential elements that make up the basic building blocks of theatre.

Is theatre a language? Does it have its own unique grammar? And if so, just what would the elements of such a grammar be? Brian Kulick asks readers to think of these elements as the rungs of a ladder, scaling one after the other to arrive at an aerial view of the theatrical landscape. From such a vantage point, one can begin to discern a line of development from the ancient Greeks, through Shakespeare and Chekhov, to a host of our own contemporary authors. He demonstrates how these elements may be transhistorical but are far from static, marking out a rich and dynamic theatrical language for a new generation of theatre makers to draw upon.

Suitable for directors, actors, writers, dramaturges, and all audiences who yearn for a deeper understanding of theatre, The Elements of Theatrical Expression equips its readers with the knowledge that they need to see and hear theatre in new and more daring ways.

1

INTRODUCTION

Toward a theatrical grammar

Theatre as language

Theatre is a language. It possesses its own unique grammar, rules that govern how its elements can be arranged to forge meaning. I suspect the mere mention of a word like grammar might make many readers slam the cover of this book shut in terror, but the word’s etymological origins are far more enticing. Grammatica, as it was called in the Middle Ages, came to mean “secret knowledge” and had more to do with magic than with subject/verb agreements. By the time the word immigrates to Scotland in the 18th Century, it was understood as being a form of “enchantment or spell.”¹ This little book grows out of a desire to discover the unique theatrical elements that have cast a spell on audiences from theatre’s inception to today. It wants to know what constitutes such elements and how, when they are combined, meaning emerges. The process of making such meaning is similar to Wittgenstein’s depiction of builders at work:

A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass him the stones and to do so in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they make use of a language consisting of the words “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” “beam.” A calls them out; B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such call.²

It sounds simple enough. There’s just one problem: what if each person has a different idea of what they are passing back and forth to one another? What if everyone uses the terms “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” and “beam” but has a radically different conception of each of these elements? This is part of the challenge of making theatre in the early 21st Century; we are often using the same words, but endowing them with a wide range of differing meanings. Every theatre practitioner understands “action” but often from the rather restricted view of their distinct discipline. The aim of this book is to develop a 360-degree understanding of certain key elements, attempting to uncover the common grammatical glue that holds our ostensibly normative Western theatrical language together. It turns to the beginnings of ancient Greek theatre, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and our own contemporary authors to begin to tease out what these shared elements might be. This is not to advocate that any of these elements are rules that must be strictly adhered to; but rather, dynamics to be understood and then, if need be, broken in informed and interesting ways. In this respect, this book believes that Picasso becomes Picasso, or Schoenberg becomes Schoenberg, because they understood the fundamentals of their respective mediums. This was an understanding on such a deep cellular level that these artists could go on to dismantle and reassemble their respective modes of expression in new and necessary ways. My somewhat humble goal is to arrive at a similar sort of cellular knowledge with the belief that it is only with such an understanding that we can cajole the medium of theatre into more daring ways of making us see and hear anew.

The basic elements of theatrical grammar

And so, this little book is an attempt to understand the elements that make up the grammar of normative Western theatre. Each of the following chapters looks at an individual element and examines how it contributes to the forging of this theatrical language. These elements are grouped in ascending order, with each organically growing out of its predecessor. One could think of these elements as rungs in a ladder, scale one after the other and the reader will arrive at an aerial view of the theatrical landscape. These rungs are: The question, truth, moments, change, world, character, states, intentions, actions, obstacles, events, cores, about-ness, and remanence (a beautiful word for what remains of an experience long after it has passed).

The first element that steps forward for our inspection is the question. Theatre, by its very nature, is fundamentally interrogative, it often begins with a deep and abiding question. These questions can be as simple and direct as: “Who’s to Blame?” (The Oresteia), “To be or not to be” (Hamlet); or even “What difference does it make?” (The Three Sisters). The provisional answers to these essential questions leads to the second element: the patient pursuit of truth.

Truth has had a difficult time in our beleaguered 20th and 21st Centuries and yet, in theatre we still find audiences saying of a moment, “That was true.” This is a very particular kind of truth, what one might call the truth of recognition. In the case of theatre, it is usually the recognition of our behaviors as they are reflected back to us by actors. The accuracy of that reflection becomes the criterion for our conception of theatrical truth. Aristotle called such a process mimesis; it is a theatre that, according to Shakespeare, is charged with “holding a mirror up to nature.” Such truths are often imbedded in seemingly inconsequential details, what Tolstoy called “the tiny bit,” a way of capturing reality which Chekhov and Stanislavsky inherit and take to its furthest extremes.

With these two foundational elements in place, we can turn to what Stanislavsky called the moment. This is the fundamental building block of theatre. The heart of a moment sits between what has just transpired and what is about to be. It is the fleeting awareness of being caught between these two temporal poles. For Shakespeare, this was “the interim” which exists on the threshold of taking an action, just before the future is forever altered. From this basic understanding of time comes everything. The moment is the essential atom of theatre. The theatrical experience is constructed moment by moment. These moments become beats, units, scenes, acts, until an entire play emerges before our eyes; leading to the next subatomic element: change.

Change happens within and about us, from one moment to the next. It is our constant companion. Ours is a world of continual transformation. Theatre mirrors this in the situations, characters, and tonalities it depicts; revealing how quickly we can move from the sublime to the ridiculous, or the civil to the savage. The scale of change can also change from play to play. Look at the difference between the grand transformations found in a Greek tragedy and compare them to the almost microscopic alterations that make up the fine weave of a Chekhov play; yet still, at the center of each work, is a profound sensitivity to the consequences that change exacts on the inhabitants of each of these worlds. This is where the poetics of theatre becomes a kind of physics. This is the thermodynamics of being.

Having dwelt in the realm of the micro, our investigation moves to the macro-level with an exploration of world and character. These two elements are inextricably intertwined. In the theatre, the world is more a verb than a noun, actively shaping the minds and bodies of its characters whose very comportment can conjure an entire world without a stitch of scenery. The conjunction of world and character leads to our next element: states. A state is not to be confused with a mood (i.e., happiness, sadness, or nostalgia), although a mood can be part of a state’s content. Moods join thought, feeling, associations, and drives which are all bundled together to create a given state at a given time. Put simply: states are the ways these linked thoughts, feelings, associations, and drives happen to us. They are rarely static, almost always in flux, taking us from state to state. Out of such states grow the more familiar elements of intentions, actions, and obstacles. These are the nuts and bolts that occupy most actors and directors as they go about assembling a performance of a play. It is through a deep understanding of this tripartite process that we come to an understanding of our next two essential elements: events and cores. The event is what happens to change a given situation from scene to scene and the core is what each of those events reveal (i.e., their subsequent meaning). Think of events and cores as two sets of parallel dramatic integers. If we add up all the events of play, we have its plot; if we add up all the cores of a play, we have its theme.

This takes us to the shores of about-ness, which deals with the slow accrual of meaning over the arc of an entire theatrical unfolding. About-ness is how a play slowly reveals its import to us through the implication of the play’s central action. It is a meaning that is often more felt than thought. It is where thought and feeling meet and become one; a sort of synesthesia of understanding. This lingering sensation leads us to the final and perhaps most elusive element of this book: remanence. This, as we have said, is what remains in our hearts and minds long after the actual experiencing of a work has passed. One could say that theatre practitioners are in the remanence-making business, intent on leaving some trace in the audience’s imagination, some often ineffable meaning that they can carry with them into the future. Artaud likened this to a kind of infection; other, gentler, theatre makers, have thought of it as a sort of sowing. Germ or seed, this is what remains of the work. It has the capacity to continue to grow within us. Only time will tell how such remanence might subtly re-script our inner life.

Same elements, different emphasis

I am equally interested in the genealogy of this grammar, how one can trace a line from the ancient Greeks, through Shakespeare and Chekhov, to a host of our own contemporary authors; in doing so, one begins to see how these elements are not only present in each of the artists under investigation, but also how they transform from artist to artist and epoch to epoch. These elements may, indeed, be transhistorical in terms of normative Western theatre, but they are far from static. As a result, one can see how these artists bequeath to us a rich theatrical grammar to draw upon, augment, re-adapt, and even reject as we continue to dream of a theatre for the future.

Tadashi Suzuki, the great modern theatre director, has observed how there is a discernible current running across the time of the Greeks, through Shakespeare and Chekhov, to us. Shakespeare may have known little Latin and less Greek, but it is clear that he was a close reader of Seneca who was deeply devoted to the tragedies of the Greeks. Similarly, Chekhov was very much a student of Shakespeare, modeling plays like The Seagull after Hamlet, and Uncle Vanya after Twelfth Night. As for now, Chekhov remains a dominant influence in the hearts and minds of many contemporary playwrights and so these elements remain alive and well in many of the works that find their way to the stages of today. It is a lineage that becomes all the more legible as we begin to trace the play of these select elements from author to author. What also becomes clear, when we follow this genealogy, is how these elements are given a different emphasis with each artist.

The land of the Greeks is the land of the foundational for Western theatre, it is here that the basic DNA of our theatre was first discovered and articulated. All of the elements we will grapple with in this book find their roots in the Greek Moment. They stand before us like those giant stone heads found on Easter Island, equal in their density and mystery. These are our origins writ large and in spending time with them we can often catch a glimpse of those secret necessities that lead to the creation of this unique form of human expression. One such intimation is that theatre is an elaborate metaphor for the Greeks’ notion of Moira (Fate). Here theatre itself becomes the very machinery of this force, coming to life whenever humans rouse themselves to action. It is as though Aeschylus and company were dramatizing the philosopher Heraclitus’ dictum: “ethos anthropoid daimon.” Novalis translated this subtle observation as: “Character is Fate.”³ If character launches Greek tragedy, it is fate that always seems to have the last word. Here, fate becomes plot and, as Aristotle tells us, plot is everything to the Greek tragedians.

Shakespeare is the great hinge of theatre, he is the bridge that takes us from the ancients to the moderns. Thanks to his historical position (a product of the Renaissance) he draws from the past, but also points to the future. Here, all the same principles are at play; only on a much broader temporal, spatial, and experiential canvas. But, most significantly, Shakespeare shifts the emphasis of the Heraclitus/Novalis equation. It is the interior of the character, rather than the exterior of fate/plot, that interests him; or, as he says in Julius Caesar, “The cause is not in the stars, but in ourselves.”⁴ Shakespeare maintains all the elements of theatrical expression, but re-prioritizes them, character assumes pride of place in his theatrical unfoldings.

With the advent of Chekhov, one senses the first incipient stirrings of modernism. It is a dramaturgy that we are still, in many ways, both deeply indebted to and guided by. What is it that makes Chekhov one of the exemplars of what we are calling the modern impulse in theatre? Perhaps, we could define Chekhov’s modernity as a kind of fundamental skepticism that enters into the understanding and use of such notions as character or plot, calling both into question. His plays beg the question: is there a real ground to the elements which we strive to emphasize, or are they just phantoms of our imagination? This essential questioning of each element opens the door for Beckett, Pinter, Churchill, and a host of other contemporary authors who take such doubts to the furthest extremes of theatrical expression. In this respect, Chekhov is one of the first cracks in the porcelain teacup of normative Western theatre.

The overall design of this book calls upon this transhistorical triumvirate of the Greeks, Shakespeare, and Chekhov to help elucidate, from chapter to chapter, the element under investigation; but at the end of each chapter, a different contemporary author is brought into the conversation so that one can see how these moderns rhyme with their classical counterparts, further exemplifying the enduring dynamics and possibilities of a given theatrical element. This constellation of contemporary authors includes: Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Caryl Churchill, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Kane.

With a little help from my friends

Theatre, by its very nature, is a plural affair. The observations, theories, and tentative conclusions that make up this book are therefore collective in their origins. They were discovered over the past 30 years in classrooms, rehearsal rooms, and performance spaces across the country. They emerged through a ceaseless dialogue with teachers, students, fellow artists, and audiences. It is this community of kindred spirits who have helped me to understand this strange vocation that we call theatre. At certain points, when I fear this work veers too far into the realm of the esoteric, I have tried to bring it back down to earth with a memory or anecdote from such fellow practitioners who possess the gift of returning these concepts to their direct and no-nonsense usage. One such reoccurring voice is that of my teacher. He is both real and mythical, as all great teachers become in their students’ imagination. His silhouette, intonation, and carriage remain so very clear and fixed in my mind’s eye; but, through a trick of memory, what he said has altered over the passage of time. Certain of his pronouncements continue to magically expand, deepen, and transform; all on their own, in unseen ways. It is like a garden that keeps growing long after its caretaker has gone. It seemed right that my teacher and these other wise voices should find a home here within these pages. It is to this extraordinary community, that I am forever indebted.

How to read this book

Like most books, the reader can certainly benefit from reading this work chronologically; and, indeed, much painstaking labor has gone into the precise ordering of these elements so that they show how each organically grows out of the other to create what we call theatre. Yet even though this book is constructed in such a fashion, it does not mean that it must be read that way. There is no injunction to dutifully follow my argument, element by element, to the end. The reader is free to graze, gravitating toward whatever element captures his or her fancy. If one is obsessed with action, one can start there and feel free ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Questions
• 3. Truth
• 4. Moments
• 5. Change
• 6. World
• 7. Character
• 8. States
• 9. Intentions
• 10. Actions
• 11. Obstacles
• 12. Events
• 13. Cores
• 14. About-ness
• 15. Remanence
• Index