The Play's the Thing...

STAGE DIRECTION

Issues in and around the theater

Issues in and around the theater

When dramatist and poet Ben Jonson published his complete works in the early days of the 17th century, he caused quite a stir in Jacobean high society. It's not that his writing was particularly scandalous. The problem, it seems, lay in the fact that he included both his plays and his poems in the same book. And why was that so surprising? He waspublishing his complete works, after all. But in Jonson's day the emphasis would be on the word works and not on the word complete. It might seem like a silly semantic quarrel today, but in the early 1600's there was a profound difference between a play and a literary work. One was frivolous, the other serious. The words play and work were taken quite literally and quite seriously.

This was not a dichotomy unique to Jonsons career. While Jonson was just beginning his literary work, Sir Philip Sidney attacked contemporary drama in his Defense of Poesy for (among other things) undermining theseriousness of literature. Even today, there are still strong echoes ofthis work-play opposition. A friend recently tried to explain to me why there are relatively few modern productions of Luigi Pirandello's plays despite his highstature in the literary world. Pirandello wrote academic exercises more than he wrote plays, she told me, and so they're very hard to put on. My friend's language alone conveys the split between literature and drama: Pirandello's plays equal academic equal exercise equal work. So they can't be put on... pretended... played.

In all fairness, this split between drama and literature is far from absolute. Playwrights as diverse (and widely performed) as Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, and David Mamet are considered great writers in much the same way that Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, or Don DeLillo are highly regarded. But this doesn't erase the gulf between dramatic literature and other types of literature. Writing a play still seems fundamentally different than writing a novel or a poem for more than the obvious stylistic disparities. I have to believe there's still a lingering senseof this difference between work and play.

One of the great attractions of theater for so many of its practitioners and adherents, of course, is exactly this idea of play and all its connotations of imagination, escape, and freedom. Its an appealing idea. Indeed, those writers that we might call aestheticists, from Alexander Pope all the way through Vladimir Nabokov, elevate the idea of play to one of the highest expressions of our humanity. Play, in the aestheticist's mind, becomes a representation of human independence precisely because it is not work; it is not essential. Unlike most animals, humans can choose to play instead of work; they can choose to make-believe. They can choose to be frivolous.

But what those who draw a line between literature and theater parallel to the line between work and play fail to see is that the play of drama is fundamentally a type of work. Tragedy, for instance, is exclusively a dramatic art form, or so most performance scholars will argue. An audience is forced to watch the tragedy through to the end whereas a reader can put down a book when it becomes too painful to bear. An audience, in other words, is forced to do the work of coming to terms with what they are seeing; a reader can choose to stop that work. As much as the play of theater is liberating, it is also a form of compulsion.

Indeed, play of any type is almost always a type of work. For children, play is a necessary means of mimicing and thereby coming to understand the world. It is a way to work things out, to learn, and to grow. If we are to define work as the aestheticists do, as an essential action, then we have to include most types of play under this definition. And it is my belief that we never outgrow this need for play-and I do mean need. I doubt that there's a culture on earth that hasn't institutionalized some form of performance directed at adults. We may learn to do the work of understanding our world through other means-through literature, for instance, as Jonsons critics would like to think. But even after we learn to read, we still want to be told stories. We still need to listen and we still need to watch.

If there is any work to be done on earth at all it is the work of understanding ourselves and those around us. It is the work that is done through play-the work that is done on stages across the world. Put two people in a room and they can't help but learn something; they can't help but do the work we constantly do throughout our lives: the work of observing. Drama forces us to observe and in doing so it forces us to work. The make-believe of drama, like the make-believe of children, is both a type of freedom from the world and a tether that keeps us grounded on the earth. Theater may be a type of play, but its also one of the most fundamental types of work that we can know.