Telling and Showing

Early in Winter's Tales, Kathleen George remarks, apropos of voice in theater and on the page, "All in all, as popular history has it, we were all looking to express the 'me' in our works. Even critics turned to the first person and the personal." Certainly Kathleen George did. As studies of literary and theatrical methods go, this is a very chatty book. Her discussions of prose fiction and plays are shaped by the fact that she is both a novelist and a theater director. Beyond that a third George persona is constantly in evidence—the teacher (professor in the theatre arts department at the University of Pittsburgh). She has the annoying habit of flooding her writing with questions as though she were using interrogation rather than explanation in an attempt to lead a class through the explication of a particular play or the analysis of a device or an organizing impulse of a genre.

The word reflections in the subtitle is an indication of the way George shapes her work. There are three long chapters, but each is divided into short considerations of aspects of the subject at hand, titled comments that make a point and then scurry on to the next reflection. She several times explains what constitutes the novelistic stage: "Narration is one of those elements that used to seem the province of the novel and is now more and more present on the stage. Other elements, to describe them in the simplest terms, are: changes of place, long passages of time, interiority of mind, the qualities of voice, the filtering of external detail through point-of-view narration, the past as experienced by the individual." Diegesis becomes mimesis, telling becomes showing. Not that there is a real lack of showing in prose fiction nor of telling on stage, but, then, her subject is the way the borders between genres—never more than weak fences—are regularly violated.

The first of her three extended subjects considers the ways in which novels share with plays and plays borrow from novels. Monologues, either inside or outside the action of a play, recall prose fiction, and, since at one point she suggests that all story-telling is monologue, the narrator's voice (the author's voice) colors the performed scenes in the drama. Having established shared elements, she turns to a consideration of the ways those elements are housed in particular texts. For her, the ur-novelistic play is Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (hence, the book's title) with its jumps in time and space (if I were going that way, I would have chosen Pericles). Shakespeare notwithstanding, the assumption is that novelizing is a fairly recent process, which is not the case because plays have employed the novel's devices since before novels existed. George chooses a handful of plays—modern classics from Hedda Gabler to The Glass Menagerie—as father/mother figures in the plundering of novels, and then goes on to illustrate in brief glances at more recent plays (mostly since the 1970s) the what and how of the plundering. Having indicated that novels and plays share telling and showing, she then presents a section on adaptation to indicate the dangers in allowing telling to upstage showing. She bravely presents the wonderfully klutzy attempt she made to novelize the opening scene of The Country Wife, but she quickly turns to novel-to-play adaptations as the more conventional form of generic transformation; actually, early in the twentieth century, popular plays were frequently novelized. The main point of this chapter is that much of what is told in the novel can be discarded on the assumption that the play can show it more effectively not only through the interaction of characters but in the face, voice, and body language of performers and in the shortcuts of setting, prop, and lighting.

George's "me" has many interesting things to say and more than a few obvious ones. Faced with her statement that "excitement about [End Page xvi...