Informing the New Dramaturgy: Critical Theory to Creative Process

Informing the New Dramaturgy: Critical Theory to Creative Process Paul C. Castagno Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Eric Overmyer and Connie Congdon offer new dramaturgical approaches to the art and craft of dramatic writing. Through analyses of their plays, certain working paradigms can be established which can then be applied in the teaching of advanced playwriting courses. Once the student has an understanding of the working application in various examples from the plays, a model is established which provides a foundation or point-of-departure for actual playwriting exercises. These exercises are designed to "open" the playwright and dramaturg to new possibilities in structure, language, and character. For those more interested in theory and criticism, these paradigms can illuminate or unlock difficult critical concepts by providing these plays (or their parts) as exemplars of a particular device. In fact, these models are construed out of necessity, since the litany of playwriting texts unhappily persists in the Aristotelian mold as playwriting's "cutting edge" defies and redefines—"what constitutes a play?" While each of the above playwrights has developed a distinctive voice, some common characteristics are evident. Generally, there is no sense of narrative linearity as is common to most realistic drama. Mac Wellman's Obieaward winning play, Sincerity Forever (1991), repeats entire interactions word for word through the voices of different characters. Len Jenkin's Dark Ride challenges the spectator to situate the story line within the multilayered, constantly shifting structure. In both cases, textual devices re-orient our focus and involvement away from the narrative. Elinor Fuchs, in her article subtitled Rethinking Theatre after Derrida, posits that, "Like a moebius strip, Dark Ride's frame and framed narratives cannot be logically distinguished, and the conventional distinction between performance and text is unsettled as the performance draws its textuality to our attention" (Fuchs 168). In another sense, rather than motivationally-oriented character choices causally related to plot structure, this new dramaturgy disrupts continuity whereby spontaneous language shifts alter the world of the play: through 29 30 Paul C. Castagno historical time as in Overmyer's On the Verge, or Jenkin's My Uncle Sam; through interstellar space—in Wellman's Albanian Softshoe and Whirligig; by creating worlds within worlds as in Len Jenkin's Dark Ride or New Jerusalem; or through bifurcation of character-identity as in Congdon's Tales of the Lost Formicans; and the transformations between characters and objects as in Tallahassee, a collaborative effort written by Wellman and directed by Jenkin (See Photograph). Tallahassee was created and performed in December 1991 at the Atlantic Center of the Arts. It offers some extraordinary transformtions as characters turn into vegetation, lawn furniture, parking lots, and musical notes. The new dramaturgy inverts the Aristotelian hegemony whereby character determines diction, as diction routinely controls or determines character choices. In On the Verge, three nineteenth-century women travelers speak not from individual choice but by osmosing (involuntarily) the future: MARY: Something else is happening, obviously. Something even more astonishing. Not only are we advancing in time, not only are we encountering the future with every step—(Beat) Ladies, we are beginning to know the future! (Beat) It is entering into our consciousness. Like mustard gas. Whatever that is. Len Jenkin (left) and Mac Wellman (right). (Photo credit: Atlantic Center for the Arts, Suzanne Fetscher, Director) Informing the New Dramaturgy 31 Wait a moment. I'll tell you. (She osmoses.) Oh. Oh. Oh. Unfortunate simile. I withdraw it. ALEX: We are absorbing the future! Through osmosis! (1.13:36) This "osmosed future" is in the form of a language, external to the historical context, which literally propels characters through time. Language is clearly not internally motivated, nor can it be seen as an "imitation of an action" from real life. Moreover, Overmyer's use of language obscures character individuation —who is saying is incidental compared to what is being said—or to the affective poetic rhythm, or to the strangeness of language without context. Overmyer defines his use of language as neoclassical in the sense of rarefied and removed from the quotidian (New Directions Panel 2). Similarly, Mac Wellman's iterative devices in Sincerity Forever remove the possibility...