Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy

11. Understanding Plays

eleven
Understanding Plays James R. Hamilton The Issue Theatrical performances require time for their presentation.1 Theatrical performances require time for their reception. The time in which theatrical performance is received by an audience is the same time as that of its presentation. Theatrical performances consist of events arranged in a sequence. The sequence of events in which a given production of a play is performed need not always be the same from performance to performance. We can imagine a production in which the scenes are numbered and, upon arrival for each evening’s performance, the company settles on the ordering of the scenes by drawing from a hat numbers corresponding to the scenes. Clearly, in this production one night’s performance could be different from every other night’s performance. Just as clearly, however, each night’s performance will have been arranged and experienced by the audience in just that one particular order, albeit an order that was randomly, perhaps we may want to say arbitrarily, chosen at the outset of the performance.2 Unless the performers make a mistake, the sequence of events in theatrical performances are experienced by audiences in the order in which the events have been arranged. Moreover, the events are experienced at roughly and typically the pace the performers have arranged for them to be experienced. The quali‹ers “roughly and typically” are required because the performers may, for a variety of reasons, perform the sequence of events, in whole or in parts, more slowly or more quickly than they had planned. In all of these respects theatrical performance may be said to be a tem221 poral art form.3 Here is another. Individual moments in a theatrical performance , “zero-duration-time-slices” so to speak, as a rule are not considered as something in the performance to which one attends in experiencing the events of which the theatrical performance consists. A theatrical performance could be ‹lmed and as a result single moments of individual scenes could be pulled out to be observed and even appreciated as pictures in their own right. But these would be freeze frames of the ‹lm of the performance, and not “non-temporally extended parts” of the performance to be observed for their own sakes, for of a theatrical performance there is nothing that corresponds to that description.4 This is not to deny that performers can stop the action in a play and allow, by means of the stopped moment, for something to register with the audience . Such “freeze frames,” if that is what we want to call them, are not only possible, they may be very effective bits of theater. But they are not presented or experienced as moments to be understood on their own in isolation from the rest of the sequence of events comprising the performance . Indeed their value as bits of theater will be experienced precisely because of their connections to and contrasts with the remainder of the events. A further pair of features of theatrical performances follows from those listed so far. First, there is no stepping back from a theatrical performance and taking it in as a whole in a single observation. Nor, second, is there any ›ipping backward and forward through the performance to check if one got it right the ‹rst time, to remind ourselves who the character now present to us really is or to discover what will later become of her.5 Reference to these practices or capacities, characteristic of what one can do with movies and novels but not with theatrical performances, respectively , may be thought useful for distinguishing theatrical performance from those other forms of art. I offer no opinion about that. I rehearse them here to raise a different question, namely, what is it to understand theatrical performances given that they have these temporally in›ected characteristics? The simple and obvious answer I will give is that to understand a theatrical performance is to grasp what is happening in the sequence of events that is presented as it is happening. This simple and obvious answer requires quali‹cation and has deep and deeply interesting implications. The tasks undertaken in this essay are to work out this view in detail and to investigate its implications. 222
Staging Philosophy A Useful Model In this essay I will focus on understanding plays, by which I will mean narrative theatrical performances. Not all theatrical performances are narratively...