Notes Chapter 1: Revaluations of Virtues 1. Critics generally credit D. W. Griffith as the director who first developed the cinema as a unique form. Gilberto Perez summarizes in The Material Ghost (1998): “As film historians have often said, [Griffith] made the shot rather than the scene the basic unit of film construction. His basic innovation was the convention of the shot: if the theater asks its audience to take the stage as a whole world, the movies after Griffith have asked their audience to agree, for as long as each shot lasts on the screen, to look at just the piece of the world framed within that shot” (24–25). See also Robert Richardson, Literature and Film (1985): “What Griffith had done was to separate film from theatre, for in the beginning, film, like theatre, presented a flowing tableau in a fixed space to a spectator (the camera and, of course, the viewer) who was also set in a fixed place” (37). 2. Chekhov wrote the part of Tuzenbach in Three Sisters for Meyerhold, who had left the Moscow Art Theatre for good and never performed the role. He did, however, later send a picture of himself to the playwright with the inscription, “From the pale-faced Meyerhold to his God” (Brietzke 3). 3. In addition to his recent film accomplishments, Sam Mendes (b. 1965) directed Judi Dench on stage in The Cherry Orchard, Ralph Fiennes in Troilus and Cressida, and Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room; and he directed Cabaret, which won four Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical. 4. Four Flicks, the Rolling Stones’ DVD following their World Licks Tour, includes three concerts and more than fifty songs, documentaries, bonus tracks, club songs, and outtakes. 5. In The Paradox of the Actor (1773, pub. 1830), Diderot, using David Garrick as a model, concludes that the great actor presents passions by studying the means to produce them objectively. Hence, the paradox: the actor who plays Othello remains quite calm and in control of his body and emotions, even as he strangles Desdemona, laments his actions , and commits suicide. This argument about emotion plays out today in discussions of actor training, whether it be from the outside-in, which emphasizes technical per- fection and visible aspects of character influencing “interior” choices, or the inside-out, which stresses having an emotional and psychological root for actions and seeing how they manifest themselves organically, physically. 6. Ironically, Plato, who casts all artists from his ideal republic, displays an artist’s sensibility in what scholars agree is some of the finest Greek ever written. He voices a stout antitheatrical prejudice, yet the dialogic form in which he excels makes for masterful drama. Unlike Plato, whose vehemence toward his subject belies his attraction to the material, Aristotle takes a dispassionate view of drama and draws upon empirical evidence to back his claims. 7. It’s impossible not to relate this narrative theory to male sexual desire and, naturally , then look for an alternative model. Peter Brooks, the Yale professor—not Peter Brook, the English director and author—applied the human desire to get to the end of the story to what he termed “narrative psychology” in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984). In this provocative book, he equates narrative desire, the drive to finish the story, with Freud’s death wish. Just as only the end of a story, a novel, a play fully reveals its meanings, death confers meaning upon a life. A paradox of reading , of life, and of sex is that the desire for pleasure (and meaning) hastens the end of experience. 8. For a thorough and accessible analysis of this production, see Johan Callens, “‘Black Is White, I Yells It out Louder ’n Deir Loudest’: Unraveling the Wooster Group’s The Emperor Jones,” Eugene O’Neill Review 26 (2004): 43–69. 9. Peter Brook’s production of Marat/Sade in 1964 is perhaps the most famous example of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” in practice. Like Shelley’s play, Peter Weiss’s text lends itself readily to practice designed to affect an audience physically and psychically. 10. The Poetics originally had two books, though one, presumably on comedy, was lost. See Gerald Else’s introduction to Poetics, 10. Perhaps like Aristophanic lovers, the two books have always been looking for each other as their perfect mates throughout history. Chapter 2: Dramatic Projections 1. I discovered this firsthand when...