Interpreting the Play Script: Contemplation and Analysis (review)

In the spirit of polyvocality Anne Fliotsos espouses from the outset of her text, Interpreting the Play Script: Contemplation and Analysis offers both traditional and innovative points of entry to play analysis. The author presents unique visions, concepts, and methods of practice, drawn from both a thorough study of dramatic theory, criticism, theatre history, directing, and pedagogy (such as Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences) and her personal experience as teacher/director. Fliotsos positions her text as suitable for those already “familiar with basic concepts” and “ready to create theatre” (xiii). Clearly, Interpreting the Play Script is not an introduction to the theatre text; it is a concise, lucid, and remarkably unbiased introduction to play analysis. Gracefully written—and with passion—this text presents and explicates an array of approaches. Fliotsos defines troublesome terminology, yet her book does not read as encyclopedic, nor—like so many others in the field—does it insist that its readers adjust to an idiosyncratic lexicon that lacks efficacy in production.

Interpreting the Play Script is organized in four parts: 1) contemplation and intuitive response; 2) formalist analysis; 3) interpreting the nonlinear play; and 4) responding to the script and choosing a path of interpretation. Each chapter is divided into subsections, making the text easy to navigate. Keeping with the openness at the heart of her approach(es), Fliotsos advises that readers may deal with these conceptual frameworks in any order they choose, or to simply draw on individual chapters to their liking. The author gives equal weight to each chapter as well, in length and in the depth of her discussions.

Beginning, then, with the distinctive philosophy that “one type of analysis cannot fit every play” (xiii), Fliotsos advocates both subjective and objective responses to the script, offering contemplative and active, experiential exercises. Among the most distinctive and intriguing of these are the meditative exercises, drawn from Zen Buddhism and first utilized by Fliotsos in her graduate course in play analysis. Recognizing that Interpreting the Play Script is a play-analysis text and not an instruction manual for meditative practice or a history of Buddhism, Fliotsos carefully outlines parameters for her use of Zen, offering concise definitions and explaining how the meditative interpretative lens is effective in establishing and maintaining focus, encouraging subjective reactions to surface from reading, and in utilizing the body as a vehicle for interpretation. She includes instructions for beginning meditation and incorporates exercises that allow for sensory responses to emerge from the reading of a given text.

With regard to bodily kinesthetic explorations of texts, she mentions production companies like Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago and proponents of the implementation of tableaux vivant, as well as Julie Taymor’s notion of the ideograph. Of script analysis through movement, Fliotsos says: “Interpreting through the body is a valid avenue of script exploration that is utilized by actors in rehearsal, but rarely used in an academic setting to study the script”; she continues by saying that “when exploration through doing/enacting is utilized it is often after an analytical examination of the text. What might happen if somatic interpretation were to come first?” (22; emphasis in original). Provocative questions like this are the hallmark of this text.

The chapter on formalist analysis begins with Aristotle, offering a cogent yet comprehensive application of Aristotle’s six elements as a still-valid methodology for unpacking a performance text. Sections on Freytag’s pyramid, the Well-Made Play, and causal/linear versus episodic plot structures (complemented by diagrams) follow. Character analysis (and terminology like “protagonist”, “antagonist”, “raisonneur”, and so on) is incorporated into this chapter, as well as a section on Stanislavski and exercises that address character function and action analysis. The seamlessness of Fliotsos’s writing makes this chapter pleasurable for even the veteran of traditional play analysis. In light of her comment in the preface about “distressingly similar” script-analysis books, “derivative of Aristotle’s, Freytag’s, Stanislavski’s principles” (xiii), I read this chapter last, expecting a less-than-positive view of...