Religious Experience as a Model for Emotional Experience in Theatre

Spring 2008 7 Religious Experience as a Model for Emotional Experience in Theatre David V. Mason Introduction In 2004 I attended a college production of a period play involving swords.1 In a climax building to the sigh of intermission, two characters took up arms against each other and, after a series of lunges, feints, and parries, one of them dealt a deadly thrust and the other followed with a quick stage death. Before the tension of the moment dissipated, however, the triumphant character bent to the stage corpse of his theatrical foe, placed a finger in the stage wound, and with a dramatic flourish jammed the befouled finger into his own mouth. Immediately, a sound rose like a signal to the house lights and the obligatory fifteen-minute break—a signal not from the stage but from a cluster of undergraduate students seated together close to the stage and center, who in perfect unison and stunning phonetic agreement said, “Eww!” From the standpoint of any one of the historical understandings of theatrical mimesis, this “Eww!-Effect” is a problem. It is one thing to acknowledge that theatrical activity inevitably imitates things outside the space and time of the theatre. It is something of a different order to confront the evidence that theatrical activity can take on a real, living life of its own, effectively existing as an ontological reality in the experience of the audience. Perhaps a degree of verisimilitude in theatre sometimes fools our conscious thoughts into a state of mistake, but in this case, the stage grotesquerie did not even include fake blood. Reasoning from this one case, a production’s naturalist aims, the psychological authenticity of its actors, and the realism of its set apparently have little to do with the Eww!-Effect. Whatever the degree of realistic illusion intended by a production, the trappings of the theatre experience, from paid-parking to poorly upholstered seats to velour curtains, impose on an audience an uninterrupted discourse of fabrication. Not only might we cringe at blood-sucking on a stage, but we might also weep at Astyanax’s death, grit our teeth at Stanley’s abuse of Stella, and laugh at Bottom’s disfigurement, as though all these things really happen while we watch. The philosophical term paradox of fiction denotes the problem of reacting to stories—as presented in novels, cinema, painting, etc.—as though to immediately real events. The theatrical variation on this paradox is that staged action can affect David V. Mason is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Rhodes College. His work on Sanskrit drama and religious theatre in India has appeared in Theatre Research International, New Literary History, and previously in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. His book Theatre Is Religion is forthcoming. 8 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism us as though it is not pretense, even while it demonstrates its pretense. Cort Webb, our college classmate, is never dead and bleeding on stage, and while the presence of his familiar, not-character body makes the pretense explicit, while we know in a very conscious way that he’s neither dead nor bleeding, we nevertheless see Brad Bergeron eat his blood, which, momentarily, like, grosses us out. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James includes the anecdote of one of the “keenest intellects” of his acquaintance, which reads, in part: On the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but the sense of presence so called came on the next night. After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the previous night’s experience, when suddenly I felt something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant ‘sensation’ connected with it.2 It is hard not to note certain compelling similarities between the experience of James’s acquaintance and the Eww!-Effect. In both cases...