Microdrama

CHARACTER: A BULLETRoad at night, cold, deserted.A minute of silence—A gunshot.    CURTAIN¹

This is, in its entirety, Francesco Cangiullo's 1915 Futurist play, Detonation: Synthesis of All Modern Theater. In their manifestos, the Italian Futurists dubbed most of their short plays sintesi, or syntheses, because they insisted the plays' compression would distill the dynamism of modern life into purified forms.² Detonation looks like a joke, and many have mistaken it for one. But what if, tongue half in cheek like the Futurists, we were to take Detonation's subtitle seriously and consider it as an accurate encapsulation of modern theater? While we're at it, might we even take it as a single, idiosyncratic case study that suggests lessons about the perverse richness of some very short plays?

I use the term "microdrama" to refer to ostentatiously short plays like this one, but also more widely to any play crafted to be considerably shorter than its audience's likely horizon of temporal expectation.³ In practice, that tends to mean a play with a running time shorter than twenty minutes, and often much shorter. But a transhistorical survey of brief theater tends to underscore the subjectiveness and contingency of brevity as a concept. Shortness becomes legible on a case-by-case basis from a confluence of emotional reactions and learned expectations that depend on personal, contextual, and historical factors. The audiences for quarter-hour plays in France in the 1880s were so accustomed to clocks that chimed every fifteen minutes that they used the phrase "quarter hour" as a synonym for a moment.⁴ But the fifteen-minute plays that struck August Strindberg and his contemporaries as momentary already seemed ponderous to Cangiullo some thirty years later, or to the audiences of the two-minute neofuturist plays performed in Chicago since 1985.

An opening salvo for the theatrical avant-garde, Detonation explodes previous conventions while distilling several hallmarks of modern theater: atmosphere trumps character, expectations are under attack, and an empty stage resonates beyond itself. The gunshot—simultaneously the play's inciting incident and climactic moment—followed by an abrupt curtain forces the audience to invent situation and resolution, perpetrator and victim. Perhaps they realize the play's attack is aimed at them, that they are one of its intended victims. But let's slow down.

To begin with, the play's structure condenses the most reliable formula for nineteenth-century drama by providing a period of rising suspense followed by a gunshot. The authors of the Futurist Synthetic Theater manifesto complain that in traditional theater, and even in ostensibly modern plays by authors like Henrik Ibsen, "Each act is as painful as having to sit patiently in a waiting room" for an important guest, creating interminable boredom before the inevitable "coup de théâtre: a kiss, a shot, a word that reveals all."⁵ Detonation isolates and magnifies this experience but does not fundamentally alter its shape. For an audience expecting a show and primed for shock by the title Detonation, the long empty minute may feel even longer and more exasperating than the acts of a traditional play, and the eventual coup de théâtre quite literally reveals all there is. Cangiullo's gunshot estranges the concept of the sudden turn of events by isolating it. Taken on its own, the coup de théâtre becomes at once a coup revolting against theater and an essentially theatrical punch in the gut.

The choice of a gunshot as the single action synthesizing modern theater is exemplary. Andrew Sofer's transhistorical study of objects on stage, The Stage Life of Props, identifies the gun as the representative prop in modern theater.⁶ Sofer argues that pistols on the modern stage both evoke and subvert the rigid conventions of dramatic closure inherited from nineteenth-century melodrama. As a result, guns in modern drama—from Hedda Gabler's pistols to Winnie's out-of-reach gun in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days—"threaten, distort, or even rupture stage time."⁷ Detonation suggests that one need not even bring the gun onstage: the gunshot alone, the audible...