long time, eh?

Wile this post is short on content - it is long in coming. Wow. It's been a long time since I blogged -- due in part to forgetting my password.

Oh well.

Here goes nothin'

Humalong

A Dream Play
(composed moments after seeing it in a dream)

This play should be somewhere in the middle. An MC enters. I’m betting that there has been someone at some point who made an announcement about the show, said hello, or at the very least told folks to turn off cell phones (and if he didn’t mention cell phones, now’s a good time)…

…that guy*.

So, he comes back out (he can still be wearing – whatever)…

MC:
Hello. I’m back. Hope you’ve been enjoying the show. Anyway. Right now we’ve got something just little different. A musical interlude, as it were, and you’re all included. A little sing-a-long break has really become a sort of tradition at these things. It really helps with – well – with – the flow. And interest. It keeps the interest thing going. You know, there are sooooooOooo many plays in one of these things, right? And soooOOOooOo many people involved. You probably came to see someone in particular, right? Someone you know? In the show? And they’ve already been on, or they haven’t even done theirs yet, and you’re starting to think, “I thought these were supposed to be short, cuz they seem pretty long to me”, right? Everybody thinks that. Trust me. They do. And because you’re not alone, because we care about your sanity, because you’re itching just to move a little right now…

A musical interlude.

Music warms the heart of the savage beast, right? And we know you’re getting antsy, soooooOOOoooo warm your wind pipes-up, cuz we’re gonna have a little sing-a-long. And here to lead you through it this year is ____________! Enjoy!

The MC claps his hands in the direction of the wings. From the wings enters a young woman, earnest, but kinda geeky. She carries a drum on a stand and a stool. She has difficulty. The MC rushes and helps. He sets the stool down-center and then abandons her. The young woman sets up her drum, apologizing with her gaze, her grin, and the angle of her body slouch, about the awkwardness of the set-up. She sits, drum sticks at the ready, it’s only just dawning on her that she is alone on stage…

THE WOMAN AT THE DRUM:
Uh. Hi. So. Um. They asked me to play something, cuz the folk-lady they usually get, well she couldn’t do it, and then Benny the piano-guy he couldn’t either, and then CC the other guitar said “No fucking way”, oh, sorry, this is uh, well, CC swears a lot, if you know CC. I don’t swear, no, not me. Uh. Anyways. The interlude. I thought we’d do one of my favorites, okay? Anyone here watch Masterpiece Theatre? This is… The Masterpiece.

She hits the drum. Now, understand, we want her to be good, I mean, who doesn’t want her to be good? Is she good? That’s really up to you. And her. Do what feels best. You know your audience, right?

So. She plays. And then. She starts to hum the melody. She puts in…

Come on guys… sing it with me…!

She gets back to the Masterpiece. If the audience is humming along too, great. Just let it go. If they’re not, then send the MC guy to help encourage them. C’mon! This girl needs help. Just tell that MC to get his lazy-ass out there and SAVE THE SHOW. You’re on a mission, man! GET OUT THERE!

We get thru the song (yea!). The MC claps! Yea!. The young woman kinda bows, maybe waves, maybe drops a stick, has a hard time with the drum, tries to take the stool. The MC helps. He jams the stool somewhere into her arms and sends her off in the direction of the wings. He claps again as the young woman retreats. He does his job.

MC:
Tradition. Gotta love it!

He claps more as he exits. Chances are the audience claps too.

END OF PLAY
AS THE SHOW GOES ON (yea!)

* I know, I know. I’m assuming your MC is a “guy” and then I go further and only refer to him as “he” and never once do I even attempt the more correct he/she, or the even even more correct she/he. Maybe you’ve had a chick introducing the shows this whole time. Feel free to use her instead. Sure, it will destroy the whole tension regarding father/daughter abandonment issues that drives the action, okay so we won’t get the big question about why women repeat the cycle of bad choices concerning men, and the theme that exposes the patriarchy can be tossed out the window. It’s not about what I (the playwright) want. Fuck that. I’m not even here, right? At this stage it’s all about making the play easier for you. So. If it’s easier for you… you have my blessing.

Perchance

On Dream Logic in the Theater
by Kato McNickle

I woke myself up laughing. Laughing out loud at a play that I was watching.
It was a dream, of course. In the dream I was watching a short play in a ten-minute festival written by a playwright friend of mine (he had asked me to perform it for him). During the dream I was both the actor and an audience member—simultaneously. While in the dream, it did not seem out of place to be both the performer and the observer of the event, and it proved to be great fun. It was the audience member part of me that started laughing, and my laughter—really laughing—caused me to awaken, still laughing. The dream was so vivid, and so recent, that I got out of bed and to my computer a few feet away. I typed the play, called Humalong (yes, the title was part of the dream too) about which I had dreamed. My playwright friend Mike still claims I owe him residuals, because in a weird way, he wrote the play, right?

Is this play conjured in a dream representative of dream-logic? Maybe. It depends who you ask.

Throughout the last century the tension between illusion and reality has been a focal point of most Western theatrical productions. The audience knows that what they are seeing is not real—a fiction—and yet something compels them to believe. The actors know that they are not the characters they portray, and yet throughout the entire process they refer to “in character” and “out of character” as distinct states of being. Across American stages the debate about ‘realism’ in the theater persists. What is ‘real’ in the theater; What is like ‘dream’?

Nietzsche, in his essay The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was an early and influential thinker regarding attributing aspects of dramaturgy and theatrical experience to that of the dream (would that be dreamaturgy?):

Though it is certain that of the two halves of our existence, the waking and dreaming states, the former appeals to us as being infinitely preferable, more important, excellent, and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that which alone is lived—yet in relation to that mysterious ground of our being of which we are a phenomena, I should, paradoxical as it may seem, maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of dreams. For the more clearly I perceive in nature those omnipotent art impulses, and in them an ardent longing for illusion, for redemption through illusion, the more I feel myself impelled to the metaphysical assumption that the truly existence primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the rapturous vision, the pleasurable illusion, for its continuous redemption. And we, completely wrapped up in this illusion and composed of it, are compelled to consider the illusion as the truly nonexistent—i.e., as a perpetual becoming in time, space, and casualty—in other words, as empirical reality.

This question: is it preferable to be awake or to dream, will prove to be an essential component of twentieth century thought, both in artistic realms, and for the social sciences. Is one superior to the other? Is dream an escape, or simply a bi-product of sleep? Are wakefulness and dreaming actually opposites? Is one state exclusive of the other?

In Anatomy of the Drama (1977), Martin Esslin describes the morphing of early twentieth naturalism into other forms:

By concentrating on the concrete detail rather than on abstract sentiments, naturalism tended transform itself into a style in which objects increasingly became symbols, embodiments of ideas. So naturalism merged into symbolism. And as the writers concerned concentrated more and more on these symbols, which after all are in the nature of poetic metaphors, lyrical images, so symbolism came full circle and turned into a type of neo-romanticism. […] [August] Strindburg […] [who started out a naturalist], took a slightly different path. In [his] determination to represent experience exactly as it really was [he] soon discovered that depicting the external world tells only half the story; you also have to include the way the world was experienced by an individual, and that meant his internal world. Hence Strindburg wrote a number of such plays—The Ghost Sonata, To Damascus and the Dream Play itself which, quite in the spirit of naturalism, tried to depict a dream.

This movement with its emphasis on individual impressions was termed ‘expressionism’.

Strindburg himself eloquently describes his intent with his Dream Play (1901) in the following excerpt from the author’s note regarding the play:

Anything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Space and time do not exist. Based on a slight foundation of reality, imagination wanders afield and weaves patterns comprised of mixtures and recollections, experiences and unconstrained fantasies, absurdities and improvisations. Characters split, double, and multiply; they evaporate, crystallize, dissolve, and reconverge. But one single consciousness governs them all, that of the dreamer. […] And since there is generally more pain than pleasure in the dream, a tone of melancholy and sympathy for all things runs through the swaying narrative. Sleep, the liberator, is often tortuous; and yet pain is at worst, the sufferer is wakened and reconciled with reality. For, however agonizing reality may be, it is, at this moment, when compared with the torments of the dream, a joy.

The experience of the internal and intimate dream state was being enacted by actors and presented for an audience. Many modern playwrights were influenced by the expressionists’ experiments, including Bertolt Brecht who expanded the idea into his concept of ‘epic theatre’ , a form that attempted an ‘un-dramatic’ style of expression. Brecht called the audience witnessing a typical theatrical production a “hypnotized mass” , and that this state was out of place for people living in a scientific-age. He describes his observation of the spectators in his essay A Short Organum for the Theatre (1948):

Looking about us, we see motionless figures in a peculiar condition: they seem strenuously to be tensing all their muscles, except where these seem flabby and exhausted. They scarcely communicate with each other; their relations are those of a lot of sleepers, though of such as restlessly […] This detached state, where they seem given over to vague but profound sensations, grows deeper the better the work of the actors, and so we, a we do not approve of this situation, should like them to be as bad as possible.

And so Brecht sought to rouse the hypnotized masses through his innovative techniques of alienation, like epic and other methods based on various sources, as in his study of Noh drama.

At about the same time as many of these artists were examining dreams and dreaming through their work in the theater and artistic life, scientists were also considering the relevance of dreams.

Sigmund Freud began analyzing dream content as part of his psycho-analytical process. The second element of his technique was dream interpretation. The foundation of his theory regarding dreams was published in his treatise Interpretation of Dreams (1900) which hypothesized that dreams were organized around wish fulfillment; sometimes as simple as bodily needs, like dreaming of drinking quantities of water when thirsty during sleep; or fulfillment of repressed desires not available to the conscious mind.

Another psychologist, Carl Jung, published his first work on dreams, The Analysis if Dreams (1909) in less than a decade following Freud. Jung’s approach to dreams was different than Freud’s. He believed that dreams were an integral function of the working human mind, and that that the figurative language of dreams was attributed to the “survival [of] an archaic mode of thought.” Because dreams were contained in the unconscious, dreams were expressions of the unconscious and not necessarily simply expressions of repressed conscious ‘thoughts.’ In his essay General Aspects of Dream Psychology (1948) he confronts the assumptions made by Freud regarding wish fulfillment as the basis of interpretation:

The interpretation of dreams as infantile wish-fulfillments as finalistic “arrangements” subserving an infantile striving for power is too narrow and fails to do justice to the essential nature of dreams. A dream, like every element in the psychic structure, is a product of the total psyche. Hence we may expect to find in dreams everything that has ever been of significance in the life of humanity. Just as human life is not limited to this or that fundamental instinct, but builds itself up from multiplicity of instincts, needs, desires, and physical and psychic conditions, etc., so the dream cannot be explained by this or that element in it, however beguilingly simple such an explanation may appear to be.

Michael Adams in his book Mythical Unconscious takes the Jungian view of dreams as the launching pad for his observations regarding archetypes based in mythic imagery that are woven throughout our unconscious life, combining these theories with the work of other explorers of myth like Joseph Campbell. Through this synthesis, he defines the difference between archetype and image, a principle he calls “archetype constancy” and “image variability” :

Archetypes are not images. An image becomes ‘archetypical’ only when it functions as the specific content of an archetype, but the image that serves this purpose on any occasion is not the archetype. Archetypes are general, abstract, constant forms; images are particular, concrete, variable contents of the forms. While the forms (archetypes) remain constant, the specific contents (or images) vary from time to time and place to place.

Archetypes are made personal, and appear to us as specific images, tailored by our individual subconscious to have meaning. Therefore, in Strindburg’s Dream Play, the images conjured are personal, and we as observers learn to tie into his specific imagery, perhaps by relating it to our own concept of archetype.

So what does recent science have to say about aspects of the dreaming mind?

In an interesting twist on thinking about the question, “Why do we dream?”, Mauro Mancia puts the cart before the horse and proposes that perhaps the function of sleep is to allow us to dream in his report One possible function of sleep: to produce dreams (1995), instead of the traditional view that sleep is the by-product of the need for sleep. He elaborates on the function of human dreaming enabling metaphor, “[D]uring sleep we produce metaphors on which we can build our dreams.” He continues by describing REM as a possible ‘hyperattentive’ state:

Unlike neurobiology, cognitive investigation considers dreams as a symbolic process of elaborating, interpreting and reorganizing in a narrative sequence all the material accumulated in memory during waking hours. The mental structures, whose task is to arrange this symbolic representation, are organized in ontogenesis. […] The cognitive model is backed by the theory put forward by Llinas and Pare, that REM sleep can be considered as a modified attentive state in which attention is turned away from sensory input, toward memories. These authors sustain that dreaming can be considered basically a hyperattentive state in many ways similar to full wakefulness.

He goes on to present current observations regarding the basis of sleep in emotional states:

Melanie Klein’s theory of internal objects has changed our views about dreams. They are no longer simply the fulfillment of suppressed wishes, but become the representation of internal objects and their relationship to the immediate present. Dreams are thus considered representations of feelings, emotions, anxieties and defenses viewed within the analytic relation. Dreams thus become a fundamental part of that rational modality know as ‘transference’. In dreams an individual’s internal objects—as representations and meaningful figures from infancy—are on stage in a private theatre where relations between them with objects of reality are acted out.

By using the private stage as a metaphor for the experience of the dreamer to the ‘witnessing’ of the dream event, Mancia notes a potential psychic phenomenon; could seeing a play in the theater be referencing (even mildly) a dream state? But in the case of the theater, it would be a collective dream state.

In her report Dreams, emotions, and the social sharing of dreams (2008), Antoniette Curci performs a study that addresses “whether the intensity of the emotion experienced in a dream predicts the extent to which this dream is socially is shared.” Her results confirm that emotional intensity of a dream is a valid predictor for the sharing of the content of the dream:

Social sharing behavior generally starts very soon after the emotion—usually the day the episode happened. It is a repetitive phenomenon , as emotions are often or very often shared, and with a variety of target persons, essentially selected among intimates. […] In both correlation and experimental studies, emotion intensity was demonstrated to play a crucial role in eliciting social sharing. [,,,] Neither valence (positive or negative) nor type of discrete emotion seems to play a significant role in eliciting social sharing. Dreams are intrinsically emotional experiences. […] Wax (2004) posits that the universality of dreaming and the high regard traditionally manifested towards dreams are testimony that dreaming is essential as a stabilizing element of group life. The author stressed that humanity has lived and evolved in small groups. The stability and endurance of a group, ad the intricate cooperation between its members, are founded on social activities such as music, dance, the seeking of visions and trance states, the sharing of dreams, and enacting of mythic drama. Similarly, Wagner-Pacifici and Benshady (1993) claim that dreams are a shared strategy that simultaneously tests and forges solidarity. […] [I]t can be predicted that the more a dream elicits emotion, the more the dream will be socially shared.

Another study that connects the intensity of emotion in the dream to the central image by co-authors Ernest Hartman and Tyler Brezler compares participants pre-9/11 central imagery and emotional intensity with post 9/11 responses (2008). The assumption was that the events of 9/11 would cause higher levels of stress, or slight trauma :

Dreams after 9/11 showed a highly significant increase in central image intensity, as central image proportion (number of dreams with scorable central image) but no change in dream length, dream like-ness, overall vividness, or context involving airplanes or tall buildings. There were no ‘exact replay’ dreams picturing the actual events of 9/11 seen repeatedly on TV. These results are consistent with the Contemporary Theory of Dreaming, which emphasizes the role of underlying emotion in producing central dream imagery and suggests that the intensity of the central dream imagery is related to the power of the underlying emotion.

It is interesting to note that it was the prominence of the central image that was enhanced, but not the image itself that changed.

In her report, Dreaming mind-brain: a Jungian perspective (2006), Margaret Wilkinson explores the Jungian-based position that dreams are an essential part of the process for encoding and affective organization of memory:

Dreaming is essentially a cortical activity in that it is the cortex with its billions of connecting neurons that allows us to experience the richness of thoughts and imagery that emerge from the dreaming process. In working with dreams in general, not just those dreams arising from trauma, the individual develops creative capacity to make conceptual and affective links across different realms of knowing; material may begin to move unconscious implicit memory towards the explicit realm of knowledge and memory where it may be thought about.

In this view, sleep is an essential part of memory function, and is essential in linking conscious and unconscious activities in the brain.

In The Scientific Study of Dreams (2003), G. William Domhoff describes an interesting effect produced when subjects are in a relaxed but waking state in darkened rooms:

[F]indings from three laboratory studies suggest that waking thought can have dreamlike qualities when participants are relaxing in a darkened room. In the first two of these studies, awake participants monitored by EEG gave dreamlike responses to 15% to 20% of requests for reports of what was going through their minds. In another laboratory study, judges who compared REM reports with thought reports from awake participants reclining in a darkened room rated the waling reports as more dreamlike. Furthermore, a field study of waking consciousness—which used pagers to contact participants—discovered that 9% of 1,425 had “more than a trace” of dreamlike thought and another 16% had a “trace” of such thought. Taken together, these studies lead to the idea that dreaming may not always be a function of sleep, thereby providing another possible link between waking cognition and dreaming.

Darkened rooms can help induce a dream-like state. Perhaps Brecht was not too far off the mark with his observation regarding a hypnotic state induced by theatre on the spectator? Domhoff continues:

Even though dreams seem to be based to a large extent on experimental-level categories, the emphasis in neurocognitive models on the close parallels between waking thought and dreaming raises the possibility that of the unusual and not immediately understandable features of dreams may be the product of figurative thinking—conceptual metaphors, metonymies, ironies, and conceptual blends. […] [T[he few attempts to undertake systematic studies of metaphor in dreams suggest that most dreams do not seem to relate to obviously primary metaphors. Rather, most dreams are like dramas or plays in which the dreamer acts out various scenarios that revolve around a few basic personal themes. Dreams seem to be instances of the “thematic” point on the repetition dimension, that is, specific episodes or examples relating to general emotional preoccupations, usually negative in nature. They appear to take the form of proverbs or parables, which can be understood only by extracting “generic” information from specific stories. These complex dreams may rely on “resemblance” metaphors, which depend on perception of common aspects of two representational schemata, or on conceptual blends, which often start with basic conceptual metaphors and then elaborated into highly novel thoughts.

Likening the experience of the dream to the watching of a drama or play seems to be a common metaphor in and of itself used to express the dreaming experience by scientists.

In a study conducted by David Kahn and J. Allan Hobson on State-dependant thinking (2005), the co-authors investigated how thinking in dreams differs from thinking while awake. Their hypothesis states that thinking in dreams has “two distinct components, one that is similar to wake-state cognition, and another hat is fundamentally different.” They found that while cognition within the dream scenario was similar to that of the waking state, the ability to think critically about the scenario was hindered and therefore unlike the waking state.

For example, a participant who stated that in the dream he was angry that the woman in front of him was taking to long to climb up a ladder and through a hatch to get into a restaurant. When asked if he would respond the same way in the real world, he said that he would have the same emotional response, but in the real world he would also know that it was absurd the gain access to a restaurant through a hatch in a ceiling, while in the dream scenario that action did not register as bizarre. Participants were asked to track dreams for a two-week period and were asked about their thinking within the dream-state and how they would think about the same situation in the real world. The inquiry uncovered the two types of thinking noted above, context logic and state logic, with state logic termed metacognition :

Metacognition has often been related to self-awareness, that is, being aware that it is the self who is doing the thinking. But in the dream state there is a difference between self-awareness and metacognition. While it is true that during the dreaming state our self-awareness severely impoverished in that we do not know that we are in our beds, we believe, instead, that we are participating in an adventure. In that limited sense there is awareness of the self in the dream. And as we have shown, the dreamer is able to think rationally (compared to waking standards) when participating in his hallucinatory adventures. But the dreamer loses his wake-state ability to distinguish “fact from fantasy,” he is unaware that he is hallucinating. He loses his wake-state gift of metacognition.

Thinking within the dream was similar to wake-state cognition, but thinking about what was happening in the dream, the event itself, was different than in a waking-state. They state their general conclusion about the data:

Within the dream event cognition is often not qualitatively different from waking cognition no matter how outlandish the hallucinatory dream event may be. On the other hand, we are unable to detect how outlandish or bizarre the dream event may really be because our ability to access knowledge about how the world works is impaired. When this kind of thinking is impaired one finds it very difficult to perceive bizarreness.

This is similar to experience a ‘play-world’. If you are seeing a musical then you immediately accept the premise that everyone is going to sing their big emotional expressions, everyone will know the same words in the chorus, and everyone will know the dances. You don’t even have to think about, you just go with it. Perhaps it is our dreaming-selves that allows us to easily slip into the world of a play. This is not unlike the experience of the dreamers in this study. But, it is possible to slip out of the world of the play—and it is usually stated that way—“It took me out” or “I fell out of the world.” So, it seems that the ability to think outside the logic of the play is available, if a stimulus is provided. This seems to tie in with Brecht’s experiments in alienating the audience, to never allow them the opportunity to slip into the play-world—“hypnotized”.

In their collection of results of experimental dream research In Search of Dreams (1996), co-authors Inge Strauch and Barbara Meier devote a section of their book to the comparison of waking fantasies and dreams. While dreams events differ from our waking experience by blending details, persons, and events detached from the continuity of everyday reality, when compared with the waking cognitive act of fantasy some striking differences occur. All participants in this study were evaluated in the sleep lab, using the same criteria used to evaluate REM sleep. Most striking is that fantasies tended to span a greater variety than dreams, and while fantasies took place more often in familiar locations, with every second environment being familiar, they did change location more often than dreams. In dreams only every fourth environment tends to be familiar. Fantasies also feature more people, animals and other creatures than do dreams. Fantasies feature animals more often than do dreams, as well as ‘fabulous creatures’ that in this study only appeared in fantasies and not in dreams. The authors note two marked differences between the reports of waking-fantasy and dreams:

While the fantasy created an idyllic setting, albeit a rather fragile one, the dream offers a dramatic event. Both reports contain bizarre elements, but these differ in impact. During the fantasy, the bizarre seems imposed and not harmoniously integrated into events; within the dream, the bizarre is interwoven with the events an dictates their strtling progress. Fantasy and dream differ further because of two opposite pairs. The loose association of images stands in contrast to a dramatic succession of events; the Fantasy-Self ‘s passive-contemplative attitude differs from the heavily involved position of the Dream-Self. These polarities contribute to the impression that the dream is somehow more serious, more immediate and unaffected, while the fantasy appears more restrained, controlled and non-committal.

Plays are constructed (in general) to operate more like dreams than waking fantasies. While dreaming, the Dream-Self is active in a number of ways, primarily through social engagement:

It is notable how few dreams deal in purely superficial chatter and conventional ritual. When dream persons meet, they do not usually ask, “How are you?” and they do not spend time with talk about the weather. They do not bore each other, but quickly get down to cases. Dreams are characterized particularly by linear and event-oriented scenarios. Dreamers do not constantly wonder who they are, how they impress others and what results their actions might have. Still, they rarely act out of character, but usually participate, quite unsophisticated and involved, in dream events. […] It may seem surprising how rarely dreams expan into the fantastic. Such dreams re not characteristic of the dream experience. In fact, they are exceptions that leave strong impressions and thus encourage hasty generalizations. The limited number of reality-remote dreams may have a special reason: if dreams were to abduct us, night after night, into a totally fantastic and alien world, we would have to reestablish our identity each morning and make sure of the daily world’s solidity. The moderately bizarre nature of dreams permits us to be neither frightened by our nightly fantasies, nor to turn away from them in boredom.

Dreams get right to the action. They do not engage in “chit-chat”, and neither should effective stage drama, as made plain by playwright Doug Wright in an interview with The Dramatist (2004), “If you want diverting conversation, then host a dinner party. If you want to divine something worthwhile about our quest in the world, then write a play.”

From these dream studies a pattern can be deduced that dreaming involves emotional responses on the part of the dreamer; that dreams are usually about scenarios that are personal in nature; dreams are event driven rather than leisurely excursions; that dreaming involves the use of metaphor; that cognition in the dream is similar to waking cognition, but that the ability to discern the plausibility of the content is inhibited; that a dream-like state can be obtained while awake; dreams are not representations of reality, but are pared-down to essential details, interactions, and characters; dreams may be an essential cognitive tool in human learning, sleep may be a function to facilitate dreaming.

Dreams seem to have many of the makings of a really good stage play. For example, stage plays are generally event driven; they are economic in form in that they only feature essential characters, locations, props, sets, etc.; plays rely on metaphor. It seems that our brains may be primed for understanding plays because we dream in logic similar to the type of logic employed in play-worlds. Perhaps it is this logic that drives playwrights to write them.

This is not only at work in the expressionist theater like that of Strindburg, or the epic theater of Brecht. The dynamics of dream logic may be at work on the observer from the moment the lights go down on any stage production. Dream-logic is at work when the play stops to change scene, or doesn’t stop but changes scene anyway, or when Chekhov can serve an entire three course dinner in about ten minutes of actual time. We suspend our disbelief not because we think about doing so—like we have installed a giant crane that hauls disbelief out of the way for a little while— we suspend it because every night, when we dream, there is a built-in mechanism that knows how to inhibit our content-o-meter by recognizing context right away. Every night we practice how to watch a play.

Anne Bogart expresses our experience of Time in the theater, comparing it to the effortlessness of a dream-state from her book And Then You Act (2007):

The theater can uniquely and eloquently express subjective time. Alice falls down a rabbit hole. The logic of time and space alters. The D.N.A. of the art form is akin to dreaming. An entire play can happen inside of one instant of one person’s lifetime. The theater is able to compress time in a way that trauma and dreams do. Dreams are largely non-linear, condensed, and associative. A few moments of sleep time can contain complicated episodes and wild flights of storytelling. If done with rigor and without abandoning dramaturgical logic, theater can do the same, and audiences will follow the logic of a dream. And, like dream time, there is freedom of movement and mind. Time in this case, the personal or subjective time, has nothing to do with clock time.

The “wild flights of storytelling” are something our minds gift to us every night.

It seems that that theater—when it places us in the dark, presents to us a world other than reality, stages a drama built around an event—taps into the mechanism in our brain that knows how to dream. It doesn’t need the formal exploration of the dream-scape, as Strindburg postulated, to achieve this. We are hard-wired to accept rapid movements in time and space—even though these exist only in the mind’s eye—simply by suggesting or implying that great leaps of time and space have been traversed either through a word, a change of light, the movement of a chair, what have you. It does not need to be real, or even pretend to be real. The part of our minds that knows how to dream clicks on (or maybe is always on—just we can’t tell) and fills the void for us. The dream-state of the theater is always present, all while the logic portion of our brains is kept occupied with language, or costumes, or sets, there is another active part that keys up for emotion and event and will ease the mode of transitions in the wink of an eye.

So, is my short play Humalong—the play that I dreamed I was simultaneously performing and viewing—a play that utilizes ‘dream-logic?’ For the expressionists the answer would be ‘no.’ But is going to the theater and seeing this (or any other) play capable of tripping into the dream-logic-state that your brain has been exercising everynight of your sleeping life? That answer may very well be ‘yes.’
Dream on—dream big—dream logic.

RESOURCES LIST:

Adams, M. V., The Mythological Unconscious, (New York: Karnac, 2001).

Arnheim, R., To the Rescue of Art, Twenty-Six Essays, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

Bogart, A., A Director Prepares, (New York: Routledge, 2005).

------------, And Then You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World, (New York: Routledge, 2007).

Bossler, G., ‘Writers and Their Work: Doug Wright’, The Dramatist, (November/December 2004),

Brecht, B., Modern Theories of Dram: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1840-1990, ed., George W. Brandt, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Cassell, The Cassell Companion to Theatre, (London: Wellington House, 1997).

Curci, A., and Rime, B., ‘Dreams, emotions, and social sharing of dreams’, Cognition and Emotion, Psychology Press, vol. 22, no. 1 (2008).

Domhoff, G. W., The Scientific Study of Dreams, (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2003),

Esslin, M., An Anatomy of Drama, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984).

Everdell, W. R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Frith, C., Making Up The Mind, How the Brain Creates our Mental World, (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Gerould, D., Theatre Theory Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zemi to Soyinka and Havel, (New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2000).

Goodman, L. E., In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach, (New York: Humanity Books, 2001).

Hartman, E., and Brezler, T., ‘A systematic change in dreams after 9/11/01, SLEEP, vol. 31, no. 2, (2008).

Hunt, M., The Story of Psychology, (New York: Doubleday, 1993).

Jung, C. G., Dreams: Crucial Texts on the Meaning of Dreams by One of the Greatest Minds of Our Time, trans., R.F.C. Hull, (New York: MJF Books, 1974).

Kahn, D., and J. Hobson, A. “State-dependant thinking: A comparison of waking and dreaming thought”, Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 14, (2005).

Mancia, M., ‘One possible function of sleep: to produce dreams’, Behavioral Brain Research, vol. 69, no. 1-2 (1995).

Nietzsche, F., The Basic Writing of Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, trans., Peter Gay, (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

Ratey, J.J., M.D., A User’s Guide to the Brain, Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain, (New York: Random House, 2002).

Root-Bernstein, R. S., and Root-Bernstein, M. M., Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, (New York: Mariner Books, 1999).

Strauch, I., and Meier, B., In Search of Dreams: Results of Experimental Dream Research, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996),

Steiner, R., Sleep and Dreams: A Bridge to the Spirit, ed., Michael Lipson, Ph.D., (Steiner Books, 2003).

Strindberg, A., Five Major Plays, trans., Carl R. Mueller, (Lyme: Smith & Kraus, 2000).

Wilkinson, M., ‘Dreaming mind-brain: a Jungian perspective’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 51, (2006),

Seriously

In his play Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller investigates the notion of creating a modern day tragic hero. He frames his play around a character from the working class strata of American society. In so doing he willfully ignores the long established western tradition of the heroic tragic figure emerging from the noble and ruling class. Indeed, Miller’s attempt at creating his modern tragic hero is more akin to a classic comic character like Dikaiopolis from Aristophanes’ The Acharnians rather than the tragic King Oedipus. How does the playwright manage to raise the character of Willy Loman, a common man from the working class, to the level of a tragic hero in the classic style?

At the beginning of Death of a Salesman the salesman Willy Loman is worn out. He enters carrying the mark of his trade; two large sample cases as described in the opening directions:

He is past sixty years of age, dressed quietly. Even as he crosses the stage to the doorway of the house, his exhaustion is apparent.
(Miller, Death of a Salesman p. 12)

Within a few minutes he is stating his disillusion about the current state of the world to his wife:

WILLY: The street is lined with cars. There’s not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don’t grow anymore, you can’t raise a carrot in the backyard. They should’ve had a law against apartment houses. Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? When I and Biff hung the swing between them? ... They should’ve arrested the builder for cutting those down. They massacred the neighborhood. … There’s more people! That’s what’s ruining this country! Population is getting out of control. The competition is maddening! (Death of a Salesman p. 17-8)

Willy Loman works himself into a frenzy over the growth that has altered the architecture of his neighborhood. As the landscape around him changes, he clings to his hard earned real estate, but the intrusion of the towering apartment buildings on either side of his home has reduced his once fertile patch of ground into a sparse wasteland that can no longer support a carrot. He longs for the happier days of the past when there was prosperity, or at least the appearance of success, in and around his home.

To begin The Acharnians, Aristophanes introduces his hero, the aged Dikaiopolis, directly addressing the audience:

My heart has drunk deep of the cup of woe, and scant the joys I’ve known … I’m fed up with my city and just craving to get back to my village. Ah! my village. We had none of this ‘Coal for sale’, nor oil or vinegar either; we’d never even heard the word ‘for sale’. Everything we needed we produced ourselves … this time I’ve come prepared: if anybody dares say a word about except peace, I’ll heckle him like fury until he shuts his cakehole tight. (Aristophanes, The Acharnians p. 49-50)

Like Willy Loman, Dikaiopolis is fed up with the state of affairs, and longs for a return to his comfortable and manageable village life away from the city, but the war with Sparta keeps him from accomplishing this. He is concerned with trying to persuade the members of the Assembly to make peace with Sparta so that citizens like himself can get back to their peace-full lives away from Athens.

In contrast to the first glimpses of either Willy or Dikaiopolis, both of whom we meet alone and downtrodden, Sophocles’ Oedipus enters at the top of his form. The chorus is already present, as they are the bearers of lamentation and woe. Oedipus wishes to reassure them and is fully concerned with aiding their plight:

Oh my children, the new blood of ancient Thebes,
Why are you here? Huddling at my altar,
praying before me, your branches wound in wool.
Our city reeks with the smoke of burning incense,
rings with cries for the Healer and wailing of the dead.
I thought it wrong, my children, to hear the truth
from other messengers. Here I am myself—
(Sophocles, Oedipus the King 1-7)

It is the procession of the chorus that is described as broken and despondent, while Oedipus is described by the chorus as robust:

…we do rate you first of men,
both in common crises of our lives
and face-to-face encounters with the gods.
You freed us from the Sphinx, you came to Thebes
and cut us loose from the bloody tribute we had paid
that harsh, brutal singer. We taught you nothing,
no skill, no extra knowledge, still you triumphed.
(Oedipus the King 41-7)

Oedipus has a record of achievement. He has single-handedly liberated the city from an oppressive beast and has been raised to the highest position in the city, that of a respected ruler. He is a mature man, but not yet old. Many of the other characters are older than he is, including the leader of the chorus, the blind prophet Tiresias, and his queen Jocasta. Oedipus, unlike the old men at the center of the other two works, is a man enjoying the prime of his life. Oedipus is at his height, supplying ample energy for the spring that is the tragic mechanism from the start of Oedipus the King.

What signals the tenor of each play, whether we are in for a comedy or tragedy? While Willy may share the physical and social attributes of Dikaiopolis, and even shares the despairing over current affairs, it is clear at the onset that Dikaiopolis world is that of the comedic while Willy’s world is that of the dramatic. The signal is the tone. Where The Acharnians begins with Dikaiopolis’ meta-theatrical direct address to the audience acting as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-this-is-a-play-you’re-watching, Death of a Salesman begins with the sound of a flute and a stage shrouded in darkness. From the darkness the two towers of the apartment buildings that frame either side of the play-world appear, followed by the outline of the house. Miller describes effect the light should have on the observer, “An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality.” (p. 11). The world occupied by Willy Loman is fragile and distinctly unreal. It is interesting to note that Willy’s world is not set at the level of the tragic immediately by any signals other than the title of the play. At the opening of the curtain Death of a Salesman could potentially be a heightened drama, but not necessarily rise to tragic levels.

Oedipus the King possesses tragic potential from the onset. The layering of the fate of Oedipus is established in the opening strains of the play simply by sounding his name, “I am Oedipus.” (Oedipus the King 9). A name so famous that twenty-five hundred years after the play was first performed its significance still resonates. The depth of the tragic crime at the heart of the play is not a secret. Oedipus’ guilt is articulated in the first quarter of the work, when blind prophet Tiresias declares, “You are the curse, the corruption of the land.” (Oedipus the King 401)

One third of the way into Act One of Death of a Salesman Willy is established as a fraudulent braggart as he speaks to his wife Linda about his success selling on the road:

WILLY: I did five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston.
LINDA: No! Wait a minute, I’ve got a pencil. She pulls pencil and paper out of her apron pocket. That make your commission… Two hundred—my God! Two hundred and twelve dollars!
WILLY: Well, I didn’t figure it yet but…
LINDA: How much did you do?
WILLY: Well, I—I did—about a hundred and eighty gross in Providence. Well, no—it came to—roughly two hundred gross on the whole trip.
LINDA without hesitation: Two hundred gross. That’s… She figures.
WILLY: The trouble was that three of the stores were half closed for inventory in Boston. Otherwise I woulda broke records.
(Death of a Salesman p. 35)

Only the reality that Linda must know the correct figures in order to pay the bills compels Willy to confess the true sales numbers to her. Later in the play it is apparent that Willy is no longer able to sort reality from his fabrications, as when he speaks with his young boss Howard:

WILLY: …Now pay attention. Your father—in 1928 I had a big year. I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions.
HOWARD, impatiently: Now, Willy, you never averaged—
WILLY, bnging his hands on the desk: I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in the year 1928! And your father came to me—or rather, I was in his office here—it was right over this desk—and put his hand on my shoulder—
HOWARD, getting up: You’ll have to excuse me Willy, I gotta see some people. Pull yourself together.
(Death of a Salesman p. 82)

Willy’s lifetime of spinning larger-than-life truths to raise himself in the eyes of others has led to his current state; he can no longer decipher truth from deception. Although in this passage we see him try to manage some truth, as when he corrects himself over the detail regarding how Howard’s father had spoken to him. Here we witness the struggle Willy has to correct a small detail, but we watch him continue to negate the truth regarding his past success when it is challenged by Howard. What is uncertain is whether Willy knows that he is inflating the numbers, or whether he believes the fiction he has created. Miller leaves this for his audience to decide from moment to moment. Part of the subtlety of the play is that as our understanding of the story grows, our assumptions regarding what’s real and what’s false become as malleable as Willy’s numbers.

Dikaiopolis also uses deception to meet his ends, but unlike Willy he does not lose his grasp on recognizing reality from fiction. As he dresses in rags borrowed from the character wardrobe of Euripides he makes clear the intent of his disguise, “—the audience have got to know who I am, but the Chorus have got to be fooled.” (The Acharnians p. 69)

Unlike either Willy or Dikaiopolis, Oedipus is a seeker of truth. While the tragic tract of the play will lead to the revelation that Oedipus is in fact the cause of the curse, he is not a character who hides the truth, nor does he deny the truth once it is irrevocably proven:

Take me away, far, far from Thebes,
quickly, cast me away, my friends—
this great murderous ruin, this man cursed to heaven,
the man the deathless gods hate most of all!
(Oedipus the King 1477-80)

Oedipus is a man who shoulders responsibility.

The architecture of each play-world establishes rules regarding time and place. In both of the ancient Greek plays the action of the play takes place outside in public spaces. This is part of the architectural aesthetic inherent in the restriction mandated by the playing of the action in an outdoor theater. But even here, there are variations. Oedipus the King is set in one location, the area just outside of the palace. Exits and entrances into and out of the palace are employed. The proximity of the private chambers is paramount as the play nears its climax:

O light—now let me look my last on you!
I stand revealed at last—
cursed in my birth, cursed in my marriage,
cursed in the lives I cut down with these hands!
(Oedipus the King 1308-1310)

This passage is followed by a stage direction, “(Oedipus) Rushing through the doors with a great cry.” The fallen king retreats to his private chambers while the action remains on the stage and the chorus continues describing the great calamity. But the door to the private chambers is visible. We do not follow the character, but the presence of the threshold reminds us of the terrible private things happening beyond our sight.

The restriction of location establishes a sense formality that reinforces the dramatic themes of the play. It enhances the discipline inherent in the tragic form, heightening the dramatic tension. Oedipus lives under many restrictions regarding conduct and law, and so does the structure of the play.

In contrast, the world created by Aristophanes is concerned with the scrutiny and deconstruction of the letter of the law. It willfully pokes established social norms and formal laws in the eye. Hence the form freely switches locations enhancing the manic themes of individual enterprise and cunning.

The play world created by Miller is one that utilizes a modern architecture, one where lighting and spatial scope can be minutely controlled. The world of Willy Loman changes location, but unlike either of the two classic works, much of Death of a Salesman takes place indoors, inside the private world. As the story spins some of the action moves to public areas of business, but even those places are indoors. Only when Willy washes the car with his boys does the play move outdoors, but these are scenes of remembering. How reliable is memory? Are these moments outdoors as authentic as the moments that take place indoors in the present? That is a question that Miller raises, and one that helps heighten the dramatic tension. What do we trust when we view the private world not just indoors, but within Willy’s mind?

This notion of memory is an interesting facet of Miller’s play, and it is the mechanism that pulls the focus from simply performing a series of actions in the present, as in The Archarnians, to the accumulated actions of a lifetime to this one moment. This is how Miller establishes the dynamic of tragic proportion. Willy Loman has a past, and it is that past that clings to his being and drives his current mental state and actions. Whether he will be able to survive grappling with the past is the question that drives the play. This is how Miller manages to diverge the character of Willy Loman from his association with the comic characterizations of Aristophanes and squarely merges him with the tragic figures found in Sophocles.

Dikaiopolis has no past, or he has no past that has any bearing on his present actions. The only past that affects his actions is the recent social past that he claims to be abandoning. He has a wife and children, but they are only mentioned once or twice, and they very quickly fall away from any significance to the hero’s actions. He is railing against the Athenian society that is at war with Sparta because the war is disrupting his life. The accumulation of past events, his personal history, has nothing to with the progression of the play. Dikaiopolis is so rooted in the immediate present that he is sometimes aware that he is a character in a play and is therefore able to stride directly to the King-Archon’s seat in the audience and address him directly:

Behold the empty jug. Will you acclaim me
As champion of Bacchus’ festival? (The Acharnians, p. 103)

His request has the double meaning of speaking as the character Dikaiopolis about having drunk so much wine, and as the voice of the playwright requesting that the play win the prize at the festival. Dikaiopolis can accomplish this because he is a character divorced from his past and from any serious repercussions in the world of the play.

Oedipus and Willy, on the other hand, have a great deal at stake in their respective play-worlds. Both carry the burden of their past actions. Both have an articulated past that haunts them. While the techniques used to present the back-stories of the characters are different, the result is the same; that we understand the burden of the accumulated effect of past choices. This awareness of the past and its impact on the future heightens the tragic forces of each of these plays.

Near the end, Oedipus curses his newly gained knowledge of his past:

Dark, horror of darkness
my darkness, drowning, swirling around me
crashing wave on wave—unspeakable, irresistible
headwind, fatal harbor! Oh again,
the misery, all at once, over and over
the stabbing daggers, stab of memory
raking me insane. (Oedipus the King 1450-5)

Stabbing out his own eyes, he sets himself on the path of an outcast and a beggar. He does not hasten death because this is not his destiny. He knows his fate is to die elsewhere, and he can also fathom the fate that awaits his children now that the truth about their parentage is set loose in the world. The tragedy of the Oedipus cycle, past—present—future is contained in these moments. With all of the pieces and images assembled the scope of the tragedy is fully present and engaged both for the play’s characters and for its audience.

It is this presence of scope, of uniting the multiple temporal dimensions of past—present—future, which raises Death of a Salesman to the tragic strata. Willy Loman, in the final passages of the play, realizes the scope of his life, and that it continues into the future not as his single life, but through the life of his son Biff. Willy at long last establishes the connection that unites himself with multiple temporal plains:

BIFF, at the peak of his fury: Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing Pop. Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all.
Biff’s fury has spent itself, and he breaks down, sobbing, holding on to Willy, who dumbly fumbles for Biff’s face.
WILLY, astonished: What’re you doing? What’re you doing? To Linda: Why is he crying?
BIFF, crying, broken: Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? Struggling to contain himself, he pulls away and moves to the stairs. I’ll go in the morning. Put him—put him to bed. Exhausted, Biff moves up the stairs to his room.
WILLY, after a long pause, astonished, elevated: Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!
LINDA: He loves you, Willy!
HAPPY, deeply moved: Always did, Pop.
WILLY: Oh, Biff! Staring wildly: He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise: That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!
(Death of a Salesman p. 133)

At last Willy recognizes a deep truth, that his son loves him—has always loved him. With this recognition of the truth Willy determines to take action, to propel that love into the future. He swears an oath, that his boy will be magnificent. Willy believes he must ensure the boys success by staking his future. The only means for accomplishing this task is through his own death, for his death will bring the insurance payment to his family. By sacrificing his life he can ensure his son’s future.

Like Oedipus, Willy Loman sacrifices himself for a greater good. Like Oedipus, he carries the weight of his past and understands the potential of his family’s future. Like Oedipus, the lifetime that has come before is defined by this one action in this one moment. Willy Loman rises from the ranks of common citizens because he, unlike Dikaiopolis, is willing to abandon his personal notions of success and comfort for the benefit of others. By accumulating the past, Willy Loman’s story deftly expands across a temporal landscape. This subtle expansion that builds throughout the play, compels heroic action that is fulfilled when Willy is finally able to recognize a deeply human truth and is then willing to take selfless action. Through Willy Loman, Arthur Miller manages to transcend the trappings of the comic hero and shape them into a moving and tragic tale.
____________________________________________________
Resource List:
1. Aristophanes, Lysitrata/The Archanians/The Clouds, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (London: Penguin Books, 1973).
2. George Plimpton, ed., Playwrights At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, interviewer Christopher Bigsby (New York: Random House, 2000).
3. Erich Segal, The Death of Comedy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
4. Toby Cole, ed., Playwrights on Playwriting, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960).
5. Lisa A. Barnett, Broadway’s Fabulous Fifties: How the Playmakers Made It Happen, interviewer Ted Mabley (New York: New Dramatist Publications, 2002).
6. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, (New York: Viking Press, 1949).
7. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1984).
8. C. Whitman, II Comic Heroism, from Aristophanes and the Comic Hero, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).

Where's the audience? Where's wisdom?

"If you are completely confident in yourself, you don’t have to think about the audience at all. You just do your thing, you just do it properly. This means YOU become the audience. What you make is entertainment, but that needs a certain amount of wisdom."

---Chogyam Trungpa


From “Visual Dharma: Film Workshop,” in the COLLECTED WORKS OF CHOGYAM TRUNGPA, Volume Seven, pages 644-645.

Read more of this quote.

Baring Feet

At the Dragon's Egg in Ledyard, Connecticut, things are accomplished in cycles. Some of the events are transient, others are tied to seasonal shifts. Later this September there will be a poetry reading timed to coincide with the autumnal equinox, just as there was one to herald the Spring. Summertime brings artists together for an assemblage project based on a common text. Pieces are assembled on the day of the event to tell the designated story. It is rehearsed once and then presented for the public.

The Dragon's Egg is a sacred space dedicated to hosting artists. Upon entering one must abandon their shoes at the door. Chairs are available for people with special needs, but most folks sit on pillows that are spread along the floor. The archway is festooned with prayer flags and above them hangs a series of bells that beg to be rung.

The space is secluded, on the remnants of an old farm, surrounded by woods. The shape of the space is an open sphere. Throughout the year the space welcomes resident guests who come and work on artistic projects. I participate in these events and find myself rejuvenated as a result. This year I became a member of the board of directors for the Egg, and so am committed to the continued life and use of the space.

Two years ago I workshopped a new play at the Egg with a week-long residency. The play itself became a ritual. The space was conducive to that form. Rehearsing barefooted brought a visceral immediacy to the work with the actors that would not have been experienced otherwise. The act of removing our shoes as we entered the space was always mindful and reverential. It reminded us that we pass through the space with others, that we share the space, and that others will come after us and care for the space too, along with us, at some future time.

People often describe their time at the Egg as "magical" whether they come as artists or as observers. Baring our feet, like sweeping the floor after we were done with our work, or turning out the lights, is part of the ritual, and an essential element of the Egg experience.

For more about the Egg on the web:
The Dragons Egg or
Dragons Egg on Squidoo

Mask Project: Making Philoktetes

Mask Project

Western theater tradition is marked by the classic Greek period of the 5th century BCE. The creative output, theatrical imagination, and social relevance of the Attic theater aesthetic have had resounding influence on the development of representational European theater. From Shakespeare to Brecht to O’Neill to Ruhl, the work of the Greeks is still with us. While a relative handful of the original plays presented at the Festival of Dionysos have survived intact, far less has been found to illuminate the exact nature of the masked performance; and when one thinks of Greek theater, one thinks of the mask. Why else does every drama club and prestigious theater award still carry the image of the mask? The mask represents the nature of ‘the thing that is and the thing that is not’ coexisting in the same form; an ambiguous relationship that still captivates the viewer and the performer alike. In the classic Greek what was the function of the masked performer and how did a performer function with a mask?

Why a mask?
When we consider the tropes of ancient masked performance we do two things: we look at current uses of masked performance, and we calculate where the use of the masked tradition originated. In the conclusion of his book on Masked Performance, John Emigh combines this forward and backward glance in this statement:

The masked actor … (works) within a “plane of similitude” to create the amalgam of self and other that may be experienced as characters. Intercultural performances—and, it seems, cultures themselves—depend on similar strategies in order to acquire their dynamic form, significance, and vitality. For me, the most successful intercultural performances of the past twenty years has been Suzuki Tadashi’s adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women.

This adaptation of Euripides was set in a field in Japan shortly after the atomic bombs had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The play was performed in Japanese and used masks from the Noh tradition mixed with kabuki face styles, a powerful combination of Western and Eastern aesthetics causing Emigh to remark, “These conventions are never employed literally, but their resonance across the ‘plane of similitude’ Suzuki and his coworkers have found between Greek and Japanese performative traditions act to reshape the form and action of Euripides’ drama, transforming the Greek masks, characters, and action.” The use of the mask reemerges as re-imagined fare.

While the dominating influence of the Greek theater on modern works is evident, the origin of the form is far murkier. The roots of tragedy are believed to spring from early masked rituals devoted to the god Dionysos. Evidence to support this theory comes from the likely origin of the word “tragedy” originating from the word tragos which means goat, and odi which means song. This links tragedy to the dythyramb because some members of the celebrants dressed as satyrs, or goat-men. Other sources claim that “goat-song” derives from the awarding of a goat play as the prize for the best in the early forms of the festival.

Theatricality, the process by which a stage-presentation is rendered, begins to propagate as the 5th century aesthetic is established and codified. In the essay “The use of the body by actors in tragedy and satyr-play”, Kostas Valakas notes how the Greek dramatists refined their art by utilizing the dramatic effect of simple forms:

In both tragedy and the satyr-play the modification of the performer’s body by a simple mask and a more or less elaborate dress produces a theatrical image which is meant to evoke the anthropomorphic world of myth in an unrealistic, but not wholly unnatural, way. Mask, costume (such as a staff, a bow, or a chariot) used in relation to a specific role, the variable voice of the male actor or dancer, and the words of his role… are the differentiating elements of theatricality; they can represent the gender, mythical status, and perhaps the geographical provenance and some individual characteristics of a tragic or satiric character or chorus.

Masks and props are vehicles for understanding, much as music video artists or advertisers rely on symbolic imagery to convey immediate and (they hope) long-lasting recognition.

In an essay describing the influence of the masks on the actors and the Attic audience attending Oedipus Rex, Claude Calame describes the physical attributes of the actor encased in a mask:

(The mask) ‘shifts’ the voice and gaze of the hero, for the mouth and eyes are the two organs which correspond to the holes in the mask’s surface: they let the voice and the gaze of the actor appear to the spectators, beyond the hero he is miming. The mask creates a confrontation between the dramatic action and the public…while mediating this confrontation.

Calame points out that the intent of the mask was not to obliterate knowledge of the performer inside the mask, but to alter that perception, or as Emigh suggests in the aforementioned passage, creates an ‘amalgam’.

David Wiles takes the relationship between the audience and the masked performer a step further. In Attic tragedy of the 5th c the masks were more neutral and naturally proportioned than the stylized masks of the 4th c or exaggerated masks of Rome:

Masks covered the whole head, requiring the spectator to project emotion on to the face and imagine movement in the few simple features tht the mask rendered visible. The actor brought the mask to life through the configuration of the whole body. Later Greek theatre was able to use subtle densely coded masks because the actors stood in shadow, but in the classical period the actors in Athens stood in the circle of the orchestra with the sun behind them.

Depending on the time day, the effect of the sun’s angle could render the actors as silhouettes to some portions of the audience, leaving the understanding of the relationships of the characters to the interpretation of shapes and configurations.

In general, the classical tragic masks were neutral in expression. Richard Green, in his essay “Towards a reconstruction of performance style” explains why:

‘Proper’ Greeks and the gods they created show calm and control even in the most adverse situations, whereas aliens, the outsiders of society, exhibit their emotions. It is an aspect of the ‘classical Ideal’… We should expect that on stage the figures of serious drama also looked ‘proper’. This is surely an aspect of the decorum expected of tragedy.

A god, a king, or a hero would be rendered as ‘ideal’ as possible, and this would mean an appearance of calm or neutrality.

How were the classic masks made?
While very little evidence exists of how the masks of the 5th c were constructed , the images that do exist support the claim that they were representational and not exaggerated. Few written descriptions of 5th c theater production are known to exist, the written records come from later Roman sources who were primarily writing about their current theatrical forms and relying on supposition to remark on classic Greek production values. No masks have survived because they were made from lightweight materials like canvas, cork, leather, or carved wood.

To understand the classical masked performer we rely on painted pottery from the same era depicting actors in performance and in relationship to their masks. Richard Green elaborates on some of the frustration scholars have had in discerning what is theatrical style and what is artist rendering:

All too few pictures survive of classical Greek actors acting tragedy. There are good reasons for this, the principal of which is the convention that vase-painters…were governed by the sense of story conveyed by the performance. Thus what is usually depicted on vases is not the process of performance but what the audience was persuaded to see, as it were the ‘real’ Agamemnon of Greek myth—history rather than the actor playing the role.

While this is frustrating for scholars, it does reveal the realistic effect the masked-performance had on its audience. Had the play been perceived as stilted by the presence of the mask, then I believe the masks would be prevalent on the renderings.

The masks were made by assistants working for the director, and were also responsible for the other aspects of costuming. The masks themselves were made from glued rags, and covered with hair either made from human sources, animal sources, or possibly tow. There are a number of marble mask heads that still survive, although not all are the correct size for matching a mask to an adult. A mask made of linen or cloth could be moulded around the marble form in a process like creating papier-mache objects. In this way a series of masks could be created and either be adorned similarly or with varying hair and coloration.

Why this mask?



The mask presented as part of this project portrays Philoktetes, the lame hero at the center of the 5th century tragedy by Sophocles. Produced in 409 BCE, the play was the second-to-last work by the aged playwright, and the last of his work that he would see staged before his death in 406 BCE. It presents the title character Philoktetes as a man who has been alone on an island for nine years, abandoned by Odysseus as the Achaeans made their way to Troy after he had been wounded by a serpent.

I have attempted to render the mask in a neutral style as befits a hero in tragedy. Originally I attempted an experiment with stiffening linen with glue. I formed the wet-glue cloth over a plastic mask of a human face. It proved impossible to get the wet cloth to remain on top of the form. I imagine what would be needed to mould linen in this way is not just the initial face form, but an indented form that could be placed over the linen to hold it in place while it dried. Another issue with the linen experiment was the way the material folds. I imagine that the linen would have to be cut in such a way that it would dry as a smooth surface, rather than one that buckles and wrinkles as the linen accommodates the shape of the nose and brow. I did manage to get a ghostly image of a face, but it looks like a face pressing itself up against a sheet. It did not render a suitable representation of a face.

To make this mask I used techniques I learned from Dan Potter, founder and director of the Mystic Paper Beasts, a mask/puppet performance troupe that has toured around the world. He enjoys using ‘found’ or recycled objects in his work. I used cardboard reinforced with a coating of glue to make it resilient and less likely to become soggy while applying paint. Masking tape was applied to cover edges and smooth out junctions. This also received a coating of glue and water to make it stronger.

Because the character has been living outdoors on an island for nine years, I wanted to give him a slightly harried appearance. The ‘hair’ is made from homespun yarn to help with this effect. Also, I chose a ruddier complexion for the face, to give the appearance of his many hours exposed to the elements seeking provisions.

Using the information gathered about Attic masked performance I have sought to create a neutral mask with subtle character attributes. The masked performance tradition of the classic Greeks is one of the facets of their enduring drama that continues to fascinate. Their stories and their style of performing are still relevant to our theater today. We have altered the look of the mask—the purpose of the mask—but the masking tradition still holds power and in its presence we listen. By making this mask, I have learned a little more about why these traditions endure.


Resource List:
1. Libby Appel, Masked Characterization, An Acting Process, (Illinois, Southern University Press, 1982).
2. John Emigh, Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
3. Richard Green, Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, ed., Greek and Roman Actors, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4. Graham Ley, The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
5. Don Nardo, ed., Greek Drama, (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000).
6. Stewart Ross, Jill A. Laidlaw, ed., Ancient Greece: Greek Theatre, (Chicago: Wayland Publishers, 1996).
7. M. S. Silk, Tragedy and the Tragic, Greek Theatre and Beyond, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996).
8. Sophocles, Sophokles: The Complete Plays, trans. Carl R. Mueller and Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek (Hanover: Smith and Kraus, 2000).
9. Don Nardo, ed., Readings on Sophocles, (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000).
10. Kostas Valakas, Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, ed., Greek and Roman Actors, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
11. David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance, An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Special Holiday Offer for YOGA IN THE CAR! order by 12/18/07!

This is an item from my friend and awesome theater artist/yoga instructor Jen Swain and friends -- It would make an excellent stocking stuffer or gift idea. And this link will take you to the special offer for friends! --Kato

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'Tis the season for giving gifts, why not Om your holiday shopping experience? Jen, Gennette and the rest of the Om the Road crew are ever grateful for our friends and family, and know you are for yours, too. For the rest of the month of December, you can buy a copy of our CD Yoga in the Car with Jen Swain: Bumper to Bumper to give as a gift for only $10 (plus the cost of shipping and handling - unless you live in LA and we have the good fortune of seeing you. It fits perfectly as a stocking stuffer, no one will have it, it's great for people who have always wanted to try yoga (but can't quite make it to a studio) it's a nice way to let someone know you are concerned about their stress/road rage level, AND at the very least, you will make them smile.

Simply go to Yoga in the Car Please order by the 18th, you have a good chance of receiving the CD's by the 24th.

You are welcome to forward this on to any of your friends who might be interested in getting this gift for someone as well.


http://www.omtheroadyoga.com/OTR_FriendsSale.htm