4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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drama, script, theater, and performance
public-domain material that has been restructured according to need
(TPG, Polish Laboratory Theater). But I, for one, want to work with
writers, and must therefore find a way of dealing with their “vision.”
I assume that plays “present” themselves to their authors as scenes,
that this scening is coexistent with playwriting. (Beckett, with his ear
for music and sense of wordness, may be an exception; he may not
“see” his plays but “hear” them.) The act of playwriting is a translation
of this internal scening into dialog + stage directions. The stage directions
are vestiges and/or amplifications of the internal scening. The
whole scening process is, in my view, a scaffold that is best dismantled
once the play takes shape as dialog. In this way was the Classical
and Elizabethan drama passed on: as sheer dialog unencumbered by
didiscalia. I think the survival of many of those plays is due to the
fact that later generations have been spared stage directions and
character descriptions.
The work of those doing the production is to re-scene the play not as
the writer might have envisioned it but as immediate circumstances
reveal it. Generally, it is not possible to do the play in the author’s
vision anyway. That vision may be unknown, as with most premodern
writers; or the play is produced in a culture outside that of origin; or
the conventions and architecture of the theater make it impossible. Rescening
is inevitable because the sociocultural matrix of the play-asvisioned
soon changes. The drama is, by definition, that which can be
passed on through successive sociocultural transformations. The original
vision is tied to the original matrix, and decays with it. I don’t
think that even the first production of a drama is privileged in this
regard – unless the author stages the play himself, and that privilege
dies with the author.
The Garage environment for Tooth facilitated the division into public
and private sides. An 11-foot-high gallery overlooked the public half
on three sides framing the fight arena; Cheyenne’s bandstand, and a
narrow bridge 7 feet high, further defined the arena. The centerpiece
limited the depth of the public side to about 15 feet. Two rectangular
archways connected the public to the private side, with additional flow
spaces at either end of the centerpiece. The private side had an 8-foot
gallery continuing around two short sides and one-half of the longest
side of the theater. The playing area was much narrower – never more