> There is a dimension of the theatrical performance of a text, though,
> that creates a third consciousness (that is, one besides the
> audience-as-audience and the performer-as-performer), even in fairly
> traditional dramatic texts like my own, which are constructed with
> plot and character and all that stuff we've come to expect from a
> night out at the local playhouse. If I can be permitted an example
> from my recent play "In Public": a character in the second scene is
> sitting at a bar, flirting casually with a colleague, when she comes
> up with this monologue:
>
I immediately think of two things when I read your examples and your
explanation of this extra dimension. The one of them you describe with
"spoken by the same actress within a 15 or 20 minute period" -- stating
the obvious, drama, unlike poetry, is a time-based artform. Lyric
poetry is perhaps the least time-based form of literature, which
strengthens its role as object-on-the-page. It exists, in a sense,
without a proper beginning, end, or sense of time having passed.
I also think of how a dramatic text is meant to be inhabited and
embodied by a performer -- mentioned earlier in this thread -- and it
seems to me critical to that the performer is not performing his or her
own words but those of a "character." (Character, of course, in the
broadest possible sense, given that less traditional drama won't have
such precise divisions). But still, the performative context of a text
is automatically a fictitious context. Even in performance art where
the performer is the writer is the character, the act of staging
produces an artificiality which enhances the impact of portions of the
text while reducing others.
Contemporary lyric poetry isn't anywhere close to being staged, on the
contrary, it's often passed off as the opposite, some kind of "direct
communication." This may well be illusory, but is often an underlying
assumption on the part of the reader.
There is a crossing somewhere. As drama approaches the purely literary
is enters the unperformable realm. Norway's own "national play" Peer
Gynt is meant to be read rather than staged; Goethe's Faustus; Seneca's
plays. And on the poetry end of things there is the point where lyric
crosses over into epic.
--Knut
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