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I tried approaching the question of “what is theatre” from several different points of view: what is theatre, why is theatre important, etc., all to no effect: the articles seemed boring or redundant, definitely uninteresting: academic. This changed for me when I found Eugene Ionesco’s article “Discovering the Theatre” in a 1959 issue of The Tulane Drama Review. The article shocked me. At first, it shocked me because I was appalled by what Ionesco was saying about theatre. Then, I was shocked because I was agreeing with him. Finally, I found myself mentally applying the points he was discussing against the play I wrote most recently and identifying what was right and what was wrong with it—and I knew that what Ionesco was saying was correct. Being thus overwhelmed by the article, I have decided to use it as a spring-board for my discussion of theatre: not so much to make any vain attempt at providing any objective truth about what theatre is, nor to even create a framework by which works may be tagged as theatrical or not; but instead to come to some definition of what theatre is to me: that I may work out of strength regarding my suppositions at this point in time.

To begin the discussion, I’ll highlight one of the comments that Ionesco makes late in his essay which, although it may seem confounding, is precise and elucidating:

The theatre can only be theatre, even though for certain contemporary doctors of “theatrology” this identity with itself is charged with tautology, or considered false, an attitude which strikes me as the most incredible and amazing of paradoxes. / For these doctors, the theatre, being something other than theatre, is ideology, allegory, politics, lectures, essays or literature. This is as aberrant as if one were to claim that music should be archeology, or painting, physics and mathematics. (Ionesco and Pronko 16)

The point is so critical that I will no doubt make a fool of myself here articulating it clearly, redundantly, to myself: theatre is theatre. Well, what does that mean, precisely? It certainly begs a question. It begs a question that I want to avoid like the plague; a question that you, my good reader, should want me to avoid like the plague as well. But, as it is pushing up from underneath, swelling my tongue to be spoken, pressing my patience at every turn, I will ask it: If theatre is theatre, what then is theatre?

In his essay defending poetry, Shelley begins with a discussion of reason and imagination and the actions of mental processes on the individual and society. I will not presume to be so lofty. I will instead attempt to identify, of my own accord, those elements that make theatre unique. That is, what is it about theatre that makes it theatre? What makes theatre different from poetry, or different from screenplays, or what is unique when it is compared against the novel? To do this, I’ll begin with questions: Is theatre simply a physical space in which an action takes place? Is theatre the notion of seeing an action or event enacted? Or is theatre a glib sneer for practices that are intentionally dramatic and unnecessarily emotional—red herrings drawing attention from something more important? This question ‘what is theatre’ is likely has old as theatre itself and, despite my attempts, it not likely to be any nearer an answer than theatre is near its end. Perhaps theatre can be defined using the words of Potter Stewart, the Associate Justice of the United States, who, in articulating a definition of pornography said, simply, “I know it when I see it.” But if that’s the case, then it begs the willful suspension of disbelief: a phrase that not only irritates some but is a statement whose precise spirit led Eugene Ionesco to write his essay in the first place: namely, that theatre had become dishonest and embarrassingly false. (Ionesco and Pronko 3-18) The complicated fact is that theatre is all of those things mentioned above: a space, an action, and, unfortunately, a diversion. Theatre is many different things to many different people: to children, it is Bread and Puppet Theater or guignol; to subscribers at the Cleveland Play House, it is On Golden Pond; and for more sophisticated palates, it is the productions of experimental theatres such as convergence-continuum or the more extreme performance art of Karen Finley. In the introduction to his book Playwriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically, Michael Wright, talks about plays in a way that can be generalized to theatre, saying:

…there is no longer any meaningful single definition of a play that applies across the spectrum of what is being created around the world, beyond saying that a play is a (largely) live event that takes place in a space that all involved have agreed is a “stage.” And in the end Wright concludes that “there is little reason to believe that theatre will retreat to the well-made play or to some rigid Aristotelian framework. Theatre is far more likely to continue its expansion of form, subject matter, language, use of space, and so on…theatre continues to evolve in an open and free manner. (Wright xiv)

If this is so, then how can one define it? Worse still, how can one judge what is good theatre and what is not good? Is good theatre a full evening of theatre? Is it an hour? Ten minutes? Is it theatre that makes you laugh and feel good—or should it make your heart break? Or should it come right out and punch you in face and scream “hey, buddy, wake up and take a look around you?”

Let’s go back to Michael Wright, who has several ideas regarding what is important about theatre: first, it is a witnessed present, that is, the event that happens in real time; second, it is immediate: there is no filter or interpreter. To Wright, theatre is a ‘witnessed present’ that is “the problems of the characters are being worked out in front of us, right here and now,” and this, whether the play was written “today or in 504 B.C.” (Wright 6-7) And further, Wright notes, that “since the play needs this ‘us’ in order to exist, it’s our present at the same instant, because the problems of the characters reflect on our own lives.” More precisely, “the play is a present event—a play needs real time in which to occur and is put on by real people in front of other real people. Humans are watching humans…when we watch a play, the people performing in the play are right there, we are aware of them and they of us. And this means that thinking theatrically is also rooted in this awareness of the existence of the other.” (Wright 7) The theatre provides a sense of immediacy unlike other forms, “there is no filter between you and what’s acting upon your sensory receptors: we listen, watch, and feel the human struggles on the stage directly.” (Wright 8 ) Wright gives the example that, “we know without hearing a word that the couple over there is arguing, or the man sitting to our left is really nervous. We read these things in the behavior of people, but we also feel these things because we are in the same environment.” (Wright 7)

Aristotle in his Poetics states that theatre’s object is imitation, “Since those who imitate imitate men in action, and these must necessarily be either worthwhile or worthless people.” (Aristotle and Else 17) He then goes on to describe the elements that create good imitations and what they may be categorized as (comedy, tragedy, epic) and of what attributes they must consist. It is of note that the categorizations and attributes that Aristotle outlined where rebranded later as principles and eventually became a form of dogma in Europe that controlled what was and, more importantly, what was not produced for centuries.

Augusto Boal in his book Theatre of the Oppressed suggests that Aristotle’s Poetics presents a coercive structure who’s plain intent was to glorify the powerful and to dissuade those who would challenge them: seeking to elevate one moral sense (that of the patron) above another (that of the viewer) and disenfranchise the “worthless people” mentioned above. (Boal 3 ) Boal defiantly states that theatre is a means to political action and a means of creating political action and a political consciousness. For his trouble he was run out of Brazil.

William Henderson in his article “Why Theatre?” raises possibilities that are both similar to those raised by Michael Wright and yet different, identifying elements important to both those participating in the creation and those viewing it. Henderson is unique in including in his consideration of theatre the aesthetic elements attendant to all aspects of theatre: both inside and out, both actor and audience member. Specifically, Henderson points to the adrenalin of performance and the never-to-be-repeated moments of sheer astonishment; the sensual “pleasure of entering unfamiliar and strange ramshackle buildings, or coming upon an entirely new spatial configuration…the simultaneous danger and allure of performers’ bodies in the space around us”; in true Bakhtinian form, “the multiplicity of dialogues that exist—between performers and audience; between the various technological media at work; amongst the performers themselves; and between them and the technological forces employed—create the possibility of an intellectual engagement at a level which purely electronic media can only gesture at.” Henderson comments that “Theatre is also and always, the circus…is a high-wire event through time with the constant risk of falling off and never being able to recover…”; and that “the frailty of the performance…the very real vulnerability of the performer, the artist; and here, possibly, the real truth…the question not of our power to woo and entertain and audience but of our weakness…the sheer vulnerability of the human being in front of us surely confronts us with our own…the real sense that in our vulnerability and weakness we are fully human and thus fully connected with those around us…” (Henderson 11/08/2007)

In his article, “Why Theatre: Questions and Answers”, Craig Stewart Walker quotes Rick Salutin, a Canadian novelist and playwright, who bluntly states, “anything that brings people together in a communalizing way is valuable.” (Walker 55)

So, to sum things up (to this point), theatre is a physical space (that may or may not be dangerous to get to or strangely configured) in which actors (who may be dangerous or alluring or both at the same time) intentionally imitate (or enact) dramatic and emotional actions (that may or may not be politically coercive) which take place before us in real time (and thus will never be precisely repeated again) allowing no filter or intermediary interpreter (so we have to figure things out ourselves) which exposes the vulnerability and weakness of all present and may demonstrate the truth of our human condition (as weak and vulnerable) in a communal environment such that a dialogue is created, connecting all of us.
Ionesco would be quick to point out, I think, that what is missing (and it should be missing) from the summation I provided above is that which is contained in the latter part of the opening quote I took from him, namely that misapprehension that theater “is ideology, allegory, politics, lectures, essays or literature. “ That is, nowhere in the summation I provided is there any mention of the content of the theatre (okay, there’s one mention)—nor is there any attempt to explain theatre in terms of something else: something that it is not. It is precisely Ionesco’s point that theatre should not be ideology, allegory, politics, lectures, essay or literature, for these forms already exist and do perfectly well on their own. So, theatre should be theatre.

But the confluence of many of these elements into theatre had a damaging (and still does have a damaging) effect on the experience of theatre, leading Ionesco to write that:

I derived no pleasure from [theatre]…The playing of the actors disturbed me: I was embarrassed for them…there was something false in it all…it seemed to me that the actor was doing something inadmissible, censurable. He was renouncing himself, abandoning himself, changing skin…It seemed painful to me, and somehow dishonest…To go to the theatre meant for me to go and see apparently serious people make a spectacle of themselves. (Ionesco and Pronko 3)

Ionesco points out that novels did not have this effect on him, nor did music, nor films, and, in fact, the actors in films did not disturb him at all—whereas the playing of actors in a theatre did:

Why could I not accept theatrical reality? Why did its truth appear false to me? And why did the false seem to want to parade as true, substitute for truth?…[The actor’s] material presence destroyed the fiction. It was as though there were present two levels of reality, the concrete reality, impoverished, empty, limited, of these banal living men, moving and speaking upon the stage, and the reality of the imagination. And these two realities faced each other, unmasked, irreconcilable: two antagonistic universes which could not succeed in unifying and blending. (Ionesco and Pronko 4)

That is, some might argue, it was a failure of the willful suspension of disbelief. Ionesco concludes, however, that “it was with a sort of desacralized awareness that I attended the theatre, and that is why I did not like it, feel it, or believe in it.” (Ionesco and Pronko 4)

Novel, music, painting, these are pure fiction, containing no heterogeneous elements; that is why they stand alone, and are admissible. The cinema itself can stand alone, since it is a series of images; it also is pure, whereas the theatre seemed to me essentially impure: fiction was mingled with elements foreign to it; it was imperfectly fiction, a raw material which had not undergone an indispensable transformation, a mutation…I saw no way out, no way to reconcile freshness, spontaneity, naïveté, that is to say, creative authenticity, with theatrical thought, with preconceived ideas, dogmatic and stifling. (Ionesco and Pronko 5)

So, apparently what ruined theatre for Ionesco was not only his inability to suspend his disbelief and overlook the two realities present in front of him, but it was the impurity of theatre in this same regard: that it had fictional events enacted by real people, and that it also mixed its media: that is, theatre could contain elements not, perhaps, native to it: music, painting, etc. It is also possible that Ionesco felt that he should not need to suspend anything in order to believe, but I am jumping ahead of myself.

Ionesco doesn’t stop at performance, though, taking on directly the texts of plays. He states that he found some worthwhile: Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare—and some by Kleist and Buchner. But these texts, he found, were exciting to him for their literary merits and not necessarily their theatrical merits. His problem with most texts is that they are not theatrical:

Strindberg seemed insufficient and clumsy. Moliere himself bored me…What do these stories of people matter to me, or these characters and customs seen in such a narrow perspective? Shakespeare questions the totality of the condition and destiny of man. The problems of Moliere seemed to me…relatively secondary, sometimes sad…but never tragic: for they can all be resolved. There is no solution to the intolerable, and only that which is intolerable is truly theatrical. (Ionesco and Pronko 6)

Theatricality is a tricky one. What is theatrical? On my blog, (Hayes 11/16/2007) I write that:

To me, writing theatricality means grasping space as you write. It means apprehending not only the characters and events that you mean to portray, but the physical environment in which they exist; how that physical environment affects your characters and events—and then using this apprehension creatively to your advantage—or more specifically, passing the three-dimensional world of the play that you are creating on to the audience and thereby making that world actively interesting, engaging, and unique to the meaning and content of your play.

But theatricality is more than just a comprehension of space and how it can be used. Going back to Michael Wright, theatricality is also dialog and it is behavior—and very often, it is the way these two elements play against one another. For example, take one of your encounters with people in the morning at work.

Take 1:
You: “Hi, Bob, how are you today?”
Bob: (Smiles) “I’m fine.”

Take 2:
You: “Hi, Bob, how are you today?”
Bob: (Scowls) “I’m fine.”

Subtext is in behavior. With regards to behavior, is your character flighty? Is she clumsy? Is she hysterical? How do any of these behaviors play out in a scene? What do they reveal about the character—without that character ever saying a word? That is, theatre is about providing your audience with something to see and figure out—making them discern what a character is about based on what that character does and letting them judge if what the character says jibes with what the character does. (Wright 8 )

For Ionesco, though, theatricality drives a bit deeper still:

The spectacle of the guignol held me there, stupefied by the sight of these puppets who spoke, who moved, and bludgeoned each other. It was the spectacle of life itself which, strange, improbable, but truer than truth itself, was being presented to me in an infinitely simplified and caricatured form, as though to underline the grotesque and brutal truth. (Ionesco and Pronko 6)

And this is a point that becomes increasingly important to Ionesco and one with which I whole-heartedly agree: art must aspire to the universal. It must find the archetypes, the forms that stand beyond all forms, and therefore reach all humans. Going back to Ionesco’s consideration of Moliere above on page seven, Ionesco writes, “What do these stories of people matter to me, or these characters and customs seen in such a narrow perspective?” Or, to reverse the perspective here and to look at it from the point of view of Robert McKee, author of numerous ‘how to’ works on writing screenplays:

The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression. A stereotypical story reverses this pattern: It suffers a poverty of both content and form. It confines itself to a narrow, culture-specific experience and dresses in stale, nonspecific generalities. (McKee 4)

Ionesco’s essay, so critical of the theatre to this point, begins to slowly articulate a theatre that he can bear, one that drives at what is universal and holds human (and hence, artistic) truth. “It is true that all authors have wanted to propagandize. The great ones are those who failed, who, consciously or not, arrived at more profound and general truths.” (Ionesco and Pronko 8 ) He goes on,

If one counted the dramatists which can still move the public, one would find through the centuries about twenty, or thirty at the most. But the pictures, the poems and the novels which still speak to us can be counted by the thousands. The naïveté necessary for a work of art is lacking in the theatre…I mean a lucid naïveté, springing from the profound sources of being, revealing them, revealing to ourselves, restoring to us our naïveté, our secret being. (Ionesco and Pronko 9)

And at this point, Ionesco lashes out a many forms of theatre, especially those that are political in nature or the “vehicle of ideologies.” Such theatre, Ionesco contends, diminishes the art, finally ridiculing those who believe that the “play should be a sort of presentation of a thesis, whose solution appears upon the stage.” Such theater, Ionesco contends, is stuck forever between being true art, in the sense outlined briefly above, and rhetoric: again, a (to him) dreadful mixing of forms, a falling away from purity.

I’ll step away from this line of thought for a moment to expand the discussion, namely, I’ve considered through various voices (as well as my own) what theatre is, or can be considered, but I have not properly addressed why it is important—and so many of the sources I’ve quoted thus far have had as their title ‘why theatre’—some asking a question and some not.

In his book Millennial Stages, Robert Brustein writes, in his essay entitled “Does Theatre Matter?”:

Who needs theatre. Does theatre matter. In the past such questions would have seemed absurd. Theatre mattered a lot to the citizens of Periclean Athens who went to see plays the way Christians go to churches and Muslims go to mosques, for spiritual sustenance through sustaining myths. It mattered a lot in medieval Europe whose church services included a theatrical Quem Quaeritis, trope that evolved into adaptations of the Old Testament and the synoptic gospels called Miracle and Morality plays, and then evolved in to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It mattered enormously to Londoners of all classes in Elizabethan England, who followed the fortunes of Falstaff from play to play the way people today follow the fortunes of Tony Soprano from episode to episode. It mattered enough to the Puritans and Anabaptists that in 1642 they shut down the playhouses the moment they had cut off the head of the English king. It mattered in Golden Age Spain, and in France during the reign of Louis XIV, when people of all classes would no more think of missing a new play by Lope or Molière than skipping their evening meal. (Brustein 12)

There is much in this paragraph that Brustein points to that is important with regards to theatre: that it had its origin in religion and certainly in religious sentiment; that it was one of the first widely followed and communal forms of entertainment and education; and that it was politically dangerous.

There is not enough time to go into the lengthy history of the theatre here, but all evidence points to its origin, somewhere back in the vast deep dark, in the religious practices of a community. Religious ceremonies from so-called primitive tribes or cultures that are extant today have revealed that the ceremonies are enactments of the mythological age—the mythological (i.e. religious to them) landscape of their people. That is, a ceremony is an eternal moment in which the gods and forces and mysteries of the world are demonstrated to the people of a community in real time, in real presence. In his essay, “The Shadows of the Gods,” Arthur Miller draws similar comparisons. In this essay he comments that he was ’shaped’ as a person by the Great Depression and that the time period gave him “a sense of an invisible world” that:

The hidden laws of fate lurked not only in the characters of people, but equally if not more imperiously in the world beyond the family parlor. Out there were the big gods, the ones whose disfavor could turn a proud and prosperous and dignified man into a frightened shell of a man whatever he thought of himself, and whatever he decided or didn’t decide to do…There was an invisible world of cause and effect, mysterious, full of surprises, implacable in its course. (Miller 36-7)

Theatre brings people together. As with the ceremonies mentioned above, and as pointed out by Michael Wright earlier and even Aristotle, people gather together in the dark to witness an event or to see an imitation of an original action. Brunstein remarks that theatre provides “as sense of community, and…a penetrating spiritual experience.” (Brustein 13) And as with a religious ceremony, where drums and chants and other effects work to create a shared environment in which all present are experiencing the same sensations, so does theatre take advantage of this effect. Michael Wright chose the following example to explain it:

When I lived in New York, I rode the subways nearly every day. A crowd of strangers, totally oblivious to one another, would become an electrified and connected group instantly if somebody abnormal or scary got on the train. Without any effort to communicate, we would all know to watch out and be careful: this person is sending out hostile or crazy energy. If that person subsequently left the car, you would immediately feel the flood of relief all around you, and sometimes there would even be eye contact between passengers (usually verboten on subways), accompanied by smiles or those ironic headshakes that make life in New York bearable. (Wright 7)

The use of theatre for Miracle and Morality plays shows that the theatre is often used as an instrument of education and instruction: the Everyman plays demonstrating how to avoid the seven deadly sins and find paradise. And finally, Brustein’s quote demonstrates the power that theatre has to activate and unite people. Theatre is not only a place where ideas are expressed, but acted out: that is, as Aristotle notes, the actions of man are imitated. And further, as Augusto Boal showed, theatre can be used to demonstrate clearly how one can change one’s environment and life through action. It is no accident that Roundheads shut down the theatres; that Louis the XVI banned Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro; or that Boal was run out of Brazil. But Brunstein’s quote also points to an opposite power: to divide and confront people:

…in the 19th century, serious theatre began to develop an adversary role in regard to its audience—something I discussed in a book called The Theatre of Revolt. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht—none of these could any longer be called “popular” playwrights devoted to providing the audience with consoling myths. They were often messianic, provocative, bleak…The title of one of Peter Handke’s plays, Offending the Audience, pretty much summed up the tensions that had grown between the stage and the auditorium. 12 (Brustein 12)

But for the most part theatre still brings people together. Brustein states that theatre is among a very few kinds of activities—churchgoing, concerts, sports events—that still bring Americans into contact with one another, one of the last shreds of evidence that we are a people and not just an isolated mass of fantasists, barricaded in our homes, seeking safety from a sinister and threatening world through canned and recorded images, whether on tape, disc, or celluloid. (Brustein 13)

True to form, Ionesco has something to say regarding the place of theatre:

Theatre is one of the most ancient arts. I think that we cannot do without it. We cannot help giving in to the desire to place upon the stage living characters which are at once both real and invented. We cannot resist this need to make them speak and live before us. To incarnate phantoms, to give life is a prodigious and irreplaceable adventure, so much so that I was fascinated when, at the rehearsals of my first play, I saw suddenly moving about the stage of the Noctambules characters which had come out of me. I was frightened. By what right had I done that? Was it permitted? …It was almost diabolical…It was only when I wrote for the theatre entirely by chance and with the intention of ridiculing it, that I began to love it, to rediscover it in myself, to understand it and to be fascinated by it; and I understood what my role would be.(Ionesco and Pronko 10)

And yet, it was precisely through this process that Ionesco came to his vision of what theatre should be; that it should not be a theatre that used the “language of philosophical treatises;” and that when theatre used “too many subtleties and nuances, it was at once both too much and not enough;” and that while the “deplorable enlarging of nuances” disturbed him, in the end “it was simply that the magnification was insufficient. The too great was not great enough, the too slightly nuanced, was too nuanced.” (Ionesco and Pronko 3-18) All of which led Ionesco to what would become his mode of operation in the theatre:

If then the essence of the theatre was in this enlarging of effects, it was necessary to exaggerate even more, to underline and accentuate them to the maximum. To push the theatre beyond that intermediate zone which is neither theatre nor literature, is to restore it to its proper frame, to its natural limits. It was necessary not to hide the strings, but to make them even more visible, deliberately evident, to go all the way in the grotesque, in caricature, beyond the pale irony of witty drawing room comedies. Not drawing room comedies, but farce, an extreme burlesque exaggeration…A hard comedy…A return to the intolerable. Push everything to a state of paroxysm, there where the sources of tragedy lie. Create a theatre of violence: violently comic, violently dramatic. (Ionesco and Pronko 10)

In this, I have learned from Ionesco. In my most recent work, A Howl in the Woods, which just received a reading at Cleveland Public Theatre, there was much in the play that was exactly what Ionesco has described: my play is a play from the unconscious, it is out of the zone of literature and is theatre in a pure state, things are pushed to a state of paroxysm. And yet, during the re-writing, something went wrong. Drastically wrong. There are many ways to characterize the nature of the defect, and on my blog I have discussed one in particular: the intervention of the conscious mind: the intervention of the mind that thinks it knows what the play “is about” and knows “which direction” the play should go. It is what another blogger I often read refers to as the “Editor’s Mind”—the internal critic, the internal censor. What entered into my play is that which Ionesco derided above, this notion that a “play should be a sort of presentation of a thesis, whose solution appears upon the stage.” This notion so engrained in me and ingrained in many a fellow playwright I see around me, ruined the play: destroyed it as surely as if I put the printed text to flame. Instead of forcing my characters to articulate themselves, I should have driven the piece to greater exaggeration, I should have known to, as Ionesco advises, “Avoid psychology, or rather give it a metaphysical dimension.” (Ionesco and Pronko 11) Or rather, in my case, I should have continued on the path I started, explored what was uneasy and frightening rather than falling back on what was safe, banal, and boring.

Ionesco continues, driving hard:

If…the actors bothered me because they appeared too unnatural, it is perhaps because they also wanted to be too natural: by renouncing this, they become natural perhaps in another way. They must not be afraid of being unnatural. / To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow. Without a new virginity of spirit, without a purified outlook on existential reality, there is not theatre; there is no art either; we must effect a dislocation of the real, which must precede its reintegration. (Ionesco and Pronko 11)

Ionesco then begins suggesting methods for achieving this result, and in many ways the essay takes on the practicality of a guide or handbook—one that I likely will use to correct the faults in my most recent effort. Ionesco discusses, in cursory fashion, many of his plays, which he refers to as “anti-plays,” “comical dramas,” “pseudo-dramas,” and “tragical farces.” But the contradictions inherent in these references are central to the thesis of his essay and his proposal for a new theatre: that “the contradictory principles” are necessary and “constitute the bases of…theatrical construction.” So, it is by contradictory alignments and exaggeration that the effect described above will, for Ionesco, be achieved:

If one believes that the theatre is only a theatre of words, it is difficult to admit that I can have its own language. It can only be dependent upon other forms of thought which are expressed by words: philosophy or ethics…words constitute only one of the elements of theatrical shock…by using them with ferocious exaggeration in order to give to the theatre its true measure, which is lack of measure, the Word itself should be strained to its limits, language should almost explode, or destroy itself, in its impossibility to contain meanings. / But there are more than words: the theatre is a tale which is lived, beginning again at each performance, and it is also a tale which one sees being lived. The theatre is visual as much as it is auditory…/ Everything is permitted in the theatre: to incarnate characters but also to materialize anguish, inner presences. It is therefore not only permitted, but it is recommended, to make props act, and objects live, to breathe life into the settings, to make the symbols concrete. (Ionesco and Pronko 13)

And all of this confirms me in how my play began and in many of the theatrical choices that I made—barring the dismal choices I made later: to have my characters explain themselves. The mere reflection on this process makes me cringe and now I know why, as my reading drew closer, I began to feel sick: it is because I had so damaged my play by the “thesis-oriented” choices I made that it had become repellant. Aligned with Ionesco’s ideals, as stated immediately above, the muffins in my play wept, the surrounding set howled to the men trapped inside their campsite, the characters were unnatural: straining against the societal constructs that tried to pin them down. In reflection, so much is right with this play, and Ionesco is pointing the way for how it can be cleaned, purified, made right again.

So where does all this tend? Ionesco writes:

When some morning, touched by grace, I wake not only from my nocturnal slumber but also from my accustomed mental slumber, and become suddenly aware of my existence, and of the universal presence, when all appears strange to me and yet familiar, when the wonder of being overcomes me; this feeling, this intuition belongs to any man, to any time. This state of mind, one can find expressed in almost the same words by poets, mystics, philosophers, who feel it exactly as I feel it, and as all men have certainly felt it…In that eternal moment, shoemaker and philosopher, “slave” and “master,” priest and layman meet, and become identified with each other. (Ionesco and Pronko 13-14)

That is, it all tends toward the universal. It tends toward the universal via the naïveté Ionesco described above. It tends toward the universal by way of helping people to see the world, again, in all its strangeness. Art is a way of seeing the world. The great artist allows others to see the amazement that he or she sees and in the way that he or she sees it. Ionesco, through the process that he outlines, and which I have very briefly touched, shares in this essay a way of seeing and a way of creating theatre that make it possible for others to see similarly. And this, for me, not just through Ionesco, but through a process of which I have become increasingly aware, is what theatre is about: exposing the unconscious forms and casting them upon the stage; revealing in these strange shapes and behaviors the truths that are universal to us as humans; to jar our way of seeing the world from the sleepy and the banal and re-awaken the sense of wonder that was everywhere present in our lives as children: the wonder that I see in the eyes and on the face of my own two-year-old daughter: resplendent, unveiled, the startling joy of being alive.

As Ionesco puts it, through the lens of Shakespeare’s Richard II:

When Richard II, fallen from power, is alone imprisoned in his cell, it is not Richard II that I see, but all the fallen kings of the earth; and not only all the fallen kings, but also our beliefs, our values, our desacralized truths, corrupted, worn out, our civilizations which disappear, our destiny. When Richard II dies, it is what I hold most dear that I see die; it is I who die with Richard II…in the final analysis it is not history that Shakespeare is writing, although he is using history; it is not a history that he presents me, but my history, our history, my truth beyond time, through showing me a time which goes beyond time and joins universal philosophic truth. / The theatre is that eternal living presence; it answers without doubt, to the essential structures of tragic truth, and of theatrical reality; its truth has nothing to do with the precarious truths of ideologies, nor with the so-called theatre of ideas: in this play we see theatrical archetypes, the essence of theatre, and theatrical language. (Ionesco and Pronko 14-15)

To reach what is universal, what allows people to see the world anew, to restore or reinvent the old, Ionesco contends that we must return to “primary truths” for these “are precisely what we lose sight of, what we forget.” (Ionesco and Pronko 16) For Ionesco these primary truths consist of what has been described above, and “spontaneity.” For he feels that “artistic creation is spontaneous,” and that it is by this method that the “instinctive and permanent schemas of the objective reality of the theatre…the essence of theatre,” will be discovered: given direct knowledge, and for Ionesco “nothing is true for the artist except what he does not borrow from others.” (Ionesco and Pronko 16)

Works Cited

Aristotle, and Gerald Frank Else. Poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970.

Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press, 1993.

Brustein, Robert Sanford. Millennial Stages :Essays and Reviews, 2001-2005. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Hayes, Thomas. Weebelly.com: A playwright’s blog: dedicated to all things play building. October (2007): 11/16/2007. http://weebelly.com/26/playwriting-process-thinking-theatrically/

Henderson, William. “Why Theatre?” Craft Culture. September (2006): 11/08/2007. http://www.craftculture.org/Bench/whenderson1.htm

Ionesco, Eugene, and Leonard C. Pronko. “Discovering the Theatre.” The Tulane Drama Review 4.1 (1959): 3-18.

McKee, Robert. Story :Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. 1st ed. New York: ReganBooks, 1997.

Miller, Arthur. “The Shadows of the Gods: A Critical View of the American Theater.” Harper’s Magazine 217 (1958): 35-43.

Walker, Craig Stewart. “Why Theatre: Questions and Answers.” Canadian Theatre Review Spring.86 (1996): 55.

Wright, Michael. Playwriting-in-Process : Thinking and Working Theatrically. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997.

Overview

In keeping with the themes of many of [amazon_link id=”B003E6C37U” target=”_blank” ]David Greenspan’s[/amazon_link] works, She Stoops to Comedy is a farcical look at love, gender, and identity–including the great lengths to which we will go when faced with the beginning or ending of love: complete transformation of the self.

Greenspan’s She Stoops to Comedy introduces us to the actress Alexandra Page, who has just experienced a relationship-ending argument with her long-time lover Alison Rose. In an attempt to recover Alison, who has gone to Maine to appear as Rosalind in Shakespeares [amazon_link id=”074348486X” target=”_blank” ]As You Like It[/amazon_link], Alexandra transforms herself into the actor Harry Samson and auditions for the part of Orlando. For those familiar with the Shakespeare play, the farcical zenith of She Stoops is reached when Rosalind, dressed as Ganymede, is wooed by Orlando. The complications of a woman dressed as a man wooing another woman dressed as a man pretending to be a woman should be ample incentive for seeing the production (if not happy confusion). But here’s the kicker: not a stitch of drag will you see. Along the way, the plot of She Stoops is complicated with the appearance of ex-lovers and new love interests (the director, the directors assistant, and the other Shakespearean actors, as well as an independent film troupe attempting to create a pseudo-documentary about reality in the theatre).

She Stoops to Comedy is an expertly and skillfully related tale of love and is in keeping with other romantic comedies such as Oliver Goldsmiths [amazon_link id=”0199553882″ target=”_blank” ]She Stoops to Conquer[/amazon_link] and Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Greenspan offers us an assortment of characters who are at various places in their experience of love, and he allows us to happily watch the reformation of love in Alexandra and Alison, who must both learn lessons about what it is to love, and how to do so selflessly.

Synopsis

As the play opens, Alexandra Page, an out-of-work, moderately famous lesbian actress, is talking through the bathroom door with her friend, Kay Fein, an archeologist or lighting designer. Alexandra is bemoaning the recent loss of her lover, Alison Rose. Alison Rose has left Alexandra to get some space and take the role of Rosalind in a production of Shakespeare’s [amazon_link id=”074348486X” target=”_blank” ]As You Like It[/amazon_link]. During the course of their discussion, we learn from Kay that Jayne Summerhouse, Kays ex-lover and the rival of Alexandra in both her career as an actress and as lover for Alison, will also be in Maine. Hearing Alexandras travails, Kay makes the off-hand remark that Alexandra should go to Maine and audition for the role of Orlando, starring opposite her ex-lover. For several possible motivations, including jealousy and to reclaim her lost love, Alexandra takes up the idea and steps out of the bathroom as a man, startling her friend Kay.

By the next scene we are in Maine and Alexandra, now Harry Samson, is auditioning for the role of Orlando. We are introduced to the director, Hal Stewart, and the brazenly-named Eve Addaman, Hals lover and assistant director. Additionally, we are introduced for the first time to Alexandras ex-lover Alison Rose. There is much merriment made of the names of the characters, the set and props on which the production will take place, and the audition of Alexandra/Harry Samson, who gets the part. The plot thickens as we witness Alison and Harry sitting down to get to know one another, and listen to each of them talk about their respective recent break-ups: ironically, with each other.

Jayne Summerhouse and her work partner Simon Lanquish enter. They are producing a pseudo-documentary about reality in the theatre, and have been invited by Hal Stewart to film the stage production. Much fun is had with the introduction of these characters and we watch Alexandra/Harry maintain composure as Jayne Summerhouse wryly ridicules Alexandra Page and openly flirts with Alison Rose. In addition, we get to see some toying with As You Like It: Simon cast as Touchstone, the clown and witty fool; Jayne as Celia, Rosalind’s cousin; and Eve Addaman as Adam, the old manservant to Orlando; and, of course, Alison as Rosalind and Ganymede. Furthermore, there is some fun with parts of the production, for instance, when Hal asks Harry to take off his shirt for the wrestling scene between Orlando and Charles the Wrestler, inspiring a farcical transition scene where Harry/Alexandra tries to smooth things over. Strengthening the love story, we have long scenes with Alison and Harry/Alexandra, and watch the re-transformation of their relationship continue.

The climax or peripeteic stage of the drama, to use Greenspan’s interpretation of [amazon_link id=”0472061666″ target=”_blank” ]Aristotle[/amazon_link], as one would expect, is the requisite scene of sexual farce. It begins with a night out for dinner with Simon announcing his sexual interest in Harry; Jayne and Alison are gone off somewhere for a walk in the dark, and Kay Fein enters; then, with most of the characters together in the restaurant, there is a cell phone call from Alison to Alexandra, with Harry’s phone ringing, coincidentally, at the same time, which nearly gives away the ruse. Simon gets drunk, believing Harry to be a heterosexual who’s not interested in his overtures; Kay goes to find her ex-lover Jayne; and Alison and Harry walk a raving Simon back to the Offstage Hotel. Then the farce explodes in the hotel room, where Simon passes out but not before asking Harry for sex, while Alison too reveals her attraction to Harry (she doesn’t know why, because she is a lesbian) with every expectation that Harry will perform sexually. Stalling techniques and other subterfuges are engaged in to survive the night. We also witness the night spent by the other couples, including Hal and Eve, and Kay Fein and Jayne Summerhouse.

The play wraps up with a discussion between Alison Rose and Alexandra Page on the success of the performance of As You Like It, Alison now happily home again with Alexandra. There is discussion of a revival of the play next year, but that the director, Hal, would like to see Alexandra play the part of Orlando, thinking that she would, for some reason, be good at it.

At no time in the play is that actor in drag’
One actress plays Kay Fein and Jayne Summerhouse.
–David Greenspans notes to She Stoops

There is a long tradition in the theatre of cross-dressing: men, since before the time of Shakespeare, being the only sex allowed to act, always played the part of women and always dressed as them besides. For women, the tradition is less apparent. There is Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, later the Baroness Dudevant, also known as [amazon_link id=”0300104170″ target=”_blank” ]George Sand[/amazon_link], who brazenly strode the streets of Paris in the mid-1800s in mens clothes; there is a film tradition, including [amazon_link id=”B001P5HI4A” target=”_blank” ]Yentl[/amazon_link], with Barbara Streisand, and [amazon_link id=”B00003CXD9″ target=”_blank” ]Victor/Victoria[/amazon_link] with Julie Andrews–who, very like Alexandra Page in She Stoops to Comedy, is a woman dressing as a man. The only catch, by comparison, is David Greenspan’s directions for the part of Alexandra: At no time in the play is that actor in drag.

What does that mean? It means that David Greenspan is challenging the imagination of the audience. Can you see the woman in the man? Can you see the man in the woman? A question that is most certainly affirmed in the name of the character Eve Addaman, a brazen direction to the audience to not be fooled or limited by a characters sex alone. Gender is never as straightforward as the sexual physiology of the person, but in this play the question is nonetheless asked: What if a persons sex wasn’t as apparent as his outward appearance? Would his sex still show through, or would there be an ebb and flow of both sexes, freely, across his person? How does sex influence gender? That is, what is it to be a man and what is it to be a woman–beyond the physiological? Does being a man or being a woman change fundamentally who you are? Or can the question even be asked? As [amazon_link id=”0679724648″ target=”_blank” ]Gertrude Stein[/amazon_link], one of Greenspan’s influences, said, What’s the use of being a boy if you are going to grow up to be a man? The light implication of her statement being: who dreams as a boy that he will turn out as he is now as a man; the darker implication being that little boys grow up to be the limited, closed, and often violent gender identities of grown men. The fact is, the identity one holds as a child is not the identity one holds as an adult. While the name may be the same, as well as the point of origin and family, the person has transmuted such that there may be little resemblance at all. Additionally, as each of us is fully aware, at any time any number of voices can be rattling around in our mind: our own voice, the voice of our mother, our father, our brother or sister, and even the voice of the guy next door. What is the influence of all these voices on your identity? Do they shape you, change you, speak for you? The nature of voice is as important to Greenspan as the nature of identity, and throughout She Stoops to Comedy, there are numerous instances of the identity questioning itself, shaping and reshaping her voice, framing the possibility that others live within the self or at least the possibility of other lives for the self. Can you have two (or more) people alive inside you at one time? Who, for instance, hasn’t experienced the following sensation when dressing for a costume party: the mask is on and suddenly a new person emerges from within, more energetic perhaps, bolder, more devious than the one who goes drably to work every Monday. How does this happen? Where does this new person come from? This is almost certainly to what Greenspan is pointing when he notes: One actress plays Kay Fein and Jayne Summerhouse, leading directly to one of the more comic scenes of She Stoops to Comedy: Jayne Summerhouse and Kay Fein arguing with each other, pointedly discussing each others weight, no less! But this example is the extreme pole of Greenspan’s position: the multiple personalities in the self released to confront each other. It is an extreme pole because Greenspan would like to see a harmonious relationship between the different selves. In fact, he would like to see them help one another, to contribute to the whole person, to see the union of the man inside the woman and the woman inside the man: the freeing of human imaginative energy from the stale gender roles and identity cocoons that each of us employs in his life. These are some of the questions raised and answered by She Stoops to Comedy and, in fact, by several of Greenspan’s plays.

But beyond this, Greenspan’s use of the gender-bending and sex-switching connects with the farcical tradition he follows, and points to throughout She Stoops to Comedy. The most obvious is Oliver Goldsmiths [amazon_link id=”0199553882″ target=”_blank” ]She Stoops to Conquer[/amazon_link]: or Mistakes of a Night. First put up on March 15, 1773, Goldsmiths romantic farce sees Kate Hardcastle, daughter of a well-to-do Englishman, square off against Charles Marlow, the son her fathers best friend, Sir Charles Marlow. Due to the stringent expectations placed on courting and its perfunctory nature at the time, Charles Marlow finds Kate Hardcastle curtsies to the floor and a lady without emotion. It is only by dressing as a barmaid that Kate is able to get the attention of Marlow and see him behave honestly, and thereby assess his true character, breeding, and emotion. By this method, Kate wins the heart of Marlow and in the end reveals herself to him, having thus stooped to conquer. She Stoops to Comedy also draws on Shakespeare’s [amazon_link id=”074348486X” target=”_blank” ]As You Like It[/amazon_link], which is the premise for the action in Greenspan’s play. Goldsmith, no doubt, found some of his themes and motifs in Shakespeares farce: a young man, Orlando, who succeeds with his true love, Rosalind, only after she dresses herself as a man, Ganymede, to instruct Orlando: to guide him away from the platitudes of overly sentimental, idealistic love and toward the proper attitude of friendship, respect, and natural desire. In both of the plays upon which Greenspan draws, one may immediately see similarities: the most apparent being that the lover takes another identity in order to excavate, align, and eventually woo the true self of the beloved. The identity is sloughed aside in order to release the energies that lie beneath, the energies of a full human being, not the limited and stagnated identity mandated by ourselves in society. The released energies have a re-vivifying effect on Alexandra Page and Alison Rose, strengthening both their self-confidence and their relationship with each other, not only affirming their love, but allowing their love to mature, take root, and grow deeper. The effect on love of the energy released by Alexandra Page is contrasted with the lost and pathetic love of Simon Lanquish, whose attempts at change have only ever been superficial and not fundamental; and the vain, self-indulgent love shown in Kay Fein and Jayne Summerhouse, imagistically symbolized in their both inhabiting the same body; and the stagnant, unimaginative love shown by Hal Stewart and Eve Addaman, whose love and love-making is as exciting as their teeth brushing together at the sink: their love will end soon due to their lack of energy and imagination and even their willingness to try.

Beyond the questions of sex and gender, audiences may be a bit overwhelmed by the form, structure, and verbal playing that occurs throughout She Stoops to Comedy. And in many ways this can be best explained by the recurring statement by Kay Fein, Alexandra Page, and others throughout She Stoops that things are post-modern. Whatever that means. In many ways, the key to the form and structure of Greenspan’s theatre can be found here, and knowing what postmodern means is crucial; so a small brush of literary theory and theatre history might be appropriate as back story for Greenspans approach.

Prior to the nineteenth century, and, in many ways even today, the form and structure of plays relied heavily on the structure and elements proscribed by Aristotle in his Poetics. The structural elements included the Hamartia, or tragic flaw, in the main character; Empathy, or the ever-crucial audience identification with the main character; the Peripeteia, or sudden fall, reversal of fortune, where audience empathy turns to dread; on to Anagnorisis, or recognition of the flaw (Hamartia); all leading to the Catastrophe, or terrible end, which evokes a Catharsis in the audience, purging it of its dread and anxiety, but sending along a good moral lesson. Over time, Aristotle’s theory and approach to theatre led to the development of five-act plays that moved in accordance with this theory and these steps. Additional elements included such things as time and place: the play should always occur in a unity of time and place, on the same day and in the same location. Shakespeare, for one, often violated the unity of time and space with the diverse settings and scenes of his plays, a fact which has often led people to suggest that he was the first screenwriter. Oliver Goldsmiths [amazon_link id=”0199553882″ target=”_blank” ]She Stoops to Conquer[/amazon_link] does, in fact, take place in one location and in a unity of time, hence its subtitle: The Mistakes of an Evening. Much of antiquity, as well as Elizabethan, Restoration, Neo-Classical, and Victorian literatures followed the forms and structures that preceded them. It wasnt until the early twentieth century, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and its accompanying changes, that a new outlook on art, culture, and society emerged: Modernism. The premise of Modernism was that the agrarian approach to life and art was outdated and needed to be done away with and replaced with a theory of life that matched the new industries, scientific discoveries, and, in short, the new outlook on man and the world. Modernism rejected the attachment to social institutions, such as governmental bodies and the Church. Instead, it sought new forms of government that were more socially conscious and equitable, religions that were more expressive of the individual and less autocratic, and methods of learning that were more scientific and less doctrinal. Thinkers such as [amazon_link id=”0814720595″ target=”_blank” ] Charles Darwin[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”014015096X” target=”_blank” ]Karl Marx[/amazon_link] emerged from this time period and have become charged examples of Modernism. While initially Modernism was a movement based on rejecting what had come before, as with any movement, over time it came to be like what it had replaced. The ideals it held in all things, including government, religion, and learning, became themselves new monoliths that stood in the way of even those who had hailed the coming of Modernism. The advent of such notions led to a splintering off of many groups who pursued their own approaches to virtually everything: thus, [amazon_link id=”0192802399″ target=”_blank” ]Postmodernism[/amazon_link] was born. There are many who argue that Postmodernism is only an extension of Modernism, and therefore is not a post at all. However, the single aspect of Postmodernism that would run most counter to this notion is the rejection of any or all unifying categories: the notion that the government can really be only capitalist, or socialist; the notion that an approach to religion should be by one method: Christian, Buddhist; the notion that learning or art can be one particular way for everyone. That is, there can be no true meta-narratives in life, for each individual cannot be categorized. Postmodernism, thus, is mostly known as a deconstructive approach to modernity or an approach that is very specific, eclectic, or stylized: feminism, Marxism, expressionism, post-structuralism, and multiculturalism serve as examples.

Postmodernism is the elevation of the individual over the majority; it is the approach that raises the specific over the general, and is suspect of anything that claims to have general truths. The manifestations in theatre are no less recognizable today with the advent of the three-act play, then the two-act, the one-act play, and now even the ten-minute play; absurdist plays that have no plot and may only seek to poke fun at the structure of plays themselves, such as Ionesco’s [amazon_link id=”0802130798″ target=”_blank” ]The Bald Soprano[/amazon_link], an Anti-Play; or plays that have characters and events that morph and change so that the audience is displaced as much as the characters, such as Beckett’s [amazon_link id=”0791097935″ target=”_blank” ]Waiting for Godot[/amazon_link]. Additionally, there are solo pieces and performance art pieces. In fact, the manifestations and forms of theater now outstrip the words that can be used to describe them all.

With this all-too-brief overview in mind, it is now that we can discuss Greenspan’s She Stoops to Comedy. The play is postmodern on several levels: the question of gender and identity, as discussed above, the structure and movement of the play, and the relationship between the playwright, the play, and the audience. As has been discussed above, the notion of a five-act play with a decisive plot and subplot that moves inevitably through the ranges of Aristotelian [amazon_link id=”0472061666″ target=”_blank” ]Poetics[/amazon_link] is not here, thus marking the play as a break with this tradition, although Greenspan does reshape this structure in some of his plays. However, as the audience will soon discover, She Stoops to Comedy becomes far more postmodern in its refusal even to be written at all. Perhaps one of the first things the audience will notice is that scene after scene progresses in what one would assume to be a normal fashion, only to turn back on itself and start over; it is rewritten. In exposition, dates change: Well this is 1950, Kay Fein says, only to remark, Well this is 1990, only a few moments later. One becomes acutely aware in hearing the play that Greenspans voice is floating at the perimeter, just outside the hermetic area of the production, and his voice is changing, rewriting, and reworking elements of the play as they happen–as if the audience, the actors, and the characters are inside the playwrights mind, and he is hearing the character voices as they speak for the first time, and then is refining them. And this isnt the only instance of such happenings: Kay Fein is an archaeologist at the start, but a lighting designer later on. Scenes where characters are introduced are awkward the first time and so are rewritten a few moments later. In many ways, the nature of the play is in flux and may cause the audience to call into question what is real and fixed and what is not. In many ways, this is just like the life that each of us leads, re-writing what happened at a particular place, at a particular time, or longing to redo or undo what we have done. This play structure displaces the audience and shows that Greenspan is truly interested, in the words of Alexandra Page, in the urge to move across the words the page to paint a character on the stage. The impulse then to translate onto the stage’to make through revision the stage a play of words moving its characters its plot its action. And this urge, impulse, and tendency toward revision will be seen time and again throughout the course of the play: revisions of monologues, statements, and actions occur at once and in front of the audience: no sooner will a monologue finish than the character who delivered it will do it again, altering, transmuting, reshaping the meaning of what was said, and the plot or direction of the play will shift also, as though the playwright were present. In fact, a great amount of the humor in She Stoops can be gleaned from details that are reflexive: a statement such as Okay fine, becomes a character name: Kay Fein; the audience must surely be at peak form coming to a Greenspan play, for he expects you to be thinking, to pay attention, and, in many ways, will not tolerate a passive audience.

The play as a self-conscious construct is not new to Greenspan. In many of his plays the characters, narrators, actors and actresses, and even the notes themselves are aware that there are other eyes watching, other minds thinking, and that no form of theirs can be permanent. Jayne Summerhouse, following her introduction, breaks into a stream-of-consciousness monologue, then, as if aware of what she, as character, is doing, and what she, as actress, is doing, and aware of the audience, questions all of it: The audience thinks the others can hear this and maybe they can or maybe they cant, it being kept purposefully ambiguous Satire achieved. Greenspan continues throughout: stage directions are spoken by the characters, asides are made and then remarked upon, the plot devices and movements of plot are pointed out: it is a play not only being written as it is watched, but being critiqued and evaluated too. Greenspan is always conscious of the theatre and the stage, its power, its limitations, and certainly its possibilities. Because this is so, Greenspan will frequently have his characters, narrators, or stage directions comment directly on the theatre: exposition, plot movements, philosophy, dramaturgy, etc. The instances are numerous: in Dead Mother, Character 4 addresses the audience from the outset, as a theatre subscriber, complaining that there are too many plays with homosexual characters; in The Myopia the narrator, later a character, Raconteur, endlessly philosophizes about the theater, its meaning and importance; and this is no less true in She Stoops to Comedy, where, from the outset, the main character, Alexandra Page, theorizes about the urges and impulses to translate people and their actions onto the stage for others to see. In fact, if there is any strong through-line to any of Greenspan’s plays, it is his overwhelming awareness of the stage and its theatrics and his conscious awareness of his role as playwright and his characters as translations to staged images. As the Raconteur from The Myopia says, theatre has the capacity of presenting things actually happening– Nothing happens in a picture–its already happened–whereas in the theater what is happening is actually happening–it is happening as it happens–it is an act.

Greenspan is constantly fighting, and some would argue succeeding, to create new structures for his plays: to break the confines of the old structures and allow new ones to emerge. For, as has been discussed above, it is precisely when old forms are broken that energy is released, giving power so that new forms can congeal. As [amazon_link id=”0809321785″ target=”_blank” ]Robert Andreach[/amazon_link] notes in his essay on Eric Overmyer, David Greenspan, and Richard Foreman:

All that I can do is acknowledge Greenspan’s contribution to theatre-creating. Adjusting the forces that threaten theatre by attempting to restrict it to a culturally sanctioned form, Dead Mother recovers its elemental power in monologue and performance, expanding them in an unstructured whole.

David Greenspan is a breaker of forms, a releaser of energy: a champion, in his work at least, for both the spirit and identity of the human individual, as well as that of the theatre. Taken in this light, She Stoops to Comedy is an excellent introduction for an audience unfamiliar with Greenspan’s work, and a delightful reunion for those who are familiar with it. The many surprising ways in which sex and gender and identity are prodded, examined, and questioned makes the farcical nature of She Stoops truly refreshing and the deft and inventive handling of the structure, movement, and ongoing construction of the play make it a genuine joy to watch.