On Oct 29, 2008, at 11:24 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
A creator in theater has to work constantly to reconcile two possibly
conflicting impulses: He wants to do what satisfies himself AND he
wants to
accommodate the audience's needs and desires as spectators....
Are those two separate and equal impulses, or is one subsumed under
the other? Would you say that the impulse to accommodate the
audience's needs is one part of your need to satisfy yourself?
I'm not sure how you can judge the audience's "needs," either, or for
that matter what this reified "audience" is, if not a series of 200 or
400 people sitting in a dark room watching the actors. I don't mean
for this to be an exercise in snarkiness, but the question remains:
How do you know?
How can you be sure that you aren't either projecting some feeling
onto an abstraction called "the audience"? Do you stand at the back of
the house during the opening nights' performances and watch the
audience members' reactions and eavesdrop on their comments in the
lobby? How can you discern a critical comment that can indicate a
needed improvement from one that merely expresses the speaker's
preference for another choice on your part, or their own preference
for more laughs or gore or bombast? I'm thinking of a silly cartoon:
Shakespeare in the shadows of the concession stand at the Globe,
thinking, "Well, 'zounds, they don't like the ghost? I rather thought
ol' Banquo would do the thing at the banquet. Banquo, banquet, a good
pun, but they didn't like it."
All of which suggests we "choose the subject" over and over again --
while
working on one piece. The subject can change radically as a writer
writes.
This intrigues me. It seems that you mean by "subject" you mean a
larger, embracing or organizing principle of a story, rather than the
core plot or theme that you started with. Another scene comes to mind,
this time with Jean Annouilh thinking aloud: In Beckett, I'm writing a
story about how ascending to a high position changes the terms of
friendship--kind of like Falstaff and Prince Hal in Henry IV, only the
inverse. Wait, wait, I think the subject should be how being elevated
to high estate changes the person's view of himself. Wait, maybe it
should be how high estate changes the person's values and in turn
changes how he views other people's actions.
BTW, "choosing the subject over and over again" seems to coincide with
your previous statement that a play or novel is a series of discrete
aesthetic things
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
