> I 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.... > To which Michael responded: > > 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? > Think of them as two different needs/desires, just as, say, a good cook preparing her specialty for her dinner party looks forward to a taste-treat for herself, but also would be gratified to see it has pleased the guests.
Michael goes on: > > 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? > I've several times mentioned "set-ups" that are often needed in storytelling. Deep into "An Officer andGentleman", the Richard Gere character suddenly floors a bad-guy with an advanced martial-arts move. The screenwriter "knew" the character's having this know-how had to be made believable -- the audience "needs" to understand how he came by it -- just as, when a character rushes onstage with a gun late in a play, the audience "needs" to believe the gun was available to her. "Deus ex machina" is a no-no. There are lots more subtle needs of that kind required to "prepare" the audience. And the preparation itself is, ideally, subtle. If the "plant" is too broad, too without its own justification, the audience realizes at once that the writer has just called their attention to this thing so he can use it later. Obvious carpentry like this "takes the audience out of the play". They want to be aware of the characters doing things, but not the writer. In the Gere movie, we see the character introduced to martial arts when he is about eleven visiting his drunken, uncaring father in the Philippines. In the scene, the boy is mugged by young natives using karate. When we see that scene, we don't realize we are being "prepared"; we take it only as nicely showing us what a lonely, lousy childhood the boy had. It is self-sufficient. In movies and tv, you've very often seen what's called an "establishment" shot. It's most often a quick two-or-three-second shot of the exterior of the building within which the next scene takes place. It is, call it, an artistic nuisance but an audience necessity. Of course the writer doesn't "know". But an intuition into the readers'/audience's appetities and satisfactions is something any writer had better bring to his job. Don't think such considerations need only be brought to bear in crude shoot-em-ups. Read Henry James's Prefaces, or, indeed, the autobiography of any reflective writer, and you will notice how aware he is of the need to prepare his audience for just about everything that will happen in the story. > > "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?" > In theater that's one of the functions of "previews". Even before previews, plays usually get book-in-hand "readings", with a smallish selected audience listening to actors read the dialog. We watch audience reactions at these events, and very often have what amounts to a question-and-answer session. My own experience is that I get very few surprises by then. I'm okay at foreseeing audience reactions. The odd thing is when I finally see a scene I wrote in front of a live audience and I myself, with no evidence from reactions around me, recoil from what I'm watching onstage. "Yuck! I wrote that scene? I hate that scene!" > 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 > If a comment doesn't strum a chord already humming however subliminally in your mind, you tend to be skeptical. But during an out-of-town tryout/workshop of ENDPAPERS, a reviewer commented on there not being a single computer in sight. Since the ingenious set was half a dozen editors' twenty-first century offices, this hit home with the set-designer, the director, and with me. We remedied the lack right away. Michael quoted me: > > "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." > And Michael commented: > > 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. > No -- damn near anything is vulnerable to sea-change. I've cut characters, whole scenes, the character of a "characters", added scenes. I had one play over the course of innumerable rewrites and years of mulling, go from a comic sex-romp to a deep tragedy. > > 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 > Yes. These discrete choices go right down to individual words. And so do the changes. ************** AOL Search: Your one stop for directions, recipes and all other Holiday needs. Search Now. (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212792382x1200798498/aol?redir=http ://searchblog.aol.com/2008/11/04/happy-holida ys-from-aol-search/?ncid=emlcntussear00000001)
