After I complained that the play RED, about Rothko, left me feeling unsatisfied, and even irritated, Michael wrote:
[You went into the theater with a mental set of standards, a paradigm or some formulation, expecting that the play would satisfy you in the way plays satisfy, and you wound up not being satisfied that way. You said, "But I felt RED as a play was bad, a narrative failure." I can understand how you can say, "I felt it was bad," but how can you say "I felt it was a failure"? The latter assertion is a judgment. . . It seems to me that you were frustrated because the play did not deliver what you expected (a certain form of narrative, development of characters, etc.). Perhaps "Red" merely eschewed those components of play-making that you expected to find in favor of another approach. Or then again, perhaps it was as you described, a poorly made play.] I meant the stress to be on 'narrative' in my line, "I felt it was a NARRATIVE failure." And perhaps I should have added, "for me and people like me." I was trying to point at one of the reasons I was disappointed and grouchy: The story for identifiable reasons did not engage me. (As William has pointed out, I'm not the only one who has griped about the storyline: nothing much at stake, no conflict, no build, no hurdle, nothing to fear or root for.) What I'm failing to convince you of is that these lacks did not repel me because I went in there with a checklist of paradigmatically-required elements that are prerequisites for my stamp of approval. When I go to theater, I do not grade the production like an Olympic figure-skating judge on the alert for fulfillment of certain technical requirements. Suppose you sit a child down to tell him his first story. And what you deliver is a series of position-paper lessons and arguments for the next ninety minutes. You'll have one damned bored and irritable child on your hands - and it's not because the child expected to be supplied five standard generic required elements. Storytelling is a craft. What one is taught in a good "creative writing" class is an empirically arrived-at syllabus comprising the acknowledged generic craft of the genre. The various lessons are derived from the examination of generations of "customer" likes and dislikes. Chekhov issued a famous warning to playwrights: "If there's a gun on the wall in the first act, it had better go off before the final curtain." Chekhov was not prompted by an awareness of some mind-independent formal law of theater. He was moved by the simple realization that there are things a playwright can do that amount to promises to the audience, they stir expectations - and if the playwright then ignores them, the audience will feel disappointed. His warning was an empirically arrived at insight about the sensibility of the vast majority of play-goers. Such a syllabus, based on the observations of audience reactions, is different from that of a strict course in poetics. If Dylan Thomas took a course in poetics and was told his homework assignment was to write a sonnet, and what he handed in was the twenty-line poem IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART, he'd receive a failing grade despite the greatness of that poem. My reaction to things I see in a theater are not like that. It's true that when I'm dissatisfied and try to identify why, the offense again and again turns out to lie recognizably in one of empirically identified generic elements that affect our personal feelings about a play. But that classification is after the fact. Narrative events that I find offensive offend me - and others like me -- in themselves, not because they violate a poetics-like requirement. I'd compare the experience to that of the effect on me of a bad singer or violinist. My dismay is as immediate as raw sensation; it is not because I bring to bear a musicologist's sophistication, see the singer has ignored certain technical requirements, and I am affronted by that discovery. I once went to an Off-Broadway play and had a wretched time because the fire alarm was defective and it repeatedly went off and filled the room with a loud clanging. I found that bell immediately irritating in itself, and not because I went into that theater with a conscious rule that the sound was somehow disobeying. Years ago I was in the Lincoln Center theater audience watching the Moiseyev dance company when a protester set off a tear gas bomb. It is wrong to say what irritated me was that this bomb was contrary to my expectations. In dinner conversations, the person sitting next to me can be annoying as hell if he rambles on and on in any number of unsatisfying ways. I'd never tell him I am irritated because I have discerned that his narrative is formally defective. (A note about books or syllabi of craft: They should never pretend to be complete or definitive. In a sense they are like a diagnostician's chart. The chart should be reached for only if the patient is complaining of symptoms. Even a "craft rule" like, "The play must have some characters you can root for," isn't always true. A play about the last hours in Hitler's bunker could conceivably be compelling. If a play isn't working for anyone who considers it, all the chart can do is ask -- not assert. The chart supplies a list of questions, every one of which begins, "Could this be the reason?") In sum, some events are, to me and others like me, offensive in themselves. If we see similarities with other annoying elements and we form a generalization, that does not reverse the truth that we found the events offensive in themselves. Michael also writes: "BTW, your description reminded me of ancient Greek plays, which declaimed a lot and portrayed relatively little (as I remember from reading them a long time ago). Agreed. I have to admit I do not remember ever deriving much pleasure from reading Greek or Roman "classics" of theater.
