Brecht, Alienation, Reality TV

I wrote my first non-realistic play my senior year of college. The play was decidedly (in retrospect at least) a closet drama. The play contained all the things I loved about absurdist drama: blatant Marxism, Brechtian alienation, and so on. That is to say, it was way too European for American audiences.

When I got to graduate school and began looking closer at American and English non-realistic plays by writers like Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and so on, I realized that these writers had not been able to do what continental European writers like Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, Weiss, and other had considered crucial. They had been unable to banish subtext.

European Absurdists accepted Brecht's notion that an audience could never fully be convinced by characters in a play. They could never be convinced that the characters had cross motives, sexual desires, inner conflict, because they could never be convinced that the people they saw on stage were characters at all. The fact that they were spectators in a theatre would always break any illusion that an audience might have that these actors were real people or that their conflicts, problems, and relationships were genuine. Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief," then, is in fact impossible. The space alone precludes it.

Since this is the case, according to Brecht, the theatre must find a means outside of emotion to
communicate with an audience. For Brecht, this means was via the intellect, through what he called the "Epic theatre." He wrote

The essential point of the epic theatre is that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things.

The theatre, then, is didactic. It "must not believe that one can identify oneself with our world by empathy, nor must it want this." Instead, the theatre should ask the audience to think. In order to accomplish this, Brecht espoused a technique (or class of techniques) knows as "alienation." A play, rather than trying to bring the audience in, should continually remind an audience that it is apart from the action, that it is not invited into the world of the play, that there is, in fact, not a world of the play at all, but only actors on a stage reciting lines.

So, as I thought of Brecht's desire that the theatre should be didactic--that it should cause an audience to think about things--I wondered how the theatre might carry this out without the European burden of alienating the audience. American audiences expect to be emotionally involved and want to be drawn in, even if this is not fully possible. How does the American theatre accomplish Brecht's goals (a theatre that forces an audience to consider) when it cannot accept his methods?

I then thought of the ABC television show "What Would You Do." In this reality show, which combines the "happening" of the 1960's with Chris Hanson style investigative journalism, actors in public settings act out shocking scenarios in order to record the reactions of unwitting spectators. The idea is to conduct a social experiment investigating whether or not people will react ethically. "What Would You Do" represents an anti-Brechtian form of didactic theatre. That is, it attempts to perform a didactic role by asking the audience to consider how and whether they would act in these shocking situations. Yet it does so not by alienating the audience so that it is reminded that the spectacle isn't real, but by convincing the audience that the scene is real. In order to do so, it blurs the lines between the traditional theatrical relationships of actor, audience, and space.

Actor and Audience:
In "What Would You Do" the shocking situations that make up the dramatic conflict are scripted and performed by professional actors. And, obviously, the viewing audience represents a very traditional passive audience. But the show blurs the line between actor and audience by staging its scenes in public places full of unwitting people who just happen to be in the right place at the right time. By filming these people's reactions to events that they do not know are scripted, and by enticing them into action, the show turns audience members into actors.

Also, when these people do react and intercede into the scenes, they then take agency from the professional actors who had up until then been performing roles. These actors then, albeit briefly, become audience members. They must watch and listen to the intercessors in order to respond appropriately and continue the action, which has become improvised. Thus, the show subverts the roles of actor and audience, though both roles do still clearly exist.

Space:
The use of space in these performances is the most important reason these ruses work. What makes the willing suspension of disbelief ultimately impossible in traditional theatre is the space itself. An audience member at a traditional play can't help but to know he's in a theatre. After all, he has bought a ticket, he has probably dressed up, driven to the theatre, taken his wife out to eat before the show, read the program, sat down when the lights dimmed. And throughout the action of the play, he sits in an area lit very differently than the space the actors occupy, likely in a row of chairs physically separated from the actors. The space, then, is alienating in and of itself.

In "What Would You Do?" on the other hand, the space the audience member enters is a public place, likely one she frequents. The space is not the Orpheum Theatre, but rather it is the restaurant that she would have gone to on the way to the theatre. She has no ticket and no program. She sits among the actors and in fact cannot know which are actors and which are other audience members like herself. She does not even know she's in a theatrical space.

Un-Alienation
This use of space then allows the spectator to be convinced that what they are seeing is, in fact, real. There is no physical reminder that the actors are reciting a memorized script, thus the audience member can fully empathize with the actor, whom they regard as a real person. This use of space, then, un-alienates (admittedly, a clumsy term) the spectator by bringing him within the same physical space as the actor. They share the stage.

The show also brings the audience member into the play in a very literal way. The entire purpose of the script it to build and build the action until some audience member reacts and intrudes into the scene. The show thus un-alienates the spectator by making him an actual part of the play. Of course, the beauty is that the spectator does not know he has become an actor in a play. Instead, he is convinced that his actions and the actions of the professional actors are real. He has unwillingly suspended his disbelief.

In this way the audience member has, through the theatrical event, been forced not only to think about what she would do, but she has been put to the test. She has had to either act or refuse to act. Similarly, the viewing audience has been able to empathize with the duped unwitting accidental actor because he could just as easily be tricked the next time he is on the subway or at a bar. He, therefore, must think about what he would have done if this shocking scene had presented itself to him.

The show then is didactic and theatrical and it is so without alienating, but in fact by un-alienating, the audience. It has then done what Brecht asked the theatre to do (caused the audience to think about things) while maintaining the aesthetic demands of an American audience to be "moved."

Radiohead and Samuel Beckett

In a paper I wrote during my MA, I argued that Samuel Beckett's writing career can be described as a process of deconstructing the theatre. Though I still have work to do to fully flesh out this claim (if I ever get around to it), Beckett's work suggests this to me because his work, especially toward the end of his career, becomes more and more minimalistic.

Through their repetitions, Beckett's early plays already subvert cherished theatrical conventions with regard to the plot model which requires rising action, climax, and falling action. Conflict is also a tricky concept in Beckett's plays. As his career progressed, however, he abandons more and more theatrical conventions. His plays get increasingly shorter and he begins to dissect his characters--rather literally.

In "Happy Days," Winnie is buried in a mound , without use of her legs. So body parts are disappearing in Beckett's plays. In "Not I," only a mouth is visible on an otherwise dark stage, and in "Breath" no character appears at all. There is only a stage covered in rubbish and the sound of breathing. At the end of his career, Beckett began writing radio plays in English, his characters finally completely disembodied and no longer physically present in the space of a theatre, existing only as sound waves.

Again, I'm not able to make the case fully that Beckett is trying to deconstruct the theatre in a linear and progressive way across his career. I'm not so sure the chronology of his plays allows this argument. But certainly his career trends this direction.

So this morning Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" hit stores, and I got to Best Buy thirty minutes after they opened to buy it (I still like CDs, or I could have bought it digitally on February 18th).

When I listened to it, I immediately thought of Samuel Beckett. It's perhaps a strange thing to compare a modernist playwright to a post-modern rock band. But I see Radiohead as doing to rock music what Beckett did to the theatre. As Radiohead moves forward in time, they are seemingly deconstructing rock music.

They began innocuously enough with their 1993 post-grunge "Pablo Honey" which some have taken to be a subversion of grunge music (using as evidence the eerie similarity between "My Iron Lung" and Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box.")

Thom York has expressed dissatisfaction with that first album and their albums since have gotten progressively more ethereal and less musically unified. Their last two albums, "In Rainbows" and now "The King of Limbs," are particularly deconstructive. One blogger even calls "The King of Limbs" Radiohead's "least accessible album to date."

In both these albums, the music has become more and more electronic, increasing the level of mediation between audience and artist. The songs are also almost completely without hooks, making it easy to get lost in the music, rather than to sing along with the songs. Finally, it often seems that the melody (where one is recognizable) and the rhythm section are in two different meters, creating a disjointed feeling, as if one can never quite catch up.

The wonderful thing about Radiohead's dissection of music is that it questions the genre and indeed music theory in general. Radiohead seems to be asking just how important our Western notions of aesthetic actually are? Can music that doesn't conform to this aesthetic succeed, especially in a genre as flippant as Rock?

What Radiohead is doing is extremely interesting, artistic, and intelligent. I hyperbolically predict that, if Radiohead continues to make albums, their music will eventually consist only of screeches, feedback, and disembodied sounds. And I'm looking forward to buying these.

Why You Never Research a Preacher's Story

As the son-in-law of a career preacher, and a regular church attendee, and as someone who teaches research, I know that preacher's stories aren't all they're cracked up to be. In fact, anyone who's spent any time in church knows that preachers' stories are illustrative fish tales. As literary texts, they belong structurally to the genre of myth. I don't mean "myth" in the popular sense of meaning "false." I mean that as narrative constructs, preacher tales work in the same way as other mythical works such as old parables, nursery rhymes, and (dare I say) the Bible. Myths are texts use common archetypal tropes in order to teach the hearer and they put their emphasis, not necessarily on the historical and chronological accuracy of the story, but on the message. In other words, myths privilege truth over facts.

So, having foregrounded this post with that, I should say that I don't particularly expect preachers' tales to pass the muster of rigorous research. Nevertheless, when I tried to find a quote from a preacher's story I recently heard (because I wanted to use it on facebook), I got a first hand look at just how shifty and shaky the literary form of the sermon illustration is. So today, just for fun, I will present to you a dubious sermon illustration followed by my own research and finally a bit of speculative questioning as to how a story (actually, more correctly, stories as we shall see) goes from half true anecdote to sermon illustration.

First, the story itself, from the best of my memory, as I heard it from the pulpit:

Harmon Killebrew, the baseball great, once told a story from his childhood about his father. Harmon was the youngest of four brothers, and his father used to play catch with his boys in the front yard. One day, a neighbor, who was known for his well-manicured lawns walked by and said to Harmon's father, "You'll never grow any grass if you keep playing on it like that." Harmon's father looked at the man and replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass; I'm trying to grow boys."

Here is the actual quote from Killebrew (which is quoted to death all over the inter-webz):

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass." "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys."

The best context I can find for Killebrew's quote, without doing the kind of serious actual research for which I may have to log into EBSCO, is from a 2004 interview in with Killebrew in Baseball Digest in which he says:

"Dad used to work with my brother and me on different things that were important in all sports--football, basketball, baseball. One evening we were out in the front yard, and my mother came out on the porch and said to my father, "Clay, the boys are digging holes in the yard, tearing up the grass." And my father went over to my mother and very sternly said: "Kate, we're not raising grass here. We're raising boys."

Though it doesn't particularly diminish the quality of the quote, the elements of the preacher's story are markedly different. Where is the idyllic scene of playing catch in the yard? Where is the turf-vain neighbor who acts as something of a villain, and who we can imagine flaunts his "Yard of the Month" sign and yells at neighbor kids who stray into his grass? Can this story have gone this wrong?

First of all, yes, of course it could. If one has ever played the game in which several people sit in a circle passing a message around to see how much it changes before it gets back to the message's originator, than one can understand how these tales get so out of control. One preacher hears a story in a father's day sermon and decides he likes it. The next year, when preparing his own father's day sermon, he says to himself, "self, we sure did like that story we heard last year. Now what was it again?" and he does the best he can from his memory of a sermon he half listened to a year before. The youth-intern from the nearby Christian college hears his sermon and sacks it away for a few years later when he'll be the pulpit minister for the kind small congregation that hires brand new grads. And so on the story goes.

Of course, with this story, there is something else, an element of the story which lets Reverend Preacher off the hook a little. And that is this fact: this story is not original (or at least not singular) with Killebrew. Instead, there is another version of this story that involves college football great Amos Alonzo Stagg.

In 1965, just before Stagg's death, the football coaching great and champion of the cause of amateur sports had a bunch of kids playing football on his front lawn. A neighbor told Stagg that if he allowed the kids to play "the grass with never grow that way." Stagg replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass. I'm trying to grow kids."

So Stagg's story fills in the missing elements from the Killebrew story. In Stagg's story, we see the neighbor presented as a character instead of the father's own wife being used as the foil, and the quote is a bit more direct (substitute "boys" for "kids" and it's exact.) What I can't yet be sure if is what these stories have to do with one another. Did the preacher's story grow out of an accidental combination of the two, as if one of the preachers in the archetypal chain heard both stories and confused them? Did in fact one of these men (Staggs and Killebrew) steal the saying from the other? Reportedly, Staggs made his remark shortly before his death in 1965, by which time Harmon Sr. had been dead for twelve years. But I don't know when Killebrew started telling his version of the story. So did Staggs borrow from Killebrew's language when he made his remark to his neighbor, or did Killebrew borrow from Stagg's language when he began telling his own childhood story about his father sternly replying to his mother's concern about the yard? Or did in fact both men make remarkably similar statements, allowing for later preacher story confusion? I can't say for certain, as it is 0034 hrs and I'm tired of researching something that will be of no use to me in my dissertation. More on this controversy as I get bored enough to pick the research back up.