Okay so here’s a small morning thought
For a long time, I’ve pretended to understand the role the audience plays in art, but I think I’ve been messing it up, working with a false theory.
What I already knew: The audience interprets, and each member has a unique experience of a given work.
I like that idea and on that basis I’ve left some work wide open, for the audience to have a kind of playground where you can construct meaning in ways that might even be opposites. For a small class of people, this is great fun, and exciting. The play is a machine that can process many theories and produce curious results.
I’ve been struggling to write a more accessible play than the last one. Wondering what kind of story to tell, thinking in arcs and traditional story forms. Researching the hero and whatnot. But today I think something important: the storyteller doesn’t tell the story — she just tells me what happened, and I tell myself the story. “Don’t worry about plot. Plot is what’s left when the work is done,” Gerry O’Malley said.
When I meet somebody, sometimes I’m not careful, and I make assumptions all over the place based on how they look, how they seem, and what they are doing. I map the information to a story without even hearing it. I think I like them, or don’t like them, or know them somehow.
Those assumptions are what create the story for me out of the information a piece of art provides. The good storyteller says: this is what happened, and then this is what happened — and all the time we’re trying to fit it to a theory we have about how the world works, to good and evil, and especially to justice (I think). Stories matter when they have the capacity to support or challenge or ideas of how the world works.
I never understood what mattered before. And maybe I don’t now, but if I can lurch through a script on this crutch I’ll be happy. A friend once told me that for something to be at stake it helps for drama to involve families — all other relationships can be gotten out of if they get weird. Family are the people you are trapped on the boat with forever, who share genes with you so that even if you leave you can never stop being family with them.
So there’s more drama if a story happens between family members. Or pseudo-families, like isolated plane crash survivors. More at risk because you’re stuck with them. But maybe what makes something compelling is more to do with how we think the world works. We want to know what happens next because we think we know, but we’re not sure if we’ve got it right. We think the hero will save the day, but that story we keep trying to tell ourselves is constantly put in jeopardy by villains and obstacles. But you can’t turn off an adventure film because the odds are stacked so high that the hero’s never going to make it. The hero story is so powerful that you know they just have to get to the finish line.
And so these two opposing forces are the drama: the story of success as we already invision and assume it, in conflict with elements that would easily destroy it. Adding conflict and tension to the story is not about having a flaming row every five minutes, it’s about putting powerful ideas about the world in jeopardy.
This all feels kind of ordinary now, but at the same time I don’t think I ever really knew any of it in a way that I could work with. I just kind of stumbled around
