Watch out
“The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?”
—Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
When I was in college, mimesis was one of my favorite words. I didn’t really know what it meant, though I used it over-freely in my lit crit papers; it was sort of akin to liking the word magenta when I was four, which I did. More or less, mimesis means the imitation or representation of something, especially human action, while magenta is pretty much hot pink. The word (mimesis, not magenta) is typically used to describe the imitation of something, esp. human action, in literature or art; viz., art imitating life, and not the other way around. Theater, by most definitions, is essentially mimetic; it is an art form that follows from life, describes it, mirrors it, and in mirroring it, shows the audience what the audience is, and what the audience does when it lives.
Theater, by my very loose definition, is an art form. For starters. This is where I first part ways with Paul Woodruff’s definition, as set out in the regrettable text (another word I liked a lot in college, text) The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched. Woodruff’s definition, which he sets forth under the lively heading “What Theater Is”: “Theater is something we human beings do, when all of us who are involved are alive and present, and at least some are paying attention to others, for a measured time and in a measured place.”
Let me pause and say that this is a perfectly awful book, and I highly recommend you avoid reading it if you possibly can. It is lifeless, bloodless, and utterly without original thought. It astonishes me that anyone got it into their head to publish it. This is terrifically distressing, because the title is so promising. What’s not to like? I myself feel theater is necessary, and would be thrilled to have someone explain to me why this is so, because it’s one of those inarticulate certainties that I often feel called upon to defend, and find myself scuffling about, gesturing vaguely—and I myself feel that there is an art both to watching and being watched, and would have been delighted to read a discussion on the matter that could help me understand those arts.
This book failed on both fronts. What this book is:
one of the reasons why no one reads books on theater, truly an exemplar of the form;
a stilted attempt at making theater “accessible” to some imagined broader audience that winds up alienating even someone who is passionate about theater, by virtue of its collision of radical simple-mindedness and total obfuscation;
a recitation of Aristotilian poetics that any college student enamored of the words “mimesis” and “text” could look up on Wikipedia; and
a gaspingly dull read.
What this book is not:
a meaningful discussion of the necessity of theater, or the arts of watching or being watched.
Woodruff’s attempts to define theater take up a good lot of time and space, and he seems to never quite get a handle on it; whether he does or not is still irrelevant to the questions he promises and fails to answer: Do we need theater? And if so, why? “People need theater,” he writes. “They need it the way they need each other—the way they need to gather, to talk things over, to have stories in common, to share friends and enemies. They need to watch, together, something human. Without this...well, without this we would be a different sort of species.”
This is not a conclusion Plato would have found logically satisfying, any more than Aristotle would have been pleased to find his definition of tragedy and comedy as poetic mimesis so chewed up and spat out as “stuff that is worth watching.” I agree wholeheartedly with Woodruff’s statement that people do need theater, and that theater is as endemic to the human species as language itself. He had the opportunity to explore that idea in his 231 pages, and did not. Instead, he presented some fairly self-evident concepts about character (people worth watching) and plot (action worth watching), while missing every opportunity to more thoughtfully explore the pleasures and problems of live theater.
And here’s the problem with Woodruff’s entire project. He defines theater so broadly as to include virtually all performative events that involve witness. He includes football games, weddings, and courtroom justice, calling these things the “theater of presence.” These things cannot take place without watchers, he says, or they have no meaning if they do; watched, they take on meaning, and are therefore moments of significance—they are, according to Woodruff, theater.
No. They are ritual. They are not mimesis. Watched or not, they take place, and do not imitate life; they are life. Theater—and this is why we need it—takes in the stuff of human experience, examines it, interprets it, and represents (re-presents, if you want to get really lit crit about it) it to the audience. It is human experience replayed for both our pleasure and our consideration—it comments on life, makes us feel what we have felt before and recognize deeply, presents things in a way that makes them newly known and understood. It, too, is ritual, and we need ritual as well; but in its imitation of who and what we are and what we do, it allows us both an enveloping sense of identification and a sense of seeing others empathetically. It is simultaneously visceral and voyeuristic, and the tension between feeling with and feeling for expands our sense of what it feels like to be human at all.
But if we define theater as Woodruff does—as virtually all that is performed and watched—then we have to think about the implications of that outside what he calls “art theater” (making the usual droll comments about how art theater is something of value for an elite alone) and in the larger realm in which we watch and perform. This passage is virtually the only one in which he explores the actual need we feel for performance and witness: “There is an art to watching and being watched, and that is one of the few arts on which all human living depends. If we are unwatched we diminish, and we cannot be entirely as we wish to be. If we never stop to watch, we will know only how it feels to be us, never how it might feel to be another. Watched too much, or in the wrong way, we become frightened. Watching too much, we lose the capacity for action in our own lives.”
The implications of a continuous “theater of presence” are disturbing, and perhaps more apt than I would like to think. The notion that our social world is in fact a theater, and we both incessantly watchers and watched, is not an implausible one. We have become accustomed to a dissolve between the private and the public spheres; our notion of news is as much performance criticism as it is the dissemination of fact. Woodruff talks about the way in which the watcher must imaginatively “frame” events as worth watching; are we living in a culture inclined to frame virtually everything, watching as experience occurs rather than living or participating in it? Is our participation performance? Are we watching each other, or ourselves? If this definition of theater is correct, or even apt, is there anything that breaks the spell and releases us from precisely what Woodruff warns of: “Suppose the charm never broke, and the applause never began. ... Like the figures on Keats’s imaginary Grecian urn, the actors would be frozen as actors and we as an audience. Life would stop, if the play never does.”
Shakespeare and Hume are so oft-quoted on the matter that I’ll refrain from the obvious “world’s a stage” bit. There is something in the human that performs, and something that watches, this is nothing new. There is the desire to watch, and to be seen. My question returns to the one I wish Woodruff would have pursued: What is the necessity of theater, in a world where we have perhaps devolved into a state of continuous watching and being watched? Have we perfected those arts in the “theater of presence” to the point where we no longer in fact act or see?
My alternative argument is this: Theater—the mimetic kind—is all the more necessary for this cultural moment. It may re-teach us to vividly see and to genuinely feel. Plato hated theater precisely because of mimesis. He felt it dug into emotions at reason’s expense. He rightly believed theater reached past the mind’s purview and into the heart’s. Behind the glassy surface of our performative lives, there is a real life that we live.
And it is theater that smashes the glass. ❦
