Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Silence is Golden: The Electric Properties of Subtext in Playwriting
Breaking Character: Most of us walk around spiritually starved and emotionally depleted. It’s no wonder we hold on to songs of love and heartache. They allow us to feel something. This is why silence in storytelling is so necessary. It compels us to contribute our own reality to the story, to fall in love, and to take the story home.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Being able to enjoy the electricity and tension of the smallest moments of a play is my personal favorite part of going to see shows. In the article, I think the most relevant and insightful part of the message was when she asked people to share what these moments were in some of their favorite plays. I definitely have experienced some of these "electric" moments in my own time as an audience member, and I think that gathering what speaks to other people can greatly influence how you chose to interpret texts. I agree with what the author said about how too many words can detract instead of enhance powerful scenes. However, something that the article didn't address is when plays take excessive liberties with the idea of dramatic timing and end up pausing more times than felt necessary, which made the overall performance seem sluggish and melodramatic. I think just as these rare moments can be run over by too many words, they can also be overused or stretched out to the point of not having any effect.
Criticism is thrown around all the time on how a play is written and whether or not that is what made the production bad. First off I don’t think that is ever the case because even if a play does not have the right language doesn’t mean that a director or the actors can make it brilliant. It’s all based on perspective. All of people don’t understand Chekhov and his work and how his characters can talk and talk and you never know what is going on but that doesn’t mean his work in bad it just means the rest of the work is left to the director and actors. Reading a play and seeing it are two completely different things. Some can be read beautifully and some can be horrible when read but the same can be when it is produced on stage. Each person has their own opinions about words and how much should be in a play and that works for them but not for all. So yes, people complain that there are too many words in plays but sometimes that is what is needed. However, sometimes no words are needed as well. To each is own.
The breed of playwriting that the author talks about originates from popular screenwriting and movies, I think. We're so used to a movie going from beat to beat to beat without pause that it only makes sense that the young people writing would find comfort in what they've experienced and been surrounded by. But I completely agree with the author of the article: in theatre, there is something so particularly experiential to subtext and silence. It gives the audience the best treat of understanding, figuring out, and following a character (and consequentially an actor) through the process of figuring out an emotion or difficult situation. When there's the barrier of a screen, like in a movie, silence can be necessary, but it's not as necessary to drawing an audience into a production. In theatre, silence can make people listen harder. When you're not shoving thousands of words per minute at people, it makes them listen harder to the words they're not saying but want to say.
I can honestly say that as a costumer one of the best things my theatre teachers ever did for me was require me to take acting classes. I may not have enjoyed the actual process of acting as much as my more stage-oriented friends did, but once I began to understand what subtext was I could have spent hours listening to my teacher talk about opposites, beats, tactics, super objectives, and why we all have to find out what we are struggling for. Not only did this resonate with me as a person, particularly as someone who was experiencing some of the hardest months of my life at the time, but it became something that I could feed off of as a designer. All of the little unstated silent truths which build into an actor's portrayal of a character have informed the way I look at design ever since, and to this day that question - "What are we all struggling for?" - comes back to me time and time again in my best and worst moments. Subtext, to me, informs costuming almost as much as it informs acting, and the fewer the words the more the designer can play with that unspoken communication of wardrobe. I may never want to look at an "Almost, Maine" script again, but what I learned from hours on end of studying the unspoken thoughts of those characters will stay with me forever. Silence, tension, unspoken communication - they all matter just as much as any precious dialogue. Today's playwrights would do themselves a favor by realizing that.
Yes!! The most important part of a show or movie is what the actors can convey to the audience without speaking, or with minimal speaking. When I am at my most vulnerable, I'm not going to go into some long soliloquy about my inner demons or fears. I'm going to fall silent, start crying (realistically) or something. The move in modern theatre towards silent moments as opposed to Shakespearean monologues has made the experience much more real for me.
Last year I walked out of a showing of An Irrational Man dir. by Woody Allen. The reason I did was because he had added a voiceover for Emma Stones character that literally just outlined her every thought and motive. It was annoying. It made me not focus on the visuals on the screen. Why would I want to see that in a movie when I could just listen to it as an audiotape or something? I wanted to be shown how she felt, not told. That's something that's very important to me.
Plays, movies and television today more or less seem to all fall into the same trap. Witty dialogue and sharp quips fill in for any actual character development, which unfortunately feels like a symptom of society at large. With the advent of social media, we as a society have become obsessed with the idea that people want and need to hear our every thought. People post long rants to Facebook and blogs, outlining their every opinion, events never go by without a tweet or comment, and words become currency to show how much you care about something. It is almost as though we have collectively agreed that to not voice a thought is the same as not having that thought. Silence is when humans are forced to deal with their own worries and fears, without receiving protection from a deluge of words and phrases that do not capture the complexity of human emotion.
There are parts of this article that I agree with, and other parts that I don’t. I definitely agree with the fact that it is in the pauses and silences when the biggest emotional impact is made. A few years ago, I saw a movement piece of theatre of The Tempest. Though called “silent Shakespeare”, it had an intense soundtrack and was in reality very busy soundwise. I thought that this show was very well done. However, my main critique of the show was that there was no period of the performance where the music was not narrating. I thought that there were some moments that really could have used silence to tell the story more than the music could ever have. I still feel this way about many shows I see. One thing about this article that I don’t really agree with is that fewer actual words make for a better story telling experience. I think that it really depends on the show and the writing style of the playwright.
Post a Comment