Saturday, January 28, 2012
Is the three-act dead?
Berkeley Rep Blog: As Berkeley Rep’s new Ground Floor initiative revs up its engines, it’s a good time to talk about what makes new theatre. Is it contemporary stories, contemporary forms, or both? At a company meeting this fall, Artistic Director Tony Taccone declared, “Artists are moving away from the three-act structure. Not because it is a trend, but because the three-act no longer reflects how people think and feel.”
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3 comments:
While I agree that the three-act structure is no longer the only way to go, I do not by any means think it is dead. People may now find an episodic or irregular structure more captivating, but that doesn't mean that we can't still be captivated by a well-planned, well-told story in a three-act format. It is great that the television and movie industries figured out that they could utilize technology to help them tell stories in a new way, but I hope that their influence doesn't ever make people think that the three-act structure is not valid or entertaining. Eventually the television and movie industries will develop all of the other structures and then those won't be as new and trendy as they are now. They will still be great ways to communicate a story, though, just as the more traditional three-act structure is now. We become familiar with the three-act structure when we read children's books or watch Disney movies, so why not contimue to utilize that structure with more adult content? It is great that new structures are allowing for more imaginative storytelling, but I hope that writers still challenge themselves with creating fascinating and unpredictable three-act works.
I don't think it's "dead", but isn't as ubiquitous as it once used to be. And that's a good thing. As people come up with more and more creative and unique ways of telling stories, they make their stories more powerful. But when something is best told by the 3 act, structure, the three-act is used. A good amount of movies and plays still use this structure, even though there are an increasing number of plot structures to choose from. The article's title is a little misleading, asking if the three-act is DEAD, but then clarifying later that by "dead" he really meant "no longer in the mainstream". In that case, I think he's correct, but it's not anything to be concerned about.
The 3-act structure has survived this long and will continue to survive because it works. I have seen the same structure (in the more general form of an interest curve) used in field as diverse as marketing and game design. A comment one of my game designers made seems appropriate for this article. He said a good story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order. I think people today are more receptive to novel story-telling formats, and it is good to see the way artistic expression is broadening. In order to tell an effective story you still need to create a good interest curve, but I think this can be accomplished by many different methods.
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