June 21, 2008

MONOLOGUES: reliving the past in the present tense v reporting on it in the past tense

John Smythe      posted 2 Jun 2008, 05:16 PM / edited 3 Jun 2008, 08:58 AM

This forum arises from the responses to my review of  Guardians (two alternating monologues using past tense). It is also relevant to Bone (three intercutting monologues; present tense) and My Brilliant Divorce (a solo monologue; past tense). I’ll explain my position by telling a story.

It’s December 1999. I have just reviewed the Circa production of Roger Hall’s solo plays The Book Club and You Gotta Be Joking (the sequel to C’mon Black) for the National Business Review. My view is that “he makes it unnecessarily hard for his actors to explore those depths. They barely get to do the roles let alone be their characters. Mostly they just get to talk about it.

“Both The Book Club and You Gotta Be Joking are long-form stories about fully formed characters with nicely turned glimpses of other people in their respective lives. As we’ve come to expect, Hall delivers on the recognition factor with amusing observations on Kiwi life. He also knows how to structure his stories by setting up, exploring then paying off his plotlines, although this can have a ‘paint by numbers’ feel to it sometimes.

“However … he wilfully ignores the most basic convention of all: Aristotle’s three unities of time, place and action.

“He sets both Deborah (The Book Club) and Dickie Hart (You Gotta Be Joking) adrift in limbos devoid of present-time actions, quests or concerns. They are simply there to tell of events that happened at some time past [although, to be fair, Dickie does relive most of his experiences in the present tense-JS, 06/08]. But nothing hangs on this exercise. There is nothing at stake, no ‘now’ choice to make and there will be no consequences. There is nowhere for them to stand and no immediate motive force to drive their stories …

“… That Jane Waddell (Deborah) and Grant Tilly (Dickie), working solo, manage to maintain audience interest over two hours is a testament to their considerable performance skills. Even the best stand up comedians and after-dinner speakers would only attempt a fraction of that.”

It is with this ‘bee in my bonnet’ that I bump into Tom Scott at Caffé L’Affare. He tells me he’s working on a play based on his growing up with an alcoholic father (it’s in development with the Auckland Theatre Company’s 2econd Unit and has become a solo play in the process). So I lay a rave on Tom about the importance of giving characters a place to stand in the present moment and the value of recalling past events in the present tense because it more effectively draws the actor, the character and the audience back into his experience.

We discuss why C’mon Black worked so much better than The Book Club especially (You Got To Be Joking did include a nunber of ‘flashbacks’) and agree that it’s because director Danny Mulheron and actor Grant Tilly (with Hall’s blessing) placed Dickie Hart squarely in the theatre on the given night of each performance, directly engaging with the audience and using the theatrical device of his travelling trunk of drawers, and cupboard’s and the bits and bobs they contained, to take us back to the revelations he experienced in South Africa as a 1995 Rugby World Cup All Black supporter, which he describes in the present tense. And here, right now he has an urgent need to share it all with us.

Two different productions of Tom Scott’s The Daylight Atheist opened in May 2002 in Auckland and Wellington. Danny Moffat is trapped in a prison of his own making as he actively relives what brought him to this point. My NBR review of the Wellington production – again with Grant Tilly in the solo role, directed by Danny Mulheron – concludes:

“Ever the entertaining raconteur, Tom Scott spins and weaves this life-spanning yarn with sure-handed skill, drawing its disparate threads into a magical whole. The present-tense immediacy of his richly textured writing allows us to simultaneously share Danny’s experiences, evaluate his self-destructive behaviour and gain brief glimpses into how it is for his wife, son and the rest of the family. While it may well be improved by giving Danny more to do in his now-time space, having him marooned with only his thoughts and memories for company is entirely valid.

“The creative team’s alignment on giving this production an everyday feel allows the humour and pathos to take us by surprise. In the aftermath I am not alone in feeling touched by the play’s inherent compassion; by a sense we’ve participated in a life-changing act of forgiveness.”

The point I’m making applies particularly to monologue plays. When characters in Greek tragedy or Shakespeare plays report events that happen elsewhere it’s for a purpose and it has a dramatic effect in the present moment of its telling.

But as Grant Tilly said when I discussed it with him just now, there are no rules. It either works or it doesn’t. Then there are the reasons we make up to explain its success, failure or the feeling something has not fulfilled its potential.

Rachel Robbins posted 3 Jun 2008, 04:25 PM / edited 18 Jun 2008, 12:19 PM

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

John, most critics accept the old dictum that they know the way, just don’t know how to drive the car. But you know how to drive the car, don’t you? Your desperation to get your hands on the wheel and your feet on the pedals soaks out like underarm sweat in every review.

Here’s a challenge, John. You’ve written many scripts for stage and screen and few have been produced. So the challenge is this. Using all the precepts you’ve laid down, write a play. You then have 12 months from now to get that play on the stage. If you fail in this mission, John, you must promise us all to return to the humble business of being a critic.

John Smythe      posted 3 Jun 2008, 10:25 PM / edited 3 Jun 2008, 10:47 PM

You’ve sprung me, Rachel, and I accept the challenge as a writer, but not as a producer. I offer three plays for your judgement that “use the precepts” as and where appropriate: Thelma, Weather and The Virtues Of Reality. Would you like to request them from Playmarket or shall I send them to you direct?

Incidentally, it was the great Kenneth Tynan who said, “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car” but I doubt he meant it as a “dictum”. He also said, “A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.”

Brendan Behan put it this way: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.” Which may be true of some – but not all.

Most Theatreview critics are also – or have been – practitioners. This is a conscious preference (on my part) and a point of difference for the site. But that doesn’t mean we’re frustrated artists wanting others to do it our way. Hopefully it means we are aware and informed enough to give credit – and discredit – where it is due, and to see where productions, or elements within them, fulfil or fall short of their avowed intentions or potential (which is not the same as complaining something is not what it never aimed to be).

I think that’s valid – don’t you? Or are you saying there is a narrow box we should all fit into?

T MEEK                 posted 4 Jun 2008, 08:54 AM

Doubtless Rachel will address your reply, John, but one immediate question does arise. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one drawn by your words to your entry on the Playmarket website. Would it be fair to say you’ve written half-a-dozen plays over the last twenty years and despite their being written to your precepts “as and where appropriate” (bit of a cop-out there, John!) none has actually been produced? What conclusion do you draw from this puzzle?

Rachel Robbins posted 4 Jun 2008, 10:34 AM

John, your self-assurance is extraordinary and leaves me envious, but you misunderstand me. I have no wish to read Thelma, Weather and the Virtues of Reality. My apologies, but already it sounds like a single, unstageable Restoration monstrosity. I am not challenging you to be a producer. I am challenging you to get a play written according to these rules you have and to get it on stage in the next 12 months. To get a play on stage you simply do what other writers do: bombard Playmarket with missives and pleadings, circulate scripts round the theatres, try to get directors interested. Here’s your chance, John. Circa, Downstage, Bats are waiting out there. Away you go. The clock started ticking yesterday.

John Smythe      posted 4 Jun 2008, 11:36 AM / edited 5 Jun 2008, 07:45 AM

Your assumptions are wrong, T Meek, so I suppose I need to put the record straight [others, please excuse the temporary hijacking of this topic].

CONUNDRA (listed by Playmarket) won a nation-wide Australian playwriting competition and was produced by the Ensemble Theatre as part of the 1982 Sydney Arts Festival. Other Australian productions of my plays (not listed by Playmarket) include MAKING A PLAY (Melbourne Theatre Company), PARTY GAMES (NIDA/Jane Street, Sydney; La Mama, Melbourne); ALFRED THE INCREDIBLE SHEEP BOY (co-written with David Williamson, Kaleidoscope Mobile Theatre); THE SEVEN STAGES OF HUGH MANN (Melbourne University Student Theatre); SWAGGY MACK AND HIS MAGIC BACK TRACK (Arena Theatre, Melbourne).

I also clocked up 24-odd hours of TV drama series script writing (ABC TV, Crawford Productions, Grundy productions), 2 radio plays (ABC Radio Drama), and developed an original screenplay and a screen adaptation that were optioned by producers but did not get produced. Plus I also worked as an actor, director and tutor, and co-founded the Australian Writers’ Theatre which produced countless rehearsed play readings with ‘resting’ professionals and peer feedback sessions …

Back in NZ, I produced and directed my ENTRANCING ENTRANCES trilogy at BATS in 1988 and its component plays – MS CONCEPTION, NOTHING TWISTED and USED HEADS have been produced many times in NZ Theatre Federation one act play competitions, their productions often doing well. Quite a few more hours of TV drama series scripts have also been produced. A commissioned TV miniseries was written but cancelled (along with others, for lack of funding) and adapted & published as a novel, and two more feature film scripts have yet to achieve production although both have been optioned by producers at various times.

THELMA, WEATHER and THE VIRTUES OF REALITY – which are three separate full-length plays, Rachel – remain unproduced. A range of conclusions may be drawn from that and I am sure you will both reach for whichever best serves your apparent predisposition to smack me about for the entertainment of others.

Rachel … My creative clock doesn’t need winding up by you. I am but one of many client playwrights with Playmarket whose passion for the craft is constantly challenged in the quest for getting scripts read, let alone produced … It was ever thus and hey, there are other ways of being useful … 

But none of this is the point of this forum. All I am attempting here is to provoke, and participate in, a robust debate about a certain aspect of dramaturgy. This is not a pulpit, it’s a forum. A return to the actual subject would be most welcome. 

Brian Halstead   posted 4 Jun 2008, 03:07 PM

Please don’t apologise, John, this is all quite fascinating! Congratulations on all your achievements. But my understanding has always been that “Thelma, Weather and the Virtues of Reality” was a play written by John Dryden. It was a “derivative work of stylistic inconsistencies… a potpourri of influences and borrowings” (Shadwell). It was not a success. Samuel Pepys called it, “So poor a thing as ever I saw in my life almost.” Why have you re-written it? To what end? Has it ever been produced?

John Smythe      posted 4 Jun 2008, 04:00 PM / edited 4 Jun 2008, 06:24 PM

Indeed, Brian. Shadwell, of course, was excommunicated from all of London’s writers’ pubs, having communed with spirits of the yet-to-be-born, written down three (21st Century) texts while in a trance, then inadvertently conflated them as one. Hence Samuel Pepys poor opinion of ‘it’. My mission has been to unravel the tangle.

Madeleine Hyland            posted 5 Jun 2008, 09:22 AM

Jut to return briefly to your first post John – while I didn’t see either of the two Hall solo plays you mentioned, and while I think it’s cruel of a writer to leave an actor adrift with no stakes – although it’s our job to find them too of course – I am curious about what you said about them ignoring the Aristotelian unities. There’s a great book by Fintan O’Toole called Shakespeare is Hard but so is Life and in it he puts forward that a lot of the time Shakespeae ignored the unities and also Aristotle’s rules for tragedy, because the world that Shakespeare was writing about was so much more complex, going through a process of such rapid change, that Shakespeare just had to grab whichever bits of the rules worked for an audience at the time…and also because the audience itself was so divided that the plays had to contain words that would reach out to both. And then we spend the next 400 years trying to make Shakespeare fit into this box or that box, editing, cutting (argh!) any bits that don’t fit in with Aristotles’ rules…

I reckon it’s just as important to keep trying to expand the diversity of your audience as it is to focus on the writers. An actor’s performance changes so much depending on whether it’s a school crowd or the subscriber’s night. Maybe something more complex and satisfying might emerge if we could see who we are talking the play to, and that the audience contained both at once? Because that’s such a huge challenge – and in we the audience seeing the actor having to survive communicating with all those different people, we learn how to do it ourselves…..

John Smythe      posted 5 Jun 2008, 10:11 AM / edited 5 Jun 2008, 11:06 AM

Very valid points, Madeleine. No rule should be set in concrete. Nor should flouting one automatically be seen as an artistic breakthrough, although there are times when that is absolutely the case. But I really don’t see the unities of time, place and action as a rule, they are simply a way of defining what drama is as distinct from other forms of artistic expression.

I agree Shakespeare was a great innovator and inventor of whatever was needed, including new language …  But can you identify any part of any Shakespeare play where actors cannot locate their characters in time and space, with actions to play? Prologues and epilogues bring everyone consciously into the performance space, right now, for a purpose. Similarly soliloquies and asides, although they also apply that particular moment within the play. Otherwise a location and moment in time, relative to the play’s timeframe, is always clear, is it not?

Of course the Greeks had a habit of keeping most of the substantive action off stage and simply reporting it on stage. But always that reportage is a present action that is affecting characters in the present moment and provoking further next action.

As for actors seeing their audience, who can pick the date when audiences were plunged into darkness while the actors were held in bright light? Relatively recent, I would have thought, if we take Ancient Greece as the starting point for the kind of drama we mostly produce today.

Simon Vincent   posted 5 Jun 2008, 11:23 AM / edited 5 Jun 2008, 11:35 AM

First of all, go see ‘Guardians’, it is some of the best acting, and directing you are likely to see this year.

I have an example of a play that comes from my own experience as an actor that had a similar form to ‘Guardians’, ‘This Lime Tree Bower’, this was performed at Circa two in 2004. It was similar to ‘Guardians’  because there were three monologues told in the past tense about one event. ‘Guardians’ has two monlogues recounting two characters involvement and responses to a particular event. My experience of playing ‘This Lime Tree Bower’ was extremely rewarding and from the immediate response we got from audiences every night (some people yelled out and felt they could get involved), I concluded that the audience were with us every step of the way.

The rehearsal for this piece was extrmely different to any I had been involved in. This is because we tried all sorts of ways to ‘make it more dramatic’ because we felt the weight of a thousand drama- school- monoogues- turned -into -nifty -multi-character -one- and -two- person -shows bearing down on us.  This is as you so rightly point out John a wonderful New Zealand theatrical tradition. Now after trying all the clever ways we could think of to make it more interesting, more dramatic, we decided to stripp it right back and just stood up in front of the audience and told the story.

This is to this date the single most terrifying experience of my career. At the time I asked myself why? The answer I came up with was this: acting in plays is about doing, action, and most plays are set in the present tense where the audience have a very specific, often quite passive role. By honouring the text of this play I ended up just standing there trying to hold an audience for 20 minutes at a time with nothing else but the story I’m telling and an Irish accent. This is very hard.

But it made me consider and reconsider my relationship to them every night and also to question my fundamental values about what theatre, drama, and plays are and mean. I then thought about where it all started. Maybe around a camp fire with people telling tall tales about the size of the sabre-toothed tiger was that they wrestled to the ground earlier that day, all of which took place before Aristotle was even a twinkle in his father’s eye.

Theatre at its core is storytelling and in order for something to be theatrical in my opinion there needs to be attention paid to the story that one is trying to tell as well as the way that one is telling it. This is exactly what Morris has done and the result from what I saw last night is both original, confronting and exciting to watch. Was it dramatic? I don’t know but what I do know is that I was gripped from beginning to end and left the theatre feeling inspired by the performances and confused about my complicity with the content.

As an audience member all I ask is that the play holds my attention. I am a New Zealander so I have seen many, many, many, many, many, many, many one and two person plays that can be dramturgically deemed ‘dramatic’ and have more present action than you could possibly ask for, do they hold my attention? Sometimes but not always. There is alot to be said for investigating the form of theatre in all its wonderful guises in order to find the perfect way to tell your story.

At a very simple level this story is about two human beings and their experiences with the media and the people who run the media, what better way to tell it than reported speech. This play belongs in the theatre because it uses an inherently and primal aspect of what theatre is: telling stories to one another, to tell a very modern story. Morris could have bombarded us with A.V. and countless other modern media devices or had loads of other perspectives in the present tense but he was clever enough to realise that his play is about people and how separate we have become from our own humanity. He asks his actors and his audience to trust each other and recognise each other. GO AND SEE IT!

Welly Watch       posted 5 Jun 2008, 05:26 PM

Oh right so this great new innovative theatrical notion of narrating stories in the past tense is not only a few decades old, it’s prehistoric. What goes around comes around. “There is nothing new under the sun…” etc etc

But now I’ve seen Guardians – and it IS worth seeing – I reckon Simon (and others) have got a point. The ‘now’ component is in the challenge to the audience to review their own complicity in it.

Back in the Comments stream under your review, John, you asked about the Neil LaBute piece. That was Bash. Three monologues that slowly reveal horrific crimes. As I remember each character is talking to an imaginary other, in a specified location, telling their story in order to gain…. forgiveness? redemption? due punishment? That worked a treat too.

On balance I think we’ve come a long way in theatre since we told each other stories around the fire and I reckon anything that makes us more present to the experience is a plus.

Rhys Latton         posted 16 Jun 2008, 12:52 PM / edited 18 Jun 2008, 12:19 PM

>On balance I think we’ve come a long way in theatre since we told each other stories around the fire and I reckon anything that makes us more present to the experience is a plus.<

A long way in linear time perhaps, but I think that many would pitch our modern technological age as being a far (backward) throw from perceived Golden Ages of theatre. I agree that the experience of the present moment is vital – In earlier epoches I’m sure the cultural significance of theatre gave it more power to give a community a shared experience in the now and be carried by story. I would go even further: the experience of charged unification in the moment at times eclipses the need to understand the story, as in rites of passage and encounter.

What do people mean by ‘story’ anyway? How might such a definition fit powerful and mesmerising offerings like “Borrowed Light” in the last festival?

Martyn Wood    posted 17 Jun 2008, 10:28 PM / edited 18 Jun 2008, 12:20 PM

As far as I am concerned, the most important relationship in theatre is the one that is crafted between the actor and the audience.  And in my opinion this is one relationship that is often neglected.

People go to theatre for a number of reasons, but surely one of the most important ones is the sense of a shared experience – an experience shared between the other members of the audience, as well as with the actors/performers on stage.  Otherwise why not just stay at home and watch “Desperate Housewives”?

As an actor I am the first to admit that I have been in many productions where I have been far more concerned with my relationship with the other actors onstage than with those watching, which sets up something I find inherently bizarre about “traditional” fourth wall theatre – a bunch of actors onstage doing their very best to pretend there aren’t 100 people (if you’re lucky) watching them, while the 100 people sit in the dark and do their very best to be quiet and unnoticed.  Depending on the piece this voyeurism is totally acceptable, but then I begin to question whether the piece is theatre (or theatrical) at all, but something that perhaps should have been a film?  As an actor it shouldn’t so much about WHAT is happening between the actors, but HOW what is happening between the actors is affecting the audience.

The most joyful and enjoyable experiences  I have had watching theatre are “Strange Resting Places,” “Wheeler’s Luck,” “On the Conditions of Helen Clark…” etc – shows where I (as an audience member) am acknowledged and included. Similarly any piece of theatre featuring direct address monologue (Guardians, Bone…) is a welcome sight – the actor is acknowledging that I (as an audiene member) am there, that it is vital that I am there for their story to be told and heard.

Photography rendered realism in painting dead, giving birth to Cubism, Abstraction, Dada, Pop Art etc.  Has film rendered realism or naturalism in theatre dead? Should we as theatre makers be pushing towards more conciously and overtly “theatrical” forms as opposed to pushing steadfastly on with keeping that fourth wall up? Rather than replicate what I can rent from Blockbuster for $7 overnight in terms of narrative and style, why not really revel in the fact that this is live performance? And keep it alive, and living for the audience?

Thomas LaHood                posted 18 Jun 2008, 10:13 AM / edited 18 Jun 2008, 12:18 PM

Yep.  That’s why I believe clown is the form that will return theatre to the masses.

John Smythe      posted 18 Jun 2008, 12:46 PM / edited 18 Jun 2008, 12:48 PM

I think all forms are valid as long as they engage their audience with content that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. In my opinion the audience’s individual imaginations – and collective experience of engaging in the event at that level – remains the most powerful element. That’s what all the creative crafts aim to achieve. And if naturalism can transport us into realms of imagination that take precedence over the fact that we’re in a theatre, well and good.

Back in the 1960s and 7os there was a huge alternative theatre movement that eschewed naturalism – some even believed it to be a dishonest confidence trick! But after much Living Theatre-style experimentation, some people found being climbed over by sweaty actors a relatively limited experience. Of course there are many forms of interactive theatre that work a treat and that shake-up period was valuable – but interestingly it didn’t kill off naturalism.

Just as actors in naturalistic plays maintain a healthy 10 percent awareness of being in a performance space for the purpose of engaging their audience, so their audiences never totally lose sight of what is really going on. But the game of ‘make believe’, well played, allows all of us to willingly suspend our disbelief and share in imagined experiences that stimulate our emotions and intellects, often taking us to places we might never have got to otherwise.

Certainly other forms of storytelling can do that too – except for the ‘shared experience’ bit. Besides, we now expect anything and everything in cinema, thanks to the special effects technologies. But in theatre we know it is really happening, in real time and space, before our very eyes. And that’s special – eh. 

Personally I am especially interested in the confessor/confidante relationship live theatre can offer.  The three plays I have mentioned above in this forum all explore that in different ways …

Rachel Robbins posted 18 Jun 2008, 02:42 PM

All very well, John, but when are we going to see “Thelma, Weather and the Virtues of Reality”?

Stuart Coats        posted 18 Jun 2008, 03:02 PM

Rachel, do you want to leave John alone for a bit? This topic is getting interesting…..

Rachel Robbins posted 19 Jun 2008, 03:15 PM

Time’s up, Stuart! I leave John alone for 24 hours out of respect for your wishes and what happens? Zilch, mate. Clearly, wasn’t interesting enough. So, John – is there a confessor/confidante relationship in “Thelma, Weather and the Virtues of Reality”?

Brian Halstead   posted 19 Jun 2008, 03:47 PM

My wife says she saw “Thelma, Weather and the Virtues of Reality” in a Scout Hut in Ngaio and she reckons it was absolute crap. That Oliver Driver was in it.

martyn roberts posted 19 Jun 2008, 04:38 PM

and the raffle after that show was dubious too…

John Smythe      posted 19 Jun 2008, 09:04 PM

I seem to have lost my sense of humour on this one (whereas ‘rafflegate’ produced many a chortle). Rachel, perhaps you could explain your agenda here. And Brian – why would you say those things? What am I missing here?  

I could contribute the information that a director said to me just the other day that if someone came up with a $30,000 budget he’d be keen to direct any one of the three plays mentioned … he seems to like them all. But why should I blather on here about my unproduced plays when there are hundreds out there hoping to have life breathed into them?

Welly Watch       posted 21 Jun 2008, 01:47 PM

What are you missing?  Wasn’t it a full moon just now? Does that explain it?

Look to Matariki I say!

“Matariki ki tua o nga whetu”

“Matariki – search beyond the stars”

The proverb signifies to artists to seek excellence in their work.

“Matariki, huarahi ki te oranga tangata”

“Matariki, pathway to the wellbeing of man”