Part Deux
Part Un (One) is at this link
Storytelling
All Theater Is Sharing
“All theater is sharing… You share with the audience.”
Michael Hordern
The audience has to care about every moment. There is a story in the wonderful biography on Mark Harris when Mike Nichols is directing Hurly-Burly and thinks that it is way too long. His assistant could see the notes he was taking and at one point during a monologue, Nichols just kept writing, “Who cares? Who cares? Who cares?… Nobody’s going to care, I don’t care.”
Storytelling is not easy
“Writing fiction is for me a fraught business … You have to sit down every day and make it up.”
— Joan Didion
“All storytelling is the invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you.”
Zadie Smith
Looking for the emotional moment
Donald Saint
Dealing feelings, not ideas
Schank
“The understanding problem is simply that humans are not really set up to understand logic. People tell stories because they know that others like to hear stories. The reason that people like to hear stories, however, is not transparent to them. People need a context to help them relate what they have heard what they already know. We understand events in terms of events we have already understood. When a decision-making heuristic, or rule of thumb, is presented to us without a context, we cannot decide the validity of the rule we have just heard, nor do we know where to store this rule in our memories.… People who failed to couch what they say in memorable stories will have their rules fall on deaf years despite their best intentions and despite the best intentions of their listeners. A good teacher is not one who explains things correctly but one who couches explanations in a memorable (i.e., and interesting) format.”
“Intelligent beings communicate. It is an interesting property of human beings that the process of communication itself can alter what is being communicated. When an animal communicates something, such as the fact that it is hungry or frightened, the active communication itself does not lead to new insights about the situation. But people can have a dialogue with themselves in effect. They can notice things about what they say that can cause them to change their view of what they are saying in midstream. This is the process of communication/discovery.
Roger C Schank, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence, 1990
More from Roger S. who taught me a great deal though we never met
Normally, the communication process for humans is very case dependent. People tell about their experiences and these experiences can be considered as cases in point, intended to illustrate some point that the speaker wants to make. The ability to illustrate a point with one’s own experience is thus an important aspect of intelligence.
We all have a desire to communicate. When something happens to us, we want to tell about it. Why this is so is an open question. But it seems that for most people the telling of an experience makes that experience live again. And perhaps more importantly, telling about an experience forces us to crystallize that experience in terms of its essence. We cannot relay the entirety of what has occurred of course. Describing a two week trip would take about two weeks, maybe more. So we eliminate the unessential.… Telling about an experience is important to us. It helps to understand that experience ourselves.”
Roger C Schank, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence, 1990
David Hare on Storytelling
“Louis (Malle) shared my fascination with techniques of storytelling. Once, we were meant to be working together on Damage, the film of Josephine Hart’s novel. But I came into the restaurant for supper usually dissatisfied with that morning’s readthrough of the play of mine called Murmuring Judges. ‘It ought to bloody work,’ I said, ‘and it doesn’t.’ At once Louis asked me to tell him the story of the play. Together we sat for three hours, refining the narrative. Louis isolated every component of the story, and then put them all back together again in the right order. It was like watching a great car mechanic lay out the pieces of an engine on a clean white cloth before reassembling them. He did it for the sheer intellectual pleasure.… (After writing the synopsis of Damage) Every morning he would make me sit down under the vines and go back to the beginning of the story. He did it so many times that I thought I was going to go mad.”
Acting Up
Tennessee Williams Chimes In
“Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition — all such distortions within our own egos — condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos, the corresponding distortions in the egos of the others — and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity arid see each other’s naked hearts. Such a case seems purely theoretical to me.
However in creative fiction and drama, if the aim is fidelity, people are shown as we never see them in life but as they are. Quite impartially, without any ego-flaws in the eye of the beholder. We see from outside what could not be seen within, and the truth of the tragic dilemma becomes apparent. It was not that one person was bad or good, one right or wrong, but that all judged falsely concerning each other, what seemed black to one and white to the other is actually grey — a perception that could occur only through the detached eye of art. (As if a ghost sat over the affairs of men and made a true record of them) Naturally a play of this kind does not exactly present a theme or score a point, unless it be the point or theme of human misunderstanding. When you begin to arrange the action of a play to score a certain point the fidelity to life may suffer, I don’t say it always does. Things may be selected to score a point clearly without any contrivance toward that end, but I am afraid it happens rarely.”
Tennessee William writing to Elia Kazan about Streetcar
And Richard Schechner
“Plot can never make character… While character makes plot”
“Bind the auditor fast” with the rhythms of words
Peter Brook: Master of Storytelling
“So what is our aim? It is a meeting with the fabric of life, no more and no less. Theater can reflect every aspect of human existence, so every living form is valid, every form can have potential place in dramatic expression. Forms are like words; they only take on meaning when used rightly. Shakespeare had the largest vocabulary of any English poet, constantly adding to the words at his disposal, combining obscure philosophical terms with the crudest of obscenities, until eventually there were over 25,000 at his fingertips. In the theater, there are infinitely more languages, beyond words, through which communication is established and maintained with the audience. There is body language, sound language, rhythm language, color language, costume language, scenery language, lighting language — all to be added to those 25,000 available words. Every element of life is like a word in the universal vocabulary. Images from the past, images from tradition, images from today, rockets to the moon, revolvers, course slang, a pile of bricks, of flaying, a hand on the heart, a cry from the guts, the infinite musical shades of the voice — these are like nouns and adjectives with which we can make new phrases.”
The Open Door
More to come
T.J. Elliott
