Dramaturgy and Silence
Geoffrey S. Proehl
Cesario, by the roses of the spring,
By maidhood, honour, truth and everything,
I love thee so, that maugre all thy pride,
Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.
—Twelfth Night 3.1.161-64
But there come times—perhaps this is one of them—
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
when we have to pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we've moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed
of oratory, formula, choruses, laments, static
crowding the wires.
—Adrienne Rich, "Transcendental Etude"
. . . the rest is silence.
—Hamlet 5.2.363
In the moment that we speak our love to another we put ourselves at risk. What happens if our protestations are only met with silence? And yet, fear moves us to speak as well, fear that if we do not open our mouths at a certain moment, that if we do not break silence, the rest will be silence, that an unredeemable chance will pass us by. This is Olivia's moment in Twelfth Night; it is what she is aware of when she tells Cesario who is Viola that her love for him/her is so strong that she must speak: in spite of the other's pride, in spite of her own wit and reason. She breaks silence and risks the silence in return that is Cesario's response: the words she wants to hear are unsaid, at least until Sebastian finds his way to Olivia. The archetypal moment for breaking silence is the moment in which we speak our love, a moment in which we most depend on language and a moment in which it will often fail us.
In rehearsal and performance, we encounter a jumble of silences. Some descend almost directly from Olivia. For example, there is the silence after a performance when we do not know what honestly to say to a performer backstage. We know, or think we know, what the actor wants to hear ("I loved your performance; the show was brilliant; I was moved; it made me think . . ."), but if in our thoughts the performance has not inspired these sentiments or something like them, we wish for the chance instead just to be silent. Even if we say something in that moment more or less encouraging, these words will often rest atop a larger silence, covering a subtext filled with thoughts and observations [End Page 25] that may be no more welcomed by the performer than the words Olivia did not want to hear from her Cesario. Indeed, an unspoken rule often governs those words immediately after a performance that come too late to improve the show: be silent about what did not work, praise what did, even if this means covering unspoken thoughts with enough illusion to enable the actor to complete the run of the show with confidence. More often than not in the words after a performance we can hear these silences even if there is plenty of talking going on in the room.
I have written about Olivia, dramaturgy, rehearsal, time, and language on other occasions. Some readers might recall the same quotation from Twelfth Night in an earlier issue of Theatre Topics (Proehl 197). This set of notes reflects my ongoing affair with her moment, with the ways in which rehearsal and dramaturgy return us to the beauties and limitations of minutes and words. Here, however, the focus is narrower: the silences that cluster around dramaturgy and the dramaturg in the form of an inexhaustive list to which others can add. Dramaturgs are among the most talkative of theatre makers. Or perhaps I am just thinking about myself: in one circumstance or another, finally wishing I had not opened my mouth for that one last comment, vowing that the next time around I will keep track of my comments on the fingers of one hand and silence myself when they have been numbered off. What first drew me to dramaturgs and dramaturgy was how much they loved to talk and their willingness, whether they were academics or professionals, to talk with me regardless of how little experience I brought to the table. Conferences planners have set up sessions for dramaturgs and their collaborators (writers, designers, directors) to discuss the ups and downs of our work together: almost invariably dramaturgs jump in again and again with words that threaten to overwhelm everyone in the room. Dramaturgs complain about having to describe what it is we do and yet at some level we welcome this invitation to once again launch into song. In many ways this is a gift, this amiable gregariousness, more likeable than irritating in the long run. To the extent that language and conversation are central tools both of theatre and theatre making, the dramaturg's volubility is an asset. And yet, in rehearsal it is traditionally the director or actor who has the floor and so it is that a legion of talkative dramaturgs have had to learn a discipline of silences.
Last winter, I spoke with DD Kugler's dramaturgy class at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Kugler asked his students to describe the dramaturgy projects they had found to work on for the class. Although they were not instructed to speak to any particular aspect of their endeavors, most spent as much or more time describing their relationships with collaborators as their explorations of texts and scenarios. Engaged in a range of challenging projects—new plays, plays already produced, dance pieces, even films—Kugler's students spoke eloquently about the dramaturgical issues involved: about structure, language, genre, story, research, and more. To my ears, however, even more central to their narratives was the search for a communicative relationship with their collaborators that felt both positive and productive: how to find time to meet; how to find means of communicating when hundreds of miles apart; how to sort out the subtle interplay between sitting back, listening, giving feedback, facilitating, and asking questions, on the one hand, and, on the other, offering solutions, crafting dialogue, creating ideas, taking the lead. They were looking for ways to move from polite but empty to meaningful but difficult conversations, even as they sought to clarify issues of ownership and allegiances. They were in the midst of a complex maze of interactions that circled back again and again to issues of language and relationship, of articulation and silence. As such, they are a microcosm for the field. [End Page 26]
I use silence here in part as a kind of synecdoche, with the dramaturg's silence being the part that stands for the whole of language and relationship within rehearsal and the theatre. Listening or conversation or language might have also served as key terms for this discussion, but silence in its narrower focus demands more than these others, just as Rich raises the stakes when she suggests that we must "bestow/ ourselves to silence," breaking from thoughtless rhythms into a "severer listening, cleansed/ of oratory, formula, choruses, laments, static/ crowding the wires" (74-75).
Informing these thoughts on dramaturgy and silence is a fundamental tension. The dramaturg—the person who appears in the program with this title—is not finally essential to the rehearsal process. To maintain otherwise would require redefining too much theatre history. Dramaturgy—that deep, often personal, even idiosyncratic understanding of the forms and rhythms crucial to a play as written and performed—is, however, inseparable from theatre making, whether or not the word itself is ever used. It is impossible to eliminate dramaturgy whether we think of it as a play's poetics or its physics, its nuts and bolts or its flesh and blood. This is not dramaturgy as glossary or a fifteen-minute presentation to the cast on the author's world, as important as these may be. It is, however, the dramaturgy that Eugenio Barba defines as the weave of the text or the "work of the actions" (61) or what Patrice Pavis refers to as "action, story, fable, catastrophy, rules, unities," as "the treatment of time and space, the configuration of characters in the dramatic universe, the sequential organization of the episodes of the Story" (98, 100). It is what Mark Lord names when he writes that dramaturgy is the "intellectual mise-en-scène, the superstructure or the subconscious (depending on your intellectual heroes) of the idea-world of the theatre event as expressed in its shapes and in its rhythms, and in its affinities with our world" (99).
The central significance of having someone called a dramaturg work on a production is that attaching this name to a living presence encourages everyone involved in a production to attend more carefully to what is ever present but often under examined: the inner workings of a play. From the first moments of its creation to its final performance, a play's dramaturgy (here a partial list)—its repetitions and patterns; its unfolding narratives; its echoes of other stories and plays; its characters who seem now new, now as old as the first parasite in ancient Greek comedy; its moments of anagnorisis and peripeteia; its flows and undulations, starts and stops— speaks to anyone who will listen. It must, however, have listeners for its silences to be broken. The nature of this listening, its acuity and passion, will determine not only the extent to which a play's dramaturgy will be understood but also which of several dramaturgies within a play will emerge, for a play's dramaturgy is not so much a simple given as a range of possibilities waiting to interact with the sensibilities of its creators.
At the same time as dramaturgs join others in this active listening, so are they, in their relative newness on the scene, still finding their own voices in the rehearsal hall. Like Olivia, they are trying to discover when to speak their love and when to rest in silence. This split around the words dramaturg and dramaturgy means that the discipline continually finds itself addressing two related but fundamentally different issues: 1. the role of the dramaturg, a topic that looks for its coordinates in rehearsal processes and personal identities, and 2. the nature of a play's dramaturgy, an area of inquiry finally most evident in performance itself, a phenomenon that cares less for how a play is made than [End Page 27] for the features of its beauties. This agon will exercise the field long after everyone understands what dramaturgy is and what a dramaturg does.
The thoughts that follow on dramaturgy and silence in most instances begin with the first of these concerns: the logistics of silence within the rehearsal hall. A discussion of the place that silence plays in coaxing out the beauty of a play will require more time, space, and thought than these brief notes can spare. Perhaps, however, in these more local concerns some hint of that larger conversation will begin to emerge.
Silence as frustration: Owing to tight schedules and geographical distances, pre-rehearsal meetings between the director and dramaturg are often difficult, if not impossible, to arrange, even though pre-production is the stage at which dramaturgs may have the most to bring to the project. The more successful the director the more stringent such time restraints are likely to be. To compound matters, the theatre might not budget time or money to make these meetings a priority.
In another instance, a dramaturg at a major regional theatre finds that conversations with the artistic director do not happen if the dramaturg does not take the initiative to schedule them.
At yet another theatre, a dramaturg tries for weeks to get just a half hour of the artistic director's time, only to face one frustrating interruption after another.
Once rehearsals begin, the busy-ness of a director during the rehearsal process makes it a challenge to find even a few minutes for the dramaturg to break silence, surrounded as the director might be with assistants, stage managers, vocal coaches, movement coaches, fight choreographers, designers, and technicians. The dramaturg looks for a moment to inject a word here or there, while feeling the multiple frustrations of these silences. Of course, many dramaturgs find the space to talk with the director or writer: before the day's rehearsals begin or after they conclude, over coffee or beer. But this vision of liquid collaboration in an overly scheduled world is often just that: vision, not reality. Breaking silence takes time and given the reality that most theatres—academic and professional—work with staggering time deficits on something like an ever-quickening production line, frustration around silences produced by day planners without empty slots is a given.
In this instance, the link between dramaturg and dramaturgy is more explicit: the same time deficits that silence the dramaturg also often silence the dramaturgy of the play, leaving it no time to speak to its makers. Our failure to make time for the dramaturg may signal a larger failure: the failure to make time for dramaturgy. Playwrights at least are granted months if not years to create a play, even if to do so requires a vow of poverty; those other makers—directors, designers, actors, dramaturgs—are often only given weeks, when what might be needed is months, even years, of preparation.
Academic theatre should offer an alternative, but academics will find a dozen chores to complete, students to advise, letters of recommendation to write, and meetings to attend before finding time for thoughtful, detailed pre-production work. I expect the amount of time we now spend on e-mail in a month surpasses the number of hours we are able to spend with a play prior to going into rehearsal. I am generalizing from myself here and probably overstating the case, but are these calculations that far off? [End Page 28]
Silence as imposition: We may impose silence upon ourselves as dramaturgs, because we do not know the answer, because we realize our opinion might be wrong, because we are not sure that an insight we have to offer will make a positive difference. We may impose silence upon ourselves if we feel that we lack the eloquence to assert a certain perspective or the desire to make the effort. Our self-imposed silences may be an acknowledgement of irreconcilable differences in our approaches either to the play or to ways of working on it: a way to move out of the house without necessarily leaving home.
Or someone might impose silence upon the dramaturg: refusing to work with one, for example, is a fairly effective method.
In contrast to these impositions are those rehearsals in which someone inspired convinces others that they can be inspired as well. Those who enter this rehearsal hall are tricked into believing that they are smarter than they are, until finally, trapped in the force of this illusion, the lie becomes the truth.
Silence as invisibility: It is possible to be audible and yet invisible: the dramaturg's work finds a voice in the language of the production—it is audible—but the source of that voice is invisible and so, in a manner of speaking, silenced.
An audience might notice the work of the dramaturg most readily in a program note or lobby display, but these visible manifestations are something like the trail left by a garden slug after its nightly duties have been silently completed: important but not finally the main point. (I am not comparing dramaturgs to slugs, so much as what we see and what we don't.) The slug's trail is a rich and viscous residue left on the sidewalk, but it is only a by-product of his travels. The insight into a play's structure that helped make its interpretation seem self-evident or the question that amplified a director's vision or the observation that clarified a writer's story is not nearly as obvious as either that shiny trail on the sidewalk or what has been visited upon our hydrangeas, although here this dangerous metaphor ends: slugs devour; dramaturgs and dramaturgy, ideally, feed.
This relative invisibility of the dramaturg's labors carries a limited liability. It is quite human and not at all unreasonable from an organizational perspective to want not only the fruits of our labors but also our laboring itself to be seen (or heard) and accorded its due. If dramaturgical accomplishments are at their best often unnoticeable as such, we dramaturgs might find ourselves wanting to point to anyone who might be around and say, "Look, this is what I did. Not just the program layout or the lobby display. Yes, I know you like them and they are important, but this and this and this as well."
Invisibility is not, however, an inherently negative quality. To many audience members, the dramaturgy of the play will itself be as invisible as its sometimes silent cousin, the dramaturg. And yet, it is this invisibility—this dramaturgy that is felt but not quite seen—that enables the presence before us of so many palpable wonders and terrors, those beauties not unlike the globes of light that Serlio once described in his Architettura:
And behind the glasses you must set great Lampes, that the light may also be stedfast: and if the bottels or other vessels of glasse on the side where the light stands were flat, or rather hollow, it would show the clearer, and the colours most excellent and fayre. (71) [End Page 29]
Silence as power: There is a strength in silence, in quietness within a room filled with talk, in an economy of words. Silence in such instances makes its practitioner more, not less visible: silence, visibility, power.
It can be as trying as the silence of a lover who will not say, "I love you." It can be read as indifference or disapproval or disdain by those who—to change the scene—still carry in their bodies the memories of cranky fathers crouched at the heads of tables, bent behind steering wheels, imposing displeasure on those forced to share their brooding presence, those who now want only for the dinner to be over, the ride to end. Uninformed by the knowledge that the one who watches, respects, and supports the work that is going on in the room, this form of silence will do more harm than good. It is therefore probably best not to imitate the posture of the professor who tilts back in his chair and peers over his glasses at the freshman who has brought his first essay in for comments.
Perhaps in some parallel reality cross fathers and detached professors play vital roles in rehearsal, but for the most part the power of silence, even Rich's "severer listening," is better exercised in other ways: by leaning forward, eyes wide or neutral, but in any event expectant, waiting—now patiently, now just a little restless—committed finally to the silent power of the play, refusing to leave until it descends.
Silence as pleasure: To not have to speak can be a relief, a pleasure. It can be pleasant not to have to deliver a solution, not to be the one who everyone turns to for direction or dialogue or a design, to have to speak only now and then. Richard Pettengill writes in an anecdote about his first job as a dramaturg that it "was actually a great relief to discover that at times just listening was going to be important in this new job" (104).
In the "Pleasure of the Spectator," Anne Ubersfeld anatomizes the pleasures of theatricality for the spectator. Many of the pleasures she lists are fundamentally dramaturgical. She describes, for example, the pleasure of what she calls bricolage, underscoring the ways in which audience members, in relative silence, enjoy assembling and reassembling elements of a play's dramaturgy. Theatrical perception, she writes,
[I]s made up of bits and pieces; it builds for another use—that of each spectator—a new ensemble with the pieces of the preceding one: a tableau, the verbal exchange and the gestures of two actors confronting each other, a lighting effect. The stage-director can only prepare the elements for possible combinations; he cannot predetermine the combination itself, which is the work of each spectator. The spectator enjoys the specifically theatrical pleasure of doing "his own thing" with the elements offered to him. (Ubersfeld 131)
It is a pleasure to sit in silence, whether as a dramaturg in rehearsal or as a member of the audience, as the play, its words and its images, enfolds us. There, of course, will always be the sensuality of moving words through our own mouths, but at other times, the most sensual of moments are those that are also the most quiet, most still.
In our attempts to understand the dramaturgy of a play, pleasure can guide us. If pleasure does not inform that work, its results should be suspect. [End Page 30]
Silence as safety: Silence can bestow a sense of safety that may or may not be productive. If the dramaturg does not weigh in on a critical decision—does not suggest the second act cut that will eliminate half of an actor's lines but clarify the structure of the entire play—he or she can then avoid responsibility for the failure or conflict that may follow, but at what cost? Silence can avoid risk, but that avoidance endangers the notion that someone named a dramaturg matters to the rehearsal process. If dramaturgy cannot be done poorly or ineffectively, if its practice cannot cause some harm, then it probably can do little good either.
Silence as humility: We may choose silence, because we do not know the answer, or we realize that we might be wrong. We may choose silence, because at a certain moment we realize that someone else can do what needs to be done much better than us.
Sometimes as dramaturgs we imagine a kind of collaborative or collective utopia in which if only the director or writer or the process were more open then we would more fully share in the authoring that a director undertakes in staging a play or a writer in creating a play script. This utopia might not, however, actually produce better work. Authorship (by which I mean a central vision or perspective that drives a production) may and sometimes does emerge from a dozen voices in the room, but it also frequently emerges from a more or less singular source, from an individual consciousness under the pressure of a driving necessity that has the force of an obsession or compulsion. This image of creative singularity plays into a romantic notion of the artist, but it also occurs with enough frequency as to make it indisputable.
The execution, refinement, development, deployment of a particular story or vision—of dramaturgy brilliantly realized—will in the theatre usually take the skilled and creative work of many different collaborators: dramaturgs, ideally, amongst them. The idiosyncrasies of creativity do not, however, necessarily wait upon or care for organizational contingencies. The vehicle for the creation or articulation of the dramaturgy of a play might be called a writer, director, dramaturg, actor, designer, or producer, but in the theatre the desire to create a work of art together cannot finally be more important than the desire to make a work of art that will cause us to tremble. To some—many playwrights, for example—this will be only too obvious; to others—some of my colleagues perhaps—it will sound like utopia betrayed by patriarchal, classist, backward looking assumptions, a betrayal made even more problematic when the director or writer is male, as is still often the case, and the dramaturg, female.
It takes a degree of humility to acknowledge that someone else is a project's author, to come to terms with one's authorial silence in a world that worships authors. It takes a degree of humility to realize that although dramaturgy itself is central that the dramaturg may know less about a play's dramaturgy than its writer or director, whether man or a woman. At the very least, the dramaturg beginning to work on a project needs to consider how he or she feels about the possibility that dramaturgy will play Antigone, while the dramaturg, for a moment not so silent, sings and dances the answers to Antigone's lines in that Dionysic chorus of twelve or fifteen or fifty. A person called a dramaturg may well be central to understanding and creating the dramaturgy of a performance, but as a discipline we need to reaffirm the importance of creative dramaturgy, even if the dramaturg's role in producing that creativity is as brilliant listener, not brilliant author. [End Page 31]
To this end, I want to affirm the value of dramaturgical silence, even if this means that the dramaturg may be perceived as less important to the rehearsal process. Perhaps we should own this secondness, not try to shun it. Envy was, after all, one of the seven deadly sins, and more than one religious or philosophical tradition reminds us of the paradoxical nature of trying to be first and ending up last, of moving to the end of line only to find that it has now become the beginning. Ironically, if our unilateral advocacy of any one kind of process is grounded in the belief that dramaturgs will only achieve primacy—firstness—if they become more like directors and writers, then we reinforce rather than challenge the hierarchies that trouble us. We create a situation—and to some extent we have—in which dramaturgs feel they have failed to attain the highest level of professional accomplishment if it happens that this accomplishment is grounded more in silent listening than in active authoring, even if this listening is at some point vital to the play's evolution.
In all of this, I am much less sure than I may sound: here are topics, nuances, for future conversations.
Silence as necessity: One role that dramaturgs play is as an audience member before the audience arrives. They listen, watch and then try to communicate what an audience member who does not know the play as well as the actors and director might be feeling and thinking as the play unfolds onstage. In this role, the dramaturg's silence mirrors the audience's.
Silence as potential: Silence allows a space with the potential for both reflection and inattentiveness, for dropping in and dropping out. Silent attentiveness can function as a kind of discipline: learning to follow along in the text hour after hour, day after day, continually trying to understand its language, trying to learn the dramaturgy of the play and the relationship between that dramaturgy and the work of the actors, rehearsing the play and its various versions within while seeing it in rehearsal just a few feet away, trying to prepare in advance an answer to the question when it comes.
Breaking silence: This again is Olivia's moment: "I love thee so, that maugre all thy pride,/ nor wit nor reason can my passion hide." When the dramaturg does enter into conversation, into all its complexities and ambiguities, how then to do this? What form will our words take when we break silence? Will we write or talk? Will we huddle with the director in a corner of the lobby just before the rehearsal begins or stand in front of the entire company when the question comes up?
Dramaturg Liz Engelman's analogy is that entering the rehearsal room is somewhat like going to a party where you may know just one person or almost everybody or no one at all. When I first heard this analogy, even though I found it apt, I did not like it all that much. I am not particularly good at breaking out of silence at parties and am almost at a total loss if I know no one at all. I find those initial conversations intimidating and often unrewarding. I more prefer Mira Rafalowicz's prose poem statement about collaboration and friendship:
as a dramaturg I am limited in whom I can work with.
I can help make something better, clearer, only
when the basic working relationship is one of
mutual respect. Not uniformity of thinking and
feeling (there is no creative dialogue possible
in uniformity, total agreement), but a basis of [End Page 32]
sympathy. Ideally with everyone in the process.
So I can really only work with friends. When I run
out of friends to work with in the theatre, I
will do something else. (164)
Both ideas (Liz's and Mira's), however, have their place. Romeo met Juliet at a party after all, and even though Olivia thought she knew Cesario and wanted him as more than a friend, her knowledge was incomplete. Old friendships can turn to silence; new collaborators can awaken language we did not know we had. In all of this, these silences and others will find their voice. 1
Geoffrey S. Proehl is an Associate Professor at the
Notes
1. Thanks to Michael Lupu (senior dramaturg, The Guthrie Theater) and to Liz Engelman (literary directer, McCarter Theatre) for reading this piece and making many substantive suggestions. Thanks as well to DD Kugler and his dramaturgy students (School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University) for inviting me into their class and sharing their work.
Works Cited
Barba, Eugenio, and Nicola Savarese.A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. Trans. Richard Fowler. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Lord, Mark. "The Dramaturgy Reader." Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book. Ed. Susan Jonas, Michael Lupu, and Geoff Proehl. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1997. 88-101.
Pavis, Patrice. Languages of the Stage: Essays in Semiology of Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982.
Pettengill, Richard. "Dramaturging Education." Jonas, Lupu, Proehl. 102-108.
Proehl, Geoffrey S. "Rehearsing Dramaturgy: Olivia." Theatre Topics 9.2 (1999): 197-205.
Rafalowicz, Mira. "Dramaturg in Collaboration with Joseph Chaikin." Jonas, Lupu, Proehl. 159-164. Originally published in Theater 10.1 (1978): 27-29.
Rich, Adrienne. "Transcendental Etude." The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978. 72-77.
Serlio, Sebastiano. "Serlio's Three Scenes." A Source Book in Theatrical History. A. M. Nagler. New York: Dover, 1952. 72-81.
Ubersfeld, Anne. "The Pleasure of the Spectator." Trans. Pierre Bouillaguet and Charles Jose. Modern Drama 25.1 (1982): 127-39.
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