It is not a derogation but only a definition to say that workable theatricality is the measure of successful playwriting. In the theater the test is not: Is this true to the realities of human experience? Instead the test is: Is this fictitious representation satisfactory to the artificial conditions of the theater? With luck—or with genius—a play may pass both tests, but it must pass the second, and if they are in conflict, the first must yield. The theater is under many limitations: the exigencies of space and time; the dictation of the literal, which requires an actual Peter Pan to swing through the air on an actual wire in the presence of practicable props; and especially the necessary conditions of people meeting together as an audience, the lowered intelligence, the lulled critical faculty, the enhanced emotionalism and suggestibility of a group, the substitution of emotional accord for the desire to experience and understand that is fed by other forms of literature. Under all these limitations, the theater succeeds in its own terms. They are the terms of the momentarily effective, not the permanently true or the permanently illuminating. Only small and superficial portions of human life can be honestly and thoroughly represented in such terms and under such limitations. Quite properly, the theater does not care: where honest and thorough presentation of life makes available material, the theater will use it; where it does not, the theater must and will cheerfully depart from it for the sake of the theatrical values. They, the theatrical values, are concerned with something else. - Bernard DeVoto, 1936
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 05:51:07 +0000
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