Flux Theatre Ensemble

(Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum. Pictured: Christina Shipp, Vince Nappo)
Charles Isherwood recently leveled criticism against the increase in use of direct address in plays, specifically singling out playwright Kristoffer Diaz, who responds smartly here. Playwright Josh Conkel issues his own rejoinder here. However, there is another essential element of direct address that Isherwood misses, an element central to my own work as playwright:

A character addresses the audience because they want something from the audience. It’s that simple.

Some examples from my own work: In Riding the Bull, GL talks to us because he wants to be forgiven. In Other Bodies, Terry tells us her story so that we will touch her. In Good Hope, Rebecca shares what happened to keep us from the unbelief that led her to lose those she loved.

And there’s the key: these characters talk to the audience because they cannot get what they want from the other characters in the play. In the above three instances, that’s because those other characters have died; and this is perhaps why I am more often drawn to use direct address in tragedy than comedy. An irrevocable loss has turned the characters away from the world of the play to face us down and try, however unsuccessfully, to get what they need most.

In practice, this can be complex, especially now when audiences seem primed to accept direct address as narration and not action. This leads them to trust direct address, when its proper use is far more subversive. We shouldn’t trust One in The Lesser Seductions of History anymore than we should trust Iago in Othello; and yet for better or worse, many looked to her for the play’s ‘message’. It was never the play’s message, it was always hers; and the action of the play often contradicts and complicates her words. She was talking to us for the same reason she spoke to the characters in the play; to make them do what she wanted.

This makes the audience essential, and every run of the play a unique living attempt for the character to succeed or fail.

(Photo: Tyler G. Hicks-Wright. Pictured: Candice Holdorf)

In February, I posted about about the dimensions of character in an oh-so-accessible post entitled A String Theory of Character. Simply put, that post explored the idea that richness of character is determined by the directions in which the meaning of a single action can resonate. When a one-dimensional character acts, the meaning of that action is simple. When a multi-dimensional character acts, the meaning echos in a number of often contradictory directions. The action is simple, the meaning is complex.

A hopefully simple example: a man blinds himself. Without the context of dimensions, it is simply a violent, incomprehensible act. But as the man is a king, the act takes on political dimensions. As he is a man of destiny, the act takes on metaphysical dimensions. As he is an infamous mother lover, the act takes on erotic and familial dimensions. And as is he is a genuinely good and supremely confident man, the act takes on moral dimensions, too.

A single act that echoes in many different, often contradictory, dimensions. And what goes for richness of character goes for the world of the play, too. One of the first questions I think about when approaching a play is how many dimensions are present? In how many directions can a single act echo?

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a supreme example: there is the meta-world of the theatre itself, the fairy world, the political/legal world of Theseus and Athens, the world of the lovers, the mechanicals, the play within the play that combines them all; each of those with its own set of moral, physical, and emotional rules, each with their own language. I also believe there is a seventh dimension, one of transcendence, touched through Bottom and Titania's union; working on the play I sometimes felt the dim shape of an eighth dimension hidden in the relationship between Puck, Oberon, and the world of shadows.

And when the play is done right, and all seven + dimensions are open, an action in the play can echo in seven different directions, so the reconciliation of Oberon and Titania is a reconciliation of magic, law, love, of the play itself, of theatre; and an end to the possible union of human and divine that their discord created. You could argue the dimension of gender adds an entire, more painful dimension to this reconciliation, as Oberon has won her love back in a misogynistic way. Additionally, the dimension of loss, introduced to the play through Titania's love for her dead Votress, adds an ambiguous note to the reconciliation, as who can say if it is good or bad that she has moved on from the memory of this woman she loved so much?

It may seem strange to consider a dimension of loss on the same footing as a dimension of law, but we are interested here in the directions in which meaning can move.

A Midsummer Night's Dream may be the supreme example, but Flux is drawn to plays that are multi-dimensional in this way. Jacob's House, our upcoming production, has at least five dimensions: family, as the siblings gather to interpret their father's will; memory, as they argue over the slippery legacy of their parent's actions; manifest destiny, as the lives of their parents seem to have stretched over the course of America's bloody history; hunger and fullness, and how ideas of morality wrestle with primal hungers; and divine blessing, as the characters deal with the gift and curse of being touched by the divine.

A single action in Jacob's House, if we do our job right, will echo in at least these five directions, and so a series of very simple things will happen, but what they mean will move to an increasingly rich ambiguity that is Flux's home turf.

It has always seemed to me that plays the obscure the story, and make the journey unnecessarily difficult to follow, are playing a shell-game where confusion masquerades as complexity, and vagueness is made up to look like ambiguity.

I've always been drawn instead to stories that take me down a road I know well, to a room I'm familiar with, to a door I've seen before, but when I open the door, I realize I don't know the road or room or door at all, and I'm falling in darkness, and just when the light above has almost dwindled entirely, the play hands me a pile of feathers and says, 'quick, make these wings'.

What plays do you think have that richness of dimension? Read the full story