Between the Lines: A Philosophy of Theatre

Perhaps the most memorable lesson from my career in academic philosophy occurred in my first philosophy class. I was enrolled in a class on Aristotle, when the professor prefaced her lecture on the Categories with a statement that captures the philosopher’s practice in a nutshell. When a philosopher reasons about a thing, she said, she is trying to answer two fundamental questions: (1) What is it? and (2) How do you explain change? The task of philosophy is (putatively via the deliverances of reason) to clearly describe a phenomenon in question and then to describe how that phenomenon can retain or lose its properties through time while maintaining its identity. All the rest of philosophical practice is subsumed beneath these modes of inquiry. In the introduction to Between the Lines: A Philosophy of Theatre, Michael Y. Bennett describes his book as an attempt to “offer the first (contemporary) systematic account of theatre,” by which he means that his account attempts to describe what theater is, how we know what we know about theater, and theater’s value. Although Bennett deals with these ontological, epistemological, and axiological questions throughout, at the most foundational level this book strives, through case study and philosophical analysis, to answer the two questions described above.What exactly is theater? In common discourse, we might use the term to refer to plays published as texts, or upon further reflection individual performances of dramatic works. Perhaps one might describe theater in phenomenological terms, referring to how bodies moving in imaginative space are experienced by an audience. Each of these modes of describing theater captures important qualities of the practice; however, any definition of theater that is limited to these domains seems incomplete in describing what theater actually is. After considering a number of competing views from both ancient and contemporary aesthetic theory, Bennett offers his own definition: theater “refers to a group of abstract objects that I call re-created objects and re-positioned objects that are related through metaphor, representation, and presentation” (55). For those unfamiliar with philosophical parlance, “abstract objects” refer to a class of immaterial things (e.g., numbers, concepts, and fictional entities like Sherlock Holmes) that seem to exist without necessarily manifesting in the physical world. In the case of theater, the character Orin Mannon, the New London home of the Tyrone family, the birthday cake in Harry Hope’s saloon, or the moon that hangs in the sky above Josie Hogan all count as abstract objects.In theater, Bennett argues that abstract objects are brought into the theatrical space by way of representing the concrete parts that make up these objects. In the case of A Moon for the Misbegotten, for instance, the idea of the moon is made manifest utilizing stage technology and the audience’s imagination through the imitation or representation of the concrete parts we associate with it. Bennett claims that this definition of theater captures how theater seems to exist “between the lines.” He claims (quite correctly, I think) that theater exists beyond words on the page or bodies in performative motion. Instead, theater exists, as philosopher David Osipovich might put it, in an audience’s active contention with theatrical performers and the world of the stage. The audience not only engages affectively with the events that occur within the world of the play, but they also engage epistemologically, discovering (and in many instances, creating) the properties of the play.Part of what makes theater unique, in Bennett’s account, is that so many of the properties of the form are created by the active participation of the troupe in conjunction with the imagination of the audience. In most plays, many of the crucial characteristics and qualities of characters are left up to the performers to embody. For instance, in Cyrano de Bergerac, the text makes clear that the hero has a large nose, but to my recollection the text of the play does not offer a description of his height, voice, or even age. These important details are brought forth in production, and these qualities become properties subsumed within Cyrano as a piece of theater. In attending a play, the audience plays an active role with the performers in generating these properties, and Bennett claims that this makes theater unique as a form of narrative art. In novels or other forms of fiction, the narrator takes an active role in prescribing the possible worlds of the story, but in live theater, this creative process is largely bequeathed to the audience.Bennett turns his attention to the second foundational philosophical question, the question of change, in the conclusion of the book. His account injects a great deal of agency into the act of theater-making, so it might be tempting to assert that there is no fixed essence to any play. It might seem that on Bennett’s model every performance of Desire Under the Elms produces a work so unique that it shares little resemblance to any other production. Such a state of affairs would have the consequence of rendering discussion and criticism of the play unintelligible. Bennett claims that such a worry fails to appreciate that theater has built-in guardrails that allow performances to cohere enough that we can speak of them sensibly across time. Comparing theatrical performances to games (drawing from David Saltz’s characterization of theater as a ludic experience), there are rules of these performances that constrain the creative process. Bennett describes ten rules of theatrical engagement, rules such as stage directions and the audience’s willingness to believe an actor. These rules serve as the guardrails of intelligibility for the theatrical experience, and though the exact experience of the play might differ from audience to audience (and, indeed, from spectator to spectator), there is a unity to speak of when one talks about plays in performance because of these constraints.To defend all the claims in the book, Bennett largely adopts a kind of Socratic method, presenting each question he intends to address, then examining competing hypotheses that might provide answers. In his analyses of these hypotheses, Bennett gleans useful frameworks that he marshals into his own account. Readers who are hostile to this armchair method of thinking about theater might worry that such an approach is not sufficiently grounded in performance itself. While Bennett offers some case studies to defend his view, much of the text approaches the phenomenon of theatrical performance through the lens of criticism and theory instead of directly engaging with plays or phenomenological accounts of plays in performance.At times this method generates idiosyncratic ideas about theater that seem unpersuasive. For instance, in a discussion of acting, Bennett claims that when an actor considers the portrayal of Hamlet, in addition to asking, “Who is Hamlet?” the actor should ask, “Who cannot be Hamlet?” Bennett claims that such an exercise emerges from considering theater as an act of constrained recreation, and such a practice invites the actor to consider the constraints of the play and the character in ways that might be helpful in performance (126). This is an interesting idea, and it does seem to reasonably emerge from Bennett’s view of theater; however, I am skeptical that spending a good deal of time thinking about what Hamlet cannot be offers much to one who hopes to enliven the character onstage. In this example, it might have been helpful to integrate a case study or evidence of directors who have employed a similar technique in actor training.It is unfortunate that in the world of philosophical aesthetics, theater is underexplored, and Between the Lines is a welcome addition to the field. For those unfamiliar with contemporary aesthetic and critical debates about the nature of theater, the first two chapters of the book are eminently helpful. Though the text does draw extensively from philosophy of language in a way that certainly creates a scholarly barrier to entry to Bennett’s ideas, most readers working in the area of theater theory can benefit from a thoughtful examination of the genre through Bennett’s lens. Bennett has attempted to capture and describe the ephemeral nature of theater in performance, and this book offers an intriguing direction one might take in answering the fundamental philosophical questions about the practice.