The New Storytelling (concluded)

General characteristics of what I’m calling “The New Storytelling” in theater:

1. Telling is the primary mode of performance.

2. The distinction between showing and telling in theater is dialectically transformed into the showing of telling and telling as a way of showing.

3. The fact that telling is what’s happening becomes a major part of the narrative, content and meaning of the piece; different modes of telling are among the different kinds of content.

4. This situation illuminates the ways in which a given mode of telling partly produces the other content of the play.

5. Examples of “modes of telling:” In The Designated Mourner, Jack and Judy’s distinct interpretative and selective stances toward events; the continuum between the everyday and the highly aestheticized in the language (which makes particular sentences and passages stand out). In Dust, the anecdote; direct reference to storytelling; narrative framing beyond the scope of the body of the piece; the musicality of the speech, including its melodic and rhythmic qualities and its speed (these produce emotional/expressive tenor, make particular phrases memorable, and cement the impression of a single voice being imitated by different speakers in their distinct styles). In The Myopia, varying degrees of absurdity in the form of repetition, mixed dialects, and stylistic quotation (“Beckett,” Stein, colloquial stereotype, high verse drama) alter the comparative importance of narrated content, language as surface, and self-reference; the most “narrational” passages and the most “dialogue-like” ones bring the issue of scale to the fore. In The Climb Up Mount Chimborazo, highly composed speech and simultaneous distinct texts; direct address to the audience, pseudo-dialect verse, announcement of general frames, and quotation vary the degree to which one is invited to draw historical parallels and extrapolate broader arguments (the scale of a given element of content).

6. Overlapping somewhat with #5: There is an emphasis on techniques of performing speech that’s more related to musical models of composition than to theatrical models. This goes beyond “stylized” telling in its demand for great precision in speech performance. Though a mode of performance may function as an “estrangement effect” (at its best, engaging and simultaneously encouraging of critical reflection, a liberating distance rather than an alienating one), it also positively sets up entire systems of relations within the new context it brings to the material presented. A new “layer” is added to the piece, and it both stands out from and intermingles with the “layers” of content and theatrical performance in the usual sense.

7. Scale is a major issue. The frame for the piece takes in much more than can be covered by what’s inside it; or the language within the piece has a larger range of reference than its frame; or the “size” of what’s told is much larger than that of what tells; or the sheer quantity of language “overloads” the play so it becomes a dance of contradictory arguments, alternative theses, possible worlds, societies, and cultural values.

The question of scale is, in a way, what calls for storytelling in the first place in these works. We in the U.S. now face, more than ever, the tensions between our overwhelmingly localized (busy, harried, overdetermined) personal existences and our large-scale global roles and relations with literally and metaphorically far-flung matters (environments, economies, people). What do we do in this situation? Specifically, what do we do as artists? These four composers have tried to tell stories that respond to the threat of a brutal new fascism, our contemporary species of profound loneliness, the long rightward drift in U.S. politics, and the latest attempts in South America at an emergence from centuries of imperialism and destitution. They have invented techniques that allow the stories to cover as much as possible while retaining the sense of imbalance and partiality proper to the global situation. These stories transcend themselves, not symbolically (as in myth), and not via any universalist assumptions, but through new formal and performative strategies and remarkably free approaches to writing. Making the importance of telling internal to the work of art places a crucial question at center stage: how to represent one’s position in the language, as the medium of large- and small-scale history as well as of interpretation and argumentation, so that it might become possible to negotiate the vast systems of relations in which one finds oneself when trying to figure out how to contribute to the end of all unnecessary human suffering. A cure for paralysis. An opening of new possibilities of thinking, and so living.