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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Ruhl
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February 22 - March 4, 2021
the big difference between the mask of celebrity and the Greek mask is that the Greek mask has to do with the universal, whereas the mask of celebrity has to do with the illusion of being able to know an individual from a distance.
That is, when Botox renders the forehead a mute sculpture, we are unable to tell what actors are thinking while they are speaking, and subtext has even more primacy.
don’t think one thing and then say another thing. Think the thing you are saying.
There is no deception or ulterior motive or “cover” about the language. There are, instead, pools of silence and the unsayable to the left or to the right or even above the language. The unsayable in an ideal world hovers above the language rather than below.
I think it is almost ontologically impossible to truly think one thing while saying another thing. It creates an acting muddle in the theater and a sociopath in life.
my character want in this scene?” One day she said to us, “Who always wants something from someone else? Only criminals. And Americans.”
Some people say that’s an objective—it’s not—it’s a sensation of well-being. Life is not constantly about wanting to get something
thought she wanted me to guess a thing she wanted and give that thing to her. In fact she wanted me to stop asking her what she wanted.
She wanted to open my heart; she wanted to walk in.
manner of the word.” But what it leaves out is the practitioner’s ability to simply do the thing, focus on the thing, and not on the manner in which the thing is done.
however, enjoy an actor who can be in a pure state of emotion, with no need of an action to justify the state. It’s a kind of ecstasy, a state of being, unqualified, unexplained.
it possible that the rise of the nineteenth-century director (who replaced the actor-manager) corresponded to the rise of subtext because it gave the director an important job, to help the actor find the hidden secret in the text, rather than have the actor merge with the language?
In the world of imaginary things, speech acts are everywhere. One declares the imaginary world into being.
Rather than having language bring to life the invisible world, in naturalism the visual lie is attempted scenically, and language is a cover for the invisible world of feelings.
Instead of thinking of conflict, I like to think of dialectic, a need for opposites that undermine each other. Or,
What if we borrowed from improvisation a proliferation of assent? A form of storytelling that used surprise as a tool rather than bickering.
rehearsal rooms: “I want to make sure that the psychological steps the character is taking on the journey are absolutely clear.”
Clear steps seem more appropriate for a manual on how to put together furniture from another country.
Whatever happened to the irrational—to the notion that brilliant practitioners of an art form have pipelines to the irrational, are accused of being madmen by Plato, are almost banished from the city?
39. The death of the ensemble
Reread this essay
knew where she was in the punctuation. And this experience made me wonder: is there an emotional melody or rhythm underlying a play that is beyond translation? And if a very good actor can act this rhythm, then does emotion follow rhythm, and no externally imposed style can intervene?
“Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm.” We often obsess in a rehearsal room about what the style of the play is. Is it possible that merely by being attentive to the rhythm of the language, even in translation, the actor can attend to the style of the piece, without worrying about stylized gestures?
preventing us from touching the object of contemplation. Because there are real people acting, we cannot own their image; we cannot have them. Perhaps that is why movie stars come back to the stage: to be, without being had.
Because they are what they are and they are automatically in a state of play rather than in a state of work? (My teacher Joyce Piven has spent a lifetime trying to get both adults and children to be in a state of play on stage.)
was so moved that telling the story was more important to them than the fear of exposure. I suppose that’s always the playwright’s hope—that telling the story outweighs the very real fear of total public humiliation.
But on the steps of the Lafayette church, they had nothing but each other, the audience, and the story. And for half an hour, I was as transfixed as I’ve ever been, remembering that theater is at its roots some very brave people mutually consenting to a make-believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.
For butthole make it l nguage andx story witghout too much fuss
hope that the play gives them the fullness of a dream. I would like to write a play that purposely puts people to sleep.
He goes on at length about the pleasures of using a traditional Japanese bathroom, which is dark, quiet, and full of shadows.
And yet, of course, the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.
plays, we began by writing plays for one audience member.
Exercise
No one to laugh or cry along with, you have reciprocity without the possibility of catharsis.
I determined at the end of seeing many audience-of-one performances that an audience of one was not really an audience but instead a form of intimacy, a form of listening.
Humans were asked to make absolutely no facial expression as they watched chimpanzees. The chimpanzees, without a facial response in their audience, went crazy. And
Do you remember the old-fashioned notion that artists give audiences pleasure, and so audiences give them money? That
The child puts on a play for parents or neighbors. The child gives pleasure and in return gets applause. A simple enough equation.
Theater in its most basic form is a kind of reading aloud. When children are small, we tell them to make a circle and we read to them. When they grow up, we tell them to sit in a corner and read to themselves. In the theater, we ask adults to be children again, to sit in a circle and be read to.
Don’t make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don’t forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.
can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It … relation is mutual.”
how can the audience exist in relation to the stage as opposed to watching the stage as object?
What can a living playwright learn from this? Canonical plays are weird. Being dead is the most airtight defense of one’s own aesthetic.
it possible that the people who hate my work the most, experience the most bile rising in their throats—are these people in fact my greatest treasures because their experience of the work is the most visceral and profound?
Because my profession requires large doses of senseless gossip. It is how we cast, how we choose our collaborators, and how we relax at parties. But what is the difference between senseless gossip and true dialogue about an object, an object that meant to please but in fact gave no pleasure?
How is it that we feel harmed? People think that in order to save the theater we need more good plays. Perhaps we need more bad plays.
But failure loosens the mind. Perfection stills the heart.
Certainly we have, as a culture, lost no pleasure in watching bad television. It can be equally fun to the average American to watch something considered “bad” on television as something considered “good.”
Perhaps theater is just by and large too expensive to tolerate failure. Perhaps we no longer believe in the sublime; we only believe in the tidy.
Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it mean to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?
How is it that e. e. cummings and Thornton Wilder, who radically challenged form, were transformed by intellectual opinion into treacly sentimentalists for the masses?
It is our fervent wish that you will write another one of those talking plays.
What does it mean for the painter to shrug off life as a model, to see life studies as merely that, studies, preparation for the blazing light of the internal landscape?
