Bogosian on characters
Posted: May 21st, 2006, 1:11 am
after watching lots of terrific sketch this week, I want to recommend to all the writers out there this recent article by one of my heroes, Eric Bogosian... "two people in a room." love it!
CHARACTER (for Dramatists Magazine)
Think "Nora" or "Willy Loman" or "Hamlet" or "Romeo" or "Big Daddy" or "Ricky Roma" and you are immediately thrown into the specific theatrical reality. That is because ours is a psychological theater, invented long before Freud. For four hundred years, since Shakespeare in fact, we have witnessed the lusts, machinations and anguish of a long parade of individuals. For the Christians and Jews of the Capitalist west, the sense of oneself as an individual has been the ultimate driving force. A succession of kings and presidents, explorers and inventors, "genius" composers, artists and generals has been enpowered by the primacy of the individual.
And so, when we make theater, we make theater about individuals, we make theater about characters.
Theater is a model of the space between our ears. It is populated with the same archtypical personae who populate our imagination. Willy Loman is not about naturalism. Willy Loman is about the way Americans thought about themselves in the late 20th century. This imagined man, imagined by Arthur Miller, struck a chord, and still resonates. His presence in "Death of A Salesman" makes this play great because we know this man. And when I say "know" I mean "know" in a sense of "think" we think this man. When we watch the action of the play, we recognize our own thinking.
I make this almost obvious point because as the academy (the universities and the not-for-profit theaters) urges theater into displays of dissection rather than eventful explosions, there is a growing emphasis on everything but character. Which may mean that a new kind of theater is being born or it may mean that we're not putting our best foot foreward when we make theater today. Call me old-fashioned, I'm still trying to write theater with characters as engines. I don't really understand nor am I deeply moved by any other kind of theater. (Topical theater, surprise-ending theater, dance theater, spectacle theater, documentary theater, science theater).
So the question naturally comes up, where do these characters come from? Do we go looking for them somewhere? Should we go hang out in subways or AA meetings or debutante balls? Well, you can do that. And you can write a theater "about" something. The pundits love that. Then they can explain to everyone what the play is “about.â€Â
CHARACTER (for Dramatists Magazine)
Think "Nora" or "Willy Loman" or "Hamlet" or "Romeo" or "Big Daddy" or "Ricky Roma" and you are immediately thrown into the specific theatrical reality. That is because ours is a psychological theater, invented long before Freud. For four hundred years, since Shakespeare in fact, we have witnessed the lusts, machinations and anguish of a long parade of individuals. For the Christians and Jews of the Capitalist west, the sense of oneself as an individual has been the ultimate driving force. A succession of kings and presidents, explorers and inventors, "genius" composers, artists and generals has been enpowered by the primacy of the individual.
And so, when we make theater, we make theater about individuals, we make theater about characters.
Theater is a model of the space between our ears. It is populated with the same archtypical personae who populate our imagination. Willy Loman is not about naturalism. Willy Loman is about the way Americans thought about themselves in the late 20th century. This imagined man, imagined by Arthur Miller, struck a chord, and still resonates. His presence in "Death of A Salesman" makes this play great because we know this man. And when I say "know" I mean "know" in a sense of "think" we think this man. When we watch the action of the play, we recognize our own thinking.
I make this almost obvious point because as the academy (the universities and the not-for-profit theaters) urges theater into displays of dissection rather than eventful explosions, there is a growing emphasis on everything but character. Which may mean that a new kind of theater is being born or it may mean that we're not putting our best foot foreward when we make theater today. Call me old-fashioned, I'm still trying to write theater with characters as engines. I don't really understand nor am I deeply moved by any other kind of theater. (Topical theater, surprise-ending theater, dance theater, spectacle theater, documentary theater, science theater).
So the question naturally comes up, where do these characters come from? Do we go looking for them somewhere? Should we go hang out in subways or AA meetings or debutante balls? Well, you can do that. And you can write a theater "about" something. The pundits love that. Then they can explain to everyone what the play is “about.â€Â