GOWNS

For the fundamental power of this image [that theater offers] of “another life” is that we do oversee it as we live it empathetically. In this respect, I would differentiate the power of theater and the power of film: film envelops us and puts us into its world more or less as we are visually within our own. In this, film and prose fiction are similar: they give us, by different means, the illusion of an unmediated experience. For this reason I suppose most people think of their lives — if they have reveries in this vein at all — as being like films and novels rather than plays. These are the media, at once intimate and spacious, with almost unlimited power to imitate our experience of being present in the world: the daily texture of life, the “aroundness” of space, the continuity (or the return or the lapse) of time, above all the shape we think of our life as accumulating (its crises, its ups and downs, its chapters, the slow composition of its destiny), all given the dignity of significance by an imaginary orchestra or a sympathetic narrator (oneself, of course) who understands everything about us that the world has misunderstood.

This is not the sort of “other life” offered by the play. We are more apt to say that an evening or an experience was like a play (people “create scenes” in restaurants, at parties, etc.). Obviously, I am making no categorical claims about the limits of film, fiction, and drama, or what they can or should do. Plays may very effectively imitate whole lives…and films regularly invade the dramatic province for their plots. I mean, simply, to isolate characteristics of the forms that encourage certain kinds of fiction and degrees of illusionary involvement. Theater, especially since the advent of the novel, is by and large the form designed for the brief chronicle: the crisis, the turning point, the consequence of the act or the non-act. Theater is swift (even Chekhov is swift). This swiftness has nothing to do with clock time or the suspense of the plot, but only with the fact that everything happens through the actor. This is the swiftness of condensation, of life raised to an intense power of temporal and spatial density.

[…] Thus one witnesses a play as an event in the real world as well as an illusion of an unreal world, and its realism is not simply the descriptive realism of either cinema or fiction but the weakly disguised reality of the actor and the raised platform on which he stands. The intimacy of theater is not the intimacy of being within its world, but of being present at its world’s origination under all the constraints, visible and invisible, of immediate actuality.

- Bert O. States, “Actor/Text” from Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater

[haha i love this guy! reading this book is like reading a book from my alternate universe self in grad school. he makes a lot of bold claims and analogies with not much to back it up besides wild enthusiasm and a few choice quotes off the shoulders of giants. very much my style.

i got it at myopic bookstore in chicago but it can be found just as cheap on the internet, if you’re into this sort of thing]