Numerology Is Bad Theater

Introspection,Theater 11 November 2010 | 28 Comments

I scheduled this post to be published at precisely 11:11 am on 11/11/10. If I could have set it up to go live 11 seconds later, I would have. This was the best I could do.

I know there are going to be people in various places noting this numerological coincidence. (I have a feeling that at the very least, the folks at 11:11 Theatre Company will have something to say about it.) The roar will undoubtedly be even more deafening this time next year, just as it was about a month ago at 10:10 am (and pm) on October 10, 2010. In advance of that collective “whoa,” I simply felt I had to add a small contrary voice: please, for goodness’ sake, just ignore the whole thing.

It’s a meaningless coincidence. There are countless similar coincidences all around the all the time. You know what’s even more amazing, though? The staggeringly large number of coincidences that don’t happen, day after day. You mention an old friend to your mother while you’re doing your grocery shopping, and then when you walk out the door a few minutes later… that old friend doesn’t happen to be there in the parking lot. It’s your dog’s birthday, so you go out to the store to buy Fido his favorite (but rather expensive) treat… and three other treats have just gone on sale. I could go on, but the list of non-examples is endless: a far, far greater number of non-coincidences happen than coincidences. Given a moderate understanding of statistics, the fact that coincidences do sometimes happen should be utterly unsurprising. It’s bound to happen.

The only reason we notice them at all is that our brains are evolutionarily hard-wired to notice patterns. Noticing patterns is what helped us survive and cooperate and haul our way up from the grasslands of our species’ infancy. That’s it. Good for us… but let’s not take it too far.

This is precisely the same mechanism that inclines young playwrights toward deus ex machina endings and stock characters and clichés. Playwrights who rely on devices like those are doing the dramatic equivalent of saying “Hey, look — almost all of the numbers in today’s date are ones!” They’ve fixated on certain patterns — patterns with no inherent significance — and are letting them stand in the place of real meaning.

So don’t pay today’s date any real heed, and don’t watch bad theater. Neither are worth your time.

UPDATE:

My post today has inspired a response from my good friend David Loehr, which you really ought to read before continuing. No, I’m not afraid to link to a dissenting opinion. Jeez, Louise! This is the internet. Now, go on, go read it, then come back.

Okay, so… it seems I’ve made a bit of a hash of things with my post. I might as well admit that up front. I’ve conflated concepts that I ought not to have conflated so cavalierly. But I shall press on.

Evolutionarily, we are adapted to recognize patterns, as I’ve said. This has been a skill that conveyed survival benefits, because recognizing patterns has helped us survive when those patterns convey useful information (such as when a certain cloud formation is a good predictor of a storm), which they do not always do. Recognizing patterns is not, to be clear, a higher-order skill: it’s instinctive. Analysis of those patterns, determining whether they contain meaning, THAT is a higher-order skill.

A side effect of our species being hard-wired to recognize patterns is that we get a slight positive neural sensation from doing it: the evolutionary equivalent of an “Atta boy” or “You go, girl.” Not a big reward, but enough to make it feel modestly good. This is the joy or beauty — the “rainbow” — that my friend talks about in his post.

Frankly, though, I think a much better comparison than a rainbow, however, is a piece of candy. We’re also hard-wired to find and eat as much sugar as possible, too — but that’s because our species evolved in a world in which sugar was a scarce, precious source of calories. In the world we live in now, sugar is plentiful, and our hard-wiring works against us in the worst of ways. The only thing keeping us from eating ourselves into oblivion is the higher-order thinking that allows us to say “Hey, maybe this isn’t a great idea” and “Let’s put nutrition labels on things” and “I vote we we take those Coke machines out of the schools.”

It is the same with our hard-wiring to recognize patterns. They were few and far between when our species was born, and often very subtle… but in the last two hundred years or so, patterns have overtaken our daily experience. We live in a highly-patterned world. As a result, what we need desperately is to be shocked OUT of our patterned complacency, lest we overdose on the mild satisfaction they give us… the side effect of which is an obese, flabby mind.

If a pattern has meaning — the iron filings lining up in the presence of the magnet, to use one of my friend’s examples — by all means, we should investigate and understand it. But we must — it is essential — always be skeptical of patterns. Many are meaningless, as he and I both agree, and many yield counter-intuitive conclusions, too; it sure does look like the sun revolves around the Earth, for example, if you only consider that it rises and sets in the same places every day… but as we all know, that isn’t the case.

Now, to bring this back to playwriting…

My first contention here is that young playwrights make the mistake of relying on stock characters, canned plots, and clichés because they are simply following the patterns they have seen in other plays. This is not, I believe, a good thing; it is a thing to be outgrown. It is, however, as my other friend Liz Maestri has noted in the comments, exactly the way young playwrights are taught to make plays, and with that I have no complaint. The best way to learn IS by imitation… as long as we’re all clear that the eventual goal is revelation instead.

My second contention here is that plays that rely on stock characters, etc. — pattern pieces, I’ll call them — are inferior to plays that don’t. David Loehr points to the long-running play Shear Madness as an example of just this sort of thing. What he finds delightful — what many people find delightful, I will concede — I consider somewhat light, personally, as do (I believe) most of the theater practitioners I know who’ve appeared in the play. (That list is long.) I mean, I do like candy now and then — as which of us does not? — but it isn’t why I learned how to cook, so to speak, and I don’t think it’s why David Loehr learned to cook, either.

My personal preferences, however, must be kept separate from what I think is right and good. Again, there’s a reason Shear Madness continues to sell gobs and gobs of tickets, so people do like it. Why, though? I believe they like it because it appeals to our hard-wired pattern-recognition system, nothing more. They sit in the theater, recognizing one pattern after another and feeling mildly rewarded for doing so. It’s “Hey, look, it’s 11:11!” over and over again. This is not going to get us anywhere as a species. If that’s all we do, in fact, we’re going to die out.

http://www.tippingoverbackwards.com Liz M

Not sure I follow this one, G. Young playwrights are certainly not the only ones using cliches. Also, regarding young playwrights, following patterns (and then breaking them) is how we learn!

http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

No, young playwrights aren’t the ONLY ones, but I mean young in developmental terms, not age.

As for your second objection: I agree. The following AND the breaking are important. All I’m saying is not to forget the second part!

Furthermore… there’s following, and then there’s slavishly imitating…

http://www.tippingoverbackwards.com Liz M

But Shakespeare, playwrights of the 19th century, modern traditionalist playwrights etc. use stock characters, and they’re considered developmentally advanced. If you mean “traditionalist” or “old-fashioned,” I could get behind that. Unless of course the cliche is being used for dramatic effect, which happens a lot in the avant garde world.

Of course, there’s Star Wars though. Star Wars without stock characters would have failed, as evidenced by episodes 1-3.

http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

Shakespeare used stock characters? Hamlet is a stock character? Prospero? Richard III? These are anything but stock characters. They’re the engines that make his plays work, and they are complicated, nuanced, human characters.

As for modern traditionalist playwrights… I’m not even sure I know what you mean here. Bottom line, for me, is that my mind turns off and gets quickly very bored and uninspired and closed and tired when I watch a play full of stock characters. I just don’t care about them.

As for clichés? I despise them. They feel lazy to me. Not sure how you’ve seen them used in avant garde plays… of which I’ve only read a small handful…

Finally, Star Wars: I completely disagree.

Episodes I-III failed because the dialogue was so painfully bad not even Tom Stoppard could save it — rumor has it he tried, at least for Episode III, though he was never credited — and because the plots were paper thin. Not to mention the fact that Lucas lost touch with the mythological foundation elements of his story.

Furthermore, you seem to be suggesting that Episodes IV-VI contained stock characters, and that their presence is what made those films successful. I think what you’re seeing as stock characters is, first and foremost, ham-fisted acting, but more importantly archetypal characters — which are different than stock characters.

http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

Good stock characters are archetypal characters. Hero, girl, secondary hero, mentor, villain, comic relief. That’s Star Wars Episode IV. They’re good iterations of the stock characters, they’re archetypes used well. But they navigate through simple cliches and a standard quest plot with a “chosen one” at the center. It’s mythic, but it’s simple and recognizable. We know the pattern, we know how it works, Lucas merely rings changes on it.

The less said about the prequels, the better.
http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

I think there’s a difference between stock characters and archetypal characters. I’m not sure I can elucidate it, but I’ll try.

An archetypal character is soulful. They represent something essential about being human. They’re round, or perhaps deep is a better word. The hermit, for example, who represents that part in all of us that withdraws from the world, from society, and who lives half-buried in earth, hoarding wisdom. On the surface, however, they look different. Crazy Ivar in O Pioneers! is an archetypal hermit, but so is the neighbor, Wilson, on Home Improvement.

Stock characters, by contrast, are flat. They represent our surface apprehensions of people, not their rich complexity. “The Lawyer,” for example. Always a bit snooty, always smug and superior, always materialistic and smart. We’ve seen so many examples of this stock character in bad television that they aren’t worth enumerating.

Anonymous

I’m sorry but I can’t resist. You are just helping me prove my Michael Bay Algorithm. Will post on my blog so you all don’t have to be tortured. Spot on post hon! xx

http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

I just looked up your post — that’s specatcular! (You’d probably love my play LET X, hon — it’s theatrical algebra.)

Pingback: David J. Loehr. Artist in Residence. - Wherever I go, there I art.
http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

See, what you’re calling a stock character, I’d call a stereotype.

http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

I might also use the term stereotype, but as a veteran of the letterpress — the arena from which the term “stereotype” arose — I try not to use it too often.

Yet again, between us, there seems to be le difference semantique.

http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

Wikipedia’s edited by monkeys on crack.

http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

Often, yes. Sometimes crack and mescaline.

So… how about Merriam-Webster: “A character in literature, theater, or film of a type quickly recognized and accepted by the reader or viewer and requiring no development by the writer.”

Or Bedford/St. Martin’s Press: “A flat character embodies one or two qualities, ideas, or traits that can be readily described in a brief summary. They are not psychologically complex characters and therefore are readily accessible to readers. Some flat characters are recognized as stock characters; they embody stereotypes such as the “dumb blonde” or the “mean stepfather.” They become types rather than individuals.”

The City University of New York: “Stock character: character types of a genre, e.g., the heroine disguised as a man in Elizabethan drama, the confidant, the hardboiled detective, the tightlipped sheriff, the girl next door, the evil hunters in a Tarzan movie, ethnic or racial stereotypes, the cruel stepmother and Prince Charming in fairy tales.”

Not high-brow enough for you? How about Georgetown: “With things like speech, dress, behavior and relations to other characters, stock characters act as cultural touchstone characters whose characteristics a particular audience has come to know and expect. Parody is a key component of situations amongst stock characters, rendering their cultural stereotypes more prominent.”

There does seem to be an argument made on several sites I’ve found that suggests that stock characters are Aristotelian in some sense… but for me, that makes them even more like stereotypes.

http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

And Wikipedia, for what it’s worth — which isn’t always much — seems to agree with my definition of “stock character.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_character

“Stock characters rely heavily on cultural types or names for their personality, manner of speech, and other characteristics. In their most general form, stock characters are related to literary archetypes, but they are often more narrowly defined.”

http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

You despise cliches, yet you like Neil Simon.*

For instinct, I’d say that noticing patterns is the instinct, but recognizing them is a higher-order skill. Analyzing them is farther up the chain. The purely instinctive are, to borrow from Kubrick, monkeys without a monolith. They know something’s going on, they know to hide when water falls from the sky. The monkeys who realize that dark clouds mean water is going to fall soon, they’re recognizing and processing the pattern. And the one’s who’ve touched the monolith and realized they could collect water the next time the clouds go dark, they’re analyzing and growing. Stimulus response is several orders of magnitude below pattern recognition.

Or, to go back to another example, anyone can turn a Rubik’s Cube. Others can see certain patterns and figure out how to solve one or two sides at a time. And then there are those who can look at a thoroughly mixed up cube and solve all six sides, sometimes without looking.

Candy has a negative effect. Of course you’d find it a better example, it agrees with your hypothesis. It still doesn’t counter the rainbow or the moment of beauty glimpsed in a heartbeat. Where is the negative effect in either of those? How is contemplating beauty–either intentionally designed or organic in nature–in any way, shape or form negative? If you stopped to look at a sunset once, does it mean you don’t ever need to stop and look at another?

I find that when we stop looking for patterns with meaning, when we accept the world around us without seeing, without questioning, without finding those moments of beauty, THAT’s when we become complacent, that’s when we’re just sheep moving from pen to pen. If there is no meaning to life and what goes on in it–if there is nothing to look for–then what’s the point in continuing? The obese, otiose mind is the one that closes its eyes and accepts life as it passes by.

Note, I equate the search for, recognition and analysis of patterns with the questioning of reality.

Another example. I look at the DC Metro map and see a subway system, beautifully realized visually. I recognize information, I see where the stops are and how to navigate the system. My older son saw it and realized it was a map, but didn’t understand how it worked or how it related to the actual city. My younger son, who was four at the time, drew his own variations on the map, calling it a rainbow city–he only knew it was a city because that’s where daddy was doing a play. Whose meaning is more worthwhile? Mine is more practical, my older son’s is intuitive, but the youngest’s idea of the rainbow city is beautiful.

We can abandon or develop the characters, the machinations of plot, the circumstances and cliches, but without some order, without some pattern, there’s no there there, only chaos. Where we evolve as storytellers is in our voice, our vision, it’s what we do with the patterns and rules and characters in the toy box. Yes, writers working by rote are a bad thing. We should aspire to be the writers who take those toys and find new ways to play.

Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with light entertainment. The lightest farce can be just as insightful as the darkest tragedy. They speak to different things, different patterns of human behavior if you will, but the best farces are only a few jokes away from tragedy. (I could make a joke about “Run For Your Wife” here, but I’m going to skip it. If you see it in the theatre listings, you should skip it, too.) Even if the only point is to give you release, to give you a few hours away from the everyday, to take your mind off the world around you, that’s a noble pursuit.

If every play were Stoppard and Becket and Pinter and Albee, rich with portent and meaning and intellectual gamesmanship, I’d take the theatre out back and put a bullet in its head. No, I’d empty the clip and then throw the gun.

I make no claim for Shear Madness being any good. It rises and falls on the casts and the audiences’ willingness to play along. Would I choose to see it if I didn’t know the actors? Almost certainly not. Does it have a right to exist? Why the hell not?

The light, the easy-to-follow, the stock cliche deus ex mechanicals like Shear exist as entry points, both in front of and behind the scenes. I know several people whose first live show was Shear, and they’ve gone on to become regular theatregoers since. Someone who sees Shear might be tempted to see another show elsewhere, maybe it’s Neil Simon’s Rumors. They enjoy that, maybe they try Lend Me a Tenor. And if they like that, maybe they get to Noises Off…

Here’s a play which is filled with stock characters and cliches, but Frayn turns them inside out and upside down and every which way, deconstructing every last element of farce. But they remain stock characters and cliches throughout. You and I might watch and see where Frayn’s pulling strings, we might appreciate how he’s subverting the form without destroying it, we can applaud his careful orchestration. But the same brilliant play can be viewed as a simple cartoon farce by someone who doesn’t see all of that.

Frayn lays out patterns, he sets up jokes and callbacks and running threads only to reverse them and tilt them out of balance, challenging you to remember the pattern he’s devised. A fair number of laughs come from where the action diverges from the pattern he’s conditioned you to recognize. It’s all misdirection and surprise. And yet, without the fluff of Simon or Cooney, without the basic empty froth of Shear or Three’s Company, Frayn’s script wouldn’t make any sense. Without simplicity, there can be no depth.

If we’re lucky, that person might wind up seeing Ayckbourne’s House and Garden, which takes it all to another level. Twice.

Do any of those plays mean anything? Shear is cotton candy, Rumors is amusing, Tenor is decent. Further up the line, there’s more depth. Frayn and Ayckbourne each bend the form and deconstruct it without tearing it apart. You could write a thesis on their three plays alone. But all of those plays could be seen by the same audience member who knows only that they laughed themselves silly.

The single best show I’ve seen in the last twelve months was a one man dell’arte show, 7(x1) Samurai. Not a single spoken word, everything played with simple stock characters, adapting Seven Samurai for one man, two masks and a bare stage. In the prologue, the actor demonstrates his motions and sounds–his patterns–so we’re able to follow the story throughout. I’ve seen the original film, but a number of people at the show hadn’t seen it, some didn’t even know what it was. But they followed the story, they could explain it pretty well afterward, and they were interested in watching the movie to see the full version. Again, simple characters, cliched moments, patterns shuffled and reshuffled and recognized in all their iterations. Did it mean anything? Not at all. But it was a rare thing of beauty to witness, and very funny to boot. David Gaines transformed the film’s story and retold it in his own unique voice, even if he didn’t say a word.

I’m happy to live in a world where a butterfly like 7(x1) Samurai can exist. Or Stoppard and Pinter et al. Or the basis for Noises Off. Or the rainbow city.

*I like Neil Simon, too.

http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

Okay: I think we’re seeing the same picture and emphasizing different parts of it, or attacking it in different ways. I also think our personal emotional biases are interfering somehow in the argument… in ways I can’t parse.

I’ll start by saying this: I completely disagree with your assessments of Simon, Frayn, etc.

I do despise clichés, yet love – not like – Neil Simon. You think these are irreconcilable positions; I think they’re redundant.

I’ll use The Odd Couple as my touch stone, since I just saw it, and it’s on my mind. Felix and Oscar are not, I insist, stock characters. They may seem that way, because so much time has passed since he wrote the play and there have been many imitators in the intervening years, but they just aren’t. The comedy in that play works – only really works – if they are played with full earnestness. (I would argue, in fact, that that’s true of ALL good comedy.) These are two real men, struggling to deal with divorce – a phenomenon that was only just entering the public discourse widely when his play hit the stage – and on top of that, they embody archetypal (I have to insist on that word here) urges toward order as a way of dealing with loss (Felix) and the dismantling of order into despair and depression (Oscar) as way of dealing with the same. (The other characters in the play are certainly thinly-drawn, but that’s fine; they are largely plot devices.)

The genius of Simon is that his one-liners hit at multiple levels: they work precisely because they touch delicate places inside of us AND function as pivot-points in the story. The reveal character even as they earn laughs.

To mistake his work as shallow – as either candy or a rainbow – is to underestimate it. The fact that it’s so difficult and complex is precisely why there aren’t many playwrights like him.

I could make very similar arguments about Noises Off and House & Garden, both of which I consider masterworks of comedy.

(The short version of Noises Off: it works precisely because over and over and over again, throughout the play, what you’re calling stock characters are consistently thwarted from actually making their “stockness” manifest. Their desires are impeded; we laugh because our clichés are disrupted, not because they’re relied upon.)

My point is this: comedy is not shallow. Comedy, done correctly, is immensely deep. Furthermore, comedy works precisely because what it does is disrupt patterns. That’s literally the formula for a joke: set up an expectation in your audience, then defy it. Laughter ensues. Comedy isn’t the rainbow; comedy is Roy G. BixW#$

Speaking of which: you question my use of “candy” rather than “rainbows,” asking me to identify the negative effect of rainbows. Of course looking at one rainbow is lovely. I will literally never forget the rainbow I saw when my plane touched down in Iceland. (Didn’t know they could be that big and bright!) But if you sit around staring at rainbows all the time, you get eaten by lions. They are just as dangerous as candy in large quantities.

You said the following: “I find that when we stop looking for patterns with meaning, when we accept the world around us without seeing, without questioning, without finding those moments of beauty, THAT’s when we become complacent, that’s when we’re just sheep moving from pen to pen. If there is no meaning to life and what goes on in it–if there is nothing to look for–then what’s the point in continuing? The obese, otiose mind is the one that closes its eyes and accepts life as it passes by.”
I think you’re conflating several things here. I want to parse your sentences a bit.

You call it “looking for patterns with meaning,” and I think you’re representing what humans do inaccurately. We’re hard-wired to see patterns; we see them all the time. What we do – what we should do – is look for meaning in the patterns, not look for patterns with meaning. That involves a great deal of questioning, and I agree that it’s a good thing – in fact, I would say it is literally THE thing that is our greatest purpose as humans.

You seem to think the beauty is only in the meaning behind the pattern. I think there’s beauty at all levels: in the pattern itself (whether that pattern has meaning or not) and in the meaning, too. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t get seduced too often by the shallow beauty if there’s no deeper beauty behind it.

Then, however, you invoke the “meaning to life” question – and honestly, this is where we differ significantly, I think. As an unrepentant ontological materialist, I do not believe there IS meaning to life. Life, I believe, is inherently meaningless. The only meaning that exists, for me, is the meaning we create: largely by telling stories.

Note that I think this kind of “meaning” is different from the “meaning” we refer to within patterns. That latter kind of meaning, inside some patterns, I would call truth, or perhaps the laws of the universe. Chaos theory, quantum mechanics, etc.

None of this, mind you, is to argue in any way that the shallow beauty in small doses – the light entertainment you refer to – is in any way bad or non-human. I know very well that we all need moments of respite, believe me. I watch CSI for mine. And I know the delight your youngest son experiences in seeing the DC map – I’ve even seen my little baby do a version of the same thing. But those moments just aren’t enough.

You say you’d whack theater if it lost all its light entertainment; I say I’d whack it just as hard if that’s all it was. Honestly, though, most of what I see in theater – to my great satisfaction – is anything but light entertainment… even, I insist, Neil Simon. (Haven’t seen the dell-arte show you reference, so I won’t comment.)

Do I think Neil Simon can serve as a gateway drug that will end up getting somebody to see, say, Sarah Kane? Maybe, but I’m doubtful. I definitely don’t agree that we can’t have Noises Off without Three’s Company, or that we can’t have Stoppard without Noises Off. I think we can’t have any of them without the hard-wiring to recognize patterns. Without the ability and desire to look behind those patterns and find truth (not meaning), we can’t have Noises Off or Stoppard… we can, however, still have Three’s Company, which I could live without. Sure, fine, as a momentary diversion: but one cannot live off of Jack Tripper alone, lest one be eaten by lions.

http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

You seem to have a binary view here, that I’m saying “only this beauty” or “only light comedy.” Not at all.

I’m not advocating sitting around looking at rainbows all the time, or that that’s the only kind of beauty to appreciate. It’s just one type of beauty and well worthy of appreciation. And of course you shouldn’t watch them to the exclusion of all else. Even so, being eaten by lions is still a secondary, unrelated event. That’s like saying, “He was eating candy when he walked off the cliff and died. Stupid candy.”

Nor did I say such moments are enough. For instance, the three interpretations of the Metro map are all valid. One is useful, one grasps the basic idea and one is pure beauty. But in all the time I’ve spent in DC, I’d never thought of the Metro that way, not once. I appreciated the elegant simplicity of the design, but that was it. Now, whenever I enter the Metro, I think of the rainbow city. His vision has added dimension–and joy–to my experience every time I ride. Joy! On the Metro! Insanity.

When I said “patterns with meaning,” I did mean the meaning within those patterns in among all the other random patterns we see. It’s what I meant by the example of the monkeys and the monolith. We are able to recognize and analyze patterns for meaning and practical use. We transcend the hard-wiring, it’s the difference between existing and living, between animal and man.

Of course, we shouldn’t be seduced by shallow beauty, but we shouldn’t ignore it or insist anyone else ignore it. That’s how your original post read to me. Who knows what the simple beauty of numbers lining up or colors in a row might unlock in the right mind? I’m not saying it would unlock any deeper meaning to that specific pattern, but it might trigger something else entirely. Haven’t you ever gotten a story idea from a completely unrelated sight or sound?

As for the farces, that’s essentially what I was saying. Yes, comedy can be deep, and yes, it is all about thwarting expectations. But we do have to have those expectations in the first place. If we don’t have an assumption of who these stock characters are, then defying those assumptions can’t happen. Yes, Noises Off would still be a funny play–he lays it out beautifully in the beginning–but because we enter into it with a working knowledge of this kind of comedy, because we know the stock characters he’s playing with and the tropes he’s using, he can take those thwarted expectations to ridiculous extremes. In disrupting the cliches, he does rely on them and our awareness of them. By aping the shallow, he creates depth and dimension.

Three’s Company is cut-rate road show Feydeau. Would I watch it now? No, but I ate it up growing up. Did I need it to watch Fawlty Towers? No, but knowledge of the form enhanced my appreciation of where Cleese took it. Did I need either to then enjoy Noises Off? No, but again, they gave me the template to expect the cliches and thus the laugh when those expectations were thwarted. They also gave me a deeper appreciation of the structure behind the script. If Three’s Company had been my only exposure to bedroom farce, I’d still have had enough groundwork to more fully enjoy Noises Off.

Let’s take a different route. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a fun show. If you see it without any knowledge of Hamlet, it’s still fun but makes little sense. With Hamlet, it becomes brilliant. With Godot on top, it becomes excruciatingly brilliant. Not that Hamlet or Godot are stock or cliched, but in Stoppard’s rarefied realm, they’re the groundwork you need to really appreciate the show. It is also a deeply funny show, as you well know. Best of all, it then enhances and adds dimension to the other plays in return, it changes the way you see them ever after.

I won’t argue with the Odd Couple, except to say that while I do love Felix and Oscar and agree with your assessment of them, I still don’t like the play precisely because everything around them is so thinly drawn. It’s the play when he began to realize what he could really do–I’d say his voice was transforming from stock characters and sitcom situations even then, it’s what led to his great ’80s plays later. Before that, not so much. After that, he still coasted regularly. When it all came together, it could be amazing. (Want a real kick? Try reading The Sunshine Boys as a drama. It becomes a devastating story about Alzheimer’s long before anyone worried about it. That’s a great script just waiting to be rediscovered.)

And I never said theatre had to only be light entertainment. We need all the shadings, not just the rainbow red and blue but crimson and navy and cornflower and puce. We need Pinter as much as Simon, Becket as much as Frayn. Sure, some people may spend more time enjoying comedy than drama or vice-versa, but that’s a good thing. Is Simon a gateway to Sarah Kane? Probably not. But you never know. It’s not a series of binary switches, it’s a matter of infinite diversity in infinite combinations. (I do know I never need to see another Sarah Kane play, that’s for sure.)

Yes, I did just go Trek there. Shut up.

Finally, the other meaning of “meaning.” That’s one where we’ll just have to disagree. Sure, I can create meaning in my life through the stories I craft. (And hopefully, I do.) But why am I in this place at this time, why have I been programmed to see the world in the way I do and craft the stories I do? How do the experiences of my life and my family’s lives inform the work I craft now? In the story of my life, am I Frodo or Tom Bombadil? (I hope not the latter, because I’d like to be in the movie.) How did I get to where I am and where is this road leading? If the only meaning to life is that which I create, that could be seen as egocentric. Yes, I am the most important person in my own life story, but then what’s the point of all these other people? Why are they here and why do they bother with me? And vice-versa?

Do I know what meaning I’m looking for? Of course not. It’s part of why I do write, reporting in on where I am today, describing this tiny glimpse of the infinite over here, a shooting star over there. It’s why I love the idea of string theory, the thought of several dimensions beyond what we can sense, the idea that this beautiful mathematical construct might actually work, the fact that there’s still no way to prove that it does.

Then again, we all know the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is really 42. But those are just numbers…

http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

I think what underlies our disagreement here — which I maintain is a semantic one, largely — is our difference of opinion about whether there’s any answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Douglas Adams, like me a secular humanist non-believer, chose 42 as the answer because a) It was — and he said this on the record — “the funniest two-digit number,” and b) Because it poked fun at precisely the sort of response-to-coincidence with which I started this post. I share his worldview. The fact that I do informs my entire argument. I think the fact that you don’t — that you believe there’s a meaning and purpose to the universe (or am I reading you wrong?) informs yours.

I’m not saying you’re wrong; I’m saying our arguments are grounded in (and distinguished by) our worldviews.

I’m also not reading you as having a binary view; neither, I add, do I have one myself. I’m simply saying that we should eat our dinner first, then have dessert (or at least eat far more carrots than we eat, say, Snickers — and I love Snickers).

Or, to phrase hte same thought in terms of the rainbows/lions metaphor (about which I think you are misreading me, though perhaps this will clarify): look, enjoy, but don’t linger TOO long and get distracted, or a lion will sneak up on you and eat you.

About almost everything else we’ve said, I re-iterate that I think we’re largely making the same assessment, but emphasizing different qualities.

Finally, I also think our vastly different impressions of Sarah Kane are also a result of this difference in worldview. I consider her early death a tremendous loss, and I think her greatest offering to us as a literary community was a masterful (and subtle) subversion of cliche, stock characters, plot expectations, and every other literary convention we’ve been discussing. If only she’d had time to write more, and get even better at it.

Now: let’s argue something that really matters, like which Star Trek series is the best…

http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

Classic. But “The Visitor” from DS9 might be my favorite episode of all.
http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

Whew. Thought we were going to have to arm-wrestle. Yes — classic.

I love “The Visitor,” too… not sure I’d choose it as my favorite, but honestly, I don’t know that I could choose a favorite at all…
http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

What “The Visitor” says about fathers and sons, creation and loss, is just tremendous. It’s maybe the only DS9 I’d put in my top five. And I love Patrick Stewart, as you know; “The Inner Light” would surely be in there. But yeah, classic’s the thing. It’s the rewatchability factor. (I’m still stunned by how much I enjoyed the recent film, too, because all the advance word had me convinced I’d loathe it with the fire of a 1,000 suns.)
http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

I love “The Inner Light,” too, because it’s all Patrick.

For me re: the classic, it’s the re-watchability and the specificity of the characters. And I, too, was surprised by how much I loved the new film…
http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

But yes, it is mainly a matter of semantics and worldview. I tossed in the 42 for precisely that reason. On the other hand, maybe if Adams had paid more attention to patterns and plotting, the series might not have gotten so boring so quickly…

Of course, don’t linger and be distracted. But linger as long as you like as long as you’re aware of the world around you. The rainbow is not inherently bad for you the way the candy is.

What if the dinner is the beginning of the pattern, the hint of the idea, and dessert is the follow-through, the depth, the sweet that enhances the savory, the perfect finish to the idea?

As for Kane, I don’t know about masterful. But I’ve always wondered if she’d be produced as much without the tragic backstory.
http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

I don’t think the candy’s inherently bad for you, either. That’s a relic of Puritanism. Candy is simply sugar. Sugar is simply calories. We need calories to survive. Getting some of those calories from sugar is perfectly fine. Too much candy = bad. Too much rainbow = bad. They are perfectly, in my mind, equivalent.

Now… please don’t say you think Adams got boring… he’s in my too-much-love-to-criticize category…

I do think Kane’s work is exaggerated by the backstory… but I also think Blasted is brilliant and she had immense gifts that would have hopefully developed.
http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

Ain’t no such thing as too much rainbow. You limit the rainbow, you limit the potential joy. Again, not saying look at the rainbow to the exclusion of all else. But no reason not to enjoy the rainbow.

And Adams. Sigh. I love his work on Doctor Who, I love the original Hitchhiker’s book and tv version. I even enjoyed Starship Titanic. (Met him briefly when it came out, a lovely man.) But the trilogy’s about four books too long for me. That’s about as much as I’d criticize, though; I’d rather reread them than a lot of other things, goodness knows.
http://www.davidjloehr.com/ David J. Loehr

A thought. If Sarah Kane had had more rainbow, maybe she’d still be here.
http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

Again, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I do think there’s such a thing as too much rainbow. A) I think it would nauseate me, and B) I think we’d fail to appreciate them if they were everywhere all the time. I have just enough rainbow in my in life as is. I like them rare.

That’s ultimately the lesson of Wonka, too.

But I’m not saying to not enjoy the rainbow, either. Don’t fail to notice it, by all means, and drink it it. But don’t overdo it.

I love every word Adams wrote. I even read The Salmon of Doubt. Twice.
http://www.suilebhan.com Gwydion Suilebhan

As for Sarah, yes — she probably failed to notice any rainbow at all. That’s also sad.