A while back, my dear friend Patrick Kilpatrick prodded me to consider, here on my blog, the ways in which scientists and those of us who make theater might be similar to one another. I said yes immediately; as an extremely science-friendly playwright, I hoped that in thinking about the subject, I’d find at least a few similarities. You see… secretly I wish I WAS a scientist. (Don’t tell anyone. This is just between us!) I even tried to be a physicist, in fact, when I was younger, but I didn’t have what it took. So the thought that I might actually be a “theater scientist” of some sort had me immediately tantalized.
Having admitted my biases—but unsure about how I might correct for them—I shall now proceed to attempt to answer the question at hand: sadly (for me), I don’t think we’re anything like scientists at all.
Consider the term scientist. A fair (I believe) definition: anyone who uses the scientific method to acquire new knowledge about the nature of existence. I would venture to guess that there aren’t many theater practitioners who fit this description. Oh, there may be a few folks who use the scientific method to devise new means by which a scene might lit, for instance, but in the main? The day-to-day work of theater seems very different to me.
But I had to consider the question in a slightly less abstract way, too, before I gave up entirely.
How, in practice, do scientists do what they do?
- They hypothesize about something they believe might be true.
- They devise experimental means by which they can gather evidence in support of (or in contradiction to) their hypotheses.
- They conduct the experiments they’ve devised.
- They analyze the data gathered by those experiments.
- They write up and share the results of their work.
By contrast, how do I do what I do when I make plays?
- I imagine a new story that doesn’t exist… one that may or may not, incidentally, observe the known laws of the physical universe.
- I design a simulation of that story (i.e., write a play).
- I work with others to create a variable simulation of that story (i.e., produce the play). Note: I consider the production a “simulation” of the real thing because the real thing only exists in my head; I call it “variable” because no two performances are the same.
- I observe the effects of the variable, simulated story on audiences.
- I adjust the simulation as desired to create different effects (though I would argue that we are only barely beginning to know how to do this) and re-run it for several weeks.
Again, very little in common. The key difference is this: an experiment is designed to either disprove or support a hypothesis. Simulations—productions of plays—aren’t designed to disprove or support anything. There is no hypothesis at all.
The bottom line, for me, is that while scientists are trying to acquire new knowledge about the universe, I’m trying to share that knowledge. I consider it my job to create new memes (not internet memes, mind you, but the real thing) that will out-compete what I believe to be some of the most destructive memes in our culture. I am, in other words, much more like the stuff an evolutionary biologist might study than an actual evolutionary biologist.
Which makes me wonder… might an evolutionary biologist have something to teach me about my work? (Or the social science equivalent: whoever studies how memes propagate?) I would like to believe that might be possible. And that perhaps by studying with such a person, I might become a real scientist after all.
I believe theatre and science are more alike than you acknowledge
here. Theatre is a way of knowing;
science is a way of knowing. Theatre is
a way of understanding the relationships between humans and the world and between
one another; science (especially social science) is a way of understanding the
relationships between humans and the world and between one another.
What is a rehearsal room if not a laboratory. What is the hypothesis? It could be anything. The scene is rehearsed; actors experiment;
directors try different configurations on stage. The hypothesis is tested when the scene is
run. But, then the hypothesis is
re-tested in front of an audience.
Audience engagement and response is used an a gauge in the preview
period to determine if the knowledge inherent in the work is being effectively
communicated.
I am not saying that theatre IS science, but rather that
making theatre (or dance – see link following) has analogues to science and
scientific process.
As to the twitter question of “objective truth,” I would say
that science can provide the “best” explanation for phenomena, not the
necessarily the “right” one. A look at the
history of science (or a stumble through Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions”) will provide numerous examples of scientific “truths” being
overturned.
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_bohannon_dance_vs_powerpoint_a_modest_proposal.html
Thanks for sharing! I really just completely disagree, however.
Even if I accept the claim that both theater and (social) science are ways of understanding the relationships between humans, I’d have to respond by asking about the NATURE of those ways… which are seriously different from one another.
A playwright might “observe” human nature and write play that reveals the results of that observation… but the resulting work is thoroughly subjective and unverifiable. A play isn’t an experiment that can be repeated over and over again by different experimenters. It’s a unique and esoteric thing. By contrast, a scientist must at least strive for objectivity, whether you agree it’s achievable or not. (I gather you don’t; I do.)
Your comparison, furthermore, of a rehearsal or performance on one hand and an experiment on the others suggests to me that we are defining the term “experiment” rather differently. To say that the hypothesis “could be anything” doesn’t answer the question of what it is. So I ask you: what hypothesis is being tested in a rehearsal or performance of, say, Cloud 9 or Uncle Vanya? And how does the rehearsal or performance either disprove or support that hypothesis? This seems to me to be a rather thin comparison. We might WANT them to be the same, but at root, they aren’t.
I also don’t believe that a play is a way of communicating knowledge. I think it’s a way of communicating a lot of things, but knowledge least among them.
As for objective truth… I think our difference here is a matter of degree.
I write a lot about science in my day job and, in a few cases, that has seeped into my playwriting. However, I find myself surprisingly neutral on this question.
The biggest parallel I see between theatre (and a lot of art) and the scientific method is that they are both good ways of asking important questions. And neither of them promise answers.
Although from a comment that Ari made at my talkback, I have a feeling that Gwydion might not hold w/ the need for a strong central question in a play.
I write a lot about science in my day job and, in a few cases, that has seeped into my playwriting. However, I find myself surprisingly neutral on this question.
The biggest parallel I see between theatre (and a lot of art) and the scientific method is that they are both good ways of asking important questions. And neither of them promise answers.
Although from a comment that Ari made at my talkback, I have a feeling that Gwydion might not hold w/ the need for a strong central question in a play.
I definitely agree that they are both good methods of inquiry. But scientific inquiry needs to be focused for it to be effective (which does not mean that the scientist shouldn’t remain open to “aberrant” results), while theatrical inquiry should, I believe, be more open.
As for Ari’s comment: I think he was just digging at me… either having spent a few hours working with me on HOT & COLD, the central question of which is (if it exists) hard to pin down, or just for (in general) being a guy who wants to challenge convention. Either way, I didn’t mind being teased 🙂
Late to the party, but MUST respond.
Theatrical writing is EXACTLY like science. What scientists produce are models, attempts to create a small system that resembles some facet of the natural world as closely as possible. When this is done well, we can translate the output of the model in terms of the natural system — we call these predictions, and a good model is one that produces lots of true predictions for the slice of reality it is meant to represent. Models are simplifications in that they can only account for so many independent variables, so many different factors, but a successful model says something about the ways in which these factors actually do relate to one another in the full complex, messy universe. When a model succeeds, it gives us understanding about the nature of things we did not have before.
In the same way, what is the playwright’s craft? Create an artificial world populated with characters who are models of real people. It is a simplified world with a small number of characters and relations, each of the characters having properties, but not full biographies. Create relations and interactions among them which give rise to situations in which they are forced to act and react. A good play in one in which we take this miniature model of life and see if there is truth — if the actions and reactions are those which we find to be faithful to the actual humanity of these limited being, then we can look at them in a way that gives us understanding about the nature of things we did not have before.
Scientists do not think their models are literally true, but reflective of truth. The same goes for good drama. The most talented of playwrights have always been a sort of applied sociologists.
SO glad you weighed in. I’ve been disagreeing with you longer than almost anyone in my life. (38 years now, right?) Why break with tradition? 🙂
The crucial difference between the two models is that we KNOW in advance how the theatrical model is going to turn out. There is nothing to be learned. When a scientist creates a model of some objective truth, and sets that model whirling, it may in fact do something very surprising and unpredictable. This never happens in the theater, except in improvisation… and that’s not really a model at all.
We must discuss this in person.