tears gather in the eyes of the Player
his face loses color
when he is once again alone on the stage
Hamlet condemns himself
the Player could energize his emotions
on the basis of a fiction
while he
Hamlet
“has the motive and the cue to passion..
(to) drown the stage with tears”
has been unable to rouse himself to action
this incident
confounds Hamlet’s earlier dichotomy
between being and seeming
complicating the simplicity of the distinction
because an act of seeming
the implementation of
“actions that a man might play”
can stimulate the body to respond
as though the stimulus was actual
rather than a fiction
actors understand the phenomenon
of experiencing a physical reaction to behavior
an imitation of experience
rather than the experience itself
of having the body react to its own performance
is such a reaction
not closely analogous
to the experience of a spectator
whose identification with the situation
provokes tears or some other physical reaction?
in some neurological mechanism
that I do not wholly understand
as the imagination processes the data of a fiction
data that if real would produce a physical response
the system suppresses
the information that reveal this data to be false
the kind of framing information
that inhibit the physical response
allowing the spectators body
to respond as if the stimuli were real
if the actor’s body
however
responds to the situation as if it were real
if the actor’s behavior
triggers an emotional response within the actor’s body
the aesthetic lie
–the fiction–
is transmitted by signifiers that are
in themselves
truthful
in this case
is the signifier true
and the signified a fiction?
the physiologically real manifestation
produced by an actor’s body
functioning as referent
to an unreal situation
and the unreal body of the fictional character?
it may be useful to use the term displacement
conceive of a real stimulus to emotion
that
in the process of building an imitation
is displaced from the actor’s psyche
into the fiction
in this case the signs of emotion
the signifiers
would be authentic
the signified would also be authentic
and the overall image produced by the actor
a fictional
inauthentic
unreal
fueled or enabled in some way
by the authenticity of the actor’s emotion
whose source lies in the actor’s own experience
in any case
this would be the case in only some instances
and the spectator would be unable
to determine the source of the actor’s emotion
what enables the actor
to produce the signs of emotion
remains in the process of perceiving the aesthetic event
outside of the spectator’s concerns
the source of the actor’s emotion
is not available to be “read”
remaining part of the inaccessible real
the gap of inaccessibility that divides
beholder
from the actual body of the actor
in the same sense
while the chemistry of processing and using pigment
or the techniques of execution in bronze casting
amplify my understanding of the artist’s work
these issues do not inform directly
my experience of painting or sculpture
one of the principal conditions
of a work of art
for me
is its accessibility
through a perception
of whatever external surface
it presents to the beholderaI should note, however, that in modernist drama, as in modernist painting, one of the subjects of aesthetic work is the process of making art. Pirandello’s theatre trilogy works within his general paradigm of the illusory and the real but these plays use the theater itself as a structural metaphor to display the formation of illusions and their fragility. Brecht’s drama displays the mechanics of the theater in order to enable the spectator to see that the playwright and the actors are using the fiction to comment upon it, to foreground the discrepancy between the intellect of the actors and the ethical choices of the fictional characters. However, in both Brecht and Pirandello the theatricality I discuss is not the exposure of the processes in which this aesthetic event has been formulated but the theatricality is, instead, a performed artifice, an enacted unconventionality written and designed. The Brechtian actor’s comment on the behavior of the character is a displacement of the playwright’s comment. If the actor’s judgment of the character differed from the playwright’s, the playwright’s evaluation would prevail.
…
References