#elinor fuchs

[aliveandfullofjoy]

We must make the assumption that in the world of the play there are no accidents. Nothing occurs “by chance,” not even chance. In that case, nothing in the play is without significance. Correspondingly, the play asks us to focus upon it a total awareness, to bring our attention and curiosity without the censorship of selective interpretation, “good taste,” or “correct form.” Before making judgments, we must ask questions. This is the deepest meaning of the idea, often-repeated but little understood, that the study of art shows us how to live.

—Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play” (x)

[besmirchthis]

The post-Beckett spectator has been trained by these two indelible images: the landscape that knows more than the figures in it, and the blank gaze of the unseeing figure in a vanished world. This spectator has grasped the groundlessness that so discomfited the early Beckett audience: the collapse of boundaries between human and world, inside and outside, foreground and background.

Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character

[suchstuffasdreams]

We must make the assumption that in the world of the play there are no accidents. Nothing occurs “by chance,” not even chance. In that case, nothing in the play is without significance. Correspondingly, the play asks us to focus upon it a total awareness, to bring our attention and curiosity without the censorship of selective interpretation, “good taste,” or “correct form.” Before making judgments, we must ask questions. This is the deepest meaning of the idea, often-repeated but little understood, that the study of art shows us how to live.

Elinor Fuchs “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play”

[whatever-floats-the-goat]

This is something truly extraordinary. 

[aluutte]

Putting together space, time, the natural world and the social world, elements that change and those that don't, you are discovering the "myth." Plays are full of archetypal places—castles, gardens, forests, roads, islands, green worlds, dream worlds, storms, night scenes, and on and on. If the play starts in a palace, goes on to a moonlit forest, and returns to the palace the next day or night (which is it? day or night?), what does that progression tell you? How is the final palace scene conditioned by the night journey into the forest? Is the world of the play at the end of the play a transformed world? Or is it the same world returned to "normal," with minor adjustments? Worlds stand or fall apart on your answer.

Elinor Fuchs, "EF's Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play"

[katiebec]

A play is not a flat work of literature, not a description in poetry of another world,but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space. Language is only one part of this world. Those who think too exclusively in terms of language find it hard to read plays. When you 'see' this other world, when you experience its space-time dynamics, its architectonics, then you can figure out the role of language in it.

Elinor Fuchs, "Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play," Theater 34:2 Summer 2004.

I do find it hard to read plays, particularly plays written in language that does not immediately read as "poetic" to me. (So I do like reading plays by the likes of Shakespeare, Naomi Wallace, August Wilson; while I tend to space out or rush through while reading, say, contemporary four-character comedies set in NYC apartments. I'd rather just see those.) I'm not a particularly language-based director, though, which perhaps has something to do with my training in devised/ensemble/movement work. This essay provides many questions to ask of a play (before you start analyzing its character development or plot structure) that, in scripted work, may help me marry my interests in linguistics, poetic, visual, sensory, phenomenological aspects of theatrical experience.

[mariastuartdramaturgy]

Referenced by our director during the first read---check it out!