2—
Actors and Objects

Invisible Actors:
O'Neill, the Method, and the Masks of "Character"

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.
—Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night

The realistic location of character in a sustaining, possibly determining stage world inextricably entwines character and environment at the moment it dialecticizes them. This thematic interdependence is both the hallmark of modern realistic drama since Ibsen and Strindberg and the main problem of realistic theatrical production: to preserve and express the romantic interiority of "character" in a stage medium that compromises it, exhausts it, or simply has no means of speaking it. As we have seen, realistic drama and theater are traced by a concern to relate visibility to objectification, and privacy to empowerment, strategies of representation complicit in broader social attitudes toward the purpose and scope of identity and action. The drama is concerned with character and environment, but the theater expresses this concern in its own materials—actors and objects. Much as the drama identifies the privacy of character in the romantic language of an evanescent "self," so the stage is driven to discover a practice for making this self articulate in performance. It is hard for us, perhaps, to see realistic acting as rhetorical, in large measure because the charismatic force of bodily display tends to overpower our sense that acting is a mode of interpreting and of signifying, as well as a mode of being and performing. Realistic drama particularly requires a performance

rhetoric that makes its thematic emphasis on privacy and interiority legible, and legible in ways consistent with the mastering integration of the mise-en-scène. As acting responds to the problems of realistic characterization, so scene design, the reproduction of theatrical space as a fictive locale, evokes the dramatic "environment" through the work of stage practice. The realistic mise-en-scène is traced by the impossibility of finding an authentic privacy for the performer and providing it with authoritative expression in a material, detheatricalized environment. The dialectic between dramatic character and its environment, and between acting and its material stage, is also replicated by the audience of realism. For the theater constructs its audience by inverting this relationship: the audience's untheatricalized freedom before the spectacle is assured by suppressing the determining role of its environment, the theatrical milieu that shapes the process of its performance.

In this chapter, I want to consider how realistic acting and staging are complicit in the production of two zones of indeterminacy, of "privacy" characteristic of the rhetoric of realism: the dramatic "character" and the interpreting "spectator." This will first involve a reading of the theory of realistic acting and the elaboration of this theory offered by Eugene O'Neill's masked drama. I then turn to the use of material space, the rhetoric of the stage set in American expressionist plays (Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine ) and realist theater (Rice's Street Scene , Sidney Kingsley's Dead End ) of the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, I argue that the plays of Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard, despite their brilliantly disorienting surfaces, tend to confirm the priorities of this rhetoric, a rhetoric that is more directly confronted in the plays of Edward Bond.

To approach the thematics of character and environment in realistic drama through their articulation as the actors and objects of the realistic theater is to ask how the drama operates with and through the machinery of its stage. The realistic drama's obsession with the disclosure of elusive or unconscious motives is made challenging as an acting problem by the necessity of avoiding explicitly "theatrical" means of realizing them—the passionate arias of melodramatic acting or the explosive rant of the heroic mode. Yet the realistic claim to verisimilitude ultimately requires much more than underplayed acting. At its most extreme, it requires the performers to refrain from acting, to become identical with and thereby transpar-

ent to "character," in much the way that the practical properties and furnishings become transparent to the objects they signify in the drama. Yet the way that the realistic actor would finally come to disappear has more to do with the discovery of a private zone of untheatrical space, a privacy that enables and complicates the actor's submission to the mise-en-scène and that reciprocates the privacy assigned to the offstage audience. The difficulty of producing oneself as a public object, a task that the realistic actor shares with James Tyrone, Willy Loman, and other realistic characters, makes the discovery of this privileged interiority the chief dramatic and theatrical problem of the realistic mode. In Philip Fisher's remarkable phrase, the problem of realistic acting is a version of the problem confronted by the characters the actor plays, the necessary and difficult act of "disappearing in public" (155).

How does acting in the realistic mode of Stanislavski and the American Method textualize the actor's behavior, the character's behavior, and the behavior of the spectator who observes?^[1] The familiar history of Stanislavski in America is both vexed and a trifle tedious: the constant revision of the "system" by Stanislavski and his disciples; the endless bickering between Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and others over its Americanization; the limitations of Method style when applied to drama outside the repertoire of modern realistic drama—surely these controversies have lost their teeth. I don't, of course, mean to dismiss the important differences between Stanislavski and Moscow Art Theater progeny like Vsevolod Meyerhold, Richard Boleslavsky, and Eugene Vakhtangov, or to

[1] Joseph R. Roach has suggested that the Method's preeminence in American acting owes something to its paradigmatic function in Thomas Kuhn's sense. Recalling that paradigmatic texts are "sufficiently powerful to deflect a group of practitioners away from competing theories and methods of investigation" and that "they are open-ended enough to create a whole new set of problems" for the newly defined group of practitioners, Roach proposes considering An Actor Prepares as such a text: "When one views Constantin Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares (1936) in this light, with its American proponents of Method Acting serving as the redefined group of practitioners and emotion memory providing the puzzling anomaly, one can see why Kuhn's description of communities of scientific knowledge might provide an illuminating analogy for the history of acting theory" (The Player's Passion 14). For an overview of the Method in America, see Gray; for the classic account of its influence on the Group Theater, see Clurman. On Stanislavski's conception of acting, see Worthen, Idea 143–53.

homogenize the variety of approaches to Stanislavskian realism developed from the 1930s through the 1960s. But think for a moment of the terms we use to describe, and to prescribe, craftsmanship in acting: the necessity of acting in response to the "given circumstances"; mental and physical concentration and relaxation; the analysis of a scene into behavioral "objectives," even "beats" of desire; how actors work in the moment and "live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the play" (Bruder et al. 5). As a shorthand for the Method, these notions have come to permeate our conception of acting, at the very least of a certain kind of acting, and we may find it difficult to denaturalize them from our sense of theater itself, to see them in history as the product of a specifically modern, "realistic" innovation. Robert Lewis, for example, defending the Method from its detractors and from its own excesses, argues that the Method applies "to every kind of acting —good acting—and not narrowly to realistic acting as such" (xii). Lewis is echoed by Charles Marowitz, who praises Stanislavskian performance by finding in its outlines a universal technique of the stage: "Each time an actor is performing with credibility and without recourse to cliché, motivated from within and unshakably involved in his role, he is practising the Method and affirming the precepts of Constantin Stanislavsky. . . . Because the Method is not an invention or a modern discovery, it is simply an articulation of truths which have existed for centuries" (Method 36–37). Institutionalized in the training of drama schools, in college and university theater programs, and in the practice of the professional stage, the ethical orientation and many of the specific practices associated with the Method have become so pervasive as to describe a kind of basic equipment for acting. More important, the Method describes what it is we look for as an audience when we look for dramatic "character" in the realistic theater, and how we look for it as well.

Like all modes of stage production, the Method prescribes a body of techniques for producing a significant relation between the actor's stage performance and the fiction of dramatic character, relations that imply a certain range of interpretive activity for the spectator as well. The work of Stanislavski and his inheritors was instrumental in defining the form and process of realistic performance, and it is not surprising to find the Method traced by a familiar rhetoric. Like realistic drama and its theater, the Method

insists on the transparency of its means of signification, on the repression of the actor's work as a legitimate object of the audience's attention, on an economy of meaning identified exclusively with the fictive drama the performers produce, on the exclusion of the spectators from the spectacle. The principal feature of Method characterization is that "character" is withdrawn from the audience, produced as an object ideally removed from the interference of the observing public. The actor turns his or her attention away from the audience in order to objectify the performance and to subject "character" to the scenic integration of the dramatic setting and of the ensemble of performers/characters. This integration of performers into the setting rapidly becomes a goal of realistic performance, and Stanislavski provides its classic formulation: an actor must seek the "public solitude" necessary to confront "the abnormal circumstance of an actor's creative work," the fact that "it must be done in public" (278). Much like realistic characters, actors in this mode perform for an audience that cannot be acknowledged, for to recognize the audience would be to render the performance theatrical, to be cast in an oddly inauthentic, spectatorial role, indicating a performance that is not fully inhabited. As the authors of a recent handbook remind us, this "realistic" attitude toward the audience has been fully naturalized as the condition of theater in our era: "Audiences are intelligent and highly suggestible; theatregoers come to the theatre to immerse themselves in illusion. The more attention you call to any theatrical artifice, the less the audience will accept it, because you are calling attention to the artificial nature of the theatre as a whole" (Bruder et al. 8).

The Method's strategies for interpreting textual features and for representing them as significant behavior are part of the assertion of an objective relationship between the audience and the stage: "character" is represented as an organic and distinct object in the field of the spectator's attention to the drama. The actor takes his cue from the director, who unifies the play's action in terms of a "super-objective" or "spine," phrasing as an abstract theme the activity to be accomplished by the performance as a whole. The actor finds his own "objectives" as a way of producing character in relation to, and as a vehicle for, these thematic goals. As Lorrie Hull describes in her textbook of the Strasberg Method:

He asks questions such as: What is the theme of the play? (What is the play about?) Does his character have a main action (spine) or driving force? How might a character's main action be expressed in each of the character's scenes?
(148)

Such determinations—theme, spine, main action, driving force—clearly arise from the kind of questions that are trained on the text, a paradigm for the production of "character" specific to realistic theatricality. Stanislavskian performance pursues a "life in art," a life that is necessarily progressive or processual. By conceiving the action as directed toward a single motivational "objective," Method performance integrates and subordinates characterization to the static harmonies of the scenic milieu and the dramatic theme.

Determined by its spine of objectives, character in Method performance becomes an object to be plotted, much in the manner of Hedda Gabler's pistols or Blanche Dubois's luggage. We can more readily see the critical consequences of the Method in the light of a more explicitly "literary" interpretive practice. Francis Fergusson's landmark study The Idea of a Theater is a case in point, for Fergusson readily combines a Method approach to script reading with a New Critic's sense of the organic text. First published in 1949 at the height of the Method's impact, The Idea of a Theater presents as its central heuristic the conception of "analogies of action" latent within a play's language, characterization, and scenic structure. In their repetitive combinations, these analogies articulate the play's organic dramatic form, for each component works to realize the play's spine of action and meaning. The spine

is to be used to indicate the direction which an analysis of a play should take. It points to the object which the dramatist is trying to show us, and we must in some sense grasp that if we are to understand his complex art: plotting, characterization, versification, thought, and their coherence. For this purpose practical rules may be devised, notably that of the Moscow Art Theater. They say that the action of a character or a play must be indicated by an infinitive phrase, e.g., in the play Oedipus , "to find the culprit." This device does not amount to a definition but it leads the performer to the particular action which the author intended.
(230)

The actor's performance is determined by a single thematic, one that claims its origin in the dramatic action or in authorial inten-

tion. And much as Stanislavski does, Fergusson—who was trained in the Method by Richard Boleslavksy and Maria Ouspenskaya at the American Laboratory Theater—locates these objectives in the demands of the text itself, rather than in the critical procedures used to discover them, the infinitive phrases, the analogical correlations of a character's immediate activities with thematic abstractions, and so on. "Character," like the objects of the set, becomes a vehicle for the production of a single, integrated "meaning," a theme or spine achieved within the controlling perspective of the absent spectator's vision.

To discover such objectives, the actor requires an analytical technique, one that necessarily inflects the kind of "meaning" that can be produced through it. The actor frames objectives by segmenting the script in terms of a motivational subtext. Character is represented as an effect of a coherent series of "beats" of desire that seem to motivate and substantiate the spoken text and the visible deeds of the stage. The beat identifies actor and character in the typical terms of the Method, posing an undecidable difference between the present experience of the actor and the represented emotion of the character as the sign of effective performance; in good acting, actor and character are affectively fused. The actor's engagement with "real" experience while presenting a fictive character marks the farthest extension of realistic rhetoric into the practice of acting; in the Method, to "signify" or "indicate" the character is to fail, to interpose a sense of the performer's activity between the audience, its reading of the character's behavior, and its interpretation of psychological attitudes and motivations. The presence of the actor's real experience asserts the absence of technique, seems to render the actor transparent to a character whose feelings seem grounded in live reality rather than being produced as artifice. Like the scenic rhetoric of which it is a part, realistic acting conceals its rhetoric behind the "reality" of the objects it stages: real doors, real emotions.

Actor training reveals the continued effect of Stanislavski in the series of complex activities designed to improve and to monitor the actor's sensitivity to authentic expression.^[2] To develop this respon-

[2] Training in this mode might proceed from simple exercises like the breakfast drink ("The student creates his usual breakfast drink [commonlyorange juice or coffee]. All of the objects in the exercise are created imaginarily.") and sunshine ("The student creates the feeling of exposure to the sun. The instructor will be able to see if the senses are working when the student is not reproducing a motor activity."), through more complex exercises like private moments, animal exercises, combinations of animal exercises with human characteristics, all designed to train sensitivity to circumstances of emotional production (see Hull 45).

siveness, actors work not only on sense memory and sensitivity exercises but also on taking cues from unspecified, preverbal, or unverbalized "impulses" rather than from preconceived "meanings" that may seem latent in the words of the text (as, for example, in Sanford Meisner's well-known exercise in which the actors improvise a given situation using only a single word or phrase, repeated again and again). By learning to act on impulse ("I wanted to eliminate all that 'head' work, to take away all the mental manipulation and get to where the impulses come from"), the actor's attention is diverted from the audience, and from the technique he or she is obliged to use to lend the drama a voice (Meisner and Longwell 36). The sense that successful acting happens when the actor is able to react through the text is revealing of our convictions about what is most powerfully "real"—for actors and for audiences—about realistic theater. Resisting "head work" assures that the character will be experienced as something prior to language, as a spontaneous, reactive, "free" subject.

Let me try to suggest in larger terms how acting inspired by the Method characterizes the actor's performance, enabling us to read (and so to write) the script of "character." Like the actor, character is withdrawn into a distinct, frontally oriented and visible space of representation; it is integrated to the verisimilar codes that organize that space as a scene; it is a discrete whole, a subject proceeding toward an "objective" through a series of consequential activities; it exists and can be known, but only through reaction, indirection; it cannot be staged or theatricalized and remain true to itself; it is free. And, finally, its course is marked not so much by the explicit verbal text as by the subtext of will and desire. The Method's reliance on subtext offers something of a logocentric view of the relationship between the dramatic text and the actor's portrayal of character. The actor's task is to look beneath the distortions of the verbal text, to

find or to invent the subtextual spine of beats that will provide the text with actable life. The Method attempts to authenticate the realistic character's presence on the stage by recovering "speech" from its belatedness to "writing," by locating the traces of speech prior to the words of the play. Much as the Method trains its performers to register subtextual experience faithfully before proceeding to work with texts, so their performance tends to locate character in an ultimately private and indeterminate zone of unverbalized motivation, in what David Richard Jones calls "modernist internality": "With the vanishing of soliloquy and tirade, conscious articulation of subtextual psychology has become a sine qua non of impersonation. The written drama has never had less rhetoric of feeling, but acting has never had more" (76). Character, like the acting that produces it, develops through the operation of desire toward a particular objective through a spine of activity. At the same time it continually disappears, becomes speechless behind the mask—of the text, of acting—that falsifies it even as it brings it to the stage.

Although we may also find ourselves through other kinds of performance, there is little point in trying to repudiate Method notions of acting and character: acting imbued with these values of "truth," interior fidelity, subtextual vitality, and character coherence may reflect our own most immediate sense of who we are, or want to be, in the theater. The rhetoric of the Method is at once a mode of representation and a mode of suasion, a means for producing onstage and for reproducing in us a sense of being and judgment, a sense of what is . Such acting is, in an important sense, ideology as behavior. "Character" can only be recognized from a transcendent or voyeuristic perspective, by an audience that is also speechless, not subject to staging. Realistic performance asserts a material world that intercedes between two zones of privacy where the self is held to be complete and fulfilled: in the palpable but unknown interiority of the actor/character, and in the unconstrained freedom of the invisible observer. The determinism of the dramatic environment comes to seem almost illusory, as the rhetoric of realism assigns its most consequential authority to these mysterious realms of privacy within and beyond it.^[3]

[3] Herbert Blau has recently described the Method as presenting "what looked like overtures of intimacy" that nonetheless kept "the audience at adistance. Putting aside the paradoxical stylization of a technique concealing itself, the process was focused in the apparent offering of a 'private moment' (named and nurtured by Lee Strasberg, this was the inversion of 'public solitude'), which was not only private but secret, giving no access" (The Audience 256).

When we think of the plays that popularized and were popularized by the Method, the first that come to mind are understandably connected with New York's Group Theater—like Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! (1935)—or with its members after the Method had become recognized—Elia Kazan's production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), for instance. Such plays are now so closely associated with the style of the Method, though, that they obscure its rhetoric, how its strategies for producing character as acting develop an interpretive relationship between the audience, the performer, and the play. The Method's insistent emphasis on character interiority, a subversive indeterminacy lurking beneath its confident location of the actor in the given circumstances of the stage, is explored more provocatively in experimental and even expressionistic plays that subject the rhetoric of realistic enactment to distortion. I am thinking here in part of the European tradition represented by the plays of Ernst Toller, George Kaiser, August Strindberg, and Frank Wedekind, and of its American counterpart in plays like The Hairy Ape (1922), Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), or Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928). I also have in mind Eugene O'Neill's recalcitrant drama of the late 1920s, particularly The Great God Brown (1926) and Strange Interlude (1928). These are bizarre and unwieldy plays, manifestly part of the same dramatic project as The Iceman Cometh (1946) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (written 1939–40), yet at the same time dwarfed by those later plays. The economy of characterization that O'Neill discovered late in his career can make Brown and Interlude seem even more inflated in retrospect, deserving of O'Neill's reputation for banal pretension, the feeling that "his masks, asides, soliloquies, choruses, split characters and the like are really substitutes for dramatic writing . . . provoked not by a new vision but rather by a need to disguise the banality of the original material" (Brustein 327). The strongest impression left by O'Neill's drama, though, is not so much that the "masks, asides, soliloquies, choruses, split characters and the like"—to say nothing of the melan-

choly Caribbean dirges, the little formless fears, the tom-toms, pipe dreams, and foghorns—are superfluous, but that they are part of O'Neill's deepest and most consistent dramatic project: the exfoliation of an unconscious, intensely private, and interior self in the public action of the theater. O'Neill's drama is sometimes grandiose, gratuitous, and overwritten, and it never really escapes (perhaps O'Neill never wanted to escape) the highly charged seductions of melodrama.^[4] But O'Neill's experimentation with the stage's resources represents a specifically theatrical inquiry into the status of realism. O'Neill's masked plays undertake a critical review of the rhetoric of realistic "character" and how it is produced and interpreted in the theater, notions that have become canonized both by the practice of the Method and by O'Neill's late plays.

The Great God Brown and Strange Interlude take the disclosure of character as their theme and present the drama in terms that both recall and question the rhetoric of realistic acting. At the moment that the Method is devising means for producing the actor as transparent to character, O'Neill works in what seems to be another direction entirely, toward a drama that formalizes and discriminates the relationship between actor and role through the use of masks. O'Neill's masked plays of the 1920s represent a theory of realistic performance, a use of masks to explore both realistic character and the dialectic within which realistic acting and dramatic characterization are defined.^[5] "Looked at from even the most practical standpoint of the practicing playwright, the mask is dramatic in itself, has always been dramatic in itself, is a proven weapon of attack," O'Neill wrote in 1932, after nearly a decade of experimentation ("Memoranda" 117). Yet despite his (and others') imitations of Greek drama, O'Neill's plays seem to have less in common with the iconic masking of the classical theater or with the whirligig

[4] O'Neill himself recognized, and possibly oversimplified, the impact of his father James's career in The Count of Monte Cristo on his own sense of theater: "My early experience with the theater through my father . . . really made me revolt against it. As a boy I saw so much of the old, ranting, artificial, romantic stage stuff that I always had a sort of contempt for the theater" (qtd. in Sheaffer 205).

[5] O'Neill's work with masks is part of a widespread interest in masks in the American theater in the 1920s, a vogue that preoccupied, among others, O'Neill's friends and partners Robert Edmond Jones and Kenneth Macgowan. See Smith 64–66.

disguise of commedia dell' arte and its derivatives in the Renaissance than might be supposed.^[6] O'Neill's masks interrupt the realistic identification between actor and character, the actor's psychological and somatic commitment to identity with the role, in order to expose the rhetoric of this integration. A dialectic emerges between the character's mask of public behavior and the actor's face, which is made to signify internal, inexpressed, or inexpressible attitudes. As O'Neill suggested when recommending the use of masks in future productions of The Hairy Ape —"From the opening of the fourth scene, where Yank begins to think he enters into a masked world; even the familiar faces of his mates in the forecastle have become strange and alien"—the mask articulates a deep conviction regarding public life: "One's outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others" ("Memoranda" 119, 117). The mask expresses the character's painful objectification, the degree to which spectators imprison the self at the moment they seem to recognize it. When, as often happens in these plays, a character is unmasked, the actor's face asserts a more privileged interiority, a "subtextual" realm of feeling and action, a kind of "public solitude" threatened by its disclosure in the world.

This use of masking would seem, like the Method, to fetishize the interiority of experience, to render it as a mystified source of authority and transcendence. And the insistent dualism of O'Neill's masks does seem to align the interior "self" of the characters with presence and truth, a presence and truth that can be known only to the spectator in the privacy of the auditorium, but usually not in the public world shared with the other characters: "Play of masks—removable—the man who really is and the mask he wears before

[6] Michael Goldman has remarked on the relationship between a dramatic role and a series of maskings, and on acting itself as a process of "showing how a character acts —that is, how he moves in and out of his repertory of roles; how he changes his disguise to meet every moment of the play, responding to changes in his situation and in the characters around him, revealing one thing and hiding another" (The Actor's Freedom 92). Goldman provides a useful heuristic both for readers and for performers of the drama, but this description of roles as masks has more in common with the exuberant roleplaying of Hamlet or Viola than with the earnest and tortuous dualism of O'Neill's characters. On masks, see also 49–50, where Goldman compares masks with the iconic aspect of dramatic roles.

the world" (Floyd 41). This dualism seems to oversimplify the scrupulous identification required by Method performance and by the complexity of the major roles in the realistic dramatic repertoire: Rosmer, Astrov, Larry Slade, and so on. Yet O'Neill believed that in The Great God Brown masks pursued a more invasive vision of character, not "the bromidic, hypocritical & defensive double-personality of people in their personal relationships—a thing I never would have needed masks to convey" (Selected Letters 246). As in the theater of Ibsen or Strindberg, the inner character can be expressed only indirectly, for when the masks are removed the characters are unrecognizable to one another (except for Dion and Cybel, who are recognizable only when they are unmasked). Such revelation is forbidding in O'Neill's play, for the unmasked characters are fearsome to behold, as if both the act of self-disclosure and the act of witnessing it were equally appalling. Early in the play, for instance, Dion removes his mask, revealing "his face, which is radiant with a great pure love for her and a great sympathy and tenderness ." Margaret, "who has been staring at him with terror ," puts on "her mask to ward off his face " and cries out, "Dion! Don't! I can't bear it! You're like a ghost! You're dead! Oh, my God! Help! Help!" (343–44). The appetite for masks in O'Neill is the same appetite embodied in the Method's promise of spontaneity, a desire to locate a palpable yet indeterminate, untheatrical "self" onstage, within the artifice of the actor's performance.

"Perhaps I have sometimes been off the track, possibly my use of masks and asides is artifice and bombast," O'Neill later confessed (Selected Letters 440). Yet the most bombastic conception of the play—that masks can be transferred between characters—is also its richest. Allowing the actors to address their masks, this device literalizes the practice of acting, in that the actors duplicate in their own performances the objectifying gaze of the spectator, as though the self were always constrained by an audience, projected, imagined, internal, or invisible. In a critical scene, staid Billy Brown addresses Dion Anthony's mask before assuming it, and assuming a role in Dion's life as well:

Then you—the I in you—I will live with Margaret happily ever after. (More tauntingly ) She will have children by me! (He seems to hear some mocking denial from the mask. He bends toward it ) What? (Then with a sneer ) Anyway, that doesn't matter! Your children already love me

more than they ever loved you! And Margaret loves me more! You think you've won don't you—that I've got to vanish into you in order to live? Not yet, my friend! Never!
(359).

The Great God Brown populates the privacy of "character," for if "one's inner life passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself," then there is no spectatorial vantage from which to view the self or the world it engages ("Memoranda" 117). "Character" in this drama never escapes its subjection to and falsification by the coercion of the spectator, by the spectators in the audience, those on the stage, and those haunting the theater of the self.

As "an attempt at the new masked psychological drama which I have discussed before, without masks," Strange Interlude follows from the premise of The Great God Brown ("Memoranda" 119). Yet although O'Neill initially conceived the roles in Strange Interlude as masklike, he focused the play's action more exclusively on the subtextual dimension of theatrical speech: "Method—Start with soliloquy—perhaps have the whole play nothing but a thinking aloud . . . speech breaking through thought as a random process of concealment, speech inconsequential or imperfectly expressing the thought behind" (Floyd 74). At first glance, the "asides" seem much like the actor's face in The Great God Brown , a technique for presenting a character's interior, private, and spectatorial commentary on the artifice of public behavior. But the asides quickly open a mise-en-abîme , implying an endless regress of self-deceit. This duplicity becomes particularly evident at moments of confession, such as when Leeds seems to recognize his reasons for preventing Gordon from marrying Nina before going off to the war:

Yes. That's exactly it. She knows in some queer way. And she acts toward me exactly as if she thought I had deliberately destroyed her happiness, that I had hoped for Gordon's death and been secretly overjoyed when the news came! (His voice is shaking with emotion ) And there you have it, Charlie—the whole absurd mess! (Thinking with a strident accusation )
And it's true, you contemptible . . . !
(Then miserably defending himself )
No! . . . I acted unselfishly . . . for her sake!
(493)

The device is often clumsy, particularly so if we read—as Brooks Atkinson did, reviewing the play for the New York Times —"the

nickel-weekly jargon that Mr. O'Neill offers as thinking" as an authoritative subtext, an uncompromised access to the "true" motives of the characters. Yet O'Neill's engagement with "character" is even more disturbing, for in Strange Interlude there is no recourse to depth, privacy, or interiority that is not already theatricalized, a shallow stage for the masks of oneself.

The prose of realistic dialogue asserts its verisimilitude by insisting on its unliterary banality. The drama—in Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, O'Neill—often arises through the necessity of wanting to say more than such language allows. The need to carve out a subtext beneath the lines, or to reach beyond the envelope of style for the evocative, but potentially bombastic, melodramatic, or excessive phrase is always implicit in the discourse of realistic style, giving rise as much to O'Neill's masks as to Ibsen's "vine leaves" and "castles in the air." The sense of a world of entrapment from which the self provides only an illusory point of private repair is O'Neill's most characteristic contribution to the realistic drama: for O'Neill, hell is not only other people but the masks of oneself that each of us contains. The elaborate theatrical mechanism of O'Neill's masked drama may too often misfire, but this revision of realistic characterization persists in O'Neill's later drama as well, where the theatricalization of interiority marks O'Neill's most challenging response to the rhetoric of realistic characterization.

Critics have frequently noted the metadramatic aspect of Long Day's Journey Into Night , the sense in which the family of Tyrones is a family of actors, each performing for others and indeed performing for the internal audience of an evanescent "self."^[7] The play presents us with a rich sense of the interdependencies and deceptions of family life, and the characters' contradictory acknowledgments and evasions seem to lend them a typically realistic mystery. The absence of an intrusive expressionism shouldn't blind us to the play's manifest conventions of disclosure, as when Mary comments on Edmund's illness:

I know he'll be all right in a few days if he takes care of himself. (As if she wanted to dismiss the subject but can't. ) But it does seem a shame he should have to be sick right now.
(16)

[7] See, for example, Chothia 188–89, and Bogard xviii.

As in Strange Interlude , O'Neill stages "character" through the dialectic of self-deception, or failed self-deception, in which Mary's hope that Edmund will improve declares her belief that he won't, in which her concern for her son only partly masks her fear for herself. Like many plays in this mode, Long Day's Journey Into Night is structured around a series of confessions, a self-staging to an audience of observers, and these confessions often have the calculated quality of performance. Such confessions seem both to cast others as spectators, consumers of the lies of self-disclosure, and to be performed for an internal, equally critical audience as well. Jamie's hatred of Edmund, Tyrone's bitter disappointment in his career, Mary's regret for her idyllic childhood seem both actual and "enacted," inscribed as fictions at the moment they declare the privilege of truth.^[8]

The rhetoric of realistic characterization—in drama and in the practice of acting—claims a romantic interiority as an authorizing ground of dramatic explanation. The progress of the dramatic action is explained as a function of the psychology and development of the characters, motives that can finally be seized only from a similarly privileged point of absence and privacy offstage. Many plays in this mode, those of Ibsen and Chekhov as well as those of American realists like O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, stage this self as self-delusion, a fiction or evasion, as a commodity for others' consumption that masks an inner emptiness. Like realistic fiction, which claims to position the reader in the plenitude and presence of the bourgeois subject who is often both its fictive subject and narrator, realistic theater seems to assign to the voyeuristic audience the ability to complete the drama, to relate events to interpretation, to discover the meaning of the drama in the reconstitution of its spine.

To practice this kind of interpretation, the audience of realistic theater must accept its construction by this rhetoric, assent in particular to the occlusion of its own manifestly theatrical relation to the

[8] In his brilliant study, Modern Drama and German Classicism: Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht , Benjamin Bennett traces the drama of divided consciousness—internally divided within character and divided between the stage and audience—to the achievement of German classicism. On the relationship between self-division and theatrical observation, see 291, and chapter 8.

events on the stage, a relation often exposed in the drama as illegitimate, duplicitous, merely "theatrical." O'Neill's drama points out that the consumers of the "truth" of character consume only performances, not selves, masks of disguise and disclosure manufactured to seem believable, much like the characters staged by Method performance. The peculiarities of realistic discourse in the theater prevent the drama from representing "consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning" (Belsey 51–52). All its subjects are, at least, duplicitous, actor-characters, and O'Neill's drama often assigns a similar undecidability to the characters' internal stages, where they find themselves peopled by a cast of others. The rhetoric of the Method, with its premium on the authenticity of impulse, works to assert a consistent subject, while the drama works to undermine its credibility. The realistic theater stages an asymmetrical relation between the spectacle on the stage and its silent consumers, for the audience's claim to integrate character and action stands apart from the dialectics of the dramatic performance it observes.

Visible Scenes:
American Realism and the Absent Audience

I have stressed here the psychological aspect of realistic "character" and its production as acting. The interpretive perspective urged by this drama is clarified in plays of a more sociological orientation, in which the objects of stage design become metonymic figures for a world of material and metaphysical constraint. The anxiety of psychological realism is that the self may be only an act. The sociological mode lives on the fear that the world is only a theater, that there is no escape, no point of vantage from which others—or the environmental forces of economy, society, history—can be viewed: that it is not possible, in other words, to be a spectator after all. O'Neill's expressionism is tightly trained on psychological processes, but expressionism generally opens a wider vista on the relationship between character and a social environment. Gerald Rabkin is right to find a "monodramatic" impulse in expressionist drama, in which "all technical devices, all characters and situations combine to reveal the psychological workings of the mind of the hero, or as the case may be, the antihero" (131). Yet for all its solipsistic focus on the experience of its central character, as a stage practice expressionist drama

depends on the interpretive relations engrained in the realistic mode it appears to challenge. Even though it represents the externalized affect of a given character, the material stage of expressionist theater is itself a constraint, a world seen from the dystopic perspective of its victims rather than from the "objective" perspective of its privileged audiences. In performance, expressionistic plays tend to literalize the relations of realism, as characters are enclosed in a mechanistic and alien material world onstage, still searching for an elusive realm of private experience.

Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), for example, provides a kind of negative image of the realistic drama it swerves to avoid. The play's scenographic devices are familiar examples of the allegorical dimension of the expressionistic mode: the giant adding machine; the ballet mécanique of the Zeros, Ones, Twos, Threes, Fours, Fives, and Sixes; Zero's trial; the meeting with Shrdlu and Daisy Devore beyond the grave. In part, the play satirizes its central character, the organization man whose failure of imagination and will makes him an eternal slave. Even when he meets Daisy in the Elysian fields, after all, Zero maintains the moral standards of suburban society ("Anyway, they wouldn't stand for this—the way we been going on"), and the play closes with Lieutenant Charles injecting Zero back into worldly existence for another incarnation: "You can't change the rules—nobody can—they've got it all fixed. It's a rotten system—but what are you going to do about it?" (99, 105). Lukács argues that the "much-heightened sense of the significance of milieu" enables the modern "drama of individualism" to become problematic, and so dramatic in its characteristic fashion ("Sociology" 434); Zero's nullity becomes dignified in exact proportion to the extraordinary power embodied in the scenic environment necessary to express and control him. And as in realistic drama, both the mechanistic mise-en-scène and the language of the text work to mask a possibly unrecognized, perhaps barely representable subtext of desire. This aspect of language is most evident in the play's brilliant second scene, where Daisy and Zero check an endless series of figures. The public language of accounting dissolves (for the audience) to reveal a private and incommunicable discourse:

DAISY: Six dollars. Three fifteen. Two twenty-five. Sixty-five cents. A dollar twenty. You talk to me as if I was dirt.

ZERO: I wonder if I could kill the wife without anybody findin' out. In bed some night. With a pillow.

DAISY: I used to think you was stuck on me.
(72)

Although Rice thought The Adding Machine to be "the very antithesis of Ibsenism," it is, like most expressionist theater, substantiated by the realistic rhetoric it repudiates (Living Theatre 124). Rice described the difference between realism and expressionism to Dudley Digges, the first Mr. Zero, in the conventional terms of dramatic style: "In the realistic play, we look at the character from the outside. We see him in terms of action and of actuality. But in the expressionistic play we subordinate and even discard objective reality and seek to express the character in terms of his own inner life" (Minority Report 198–99). The "objective reality" that expressionism appears to discard is, in fact, simply—in the party scene, the trial—re-presented from the perspective of its victim. As in the realistic theater, the material world of the expressionist stage both constrains the character and becomes the character, in much the way that realistic heroes often find the signs of the degraded world they oppose etched within themselves.^[9] For this reason, it's not surprising to find that Rice's sense of Zero restates the realistic dialectic between external pressure and a private zone of interior contradiction:

For I conceive Zero as a complex being. A bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions, of impulses and fears, of desires and inhibitions. His conduct in a general sense is determined by hereditary influences, childhood environment, education and the social inheritance, but more particularly it is influenced by the state of his digestion, the weather, his internal secretions and the multitudinous sensory stimuli of light and sound, touch and temperature, taste, motion and pain.
(qtd. in Murphy 150–51).

Plays like Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928), John Howard Lawson's Roger Bloomer (1923), and The Adding Machine suggest the problem posed by expressionism: namely, that as a style it superficially departs from a realistic ideology that it reifies in the rhetoric of its stage production. The expressionistic mapping of the dynamics of character onto the scenic materials of the stage presents a

[9] See Williams, Modern Tragedy 98.

world governed by alienated, abstract forces that the characters in the plays are barely capable of recognizing. As Raymond Williams argues, the increasingly threatening and hostile realistic environment becomes (often in plays written by the same authors and produced by the same companies) transformed into a realization of the characters' responses to that environment, staging the characters' responses to the world as the dramatic world itself (Drama 339–40). In a sense, Rice's career is emblematic of Williams's observation, for in turning from the expressionistic mode of The Adding Machine and The Subway (1929) to the scenic realism of his most famous play, Street Scene (1929), Rice reveals the complicity between these two modes of production, a complicity based primarily on the determining power located in the scene . Moreso than the expressionistic theater, drama in the sociological mode uses the object world of the stage design to control the audience's interpretive perspective on the action. Much as the mechanistic quality of expressionistic staging reduces the characters to machines, in the sociological drama the extent to which stage objects become agents of the action transforms the characters into things.

To view the lower classes as objects is one of the originary aspects of realistic theater; as Martin Meisel observes, even Zola's "public places, inhabited by functioning representations of all classes and occupations, suggest a sociological rather than a psychological perspective, and ultimately an alternative to bourgeois drama" (Realizations 374). The supposed neutrality of this environmental absence of perspective is enforced in Street Scene through the rhetorical arrangement of stage space. The New York Times reviewer commented on Rice's (and designer Jo Mielziner's) "lithographic New York environment" and saw it as the hallmark of a play apparently without "a point of view," without a perspective on the "traits of our slummy life." The title claims the play's slice of life for its subject, a working-class scene modeled on a brownstone front on New York's West 65th Street. Mielziner found the play "a work of strong, almost journalistic realism," and his celebrated set seemed to spill its contents directly onto the foreshortened playing area (Designing 148). The space, defined by the edge of a street running parallel to the proscenium downstage and the facade of the brownstone occupying the entire upstage wall, is one of maximum frontality. Directing the play, Rice orchestrated a variety of dramatically inconsequential activities

to enhance the apparently random and lifelike process of the action, down to laying a concrete sidewalk on the stage and using prerecorded street noises throughout the performance to create an auditory as well as a visual environment. But it was Mielziner's set that became the play's protagonist, brooding over the drama, integrating the scattered and inconsequential lives of the characters.

As in plays like The Silver Box , the condition of such characters is to be visible, revealed to us on this occasion because of the summer heat and the size and poor ventilation of their apartments. The brownstone becomes a kind of vitalistic center of the action, and the characters become its furniture, a point emphasized toward the end of act 2, when two objects are about to be brought from the building: the corpse of Mrs. Maurrant and the belongings of the evicted Hildebrand family. The objectification of the characters is implied as well in the position that the play's environment assigned to its audience:

What distinguishes "Street Scene" from a host of synthetic forerunners is Mr. Rice's remarkable sense of character. Here are not merely the automatons of the giddy city streets, but the people—the intellectual Jew who runs on endlessly about the capitalistic classes, the Italian musician who dreams of the flowery land from which he came, the office girl who wants to move out to Queens, the pleasant woman who is quietly sacrificing her life to a sick mother, the ruffian taxicab driver, the flirt, the school teacher, all brought into focus with telling strokes of character-portrayal.
(Rev. of Street Scene )

Life "on the grimier edge of the middle class" is replete with social and ethnic types—the cranky Jewish intellectual, the happy-go-lucky Italian, the stoic Swedish janitor, and so on—whose verisimilitude is a function of the reviewer's voyeuristic point of vantage outside the social, economic, and ethnic conditions they inhabit. Rice echoes the review when he discusses his own audience and implies that the class differential between stage and audience is necessary for the scene to seem an image of social reality. No grimy social others here. The "cross section of the New York theatregoing public" that Rice sought was predictably an educated, professional-class audience of "college students, office workers, hospital nurses, lawyers, shopkeepers, a sprinkling of actors and of personal friends" (Living Theatre 219). Not surprisingly, the least stereotypical characters in the play are those who reflect this audience: Rose

(who has a job in a real-estate office) and Sam (who is planning to go to law school). These characters are granted the richest interior life, the most complex motivation, the least obtrusive ethnic tics; their longing for escape is the most urgently felt, and their opportunities for mobility are the most keenly realized.

The object-like quality of the characters can be read in the context of Mielziner's massive set. The set creates and specifies an immediately recognizable locale, but it also functions dialectically, to signify an absence, an unattainable elsewhere that seems to have been forced out of the picture by the weight of the material world. Rice recalled critics like St. John Ervine complaining of "a garbage can, an actual and veritable garbage can," onstage; such effects helped to compose a concrete locale to sustain and substantiate the action (Minority Report 256). The totality of Rice and Mielziner's scenic integration also seems to render the characters' desire for something else—Mrs. Maurrant's indefinite longing for something better, imperfectly realized in her tawdry affair with the sleazy milk collector; the romance of Rose and Sam—powerful, poignant, and impossible. The materiality of the set, in this sense, seems oddly to express not the drama's openness to the unscripted world offstage but its closure to the world beyond this street. This feeling of closure underlies the play's sketchy politics as well—"And if you was to elect a Socialist president tomorra, it would be the same thing" (129)—and reifies them in its plot structure. Although the events of the day appear to the characters as points in a disconnected yet unremitting repetition of the same, the play insists that the audience regard the action as part of a natural cycle of change and renewal. Street Scene closes, after all, with the arrival of new tenants and with a new round of gossip developing among the inhabitants of 25 West 65th.^[10]Street Scene requires and projects an audience of

[10] As a television producer suggested to Rice in 1954, explaining why Street Scene could not be considered as a vehicle for a weekly television series, the play requires an asymmetry between stage and audience at odds with Madison Avenue's sense of good advertising: "Foremost among these objections is the squalor of the setting, the lower class social level of all the chief characters, and the utterly depressing circumstances which they all find themselves in," circumstances opposed to how the "American consuming public" is presented "by the Advertising Industry today . . . middle class, not lower class; happy in general, not miserable and frustrated; and optimistic, not depressed" (Living Theatre 223).

others, whose freedom—to dream, to judge, to depart, not to be seen—exactly reverses the determined scenic milieu that stands for reality on the stage.

The scenic rhetoric of realistic theater insists on the explanatory power of the stage milieu and on the inaccessibility of the "self"—of some characters at least—that the scene claims to control. In something like Mielziner's celebrated design for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949; the working title was The Inside of His Head ), the world of realism falls open to enable contact between two zones of privacy, a one-way transaction illuminating the actor-characters onstage for an unstaged and concealed audience. Willy Loman's expressionistic timebends do not, after all, open him more fully to the understanding of his family, who remain, as the characters in realistic drama generally do, isolated from one another, trapped within themselves, their language, and the walls that surround them. This sense that scenic or sociological realism locates two complementary realms of interiority, of freedom, while dramatizing an intervening realm of economic and material necessity can be felt throughout the drama of the 1930s, particularly in plays like Street Scene and Maxwell Anderson's Winterset (1935; the set, also designed by Mielziner, was dominated by the enormous pier of the Brooklyn Bridge), in which the set operates like the outsized machinery of expressionist theater to dwarf, control, and objectify the characters as cogs in the urban machine. When there is escape from such scenes, it often appears as escape into an unknown and unknowable elsewhere, a figure for the unreality of the characters' desire to depart the scene: the Liebstod of Anderson's Mio and Miriamne, Rice's Elysian Fields, the "certain place where it's moonlight and roses" that draws Moe and Hennie at the end of Awake and Sing !

The rhetoric of realism is torn between the assertion of an environmental causality—assimilated to the economy by Odets, to social pressure by Galsworthy, to the double standard by Pinero, to gender and class oppression by Robins and Shaw—and the necessity to retain the freedom of its characters, a freedom that seems increasingly internalized and impalpable. This dialectic between visible constraint and an unknown inner freedom apparently inverts the circumstances of the absent audience of realism but actually duplicates them: our "freedom" exists similarly in the form of

consciousness, while our actions are hedged by the manifest proprieties of our attendence in the theater. This tension is expressed in the Method's reliance on "given circumstances" vivified by the actor's "emotion memory," and in the dramatic function assigned to privileged moments of privacy or withdrawal from society in the drama.

These concerns can also be seen in the working of the visible mise-en-scène itself, in a play like Sidney Kingsley's Dead End (1935). The play is set on a New York street that dead ends into the filthy East River, and provided the occasion for one of Norman Bel Geddes's most intricate and splendid sets. More than the familiar brownstone of Street Scene , Geddes's design strikingly evoked the dialectic between engagement and detachment characteristic of realistic vision. Instead of the frontally oriented brownstone, Dead End presented the audience with a deeper, more urgent perspective. The entire front of the stage was transformed into an East River pier, extending the width of the proscenium and jutting several feet beyond the curtain line into the orchestra pit. A narrow street, running between a dilapidated tenement (audience left) and a huge coal hopper (downstage corner, audience right), angled upstage to the audience's right, disappearing in a dark horizon. As one reviewer noted, "So real it all seemed that I, sitting there in mid-river, found myself paddling to keep afloat" (Gabriel). On the audience's left, downstage and roughly parallel to the proscenium, a narrow and fenced path led to a swanky apartment offstage; a small gate faced the street, beside a raised and fenced terrace: "The wall is of rich, heavy masonry, guarded at the top by a row of pikes. Beyond the pikes, shutting off the view of the squalid street below, is a thick edging of lush green shrubbery " (453). The upstage side of the terrace abutted the side wall of the tenement, freshly painted and adorned with a large trelliswork. The dreary front of the building faced the litter-strewn street, and other tenements could be seen on adjacent blocks, replete with broken windows, washlines, and dirty mattresses airing on the fire escapes. As Brooks Atkinson remarked in his review, Geddes "reared up a setting that pushes the thought of the author's drama ruthlessly into the audience's face. Not only in its accuracy of detail but in its perspective and its power his setting is a practical masterpiece."

Onstage, the drama and its scenic environment brought two

urban landscapes into an uneasy proximity: "What you have seen and heard in New York, wondering and apprehensive" (Atkinson) was brought up against East Side privilege, symbolized less by the unseen apartment or the green and growing terrace than by the small gate downstage, painted a dazzling white against the gloom and darkness of the set. The dramatic action is divided between showing the life of the slum's inhabitants and the conflict that erupts when they are confronted by their immediate spectators, the wealthy inhabitants of the apartment building. The scenic environment is similarly duplicitous, both receding into the city topography and aggressively threatening its audience. Geddes emphasized this perspective with a variety of devices—miniature laundry hanging on "distant" clotheslines, raking the street upward toward the back of the set—and then filled in the environment it governed with a famous array of realistic effects: street litter, recorded sounds of street noise and lapping waves on the pier, boys climbing dripping wet from the "river" in the orchestra (really a net below stage level, where they were sprayed with mineral oil), actors without stage makeup.^[11] Perspective constitutes its fictive scene by displacing the audience from it. Like the wealthy, slightly unreal inhabitants of the unseen apartment, we are screened from a reality we enter only empathetically. The little gate signals our access to, and protection from, the life of the street as well.

"The street has imaginative, as well as actual, perspective," Edith Isaacs remarked for Theatre Arts Monthly , and within that perspective the environment utterly controls the characters' lives: "Before a word is spoken, you recognize that this place of darkness and dirt is captain of their soul and master of their fate" (891). The

[11] Geddes used an RCA recording crew to make recordings of waves lapping against a pier, the sound of boys diving into the river, vehicle sounds, dogs barking (various kinds and duration), babies crying, and so on, which were broadcast from speakers located at various points in the set both before the curtain rose and during the play itself. On the complexity of the design and placement of speakers (river sounds emanated from a speaker near the front of the stage), see Sobel. Various articles were published noting that no special stage makeup was used for the performance; women wore cosmetics in character, and the men appeared without makeup. One article also notes that the boys were dirtied with cork instead of real dirt, and that they were sprayed with mineral oil before climbing out of the "river" onto the stage; see "'Dead End' Cast Shuns Make-Up."

scene urges a cyclic social evolution in much the manner of Street Scene , with which it was inevitably compared. The boys who hang out on the pier eventually get into trouble with the wealthy apartment residents; their future is embodied by the gangster Babyface Martin, once a child here himself, who comments, "Da kids aroun' here don' change" (471). The stage's receding perspective, however, was offset by its aggressive confrontation of the audience, reaching out into the auditorium to force a kind of complicity between the viewer and the scene. The forestage acting area was dominated by the gang, and one of the boys' principal activities throughout the play was diving off the pier into the "river" in the orchestra pit.

Despite its melodramatic plot and sentimental characterization, Dead End seemed to strike a certain apprehension in its audiences, reflected not so much as a response to the play's dramatic action as to its characterization of the gang. The rumor that the boys were really not actors at all is a testament in part to the polish of their performance and in part to Kingsley's dialogue. This is, after all, a play in which boys talk about diving "bareass" into the river (460); they taunt one another with "Sissy, sissy, sucks his mamma's titty!"; one boy shouts "Frig you! . . . Ah, I'll sock yuh inna tit" to his friend's older sister (465); and they "cockalize" victims like Milty and the rich boy Philip. Such performance emphasized the verisimilitude of the scenic milieu by puncturing familiar stage conventions: the boys were neither winsome waifs, nor sentimental stage hooligans. "It seems to me no group of children could be so perfect in their portrayal of the various roles or be so filthy in body and mind unless they were accustomed to such an environment," complained one reviewer, and Variety warned—or hoped—that "the script will have to be tempered somewhat to keep the law out."^[12] Geddes's design shaped Kingsley's sharpest assault on the audience's sensibilities, by thrusting the "realistic" behavior of desanctified stage children appropriately through the proscenium, practically into the audience's lap.

Like Method acting, like realistic dramatic action, the design of Dead End locates the privileged perspective of the spectator as a

[12] Rev. of Dead End, Brooklyn Citizen 29 October 1935; Rev. of Dead End, Variety 30 October 1935.

zone of privacy and illusionistic completion; breaking the proscenium, it dramatizes the relationship between that privacy and social empowerment. Appropriately enough, the subject of architecture becomes critical to the play's thematic design, extending and clarifying the function of stage space in its theatrical organization. The romantic plot in the play involves another neighborhood character, an unemployed architect named Gimpty, who cannot hope to make the money to support the woman he loves and must watch her sail out of his life on a yacht, knowing that she loves him but will not live in poverty. Gimpty sits watchfully on the edge of the scene throughout the play, observing events while he sketches designs for an urban scenario that will never be built, a city of dreams. He comments on the relationship between environment and character in the play:

New York with its famous skyline . . . its Empire State, the biggest God-damned building in the world. The biggest tombstone in the world! They wanted to build a monument to the times. Well, there it is, bigger than the pyramids and just as many tenants. . . . I wonder when they'll let us build houses for men to live in?
(491)

Kingsley's echo of Ibsen's Master Builder Solness is important here. Solness, climbing the dizzying tower toward his castles in the air, undertakes a vertiginous assault on the uncanny, unknowable interiority of realistic character, and an assault on the reliability of the material stage world to express it. Architecture, in The Master Builder , figures one of Ibsen's characteristic projects of self-creation, whose awkward place in the rhetoric of realism marks their descendance from an earlier, more expansive romantic dramaturgy.^[13] Gimpty, on the other hand, is unemployed, unable to build the world where he might stalk that romantic self. In the scene, but not part of it, Gimpty's drawings precisely register the dialectic of engagement and detachment typical of realistic observation, reified here in the design of the set itself. As the play's title implies, Dead End stages a world of material limitation, in which characters are unable to climb where they build, and an unchanging future is visible in the static present. Only the audience remains disencumbered, floating in an unimaginable freedom.

[13] See Goldman, "The Ghost of Joy."

Empty Spaces and the Power of Privacy:
Pinter, Shepard, and Bond

In productions like Street Scene or Dead End —and, of course, in the less spectacular settings of plays from O'Neill's Iceman to Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)—the realistic theater reaches an inescapable impasse, one engrained within the rhetoric of realism itself. As the scene becomes increasingly concrete, "character" itself may seem to become a kind of object, unless it is withdrawn from the scene altogether, into a shadowy interior realm of masks, motives, and desire. Projected as a point of observation, freedom, and completion outside the stage, the audience comes to reflect this sense of character as an unrepresentable absence at the heart of the play. Yet when we think of the drama of an undiscoverable interiority of character resisting an inscrutable, vaguely oppressive milieu we may not now be thinking of Ibsen but instead of the drama of the absurd, of plays like Waiting for Godot (1953), The Chairs (1952), The Empire Builders (1959), or The Birthday Party (1958).

Martin Esslin remarked in The Theatre of the Absurd that "it is not merely the subject-matter that defines what is here called the Theatre of the Absurd"; it is a "sense of the senselessness of life, of the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose," conveyed by openly abandoning "rational devices and discursive thought" in order to "achieve a unity between . . . basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed" (5–6). Esslin was certainly right to sense the absurd's interest in altering the "logic" of realistic drama and modern theatrical experience. But though such plays openly dispense with verisimilitude, they often remain dependent upon realistic priorities: a stage world of material constraint, identified with an internally consistent dramatic "scene"; characters influenced by, yet resisting, a stubbornly mysterious environment; an audience of offstage observers who seem—at times, at least—to be identified with the threatening authority of the milieu itself. This is not to say that absurdist theater could not prove baffling and recalcitrant. Nonetheless, a generation of audiences and critics rapidly discovered that the absurd could be read as a version of the quotidian world outside the theater, its plot troped by the preexisting text of reality, refined to its "existential" essentials. Are plays like Rhinoc-

eros (1960) or The Firebugs (1960) about the Communists or the Fascists? Is Godot God? Don't Pinter's plays describe the modern failure to communicate? Although playwrights, performers, scholars, critics, and audiences rapidly became impatient with such questions, they are the kind of question that the theater of the absurd initially seemed to invite. In the theater, the drama of the absurd first made sense as a departure from verisimilitude within the rhetorical ordering of stage realism.^[14]

Film and television, too, have readily appropriated the rhetoric of realistic production, not a surprising development given the way that the camera can be used to project a single, absent subject. And, of course, a large and significant body of drama effectively develops from the realistic tradition—think of the plays of August Wilson, Beth Henley, Brian Friel, David Storey, Marsha Norman, or Neil Simon, for example. On the contemporary stage, the rhetoric of realistic production has been invaded not so much by the symbolism and expressionism so complicit in defining the project of realism at the turn of the century as by aggressively antirealistic modes like absurd theater, happenings, the theater of Brechtian alienation, poor theater, and indeed by conceptions of pace, temporality, and dramatic organization reintroduced to the stage from video and film. The bizarre and unexpected turns of plot, unusual mises-enscène, or oblique and refractory language characteristic of David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, and other playwrights like them often seem to signal an effort to reshape the project of realistic theatricality. In many respects, though, this drama capitulates to the categories of meaning and interpretation found in earlier realistic modes, especially the classic dialectic between character and environment, still visible in the drama, in production practice, and in the figuration of an audience. In the contem-

[14] Timothy J. Wiles rightly remarks that the formal and thematic innovations of the theater of the absurd are largely "literary" in inspiration, development, and effect, rather than deriving from specifically performance innovation (117–18). In much later plays—Beckett's Catastrophe (1982), Pinter's One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988)—theater of the absurd develops a more searching critique of the structure of realistic representation in the theater, as the formal complicity between absurd theatricality and the theatricality of state-sponsored torture directly criticizes the modes of interpretive authority practiced by the offstage spectator, the powerfully absent subject both of realism and of its derivative stages.

porary theater, a determining offstage order no longer needs to saturate the visible space of the stage with objects in order to be realized. Even in a world of scattered and disheveled things, we can see that "Something is taking its course" (Beckett, Endgame 13).

As we have seen, realistic theater emphasizes the integration of the stage scene, a scene which governs interiorized "characters," the apparent intervention of a material "world," and a similarly interiorized interpretive practice identified with the absent "audience." Although much contemporary drama seems to frustrate these priorities by compromising the intelligibility of the material world onstage, in fact it tends to confirm the illusory or irrelevant status of that world in relation to the drama's privileged points of explanation—the mysterious "character" it holds and expresses, and the mystified privacy of the offstage spectator. Pinter's drama is a case in point, in part because its relation to realism seems at first confrontational. Pinter's plays are explicitly dependent on the codes of realism: think of the replay of the past in Betrayal (1978) or Old Times (1971), or of Ruth's role as the "woman with a past" in The Homecoming (1965). In the theater, Pinter's plays require the scenic "objectivity" of the realistic mode, and it is apparently against the grain of realistic expectation that this drama is achieved. Pinter's early drama of rooms locates the domestic scene of realism within a menacing offstage milieu whose relation to the scene onstage is inscrutable and threatening. Pinter's rooms seem to have become unmoored, no longer to disclose upon a readable offstage social environment, something like the disconnected street of Street Scene . They give on to a world that sends strange signals down the dumb waiter in The Dumb Waiter (1960), or sends disturbing visitors like Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party , or Riley in The Room (1960). Paradoxically, though, this dislocation seems to dematerialize the stage world and to forge a more explicit complementarity between the privacy of the character and the privacy of the spectator.

The stage displays its objects, but they fail to cohere, to claim a self-evident and natural relation to the characters and to a larger dramatic world, a coherence that can confidently be seized within an external perspective. As Mick says to Davies in The Caretaker (1960), surveying the junk-filled room, "It depends how you regard this room. I mean it depends whether you regard this room as furnished or unfurnished. See what I mean?" (71). In contrast to an

earlier realism, the objects onstage seem abstracted from an informing context that would supply them with apparently immanent meanings; we decide what they mean and how they are related to one another, in a world which is said to be "open to any number of different interpretations" (73). The audience is dislodged from an interpretive perspective that exceeds the action, is forced to read the stage as the characters do. Like the characters, we discover that the scene's "meaning" is not implicit within the scene itself, waiting to be disclosed to an objective eye offstage. To cling to this perspective is usually the sign of desperation or defeat in Pinter's plays, as it is for Teddy in The Homecoming :

It's a way of being able to look at the world. It's a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things. I mean it's a question of your capacity to ally the two, to relate the two, to balance the two. To see, to be able to see! I'm the one who can see.
(61–62)

To "operate on things and not in things" is, in The Homecoming , precisely to fail to see the play. Yet the nostalgia for this mythological authority points to ways in which Pinter's theater relies on the paradigms of the realistic stage. The sense that Pinter's characters subject both language and the environment to their own immediate needs seems both to extend and to challenge the romantic impulse of Ibsen's or Chekhov's drama, where "character" is confined by a material world incapable of expressing it fully, a world that seems mute and degraded in relation to a barely visible inner vitality. Pinter's presentation of character is only superficially more decentered and depthless than, say, the characterization of Rosmer or Solness, for character and objects are dialecticized in Pinter's theater not because they are unlike, but because they are so like one another. In Pinter's plays, character seems largely provisional and instrumental, a function of action and interpretation whose "identity" is explicitly constituted in the play only by its use, and so by of our reading of it. In this regard, Teddy is right to feel that the characters can be known only as things that "move about," as "objects"; where he goes wrong is in assuming that he can occupy a position outside the scene, where his perspective will work on these shifty things, transforming them into fixed objects. To present "character" as an object—even as a changing one—is to recapitulate that aspect of realism that locates character in a world by ren-

dering others as "things," reserving (as Teddy does) the privileges of humanity, of subjectivity, for the self offstage. The real problem of Pinter's theater is that it seems increasingly difficult to find that offstage vantage.

Pinter's theater both suspends and retains the authority of the spectator over the objectified others onstage; the plotting of Pinter's plays similarly frustrates but preserves the longing for a totalizing narrative. Confessions are usually deployed in realistic drama to provide the audience with information about the action and the characters' motives, but in Pinter's drama confessions are emptied of this authority. Lenny's monologues in The Homecoming , for instance, are so strongly colored by their instrumentality in the present moment as to become indistinguishable from fiction. As a result, when Sam finally blurts out the "truth"—"MacGregor had Jessie in the back of my cab as I drove them along" (78)—the anticipated scène à faire signally fails to resolve or to explain the action. In the relationship between Jessie and Mac resumed by Ruth, in the brilliantly illuminated tableau of the slumping man and two women in Old Times , in the syncopated reverse sequence of Betrayal , Pinter recalls the "retrospective" method of Ibsen. Yet if the "past" is refused as an "objective" point of reference and explanation, becoming instead an instrumental fiction in the present action, this, too, seems only to literalize the problematic undecidability of the past in realism itself. Even in Ibsen or O'Neill, the past must be kept open, susceptible to negotiation, if the romantic interiority of "character" is to remain an open dramatic possibility. That is, despite some apparent innovation, the status of the past in Pinter points to the realistic theater's need to preserve character as a figure for the absent audience's similar privileges of privacy. As Ruth puts it in Old Times , "There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place" (32). It might be argued that realism's complementary zones of privacy—character, audience—are aligned to some extent here, as the mysteries of motivation and of interpretation are both assigned to an absent and indecipherable "self."^[15] In this sense, Pinter's theater

[15] The sense that Pinter's actors should avoid "filling" the silences, and so "filling" the characters with a readable subtext is now familiar. See Hall 16, and Van Laan.

might more fairly be described as parasitic upon realism than as radically reorienting it.

Beckett is surely the most original playwright of the postwar era, but Pinter's strategies for representing a "realistic" surface shorn of the interpretive coordinates of earlier modes may well be more immediately influential. Sam Shepard's theater is similar in this regard, for although it is more spectacular and extroverted, Shepard's stage is also traced by a nostalgic recasting of the rhetoric of realism. The arabesques of character in Shepard's plays are traced on the forms and traditions of American drama: the Westerns hovering behind Tooth of Crime (1972) and True West (1980); Buried Child 's (1978) Milleresque gothic; the social realism of Curse of the Starving Class (1978). This generic backdrop provides the horizon of thematic expectation from which Shepard's characterization departs, much as the consumer trash that clutters Shepard's verbal and object world departs from the "natural" social and material environment of domestic realism. The object world of Shepard's theater is a world of commodities, interchangeable items in the discourse of consumer culture, much as the lexicon of plays like Tooth of Crime —the languages of drugs, crime, rock music, and cars—is subject to shifting uses, values, and meanings, and so to different kinds of implication in the world onstage. Character also has this status in Shepard's drama—think of Kent and Salem in La Turista (1967)—and often seems more like a mode of transaction or of temporary possession than of identity. Character exists where it is consumed, practiced, or reproduced: the Old Man in Fool for Love (1983) represents himself in two families; in True West , Austin and Lee exchange occupations; in Curse of the Starving Class Wesley returns wearing Weston's clothes ("And every time I put one thing on it seemed like a part of him was growing on me. I could feel him taking over me" 196); Vince assumes his inheritance in Buried Child and also assumes Dodge's place on the sofa. Crow's enactment of Hoss in Tooth of Crime is the type of such possession:

Very razor. Polished. A gleam to the movements. Weights out in the eighties from first to third. Keen on the left side even though he's born on the right. Maybe forced his hand to change. Butched some instincts down. Work them through his high range. Cut at the gait. Heel-toe action rhythms of New Orleans. Can't suss that particular. That's well covered. Meshing patterns. Easy mistakes here. Suss the

bounce. (CROW tries to copy HOSS'S walk. He goes back and forth across the stage practising different styles until he gets the exact one. It's important that he gets inside the feeling of HOSS's walk and not just the outer form. )
(228)

While Pinter's characters are ruthlessly improvisational, avoiding the implication of a "center" or "depth" that would enable them to be seized by an audience of spectators, the rhetoric of character in Shepard's drama works through a recollection of this depth or presence: the blank indeterminacy of Pinter's characters is, in Shepard's plays, produced as an absence, a lack. The characters compete not to convince others but to inhabit a space, a role, an occupation, a family, the fiction of a self.

Much as acting in Pinter's plays does, producing character in Shepard's drama requires the performer to swerve from the rhetoric of Method performance. Pinter's characters seem improvisational, while acting in Shepard's plays requires the performer to assert the authority and presence of a "self," but a self emptied of identity. Although Shepard's plays are often compared with Arthur Miller's or Tennessee Williams's, the acting they require differs from the "studio realism" appropriate to the American classics in the pace, violence, and volatility with which a given "spine" can be discarded and replaced.^[16] As Shepard warns the actors of Angel City in his prefatory note to the play (1976), character is subject to continual renegotiation:

Instead of the idea of a "whole character" with logical motives behind his behavior which the actor submerges himself into, he should consider instead a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme. In other words, more in terms of collage construction or jazz improvisation.
("Note" 6)

The collage of characterization in Shepard's plays requires the performer to project the role, and the self that appears to inhabit it, as though it were capable of instant deformation, multiplication, or exchange. Although this characterization seems to liberate both actor and audience from coherent realistic psychology, in fact Shepard's characterization is usually dominated by a "theme," a principle of wholeness realized in the bits and pieces of discontinuous

[16] On "studio realism," see Zinman.

performance. Shepard's characters have the "post-auratic" fascination of advertising images: their jagged performances outline an illusion of completeness in order to pique a nostalgic appetite for wholeness—whole characters, whole selves—while at the same time deferring that satisfaction.^[17]

Much as Shepard invokes a longing for the presence of "character" in the realistic mode, so beyond the scene onstage seems to lurk a weirdly disorienting but nonetheless influential order, a milieu that recalls the offstage social environment of realistic drama. Shepard has commented on his early interest in Waiting for Godot , and the action of Shepard's plays often implies an "absurd" sense of the stage as an arbitrary, possibly malevolent environment (see Chubb). The spare stage space of Beckett's theater encourages the audience to read the action as existential parable; Shepard's stage tends to locate its objects more concretely in a bizarre and threatening society. The action of a Shepard play often transpires against a dimly seen world of chance encounters, transactions, deals, and contracts, governed by a vague and unstated order, like the mysterious "code" of Tooth of Crime or Taylor's business world in Curse of the Starving Class:

You may not realize it, but there's corporations behind me! Executive management! People of influence. . . . Everything's going forward! Everything's going ahead without you! The wheels are in motion. There's nothing you can do to turn it back. The only thing you can do is cooperate. To play ball. To become part of us.
(178–79)

The metonymy of realistic staging urges the audience to read the box-set drawing room as a point where the economic, social, and personal realms intersect; like the box set itself, this drama claims to render those realms visible, understandable, open. In Shepard's drama, the stage continues to imply this metonymy, but the randomness of action and characterization conforms to a fear that the world is ultimately inscrutable, a loss of confidence in the ordering of the world onstage and off.

The object world of Shepard's plays seems not to act upon the characters, nor to provide instruments for their expression, for the objects of Shepard's plays frequently don't work, are destroyed in

[17] See Wilcox 561. For a useful and incisive overview of Shepard, see Blau, "The American Dream."

the course of the action, or multiply beyond use like the toasters in True West . At one point in Curse of the Starving Class , we see Wesley building a door, a pot of artichokes boiling away on the stove, a pile of laundry on the kitchen table, while Emma sits making large charts out of cardboard, wearing jodhpurs and riding boots (see 160). Emma works intently, but the objects onstage are assimilated to several independent designs or projects, as though no "spine" of activity could hold them together. In True West , the golf clubs, typewriter, toasters, even the amplified howling of coyotes are liberated from their usual function, and so from their ability to register a world in which those functions are given and expected: they become weapons in the conflict between Lee and Austin. And yet, in another sense, the objects and the projects in which they figure—fixing the door, the 4-H project, writing a screenplay—seem to betray the same longing traced in Shepard's characterization. The codes of behavior and action and even the physical disposition of objects that structure the world may not finally be readable as a consistent reality, actual or fictive, like the West that eludes the characters in True West . But making that world remains as a project, and demands to be read as a sign of the desire for that world.

Shepard's is a drama of defamiliarization, and so works within the rhetoric of realism that it depends on. Edward Bond's drama is more vigorously a drama of alienation, in which the estrangement of the materials of dramatic and theatrical production develops a political critique of that rhetoric. In many respects Bond's career as a playwright recapitulates earlier debates about the use of "realism" in political art. Bond's drama is reminiscent of the Balzacian richness and variety that stand at the heart of Lukács's vision of realism, a panoply of characters and situations that makes no pretense to a naturalistic "milieu theory, a view of inherited characteristics fetishized to the point of mythology," but instead claims to penetrate "the laws governing objective reality . . . to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society." Abandoning the pretense of objectivity, the "creative realist" (and here Shaw may come to mind as much as Lukács's heroes) works to shape a "living dialectic of appearance and essence" ("Realism" 36–39). In general, though, Bond's stance toward the rhetoric of the mise-en-scène owes more

to the "experimental" realism of Brecht, an attitude well described by Fredric Jameson:

The spirit of realism designates an active, curious, experimental, subversive—in a word, scientific —attitude towards social institutions and the material world; and the "realistic" work of art is therefore one which encourages and disseminates this attitude, yet not merely in a flat or mimetic way or along the lines of imitation alone. Indeed, the "realistic" work of art is one in which "realistic" and experimental attitudes are tried out, not only between its characters and their fictive realities, but also between the audience and the work itself, and—not least significant—between the writer and his own materials and techniques.
("Reflections" 205)

This account of Brecht forecasts much in Bond's work as well, particularly its position in the culture of the contemporary theater, its attitude toward that theater and toward the relationship between the stage and the audience. And although Bond has frequently adapted the style of Brecht's drama, his theater pursues Brecht's more urgent assault on the practices of the stage, particularly the rhetoric implicit in realistic production, and its construction of a "realistic" social audience.

Bond's theater generally avoids the scenic integration characteristic of realism: the space of a Bond play is usually open and spare, like the unlocalized space of Brecht's theater, but without Brecht's theatricalizing technology, the placards, film screens, turntables, and so on. It is not surprising that Bond avoids the scenic clutter of realism, and the informing ideology of social stability it has historically implied.^[18] In the absence of Brecht's scenographic markers and the thematic pointing of alienation effects, and given the existential neutrality conventionally claimed by the open stage in the post-absurd era (as common, now, in productions of King Lear or Heartbreak House as in productions of Godot ), Bond's repudi-

[18] In "Us, Our Drama and the National Theatre," Bond describes his sense of the politics of realism: "The bourgeois theatre set most of its scenes in small domestic rooms, with an occasional picnic or a visit to the law courts. It thought it understood the world and believed that nothing in it needed to be changed very much. Things merely needed to be adjusted from time to time with the right word of advice, the right letter or the right sympathy" (8).

ation of scenic integration makes the stage space of his theater unusually difficult to read. This is particularly true of plays like Saved (1965), where Bond is recognizably working within the realm of a sociological realism, but a realism in which the material and social environment might seem almost entirely to have disappeared. How can we read the openness of the scene in Bond's theater not as the vaguely hostile and indifferent emptiness of the absurd, but as an attempt to disentangle realistic representation from the oppressive social practices that form "the physical, institutional, legal, domestic environment—in a word the social environment" ("Activists" 89)?

Despite Lukács, Bond is oddly the inheritor of one strain of realistic theatricality deriving from Zola and the naturalists: the desire to analyze and expose the working of society through a "scientific" or "rational" art.^[19] For this reason, Bond works to set his "scenes in public places, where history is formed, classes clash and whole societies move" ("Us" 8). Bond invites his audience to read the open stage as resisting the integration of the material mise-en-scène and of a single mastering perspective on the action, a unifying principle beyond the frame of the stage. Bond's open stage works to resist realistic notions of environmental causality. He divides the stage space and interrupts linear narrative to break down the integrating force of the realistic scene, to build "alienation into the play's structure." Not surprisingly, he follows Brecht's lead in characterization as well, "showing characters in their various social roles and in various social situations . . . rather than developing a character from its geist " ("On Brecht" 34).

Objects, too, in Bond's theater, gain meaning not through assimilation to a pervasive scene or to the internalized motivation of a given character, but from their use in a specific situation, as Bond suggests in The Pope's Wedding (1962), where he calls for a dark, bare stage, littered with a few objects to indicate location: "The objects are very real, but there must be no attempt to create the

[19] As Terry Eagleton notes in an exemplary reading of Bond's nondramatic writings, Bond's representation of violence in society, and so of society itself, is torn between an implicitly naturalistic "biological" account of the causes of violence and more explicitly Marxist "cultural" explanations (132).

illusion of a 'real scene'" (227).^[20] Shown, like the characters, in various roles and situations, the objects onstage develop a public history, one that this theater asks us to learn to read. A table, for instance, may seem beautiful from a distance, but when we look more closely we discover that "It's chipped and scoured. The table was made for a ballroom or a minister's office but now it's a carpenter's workbench. We're not deceived by the elegant proportions or antique design. We look and see a workbench. We learn to know what things are by their texture. Texture is evidence of truth." Bond uses the term "texture" to locate both characters and objects in history. For texture also "concerns what someone does," and "when the character is treated as part of the play's texture it's placed in its social context. Instead of being abstract and spiritual it becomes political and is seen to be a matter of class." Inviting us to read actors and objects as moments in a public history, Bond hopes to alter our habits of interpretation, the ways we read ourselves and the physical world we create. He hopes, finally, to provide "an image of the world where the audience act" ("Activists" 133, 132, 143).

Bond's use of objects in stage space represents an important dramatic concern: to open the relations between classes, between objects and people, stage and audience, to view, rather than collapsing them into the realistic assertion of homogeneity before a single point of observation. This relational aspect of Bond's drama undermines the authority and power assigned to privacy by realistic theater: the privacy of the spectator beyond the action, the similar privacy accorded to the privileged classes in society, and the privacy of realistic versions of character. And much as Bond refigures the role of objects onstage, so he calls for a different kind of enactment from his performers as a means of refusing the rhetoric of realistic characterization. Bond hardly dispenses with "character" in the psychological sense. To make acting and character "public," Bond treats them as part of the material "pictoriality" of his stage, asking his actors to apply "a concept, an interpretation" to the role.

[20] On Bond's use of properties, and for this insight about The Pope's Wedding , I am indebted to Peter Holland's fine article. For an economic reading of the characters' relationships with one another in Saved (discussed below), see 28–29.

This "concept" differs from Shepard's "theme" precisely because it is an interpretation, concerned less with the character's self than with relating "the character to the social event." As Bond discovered directing The Woman (1978), the "open space demands a new sort of acting":

At the first run-through of The Woman at the NT [National Theatre] I was astonished at the way acting forced the play into the ground, buried it in irrelevant subjectivity. Much of the acting still belonged to the nineteenth century. The company were acting emotions, hugging feelings to themselves, gazing at themselves, speaking to themselves even when they shouted. They were private performers on a public stage, still part of the bourgeois theatre.
("Us" 8–9)

"This," Bond goes on to say, "is the decadence method acting has been reduced to." Bond's stage doesn't provide an integrated scenic environment, one that would frame circles of attention radiating out from Stanislavskian actor/characters. Instead, Bond's theater stages a select set of things—Shakespeare's letter at the opening of Bingo (1973), for example—that work to externalize "character" in relation to its object world, in what Bond has come to call "public soliloquy," such as the one Terry delivers to the boardroom table in The Worlds (1979). For the table's history is social history, both prompting and organizing individual reflection: "How often do we use a table like that? When we're married? They lay us on something smaller when we're dead. They [the board of directors] use it every day" (66). This apostrophe to furniture recalls Gayev's salutation to the bookcase in The Cherry Orchard , but rather than prompting a personal display of feeling, the table enables Terry to seize on the difference that privilege makes even in the simplest objects and activities of daily life. Terry comes to this recognition in public, while teaching the audience to read the table's "texture" and his own implication in the texture of social life as well. As Bond remarked in "Notes on Acting The Woman ," "If we try to act this play in a Chekhovian way we get bad Chekhovian acting because the play is always struggling against our performance. We have to release the play into its natural freedom. That means that each character in the play wants to tell us his story. He does not want to relive it" (127).

Although Bond generally maintains the realistic boundary of the

proscenium, his drama works to retrain habits of attention learned in the realistic theater.^[21] As we have seen, the work of the spectator in the realistic theater is refracted in realistic drama in a number of ways: in the power accorded to the privacy of the "self," in the privileges that sustain privacy in social and class relations, in the characters' haunting fear of being staged to the view of others. Bond's drama qualifies privacy differently, and requires us to locate it on a different spectrum of personal and social relations. The third scene of Bingo , the scene between Shakespeare and the gibbeted girl, is a case in point. The girl's suffering prompts one of Shakespeare's most "poetic" speeches in the play, one of the few points at which Bond satisfies the audience's desire to hear the character speak as we might imagine Shakespeare to have spoken, that is, like a Shakespearean dramatic character: "Then a swan flew by me up the river. On a straight line just over the water. A woman in a white dress running along an empty street." To speak "Shakespearean" poetry Shakespeare must look away from the girl at hand. He attributes a transcendent humanity to the girl only by ignoring her immediacy, as he had done, of course, in failing to protect her earlier in the play: "(He goes to the gibbet. The OLD WOMAN watches him. ) Still perfect. Still beautiful." Shakespeare, sensitive even here to the violence of the society in which he lives, nonetheless protects himself from the consequences of his own vision even as he composes it as poetry. Poetry, that private speech of a "Shakespeare" we know only through his public plays, arises to prevent vision, to hedge Shakespeare from a world partly of his own making. As the Old Woman reminds us, "Her's ugly. Her face is all atwist. They put her legs in a sack count a she's dirty. . . . She smell. She smell" (27–28).

This sense of the privilege of privacy informs the action of Bond's most conventionally realistic play, Saved . Bond set the play in South London because he had the sense "that it's physically flatter—there are those miles and miles of long straight streets that always look the same. I used to call it the brick desert, and this feeling of being in

[21] "Alienation isn't the removal of an emotion, it is the adding of a commentary," and Bond describes several exercises for producing alienated emotion in the theater, public soliloquies of the kind that Terry delivers in The Worlds . See Hay and Roberts, Edward Bond: A Companion 49.

a desert of bricks seemed to be absolutely right for the play" ("Drama" 7–8). The brick desert shows openly what more orderly streets tend to conceal, "the hidden debris of waste and destruction that are already involved in a prolonged act of communal violence" ("Author's Note" 17). Onstage, the play vividly marks the difference between the visibility of its lower-class characters, and the privacy of the theater audience, for privacy of any kind seems impossible in the desert of Saved . Sexual encounters—real or imagined—take place in the open: Harry intrudes on Len and Pam in scene 1, and thinks he has intruded on Len and Mary in scene 9; Len listens from his room to the sounds of Fred and Pam in hers. In scene 4 (perhaps the most trying scene for the audience), the baby's offstage wailing forces each of the characters to work to create a little private space—to eat, watch television, talk—by shutting out the baby, and one another. In Saved , there is no escape from others, not in the park, not fishing, not even in jail. Yet the lack of privacy does not imply sociability, as though contact with others naturally resulted in community. Throughout the play, Len's dogged, even annoying efforts to forge a connection with other characters—helping Mary with the groceries, trying to interest Pam in the baby—dramatize the difficulty of making social relationships in Saved . The society of the play is compressed yet atomized, as though the characters' unremitting openness to view signaled their vulnerability in a world in which privacy is distributed along class and economic lines, in a way reminiscent of the world of Galsworthy's Mrs. Barthwick, for whom the privacy of the "lower classes" can only be seen as a threatening "secretiveness." Len's desire for a refuge—a "fair little place" to build a family (31)—can only be a kind of fantasy, imagined in the brief seclusion of the rowboat isolated at the center of the stage. And, of course, even this dream comes abruptly to an end when Fred pulls the rowboat to shore and flirts with Pam.

It's one thing to dramatize "character" as public; it's another to catalogue the social consequences that arise from the systematic objectification of "character" along class lines, the deprivation of the resources that would make the privileges of privacy—essential to the realistic audience's sense of humanity—accessible. This deprivation extends from the sphere of the social environment to the sphere of "character" as well, and poses challenging problems for the enactment of Bond's dramatic roles. Malcolm Hay and Philip

Roberts remark that "English-trained actors sometimes experience difficulty in working with Bond's text," looking for ways to justify their performances in psychological terms (A Study 62). Bond partly prevents this kind of justification by downplaying the importance of an emotional subtext, by emphasizing the prosaic directness of the characters' speech, and by forcing the actors to conceive character as part of the dramatic scene rather than as its cause. In Saved , characterization more directly confronts the privilege of the "self" as a social phenomenon.

This point may be difficult to grasp, but we can glimpse it by comparing one of Lenny's oblique narratives in The Homecoming ("One night, not too long ago, one night down by the docks, I was standing alone under an arch" [30]) with Fred's instruction to Len about how to bait his fishing hook. Although Lenny's speech does not disclose his "motives"—as it might if the scene were written by Miller or Williams—it does create the impression of motivation, a pressure arising in the private interiority of character. This impression stems, in part at least, from Lenny's transformation of the immediate situation into a narrative of violence and domination. Spoken under the living-room arch to a woman of ambiguous intentions, Lenny's narrative works to replace the present scene, to provide a reading of it, a plot for it; Lenny becomes dramatic at just the moment that he resists and rewrites the material world. Fred's language, on the other hand, is tied immediately to the world of objects: "Now yer thread yer 'ook through this bit. Push it up on yer gut. Leave it.—Give us that bit. Ta. Yer thread yer other bit on the 'ook, but yer leave a fair bit 'angin' off like that, why, t' wriggle in the water. Then yer push yer top bit down off the gut and camerflarge yer shank. Got it?" (59). In Saved , language is unable to replace material reality, to become the instrument of the characters' representation and transformation of themselves and their situation. Bond's characters relate to words as they do to objects, as a given, material dimension of an inescapable social horizon: "No 'ome. No friends. Baby dead. Gone. Fred gone" (123). As a result, "character" emerges in different terms, through a rigorously externalized convention of dramatic speech that prevents the audience as well as the performers from locating the substance of the action exclusively in the characters' motives. It's not that the self has been extinguished in these characters, but rather that its possibility is

withheld from the audience as a privileged point of reference and explanation.

Saved challenges the realistic audience's habits of reading the stage most directly in scene 6, the baby-stoning scene. The baby is a figure for the play's adults, vulnerable, speechless, battered, ignored, and treated with a mixture of sentiment and loathing. The violence they enact on it replicates the treatment they receive. They, too, after all, are regarded as having no humanity, "no feelin's," "Like animals" (77). What is most resistant about this scene is not the violence itself; observing scenes of lower-class urban violence has a long history in the modern theater. Instead, the scene challenges us by refusing to cast us as "realistic" spectators, whose distance contains within it an enabling interpretive power. Herbert Kretzmer, reviewing the play, found it to be "peopled by characters who, almost without exception, are foul-mouthed, dirty-minded, illiterate, and barely to be judged on any recognizable human level at all. . . . it cannot be allowed, even in the name of freedom of speech, to do so without aim, purpose, or meaning." The Times similarly found the play to do "nothing to lay bare the motives for violence," violating the expectations of "domestic naturalism." Preventing the audience from identifying with the characters, from valorizing their actions through the ascription of private motives, or from locating the cause of their acts in a determining environment, Bond presents the chilling violence of the scene in a way that disables the interpretive strategies of the realistic mode. The violence on the stage comes at us with the immediacy it has outside the protective distance of the theater, in a way that is more real than realism ever allows.

This aimlessness is achieved in Saved in ways symptomatic of the play's wider assault on its privileged audience. The motiveless violence practiced on the infant seems to reciprocate the similarly aimless, pervasive violence that the play's invisible social order practices on its characters. "Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up" (Foucault 202). The play's refusal of realistic causality might be read as an effort to disrupt the forms of theatrical interpretation, habits of reading the social other that extend beyond the bounds of the

theater. These habits are also evident in sympathetic readings of the play, which tend to reify the audience's social superiority as interpretive authority. Martin Esslin remarks that "Bond succeeds in making his audience see deeply into the minds, and comprehend the motives, of human beings who are not only practically unable to talk but also incapable of understanding their own motives," concluding that "by illuminating their speechlessness and letting us see into their tormented souls, which are even more tormented by being unable to express their anguish, Bond shows us that these people too are full human beings, capable of the noblest emotions and actions" ("Introduction" xiv–xv). To see Saved from this perspective, though, is implicitly to remain within the absent social "environment" that Saved attempts to criticize, a notion of the environment that conceals oppression in the guise of an inactive empathy. How can we know that the characters are "tormented," or that their deeds are not a rich and perfect, fully articulate act of expression?

Bond removes the signals that would enable the audience to repair confidently to this position of interpretive "freedom" and empowerment, the privacy of the spectator that the play repeatedly withholds from its characters. The play is rigorous on this point. Saved equally resists the impulse of The Homecoming , to position its audience in a kind of interpretive alignment with the characters: Bond refuses the notion that the audience can share the perspective of this oppressed class, in the theater or elsewhere. This may, finally, be the point of the play's brilliant final scene, which takes place entirely in silence. Bond claims that the play "ends in a silent social stalemate, but if the spectator thinks this is pessimistic that is because he has not learned to clutch at straws" (Appendix 309). At its close, the play withdraws the usual materials of interpretation, especially the dramatic speech that discloses the characters and their motives to us. Instead, we are given a lower-class family in a more typical and actual social relation, one that epitomizes the play's final attitude toward its theatrical and social audience: silent, withdrawn, observable but not speaking to us. As in plays like Street Scene or Dead End , the play reifies the proscenium as an instance of the more insistent boundaries of class. Although Saved invites us to view, it refuses to identify our reading of the scene as insight, as privileged vision.