Dramatic Structure in the Contemporary American Theatre by Robert Andreach

Author:Robert Andreach
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938288340
Publisher: SCB Distributors

Introduction to the Tragedy: Eno and Cleage

Unlike the study’s first half, the second half was not envisioned as a continuation of Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre when that book was published. The impetus for the continuation had its origin as I waited in March 2015 in the lobby of The Kitchen for the house doors to open for the performance of Richard Maxwell’s The Evening. Reading descriptive material for a work promoted as inspired by Dante’s Commedia, I saw the word “tragic.” Since Dante’s tripartite poem is not a tragedy and neither are contemporary American works that reimagine it,1 I could not get the word out of my head not only on the train ride home that night but also for days afterward, as it kept attaching itself to the trilogies in the study I was writing. In the section on Shanley’s Defiance, already written, I argue that the colonel comes close to being an Aristotelian tragic hero. In an interview coinciding with the performance of Father Comes Home from the Wars: Parts 1, 2 and 3, not yet written, Parks said that she originally conceived of the work as tragic but changed her mind during rehearsals. Most importantly, however, the word attached itself to something in Rabe’s Sticks and Bones, already written, that was bothering me ever since I saw the revival, something that had not bothered me when I first encountered the play decades earlier. The realization came to me that in a study of dramatic structure, I had to include tragedies.

Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre concludes that although the genre is vital and relevant, it does not conform to Aristotelian tragedy if the concentration is on the tragic hero. Though I still stand by that conclusion, and in my research I found support in the studies of such prominent scholars as Brenda Murphy and Steven R. Centola,2 I kept wondering whether the contemporary American theatre creates Aristotelian tragedy if the concentration is on structure. Hence the stimulation working on the first half, where the study accepted whatever structure, or construction of interdependent parts, the trilogy’s first segment was built on and then examined the two remaining segments to see what they did with the structure to arrive at the trilogy’s theme.

In this second half, for what would normally be called structure, the study uses the term pattern. For Aristotle, classical tragedy consists of six elements, the first two of which are plot and character. The “soul of a tragedy,”3 plot is the imitation of the action that the tragedy dramatizes: that is, the arrangement of the incidents. Character is both the agent that the action implies and a quality that the agent possesses such as the choices he makes. By acting, the character or agent sets in motion the plot’s pattern. In Chapter 11 of the Poetics, Aristotle identifies the parts: “Two parts, then, of the Plot— Reversal of the Situation and Recognition—turn upon surprises. A third part is the Scene of Suffering. The Scene

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