Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

On Wednesday, Amy Morton, Tracy Letts, Ian Barford and I did a talk at the Arts Club. We were there to discuss Betrayal–both the play itself and their actor experience of it. One of the things we discussed was the language of the play and the orchestration of the “pauses” and “silences” (a distinction that Pinter supplies in his stage directions) in the play. We started talking about the discipline that Pinter requires in the actors’ management of language. It’s not naturalistic speech (it isn’t intended to be) but it does require that the actors create the illusion of conversation. In the conversation, we also referenced Mamet as a playwright who produces a similarly rigorous deployment of language. (And Tracy pointed out that Mamet references Pinter as an influence on his, Mamet’s, playwrighting style). We sort of riffed our way into the ways in which playwrights distinguish themselves through the shaping of the speech act.

Thinking more about it, I suspect that playwrights are subject to a myriad of influences as they develop what comes to be understood as their “style.” One influence, surely, is the force of their own internal voice–the speech they received in their early environment (the talking style of their home which, itself, is a confluence of forces–the collectively-achieved family voice, the influence of national, regional, and cultural/ethnic identity). Another is the voice of the times (the popular cultural lingo, the political discourse, the social proprieties). And another, surely, is their project as artists–the ways that they choose to resist those commonly-held texts to foreground their voice as distinct against the background of culture. I suspect that playwrights are compelled to engage in a dance between a participation in the language culture of their belonging and the adoption of a counter-cultural voice (out of which can issue a cultural critique–or, at least, a voice that awakens culture to its received values).

Which makes me wonder about the forces that shape the language (the languages) of today’s playwrights. It seems to me that a trend for contemporary speech is being hugely shaped by our various technological media. Email, text-messaging, television–all of them contribute to a telegraphic tendency in speech. None of those media invite copia in speech–all of them prefer the terse, the elliptical, and, in the case of television, the provision of an image-text that stands in for the narrative freight of the spoken word.

The stage, on the other hand, foregrounds the primacy of speech. Certainly the stage provides an able platform for the construction of image and, as noted in Pinter’s texts, the stage provides a platform for the eloquence of silence. But what happens to the language of the stage against the cultural background of telegraphic speech? And, increasingly, it seems, in our merchandising discourse and our political discourse (which, itself, might bear the influence of a merchandizing culture), speech that shouts, speech that reduces message to slogan? Will the language of the stage seek resistance in eloquence? In poetry? In the copious and complex? Or will it compress itself into the poetry of ellision? Or will it stop trying to achieve collective intelligibility and fracture into idiolects of chosen audiences (a sort of private speech among cognesceti)?

I don’t know. But it interests me very much. The pool of stories that express our human experience is limited. The way we tell the tale is limitless.

This entry was posted by Martha Lavey on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Betrayal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.