Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2008 20:15:43 -0800
To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
From: The Independent Eye <eye-AT-independenteye.org>
Subject: Re: [Puptcrit] Making powerful stories


>   I see that, for example, in MACBETH, that WS felt it was a 
>cathartic necessity to include a drunken porter as comic relief.  I 
>see where in most of his works, Bertholdt Brecht also felt that 
>comedy should run simultaneously through his stories that are hardly 
>"funny ".  So I'm pondering the psycological dynamic here.... 
>wondering how I could/should include it in my own play. Wondering 
>what the "rules "  of comic relief might be, for effective 
>manipulation of the audience in being able to deliver a work that is 
>troubling. ... yet not burn them out to the degree they can't 
>receive it.

Dear Michael-

A provocative question.  I've never felt that comedy is a "relief." 
It's always been part of our most serious work, simply because it's 
part of life.  In MACBETH (we had a puppet Macbeth in repertory over 
a 15-year span) the drunken porter definitely changes the tone, like 
a sudden shift in music, but his presence actually intensifies the 
progress of the murder's horror.  Macbeth and his lady have gone off 
to do the deed, and we're hanging on what's going to happen.  What do 
we get?  A drunken porter, acting as if he'd just wandered into the 
theatre and has no idea what the play is.  It's funny, but it also 
intensifies the suspense to the extreme, and then all hell breaks 
loose.  Auden's poem speaks of the executioner's horse scratching its 
ass against a tree as the Crucifixion happens - suddenly it makes 
that mythic happening real.

Brecht was a genius, both as playwright and director, at what I'd 
call the theatrical version of alternating current:  fields of energy 
cutting across each other to generate the intense current.  People 
mistake his "Verfremdungseffekt" as being anti-emotion.  Not so. 
"Estrangement" simply means surprising audiences into seeing the 
ordinary or the accepted as "strange," not god-given, not acceptable, 
not "normal."  I would think that a civil rights play demands the 
maximum degree of surprise, in terms of tone.  We're so imbued with 
the seriousness of it, the sense of victimization & suffering, the 
nobility, etc., and that's all true, but it's fatal if the audience, 
from the outset, can predict the whole play.  What about the heroic 
kid at the lunch-counter sit-in who needs desperately to pee?

One of my interviewees, who as a college student was jailed at a 
demonstration, despite her swearing to her mother (on a Bible) that 
she would not participate in the protests, said that her first 
thought, when tossed in a cell with murderers, was, "My mama's gonna 
kill me!"  That's funny because it's unexpected, it's real, and we 
can connect viscerally with her reality.  And when she was released, 
she returned to her dorm room and five minutes later the phone rang 
and her mother's first words were, "WERE YOU RAPED?"  Mama had heard 
a news item from Mississippi, and this was the first thing in her 
mind.  Colleen replied, "No, Mama, I wasn't raped, but I've got 
lice."  I think that says it all.  It's funny, it deromanticizes it, 
it makes us feel the horrible emotional stress not just of the people 
on the front line but the people back home who love them, and it 
shows the true nuts and bolts of heroism, made not by saints but by 
ordinary people who really don't like to have lice.

Great challenge.  Good luck.

Peace & joy-
Conrad B.

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