Show vs. Play
Consider: words are not passive transcriptions of realities that are external to the language we use to describe them; rather, words are active instantiations—constructions—of realities to which we have no direct, uncomplicated access to begin with.
The latter part of this contention—our having no direct access to “reality”—is not something we could deal with at any length in this essay, because it involves several distinct and particularly nasty cans of academic worms, and while it can (we think) be quite handily defended, undertaking that defense would lead us rather off in a different direction. The former part of the statement—that words are active constructions of realities—is the matter under immediate consideration. The role a word plays in the subsequent experience of the thing it proposes to describe is crucial, as is increasingly apparent the more attention you pay to the processes and particulars of signification.
Several epithetic or epigrammatic scenarios could be put forth as illustrations of how different words construct different realities. For instance, in different languages, even within the same western tradition, abstract ideas like love or forgetfulness are constructed differently, with significant disparities between agency and passive versus active roles. In Spanish, for example, one talks of how one is “pleased by” something, rather than talking of how one “likes” something: “me gusta Shakespeare,” or “Shakespeare pleases me,” as opposed to “I like Shakespeare.” Practically speaking, the different ways of phrasing the thought do not affect the overall or general meaning, but the difference in agency, to begin with, is significant. In the typical Spanish phrasing, the noun “Shakespeare” is the agent, or acting subject, and its object is the personal pronoun (objective case), “me.” In the typical English phrasing, of course, the roles of agent and object are reversed; it is the “I” who is responsible for the liking, while “Shakespeare” is the passive object of the verb.
The distinction between the two ways of describing what might casually be called “the same thing” is more pronounced in a second example: in English, we typically describe the action of forgetting from a first-person, nominative, active perspective: “I forgot my shoes.” The agent responsible for the forgetting is the speaking “I,” while the shoes are the passive—which is to say blameless—object of the forgetting. In Spanish, however, the typical construction displaces the blame from the forgetter onto the shoes: “se me olvidaron mis zapatos,” or “my shoes forgot themselves to me.” Again, we are looking at two different ways of saying “the same thing,” but in this second, slightly more pointed example, the distinctions of agency show more clearly the potential for language to effect different realities. The way we describe our circumstances, experiences, visions, roles, and so forth, is not a matter of passive transcription. Description is not an activity in which objective circumstances are related in a sequence of transparent signifiers that register reality without affecting it. By assigning blame to inanimate objects like shoes, the Spanish phrasing brings about an important shift of perspective, moving blame away from the speaker. In short, the words you choose affect the realities they are supposed to represent. Or to rephrase it ever so slightly, the words you choose effect the realities they represent. What we are suggesting is that the same thing described in two different ways is no longer the same thing.
In a simpler example, we could look to word choice and denotation versus connotation. Consider, for example, that the denotative meanings of the words “antediluvian,” “ancient,” and “geriatric” overlap significantly. They all denote “old,” and “old” would certainly appear early on in a dictionary definition of any of them. But of course, their connotative meanings—the range of associations, from obvious to subtle, that comes along with each word—diverge substantially, and you couldn’t use the three terms interchangeably in describing something as “old.” You’d be “persuading to an attitude,” to use Kenneth Burke’s phrase, depending on which term you used—an attitude of Biblical past, of western civilization, of dismissive contempt, and so forth. The word choice colors the external reality described in meaningful ways that have real-world effects. Language not only reflects reality; it colors—or even constitutes—reality.
The problem with the denotation/connotation example—or with the Spanish vs. English example, for that matter—is it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in suggesting the constitutive potential of word choice. Most of the work done by psychologists and linguists in the area suggests effects far more profound (even unsettling or downright disturbing) of language on the material world. A lot of the speculation, particularly in psychology, has to do with the idea of “individuals” and with the emergence in infancy of a thinking, self-aware and self-identifying consciousness and the role the structures of language play in that emergence. It’s all actually quite compelling, but it’s not the kind of research that’s likely to convince us that we can change the world by calling our plays “plays” instead of something else. While we do think the ponderous theoretical argument for using the word “play” for our projects carries plenty of weight, a more effective argument for “play” can be made by simply considering its centrality to this group of people and the process that drives our work together.
The word “play” is of special importance in what Bedlam Faction does or is trying to do. We collectively considered Mark Harris’s pronouncements on the idea of play so important that we put them on our website: “when we're in a state of intense play, our cares and worries tend to vanish . . . we feel pleasurably alive, lighthearted. But play can also take us to new heights of conscious awareness.” We are the happy inheritors of a word that functions on related levels as a noun and a verb in the immediate context of our “work” as a theater company. “Play” is our stated goal every time we step onto a stage, audience or no, to work on a play. And a “performance” for us is an act of coordinated play, loosely guided by a script on which interpretation, cooperation, elaboration, variation, and other forms of “play” are keystrokes.
But that’s only one of several tips to this particular iceberg. “Play” has important associations, for instance, with early modern drama, in which period of explosive expression (and profit, it should be noted) the English-speaking west basically reinvented drama, building a new kind of cultural entertainment around celebratory social conventions from feast days to Carnival and misrule and allowed fools, and canonizing along the way the kind of improvisation pioneered in taverns and on stages in London by people like Richard Tarlton and Will Kemp. We think the spirit of improvisation is especially important, and especially prominent, in our best work as a company.
“Play” also rings with a rich musical significance in contemporary usage. Again, the notion of a script or text or score that is performed via an involved “playing” of a piece comes to mind. At the bottom of all these associations is a notion of fun, of pleasure, of expression. We have had little success trying to discover the exact origins of expressive play in western culture, but it’s clearly present in early ritual, where it has an important role in the divergence of ritual expression of self from dramatic representation of objects. In any case, it has been with us here in the west for a long, long time, which is why we think it is safe to say we are the hereditary keepers of a concept that used to inhere in all dramatic performance but that doesn’t always factor into theater today. We won’t for a second suggest that the Bedlam Faction is the only company around who plays while performing. But we have gathered a particular, signature momentum around the concept of play, and this momentum can carry us forward.
For all these reasons, we think especially when it comes to key terms like “play,” how we refer to what we do in this company is fundamental—or to put it more forecully, it is bedrock fundamental; it is positively transcendental in importance; it is the material on which we build not only superstructures, but bases as well. Not bricks and mortar, but the water and grit that we use to make our bricks and mortar to begin with. In order to keep play first and foremost in our process and in our performances (regardless of whether the material is goofy parody or high tragedy), we’ve got to drop the idea of “play” into the old well of the subconscious and let it flavor everything we produce. We’ve got to treat it like a kind of meditative syllable synchronized with the old heartbeat.
This means the difference can’t be disregarded, nor can it become merely a matter of lip service to refer to a “play” rather than a “show.” we want to stress that this isn’t simply an overblown, garrulous attack on the word “show.” “Show” does have some connotative meanings that aren’t especially savory, as far as I’m concerned, but the defects or drawbacks of “show” are of little importance in the bigger picture. The argument in favor of “play” is surely more persuasive than any argument we could make against “show.”