Edwin Block: Drama and Religious Experience, or Why Theater Still Matters

8/14/2019 Edwin Block: Drama and Religious Experience, or Why Theater Still Matters

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Edwin Blo ck

Drama and ReligiousExperience, or Why Theater

Still Matters

Life is a play in the presence of God.

plato, laws

We live in a postmodern, or what Catholic novelist Walker Percy

has even called a post-Christian world.1 Yet the desire for religious

experience is strong almost everywhere. A similar phenomenon is

evident in the theater. For decades critics and the public alike have

complained about the decline of serious drama on the stage. In ,

internationally known director Peter Brook said, Most of what iscalled theatre anywhere in the world is a travesty of a word once full

of sense, and, he asks,Has the stage a real place in our lives?2 More

recently, in a New York Times article, playwright Arthur Miller asked,

Is a lively, contentious, reflective theater beyond our reach?3

The view of dramatic experience that I am defending is, perhaps,

not a popular one. In the face of theorists like Bertolt Brecht,

Antonin Artaud, and the often contradictory claims and practice ofperformance artists and theorists, I propose a view that emphasizes

the similarities of dramatic and religious experience. My purpose is

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to show that drama continues to satisfy a deep need that is related to

but different from that which is satisfied by religious experience.

In the same book (The Empty Space) in which he questioned the-aters purpose, Peter Brook also sought to describe the perennial

appeal of drama by saying it satisfies a hunger for a reality deeper

than the fullest form of everyday life.4 In a more recent statement

and in a somewhat lighter veinphilosopher Louis Dupr observed,

The theater mysteriously merges the illusion of play with the deep-

er reality of life.5 This, in turn, recalls the idea of play as analyzed

by hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. For Gadamer,play is nonpurposive rationality, a form of engagement that calls

forth profound commitment.6 To explain how Brook, Dupr, and

Gadamers statements apply, I contend that drama in the theater can

be an everyday experience of the numinous, the ground experience

of the religious. According to Rudolf Otto, whose work I shall dis-

cuss in greater detail later, the numinous involves a sense of our

nothingness before a greater reality, a sense of awe, majesty, andenergy in and beyond the external world. And, whether we always

recognize it or not, a hunger for the deeper reality disclosed by an

experience of the numinous is why we continue to come to drama.

My specific purpose is to show that dramatic experience is a

powerful analogy of religious experience and that understanding it

in that way makes us appreciate drama more. Understanding the

common heritage of dramatic and religious experience may alsomake individualsif not audiences and communitiesmore open

to the drama that is life. Because space will limit the number of spe-

cific examples I can invokeand my experiences will likely differ

from those of readersI ask readers to recall the most powerful dra-

matic experiences they have had. Insofar as these experiences pos-

sess the features and effects I discuss, they will be the touchstone

for the truth of what I say.I presuppose a definition of drama that is indebted tobesides

the authors already mentionedboth Aristotle and the French play-

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wright and existentialist thinker Gabriel Marcel. From the perspec-

tive of the audience, dramatic experience is a form of observant,

attentive participation in a represented action that engages intellect,memory, desire, and emotion in a way that yields nonconceptual

forms of revelation and insight.7Just as we can play a game for the

fun of it, we can also do so to exercise our skills and gain addition-

al knowledge of ourselves and our capabilities. The insights and rev-

elations that we derive from dramatic experience, I argue, are

capable of providing greater self-knowledge even as they entertain

us and elicit a sense of the numinous.8 Dramatic experience is not asubstitute for but an analogy of religious experience. Even the inten-

sity of dramatic experience can only suggest the fulfillment, the

pleroma promised by Christian revelation.9

The kind of dramatic experience I am discussing is paradigmat-

ic. It does not occur every time we attend a performance (even a

very good one). It is an aesthetic experience, as opposed to mere

entertainment. But it is an aesthetic experience unlike that envis-aged by Kant with his sense of detachment and distantiation. Dra-

matic experience is, rather, a normative experience, in Gadamers

sense. We may be entertained, but the degree of our engagement is

greater, and the applicability to our lives is more apparent and

more serious. The play makes a claim on not only our attention but

our moral awareness. Or, we might say, with the late Swiss human-

ist and theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, that the dramatic expe-rience is a revelation of beauty that poses a challenge. Both Balthasar

and Gadamer agree that an experience of artlike drama in the

theater always possesses both qualities.Both authors refer to the end

of a sonnet by the German symbolist poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. The

poem describes and responds to a statue of Apollo. After describing

and regarding the beauty of the statue, the final line reads,You must

change your life. In this line both Gadamer and Balthasar find amodel of aesthetic experience as a personal call, a challenge for the

reader or participant in the experience to undergo a transformative

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but also a self-authenticating experience even as such a challenge

may, paradoxically, lead to self-transcendence.

As should already be apparent, the experience I am describing ismost certainly not ecstatic absorption in and annihilation by the

experience. Euripides warned against such indulgence in his Bacchae,

yet something similar to such an effect has been part of the attrac-

tion of rock concerts, sports events, and happenings. It is about

such an effect that performance theorists have been so enthusiastic.

But precisely because it is less ecstatic and unfolds in time (and over

time), involving past, present, and futureas well as engaging afuller spectrum of our intellectual and emotional resourcesthe

type of dramatic experience I am describing evokes a more holistic

and authentically human response.

Related as a corollary to what I say with regard to the paradig-

matic nature of this experience is the fact that not every play even

aims atlet alone achievesthe effect I am describing. Or, to put

it another way, many plays trade in ersatz forms of the experience.They entertain us or merely manipulate our feelings. Most farce

and simple dinner theater type playssuch as situation comedies

on TVdo not (because they cannot) inspire the actors and

actresses to achieve that cooperative self-transcendence that affects

the audience and moves it deeply to achieve the effects I will

describe. Taking its lead from television shows, naturalistic fiction,10

and, before that, the tradition of melodrama and/or the well-madeplay, the work of, for example, Noel Coward, Neil Simon, David

Mamet, and Neil LaBute, each in its own way trivializes if it does not

actually debase dramatic form and its ability to create conditions for

an experience of the numinous.11

The early work of many great playwrights from Shakespeare to

Tom Stoppard12 does not generally achieve this effect either because

the playwright has not learned or the genres and situations chosencannot create the appropriate conditions. The melodrama, the well-

made play, dinner theater, and TV sitcoms (as good as some of these

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may be) serve up thin beer for the thirsty theatergoer who is too

much in a rush to be entertained rather than be patient and let a gen-

uine dramatic experience develop.13Yet even comedies can have a religious dimension, where the

rhythm of participation and distance, suspense, revelation and rein-

tegration (or forgiveness) can facilitate an intense, numinous expe-

rience. The Swiss playwright Friedrich Drrenmatt complained that

in the twentieth century, tragedy was no longer possible, only com-

edy, satire, and parody.14 If that is the case, then we must look to such

forms for the kind of experience I am describing or despair of everfinding it. Examples of traditional and modernor postmodern

comedies that potentially give access to the numinous might include,

besides GoldonisA Servant of Two Masters, some of Shakespeare, per-

haps Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest, and such borderline,

genre-blurring instances as John Guares Six Degrees of Separation and

The House of Blue Leaves or D. L. Coburns The Gin Game. Here, cer-

tain archetypal themes and issues (with which comedy can and doesdeal)15 and certain situations lend themselves to such effects.

Having introduced these few qualifications, I would now like to

return to the focus of this article and ask more pointedly, What is

the nature of religious experience that we should hope to find an

analogy for in dramatic experience? There are (pac William James)

varieties of religious experience.16 Some spiritual writers speak of

a sense of unity with the divine. Others speak of enrapturement.17

James himself isolates (and Rudolf Otto subsequently endorses)

two particular characteristics of the numinous: the sense for the

infinite and the universal feeling of absolute dependence. We have

all experienced something like the sense for the infinite. When,

especially in the summer, we look up at a night sky full of stars, we

get something of that sense of vastness. It has to do with size and

comprehensiveness and the diminution of our sense of place andtime and even self.

As to dependence, philosopher Maurice Blanchot describes a



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radical form of dependence approaching the condition of helpless-

ness. In the following two-part example, Blanchot means to distin-

guish what he calls a limit-experience:

it is perhaps given to us to live each of the events that is ours

by way of a double relation. We live it one time as something

we comprehend, grasp, bear, and master (even if we do so

painfully and with difficulty) by relating it to some good or to

some value, that is to say, finally, by relating it to a Unity; we

live it another time as something that escapes all employment

and all end, and more, as that which escapes our very capaci-

ty to undergo it, but whose trial we cannot escape.18

Now the first instance describes how we, usually retrospectively,

make sense of and appropriate even painful experiences in life. The

second instance could describe our experience of the death of a

loved one, the sudden loss of a job, or any other life-changing event.

But when Blanchot says that such an experience is something that

escapes all employment and all end, he sounds almost Kantian, as if

he were describing the disinterestedness of aesthetic or, particu-

larly, dramatic experience. Something of this loss of self-possession,

something irreducible to cognition19belongs to the nature of dra-

matic experience.20

Now dramatic experience is not as disruptive or as overpower-

ing as Blanchots limit-experience. But when we do become fullyinvolved in a dramatic experience, we do, for the space of the per-

formance, to some extent forget ourselves; Balthasar would say we

surrender [Hingeben] to the enrapturement of the event. Hence,

to that extent it escapes all employment and all end. In fact, Aris-

totles notion of catharsis21 seeks to define the very limit that such

a limit-experience might have in the theater. If a dramatic experi-

ence, in Blanchots words,escapes our very capacity to undergo it,the distinction between art and life would be totally overthrown

and we could not appropriate or enjoy it. This blurring of the dis-

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tinction is, in fact, what someparticularly performance theorists

following Artaudendorse.22

William James refers to two other important (psychological)aspects of religious experience. The first has to do with transcend-

ing the self:

There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no

others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own

has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be

as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. . . . The timefor tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of

calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant

future to be anxious about, has arrived.23

Elsewhere James refers to a disposition of sacrifice, what Balthasar

and some other recent theorists call kenosis or self-emptying:

In its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is

no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It con-

sents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrificeinwardly it

knows it to be permanently overcome. . . . In our future

examples, even of the simplest and healthiest-minded type of

religious consciousness, we shall find this complex sacrificial

constitution.24

As should be apparent, the paradoxical nature of religious experience

remains. James clarifies our role in religious experience as involving

not only surrender and dependency but also freedom and serenity.

A psychologist such as Abraham Maslow describes more positive

and less threatening qualities of religious experience than Blanchot

or even James and Otto. In Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow,

having likely consulted James, Otto, and other sources, sums themup, giving them a characteristically late twentieth-century cast.

Maslow sees what he calls a peak experience as analogous to what



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religious writers describe. He analyzes a number of characteristics

that combine the enrapturement about which Balthasar speaks and

the sense of surrender to which both James and Balthasar advert.Referring to them as features belonging to a way of knowing,

Maslow also makes the case for a connection between religious and

aesthetic experience. He says,

I have found a particular kind of cognition for which my

knowledge of psychology had not prepared me but which I

have since seen well described by certain writers on esthetics,religion, and philosophy. This I shall call Cognition of Being.25

Key features of the peak experiencewhich we might connect with

our own best experiences of dramaare a loss of self-possession,a

special flavor of wonder, of awe . . . of humility and surrender before

the experience as before something great,26 and perhaps, he notes,

a general confounding of normal categories, such as those of timeand space.

What Maslow is describing is an experience of holistic, integra-

tive, and in a Christian context we might say incarnated form of

knowing, such as Gabriel Marcel has described.27 Maslow then turns

to a description of some of these basic cognitive happenings in . . .

the parental experience, the mystic, or oceanic, or nature experi-

ence, the aesthetic perception, and the creative moment. Theseand other moments of highest happiness and fulfillment, he says, I

shall call the peak-experiences.28

A brief look at a few of the nineteen characteristics will manifest

their similarity to what we may experience in both religious and dra-

matic experience. In the peak experience, Maslow says, the object

tends to be seen as a whole, as a complete unit detached from rela-

tions, from possible usefulness, from expediency, and from pur-pose.29 This would be how we see drama as a form of play or

recreation, if not mere entertainment. He also notes that repeat-

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ed cognizing seems to make the perception richer. We all know this

experience. The more we attend to the play, the better it is.30 More

significantly, The perceptions are relatively ego-transcending, self-forgetful, egoless. And, sounding even more like aspects of Jamess

description, Maslow notes, In the experience there is a complete,

though momentary, loss of fear, anxiety, inhibition, defense and con-

trol. Another significant feature of the peak experience is a very

characteristic disorientation in time and space. It would be accurate

to say that in these moments the person is outside of time and space

subjectively.31Two final characteristics refer again to the worth of the experi-

ence and to the self-forgetfulness of the person experiencing. The

peak-experience, Maslow says, is felt as a self-validating, self-justi-

fying moment which carries its own intrinsic value with it.32 And,

once again sounding like James, Maslow observes, The emotional

reaction in the peak experience has a special flavor of wonder, of

awe, of reverence, of humility and surrender before the experienceas before something great.33

How, then, does drama achieve such results and make possible a

sense of the numinous? According to Brook, a dramatists first step

is to create and then present an unseen world. In a chapter ofThe

Empty Space titled The Holy Theatre, Brook observes that the

notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear has a

deep hold on our thoughts.34 In a similar vein, Balthasar refers todrama in the theater as the dangerous border line where magic and

revelation cannot be told apart. It is, he says, a place where the

divine and human worlds confront one another.35

To specify more carefully what a dramatic production does to

elicit this sense of an unseen world and thereby make possible an

experience of the numinous, I will start with dramas fluid sense of

time. Josef Pieper36 and Johan Huizinga37 laid the foundation for aludic or playful sense of time (deriving, according to both, from reli-

gious feast days and rituals). A recent student of Huizinga observes,



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Festivals typically combine solemn and stately formalities with

a suspension of some of the ordinary rules of social life. Both

formalities and informalities are playful in that they contrastsharply with the routines of ordinary practical life, and yet it

is clear that the play element has a serious, perhaps a sacred

purpose, even in the most secularized societies.38

Subsequently, such varied authors as Mikhail Bakhtin, Dupr, and

Gadamer contributed their insights. Gadamers summation is perhaps

the most succinct. What Bakhtin calls festival time39 is, for

Gadamer, a separate space that proffers time, arresting it and allow-

ing it to tarry . . . the calculating way in which we normally manage

and dispose of our time is, as it were, brought to a standstill.40 Fes-

tival time, like Piepers and Huizingas, is a time set apart. And, like

Blanchots limit-experience, it escapes all employment and all end.

In light of Gadamers observation we can see that the dramatists

use of time on stage becomes expressive and a condition for cre-

ating the unseen world. Not only will the famous Greek unity of

time be capable of achieving the desired effect, but the Shake-

spearean chronicle and the near atemporality of a Pinter or a Beck-

ett play will be capable of doing so as well.41 Swiss playwright

Friedrich Drrenmatt also refers to what drama can do to time.42 It

is Balthasars point as well. By the clever negation (via, for exam-

ple, reversal or fragmentation) of time, the play opens a horizon that

is potentially infinite.43 Every genuine play (in contrast, for example,

to most television shows) desires to be timeless, even when it is set

in a specific time and place. The challenge (perhaps not confronted

directly) is to make that specific time and place universal. This can

also be done by invoking archetypes of character, action, and feeling,

about which I will say more.

Let me offer a few examples of how time becomes expressive and

becomes a condition for an experience of the numinous. The Greeksachieved concentration and intensity through limiting a dramas

action to the time of a single day. We have the sense that the action

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is happening in real time.44 Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller, in

Hedda GablerandAll My Sons, respectively, achieve similar results by

the same means. But by doing Shakespeare one better, other, morerecent playwrights give time a fluid sense, portraying not only

decades but centuries and millennia, all in the short space of an

afternoon or evening in the theater. Other playwrights employ flash-

backs or incorporate the perspective of life after death. In this way

time is dematerialized45 and becomes expressive, malleable, and

almost unearthly.

In The Grain of Wheat, his collection of aphorisms, Balthasar pre-sents an interesting paradox about time:

Time is the revealer of love through its manifoldness, through

its slow unfurling of millions of possibilities. Time is the fully

unfolded intensity of love, since within Time love can take on

the wonderful meaning of a story, of a process.Even in a pure-

ly formal sensequite apart from whatever happens within

itTime is Gods most glorious invention, as revelation of his

patience (because there is always more Time) and of his impa-

tience (because Time is irreversible).46

The expressive use of time in drama has the effect of opening and

then supporting or undergirding what Balthasar later, in his Theo-

Drama, calls the horizon of the infinite, but that we might, with

qualification, call universality. Hence, with regard to time, it matterslittle whether a playwright seeks to observe the unities or to adopt

Thornton Wilders epic sweep or Drrenmatts fantastical histor-

ical47 perspective or Shakespeares historical or feigned historical

horizon, as in, for example, Measure for Measure. The expressive use

of time is that within which the plays thematic impact becomes

doubly operative, temporarily overpowering our sense of a separa-

tion between art and our lives.Just two further examples. Recall when George Gibbss sister,

Rebecca, in Our Town, reads the way the minister addressed a letter



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to a friend when that friend was sick. Rebecca starts, It said: Jane

Crofut: The Crofut Farm; Grovers Corners; Sutton County; New

Hampshire; United States of America. Then George interrupts,but Rebecca goes on:But listen, its not finished: The United States

of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere;

the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of Godthats

what it said on the envelope.48 For the period of Rebeccas reading

we experience the impact as Rebecca does, within the great expanse

of the plays conception of time. And for a momentbut maybe also

when we leave the theaterwe have a sense of what it is to existwithin the mind of God. Drrenmatt deals expressively with time

in yet another way. InAn Angel Comes to Babylon, the background for

this fantastical-historical tale of Babylon just before the tower of

Babel is the entire Andromeda Galaxy, from which an angel descends

to offer a gift to mankind.

C. S. Lewis, in his collection, Letters to Malcolm, provides an

unusual perspective that casts light on the use of time in drama. Inrejecting the idea that the dead are not in time,49 Lewis speculates

that for the dead there is a time which was not quite so linear as ours

. . . it might, so to speak, have thickness as well as length. He goes

on to say, Already in this life we get some thickness whenever we

learn to attend to more than one thing at once.50 While experienc-

ing a play, we may realize this thickening preeminently because we

are both in the present and aware of past and future as we areattending to more than one thing at once. As we saw in Balthasar,

living human beings realize Gods plan in and through time. The

experience of drama provides a perspective that is both in, above,

and through time.

Among the simplest and most familiar tools for creating a dra-

matic experience of the numinous is dramatic theme. The greatest

playwrights have known, consciously or unconsciously, that thosealmost ritualistic patterns of events and interactions of characters,

which are also closely analogous to the central experiences of the

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great religious traditions, have an appeal that borders on the uni-

versal. Even the conventions of naturalism do not automatically pre-

clude the possibility of evoking a transcendent dimension. Bythematizing the most explicit kind of kenosis (self-giving), George

Bernard Shaws Major Barbara suggests a world of transcendent val-

ues even as the play seeks to undermine them. In a crucial scene, the

principled Salvation Army major finds herself betrayed by both her

father and Mrs.Baines, the Salvation Army commissioner. Her father

contributes money from his liquor and munitions businesses to the

army, and Mrs.Baines accepts.Barbara cries out,Drunkenness andMurder! My God: why hast thou forsaken me?51 A bit later, to one

of the poor she helped, she describes the measure of her desolation

in the ironic terms and dialect of the people she has served when she

says, Peter: Im like you now. Cleaned out and lost my job.52 But

even by the end of the play when Shaw tries to substitute an imma-

nent, socialist worldview for a religious one, Barbaras self-tran-

scendent act belies Shaws merely political point. The number ofplays, even down to the end of the twentieth century, that thematize

such self-offering is impressive, including such notablethough

often ambiguously resolvedinstances as Peter Shaffers Equus and

Athol Fugards Sizwe Bansi Is Dead.

Themes of forgiveness (like Isabellas forgiveness of Angelo in

Measure for Measure), reintegration after expulsion (as in the conclu-

sion to The Tempest or August WilsonsJitney), love, and sacrifice areall time-honored themes of drama that can elicit something similar

to religious awe and revelation. The threat or imminence of death,

particularly when it brings about a revelation for the characters

involved, has a perennial ability to evoke powerful response.53 A

recent example is Margaret Edsons Wit.

Along with the revelation or recognition of death can come an

awakening and a sense of seeing life for the first time. Such a rev-elation casts its bright shadow upon our everyday lives as well. In

Anton Chekhovs The Three Sisters, Baron Tuzenbach, the fiance of



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fundamental values and assumptions. Just as a fluid sense of time can

evoke a sense of helplessness, so too can a plays radical questioning

make us lose the firm grasp we think we have on reality.Related to this, recent theorists57 have examined the way in

which the numinous arises as a call, a summons, and a disruption of

our everyday world. Features that can effect such disruption include

such now familiar metatheatrical techniques as the stage manager,

the play-within-a-play, and even the use of monologues. Adapting a

Pirandello technique, Wilder employs the stage manager in Our Town

in a way that invites the audience to see the action of the play, and ofthe world, against the widest horizon possible: that of the infinite. In

the four monologues that constitute Brian Friels Faith Healer, we

learn slowly and uncannily that the characters are speaking from

beyond the grave, and thus we experience a new perspective on

their lives and ours.

The presence of the actors and actresses is another important

factor in creating a sense of the numinous. Notice how their intensefocus of attention heightens everything they touch or refer to by

drawing it out of the everyday flow of time and space. That presence

makes us simultaneously aware of what is happening, the whole

event of which each action in the play is a part, without losing aware-

ness of (that is, while still attending however tangentially to) what is

happening in the theater and the rest of the world. There is some-

thing like what Lewis called the thickeningcall it an intensifica-tionof lived time. This is also what it means to live in the

heightened consciousness of Maslows peak experience.

The dialectic of appearance and reality, upon which drama

and much of everyday life dependsis carried over into the work of

the actors and actresses. Theorists, critics, and directors agree that

when on stage, actors or actresses exercise a strange fascination.

They are representative and unique, familiar, yet in some way whol-ly other than ourselves.58 The actors and actresses intense pres-

ence, deriving from that otherness, is a manifestation of a



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self-transcendence that the play itself may thematize. The better the

play, the more it will invite or challenge the actors and actresses to

become not just the individual character that each one plays butalso part of the ensemble event that is the works and the play-

wrights intent.59 Fully realized, such self-transcendence communi-

cates itself to the audience as the inevitable movement of an action

that is beyond the actors and our own control. Despite what post-

modern theorists claim, the sense of the whole that a dramatic expe-

rience provides is not necessarily one of artificial or contrived

closure. As Louis Dupr observes,

Though the uncertainty of its outcome distinguishes the drama

[from ritual], the orderly, stylized dramatic processes assure

the spectators that they may count on a definite, albeit not

definitive, conclusion.60

Dupr is merely stating what Balthasar observes again and again in

Theo-Drama. In drama,human beings attain to something like a god-like view of time, events, and life itself.

I approach the issue of language in drama via two points: speech

and metaphor. In Problems of the Theater, Drrenmatt speaks of a ten-

sion between the need to speak and the desire to remain silent:

The human being of the drama is, after all, a talking individ-

ual, and speech is his limitation. The action only serves toforce this human being on the stage to talk in a certain way.

The action is the crucible in which the human being is melt-

ed into words, must become words.61

I choose to see in Drrenmatts comment a profound insight into

how the dramatist creates the unseen world on which creation of a

numinous experience for the audience depends. When characters

melt into speech, it is as if their words create the world they see andlive in, and that, in turn, makes that often unseen world real to the

audience.

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Though explicitly concerned with the onset of the Holocaust in

Germany, Arthur Millers Broken Glass offers an example of

how even naturalistic drama can intimate an unseen world and evokea sense of the numinous. After reading about Kristallnacht in the

papers, one of the chief characters, Sylvia Gellburg, experiences a

sudden paralysis of her legs. Her physician suspects the condition is

psychosomatic. When he questions her about her fears of what is

happening in Austria and Germany, Sylvia tries to explain her sense

of an evil force at work behind or beneath events. This becomes the

occasion, the cause, for her melting into speech. Sylvia describes,

its almost like theres something in me that . . . I have no word

for it, I dont know what Im saying, its like . . . something

alive, like a child almost, except its a very dark thing . . . and

it frightens me!62

As she describes the evil force that haunts her, that force becomes an

almost palpable, if unseen, reality of the dramatic experience. We

might describe what Sylvia feels as irreducible to cognition and thus

like the mystery that Marcels dramas sought to embody and

explore.63

With respect to metaphor in drama, director Peter Hall sees

drama as a place for metaphor. Because filmwith rare excep-

tionsalways shows an image of the literal world, it is only drama

where, despite the degree of literal or naturalistic setting, language

has a primacy that makes the use of metaphor a form of power. A

striking example occurs in Harold Pinters play,Ashes to Ashes.

The play is minimalist in the extreme. In a virtually placeless, time-

less afternoon, a man and a woman, Devlin and Rebecca, discuss

events whose reality seems to be constantly in question. Critics

argue about the plays theme(s): abuse of women,Nazism, the absur-

dity of existence. But from out of the flow of words an unseen world

appears, one that opens on the uncanny, if not the transcendent. Inone passage, Rebecca describes an almost dreamlike scene, yet a

scene whose power grows from out of the words:



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I looked out of the garden window, . . . in the middle of sum-

mer, in that house in Dorset. . . . I was alone. I was looking out

of the window and I saw a whole crowd of people walkingthrough the woods, on their way to the sea. . . . They seemed

to be very cold, they were wearing coats, although it was such

a beautiful day. A beautiful, warm, Dorset day. They were

carrying bags. There were . . . guides . . . ushering them,

guiding them along. . . . I lost sight of them. I was really quite

curious so I went upstairs to the highest window in the house

and I looked way over the top of the treetops and I could see

down to the beach. The guides . . . were ushering all these

people across the beach. It was such a lovely day. It was so still

and the sun was shining. And I saw all these people walk into

the sea. The tide covered them slowly. Their bags bobbed

about in the waves.64

Without additional comment, the fate of these people becomes a

metaphor, and, with next to no transition, Rebecca and Devlinsconversation takes a different turn, leaving the mystery of the crowd

of people in the sea to hang, uninterpreted in the air of the theater.

As these examples show, language need not be flowery or rhetorical.

It need not be Shakespearean. But it must be able to evoke the

unseen, the mysterious, that which is beyond glib, conceptual under-

standing and hence dismissal or manipulation.

Dramatic experience can provide a sense of freedom from thedeterministic world. As Louis Dupr observes, only in the ekstasis

of becoming what we are not does freedom allow us to become what

we are.65 Dupr is pointing to the fact that in every great drama the

audience is challenged to witness an alien point of view. Drama can

give this sense of freedom,paradoxically, as it presents a most deter-

ministic, empty, or even atheistic view of that world. Think of the

exhilaration after some of Samuel Becketts plays.66 Drama createsan unseen world via the artifice, or artificial sense of a whole life,

a whole event, one that, because of its structure, and horizon, inti-

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mates the infinite, the supernatural, the mysterious, and the numi-

nous. Dramatic experience exhibits and then questions those very

forces that motivate so many of our actions.From these observations we may conclude that a dramatic expe-

rience that most closely analogizes religious experiencea sense of

the numinous, the Mystic,67 the limit-experiencewill have the

potential to transport the audience beyond the boundaries of the

everyday world, providing an intimation of the infinite.68 As both

separate from and yet participants with the actors, the audience

finds itself both in and out of time, able to see and feel and yetjudge, embodying Goethes idea of the ideal reader, one which

judges as it enjoys and enjoys as it judges.69 It is an attitude that,

despite the possibility of tragic outcomes, is a kind of lightness that

augments enrapturement. The experience is, as Maslow reminds us

of the peak experience, one in which many dichotomies,polarities,

and conflicts are fused, transcended or resolved.70

Drama in the theater, then,can be a foretaste of the experience weenjoy when, in what Christians call the state of grace, we apprehend

a sense of meaning, harmony, and peace in worship and in life. It is a

sense composed of more than emotion. It is one that comes from

insight, recognition, and acceptance. It can be acceptance even of sit-

uations that may seem overpowering.71 It is an experience that comes

from having had ones whole sensorium,heart, mind,and will enrap-

tured and engaged, attuned to rhythms larger than the everyday.A few lines from a poem by W. B. Yeats, called Lapis Lazuli,

express, for Harold Pinter, the self-transcending lan that dramatic

experience achieves. Speaking of an actor friend, Pinter says,For me

his acting at these times embodied the idea of Yeats line:They knew

that Hamlet and Lear are gay, / Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

Mac [the actor] entered into this tragic gaiety naturally and

inevitably.72 What the actor or actress experiences is projected to theaudience. Through the actors embodiments, the audience, too, can

enter into this tragic gaiety or comic exuberance, as the case may be.



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Pinters observation sums up the kind of dramatic experience I

have been describing. As noted, it is not merely a state of mind; it is

a disposition of the heart and soul that sees beyond and can rest con-tent with fortune and misfortune. It is an attitude that has connec-

tions with what Paul Ricoeur calls second naivete73 and Lewiss

thickening of experience.74 Like a person enjoying Maslows peak

experience, the viewer of the play is both in and out of time, seeing

the horizon of both this world and the infinite that rises up behind

events on stage.

Whether it is an attitude made possible by the entire event of theplay, or an individual, or even momentary insight within the work,

whether it derives from a coalescence of theme, language, produc-

tion features, or the actorsor any combination of all thesethe

result is like that enrapturement to which Balthasar refers and that

often accompanies us as we leave the theater. It is that sense that

enables us to see our world and our life in that world in a different

way.A final quote from Peter Brook may say it best: We need des-

perately to experience magic in so direct a way that our very notion

of what is substantial could be changed.75 As a result of such

magic, the world outside the theater, our everyday world, looks dif-

ferent, more dramatic, more meaningful, more capable of intensi-

ty, and hence more open to the possibility of mystery. Recalling

Bakhtin and Gadamer on festival time, it is a way of perceiving,feeling and abiding in that moment, and which can momentarily

or profoundlytransform the way we view and live our lives. Dra-

matic experience can, in fact, address us in the final words of Rilkes

sonnet, You must change your life.

Notes

1. Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Noonday Press, ).

2. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Macmillan, ; repr. New York:

Atheneum,), . Here Brook merely echoes Friedrich Drrenmatts remarks

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in Problems of the Theater in Plays and Essays, ed. Voldmar Sander (New York: Con-

tinuum, ), in which the Swiss playwright had said the theater in the twentieth

century was either a museum or a place of experiment. Playwrights and performance

theorists continue to pose the question and to assert the theaters irrelevance. In the

s, critics and theorists (see W. B. Worthen, Drama, Performativity, and Per-

formance, PMLA , no. [October ]: ) went to an extreme, say-

ing that the scripted play is, like chamber music, an outmoded genre.

3. New York Times, February , , C.

4. Brook, Empty Space, .

5. Louis Dupr,Ritual: The Divine Play of Time, in Play, Literature,Religion, ed. Vir-

gil Nemoianu and Robert Royal (Albany:State University of New York Press,),

.

6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, ), .

7. Brendan Sweetman, Marcel and Phenomenology: Can Literature Help Philoso-

phy? Renascence , no. (Spring ): .

8. In terms that George Steiner might approve, we can say it enables a provisional

(re)discovery of meaningful form. (See George Steiner, Real Presences [Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, ], , , , ).

9. In Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. I: Seeing

the Form(Edinburgh: T & T. Clark,

), Balthasar speaks of enrapturement, butin his Theo-Drama, vol. I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, ), it is more the

Gadamerian response: you must change your life. But it can be both ecstatic and

criticalwhat Aristotle was pointing to when he sketched his ideas about catharsis.

10. As a colleague, John Pustejovsky, pointed out,one goal of naturalistic dramalike

the naturalistic fiction that became the dominant mode in the late nineteenth cen-

turywas portraying a moral conflict in such a way as to make the real world . . .

into a force large enough to affect the moral choices of society. Still, the naturalis-

tic mode in the theater does notsome critics notwithstanding (see Simon Shepherd

and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History[London: Blackwell, ],ix)prevent the emergence of a sense of the numinous. See later comments on

Arthur Millers Broken Glass (New York: Penguin, ).

11. An exception: some commedia dellarte productions, and works based on them,

such as Carlo Goldonis A Servant of Two Masters, have the potential, in the right

hands, to transcend their own limitations. Sometimes it is the inherently metathe-

atrical element in commedia; sometimes it is an unexpected reflexivity in a char-

acter that stands out so far above the level of the play that an alien, alterior

dimension or horizon opens up and a sense of the numinous makes itself felt.

12. Shakespeares Comedy of Errors and StoppardsAfter Magritte come to mind.13. Musicals are probably a special case. As anyone who can respond wholeheartedly to

the experience of music knows (see Steiner), music has a special power to evoke self-

transcendence on its own. It is mere speculation,but it seems that much of the appeal



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of the modern musical (like opera before it)pac Bertolt Brecht on the culinary

in operais the physical as well as emotional and intellectual exaltation felt in the

combination of sound, words, and movement. The degree of reflectiveness neces-

sary to achieve the effect I am describing, however, is often insufficient or superficial.

14. Friedrich Drrenmatt, Problems of the Theater, .

15. In Ren Girard,Perilous Balance:A Comic Hypothesis in To Double Business Bound:

Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, ), critic Girard argues that in structure as well as intent comedy and

tragedy are actually quite similar ().

16. Maurice Blanchot,Abraham Maslow, Jean-Luc Marion,Emannuel Levinas,Francois

Lyotard, and C. S. Lewis are my reference points.

17. Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, ff; and Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. II (San Francisco:

Ignatius Press, ), .

18. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, ), ; Gerald Bruns glosses Blanchot in Gerald Bruns, The Senses of

Augustine (On Some of Lyotards Remains), Religion and Literature (Fall ):

a limit experience is an experience in which we can no longer comport our-

selves as cognitive subjects: it is an experience in which the Icannot sustain its self-

possession or position as a disengaged punctual ego exercising conceptual control

over whatever is presented to it. Experience in this sense is irreducible to cognition.

Le je is turned into le soi (passibility).

19. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation.

20. We might also think of that loss of self-possession that occurs when playing certain

games, when we are totally taken up in the event.

21. A concept whose twin terms are badly translated (as Balthasar points out) as pity and

fear. The purpose of catharsis, according to interpreters of Aristotle, was the pur-

gation of these two emotions.

22. Derridas essay on Artaud takes as part of its title Artauds own term, The Theater

of Cruelty. Jacques Derrida, The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Repre-

sentation, in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

). The blurring that Artaud and Derrida seem to endorse could turn an audi-

ence into a mob. But whereas a mob may suddenly think, feel, and act as oneand

some revolutionary theorists idealize and justify such behaviorin the loss of indi-

viduality and freedom the participants are no longer really human.

23. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library,

), .

24. Ibid., .

25. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: D. Van Nostrand,),.

26. Ibid., .27. Sweetman, Marcel and Phenomenology, .

28. Maslow, Psychology of Being, .

29. Ibid., . This recalls what Emmanuel Kant refers to as disinterestedness.

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30. This fact also raises a key theoretical question as it also explains why many people

may care to repeat the experience as they see the same movie again and again. The

theoretical question has to do with iterability, the fact that a play is meant to be per-

formed numerous times; yet it is the task of not only the author and the director but

the actors and actresses as well to make it seem that the events on stage are happening

as if for the first time. It is thisshall we say finalillusion of the theater that post-

modern theorists and performance theorists would like to undermine, negate, or

deny.


32. Ibid., .

33. Ibid., . John Macmurrays discussion of intrinsic value and contemplation,

has parallels with Maslows ideas in his overlooked classic. John Macmurray, Religion,

Art, and Science: A Study of the Reflective Activities of Man, the Forwood Lectures, (Liv-

erpool: Liverpool University Press, ).


35. Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. I, .

36. Josef Pieper, Leisure:the Basis of Culture (New York: Pantheon, ).

37. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: Roy

Publishers, ).

38. Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater:Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority

in Renaissance England(London: Methuen,), .

39. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), and

Mikhail Bakhtin,Forms of Time and Chronotype in the Novel in The Dialogic Imag-

ination (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), .

40. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, .

41. Drama critic and theorist Peter Szondi has located the point at which this timeless

element emerged in drama in the Renaissance drama of, particularly, Shakespeare.

See Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama:A Critical Edition, ed.and trans. Michael

Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). Originally published in

Germany as Theorie des modernen Dramas (Suhrkamp Verlag,

).42. Drrenmatt, Problems of the Theater, .

43. Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. I, .

44. Our experience of Greek drama may be anachronistic from the way the Greeks

experienced it. That is because (as Szondi points out) Shakespeare and the Renais-

sance transformed our sense of acted time.

45. In Problems of the Theater, Drrenmatt refers to dematerializing space (), but his

An Angel Comes to Babylon also dematerializes time.

46. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, ), .

47. I refer particularly to his anachronistic re-creation of pre-Babel Babylonia in AnAngel Comes to Babylon.

48. Thornton Wilder, Three Plays by Thornton Wilder(New York: Bantam, ), .

49. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm (New York: Harcourt, Brace,), .



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50. Ibid.

51. George Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaws Plays, ed. Warren S. Smith (New York: Nor-

ton, ), .

52. Ibid., .

53. One media person put it in a crasser form that still suggests the point:anytime death

is imminent, life is more exciting (Andy Rooney, Sixty Minutes, April , ).

54. Anton Chekhov, Chekov:The Major Plays (New York: New American Library,),

.

55. Wilder, Three Plays, .

56. Ibid., .

57. See, for instance, Bruns, Senses of Augustine, .

58. See Herbert Blau, Universals of Performance; or Amortizing Play, in Richard

Schechner and Willa Appel, ed., By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of The-

atre and Ritual(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .

59. Hence the idea of ensemble acting, in which the emphasis is on the individuals sub-

ordinating themselves to the whole. Clearly, the star system militates against such

melding and the resulting ensemble effect.

60. Dupr,Ritual, .

61. Drrenmatt, Problems of the Theater, .

62. Arthur Miller, Broken Glass (New York: Penguin, ), .

63.In a parallel situation, Marcels The Broken Worldhas the character Christianne say toher friend Henry, Im saying theres someone in me I hardly know, someone who

certainly doesnt belong to your group. There is a part of me that is searching, try-

ing to find herself, and who in rare moments is in touch with herself, in another

world, one that is foreign to you. Katharine Rose Hanley, Gabriel Marcels Perspective

on the Broken World(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, ), . And in

T. S. Eliots The Cocktail Party, Celia Coplestone has a sudden insight of sin that

shakes the life of this young woman down to its foundations. Quoted in Josef

Pieper, The Concept of Sin, trans. Edward T. Oakes (South Bend: St. Augustines

Press, ), .64. Harold Pinter,Ashes to Ashes, inAshes to Ashes and Mountain Language (London: Faber

and Faber, ), .

65. Dupr,Ritual,. See also Gadamer on play in Hans-George Gadamer,Truth and

Method, d rev. ed. (New York: Crossroads, ), ; and Balthasar on the

assumption of a role, Theo-Drama, vol. I, .

66. But also, in contrast, think of the depression experienced after a play by Mamet or

Shepard, or Neil LaBute. This makes one ask about the kinds of dramas that invite

religious reflection.

67. Bruns,Senses of Augustine, , suggests that this is what Jean-Luc Marion seeks toinvestigate in Jean-Luc Marion, Distance and Its Icon, the final section ofThe Idol

and Distance (New York: Fordham University Press, ), .

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68. A play can do this through a narrowly delimited view or through one so expansive

that it pushes out against the universe (see Drrenmatt inAn Angel Comes to Babylon).

69. Letter to J. F. Rochlitz dated June , , in WA IVvol. , . Quoted in Hans

Robert Jauss,Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, ), . Dupr also observes that, watching characters inter-

action,we realize that freedom demands that we realizeourselves within the con-

fines of character, (Ritual,) and that the quest for identity leads through the

alienation of role-acting ().


71. Recall James on this complex sacrificial constitution (Varieties of Religious Experience,

).

72. Harold Pinter, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics, trans. E. Buchanan (New York:

Grove, ), .

73. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil(New York: Harper and Row, ), .

74. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, .


Other Works Cited

Bourgeois, Patrick.Catholic Author, Musician, Philosopher: Gabriel Marcel in Postmod-

ern Dialogue. Renascence , no. (Spring ): .

Gadamer,Hans-Georg.Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press,

.

. Truth and Method. d rev. ed. New York: Crossroads, .

Jacobs,Alan.A Theology of Reading. Cambridge: Westview Press, .

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Confession of Augustine. Stanford: Stanford University Press,

.

Marcel, Gabriel.Awakenings.Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, .

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. New York: Oxford University Press, .

Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation. New Haven: Yale University Press,.


Edwin Block: Drama and Religious Experience, or Why Theater Still Matters

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