Julio Torres, Intern
Paul Woodruff is a professor of philosophy and classics at the
University of Texas at Austin. In his latest book, The Necessity of Theater, Woodruff articulates why we created theater, why we practice it, and above all, why we need it. Throughout book, poignant examples of our day to day need for watching and being watched are weaved in with cornerstones of our traditional definition of theater—football is compared to Hamlet, family weddings with Waiting for Godot. In the following excerpt, Woodruff picks apart the role of spatial definition in both traditional and day to day theater.
Why does theater need a measured space? In order to practice the art of theater successfully, some people must be watching the actions of others. Whether your job tonight is to watch or be watched, you need to know which job is yours; the watcher-watched distinction is essential to theater. We shall see that even this can break down at the end of a theater piece, with marvelous consequences. But one of those consequences is that the event is no longer theatrical. When no one is watching, it’s not theater; it has grown into something else. Marking off space in theater is a device for meeting the need to distinguish the watcher from the watched. In most traditions there is a circle or a stage or sanctuary or a playing field.
Plot measures time better than a clock does, but what could measure space? This is a hard question, because theater space seems to be much more elastic than theater time, and nothing serves the function of plot to give space a structure that is comparable to the beginning, middle and end of the time in theater.
Back to the green lawn in front of the tower, the lying plastic disks, and the leaping, twirling young men. Suppose that, after our meeting concludes, we return past the same green and see the students still playing. Our meeting ended early, and we have time to watch again. The throes are longer now: one student leaps the hedge to catch a long throw; his friend dashes down the steps to retrieve another. In the pause for retrieval, the third player recognizes one of us, and, as a challenge, throws her an extra disk that had been kept in reserve on top of his backpack. Wordlessly, one of us moves into the green and we commence to play, a separate game, fully clothed and far less skillful. But on the same ground. The student players shift slightly to make room for us.
The student game never had boundaries, although perhaps the green looked as if it gave the players a spatial boundary. But no. They violated nothing when they leaped over the hedge and we violated nothing when we stepped through a gap in the hedge and began our own game.
But imagine the outcry if the nest football game between Texas and Oklahoma went the same way. In this stadium, there is a line drawn on the grass, and it marks the space for the game. If a player crosses the line, he must pay a price for that. The game will stop if he does not stay sitting in the front row at this game, grow bored with the poor quality of play, we might decide to start our own game of catch on the same field during the game. But to do so would be to risk being disarmed by the crowd. We would be straying into sacred space. Certainly, this space is sacred to this crowd of football fans. (I almost said “worshipers, but football mania is not worship. It merely resembles worship.) And for an audience member who intrudes on that space the price is much higher than for a player to stray outside it.
“Sacred” is a word we have almost l