{"id":783,"date":"2023-12-12T19:50:03","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T19:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/?p=783"},"modified":"2026-05-27T20:11:26","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T20:11:26","slug":"letter-to-a-playwright-how-drama-works-dramaturgically","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/letter-to-a-playwright-how-drama-works-dramaturgically\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter to a Playwright: How Drama Works Dramaturgically"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Julian Meyrick<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This article features one letter in a correspondence between the author and New York playwright Will Eno concerning Annie Baker\u2019s Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/font>. The exchange focuses on the insights to be gathered from close analysis of how the play \u201cworks\u201d dramaturgically and how it unfolds for audiences as a series of cognitive and emotional operations. The article argues for dramaturgy as a Heideggerian \u201clearning in practice\u201d rather than a species of academic discourse. The dramaturg is not a removed intellectual, but a member of a community of practice, working with terms and concepts defined as useful by that community.

Keywords: <\/strong>Dramaturgy, dramaturgical analysis, Annie Baker, Circle Mirror Transformation, Will Eno<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This article arose out of a letter exchange with the New York playwright Will Eno in 2009. It was prompted by an off-Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons of Annie Baker\u2019s Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em> (Baker) which we attended together. At the time, I had directed two of Eno\u2019s plays in Australia and was a few years away from directing a third.[1]<\/sup><\/a> It is comparatively rare for an Australian theatre practitioner to enter into correspondence with an award-winning U.S. dramatist about abstract questions of craft. The lived reality of a post-colonial country is to import its cultural norms, sometimes to export them, only infrequently to debate them. However, drama is nothing if not a conversation\u2013\u2013between artist and audience and between artist and artist. Sometimes, opportunities present themselves for a dialogue that otherwise would not occur. Not because it is intellectually inconceivable, but because it falls into that abyssal gap between national imaginaries so easy to overlook, yet so difficult to cross.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Playwright Annie Baker. Photo: Luigi Novi\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Like other writers for live performance, Eno sometimes works in an advisory capacity on dramas other than his own and his interest in dramaturgical ideas and techniques is accordingly wide and deep. Historically, Baker\u2019s play may be identified as belonging to the \u201ccool\u201d variant of the \u201cin-yer-face theatre\u201d movement named by Alex Sierz in his seminal In-Yer-Face Theatre <\/em>(7\u20138). Critically, it may be discussed as an example of Hans-Thies Lehmann\u2019s postdramatic theatre “when the progression of a story with its internal logic no longer forms the centre [of a play], when composition is no longer experienced as an organising quality but as an artificially imposed ‘manufacture'” (26). But from the point of view of professional craft\u2013\u2013that is, from the perspective of a dramaturgical practice\u2013\u2013these approaches do not exhaust the fascination of Circle, Mirror, Transformation.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a jobbing playwright and his sometime director, describing what a play is and why it is, is less important than explaining what it does and how it works. Hence this letter, whose epistolatory form I retain as a framing device to indicate that the insights it offers, unlike historical or critical ones, do not aspire to decontextualized significance. They are remarks from one theatre artist to another about the work of a third, with a focus on what Martin Heidegger calls \u201clearning in practice\u201d (Nielsen).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The playscript is less an object to be intellectually appraised than a piece of equipment to be handled to achieve practical knowledge of the world of useful relations. The letter uses few specialised terms or concepts lying beyond the likely experience of an audience seeing the play as Eno and I imagined this to be. There is no attempt to understand Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em> from above, no concern to put it in one category or another, historically or critically. The focus of our exchange was the opposite: to plumb the singular nature of the play and discover how it achieved that nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, from time to time, exhaustive analysis of the particular can shed light on the general. Exploring how Circle, Mirror, Transformation <\/em>unfolds as a series of cognitive and emotional operations helped Eno and I gain insight into what the play has in common with, and what sets it apart from, other dramas. This what-plays-have-in-common-and-what-sets-them-apart<\/em> is, I would argue, the prime dramaturgical question if dramaturgy is conceived as a craft that aspires to, and mobilizes, transferable ideas and techniques. In this way, while no theory<\/em> of dramaturgy can be generated outside the field of instances that ground its practice, it nevertheless claims a broader vista of perception and understanding as a being-in-the-world body of practical knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Annie Baker\u2019s Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em>, directed by Sam Gold, Playwrights Horizons (2009). Cast: Reed Birney, Tracee Chimo, Peter Friedman, Deidre O\u2019 Connell and Heidi Schreck. Photo: Joan Marcus. Courtesy of Playwrights Horizons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
The Letter<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Dear Will, in this letter I define, discuss and apply some ideas about how drama works dramaturgically, taking as an object for discussion Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em>. I first describe its plot, then outline the dramaturgical ideas I am interested in, making observations about their application when a play like Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em> unfolds live on stage. For the sake of clarity and directness, I set aside the terms and concepts of theatre and performance studies, as well as the scholarship of dramatic criticism and dramaturgy. My focus is on the coherence and value of drama<\/em> independent of other stage variables\u2013\u2013such as, inter alia,<\/em> literary quality, theatricality, performativity, acrobatic prowess\u2013\u2013and the constraining, and so decisive, influence of time. It is drama<\/em> as it impacts on the minds of non-expert audiences as they strive to make sense of what they are witnessing using their natural cognitive resources that I believe is of striking interest. In this, everything <\/em>that can be usefully said about a play involves assessing the impact of time on its unfolding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Academic discourse, especially in its hermeneutical mode\u2013\u2013the poring over the textual, visual or choreographic elements of a play to interpret its \u201creal\u201d meaning or show that it is \u201cendlessly deferred\u201d and so on\u2013\u2013should not be confused with the experience <\/em>of a play, which takes place in another way altogether. A way of capturing this is to say that plays present <\/em>prior to what they represent. <\/em>Or they just happen. Or they involve events <\/em>not just processes. Or they have phenomenal intensity not just aesthetic coding. They are, <\/em>ontologically. <\/em>As their surface unfolds, their Being deepens, and if\u2013\u2013 if\u2013\u2013there is a radical shift such that the experience of a play presents as surplus to its apparent meaning, <\/em>then that Being steps forward and is seen for what it has become: truly alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em> is a play about a Vermont adult drama group that meets weekly to engage in quasi-interactional exercises exemplifying a certain type of actor training. There are four participants and a leader\/teacher, who also engages in the exercises from time to time. In five long-ish, week-apart scenes, we see the group immersed in the exercises and doing things before and after class, and during their breaks. The group is composed of three women and two men. They are: Marty, the aging, hippy teacher; James her alpha-male, older husband; Schultz, a recently-divorced middle-aged depressive; Theresa, a N.Y. actress fleeing professional and personal disappointment; and Lauren, a dysfunctional teenager on the cusp of adult awareness. The fact that both the situation and the characters are instantly recognisable is a key feature of the play, not only in terms of its content but in terms of how it mines its nipple-twisting humour:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Group members pose as trees, beds and baseball gloves. They perform emotional scenes using only the words goulash and ak-mak. They pretend to be one another, telling their life stories. They write deep, dark secrets (anonymously) on scraps of paper and listen, sitting in a circle on the floor, as their confessions are read aloud. This is deep stuff, and the group is made up mostly of strangers.\u2026 the sort of motley crew you might find if you signed up for a writing class or a yoga<\/a> weekend. The artificiality of the acting games emphasizes the naturalness of the characters\u2019 real lives and feelings. (Gates)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The characterizations display a miniaturist attention to detail that goes down to the bone, and the actors convey as much in a look, a gesture or an awkward silence as they do in words. Baker is never blind to their weaknesses and faults, yet regards all [her characters] with a warm, empathetic eye. Anyone with experience of drama workshops has had at least one teacher they will instantly recognize in Marty. Usually adorned with headscarf and oversize earrings, equipped with knowing eccentricities but without self-irony, these alternative-education stalwarts coach students through relaxation, memory, focus, mood and role-play exercises that often seemed dated even in the ’70s, cooing words of encouragement like \u201cWow,\u201d \u201cThank you\u201d and \u201cGreat job.\u201d (Rooney)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The division between action \u201cin\u201d and \u201coutside\u201d of class is the first structural feature of Baker\u2019s drama. Sometimes, the characters are engaged in exercises and so \u201cacting,\u201d and sometimes, they are not and are therefore \u201cbeing real.\u201d This allows all sorts of slippages and reversals. An exercise in which nonsense is spoken tonally shifts into more intimate gear\u2013\u2013is \u201creal\u201d for a moment in a way real life itself does not allow\u2013\u2013because it is protected by semantic opacity. Thus, the exercise is real not despite <\/em>the fact nonsense is spoken but because <\/em>of it. Language disabled provides a haven for emotional response. All of which is meat and drink to Marty, for whom this is the point of class: to release and confide within a secure setting, thereby encouraging personal and collective freedom. The circle <\/em>of the group + the mirror <\/em>of the exercises = the transformation<\/em> of the participants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To do an exhaustive study of Circle, Mirror, Transformation,<\/em> every moment of its unfolding would need to be explained in both its particular construction and its accumulated impact on other moments. Moments do not \u201cpass\u201d in theatre any more than they do in life. Instead, they shift temporal status, moving from \u201chappening in front of our eyes\u201d to \u201chappened minutes ago and therefore clearly recallable\u201d to \u201chappened an hour ago, which may as well be last year.\u201d Memory is the active ingredient in the adhesion of a play\u2019s properties into sense, the time-binder par excellence. Without memory, moments on stage are all there can ever be, a dissolution of the accumulative and (therefore potentially experiential) aspects of a live performance event and the negation of drama as such (Meyrick and Cavanagh).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A major concern of contemporary theatre is with the centrality (or fragmentation) of the literary play text. This artefact, it is sometimes claimed, embodies the \u201cdramatic\u201d part of a live stage event, as against other elements which are \u201ctheatrical.\u201d Eric Bentley argues as such in The Playwright as Thinker<\/em>,and his is a seminal contribution to a polemical debate that runs throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. But I want to define drama more functionally and not confuse it with a particular media incarnation. Play texts may <\/em>be dramatic. But they may also be inert. Other elements\u2013\u2013lighting, design, music, most especially acting\u2013\u2013may supply the adhesive qualities constituting the ground of drama. For our purposes, the distinction between the line as written and the moment as delivered is inoperative. The question of a play text\u2019s contribution to a dramatic experience, as opposed to, say, that of the actors, is certainly interesting. But for a dramaturgical<\/em> analysis, there must be a radical subordination of comparative merit in the face of a more urgent, practical question: does the play work<\/em>?(Luckhurst 5).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drama is what drama does. \u201cDramatic structure\u201d is the name given to a series of operations, performed over time, on the minds of an audience, such that a live performance event attains deeper cognitive meaning and enhanced emotional and sensory life. It is not a thing <\/em>but a force. <\/em>While it has structure, it is not defined by it and, at a certain point in its unfolding, it must radically uncouple from that structure to present its most consummate face. At the limit, structures are honoured in the breach. Dramas set them up only to violate them. These violations are then co-opted to a renewed sense of structure, which forces the drama onward, to further acts of self-defiance, until it has achieved itself, or the evening ends, whichever is the sooner. Baker\u2019s play is exemplary in this respect, almost a case study, so the next and most vital question for a dramaturg is: how is this achieved?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drama as Force: Shape and Expectation<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Let me now make a first-step analysis of how structure \u201cworks\u201d in Circle, Mirror, Transformation. <\/em>There is a formality to the way the narrative shifts between characters and their relationships, the pattern of tension and release or, as Aristotle would say, of recognition (anagnorisis<\/em>) and reversal (peripeteia<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Aristotle spoke about the importance of recognition (anagnorisis<\/em>) and reversal (peripeteia<\/em>), and how they affect character relationships. Photo: Web\/Public domain<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

While it is too strong to call these shifts \u201cmathematical,\u201d nevertheless a sense of quantitative exhaustion accompanies all successful drama. Big plays impress the sweep of their extensive possibilities; small ones by the prospect of the intelligent application of a limited number of inputs. Either way, an audience\u2019s sense of shape<\/em> is tapped, regardless of what might be thereafter communicated by way of political, social or psychological concerns. To show how this works, let\u2019s assign each character in Circle, Mirror, Transformation <\/em>the letter of their first name. Thus, there are five monadic relationships (the sort we have with ourselves):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M[arty]            J[ames]          S[chultz]        T[heresa]       L[auren]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And ten possible dyadic ones:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MJ       MS      MT       ML       JS       JT        JL        ST       SL       TL<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And eight triadic ones:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MJS    MJT     MJL     MST    MSL    JST     JSL     STL    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And four quadratic ones:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MJST  MJSL  MJTL  JSTL<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And one \u201cgroup\u201d one:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MJSTL<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of these has a role in the way Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em> unfolds, with dyadic relationships featuring in amorous couplings, triadic ones in parent\/family scenarios and four-cornered ones in everybody-knows-but-one-person situations (pivoting on an act of exclusion rather than inclusion). The group relationship is best represented by the exercise ending each session (and beginning the play): the count-to-ten game, where the characters lie on their backs and call out numbers, trying to count in sequence without interrupting each other, thereby showing they are, indeed, a group (both ironically and non-ironically). The concept of character, treated by literary analysis in a unitized way\u2013\u2013plays have characters in the way that hat-stands have hats\u2013\u2013is thus more diaphanous, extending as it does over a series of points of different sizes and valences. \u201cThe class as a group\u201d is an important character<\/em> in Circle, Mirror, Transformation,<\/em> as both the engine and the object of transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All relationships are co-figured. That is, they take place alongside and against each other, and this is a constraining and enabling parameter for playwrights, actors and audiences in realising the shape-based dimension of the drama. This can achieve a high level of sophistication. For example, in Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em>,at the start of each session there is an exercise where individual characters speak \u201cas if\u201d they were another member of the class; each character, over the course of the play, performing this service for one other. Information pertaining to a monad is displaced and doubled, put into the mouth of a single character, who can thereby trick out a dyad. Monadic\/dyadic relationships can be read against each other, and increasingly are, as the drama unfolds and more contextual information is fed in. By the time of the last \u201cas if\u201d exercise, we can tell not only the precise feelings of Theresa towards James when she pretends \u201cto be\u201d him but make a shrewd guess at what will happen next between them. But here, we have moved beyond shape, to something more directly temporal: expectation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drama is the art of next things. \u201cWhat will happen now?\u201d is more than a question for a live performance event. It is an organising principle of its being, the interrogative implication of its temporal nature. The result is a sequence of looked-for but, until their appearance, unknown moments: this\/then this\/then this\/then this\/then this\/then this\/then this\/then this.<\/em> The sequence is formally empty. At the limit, nothing can be said about it other than it exists. There is no necessary link between one moment and the next. It is no more than a fact to say that in drama anything can happen. <\/em>Temporal sequencing allows (in theory) for totally aleatoric succession. Whatever order we impose on it\u2013\u2013verbal, imagistic, choreographic\u2013\u2013is incidental to the \u201cnext things\u201d dynamic itself which is indifferent to what <\/em>next things there might be; it is concerned only that there will be <\/em>next things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plato uses the famous analogy of a cave to illustrate his argument about mankind\u2019s limited grasp of reality. We sit, chained, facing away from the mouth of a cave, seeing only the shadows a fire throws onto the back wall.  Let me put forward a different image for drama: that of an illuminated window. We sit, fixed to our seats, unable to turn or move closer. In the window, people walk and talk, fully visible. But when they go, they go absolutely. There is literally nothing <\/em>outside the window, only the extinguishing of what happens within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a minimum, therefore (before anything has been done or said), drama follows the same invariant condition of mortal life as constrained by time: out of the dark, into the light\/out of the light, into the dark<\/em>; where the dark is not \u201cthe opposite\u201d of the light but its complete cessation. Everything that arises in a drama comes from within the drama and not from some more foundational layer of awareness lying beyond or behind it. Drama \u201cfloats\u201d at a distance from the world\u2013\u2013though distance implies space, while this gap is a void, an alien, un-traversable nothingness. There <\/em>is the world. There <\/em>is the drama. The relationship between the two can never be fully explained, nor is passing from one to the other without consequence. When the lights go down on a play prior to its commencement, who knows where we go before surfacing again in the brightness of the window of the drama?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This lack of necessary relation is infinitely creative. If the world could be read off a play in the manner of a train timetable, it would be no more than a receptacle for what we already know about it, thus not only without mystery but without truth. But how is this radical ontological separateness managed as a job of work? A play can be so constructed that, despite its alien status, it is intelligible. It can be invested with recognisable features drawn from the social world, and for this, there are three main avenues: what gets said and done; what gets inferred from what gets said and done; and what is known by an audience ahead of time. These are the means by which a drama makes of itself a representative object, something that can stand as a simulacrum of real experience. In its focus on the first source of dramatic knowledge, the playscript, literary criticism never takes adequate measure of the second or third. It is the latter that do the bulk of the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, how does this happen? Obviously, it happens in a broad way first. Social context provides a major resource for identifying and interpreting worldly features in a drama. With Circle, Mirror, Transformation,<\/em> contemporary American audiences can be relied on to come to the theatre with an understanding of adult drama classes, small-town life, the anxieties of middle age, the idea of personal change, how mobile phones function to disrupt our lives, the ethics of serial monogamy, and how events may be life-changing not because of their size but because of their timing. Logical inference is also a useful tool. When Schultz and Theresa, on a break, leave the stage hand-in-hand after having kissed, and Lauren, hidden, sees them go but says nothing to Marty when she asks where they are, we are presented with a powerful sequence of tight-fit associations. The links between them cannot be guaranteed. There will always be patrons who do not bring the required contextual knowledge, or, falling asleep during the performance, fail to make the appropriate connections. But probably <\/em>they will, and on that basis\u2013\u2013on the basis of most people making the connections and thus contributing to an evolving collective understanding of the night\u2013\u2013a stage play ventures to deploy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having thus looked at how shape and expectation (naturally-occurring concepts, readily perceivable and discussable by non-expert audiences) operate in Baker\u2019s play, we can turn to the guts of drama as an experience: the way in which \u201clearning by experience\u201d actually takes place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heuristics<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Heur\u012d’st|ic<\/strong> 1. serving to discover; . . . proceeding by trial and error; ~ic method<\/strong>, system of education under which the pupil is trained to find things out for himself [irreg. f. Gk. heurisk\u014d <\/em>find] (Oxford English Dictionary)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Relying on contextual information and inference is an efficient way of packing coded associations into a drama. It volumizes a live stage event, co-opting an audience\u2019s propensity to invest in the action before it. The thoughts audiences have on their own account are not entirely personal (though, vitally, some will be, as we shall see) but are responses to features in the drama analogous to their off-stage experience. For some dramas, realistic ones, these features present as typifications; for non-or anti-realistic dramas they present as ideal types.[2]<\/sup><\/a> Either way, they call forth what micro-sociologists call \u201crecipe knowledges\u201d (Heritage), notions derived not from a situation at hand but from socially received idea clusters that are \u201cin the air.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Deirdre O’Connell, Heidi Schreck, Tracee Chimo, and Reed Birney in Annie Baker\u2019s Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em>, directed by Sam Gold, Playwrights Horizons (2009). Photo: Joan Marcus. Courtesy of Playwrights Horizons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Thus, while Circle, Mirror, Transformation <\/em>has unique features as a drama, it also has aggregate ones. I call these heuristics<\/em> because they work as active discovery devices. They are used<\/em> by playwrights, actors and audiences to achieve a deeper connection with the drama and richer cognitive and emotional processing (Turner and Behrndt 33). The heuristics presented at the level of narrative are the ones audiences probably notice first; that is, the story features Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em> shares with other dramas of the type. For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n