Constructing the Reader: How Drama Can Invade Exposition

In ordinary, non-dramatic composition, such as the essay, travelogue, technical description, event review, and so on, the voice of the author is sometimes suppressed.  The author should be ever-modest lest subjectivity sneak in and stab objectivity in the back.  

What happens to the reader when the author's voice becomes audible during the description?  What if the author allows an entire herd of outlaws, each carrying an array of hypothetical personalities just to try them on, crawling stealthfully from the background or cartwheeling under your nose up front. 

Because there must be at least a transmitter and a receiver of information and if the transmitter the opportunity to consider the receivability of the message, which has to include a model of the receiver, the listening person, the student of the author's advice, the member of the audience with all the skills and poses required by his tribe to be allowed to mlisten.   

For example, the humble student bows his head before your book, perhaps lying in wait for your mistake (which recreates a second recipient), and even your open opponent, sworn so see you die, figuratively, to see you writhe in disgrace and suffer banishment.  Your Mom could be out there, starting the applause.  Inspect each mask in the auditorium.  

There's nothing new in this.  We've seen it done well in Rashoman where three people tell the same story, judged by a forth who sums up the points of view to resolve the story by the end of the movie.  Stories demand resolution and resolution a resolving personality who is reconstructed from the fragments of doubt and anguish, the ordeal of generalizing from specifics, finally assembled into the whole being, the judge with a relief to all but the convict.  

Each cell in the matrix corresponds to a vulnerable mode of being in the audience member in response to change in the voiced person.  It would be a chore to expose all 18 cells in your argument and more tedious still for the audience.  The author would need a large bag of tricks to construct all 36 combinations and not lose us in the detail.  If only the seven marked states were used, seven paragraphs would describe the object, putting the audience in each of reactive 7 states as they shift their identifies to accommodate implications of 'I' or 'They' and so on.  

The audience member's reply would be the sum of his personalities.  

Summation of Personalities

Person(n) = Sum(Person(1), Person(2)) 

A person cannot be two people at once.  The sum produces a contradiction that must be resolved.  

A person is a system that exhibits a step-response to an input.  

1. Failing to understand, disequilibrium.  
2. The understanding, when the person is in equilibrium.  
3. The change from failure to success, a time-valued function that is driven by the difference between the angst of being discovered and the relief of rejoining the audience of understanders.  
4. As with any simple system, the rate of change is rapid initially and then slows as the equilibrium state is approached.  The time constant for the function is the product of the capacitance and resistance of the system.  Larger capacitances and resistances delay reaching equilibrium.   Small resistances and capacitances drive the person quickly into equilibrium. 

The shock is valid during the switch from one personality to another, For at the moment when you are caught redhanded.  It's not the first time, remember they won't kill you and you become a convict like the rest.  

How can the shock be amplified?

• Extended in time, repeated.  They won't let you assume the convict personality.  You must remain a criminal, one who is hunted, who may be assaulted.   Reopen the wound: 400 Blows.  
• Your homies are out to get you too.  

A Formal Model of Generative Dramatics

If character-driven drama is strictly structural, it can be formulated as a set of well-formed dramatic sentences containing characters, objectives and techniques.  

The sentences have the form: 'Character A tries to Do Something to Character B to Get Objective A.'  

The list of sentences would be the sub-text of the play.  

Why?

• Can it efficiently produce a subtext.  
• What can be learned in the attempt.  

The experiment will answer the first question.  

I find that learning anything can stimulate the creative process.  

Program

Here is the first program, written as a query in the database language, MS Access.  

Here is one of the tables...

Here is the query that pulls data from the tables and forms the sentences...

The query results in 108 generated sentences...

The sentences were convenient to generate.  The query uses 4 tables, weighted lists of nouns and verbs.  The tables are free of each other in the query, creating a cross-product of the words, resulting in all combinations of  the listed nouns and verbs, 108 more or less well-formed sentences that might form the sub-textual basis of a drama.  A simple text-calculation generates the sentences from the nouns and verbs, gluing them together with prepositions.  

There is nothing planned plot-wise in any sequence of the generated sentences.  The elements are characters, objectives, and techniques.  The tables have an ordering that accidentally puts 'murder' in the last generated sentences, creating the illusion of climax.  

Using the weight attached to each of the characters and the techniques, would allow the program to control who can do what to whom and when.  An illusion of plot is created by the writer and reader.  Sorting the list changes the plot.  

Some of the sentences are absurd, such as 'Al tries murder on Al to get the gun'.  The program could filter out self-reference absurdities.  Filtering out self-references generates 72 sentences.  In a non-absurd play, murder is irreversible, creating a dramatic dependency.  Sentences that violate dependencies (dependency absurdity), such as dead characters, should be deleted, which could be done in the program or in manual editing.  

Absurdities...

• Self-references
• Dependency-violation: Getting murdered, which prevents the character acting as a subject or object of future sentences.  
• Dependency-violation: Not getting the little money, which is necessary to getting the gun.  
• Dependency-violation: Not getting the gun, which is necessary to a murder.  
• Dependency-violations: Before being murdered, the murdered person transfers the money to the non-murderer, unless the non-murderer has already been murdered.  
• Dependency-violations: Getting the gun prevents losing the gun. 
• Dependency-violations: Getting the Big Money ends the play.  
• Dependency-violations: Trying to murder someone to get the gun.  
• Dependency-violations: Trying to use the Little Money to get the Big Money.  

Length

If each of the generated sentences produces a minute of dialogue, the play run 108 minutes.  Kicking out some of the absurdities would reduce the stage-time.  

Increasing the number of characters, techniques or objectives multiplies the running time.  Sorting the order of the list has its effects, especially on when dependencies are considered.  

Filtering exceptions out would eliminate surprises.  Filtering them in would produce only surprises, breaking into the pataphysical world.  Increasing number of variables to filter increases the complexity of the program, increases the number of unanticipated consequences, undermines the intuitive understanding of the program and disturbs the audience.  

What other kinds of absurdities can be found?  

Add state variables for each character:

• Already Dead
• Cannot Attack Character(n), must yield to
• Already Robbed

Probability calculations can be added to determine state transitions.  

Semi-passive characters could be modeled by filtering on Cannot Attack.  

I find that I have implicit rules in mind that are only discovered after the exercise is under way.  

The exercise will write only the subtext.  

What would be the audience reaction if it were known that the play's subtext was written by a computer program? 

Downloadable application:  Essay/SubTextGen.accdb  MS Access 2010 or above is required to run this program.  

Cruel Transformations

When a play is analyzed with a relationship matrix (such as A dominates B), the initial and final states of the sum of the transitions can have maximum range: If the states toggle for all elements, the play is an avalanche of tragic loss and is symmetric.  

We can see the states toggle in a recognizable subgroup, such as the Hamlets versus the family of Polonius.   

We can automatically write the structure of the play by multiplying the character-vector by the objective vector by the vector of technique.  The techniques can be weighted by degree of violence so that the theorem-sentences (the beats) can be sorted with violence concentrated at the end of the play.  During editing, we can kick out the non-sequitors, out-of order sequences, and other absurdities or even kick out the rationalities and hand the actors a script whose subtext cannot be followed logically.  

If no one dares risk anything or the actors cover their angst with platitudes and niceties or just stand there, reciting their lines, the play is flat and reassuring.  The audience must respond with more platitudes to explain to themselves why they sat through the long and boring performance for which they were charged good money.  What else can they tell their friends if it was supposed to be good?  

Radical transformations alter the structure of the play, changing the rules of the game.   A structure that changes its structure is not a structure.  

The structure can be reduced in its number of alliances by irreversible transformations, such as murder.  Fewer things can happen.  There are fewer elements who can act.  The play can become claustrophobic.  The characters are reduced to singularities of extreme selfishness.  The winner wins everything and nothing.   

A new character can jump into the mix, opening up the field of alliances, or bring a newer, more cruel technique, escalating the violence, deepening our disgust.  

While allowed structurally, repeating a technique is bad for drama.  In fact, by increasing the stakes and thus demanding more murderous violence, the play tends to eliminate techniques as well as characters and devolve monotonically, in its complexity, while becoming more intense.  The number of possibilities decline as characters are eliminated and only the most violent techniques remain.  

A radical transformation happens in an art when the artists, in exploring the media, discover that they are only limited by their medium.  What can be done on stage should be done on stage.  Art should not be a pack-mule for anything else, dragging along a philosophical or artistic or political or ethical ideal.  In drama there are only the characters, their objectives, their techniques, the slayers and the slain, the methods and timing of murder.  

To enlarge the the number of elements in play, bring in the audience.  Leave the door open in case some of the audience wants to flee.  Deride the escapees.  Establish rules and find cunning ways of breaking them.   Structure is a building material.  Use it to build a prison to break out of.  

To paraphrase Artaud, great theatre is like the plague.  It should make the citizen uneasy just to hear about it, cause him to pack up and flee if it arrives in his city, and prompt the authorities to burn down the theatres and fill their cellars with their rubble in an effort to prevent it from ever happening again.  

Theatre of Cruelty: Bossman Cull

Things to do on stage:

• Love
• Sex
• Murder
• Death
• Apathy

The two acts of The Five, have 5 scenes each of which express one of the five elements above in order.  

In Molly's wooing of Vic, she expresses all five strong actions.  

In Vic's wooing of Taylor, they interweave the themes.  

The order of the expressions is important.  Love is the highest expression and with its failure the drama devolves to the next lower expression.  

The play is structural:

• Each of the expressions is a relationship between one or more characters.  
• Each expression either succeeds or fails.  
• Any expression can be re-expressed as a sequence of the five expressions.  
• The audience is brought in by recognition of the pattern of the expressions.  

Bossman Cull

1. Act 1

   The Brothers

   1. Love is expressed between the two brothers
   2. It devolves to a symbolic sexual relationship as the brothers physically try to dominate each other.  
   3. Vic identifies the one thing that will break up the brotherhood and leads to murder.  
   4. All 3 on stage partake of the vision of the death of one of them
   5. Unsatisfactory platitudes end the scene

   Molly

   1. Molly promises love to Vic if he will give her what she wants.  
   2. Molly promises sex to Vic
   3. Molly et al threaten Vic with murder
   4. The ice-box episode and the slow fade to black at the end of the scene symbolize death.  
   5. Music symbolizes apathy.  
      
2. Act 2

   The Brothers

   1. Taylor, the brothers and Vic commiserate over the death of Molly and express their love for her.  
   2. With sexual pleasure, they plan to murder Mac.  
   3. Vic and Taylor express their love for each other, talk consummation, but first they must murder Mac and see his dead body.  
   4. There is nothing to say after this; only something to do.  

   Mac

   1. The four trick Mac into letting them into his office by expressing their love for him.  
   2. Inside, they plan all the wonderfully exciting things they can do together.  
   3. They shoot Mac; Mac shoots the brothers and Vic.  
   4. Mac crawls mortally wounded to the edge of the stage, expresses regret for all the things he did and things he didn't get to do.  
   5. Taylor sits wordlessly in a chair and contemplates the dead brothers.  She helps the wounded Vic to his feet and they leave together.  

Of course, neither love, sex, murder or apathy can act.  The characters in reaching for the objects of their desire, in destroying their obstacles, create the action in the usual way.  Love, sex, murder and apathy are identifiable bi-products, the residue of drama.  

Thematically, the play is existential.  Characters hold themselves together by a sense of honor, which cannot survive in a society that is becoming fundamentally selfish.  

By Theatre of Cruelty, we only mean it as a response to the Theatre of Reassurance.  The theatre of cruelty abandons the burden of reassurance, as well as the burdens of truth, beauty, righteousness and political expediency.  We attempt to show a picture of humanity devoid of apology.  

Mad Tom

A mode of being is a trail leading through life toward finitude.  

Shakespeare collectively invented individualism.   At some time, individualism, as a mode of being, will peak and decline.  Not only will you confront your own physical mortality, a profoundly disturbing situation to one at the center of the universe, but confront also the extinction of everyone who thinks like you.  Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, Communists, Fascists, Atheists and Evangelicals are all exactly alike in their finitude and their stuckness in our time, and are not just doomed but damned to ignominy.  No one will ever have heard of you. 

Inheriting the vocabulary of earlier individualistic mode of being, the corporate human will seize the economic high ground as producer and consumer.  Tribal loyalty will become a liquid asset as the privileged professional climbs around a global network of departments and corporations and governments.  Professing freedom of choice, the upwardly and laterally mobile corporate übermann will straddle the lower social orders like a colossus while living in terror of being cast out into the undocumented, the felons and their hosts, the houseless, the feral, the arrested, the hunted, those without diplomas and resumes, drivers of old cars, the bankrupt uninsured, informal dealers in this and that and families on the run.  

The government will enforce the separation of the classes by identifying and either exonerating or stigmatizing subjects caught in police dragnets.  

Vestigial liberals, compromised from real action by their privilege, will be known as sympathetic by their überclasse peers, thus preserving the illusory spectacle of political diversity.  Seeking a brief vacation from their gated sterility, adventurers will penetrate the underclass to discover art and music and other forms of prostitution before retreating with a tale to tell.  Some sociologists will insist that the two classes need each other while others preach extermination.  As usual, once each generation there will be a war to cull the more volatile young men, exercise the military-industrial complex, and provide a spectacle for the legions of arm-chair warriors.  No one will actually be in charge of anything more than their department. 

Tom is the last of the outcasts, terminally selfish, incapable of alliance and utterly without hope.  Tom and his people live below the oppressed.  

Tom opposes Bill, not for any object, such as Mom, but for daring to approach Tom and his life.  Any tread within his purview is suspect.  Bill is the Hated Other.  

Sheila can ally with Mom against Bill, as a mark.  Tom and Joey could pick up the signal too.  Sheila maintains a fragment of the existing alliance to test the waters (by rocking the boat), money, because betrayals and other opportunities to be cruel are always fun.  

Matrix of Relationships in Sam Marlowe

Identity is not central to character.  There is no essence of person. 

Identity is a shield that is born before the mind as it fights its way through immediate society.  Use it to push away your rivals or hide from their projectiles. Some shields have sharp spikes while others are soft and sticky.  All are weapons. 

The matrix of relationships is a dynamic 5-pointed snowflake with Sam at the center.  Each person, in bearing their shield, dis-identifies the other.  A pair is visible as a mutual repulsion that breaks the old, familiar connection, eventually leaving Sam, dis-identified alone. 

The modern craves identification.  To attack the identity is personal war. 

The central relationships are with Sam and evolving.  There are no types, kinds, natures or otherwise fixed characters, especially the observer, who is under fire and must shift position as new info turns up.  

There are relationships outside of Sam, between Edna and Jimmy, say, but it’s vital for the play that they do not swamp out Sam’s part of the determinate but in fact must support it.  

Folding and Fracture in Sam Marlowe

One way to write and analyze plays is to identify beats, which are small sections of dialogues where one character uses a technique to get something from another character. Al tries to get some money from Bob so he can buy a gun from Carl so Al can eliminate Dave as leader of their little gang of petty criminals.  Each beat creates more risk for the characters and the last beats form an exciting climax.  The objectives, such as money, power, and sex, are vulgar and often material. 

Another approach is to identify beats as ploys where existence is at stake.  The characters are vying for presence and the fore-grounded objects are in play only to ground the narrative, to provide a story that anyone can see. 

In Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice, her chapter Addressing the Subject identifies three situations where the character, the author and the reader are dislodged from their norms and the reader typically must find a new area of comfort and stability (existence) from which he or she views the work.   In this view, character, author and reader are created (or destroyed) in the moment within the active relationship of literature. 

In each of the three situations, the images of self, author, and character are folded back to meet an antithetical image, stressing the reader and possibly fracturing the presumed unity, which is fundamental to the modern individual seen as wise, central, and indispensable.  This theory of creation and destruction represents the war between the Closing and Opening forces.   

Collision of Desire and Language

Modeled as an early disturbance in one's life, the invention of language in the child represses libidinal desire in trade for negotiating tools.  The child may demand from others the objects of desire.  The delay and transformation of desire is traumatic, disrupting the organic reaching for its object, and forcing a mediation of desire into language.  The original desire is necessarily inexpressible.   The unconscious is what cannot be formulated.  It is the collision of desire and reality that folds and fractures the unified libido into the complexity needed to interact with the social world.  

Language can  be used to approach anything in nature, chase it around,  but cannot catch it, touch it or own it.  Poetry can be used to bring us to the object, but not actually touch it.  The marriage ceremony can be viewed as a linguistic exercise that formulates the vulgar desires of all concerned into a mutually-acceptable contract.  Ownership of the woman is transferred from the father to the son-in-law. 

In Sam Spade, Sam and Miles talk about women as objects of desirable and repulsive.  They approach the subject of women as men, in competition with each other and in conflict internally as they are drawn to and repulsed by their own ideas about women and the related memory of their own experiences, all of which take place in language.  

Collision of Social- and Self-Image

One's image of self can be reinforced or destroyed by discovering another's image of 'you'. 

When another's image of you attacks your image of yourself, you react by reinforcing your image, constructing a new image, or by attacking your attacker and thus destroying his credibility. 

Miles and Sam are in combat, attempting to tear each other apart, undermining, discrediting, and depreciating.  Each to the other represents an unacceptable public view.  Neither wishes the opinions of the other to be commonly known, to be taken as it really is. 

Thus Sam views himself as austere, persistent, calculating, prescient, brave, singular, all the virtues of the hard-boiled private eye while Miles portrays Sam as poorly-dressed, driving an old car, living in a dump, an economic failure, utterly undeserving of a good reputation. 

Collision of Self-Reflection

When the dividual reflects on him or her self, the 'I' of the speaker is juxtaposed with the 'I' who is being described, the self-reference creating a fold in being that might break the original and make possible the creation of a new being.  On the other hand, the discovery might be repressed and remain invisible to the conscious unity.  The latter is the usual state of the dividual and the former is the shoreline of revelation. 

Sam has several monologues in which he presents, represents, and criticizes his images of himself. 

A Post-Existentialist Theatre

In melodrama, characters do what they must do.  They have a nature, a destiny, and a plot and are on stage to fulfill it.  Action instantiates an absolute knowledge. 

In modern drama, action creates character.  Action is Sartrean in that it creates the character as a Foucaultian unity. 

Many plays can now be analyzed by identifying the inflection points of the being in crisis. 

One earlier solution of the crisis is the simplified Sartrean where by the self is presumed to be an existing entity who projects itself into the world by the choices it makes.  Essence (the plan, the meaning, the purpose) comes after existence. 

In Camus, the person is preoccupied by destiny. 

In both cases, the unity of the self is presumed and the challenges it faces in the world offer it an opportunity to define itself in terms that can be seen by others. 

In a post-existentialist drama, the individual is being broken into irreconcilable pieces, and that process, which necessarily includes the reader, writer, and character, creates the possibility of change, opens the structure, becoming post-structural. 

Post-existentialist drama can continue to fore-ground the vulgar objects of desire to construct a recognizable narrative that all can see, but the action takes place on a more fundamental, more stressful level.  The struggle is not for money or even for life but for existence itself.  In dramatic characters, existence is a mutually exclusive state. 

The classical definition of drama, that set of actions on stage that reveal the inner nature of the characters, still holds but is extended into the field of existence whereby the the character, author, and reader is fundamentally threatened. 

Post-Individualism

Please refer to Wikipedia for the latest version of this article. 

Post-individualism is the assertion that the individual is an invented concept that has become popular.  Individualism has undergone change through time, reaching its zenith in popularity at some point, and will eventually fade away.  Post-individualism is a collection of possibilities, any or all of which could replace the individual as a mode of social networking.   

History of the Individual

Research in the history of the individual comes from close reading of the texts created in the period of interest whereby the laws, dramas, paintings and news display the salient cultural issues of the day.  Foucault and Belsey analyze cultural artifacts, such as play scripts, paintings, histories and sciences, each item a product of its own place and time observe here and now.  They research history at the level of the signifier, examining trends in primary and secondary documents, identifying points of reference in the gradient of cultural change.  

Oxford English Dictionary (1971) notes the adjective individual in 1425 referring to the catholic trinity, in 1600 to a mate who could not be separated and finally in 1613 to a particular person in contrast to a group.  As a noun, it appears in 1606 in reference to a single person, in contrast to a society or family.  Individualism is noted as referring in 1835 to a ‘novel expression’ found in a translation of De Tocqueville.  

In the Subject of Tragedy, Catherine Belsey outlines the evolution of the subject and issues a bold preface: “The subject is to be found at the heart of our political institutions, the economic system and the family, voting, exercising rights, working consuming, falling in love, marrying and becoming a parent.  And yet the subject has conventionally no history, perhaps because liberal humanism itself expresses a human nature which, despite its diversity, is always at the most basic, the most level, the same.” p ix (Preface). 

In The Subject of Tragedy, she describes the pre-Shakespearean and pre-individual miracle plays where the nameless, featureless main character of the play must navigate the vices and virtues. Only through the denial of the self and its desires can Everyman be saved from Hell and granted admission to blissful Heaven.  In Belsey's Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, the story of Giselle, a Job-like woman who suffers decades of abuse, maintains her obedience to her husband and master and is eventually rewarded for her virtue. Faith to father, king, and god characterizes pre-Elizabethan theatre.  

By the time of Marlowe and Shakespeare, the main character evaluates his choices in reference to his own empirically derived values.  He lives as an  genuine individual in a hierarchal world that tries to force him back into his place in the pyramid of power.  Faustus sells his soul for the chance of sexual pleasure.  Hamlet must prove to himself what his eyes and ears have told him.  In both cases, the main characters exhibit real struggles with themselves rather than being mere foils in concocted duels with the cardboard vices of the medieval play.  

The possibility of marrying for love versus being married off for the father's political gain is a common subject of several of Shakespeare's plays.  In Romeo and Juliette, Juliette is caught between her very real love for Romeo and the drab forced marriage with Paris driven by her father.  

By the English Restoration, the aristocracy portrayed in theatre doesn't believe in anything outside the body.  Yes, one must put up appearances in public but adultery, lying, and money-grubbing are in vogue.  In The Country Wife, the seduction of a provincial man's pretty wife is the object in play.  The character celebrates his independence from the secular and political hierarchy.  

In Shakespeare The Loss of Eden Belsey shows how Hamlet the play could have been constructed out of the popular sermons and iconography of the time, reflecting the loss of Eden story, the division of labor between the sexes, and the first murder.  The character of Hamlet is a reflection of the fashionable story of the Dance of Death, taking kings, queens and counselors, courtesans, and cavaliers democratically.  Throughout the course of the drama Hamlet takes the life of all these classes of character, either actually, as in the dueling scene, or symbolically as in the graveyard scene.  

Descartes published statements easily taken to be the individualistic experience, such as "I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world..." and his famous 1641 cogito whereby he proved his own existence from his own internal state.  

Michel Foucault details the principle that French cultural texts, sampled over time, exhibit profound changes in their fundamental modes of justification. In I, Pierre Riviere, Foucault's contribution notes the appearance of broadsheets in the early 19th century that for the first time made extraordinary news out of the ordinary crimes of the lower class. 

Foucault's The Order of Things, “For Nietzsche, it was not a matter of knowing what good and evil were in themselves, but of who was being designated, or rather who was speaking…” (p305) chapter Man and his Doubles. 

Foucault again in The Order of Things, "Before the end of the eighteenth-century, man did not exist.  ...  He is quite a recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with his own hands less than two-hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known." (p308)

In Discipline & Punish, Foucault traces the construction of the individual as its own center of power.  Prior to 1800, punishment in France was a way to control the populace through fear of the king through his magistrates.  Beginning in 1800, the rising middle-class demanded more systematic punishment, not because the king's justice was so cruel but because it was not systematic enough to protect middle-class property.  Reform, the forced internalization of law, the remedial construction of the obedient subject, became the new intention of the French legal institutions.  

Tocqueville came to America in 1831 explicitly to see American reformatory experiments (p30, Tocqueville), visiting and reporting on penitentiaries at Auburn, Sing Sing and Philadelphia where prisoners were subjected to theories of work, prayer, and isolation therapy in the attempt to reconstruct their personalities.  Tocqueville and his companion Beaumont published a 440-page report analyzing the American penitentiaries and recommending techniques for implementation in France.  (p705).  

The colonies inherited the cruel corporeal punishments of England, decided that all human life deserved better.  They responded with imprisonment and for the first time built institutions designed for imprisonment, which quickly devolved into places of disease and death and colleges of crime.  The prison reform movement, creating good citizens out of bad, came out of that experience.   (p95)  The citizen was being created to live with other citizens, not to live within a hierarchy of power.  

In the usual Freudian model, the character-ego develops from collisions between the libido and reality as the person advances through the oral, anal, and genital stages of sexual development.  The model suggests the ego develops in each person and is not regarded as innate by psychoanalysts of this school.  

In 20th Century American drama, the main characters continue the de-coupling from hierarchy.  In Tennessee Williams' plays, the characters attempt to express their sexuality against the background of the decrepit hierarchy of the Old South.  In Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche arrives to announce to her sister that her family's old estate has finally evaporated.  The house and lands are dispersed and she, unable to fend for herself, incapable of living as an independent individual, must throw herself on the remaining fragment of her family.  Her brother in law Stanley, a modern individual, is capable of standing alone, of migrating, of creating his own family.  Sister Stella is torn between the Old and New South and decides to ally herself with her dictatorial husband.  

In Arthur Miller, it is the nuclear family itself that is disintegrating, leaving open the possibility of the completely independent individual. In View from the Bridge, Eddie attempts to construct himself as autocrat but does so independently of his surrounding forces, such as the city and federal law enforcement agencies, the neighborhood code of silence, his wife's wishes that they live in peace and love and his niece's desire to marry the man she loves rather than stay at home in the shadow of her uncle.  In Death of a Salesman, the father dreams of his successful, loving sons while he is falling apart.  The sons themselves do not resemble the ideals imagined by the father.  The mother tries to make do, a neighbor steps in to help but they cannot substitute for the damaged family.  

In Sam Shepard, the family has already fallen apart and the fragments attempt to reunite but do not know how.  The powerful individual values overwhelm the weakened bonds of family.  In True West, two brothers stay in their absent mother's cottage while she is off exploring an ideal world that she can't find.  The brothers claim to love their father, who lives alone in the desert.  The brothers are at each other's throats from the opening scene.  They cannot write the screenplay they claim to want, they cannot take care of their mother's house, they can barely keep from killing each other and they haven't a chance of supporting their absent father.  

In David Mamet, the family is only a distant, unheard voice on the phone.  Individuals are isolated, amoral, reaching for the objects of desire and incapable of alliance.  In Oleanna, John talks with his wife on the phone, trying to reassure her that their life is not falling apart.  His on-stage interaction is with a student who is working with her group, a collection of students who have recently assembled for the purpose of exposing chauvinistic professors. John's own narcissistic self-involvement prevent him from seeing the danger he is in.   

After Individualism

Foucault and Belsey pose the individual as a necessary structural element of their cultures, an element that comes into being and evolves with changes in the system of power.  

In Foucault, the 19th Century French individual arose from the blossoming middle-class, which needed to be educated (formerly a privilege of the upper class) and which needed to educate others at the public expense, such as children, professionals and criminals. Law was formerly an exterior force that was feared and now must become interiorized, must become integral with the individual person itself.  It seems logical to suggest that if the middle-class were to shrink then so should education.  Less emphasis would be made on individual rights.  

In Belsey, the subject is an open, ever-mutating entity that surfaces as new issues in cultural artifacts.  The mutation occurs in the reflection of cultural studies, in self-examination and in art criticism. 

Fred Dallmayr sees the individual morphing in response to global power.   He sees the social problem as extreme idealism where people mistake an idea for the actual on-the-ground work that must be done.  Dallmayr recommends a being-in-the-world existence.  Dallmayr's example of the next person to step forth is Arundhati Roy who broadly displays compassion for the victims of power and recommends that we think smaller rather than bigger, limiting our scope to what we can actively see and hear and do.  

Jonathan Friedman sees anthropology in global terms.  Human society on the large scale does not evolve but instead exhibits repetitive phases.  Hegemonic powers naturally and structurally accrue resources and then diversify in such a way as to decentralize power, eventually fading in deference to new hegemonies.  The smallest anthropologic element, the individual person, is driven in response to the macroeconomic phases and is simultaneously a driver of the macroeconomic phases at the lowest level.  In Cultural Identity and Global Processes, Friedman admits of the difficulty of analyzing the individual because the researcher is already embedded in the intellectual judgments of the hegemony.  

Sociologist Anthony Giddens classifies the modern individual as an active chooser faced with existential anxiety who decides among cultural options to enhance ontological security.  In Modernity and Self-Identity, self-actualization connects the interior, personal life with political life.  Giddens characterizes the modern person as a set of internal references that socially interact, exposing and developing the references, particularly in the emancipation of the person from traditional constraints. A person is the evolving result of self-actualization.   

Criticism

Individualism might have been invented or discovered in other places in other times.  Aristotle displays a demonstration of the existence of mind similar to to Decartes 2000 years before.  (Aristotle Book 9, Chapter 7)

In theatre, some classical Greek plays appear to support something like the modern individual.  In the Orestia, Agamemnon's triumphal return from Troy is interrupted by his murder by his wife, which appears to be her choice.  The remaining events of the trilogy are automatically triggered by the violation of law.  Orestes is tormented by the demand to avenge the murder of his father, which means killing his mother.   However, the Oedipal story is the revelation of oracular fate, which makes individual choice futile.  

The individual might have pre-existed in repressed form before the 16th century in England or 19th century France and only appeared to surface as individuals battled for recognition.  According to Belsey, cultural artifacts are not records of the actuality of a culture but idealizations of how the artist thought the culture should be.  Only the differences between the ideal and the actual float to the surface.  However, in Foucault, the change in salient issues through time, the discontinuity in the archeological strata of culture, reveal direct insights into the culture.  

References 

1. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics.  http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.mb.txt

2. Belsey, Catherine (1985)  The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. Methuen.  ISBN  0- 4163-2710-9

3. Belsey, Catherine (1999) Shakespeare: The Loss of Eden.  Rutgers University Press ISBN 0-8135-2763-5

4. Barker, Francis (1995)  The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. University of Michigan Press ISBN 0-472 0-6552-1

5. Bloom, Harold (1998) Shakespeare The Inventor of the Human Riverhead Books ISBN 1-57322-120-1

6. Bloom, Harold (2003)  Hamlet Poem Unlimited. Riverhead Books ISBN 1-57322-233-X

7. Dallmayr, Fred (2005)  Small Wonder: Global Power and its Discontents.  Rowan & Littlefield Publishers ISBN 0-7425-4968-2

8. Descartes, Rene First Meditation, http://renedescartes.com/meditations/rene_descartes_meditations_006.htm

9. Foucault, Michel (1973) The Order of Things.  Vintage Books ISBN 0-394-71935-2

10. Foucault, Michel (ed) (1975) I, Pierre Riviere.  Random House ISBN 0-8032-6857-2

This article was uploaded and modified to WikiPedia 20110928.  All maintenance will be in WikiPedia henceforth, unless the article is removed.  

A New Theatre

Structural Theatre

A set of characters, their mutually-exclusive objective, and the techniques that they use on each other.  

Post-Structural Theatre

Structural at basis but open, rather than closed.  

Establish the set of relationships in equilibrium.  

One character disturbs the balance.  Gets it swinging.  

Characters break down.  Elements leave the set.  

Irreversible processes.  

Mitch Mikinos

Mitch Mikinos is the culmination of several one-act experiments in structural drama design. 

In these experiments, a set of characters and objectives were established and the characters were armed with a set of techniques that they would use on each other to achieve their objectives. 

In Mitch Mikinos, each of the characters wanted more or less exclusive ownership of the family wealth, the house, the business, the car, and the mysterious briefcase that appeared every Friday afternoon. 

However, each character was so atomic, individual and selfish that they could not form stable alliances, even in their own interest, and they failed to achieve their objectives because of their failure to ally. 

There was a family but the members did not trust each other and everyone hated the patriarchal Mitch. 

There was a business but no one liked working there, especially under Mitch. 

There were two criminal enterprises but they too fell apart in the chaotic environment. 

Each person maintained their individuality, even to the point of death. 

The play is structural, in the piagetian sense, in being a closed set of objects (characters and objectives) and operations (theft, deceit and seduction).  Some operations yielded no change (identity operation) and some operations reversed an earlier operation.  The operations were associative, that is, (A + B) + C = A + (B + C).  Could play with that though.  Alliances and jealousies.  

The structure finally broke, reducing the number of objects via the irreversible process of death. 

The audience sees a typical mystery, which constructs in each audience member the personality of the observer attempting to see into the observed.  At the end of the play, all is resolved. 

Something You Might Want

In Something, Gwen is able to build an alliance.  She uses her attractiveness and the selfishness that attractiveness inspires to get two men to love her and to more or less put up with each other.  She is building an upside-down harem, a woman collecting husbands. 

She also posits but does not detail a new existence, a new mode of life, and offers to explore that existence with her two husbands.  

The alliance is highly-stressed, so much so that her attempt to add a third husband ends in disaster for the candidate but the triangle remains quasi-stable. 

Mad Tom and the Dividual

Composed of characters and objectives, Mad Tom is fundamentally structural in the same way as Mitch Mikinos.  The characters act selfishly to achieve their objectives, so much so that they are unable to form stable alliances. The play is a sequence of destruction, a monotonic decay of order all the way down to the individual and then through him the psychological fragments such as memory, fantasies of revenge, abject fear, hope, and cavalier ignorance.  

He's alliance with Mom lasts longest and continues to moderate Tom's actions.  Then Mom leaves the house, leaving Tom alone once again. 

Tom’s personality depends on his relationships and when they break down, as each character in turn leaves the house, he diminishes.  When he is alone, he falls apart, becoming a set of objects and actions, including Mom and the other members of the cast, himself, a cop and a drunken sailor all of whom ‘he’ imagines at the scene of his death. Tom as a discrete object breaks down. 

While Tom as a set does not violate the structure, as a set can be a member of another set and subject to its methods, the disintegration provides for the possibility of suicide, which as an act is irreversible. 

‘Tom’ attempts to reassemble himself with his imaginary relationships and finally succeeds, via sense of nostalgia for the good old days of the hour before.  The newly restored Tom has approached the brink of the abyss, entry into which is irreversible, and has backed away, restoring the structure in the retreat. 

From the audience’s point of view, the question is: Who is Tom?  What is he going to do?  At the end of the play, he is who he was at the beginning but has traversed the terrain around the abyss of ignominy and returns to tell the tale. 

Corned Beef and the Audience

In Corned Beef, each character is a series of masks.  The characters lead each other to believe in something about them and then violate that belief. 

The intended impact of the performance on the audience is to disrupt their ideas of who the characters are, to shift periodically the ground beneath the audience’s feet, and to prevent them from coming to a succinct conclusion about the characters and what the play is about. 

Of course there is nothing new about pretending characters.  Many plays have featured deceitful characters.  Movies such as Elmer Gantry, The Johnny Cash Story, and The Jerk feature characters who fall apart.  But these characters reconstruct at the end of the play.  The audience is left with the reassuring certainty that there is really someone at home within the shell of the character. 

But the characters in Corned Beef reveal that underneath the mask there is nothing at all.  There is no one home. 

Robert's objective is to score.  Gwen's objective is to involve Judy in a relationship.  Judy is looking for significance and has a history of disappointment.  Mike wants to reinforce his membership in the Gwen/Judy click.  

A New Theatre

If culture progresses and opens up structurally by game-destruction, Mad Tom illustrates a thumbnail history of drama in the West.  

In Shakespeare’s time, drama was commonly about the death of the king, the only game in town. 

By the English Restoration, it was about the decrepitude of the aristocracy. 

In 20^th century American drama, it was about the disintegration of the nuclear family. 

21st century drama is about the apotheosis of the individual.  Adventure and action movies, love stories, and situation comedies all prop up the individual as center of the cosmos.  In many cases, the individual is taken down but there is still a surviving core, the indestructible atom of Self. 

What is the drama that will follow individualism?  What changes in the other components of culture can be related to the mode of being, what you teach your kids?  If our societies split into a corporate class, whose members are documented, and an under class, who aren't, art will generated at the interface, as each class needs the other.  If one were eliminated, the survivor would split into two opposing components.  

As America approaches its imperial zenith, we are wiring ourselves into a matrix of power, proud to be its citizenery, standard bearer, or at least a consumer, or its pugnacious opposition, or singular exception, or its victim.  By choosing which soap to buy or lifestyle to emulate or movement to oppose, each member receives the pay-off of membership. 

Neither patriarchy nor monarchy nor the nuclear family has disappeared from the world or from drama but the contemporary mode of interface between the person and culture is one of individual choice, world-as-supermarket with the self at center as shopper. 

As American power thrashes around its possibilities: What’s next for drama?  What follows the apotheosis of the individual?  Is the green man to return?  Whatever is to follow, the old game, the old method of plugging into our culture will change to reflect our changing view of ourselves.  

The New Theatre will investigate the individual in its late, decadent state of hyper-selfism and and deconstruct the individual, analyzing its formation within the field of concepts, and exposing the ruins.  The New Theatre will also ask the question: What is to follow?  Is there a new kind of person in the making?  The post-individual? 

Theatre is the disruption of the atomistic individual, on stage, in the audience. A set of techniques should be listed.  

Comedy produces the delighted audience member and tragedy the empathetic.  What techniques disrupt the audience as subject, disallowing delight and sympathy or setting up one to crash into the other?  You won't know whether to laugh or cry.  We do try so much to understand what we see.  

The Descent of Character in Corned Beef

Character as mask: Assume a threatening pose, define your character.  

Push-back: Other characters will gratuitously reinforce or undermine your definition.  

Robert

1. Stud

2. Loser

3. Winner

4. Lost

5. Clown

Stephenie

1. Hooker

2. Babe

3. Santa Claus

4. Dangerous Woman

5. Manager

Judy

1. Babe

2. Introvert

3. Psychologist

4. Literati

5. Despair

Mikey

1. Macho Hyper-male

2. Loser

3. Clown

Context of Loss in Mad Tom

No one can just leave.  They have to be thrown out.  

Cunning Confessions

Each character confesses to the rest in an effort to gain acceptance.  

B: Was dissipated as a youth but is ready to settled down now.  

S: Was disadvantaged as a child but is ready to come of age.  

J: Continues to try to take advantage of what little he has.  

M: Tries to take care of everyone with what little she has.  

T: Wants to be left alone.  

Mom's Fears

Being alone

Guilt

The Time Thing

Boredom

Tom's Fragmentation

On leaving, each character lets Tom know exactly what s/he thinks of him.  

No two characters agree.  

Each takes a piece of Tom on leaving.  

Attempting to preserve his reputation for unity forces a traumatic adjustment on Tom.  Tom must reconstruct himself out of the remains.  Each opinion is destructive.  Mom's formula: polishing, which means Abrasion.  

Tom himself reacts to the attacks by being less vulnerable, taking fewer chances.  Being more formal. But no more willing to build an alliance?  No more dependent? 

As repute diminishes, so do dependent choices and expectations too.  A turning inward.  Narrowing of the field of choice.  

B/T: Crazy 

S/T: Not a real man 

J/T: Not a friend.  Enemy.  

M/T: No fun.  All of the above

T/T: All of the above

Sheila's Poles

Sheila is charming and seduces you immediately into close friendship.  Show this for everyone but Joey.  

If something goes wrong she tries to kill you.  Show this for everyone but Joey.  

Joey's Dissemblance

Labyrinthine.  Hopes that his pursuers will give up.  

Bill's Monarchism

Vestigial.  As reclaimed by a very poor student.  The death of Patriarchy.  

Loss of Love

Each of the above must be shown x3 in the script. 

Relationships as a Card Game in Something You Might Want

Details a matrix of relationship-styles and resultant operations that were either added to or already were found in the first scene, Friends, in Condo.  

The scene would be raw and synchronic in form if the matrix were its only source.  However, Robert was already leaving at the end of the original scene, having been eased out by Gwen and Dan and himself.  There was already a scene-wide pattern of action.  

Raw and amorphous would be okay for the first scene where the characters are introduced.  

About half of the scene was written more or less intuitively before the matrix was discovered.  Robert left at the end of the scene because Gwen chose his friend Dan to stay the night.  

Gwen's Management Skills was filled in first.  

A few beats were immediately pulled down from a bone pile kept in the top of the file.  

Other beats would probably be found in the body, as the matrix-ideas were old any way.  Look for repetition and combine the instances.  

Relationship Styles 

Gwen 30. Managerial.  Neat.  Consultative.  Fastidious.  Thoughtful.  Calculating.  

Dan 30.  Docile.  Neat.  Resilient.  Fastidious.  Spontaneous.  Intuitive.  

Robert 30.  Docile.  Casual.  Sensitive.  Untidy.  Resentful.  Calculating. 

Jack 30. Opportunistic.  Neat.  Offensive.  Fastidious.  Jock.  Calculating. 

Result

Dan’s Calculations

Robert’s Sensitivity

Gwen’s degree in management 

Wealth building

G: Owning property and having cash makes you look smart. 

Could the condo be a business deal?  

G: I own the air between the walls.  

Team building

G: You abuse Robert.  

D: He’s got it coming.  

G: It’s a guy thing.  Hit him to see if he goes down.  

D: If he goes down, laugh at him.

R: Give him another chance.  

G: If he stands, adopt him into your tribe.  

Hires, Identifies resources

G: Dan, you should hire Robert.  He doesn’t like his job.  

D: He’d start out low.  

G: Pay’s not too bad.  And when you wait tables you get tips.  

D: Bea change for you.  

R: Don’t feel like I’m going anywhere on my current job.  Except prestige.  Being a waiter is just a cut above cab driver in this town.  

Fires  

G: That was the first thing I had to do when I joined the group as manager.  Handed a name.  

D: Executioner.  

G: I did it like I did anything else.  I have to say, at this group, people listen to me.  

R: Wonder why.  

Takes names 

G: Send their names into the pool.  

D: Once in a while the pool gets drained.  

R: Sooner or later you can’t keep up.  

G: Take you out in the snow and leave you there.  

R: I’m in IT.  We don’t do things that way.  

D: You’re just slower.  

G: Which means you’ve got dead wood.  

D: Robert’s job is on the line.  Claims he doesn’t like it when really it doesn’t like him.  

R: They’d fall apart without me.  

Identifies sacrificial victims

G: I think you should get rid of them.  Warn them and put them on a waiting list.  Hire some new waiters, put them to work.  Julie’s a trouble-maker.  A parasite.  She’s got her fangs sunk into your skin and is sucking the life out of the business.  

Records calendar of promises  

Calendar-based agenda

Identifies projects and their deadlines

Maintains the hierarchy

B

J

G

D, R

Physical Matrix

3 chairs on stage and 3 characters, suggesting the permutations of 3 objects, a well-explored mathematical group.  

First, 3 chairs in scene 1 symbolized the equality of friendship, but also provided a field for maneuver as Gwen attempted to place herself exactly between the two men.  

Then, musical-chairlike, Scene 2 opened with 2 chairs, symbolizing the couple: Who is it now?:  Who is it to be?  2 chairs and 3 people?  Scene 3 featured: 1 chair.  Who will occupy it?  At one point, Gwen directs both men to sit in the single chair. Jack enters, determined to own the chair.   

Relative to the door, Robert leaves at the end of Scene 1 and is the outsider coming in the door in Scene 2.  

In Scene 2 Gwen positions herself strategically with respect to the door and the two men. 

In Scene 3, the door is the portal through which Evil Satan is invited to enter.  The window is uncertainty, a new portal through which Evil might be defenestrated, cast down.  

The Nerf Football game was already in the script by this time.  

One advantage of writing drama this way is it's apparent spontaneity.  One thing does not lead necessarily to the next, chained uneditably to the next, but each action fires more or less autonomously, it's logic absurd, intuitive, or expressionistic.  

The placement of the beats by the writer in sequence creates the logic.  

The logic driving the appearance must be inferred from the text by the audience.  Hence 3x.  

Dimensions of Success

The Ttl/Possible = 15 Changes divided by the 25 total possible changes.  This number should be higher.  It is low because Jack undergoes only one change.  He becomes famous for being thrown out of a window.  

If it were shown that Jack achieves Assets, Pleasure, Security, Fame, and Love the ratio would be 80%.  This would make Jack's role stronger and the play longer.  

This play was written by switching attention between the matrix of relationships, the expressions suggested by the matrix, and the beats of the dialogue.  

DAN wants GWEN

ROBERT wants GWEN

JACK wants GWEN

(Dan and Robert) want GWEN

GWEN wants (Dan and Robert)

GWEN wants (Dan and Robert and Jack)

DAN rejects ROBERT

ROBERT rejects DAN

DAN rejects JACK

JACK rejects Dan

ROBERT rejects JACK

JACK rejects ROBERT

(DAN and ROBERT) reject JACK.  

Contradictions

If DAN eliminates ROBERT, GWEN rejects DAN.  

If ROBERT eliminates DAN, GWEN rejects ROBERT

If (DAN and ROBERT) eliminate JACK, (DAN and ROBERT) get GWEN.

If JACK eliminates (DAN and ROBERT), JACK gets GWEN.

Not every permutation is important but all should be examined.  

Important permutations deserve a beat (a unit of dialogue) that demonstrates the expression.  

Form is more important than content.

Structuralism

This identifies techniques of structuralism that can be used to simplify dramatic analysis and synthesis and that can liberate a dramatic work from its context, meta-narratives and reality. 

Synchronically, a drama is a set of reversible relationships between characters and the objectives held by the characters. 

Diachronically, a dramatic work records the irreversible evolution of the successes and failures of the characters to achieve their objectives in competition and cooperation with each other. 

In drama, the man wants the woman. She does not want him.  He pursues.  She obstructs.  If each persists, striving and obstructing, time passes. If he is strong in his reach and she clever in her obfuscation, so might the play be strong and clever.  

A/C: Dominance asserted.

A+C: Alliance asserted.  Unstable without dominated object?  

(A+C)/B: Dominant alliance asserted.

NOP: Assertion fails.

Inverse A/C is the inverse of A+C.  

Bi-stable vibrator:

A+C

A/C

C/A

A+C

If resources are required to switch states, energy becomes an element.  Is it steady-state?  Reliable external source?  Entropy?  

If GOLD is the object of desire and GARBAGE is the object of loathing…

Robert gives GOLD to Gwen: Robert loves Gwen

Robert protects Gwen against GARBAGE: Robert loves Gwen

Robert gives GARBAGE to Dan: Robert hates Dan

Robert protects GARBAGE against Dan: Robert hates Dan

3 Characters Over 2 Operations

A-B: A tries to abandon an alliance with B

A\B: A tries to dominate B

q3x2

chars.char	ops.Op	chars_1.char	ops_1.Op	chars_2.char
Al	+	Carl	-	Bob
Al	\	Carl	\	Bob
Al	+	Carl	\	Bob
Al	-	Carl	\	Bob
Al	-	Bob	-	Carl
Al	+	Carl	+	Bob
Al	-	Carl	+	Bob
Al	\	Carl	-	Bob
Al	\	Carl	+	Bob
Al	-	Carl	-	Bob
Al	\	Bob	\	Carl
Al	+	Bob	\	Carl
Al	+	Bob	-	Carl
Al	\	Bob	+	Carl
Al	+	Bob	+	Carl
Al	\	Bob	-	Carl
Al	-	Bob	+	Carl
Al	-	Bob	\	Carl
Bob	\	Al	-	Carl
Bob	+	Carl	+	Al
Bob	\	Carl	-	Al
Bob	+	Carl	-	Al
Bob	-	Carl	-	Al
Bob	\	Carl	+	Al
Bob	-	Al	-	Carl
Bob	-	Carl	\	Al
Bob	+	Al	-	Carl
Bob	\	Carl	\	Al
Bob	-	Carl	+	Al
Bob	-	Al	+	Carl
Bob	\	Al	\	Carl
Bob	+	Al	\	Carl
Bob	-	Al	\	Carl
Bob	+	Al	+	Carl
Bob	\	Al	+	Carl
Bob	+	Carl	\	Al
Carl	+	Bob	\	Al
Carl	\	Bob	+	Al
Carl	-	Bob	\	Al
Carl	+	Bob	+	Al
Carl	-	Bob	+	Al
Carl	\	Bob	-	Al
Carl	+	Bob	-	Al
Carl	-	Bob	-	Al
Carl	\	Al	\	Bob
Carl	+	Al	\	Bob
Carl	-	Al	\	Bob
Carl	\	Al	+	Bob
Carl	\	Bob	\	Al
Carl	-	Al	+	Bob
Carl	\	Al	-	Bob
Carl	+	Al	-	Bob
Carl	-	Al	-	Bob
Carl	+	Al	+	Bob

The above 54 combinations are the result of a query containing un-joined (cross-multiplied) tables in MS Access.  Placing parenthesis between two adjacent characters doubles the number of combinations.  

Selection criteria are used to eliminate self-domination, -alliance, and -abandonment.  

SELECT chars.char, ops.Op, chars_1.char, ops_1.Op, chars_2.char
FROM chars, ops, chars AS chars_1, ops AS ops_1, chars AS chars_2
WHERE (((chars_1.char)<>[chars].[char]) AND ((chars_2.char)<>[chars].[char] And (chars_2.char)<>[chars_1].[char]));

To establish the time-independent model, identify the operations that evidence the relationships.  These initial conditions illustrate the system in equilibrium, as if it had always been that way.  

The relationships exist in balance until some one or something introduces a new event that disturbs the equipoise, liberates each character from the trap of  propriety and thus the play is set in motion.  

Relationship Matrix: Place each in a cell in a row across the page.  Place each character in a cell in a column down the page.  

System in Motion

After the synchronic model has been sketched, the time-based evolution begins with its equilibrium state, that more or less stable set of states of the relationships of the characters such that they can continue to try all operations on all rivals.  Dan can continue to love Gwen and hate Robert.  Once established, the play is in danger of boredom.  

For each cell in the table with a strong relationship, write a unit of dialogue that shows that relationship using each of several operations.  

With each beat, it should become clearer to the audience what Dan wants.

Each dialogue should end with a clear win or clear failure with respect to the driving character’s objectives.  

Gwen might reject each demonstration until she gets to the one she wants.  Dan is persistent.  He will not give up easily.  

Robert gets his turn.

Gwen gets her turn.

This is how they live.

Each scene in Condo is a separate structure.  

The equilibrium is disturbed by news.  Gwen has invited Jack to dinner.  Each man wants to eliminate the other two and possess Gwen exclusively.  All must deal with the imbalance introduced by Jack.  

The play is now in motion.  

Identify a unit of dialogue that escalates to physical violence, marriage, divorce, separation, prison, or another life-changing event.  

Reorder the dialogues so that the climax is near the end. 

Reexamine each of the dialogues and get the characters to raise their stakes with each beat until physical violence is the only operation remaining. 

If the writer desires resolution, Gwen must use her management skills to bring the situation back into equilibrium while getting what she wants: All three of them.

Or, if Dan and Robert succeed in the alliance and drive John away, the previous equilibrium is restored.

Resolution is not necessary.  

Add more obstacles to make the characters assert themselves, becoming more resourceful, increasing the risk, and accelerating toward climax. 

Map the structure any way you can.  Note that each transition begs for at least one and preferably three beats in the play to demonstrate it to the audience.  In the diagram below, there are 24 beats, counting the initial state as a change.  

Adding new characters widens the play by expanding the matrix, new geometric representations, creating new opportunities for the dramatist. 

Each beat should clearly identify the beater, beatee, objective, obstacle, and the result.  Avoid repeating beats unless they become increasingly effective.  Consolidate similar beats.  

Examine the matrix for duals.  Check to see that alternatives for each beat are represented as active elements.   If a character makes gifts of pleasantness to a character, check that the giver has also tries to protect the givee from unpleasantness. This strengthens awareness of the character for the actors and audience.

Discard characters without objectives.  

Discard characters who are not obstacles.

Eliminate from the script all expository dialogue that does not show one character trying to get another to do something for the first character.

Eliminate calls for altruism, wisdom, historicism, realism, romanticism, materialism, scientism, and other ideas that are not used as weapons.  

Eliminate dialogue that serves only to inform the characters or the audience.  A statement from a character must be a weapon in use.  

The 5 Card Draw poker game consists of three sets of elements: cards, players, and chips.  

Operations consist of the ante, deal, bet, raise, fold, call, and show.  

The set is closed over the set of possible hands.  The possible hands are ranked.  Some possible hands are equal.  

For any Player, a winning hand might be followed by a losing hand, hence the play is reversible.  

If the ante is zero, it's possible for a hand to result in no change.  

Consider the set of all whole numbers, including negatives and zero.  

Add to the set the operation of addition.  

When any two elements are added, the result is an element already in the set, hence the set is closed over the operation.  

Any number can be added to zero to produce that number, hence the identity requirement is fulfilled.  

Any addition is reversible by adding the negative of either one of the numbers.   

The result of the addition of 3 numbers (x + y + z) is independent of order ( x + y) + z = x + (y + z), hence the group is associative.  

The result of the addition of 3 numbers (x + y + z) is independent of order  x + y + z = x + z + y, hence the group is communtative.  

Alice loves Leslie who loves Bette who loves no one. Thus Alice loves but is not loved. Leslie loves and is loved but not by the same person. Bette is loved but does not love.

The asymmetric relationship drives the action. Alice increases her love for Leslie as she is loses him. 

With Alice waiting, Leslie is free to roam.  Leslie, with the most symmetry is most pleased.  

Bette is unsatisfied with her asymmetry, tied to Leslie by the thread of being loved but not loving.  For amusement, she tantalizes her lover, keeping him in tow.  

The relationships are generally reversible, in that any may forgive the trespasses of another and return to a seductive state.  Anyone of them is free to reject the beloved or the lover.  

Time, however, is unforgivingly irreversible.   

The young woman is at the distant center of her social universe that wants to forget her. She is trapped at the center.  The structure is spherical, almost perfectly symmetrical in every direction.  

One or two relationships are relatively open, unbalancing the sphere, and suggesting motion.

By leaving town, she closes the nearly open relationships, risking increased isolation.  

The young man is in the distant center of his hostile social universe that wants to kill him. There is no where to turn.  All forces converge on him. 

One friend provides relief, breaking the symmetry.