WHAT THE PERFORMANCE OF A PLAY gives an audi-ence is less a set of ideas, propositions, or abstractions about life and how to live it than what Arthur Miller has called a "felt experience," the imaginative sharing and participation in the lives and actions of imaginary characters. The performance is mythic; our sensibilities are enlivened by imaginary characters and we become engaged in their conflicts. Our thoughts and emotions are never so detached from theirs that we can remain "objective" in our feelings for them and in our judgments of them. If the play touches our humanity, we weep, or we smile; their movements move us, and our thoughts about them are kindled by our feelings toward them. Thus, we are most completely engaged in the play, as in any performing art, as it is being performed within a particular space and time. So it may seem, to a degree, presumptuous or meretricious to discuss those ideas of a play, of which the play touches on, without both the writer and reader having directly and immediately experienced the play itself. Yet many great plays-especially those written by Arthur Miller-are also plays that engage us directly in social, political, and moral questions, in questions that may be posed early in the plays themselves, and which continue to stimulate and engage us. Significantly, these questions may linger, or stimulate us as an audience to ask other related questions, after we have experienced the play.
To read the full article, click HERE.
JULIUS NOVICK To me the theater is not a disconnected entertainment. . . . It's the sound and the ring of the spirit of the people at any one time. It is where a collective mass of people, through the genius of some author, is able to project its terrors and its hopes and to symbolize them. —Arthur Miller. A primary function of the theater is to perform social fact, to express it in terms of fictive yet truthful personal experience. With the passing of the years, social fact becomes historical fact, and the drama, particularly the realistic drama, stands as an often-invaluable record of what history felt like to those who actually lived it. The great subject of American Jewish drama—defined for our purposes as plays written in English by American Jews about Jewish experience—is the great subject also of the historians and sociologists of American Jewry: the encounter with America, the complex question of Americanization, acculturation, as similation. America is famously a nation of immigrants. In Oscar Handlin's words, "the immigrants were American history." The "history of immigration," he went on to say in his most famous book, significantly called The Uprooted, is a history of alienation and its consequences. . . . Emigration took these people out of traditional, accustomed environments and replanted them in strange ground, among strangers, where strange manners prevailed. The customary modes of behavior were no longer adequate, for the problems of life were new and different. With old ties snapped, men faced the enormous compulsion of working out new relationships, new meanings to their lives, often under harsh and hostile circumstances. . . . The shock, and the effects of the shock, persisted for many years; and their influence reached down to generations which themselves never paid the cost of crossing.
To read the full article, click HERE.
