I think the imaginative participation required of the audience in both seeing and reading plays is very similar to the gutter in comic books or graphic novels. The gutter is the white space between frames and sometimes time will elapse during the white, seconds or days, or something will just be implied, like a raised axe in one frame and a scream in the next frame. In a Scott McCloud book (I’m not sure which one) he talks about the reader’s participation in the gutter--that it is the reader, not the author, who brings the axe down, decides what really happens in the white space, the reader is the true murderer. It’s that participation of audience that give comics a special draw and I think that same pull of the imagination makes the monologues effective. The convention that the characters are just telling their story makes us require less of the set, less “reality.” Bell is able to produce vivid imagery of a huge flood without a drop of water. In a talk-back with Rosalind Bell and Professor Proehl during the UPS production of NOM, I remember them talking about the decision to use a fake baby or not. I think in the end they decided just to pantomime the presence of a baby because it was more evocative to make the audience fill it in than give them a stand in--it forced us to see a baby ourselves whereas a fake baby could instead serve as a reminder that it wasn’t “real.” Making a play about Katrina could be like trying to write about war--lots of death and destruction and water on a very large scale. But NOM succeeds because it doesn’t try to show you everything-- it gives you important pieces of description, pulls on the real images people have from the news, and forces the audience to put them together. I remember seeing the scene with the boy on the roof with the diabetic father and I don’t think I wanted to be able to actually have the father dying on the stage with the mother sacrificing her own spit for his mouth-- I could see it already, the boy was on that roof.
Something I noticed about NOM was that it was completely seamless to move from the interview back to dialogue happening during Katrina. I didn’t object to that break from the format of people’s stories and really I think it was a nice through-line to have that “real-time,” fleshed-out story sandwiched between the other (connected but stand-alone) monologues. It was nice to have a break from the pace of single person narrative and have interaction between characters. I think that would be nice in The VMs too, if the characters walked in and out of each other stories, but she was limited by her monologues being true interviews (if I remember correctly)
One of the biggest things that I noticed about the monologues from a writing perspective is that they all operate under the convention of a person(s) responding to prompts by a narrator. I think that’s probably an effective solution to connect monologues and give the characters a reason to be telling their story and I think the audience is familiar with that format enough to buy into it easily. Is that format tired? What would be another format/convention for a play other than interviews? The interrogation (like in Pillowman) is a closely related to the interview but it has a more foreboding feel as there has to be a reason (usu. a crime) that a person is being interrogated in the first place. And, the interrogator is usually another character, versus the audience. This winter, I saw the premier of a new Lauren Weedmen show which was semi-autobiographical. It was essentially a one-woman show of monologues, but there was dialog where she was other people talking to herself. She wasn’t being interviewed or anything, she was just sort of “living” in this world where the audience bought that she was everyone. I think what makes that different from the monologues we read is that she wasn’t really talking to the audience--maybe talking to the audience requires the convention that the audience is standing in for an interviewer.
An interesting thing about The Vagina Monologues is I don’t think it is commonly considered to be a great dramatic work--and yet it succeeds in getting consistently produced. I wonder if its accessibility actually hurt the perception of its literary value as it produced by colleges nationwide every year. It is the perfect vehicle for social change as the monologues can be produced on a low-budget with a flexible amount of actors. But I guess I have somewhat of a bias against this show as I feel like as a compilation of true(?) stories of women and sex and sexuality, are valued more for their activism than their impact as theater or literature. I think the monologues do what they’re trying to do well--empower women to talk about being women, start dialogue between men and women, etc. but, I always go to a production of The Vagina Monologues expecting a certain kind of theater. I’ve never seen Laramie, but now I’m definitely interested. I think it probably is produced with the same sort of intention of Vagina Monologues-- for social change. And actually I guess NOM is too in that it’s really mostly about race and prejudice. Is it coincidental that these stories geared towards overt activism are the plays that can be produced on low budgets? Small communities or students clubs can’t produce production-heavy, big ensemble cast shows such as Eurydice, but basically any group of people could do a reading of The Vagina Monologues--they can be impactive and influential without even memorization or staging. Maybe that accessibility, even though I think it’s ultimately a good thing, is why I have a hard time taking The VMs seriously.
I noticed that NOM has the characters introducing themselves after their monologues and Laramie has the narrator introducing them prior to their monologues. I think it definitely works for NOM for us to find out who is speaking at the end because it acts to delay judgement of the character in the same vein as the message of the play-- that you can’t judge a person by their name, age, hometown, etc.
My favorite part of the construction of NOM is the repetition of the lines on the first and last page: “Sometime you look back on a thing and you can’t do nothing but just wonder. Water. A can opener...a basketball. Some gas...garbage...you never know what’ll save your life.” (3 and 43). It’s a great set-up for the way things play out with Arnold and a satisfying ending. When I read it and saw UPS’ production last fall I don’t think I was as in tune with how much the characters’ accounts of Katrina are steeped in their race and racial perceptions. I think she does a really good job playing with the characters’ voices and the stereotypes of speech in their diction.
Overall, I don’t think monologue plays are my favorite...
