The Antithetical Scene

An Analysis of Vernon God Little and Water

The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his work on the subject, proposed that the optimal experience is a state of “flow.” (1) According to Csikszentmihalyi, a state of flow is characterized by the loss of the sense of self and the merging of the emotional and intellectual towards the task at hand. Flow is only achievable if the task is challenging but satisfying.

In the 1930’s Antonin Artaud set out to establish an absurdist theatre of cruelty. This cruel theatre made as its aim the unsettling of the audience to dispel the “shroud over our perceptions” (2). To shatter the audience’s illusions, Artaud argues, the play must bring the audience into the emotional scene and then “cruelly” destroy that false reality.

Bertolt Brecht’s Dialectical Theatre was opposed to this emotional embrace of the audience. Watching the Brechtian stage, the audience is constantly aware that they are watching a play. They are never allowed to enter the world of the play because it is the dialog between the play and the outside world that allows the performance to speak.

To the modern audience, however, neither of these forms of theatrical scene is likely to provide a very satisfying experience, and is through analysis of “flow” that we understand why.

While the typical West-End musical certainly creates an enjoyable experience, it is unlikely to challenge the audience. Absurdist theatre, while certainly challenging, remains unenjoyable. Brechtian theatre, meanwhile, prevents the audience from ever losing its sense of self. For Csikszentmihalyi, and sadly for many of us, this prevents a state of flow.

Today’s audiences expect and deserve to be put into a state of flow: to be challenged, provoked and to still enjoy the experience! To ensure a play’s success in today’s competitive cultural economy[1] and within the audience’s own mental economy[2] a play must do this.

The scenography of two recent productions in London, Vernon God Little (3) and Water (4), merge the gap between the dialectic and the absurd, allowing the audience to experience a state of flow, leaving them both shocked and entertained. Their scene is the creation of a theatrical space that runs directly against the narrative of its story. This contradictory scene derives its voice from a sort of Brechtian Dialectic, where instead of leaving one voice to the audience, it instead presents both voices. One voice comes from the plot that is unfolding onstage and one voice comes, as it were, from the theatre or ensemble itself through a series of strong scenographic choices that directly contradict the voice of the story. This is the essence of the antithetical scene.

Water

Water is a play of missing connections. Graham is separated from his father by space and from his brother, Chris, by time. Claudia separates herself from Joe out of fear and both isolate themselves from the world in their pursuit of greatness[3]. Claudia’s isolation drives Joe away, despite the fact that she carries his child. Joe’s isolation and ego cause him to go on a suicidal dive, and Chris is left with no real family despite the social status he’s carefully cultivated (a fate all the characters share).

The separation and isolation continues on the meta-narrative level, where the parallel plots of Graham and Claudia never intersect. Both characters stay at the same Canadian hotel and at one point they both board the same lift. The audience fully expects the transcendent moment of suddenly intertwined narratives that the production has been careful to set up. The plot, however, denies the characters even that connection and the audience feels cheated and empty when the play ends with neither character ever becoming aware of the other.

However, even as Claudia is unable to work with the international community towards a higher goal (combatting global warming), her actress is busy dashing about the stage becoming in turns a receptionist, a stewardess, even a breathing apparatus, in a highly choreographed meta-scene.

What Water does, in a seemingly Brechtian move, is lay bare the process of theatre-making. There are no curtains hiding the stage crew, no hiding the actors as they deftly switch roles, and the sound effects (an intricate, rhythmic and meaningful music) are not created remotely but are made on stage, in plain view.

Critic Ian Foster noted that the inventive soundscape was created “in the most varied of manners … finding connections in the most disparate of things.” (5) Indeed every sound arising naturally in the scene eventually found its way into Tim Phillips’ music, finding connections with other sounds, other characters and even other scenes.

In a marked contrast to the disjunction of the plot, the scenography of the performance itself is very connected. The very embodiment of Baugh’s “scene-as-machine” (6) each scene gives way to the next as easily and powerfully as the tide. Yet even as we see these wondrous, fluid transformations of space and hear Phillips’ beautiful music this image of effortless power is grounded in the production’s flaunting of the human hands and effort which run that machine.

The story of Water presents a rather bleak narrative of man’s inability to connect and the suffering that surely awaits him. The scene around that story presents the audience with an antithetical narrative: the beauty and puissance that comes from the successful collaboration of the people running the theatre. It is in creating a dialog between the story and the scene that Water finds its voice and simultaneously disturbs and consoles. The story leaves the audience shaken by a sense of futility, but the scene offers the chance of redemption: if only the characters could come together and see (or perhaps hear) the beauty and connections in the scene around them.

Vernon God Little

Vernon God Little presents the opposite relationship between the scene and the story. While in Water the scene contradicts the plot, in Vernon God Little it is the story that undermines its scenography.

Vernon is a play of manipulation and perception[4]. Before the action of the play, Vernon’s best friend, Jesus, doubly outcast from Texan society by being Mexican and gay, goes on a murderous rampage, killing sixteen of their classmates before turning the gun on himself. As the town looks for someone to blame, they turn on Vernon: a move facilitated by the opportunistic sleaze-ball Lally. In a cycle of injustice, Vernon is forced to run, each step incriminating him more in the media-informed eyes of the spectacle-hungry public. Vernon is eventually caught in Mexico when his own sexual desires are manipulated by Taylor, and it isn’t until, on death row, when Vernon decides to “give the people what they want” that his tragedy ends and he can return home exonerated.

Such a story could easily become pathetic melodrama were it not continuously undermined by antithetical scenography. While the story asks us to pity Vernon, a raucous blue-grass band stomps about stage celebrating Vernon’s pain. In the grossly unfair mistrial that condemns Vernon, glittering beads and a gospel singing judge exuberantly endorse this spectacle of justice. And when Vernon’s triumphant resurrection and return home is undercut by his mother’s new fridge, the scene legitimizes her inhuman selfishness by allowing the radiant symbol of consumerism to literally upstage Vernon.

Clearly the production is not asking us to exchange our empathy for Vernon for a fridge. What this antithetical scene presents us with is the story through the eyes of the story’s society. A caricature of mediatized sensationalism, populist blood-lust and rampant materialism, the scene mercilessly reminds us how we would feel about the story had we not the advantage of Vernon’s perspective.

It is the cognitive dissonance between the story as we know we should experience it and the story as we are asked to experience it by the scene-as-society that allows Vernon God Little to act as an intervention. In true Artaud fashion the audience’s normal view is made grotesque and disgustingly false, disturbing the audience both with the distance between perception and reality and by the knowledge that we often do perceive the world in this way.

Foil Characters and achieving Flow

Clearly the antithetical scene has opened new vistas of theatrical expression for these productions, but how does this antithetical scene achieve a state of flow? A naïve but partially correct explanation is that in both Vernon and Water the smooth, unbroken, dreamlike transition from scene to scene helped the productions to flow[5].

In the Csikszentmihaly model, viewing a play is the task of coming to a clearer understanding of the world by grappling with the conflicts and contradictions the play presents. To experience a play in a state of flow, the audience must engage with the task (with both sides of a conflict) at both the reflective (intellectual) and visceral (emotional) level: empathizing with and projecting onto both sides so strongly that the sense of self is lost.[6]

Plays that achieve this typically do so through characterization. In Frankenstein (7), the foil characters of the scientist and the monster as well as the opposing forces of the individual (as represented by both characters) and society as a whole (as represented by the rest of the ensemble, particularly Elizabeth) are each so identifiable and understandable that we cannot help but be moved and absorbed by the conflict between them.

In Water and Vernon God Little it is the representation itself and its opposing presentation that provide us the “foil characters” on which to project our views. In Water we identify with the plight of the characters, and with the hopeful beauty of its soundscape. In Vernon we identify not only with Vernon and Jesus, but unfortunately with the dehumanized, sensationalist presentation which has come to be all too familiar today.

Using the idiosyncrasy of Artaud’s absurd and Brecht’s awareness of the dual layers of representation and presentation, the theatre of antithesis turns its own theatricality into its vehicle of expression: able to simultaneously disturb and console; inform and delight, all the while maintaining its sense of flow.

Bibliography

1. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York : Harper and Row, 1990.

2. Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. 1938.

3. Norris, Rufus. Vernon God Little. Young Vic, London : s.n., February 2011.

4. Farr, David. Water. Tricycle Theatre, London : Filter and Lyric Hammersmith, February 2011.

5. Foster, Ian. Review: Water, Filter at Tricycle Theatre. There Ought To Be Clowns. [Online] February 5, 2011. [Cited: March 29, 2011.] http://oughttobeclowns.blogspot.com/2011/02/review-water-filter-at-tricycle-theatre.html.

6. Baugh, Christopher. Theatre, Performance and Technology. New York : Palgrave MacMillian, 2005.

7. Dear, Nick. Frankenstein. The National Theatre, London : s.n., 2011.

8. Boorstin, J. The Hollywood Eye: What Makes Movies Work. New York : Cornelia & Michael Bessie Books, 1990.

9. Norman, Don. Emotional Design. New York : Basic Books, 2004.

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[1] Plays are competing with cinema and other art forms that already do this very successfully. See footnote 6

[2] What I’m suggesting here is that a play’s goal is to be long remembered by those who see it. A play that is enjoyable but not profound will be quickly forgotten for more recent, pleasant experiences. A play that is profound but not enjoyable will not long be contemplated because of its negative emotional associations. Only the play that is both enjoyed and disillusioning will be long remembered.

[3] In this way the fate of Claudia and Joe parallels that of Dr Frankenstein: damned by their individualist pursuits of greatness; while Graham’s parallels that of the creature: doomed to separation from his bookish progenitor. (7)

[4] As such, it seems to be almost obvious that they should choose to present these themes at the meta-theatrical level.

[5] In this sentence I use flow in both Csikszentmihalyi’s sense and the more quotidian sense.

[6] This is a connection between the work of film critic J. Boorstin and psychologist M. Csikszentmihalyi that I came across in cognitive scientist Don Norman’s book Emotional Design. Its extension into the theatrical realm is, I feel, obvious. (1) (8) (9)

The Science and the Humanities Major

First, a stupid joke of my own creation:

A humanities major and an engineering major walk into a bar and each order a pint. They sit down and a bit later a barmaid hands each of them a pint glass that's half-full. The humanities major, enraged, asks his engineering friend to go complain to the cheapskate bartender. The engineer agrees, "Seriously! As if they can't afford to buy half-pint glasses!"

Okay, so obviously the first thing that jumps out is how bad I am at making jokes. (Please inform me of a better such joke if you know one) The point however is not my poor talents at humor, but rather the difference in thinking between humanities majors (hereafter called "anthros") and engineering majors (hereafter called "smiths"). The anthro in this joke sees the half-full glass as resulting from the barkeeper's hesitation to give them the full pint, and the smith sees the half-full glass as being twice as large as it should be.

The difference in thinking is obvious, and much seen, but what precisely is this difference and what can it tell us about how we (as humans) see the world.

The answer is, simply put, that humans have evolved as both users of tools and as social creatures.

As social creatures, whose survival both of our group and within our group depends on effective communication of empathy, we are cursed by a lack of telepathy. If we had telepathy, and could know what each other was thinking and the thoughts of predators and prey in our environment, we would be able to plan around what other agents in our environment were doing because we would know completely what that was. Life would be reduced to a game of complete information, and we would all have evolved to be chess players: the tiger is hiding there and wants the turkey over there, not me, so I don't need to be afraid of walking here.

But this is not the world we evolved in. To determine whether the tiger wants to eat you, you must closely watch its posture and see who it's targeting. The process of making sense of the world by looking for "social" cues (loosely defined here to include the posture of tigers) is roughly one of dividing the world into agents (having goals and desires and the free-will to pursue those goals) and then attempting to understand their desires and infer their internal mental state. This process, of seeing the world as a collection of intelligent, emotional, "human-like" agents, is called anthropomorphism, and this is the way that the "anthro" sees the world.

The world is complex, and is the product of the interaction of many complex things that we cannot understand. The anthro "chunks" the world into easily identified agents and makes sense of the world as the "social" interaction of these elements. The extreme example of this being, obviously, the nature gods.

But as we came to understand the workings of high and low pressure systems, we obviously no longer needed to view "the north wind" as a human-like god. We now understand the wind as a "scientific" phenomenon, rather than a "miraculous" one. The triumph of the smiths!

This transition from deified, anthropomorphic understanding to a scientific one is typically cast as the triumph of god-like human reason over our more animal-like, emotional understanding. This view, however, ignores the fact that our "smith's" scientific view is also the product of evolution.

Humans are, apart from uniquely social, uniquely tool-using. Not only do we use the objects in our environment as tools, but we even design and create tools for future use. To understand how a rock or stick might be used as a tool, we must first be able to predict how this object would affect and be affected in a variety of situations. The goal of science, to make predictions about future observations, is a pragmatic goal based on our evolution as tool-users, not a lofty one handed down by god.

To the black-smith, a hammer is not an independent agent but rather an extension of his arm: he understands its properties and can cause changes in his world by using those properties. To "smiths" the world is the predictable interaction of simple tools: I strike the flint, the sparks heat the twig, the twig catches fire, the fire heats the pig, the pig feeds me.

This is the primary distinction between our humanities and engineering majors: how they make sense of a complex world. The engineer views the world from the bottom up: as the vast interaction of simple elements. He predicts the future, by extrapolating from the simple to the system. The humanities major attempts to view problems from the top down: assigning goals and personality to a system, and making predictions from their understanding of humans (themselves a pretty complex system!). While in today's secular society science is often touted as being superior, in fact these two understandings of the world are equally flawed, just in different ways. The scientist may fail to take _every_ interaction into account, and often the wholistic approach misses the crucial detail.

Eeastern and Western Medicine as Exemplifying this Difference

The primary difference, as I see it, between Western and Eastern medicine, is the difference between an anthro's and smith's approach.

In western medicine, we see the body as a completely intelligible interaction between simple components. Naturally, to correct a problem one simply needs to correct for the component of the machine that is missing or repair it. Is you kidney failing? Let's put you on dialysis! Is your heart stopped? Restart it! Are you sad? Take this serotonin supplement! This approach is fantastically successful at saving lives in seriously threatening situations. To some degree, your body is a machine and to keep functioning each part (each "tool") must fulfill its responsibilities.

Where this breaks down, however, is in unintended consequences. For as much as we would like to compartmentalize our understanding of the body, it is a fundamentally more interconnected, complex artifact than can be understood completely. Drugs have side-effects, and while the body is usually resilient enough to balance them out, it is today's "body as machine" methodology that results in serious (sometimes fatal) complications. This leads to the bizarre, completely insane yet all too common practice, of taking one or several drugs just to combat the side effects of another drug. For example, millions of people today are taking Advil to combat the aches and pains caused by Allegra and Lipitor, and it isn't uncommon for psychiatric patients or patients with liver problems to take cocktails of dozens of drugs to remain stable. The nearly endless stream side-effects comes from this erroneous notion that we can have a targeted effect on one part of the body, without it effecting others.

Chinese medicine, far from discarding these inter-relations, relies on them. It views the body as an anthropomorphic relationship between parts, and in attempting to "please" the body they get a fuller understanding of the body-system as a whole. It is this understanding that makes Eastern medicine "wholeistic" and (in many ways) far superior to Western medicine, particular for non-specific ailments and long-term health. Have a stomach ache? Drink this tea, and let me poke your foot! You feel sad? Let's fix your diet, and meet regularly for a massage, de-stress and talk about your life. You heart has stopped? Let's put some needles in your back!

My point is: Give me western when something is seriously wrong: give me eastern the rest of the time. It is a mistake to think that a logical, tool-based understanding is any more valid or any less a product of our animal heritage than a perceptual, anthropomorphic understanding. Both ways of understanding a complex world are equally valid and important.

Application to Computer Interfaces

The problem with computers today is that without presenting a good understanding of how it works to the user, then you cannot think of it as a tool. Yet without presenting itself as a social creature, giving clues and working "with" the user, you cannot understand it as an agent! It's easy to see how many claim to "not get" computers! The challenge to designers of all kinds of tools is to create something whose function (and therefor use) are obvious and appeal to our existing understanding of the world.

The challenge (and perhaps opportunity) with computers is that they are so complex and abstracted away from our typical (physical) understanding of the world, that only very nerdy computer scientists can understand how they work. The opportunity here is that this means that computers are _already_ anthropromorphised, and that it shouldn't be too difficult to "play up".

While many consider "clippy" (Microsoft Word's paper-clip assistant) to be a laughable failure in the history of interfaces, this is (I claim) more from its failure as an agent, than a failure of approach. The problem with clippy was that for as helpful as he tried to be, he never quite understood what you actually wanted. He was, in this way, too ambitious for his time. Despite his complete lack of utility, he (see the anthropomorphism here?) became a well-loved (if oft mocked) mascot of technology attempting (and failing) to be helpful.

But modelling intelligent agents, using machine learning to identify user intent, and even the theory of designing lovable mascots and modelling emotion have all progressed significantly in the past 15 years. Computers are not becoming less complex, and people's conceptual understanding of computers as tools is progressing slowly. Perhaps the time has come for the PDA to truly try to be your friend.