Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

ENGAGING AUDIENCES

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance Edited by Bruce McConachie and Blakey Vermeule Books in this series: Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science, and the New Humanities (2008). Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences (2008).

Engaging Audiences A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre Bruce McConachie

ENGAGING AUDIENCES

Copyright © Bruce McConachie, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60988–4 ISBN-10: 0–230–60988–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 General Cognition for Theatre Audiences

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2 Social Cognition in Spectating

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Cultural Cognition in History

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Epilogue Writing Cognitive Audience Histories

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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ike nearly all of my colleagues in theatre and performance studies, I claim no professional credentials in the interrelated fields of the cognitive sciences. Thanks to my wife’s interest in cognitive learning theory, however, I began to do some reading in cognitive studies in the early 1990s. Specifically, Stephanie’s dissertation project introduced me to the ideas of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and I soon realized that their approach to embodied cognition had significant implications for actors, audiences, cultures, and the writing of theatre history. My initial foray into cognitive studies helped to shape American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (2003). I am grateful to Tom Postlewait for his editorial work on that book and his interest in helping me to effect a smooth synthesis of cognitive and cultural studies. While writing my book on the cold war, I began to see that cognitive science had the potential to disprove or alter most of our usual scholarly paradigms in theatre and performance studies. Not just another framework in our bag of theoretical tricks, cognitive approaches undermined the major premises of Saussurean semiotics, Derridian deconstruction, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as productively modified most schools of phenomenology and materialism. This led me to broaden my readings in cognitive studies and to seek allies with scholars in theatre and performance and related fields who had also become excited by the cognitive turn in the humanities. My aim was to produce a coedited anthology of essays that would use cognitive science to explore many areas in our field and, in the process, call into question several of the scholarly norms of our discipline. This goal sparked extensive discussions with Rhonda Blair, John Lutterbie, and Tobin Nellhaus, whom I thank for their insightful questions and their eventual contributions to Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (2006). Joining me as a coeditor on this project was

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F. Elizabeth Hart, who had already written extensively on cognitive studies in drama and whose knowledge and curiosity would continue to propel me long after our book together was complete. Liz brought along other colleagues in dramatic literature, including Lisa Zunshine, Howard Mancing, and Naomi Rokotnitz, whose essays in our anthology further broadened my understanding of the potential reach of cognitive studies in theatre scholarship. Finally, I am happy to thank several graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh who read drafts of the anthology essays and, through their discussions and seminar papers, helped me to better comprehend what we were all attempting. These students include Chip Crane, Lofty Durham, Rick Kemp, and Jennifer Pierce. In the run up to the publication of Performance and Cognition, I began to plan for a single-authored book that would explore how a related group of theories in several areas of cognitive science might help us to understand what audiences do when they engage with dramatic performances on the stage. Engaging Audiences is indebted to all of those scholars who helped me to shape my two previous book projects involving cognitive studies, plus many more. I have had productive conversations with cognitive scientists Merlin Donald, Mark Turner, Keith Oatley, and others at conferences and symposia. Philosophers of science Mark Johnson and Edouard Machery have helped me to understand the history and epistemological premises of some of the cognitive science that I am using. Several scholars at conferences on cognitive studies and literature sponsored by the University of Connecticut and Purdue University have also broadened my comprehension of the many intersections between cognitive science and the humanities. Theatre researchers Willmar Sauter, Richard Butsch, Peter Eversmann, and John Emigh have discussed ideas about audiences and theatrical events with me that have found their way into this book. I have also enjoyed the support and encouragement of Performance and Cognitive Studies, a study group at the American Society for Theatre Research. At the University of Pittsburgh, I have benefited from Buck Favorini’s insights on theatre and memory and Lynne Conner’s proposals to arts administrators for new approaches to audiences. In the process of reading manuscripts for our series at Palgrave Macmillan—Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance—my coeditor Blakey Vermeule and I have shared many insights about the book projects we are helping to launch. Among those possible authors in our series that have directly influenced my work in Engaging Audiences are Amy Cook and Teemu Paavolainen. I also thank Jonathan Gottschall, whose Literature, Science, and the New Humanities for Cognitive

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Studies in Literature and Performance helped me to understand the epistemological ramifications of our kind of scholarship. Liz Hart, Tobin Nellhaus, Teemu Paavolainen, and Lynne Conner read early drafts of Engaging Audiences and made extensive notes that have benefited the final product in numerous ways. Thank you all for your help with this project. I should note as well that I have reprised some passages from previously published essays for the present book. Readers will find a few selections from “Using Cognitive Science to Understand Spatiality and Community in the Theater,” Contemporary Theatre Review 12, 3(2002): 97–114 and “A Cognitive Approach to Brechtian Theatre,” Theatre Symposium 14 (2006): 9–24 in this book, plus most of my recent article in Theatre Journal, “Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies,” 59, 4 (December 2007): 553–77. I thank editors Maria Shevtsova, M. Scott Phillips, and especially David Saltz, coeditor of Theatre Journal, for their help in crafting these essays. Finally, I am indebted to two of my graduate students, to the Theatre Arts staff at Pitt, and to the editorial and publishing staff of Palgrave for their assistance in turning my manuscript into a book. David Wright checked and formatted many of my endnotes and Lisa Leibering prepared the index. At Palgrave, Brigitte Shull looked after many of the details of publication, Sloan MacRae at Pitt helped with the cover design, and Maran Elancheranproofed the manuscript prior to publication. Executive Editor Farideh KoohiKamali speeded the process along and encouraged me at every step. I thank her, as well, for her work in facilitating our book series and am delighted that Engaging Audiences helps us to launch Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance.

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Introduction

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decided to use “engaging” in the title of this book when I was performing a role in a Pittsburgh production of Richard II. There are two “gage” scenes in Shakespeare’s history play, when several noblemen on stage throw down the gloves they wear (their “gages”) as a part of their armor to challenge the truthfulness of their opponents’ statements. If one nobleman picks up his challenger’s gage, his “honour’s pawn,” each must defend his good name in mortal combat and only the King can prevent bloodshed. At its best, good theatre involves similar challenges, with both actors and spectators throwing down and taking up emotionally charged entanglements of truth, status, honor, and identity. As Shakespeare recognized, “engagement” can sometimes verge on the ridiculous; eight gloves get tossed on stage during the second gage scene, ironic testaments to Bolingbroke’s inability to control his fractious nobles any better than could King Richard before him. Good theatre takes us over the top in these ways, too; as actors and spectators, we want to be pushed to emotional extremes, even if we smile at ourselves later for our foolishness. Like exciting sporting events and transforming religious rituals, good theatre can tie significant meanings to emotional epiphanies. Theatrical engagement always works in two directions. That is, theatre audiences must engage with actors (and indirectly with others behind the scenes), and the artists of the theatre must engage with spectators before performative communication can occur with effectiveness. The ambivalent title of my book, “engaging audiences,” intentionally cuts both ways. Because this engagement happens among live participants in the same space and during the same time, theatre usually has more in common with face-to-face conversations than do other mediated events, such as viewing films and Web sites.1 Although we tend to forget the immediacy of theatrical engagement,

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audiences are forcefully reminded of it when actors forget an entrance or drop a line. Of course anyone with a passing knowledge of theatre history knows that spectators and actors have not always paid much attention to each other throughout a performance. Our contemporary custom of engaging with performers through studied attention, emotioncharged silences, and occasional laughter, coupled with applause only at the curtain call, is hardly the historical norm. Aristocratic auditors at the Paris Opera in the middle of the eighteenth century arrived at performances late, left early, and spent most of their time chitchatting in between. A century later, working-class spectators at the Bowery Theatre in New York also took time away from watching the entertainment to socialize with each other, often preferring their own company to any ongoing engagement with the actors. In both of those historical situations, however, the performers accommodated lapses in audience attention and could make up for them with coup de theatres of vocal force or energetic movement. Minor star J. Hudson Kirby of Bowery fame in the 1840s, for example, generally walked through most of his roles until his death scene, when he invariably writhed and crashed upon the stage floor with such force and abandon that the Bowery pittites roared for an encore. “Wake me up when Kirby dies,” a standing jest for years, aptly summed up the expectations of Bowery regulars for entertainment that would alternately allow for casual socializing and rapt engagement. These modes of spectator–performer interaction, though far different than the conventions of our own time, still prized engagement, though audiences and actors expected it to be intermittent rather than ongoing.2 The give-and-take of theatrical communication does fall short, however, when the actors sense complete spectator indifference or lack of understanding. I once performed a role in Private Lives before an audience of mentally ill patients who simply lacked the ability to engage with the circumstances, characters, and language of Noël Coward’s comedy. The producers of the show had intended our oneoff performance as a goodwill gesture of charity, but the experience left the cast almost as unnerved as were many of the patients in the audience. For theatrical engagement to have a chance, spectators and players require most of the cognitive skills that Homo sapiens normally expect of one another. As we know, non-sighted and hearingimpaired spectators and performers can also play the game of theatre, but in such cases basic perceptual normality is less crucial, as we will see, than attention, memory, empathy, and cultural knowledge.

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As my title suggests, Engaging Audiences will focus primarily on spectating. While I do not underestimate the importance of competent artists, I happily leave those cognitive investigations to other scholars. Providing an overview of the usual cognitive involvements of spectators is plenty for one book, especially since such an investigation must also include emotional engagement. Cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists now affirm that emotional drives undergird and sustain even the simplest of intellectual tasks, such as adding two numbers together; the old separations between reason and emotion no longer hold.3 As I will explain in a subsequent chapter, the Brechtian desire to elevate a spectator’s rational over her or his emotional response was misplaced; a modest level of emotional engagement is necessary to sustain all rational attention in the playhouse. Nor, on the basis of cognitive science, can we make firm distinctions among certain types of spectators that continue to concern some theatre scholars—“passive audiences,” “resistant readers,” and “gazing viewers,” for example. These terms, as we will see, derive from assumptions based in theories that do not fit with the experimental evidence. There is no adequate word in English that encompasses all that an audience does on a regular basis at the theatre. Accordingly, I will use the terms available to me rather loosely, with little attempt to distinguish among “viewing,” “spectating,” “gazing,” and “watching.” As will be evident, even the apparently obvious distinction between “auditors” and “spectators”—between hearing and seeing—breaks down under examination. Our usual metaphors for how audiences engage with performance also lead us astray. Having borrowed the assumptions (if not always the methodology) of semiotics, many academic critics and historians of the theatre describe audience experience as a version of “reading.”4 From the point of view of cognitive studies, however, there are fundamental differences between readers making sense of signs on a printed page and the mostly nonsymbolic activity of spectator cognition. Nor does the scientific evidence support metaphors that purport to examine audience “reaction” or “response.” These terms, which derive from behaviorism, assume that the theatre is primarily a one-way delivery system of messages or fantasies that audiences respond to according to their past conditioning and/or psychic life.5 In contrast, my emphasis throughout will be on spectator action and interaction—what audiences do to engage with and become engaged by a performance. As we will see, spectators are much more proactive than the traditions of semiotics, behaviorism, and Freudianism have

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generally understood. I hope that my subtitle, A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, signals a shift away from these scientifically unreliable approaches and opens up a new orientation to audience studies. Nature and Nurture From a cognitive perspective, social dynamics do not entirely construct audience engagement. To be sure, spectators respond differently to performances partly on the basis of their cultural position with regard to race, class, gender, and similar social discriminations.6 But the primary assumption of social constructivism—that social and cultural learning (nurture) operate separately from genetics and “hard-wired” cognition (nature)—is no longer tenable. Social experiences and genetic endowments come together in the constructions of our brains and minds in so many ways that they are inseparable from infancy onward. As evolutionary psychologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd put it, “The ultimate explanation for cultural phenomena lies in understanding the genetic and cultural evolutionary processes that generate them” (ital in original).7 The term “mind/brain”—a coinage widely used in cognitive studies—suggests this necessary symbiosis; the evolution of our biological brains enabled cultural minding, but minding ceases if we are “brained” and die. In fact, as we will see, it is likely that the late stages of human evolution depended as much upon the nurturance of culture as on the operations of nature. All cultural practices and beliefs—from shopping to religion—get embedded in the synapses of the mind/brain; there is no culture without cognition and no cognition without nature. Further, evolution, biology, and the cognitive structures of the mind/brain place limits on the extent to which society and history can shape individuals and cultures. Because humans walk upright and because many of the operations of our minds embody our physical orientation in the world, people in all cultures carry a concept of “verticality” in their heads. This mental concept, like many others, is universal, even though its particular expression varies across cultures. Cognitive science and our evolution as a species suggest the likelihood of several other universals that transcend cultural variation, including caring for kin, constructing social hierarchies, and performing rituals. Although Frederic Jameson wrote in 1991 that “Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is over and nature is gone for good,”8 nature never died. Like other

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species of mammals, Homo sapiens as a general population exhibit certain characteristics that may be said to define our “nature.” That we share a “human nature” as a species may deflate the hopes of some utopians for radical transformation, but it still allows for an enormous range of cultural-historical expression, action, and change. For many humanists concerned to avoid “naturalizing” categories of scholarly analysis, my attempted synthesis of the natural and the cultural will send up a red flag. This concern, however, is based on Jameson’s and others’ assumption that the natural and the cultural can be easily distinguished and divided, when they cannot be. It also conflates the natural with the ethical. Just because evolution may have favored the survival of aggressive males and care-giving females, this does not mean that males have a right to be aggressive in all situations and women must always remain in care-giving relationships. Our human nature is flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of behaviors and ethics. I intend to show that cognitive and cultural approaches to audiences need not be antithetical, despite some recent anxiety about cognitive studies from scholars in cultural studies.9 Behind many of the fears of humanists is the belief that embracing an evolutionary understanding of cognition will undermine their liberationist politics. But this fear is largely misplaced. As Peter Singer points out in A Darwinian Left, the tree of evolution and its flourishing branch of cognitive studies do not support neoconservative doctrines of competition and old-fashioned social Darwinism. Rather, good science suggests that sociality and cooperation have been significant keys to the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens and will continue to be important for our future on this planet. Singer posits that a Darwinian left would: “Accept that there is such a thing as human nature, and seek to find out more about it, so that policies can be grounded on the best available evidence of what human beings are like; reject any inference from what is ‘natural’ to what is ‘right’; promote structures that foster cooperation rather than competition, and attempt to channel competition into socially desirable ends; stand by the traditional values of the left by being on the side of the weak, poor, and oppressed, but think very carefully about what social and economic changes will really work to benefit them.”10 According to Singer, combining evolutionary and cognitive thinking with historical insight could benefit progressive politics. Incorporating history into a cognitive discussion of audiences means that this study must proceed on three levels—the species, the

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cultural-historical, and the individual levels. From a cognitiveevolutionary point of view, we are all alike in some ways, we share some attributes and practices with cultural groups in other ways, and each of us, as well, embodies qualities that are absolutely unique. Although we can speak abstractly of these as distinct levels, our species-, cultural-, and individual-specific traits are interdependent and cannot really be separated. Without the intermediate level of history and culture, however, the other two levels become opaque and nearly inaccessible. Our languages, historical traditions of inquiry, and cultures of science inform us that our species evolved partly in response to the gravitational pull of the earth and that the neuronal networks in each of us differ from those of everybody else on the planet. Falsifiable Theories Engaging Audiences is primarily an introduction meant for theatre and performance generalists. I expect that its insights about audience engagement will be especially significant for academics who teach theatre history, dramatic literature, dramaturgy, and performance courses in acting and directing. Occasionally I will break from my usual patterns of description and analysis to point to significant works of theatre and performance scholarship that are consistent with my cognitive orientation. I will also critique some that are not. Initially, I had hoped to be able to keep most of my theoretical musings in the endnotes, but I soon discovered that often the most efficient way to make a necessary point about the cognitive dynamics of spectatorship was to contrast it to a salient idea from an opposing theory. Given my anticipated readership, I have tried to keep my theoretical interventions brief and to the point. Those who wish more extensive discussions of the theoretical underpinnings of my argument will find them in my endnotes.11 In this regard, I must emphasize at the outset that this short study can only introduce one cognitive approach to spectatorship. As I hope to make clear in the following chapters, cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, evolutionary theorists, and linguists disagree about many aspects of consciousness, emotions, spatial perception, speech, and all of the other processes and attributes that facilitate and enhance performance spectatorship. In general, scientists no longer model the operations of the mind/brain on the digital computer, the primary paradigm for cognitive science in the 1960s and 1970s. Scientists still use computing to figure out

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some aspects of cognition, but other models with ties to evolution and embodiedness are now in play. As a consequence, several schools of thought now compete in all areas of cognitive scholarship among the thousands of researchers in the field. This is not to say that cognitive science is a wildly speculative enterprise; scientists already know a great deal from their empirical experiments and this knowledge is unlikely to change. Rather, they tend to disagree mostly at the levels of interpretative synthesis, where lab results and real-world observations can fit into a variety of intermediate and encompassing theories. Because there is no Grand Theory of the Mind in cognitive science that most would find acceptable, I can offer no grand theory of audience cognition for performance. What I do offer, however, are some intermediate theories based in empirical findings that can help us to answer many of the questions that we have about audiences. Theatre people recognize that an adequate understanding of spectatorship must encompass many kinds of engagements with performances. To understand what audiences do, we need to know how spectators comprehend and negotiate the “doubleness” of theatre—that is, the fact that a single body on stage can be both an actor and a character, simultaneously existing in both real and simulated time-space. Theatre scholars want to discover how audiences perceive spatial relations and moving actors and how empathy works to draw their attention to a performer’s body. We need to make sense of spectators’ catching emotions from actors as characters, and how such diverse phenomena as cross-racial casting and the repetition of dramatic genres work in spectators’ heads. We also want to understand how spectators make ethical (and political) meaning from what they see and hear. Cognitive science provides ways into these problems, but no unified answer. Nonetheless, scientists and cognitive philosophers have been working in all of these areas that concern theatre people with regard to spectatorship, and in many more areas that are relevant to our interests. Most do not address our questions directly, but their test results and intermediate theories are often applicable to our questions. Unfortunately, most of these scientists and philosophers have been developing their ideas in several discrete subfields of cognitive science and few of the generalists attempting a synthesis have addressed our concerns. My strategy for writing this book, consequently, has been to patch together what I take to be the experimental results and the intermediate theories that are generally relevant to our needs and also compatible with each other. As will become apparent in the following

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pages, my choices of useful ideas from cognitive science and philosophy lean toward neuronal selectionism, embodied notions of minding, simulation theory, a neuroscientific approach to emotions, a dual approach to vision, ethical naturalism, and a general emphasis on consciousness over “hard wiring.” According to the insightful studies written by Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Merlin Donald, David McNeill, Gregory Currie, and a few other cognitive scientists and philosophers, most of these approaches overlap in their epistemologies and general assumptions about cognition. But no one that I have read has endorsed the full compatibility of all of them together. From a scientific point of view, I expect that Engaging Audiences will appear to be a curious construction, part Lego, part Erector Set, and perhaps even part Lincoln Logs. I make no excuse for this oddly constructed model, however. Theatre people cannot wait for scientists and philosophers to turn their attention to the problems of spectatorship and develop a “Theory That Explains It All To You.” I expect that the cognitive scientists I cite would agree that no such theory will be forthcoming in the next twenty years; there is too much that remains unknown and the necessary constraints on experiments with human subjects will keep the debates percolating. But enough is known now to advance many rough answers and to rule out some impossibilities. Besides, this is properly our own task; we already know a great deal about how theatre works. In this regard, if you have done some directing and playwriting as well as lots of spectating, some of the information on the following pages will simply confirm your common sense about audiences. It is never a bad idea, though, to get some scientific confirmation for common sense. Although good science can help us to confirm our ideas, it can never prove them absolutely. The cognitive theories I am using to craft this book are “only” theories and may be surpassed by better theories in the future. This lack of certainty is not a problem for good science, however. For most scientists today, Truth with a capital “T” is an impossible chimera. Popper’s concept of falsifiability, which logically demonstrates that no set of experiments can ever deliver objective proof for any scientific hypothesis, has been a guiding principle for many scientists for the last fifty years.12 According to Popper and others, good science cannot give us absolute truth, but it can construct provisional theories that are able to withstand the competition and scrutiny of other scientific tests and ideas. All science is based on such theories. A heliocentric solar

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system, the circulation of blood, and the concept of evolution are “only” theories, too (as some religious fundamentalists are quick to point out), but reasonable people who understand how science usually works will likely agree that these theories provide a probable explanation for the wide array of natural phenomena that they purport to encompass. Falsifiability is an important key in this regard, as is the search for empirical evidence. By falsifying provisional theories, constructing alternatives, and searching for evidence to support them, scientists gradually forge new possibilities that offer more robust explanations. In his Gesture and Thought, for example, David McNeill demonstrates that several competing ideas about the synthesis of speaking, gesturing, and thinking cannot integrate the range of experimental results and answer the kinds of rigorous questions that his new theory is able to accommodate. Scientists do not arrive at objective truth, but, through experimentation and argumentation, good science narrows the range of possible explanations and interpretations. Many of the theories currently in play among theatre and performance scholars cannot make this claim. All scientific assertions are potentially disprovable through the use of the scientific method, but few scholars in our field have asked the advocates of Bourdieu, Lacan, and Derrida, for instance, to justify the epistemology of their theories on scientific grounds. Looking at the major theories that have retained credibility among theatre and performance scholars over the past twenty years,13 one might say that they represent a range of approaches that admit to greater or lesser degrees of empirical evidence and falsifiability. At one end of the continuum are the sociologically oriented theories of Bourdieu, Habermas, Gramsci, and Williams, which generally work within the empirical protocols of social science. These methods, though open to dispute, have been fairly well established since the days of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. When Raymond Williams’s version of Gramsci’s hegemony theory was gaining a curious audience among historians, for example, its potential falsifiability was widely discussed.14 While social scientists, including historians, cannot apply protocols of evidence and falsifiabilty to their work with the same rigor as scientists who work with nonhuman subjects, their standards concerning matters of agency, causation, and explanation are fair-minded and high.15 Somewhere in the middle on the continuum of evidence and falsifiability, perhaps, are the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, their synthesis with semiotics in Lacan, and the many theorists who build their own ideas on some version of a psychoanalytic base. Their

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advocates claim scientific validity for these theories and can point to the early work of Freud for justification. Most contemporary psychologists, however, have rejected psychoanalysis and its spin-offs as empirically weak and unfalsifiable. In her Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science, for example, Wilma Bucci concludes that Freud’s metapsychology has not “been subject to the empirical evaluation and theory development that is necessary for a scientific field.” Specifically: the type of systematic inference that is applied in cognitive science and in all modern science requires explicit definitions that limit the meaning of the concepts, correspondence rules mapping hypothetical constructs and intervening variables onto observable events, and means of assessing reliability of observation. Each of the indicators that analysts rely on to make inferences about the conscious and unconscious states of other persons (as about one’s own conscious states) must itself be independently validated as having the implications that are assumed.16

In defense, Freudians and Lacanians often claim that their theories are consonant with good science because their concepts have been scientifically validated in therapeutic sessions.17 But clinical success, however it is measured, is not the same as empirical validation. Records of clinical sessions are not open to other scientists, standards vary regarding the interpretation of the patient’s discourse, and analysts must filter and summarize a patient’s problems to arrive at a possible treatment. Further, no clinical session is repeatable. Because their primary responsibility is to their patients, therapists, by themselves, have difficulty pursuing rigorous scientific research. Besides, just because “the talking cure” may have been effective in some cases does not mean that Freud’s or Lacan’s explanation for why it worked is true. Humans have had many explanations for fire over the centuries, but understanding why and how combustion really works must rely on recent physics and chemistry. One rough parallel between therapy and science in our own field is the relationship between the teaching of acting and scientific research into how actors actually pursue their art. Most acting instructors will affirm that Stanislavsky’s “system,” developed between 1906 and 1938, still has much to offer actors. This does not mean, however, that Stanislavsky’s explanation for why his system worked—a curious psychological stew dependent on the theories of Pavlov and Ribot—retains scientific credibility among research psychologists today. While there appear to be good reasons to continue to work with actors on the basis of

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“objectives,” “obstacles,” and “emotions,” the acting class alone cannot become a laboratory to test for the scientific basis of Stanislavsky’s ideas.18 Ethical objections render such a methodology untenable. For similar reasons, most psychology departments today segregate basic research from clinical therapy. Some scientists work with clinicians, of course, in order to help them to improve their therapies, but the two groups as a whole inhabit different intellectual worlds. Most psychologists understand that therapeutic results alone cannot provide the basis for good science.19 At the other end of the continuum are theorists such as Baudrillard, Derrida, Féral, and several poststructuralists, whose radical skepticism challenges the ability of science or any other discourse to provide a standard of empirical validity and falsifiability. The relativism of poststructuralism, including its challenges to empirical verification, defies any protocols that might stabilize knowledge based on the slippery signifiers of language.20 Despite what they take to be the inherent contradictions of textual assertions, poststructuralists from Lyotard to Derrida rely chiefly on logic and argumentation, rather than scientific or historical evidence, to assert their claims. Within the assumptions of poststructuralism, Derrida’s gnomic remark, “There is nothing beyond the text,” is simply unfalsifiable. The critic who wishes to rely on what Derrida might have meant in that statement, however, will have to ignore a great deal of good science in linguistics and evolutionary psychology to be able to assess the probable truth of Derrida’s assertion.21 Brian Vickers challenges the weak scientific credentials of several of the critical theorists that many humanist academics have embraced. As he points out with acerbity: Freud’s work is notoriously speculative, a vast theoretical edifice elaborated with a mere pretense of corroboration, citing “clinical observations” which turn out to be false, with contrary evidence suppressed, data manipulated, building up over a forty-year period a self-obscuring, self-protective mythology. The system of Derrida, although disavowing systematicity, is based on several unproven theses about the nature of language which are supported by a vast expanding web of idiosyncratic terminology . . . . Lacan’s system, even more vastly elaborated . . . is a series of devices for evading accountability . . . . Foucault places himself above criticism.22

Whether all of Vicker’s charges are valid may be less important than his general point: these theorists tried to place their ideas beyond the protocols of empirical evidence and falsifiability.

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Are theatre and performance scholars aware of the substantial range of differences in the empirical basis and falsifiability of the ideas of these master theorists when they deploy their approaches to investigate problems in our discipline? Like the general population of the United States, most humanistic scholars are genially uninformed about good science and its procedures.23 Many scholars in our field would likely protest that scientific evidence and falsifiability are not their concern because theatre and performance studies is not a scientific discipline. They would agree with most scholars in English departments who believe that questions about interpretation and causation “cannot be captured by scientific reason,” in the words of Geoffrey Harpham.24 This may have been a defensible position in the past, when scientific and humanistic concerns shared little common ground. Humanistic scholars have long drawn on ascientific theories to prompt their investigations and bolster their arguments. As long as the ideas of past master theorists provided insights and terminologies that did not counter scientific understanding, this arrangement made a certain sense. What happens, though, when theories deriving from good science come into conflict with critical theories that have no basis in scientific evidence or logic? Are scholarly conclusions based on theories that are no longer valid or that claim to be beyond empirical evidence and falsifiability just as reliable as conclusions rooted in scientific understanding? I believe that they are not. The critic or historian interested in discussing how audiences engage with performances has a choice to make, a choice among kinds of theories that is already pressing and will become increasingly common in the future. This scholar should know that the history of Western (and now international) modes of scientific thought since Copernicus suggests how this conflict between kinds of theories will likely be resolved; in the long run, among people who rely on reason instead of belief, the theories of good science have continually trumped unscientific philosophy. When we are discussing Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom, for example, we no longer have to ask whether witchcraft actually exists; we (like both playwrights) can rely on science to supply the answer. And, I would add, this is as it should be. Not because science is always right, but because conclusions based on its provisional theories narrow the likelihood of egregious error and prevent humanistic scholarship from being foolishly wrong. As we know from the scandal concerning the Sokel hoax in Social Text, the same cannot be said for all types of critical theory. 25

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If many of our current theories in theatre and performance studies cannot be falsified or supported with reliable evidence, the conclusions based on these theories—which would include many of the major books and articles in our field during the last twenty years—are potentially built upon sand. Further, lacking good theories, scholarly differences cannot be adjudicated and resolved; with the result that knowledge in our discipline cannot be consolidated and advanced. The scientific process, on the other hand, encourages the resolution of different interpretations and explanations and may lead to the accumulation of knowledge. Paradigm shifts in science often reinterpret traditional evidence, but that does not mean that the old experiments have no value; Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity led to modifications in Galileo’s conclusions about gravity, but Einstein needed the ideas of Galileo, Newton, and others to enable him to construct his General Theory. In the process of crafting a new paradigm, scientists continued to use much of the earlier experimental evidence. Apart from large paradigm shifts, scientific knowledge at the level of intermediate theories may change, but many of its empirical findings will remain constant. Thus, George Lakoff can both assert many new ideas about language and categorization in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things and reassure his (and Johnson’s) readers in Philosophy in the Flesh that “much of what we have learned about the brain and the mind is now stable knowledge.”26 “Stable,” that is, as an empirical finding. How thousands of such diverse findings may be integrated into grand theories, however, will remain matters of conjecture and contest. Nor does the slippery slope of language drive scientists into the melancholy limbo of “undecidability” and postmodern relativism. Whether light is best described as a particle or a wave remains an ambiguity in modern physics that cannot be resolved through language alone. Experimentation and probability theory can get scientists around the imprecision of language in describing light, however, by providing an acceptable, provisional answer to this apparent conundrum. As we will see, in psychology and neuroscience today, the term “emotion” has several definitions, depending on whose science you read.27 Definitions of this term will likely be narrowed in a few years, however, as different notions of “emotion” compete empirically and theoretically for more robust explanatory value. In similar ways, scientific definitions of “atom” and “cell” achieved provisional validity in the past. Eventually, scientists will be able to state reliable “facts” about our emotional lives, according to the definition of a scientific fact provided by Stephen Jay Gould: A statement “confirmed to such

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a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.”28 When confronted by confusing information, scientists are initially no better than performance critics at naming significant attributes of their world. Experimentation, theorizing, and falsification, however, encourage the honing of provisionally acceptable terms and descriptions. Some philosophers now hold that there are no fundamental differences between humanistic hermeneutics and hermeneutic reasoning in the sciences.29 Relying on similar procedures, both humanists and scientists can aim at plausible, provisional, and falsifiable statements of truth. Of course, one obligation that a scientific orientation carries with it is to recognize that provisional conclusions will have to be scrapped if better science comes along and displaces the theories that have provided the initial basis of knowledge. Unlike scholars who draw on Lacan, Foucault, and other theorists who resist empirical protocols and the procedures of falsifiability, there are no foundational texts to which an investigator in performance and cognitive studies can return for first principles and primary definitions. Cognitive neuroscience, especially, has made rapid strides in recent years and continues to expand how and what we can know about the mind/brain. This pressure will make scholarly consistency and consolidation less important for the critic-historian in theatre and performance studies than cutting-edge knowledge and a readiness to rethink recent approaches and conclusions. Consequently, some of the conclusions that I have reached in this book may have to be reformulated in five or eight years.30 Engaging Audiences, then, proposes a new orientation for understanding the interplay between spectators and performances. In addition to examining how spectators perceive and process performances, my goal is to shift the epistemological ground that historians and critics use to make truth claims about audiences. I hope to demonstrate that an approach to spectatorship grounded in falsifiable theories and empirical knowledge has a better chance of discovering some critical and historical truths than do theories that cannot be validated scientifically. This does rule out the incorporation of other theories that may be consilient with the scientific ones that I am chiefly relying on. Accordingly, where appropriate, I will draw on theories about culture, history, and audiences from anthropology, phenomenology, communications, and cultural studies. These are secondary theories, however, intended to supplement the insights of cognitive science. Simply put, given two competing conclusions about spectatorship where scientific knowledge is relevant, with both claims based in a

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fair reading of the available evidence, we should trust the claim that is also reliant on empirical evidence and falsifiable theory over the claim that is not. This apparently straightforward epistemological principle will not be easy to put into practice, however, for three primary reasons. It will be difficult, first, because scientists themselves do not agree on what I have called (with intentional blandness) “a fair reading of the available evidence.” One side benefit of these ongoing debates for performance scholars, however, is that some scientists welcome our expertise as suggestive prompts for further investigations. The conversations among interested scientists and ourselves in areas of mutual interest have just begun and there is wide room for innovation and creative disagreement.31 The second and third reasons, though, do not bode well for a productive interdisciplinary future. About ten years ago, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll urged film scholars to reconstitute their discipline on the basis of good science. Even though their anthology, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, featured only a few articles that advanced a cognitive approach, it provoked a vicious counterattack from psychoanalytic critics who feared that cognitive science would delegitimize their ascientific epistemology and method. This scholarly battle still divides film scholars and there are signs that a similar controversy may erupt in theatre and performance studies.32 Third, some theatre and performance scholars, like many popularizers of cognitive science, may avoid the complex challenges that cognitive approaches present to our disciplinary paradigms and simply cherry-pick a few key ideas from the sciences that seem to confirm their present beliefs and prejudices. Not surprisingly, this is already occurring.33 An unwillingness to abandon past theories, popular fads, and simple scholarly laziness may sidetrack the difficult conversations that must be engaged if we are to make theatre and performance studies a more empirically responsible field. This does not mean that scholars in our discipline must become scientists to use good science in appropriate ways, however. There are likely some areas of our discipline that will remain beyond the reach of scientific investigation. Also, while I would welcome theoretically savvy empirical experiments with audiences, this book does not advance such an approach.34 For those interested in such investigations, I would suggest partnering with cognitive psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists to design long-term empirical projects that hold the promise of substantially advancing our knowledge about spectatorship. Theatre and performance scholars will need to move

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beyond postshow interviews, audience surveys, and similar methods, however, to deploy the tools of experimental linguists and neuroscientists that can clock language recognition in milliseconds and take pictures of the brain thinking. Scholars in music have been doing these kinds of experiments for the past ten years and their work has produced a substantial body of scholarship about musical cognition, musical learning and therapy, emotions in music, and the cultural contexts of musical communication.35 Cognitive music studies offer a good model for partnerships between scientists and scholars in the arts, where both sides can benefit from each other’s knowledge. Similar investigations into theatrical performances will likely be necessary before we will fully understand how audiences perceive and respond to the play of language, emotional acting, and the lures of narrative on the stage. Situated Cognitions In the pages that follow, I quickly summarize complex positions in the cognitive sciences so as to be able to apply this knowledge to the dynamics of spectatorship. I have tried to cut through the jargon, simplify the science, and avoid most of the methodological disputes that dog all scientific investigation. (Readers desiring more information about these cognitive complexities and disputes—and I hope there are many—are invited to jump into the scientific and philosophical literature in my endnotes.) Consequently, for scholars who know their way around the major debates of cognitive science, this book will probably seem cursory and fragmented, though I hope it will not be imprecise or mistaken. Given my aims and readership, I have chosen to pull most of my examples from productions of well-known plays. Although many plays and productions will be introduced to advance the discussion, I will examine five in detail. In chronological order, these are: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King in the fifth century BCE in Athens; Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple in 1602; Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899; A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, produced on Broadway in 1947, and Top Girls, by Caryl Churchill, initially performed 1982 at the Royal Court in London. These productions offer lots of dramaturgical, theatrical, contextual, and— consequently cognitive—variety: a classical Greek chorus and masked actors in a large outdoor space; a feast-day performance, boy actors in female roles, and carnivalesque laughter; classic realism and resonant stage

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props behind a proscenium arch; an emotionally complex heroine, poetic dialogue, and an ambivalent production; a nonchronological plot, Brechtian techniques, and strident ethical attack. Overall, my chosen historical productions engaged many kinds of spectators: male citizens of ancient Athens, lawyers and students at the Middle Temple, aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and intelligentsia in turn-of-thecentury Moscow, business-class playgoers and other postwar Broadway spectators, and a predominately anti-Thatcher wedge of the upper–middle class in 1980’s London. Together, these productions involved a wide range of historically situated cognitive engagements from their spectators. In addition to selecting them for their varying cognitive challenges, I have chosen these five plays because I have directed or performed in productions of all of them. While I make no claim that directors and actors make the best critics and historians, I do believe that knowledge from an artist’s perspective about how a play has worked for contemporary audiences can usefully inform how plays engaged historical spectators. Some species-level commonalities will usually continue from the past to the present, even though cultural and individual differences will also abound. We can safely assume, for example, that some spectators at the Middle Temple watching Twelfth Night in 1602 laughed at Malvolio and hoped that Viola would find her twin brother. Not only is there some direct evidence for this conjecture, but cognitive science can tell us enough about the dynamics of laughing at outcasts and sympathizing with kin to make this likelihood a near certainty. Prudent use of the possible evidence coupled with artistic knowledge and cognitive insight can significantly enhance historical investigation. Sometimes I will discuss performances of these plays in the context of the audiences that viewed them and the society that rewarded their production. At other times, I will use only the texts of these and other plays as jumping off points to investigate a general problem of spectatorship. This second approach will necessitate the kind of examination that Robert D. Hume and Judith Milhous label “production analysis”: “By this term we mean interpretation of the text specifically aimed at understanding it as a performance vehicle—‘reading with a directorial eye,’ if you will. While heavily grounded in textual analysis, such criticism will be undertaken on the principle that what should emerge is a sense of multiple possibilities in actual performance.”36 Hume and Milhous intend their approach primarily to serve the needs of producers and directors, but it can assist historian-theorists of spectatorship just as well.

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The general point is the same: imagining historical plays in performance in the mind’s eye can help directors to stage them as well as investigators to consider their possible modes of involving audiences. In short, Hume and Milhous open a path for considering the rhetorical engagements of scripts in production. My three chapters in Engaging Audiences move from species-level characteristics of audience cognition to more culturally specific kinds of cognitive engagements. Chapter 1, “General Cognition for Theatre Audiences,” focuses on those significant aspects of spectating that have been common to most people watching performances throughout history. These include the cognitive dynamics of consciousness and attention, our ability to remember mental concepts and words, and the two basic modes that viewers use to process visual information. The fact that audiences look at scenery very differently than they look at actors has significant implications for spectatorship. Chapter One also examines the cognitive characteristics of play, the human emotion that establishes the necessary mood for understanding some kinds of framed activities as performances. Departing from theorists who understand performance as “the willing suspension of disbelief,” this chapter makes a case for conceptual blending as the cognitive basis of spectating. In brief, these blends merge together two different mental constructs in the imagination, specifically our conceptions of an “actor” and a “character.” When engaged in the performance of a play, spectators usually experience “actor/characters” as a blend, not as separate entities. The cognitive dynamics I discuss in this chapter occur at the species level; they are not socially constructed. In Chapter 2, “Social Cognition in Spectating,” I join the universal to the social through a focus on how our mind/brains process social interaction. To interact with others and watch actors on stage, we use our mirror neuron systems, which “mirror” the intentional motor actions of others. Our ability to empathize with the experiences of others through mirroring is the cognitive hook that impels spectator interest in the activities of actor/characters and engages us in the unfolding narrative of a play. When actors use stage props to express and extend their goals and feelings, audiences will also interpret these actions through their mirror neuron systems. Even spoken language, because it is necessarily linked to vocal and physical gestures, gets mirrored in the mind/brain. The empathy that results from mirroring is not an emotion in itself, but it can quickly involve spectators in the emotional entanglements of actor/characters. Over time, as audiences use their cognitive skills and emotional engagements to judge onstage actions, they form

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feelings of sympathy or antipathy for many actor/characters. An emotional commitment to one character or another can also lock in later judgments and lead spectators to focus on related dramatic information and ignore other actions. Audiences often seek emotional extremes in the theatre, using emotional baths of laughter or tears to restore their body’s sense of equilibrium. Chapter 2 ends with an introduction to the mental evolution of Homo sapiens that puts in perspective the major attributes of general and social cognition and sets the stage for an investigation of theatregoing in culture and history. Chapter 3, “Cultural Cognition in History,” primarily examines the cognitive dynamics of spectators within historical cultures. First, I borrow the concept of cultural models from a cognitive anthropologist to explain how the cognitive work of culture gets joined with and generally reinforces a culture’s institutional practices. Theatregoing is one such cultural model and I look at theatregoing in several cultures to examine a few of its more important dynamics. These include places for performance (and the inevitability of “placeness” in our thinking), casting conventions (more a function of the whole culture than the practices of a specific theatre troupe), metaphorical language (and its usual links to emotional crises in a culture), our ethical entanglements at the theatre (as natural as they are cultural), narrative construction and understanding (which varies from culture to culture), and dramatic genres (which may be more usefully designated through evolutionary psychology and audience-generated emotions than formal characteristics). As is apparent from this overview, any one of these chapters could easily constitute an entire book. My aim, however, is to introduce all of the major dynamics of spectating from a cognitive perspective. An in-depth treatment of each must await further investigations, hopefully by several other scholars. To ensure that my introductory generalizations are grounded in some specifics, I have woven discussions of my five plays (Oedipus, Twelfth Night, Vanya, Streetcar, and Top Girls) and their initial productions throughout. Despite the page-to-stage nature of part of this investigation, I expect that readers oriented toward performance studies will recognize that my cognitive approach opens up much common ground with theatre studies. In both, spectators play “framed” games of make believe through the dynamics of blending that involve attention, memory, empathy, and heightened emotions. The careful reader of this summary will have noted, as well, that I have focused my attention primarily on the synchronic cognitive

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operations and cultural practices that occur within theatres when play performances are underway. The major goals of my book do not lend themselves to diachronic historical discussions. Although much of what I have to say in Chapter 3 looks beyond the playhouses to discuss the cultural and historical contexts that always impinge on theatregoing, I have generally stayed inside, in one or another historical present, to watch the show. As I will demonstrate, this has partly to do with the cognitive flexibility of audience engagement; social constructions of class, age, gender, and so on., though not unimportant, constrict audience imagination less than we have generally supposed. Nonetheless, I remain a theatre historian at heart and I could not conclude this book without addressing some of the implications of my cognitive orientation to audiences for the writing of theatre history. I have gathered these ideas together in an Epilogue entitled, “Writing Cognitive Audience Histories.” Although this Epilogue treats a more specialized topic than the rest of the book, I make no apology for attempting to induce everyone to entertain the methodological and epistemological joys of the theatre historian. I recognize, though, that this Epilogue will not be engaging for every reader. Two Incidents and a Moral I end this introduction by comparing two incidents that I hope will point to a challenging moral. First incident: In Scene 4 of Galileo, Brecht’s antihero scientist invites several famous Florentine scholars to his house to get them to examine the sky through his telescope. The scholars, believing they have all the truth they need about the universe from Aristotle, Ptolemy, and other authorities, demur. Even after Galileo explains that the common people will soon use their own telescopes to discover that the cycles and epicycles of the scholars’ heaven do not exist—a prediction that soon comes true in the play—he cannot entice them to look at the sky. At the end of the scene, the telescope sits, unused, in the center of the stage.37 Second incident: On September 3, 2006, Parade, the magazine enclosed as a supplement in hundreds of Sunday newspapers and read by millions, ran a short piece about our “mirror neurons” and how this “brain-to-brain link coordinates the timing of two people’s laughter or the speed of a kiss.”38 As I explain in Chapter 2, for about eight years now cognitive scientists have understood that our mirror neuron systems are an important key to social intelligence, including our

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ability as spectators to empathize with actors in performance. Yet in all this time, I have read very little about this discovery in theatre and performance scholarship.39 Most scholars who write about spectating are content to rely on the same authorities that our discipline was embracing twenty years ago. Moral: It is time to look through Galileo’s telescope.

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Chapter 1

General Cognition for Theatre Audiences

Many elements of spectatorship are so basic that we tend to overlook

them when analyzing what audiences do while engaged in a performance. We take it for granted that spectators will usually pay attention to what is happening on the stage, that they will be able to understand the sounds coming out of the actors’ mouths as intelligible communication, and that they will know what they are seeing when they perceive inanimate objects as well as live actors as they watch the show. We also assume that audience members understand that the actors are not really the characters they are playing, even though spectators will often respond to the actor/characters’ actions in the drama as though they were. These elements seem like commonplaces of theatrical spectatorship, but they hide a myriad of general cognitive operations that must occur before audiences can begin to engage with performances as social animals and culturally situated individuals. Accordingly, we must begin at this basic level to lay the foundation for subsequent investigations of more complex spectatorial engagements. Though foundational, the cognitive processes of attention, memory, visual perception, and imaginative play are far from simple and cognitive scientists continue to disagree about what they are and how they work. We will pick our way through some of the competing theories to arrive at one perspective about these general operations. Consciousness and Attention At one time or another, all theatregoers have trouble focusing their attention. More than simple awareness, attention requires conscious,

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selective effort. According to many of the cognitive scientists who have studied it, attention is a lot like a follow-spot with an automatically adjustable opening, allowing us to take in more or less of a visual field.1 Although this is a good visual metaphor, we must complicate it to include sound; auditors pay attention with their ears as well as their eyes. Theatregoers, however, do not always shine the follow-spots of their minds on (or “open their ears” to) the stage action. They may get distracted by others in the audience, take a moment to get comfortable in their seats, or begin musing about personal matters unconnected to the production. Many historical audiences chatted among themselves intermittently, ignoring the players. To counter this problem, theatre artists use many vocal and visual strategies to sustain or grab back spectatorial attention. Talking loudly (or sometimes more softly) is one obvious technique. Visual techniques include what cognitive researchers term “spatial-cuing,”2 which, for theatre people, involves some of the movement basics of acting and directing. Gaze tracking is one important spatial cue ubiquitous in the theatre. Simply put, spectators tend to focus their attention on the same people or objects at which the actors are gazing. Let’s take an example about five minutes in to the first act of Uncle Vanya. The play begins in the garden, with Marina and Doctor Astrov in desultory conversation. They are soon joined by a rumpled and yawning Voynitsky, recovering from an afternoon nap, and all three await the return of the others from a tour of the estate. Following some offstage chatter, Professor Serebryakov, his young wife Yelena Andreyevna, his daughter Sonya, and Telegin enter the garden. No sooner has Voynitsky announced “teatime,” when the professor tells them that he will take his tea inside and exits. The script indicates that Sonya bustles after him and Yelena follows. Where is the audience looking during this flurry of entrances and exits? Although Chekhov’s stage directions can tell us little about their likely visual attention, his dialogue provides some good clues. With perhaps six actor/characters moving at once, Chekhov knows that audience attention will be fragmented, at least initially. When Serebryakov calls out, “My friends,” however, the playwright could be sure that actors who know his script will stop what they are doing and pay attention to the powerful old crank. Following the gaze of the actors, the audience will also focus on the professor. After his pronouncement and as he is exiting, most of the actor/ characters will resume their getting-ready-for-tea movements, while Sonya, whose next line of dialogue indicates that she is near to her father, hurries after Serebryakov. This leaves Yelena to take her exit

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alone. Where is the audience probably looking next? There are three male actor/characters on stage; along with the old nurse Marina, and subsequent dialogue leaves no doubt that Astrov and Voynitsky want to look at the beautiful Yelena as often as they can. Unlike the other women in the play, Yelena is always dressed stylishly. Smart directors will block the scene to enhance Yelena’s exhausted, yet captivating trudge across the stage as she leaves to attend to her husband’s needs. Clearly, Chekhov wants his audience as well as the doctor and Vanya to gaze at Yelena as she exits. “Attention must be paid,” Linda Loman’s command to her sons in Death of a Salesman, is the implicit cry of playwrights, directors, actors, and costume designers in moments like this in the theatre. Most of the time, as spectators, we eagerly comply. In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, attention is usually recognized as a property of consciousness. While it may seem obvious to us that audiences are consciously paying attention to actor/Yelena as she exits, some cognitive scientists would disagree. Some view consciousness as epiphenomenal—a characteristic of minding that is determined by processes over which we have no control and that, by itself, does not alter human behavior. Our bodies often run automatically, of course, not just our involuntary muscles and other physical functions that are closed to consciousness, but perceptors like our eyes and ears and even the processing of language. Perhaps conscious control is simply an illusion. Computers, after all, can play chess, even beat world champions at the game, and computers have none of the attributes that scientists attribute to consciousness. If a computer were taught to “watch” a play performance and to process all of the information coming from the stage (in terms of plot, character, or any other categories we might care to invent and program), could we say that the computer was attentive to the performance? Could Yelena’s cross in Vanya engage a computer? I agree with Gerald Edelman, Merlin Donald, and many other cognitive scientists that the answer to that question would be “no.”3 The opposition, however, whom Donald characterizes as neo-Darwinian “hardliners,” has dominated popular perceptions about neuroscience in recent years.4 According to Edelman, consciousness has attributes that set it apart from other kinds of cognition. Most spectators watching the first five minutes of Uncle Vanya will be able to integrate all of the sensory percepts that surround them in the theatre, including smell, kinesthesia, touch, and the aural and visual stimuli from the stage. This is more complicated than it sounds, because their brains must process form, color, movement, timbre, pitch, rhythm, and other

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features of the aural and visual surround separately and then integrate the results into what can be interpreted as a momentary mental sound-picture. Spectators achieve this integrated mental sound-picture through complex networks of neurons in their brains. Each spectator has billions of these nerve cells, many of which are devoted to conscious activities. Neurons include axons, which send out electrical signals, and dendrites, which receive these signals from other cells. The brain works by activating or inhibiting electrical charges of varying strengths in vast networks of neuronal nodes and circuits. In their understanding of neuroscientific operations, Edelman and Donald acknowledge the basic premises of “connectionism,” a theory now widely accepted about how the brain’s processes become the mind’s foundation. According to Elizabeth Wilson in her Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition, connectionism “figure[s] cognitive processing as the spread of activation across a network of interconnected neuron-like units [called nodes]. It is the connections between these units, rather than the units per se, that take on the pivotal role in the functioning of the network.” States one popularizer of cognitive science: “Inputs . . . into the network activate some nodes, inhibit others, and over time begin to produce a stable pattern of response across the network. The system’s knowledge is the pattern of connections.” Consequently, as Wilson explains, “knowledge is implicit, stored in the connections rather than the units.”5 To construct only one sound-sight image of Yelena’s stage cross at the end of this scene, a spectator’s mind/ brain must process separately the color of her dress, the sound of her walk, the expression on her face, and perhaps a dozen other perceptions about her. In a few milliseconds, the connectionist brain creates an integrated percept of these pieces that is more than the sum of its parts. Given the gestalt nature of this image, humans do not see or hear confusion or contradiction in a single percept. Recall the ambiguous black and white picture we have all seen that can either be interpreted as a vase or as two women looking at each other, but not both at the same time. Try as we might, we cannot see both images simultaneously. Humans process discrete sound-sight images from the stage in the same way. Although multiple images produced by spectators over several milliseconds may be ambiguous, single percepts are not. A spectator’s mind/brain may generate several contradictory images of Yelena as the actor/character moves; she may seem to be angry, flirtatious, and beaten by the heat, for example, in three

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separate percepts. But each single image makes holistic sense for the spectator in each moment. In processing actor/Yelena’s stage cross at the end of the scene, an audience member might construct hundreds of these sound-sight images over several seconds of performance time. Each gives the spectator information quickly because of what the connectionists term “parallel distributed processing.” The processing of color, sound, and facial expression, for example, occurs in parallel, rather than serially, and much of this processing is distributed across several areas of the mind/brain. (Some processing, such as language, does happen primarily in one area of the cortex, but its integration with other mental events to create a sound-sight image is widely distributed.) By the time Yelena has completed her exit, many spectators will have put together all of their millisecond images to get a sense of the actor/ character and her situation in those moments. As I will explain in a later section of this chapter, audiences do not combine these millisecond images into signs and read them as part of a semiotic process. Nor will most spectators step back from their involvement in the flow of the scene to make deliberative conclusions about her condition. Rather, most viewers will directly experience Yelena’s exhaustion, irritation, and embarrassment through their mirror neuron systems and also get a sense of her vanity as she enjoys the effect of her beauty on the men. This empathetic process is mostly automatic, but the kind of awareness it produces lodges in memory and is easily brought into consciousness. The next chapter provides a full discussion of mirror neurons and the empathy they produce. Donald and Edelman agree that human consciousness of the kind we have been discussing allows for a wide range of activities that separate humans from monkeys and wild apes. On the basis of many experiments cited by Donald, these skills include: self monitoring of success and failure, multitasking, self-reminding, the automatic recall of language-like symbols, self-recognition, rehearsal and review of action, whole-body imitation, mindreading through empathy, pedagogy, gesture, and symbolic creativity.6 Just because several of these skills become automatic does not mean that they were always unconscious; as Donald notes, “automatization is the end result of a process of repeated sessions of rehearsal and evaluation, which rely heavily on conscious supervision.”7 Donald acknowledges that apes can be trained for some of these skills—they can learn the elements of automatic symbolic recall, self-recognition, mind-reading, and pedagogy, for example—but adds that they do not have a “culture” in the wild through which new generations of young apes can learn these skills.

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As we will see in subsequent sections and chapters, each of these enculturated skills is necessary for theatregoing. Audience members need most of them just to maintain their conscious attention at a performance of Uncle Vanya. The gestalt nature of conscious sound-sight images will enable spectators to focus most of their attention on Yelena during her exit. Several distractions, however, might interrupt their focus. Perhaps, for one female spectator, someone in the balcony is coughing, an old man nearby emits a snore, and some gas gurgles in her stomach. To each of these events she accords momentary attention, but quickly ignores them to turn the spotlight of her mind back onto the stage. Perhaps her gurgling tummy is the most intrusive, but after a second and a half she banishes that problem to peripheral awareness in order to return her attention to Yelena. Nor does our dyspeptic spectator mix these distracting moments with sound-sight images from the stage. Hearing the man near her snore and watching Yelena grimace as she plods toward her exit may occur simultaneously in real time, but her consciousness easily divides them into separate perceptual events, two distinct gestalts. Framing off a stage performance from its social surround is no more difficult for our viewer than the kind of multitasking she does everyday with different kinds of simultaneous events in her life. If this spectator is a contemporary young mother, she may have handled a crying baby, a ringing phone, and music on the radio at the same time, without ever mixing up the origins of the sounds. Even without a proscenium arch, our audience member could easily separate the world of the stage event from other events happening at the same time. Conscious attention can process several realities within a few milliseconds. Cognitive multitasking made it possible for spectators standing in the French parterre in the eighteenth century to pay intermittent attention to the actors. A socially mixed group of Parisian men jostled, criticized, and occasionally rioted in the pit of the Comedie Francaise and other French theatres throughout the century. One might think that standing in the midst of noisy men would make it difficult to focus on the stage, but the Abbe de Condillac used the experience of spectating in the parterre as an encouragement to riveted attention: [E]veryone has had the occasion to remark that one is never more apt to believe oneself the only witness of an interesting scene, then when the theatre is filled to capacity. This is perhaps because the number, the variety, and the magnificence of the objects stir up the senses, heat up and lift the imagination, and thereby make us more susceptible to the impressions the poet wants to arouse. Perhaps, too, the spectators

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mutually prompt each other, through the examples they give each other, to fix their gaze on the stage.8

Theorizing about how images pass into memory, Condillac stated that an individual’s attempt to overcome the tumult of the parterre actually sharpened his attention and heightened the likelihood of memorable images. Moving his attention back and forth between his friends and the stage, a Parisian merchant in the 1740s might find more to focus on in a performance than might a seated businessman in a mostly silent orchestra section of a Russian theatre in 1899. Would the contemporary female spectator watching actor/Yelena make her exit and the male members of the eighteenth-century parterre tend to focus on different kinds of actions on the stage? Do sex and gender shape spectators’ attention? The science on this subject suggests that men and women mostly attend to the same phenomena on the stage. In her Brain Gender, Melissa Hines is careful to note that sex differences regarding cognition are always a matter of averages. Because of the undeniable range of cognitive differences among all Homo sapiens, she defines a sex difference as a characteristic that “differs on the average for males and females of a given species.” Further, Hines disagrees with those authors who try to distinguish between gender and sex on the basis of social construction and biological determination. Too little is known, she says, to make firm distinctions between the biological and the social where sex is concerned and, besides, most behavioral differences in this regard appear to result from “complex interactions among different types of influences, some generally considered biological, others social.” 9 Finally, though, the distinction between the biological and the social is ultimately a false one for Hines: “All of our psychological and behavioral characteristics . . . have a biological basis within our brain. No matter whether hormones or other factors, including social factors, caused us to develop in a certain way, the hormonal or social influences have been translated into physical brain characteristics, such as neurons, synapses, and neurochemicals.”10 Accordingly, Hines uses sex and gender interchangeably in her book without trying to distinguish between biological and social influences. In her review of the scientific literature on cognitive sex differences, Hines finds a range of linkages. Not surprisingly, perhaps, how people identify their core gender identity and their sexual orientation differ dramatically, on average, among men and women. With regard to general intelligence and specific abilities, however, the differences between men and women are considerably smaller. On average, men

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do better on several tests that measure visuospatial abilities and women have a small advantage with regard to verbal ability. In terms of childhood play, boys engage in more playful aggression than girls and girls play with clothes and household items more than boys. These differences occur across all cultures that they have been tested for, although they appear to be more pronounced in some cultures than in others. Likewise, boys tend to be more aggressive in social situations than girls when they grow up, again, regardless of culturalhistorical context. What do these differences mean for spectatorship? Hines emphasizes that these average sex characteristics do not hard-wire men and women into different social lives. First, outside of gender identity and sexual orientation, these average differences are relatively small; men and women differ far more in terms of physical height than they do with regard to cognitive abilities, levels of aggression, and other variables where sex plays a role. Second, most of the sex differences that alter behavior are caused by hormone levels rather than direct genetic effects, and hormones are responsive to changes in the environment, including new life experiences. Hines criticizes several researchers who focus narrowly on hormonal explanations without factoring in social influences. “They tend to see [sex-based] limitation,” she says, “such as sex segregation in occupations, unavoidable aggression, or limitation on abilities to nurture. A broader perspective leads to the conclusion that even if hormones contribute to a behavior, it is still possible to influence it by other means . . . . The empirical data on hormonal influences on the brain and behavior suggest flexibility and variability in outcomes that argue against these conclusions . . . . Recent research suggests that the adult brain is remarkably responsive, even in terms of its structure, to experience as well as to hormones.”11 Among the kinds of “experience” that Hines lists are beliefs and expectations, including placebo effects. Theatregoing, of course, is a kind of placebo; the “pill” we swallow as spectators when we engage in a performance allows us to believe in certain realities and to expect a restorative outcome. As far as I know, no one has tested and averaged the hormonal levels of men and women while they are watching a play, but, based on Hines’s conclusions, it is reasonable to suppose that their engagement in the same make-believe world would tend to neutralize hormonal differences and pull their attention toward the same phenomena on the stage. In this regard, scientists have noted no sex differences in simple matters of cognitive attention, such as gaze-tracking and multitasking. Men might get

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more involved than women in theatrical scenes of physical aggression and women might enjoy some verbal exchanges and intricate costumes more than men, but there is little in the research to suggest that male and female attention and response, on average, would be widely different. Historically, this generalization appears to hold true for mixed-sex audiences, but not for audiences where the gender composition is widely out of balance. Anglo-American audiences in the eighteenth and for half of the nineteenth century were predominately male and there is ample evidence that playhouse norms allowed for a wide variety of male aggressiveness, from jeering and roughhousing to all-out riots. In contrast, male actors, managers, and critics in the United States complained that predominately female matinee audiences at the turn of the twentieth century sat passively before costume epics and weepy melodramas. These complaints were probably exaggerated, but it is clear that female auditors around 1900, rather than vocalizing their occasional dislike of an actor or play, generally remained silent. This is not to suggest that gender characteristics were the only reason for these differences; dimmed houselights, more restrictive norms of public behavior, and other factors also mattered. Nonetheless, the wide disparities between the behavior of predominately male and female audiences, which occurred within sixty years of each other in the same culture, indicates that sex differences may have played a role. While historian Richard Butsch has amply demonstrated these changing patterns of audience demographics and response, no historian, as far as I know, has tried to isolate sex differences as a causal factor.12 Despite appearances, however, this history does not really contradict Hines’s findings. When cognitive scientists test for sex characteristics among cognitive abilities and emotional responses, they test individuals, not groups. As we will see in the next chapter, group dynamics, including audience behavior, always affect individual cognition. Although men and women as individuals mostly pay attention in the same ways, the modes of engagement of same-sex audiences will tend to reflect and reinforce gender differences. As this historical example suggests, performance scholars can assume that the fundamentals of paying attention have varied little over the centuries. The basic properties of consciousness evolved thousands of years ago and there is no reason to suspect that they have changed during recorded history. Evolution rarely works that fast. Consequently, recent psychological experiments concerning the limits of attention can be read back into past spectators’ perceptions.

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Conscious attention, for example, has a limited capacity, especially when movement is involved. Cognitive psychologists have discovered that most people can only integrate about seven pieces (or “chunks”) of information in a single conscious gestalt, and only about four if those chunks are in motion.13 If several characters had been moving or talking during Yelena’s exit, for example, the focus of the scene would have been fragmented and viewers, presented with too many chunks of moving information, might have missed some of her important qualities. All of this is common sense for actors and directors, even though spectators often do not realize that their conscious attention is being directed in these ways. Memory and Cognitive Concepts One of the most disorienting effects of Waiting for Godot on audiences, even fifty years after its debut, is the doubt the play afflicts us with about our memory. In several of their exchanges, Vladimir thinks he remembers what happened “yesterday,” but Estragon is never sure and his doubt always erodes Vladimir’s certainty. By Act II, neither remembers whether they have lived most of their lives in the Macon country or the Cackon country, even though, in one of them, “everything is red.”14 The play leaches more meaning from “yesterday” when Pozzo and Lucky stumble back onto the stage in the second act, one blind and the other dumb, with neither remembering when these catastrophes occurred. Finally, the past collapses into an “instant” in Pozzo’s mournful exit line: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”15 As memory fades and nearly vanishes for the characters in Godot, the audience gains a heightened sense of its own struggle to remember what they have been seeing and hearing on the stage during the performance. Apart from Godot, most plays seek to reinforce rather than undermine spectatorial memory. Shakespeare, for example, counts on audiences watching Twelfth Night to figure out that the actor playing Viola (whether a teenage boy or young woman), who first appears as a shipwrecked woman in Act I, scene 2, is the same person as the Duke’s male page Cesario in I, 4. Not only does Shakespeare have the actor set up Viola’s disguise in the earlier scene, but also the spectator will likely remember the face, voice, and size of the actor ten minutes later when he or she reappears. Even productions of Beckett’s memory tricks in Godot rely on spectators’ remembering his characters from moment to moment, recognizing the communicative features of the words they

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are speaking, and recalling that, as spectators, they are participating in a theatrical event that began at a specific time and will (probably) end roughly two-and-a-half hours later. We never really forget most of our memories while we are engaged in theatregoing. Indeed, without memory, we have no theatre and no culture at all; erase memory, and we would not have emerged and survived as a species. Cognitive scientists recognize the importance of memory, but differ in significant ways about what it is and how it works. “Memory as storage” has been the dominant metaphor in memory studies and remains influential today. This view of memory accords with common sense; we often think of events from our past as a series of snapshots or brief films stored away in our heads. In the scientific understanding of this point of view, memory is representational—not in the sense of actual images in the head, but as information stored in the brain much like a computer stores “memory” on its hard drive. There are several problems with this approach, however. Input from the senses about the body and the world does not come to the brain precoded. Even if some sorting occurs after perception, it is not clear how various messages could be stored in the right “places” and, then later, get recalled and “read” to inform present action. Again, the brain-as-computer metaphor leads to more problems than it solves. Edelman and others endorse the idea of nonrepresentational memory. For Edelman, “constructive recategorization” is a better metaphor for memory than storage: In a complex brain, memory results from a selective matching that occurs between ongoing, distributed neural activity and various signals coming from the world, the body, and the brain itself. The synaptic alterations that ensue affect the future responses of the individual brain to similar or different signals. These changes are reflected in the ability to repeat a mental or physical act after some time despite a changing context . . . . [Memory] is, in some sense, a form of constructive recategorization during ongoing experience, rather than a precise replication of a previous sequence of events.16

When we remember a person’s name or where we are when we walk into a room, we are matching a contextual signal with neural groupings and firings in the brain. A person is able to remember such things because those previous actions prompted the brain to make alterations so that a similar signal at a later time would engage a similar response. As the brain continues to remake itself in response to experience, it reallocates different neuronal groups and synapses among the several billions of neurons available. Consequently, discrete memories

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are not stored in one place. There is no fixed template in the brain for the representation of any “memory”; all performances of memory, even the speaking of a single word, engage different groups and firings each time. In Edelman’s view, most operations of memory are widely distributed among many systems, including perceptual systems (sight, touch, sound, etc.), systems that govern movement, and our memories of words and syntax for speaking and reading. These long-term memory systems are distributed across the surface of the cortex, the folded, layered outer casing for most of the brain. There are likely thousands of memory systems in the cortex, allowing us to recall such unique smells and sounds as frying onions and our mother’s voice. In contrast, short-term or working memory—the memory that allows us to remember such details of a play production as who is Malvolio? and what did Olivia say to him at the start of the scene?—occurs in a specific area of the brain. Short-term memory has an “attention span” of about fifteen minutes, which means that audiences may forget an important detail of the action unless the playwright locates it in a wider context that indirectly reminds them of the detail at least once every fifteen minutes. Perceptions of new events are kept “alive” in the brain for the short term and relegated to long-term memory primarily through repetition or some gauge of importance.17 So-called “flashbulb memories”—for my generation, the memory of where I was when President Kennedy was shot in 1963—stay in long-term memory without the need for repetition. Directors ignore the time limit on short-term memory at their peril. Director Richard Eyre worked closely with playwright-adapter Trevor Griffiths on a new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard that was produced at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1977 and then later, in a televised version for BBC 1, in 1981. Concerned that most versions of Chekhov’s play had been drained of class conflict, Griffiths reoriented the short scene in Act II between the vagrant and Madame Ranevskaya to identify the intruder as a revolutionary and to emphasize his hatred of those with money. Although Griffiths altered other dialogue and characters to suit his socialist version of the play, he hoped that this scene, in particular, would jolt spectators out of their usual sentimental understandings of the play. Eyre shared Griffith’s agenda and directed the scene in a Brechtian style to emphasize its disjuncture from much of the rest of the action. His televised version had a stark, grainy quality that also separated it from other scenes in the play. Interested to discover how this scene

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was received by spectators, reception sociologist John Tulloch showed the televised version to students at many universities and questioned them about it in focus group interviews. He reports that many viewers forgot entirely about the scene and, when reminded, less than a fifth of the interviewees could identify the vagrant as a revolutionary. Tulloch notes that only 7 percent of those interviewed interpreted the scene as Griffiths and Eyre had intended it.18 Although Tulloch does not discuss the dynamics of short-term memory in his conclusions about the reception of this scene, it is clear that memory played a major role in the students’ responses. The scene takes about a minute of playing time and is never referred to again in The Cherry Orchard. Unless spectators know Chekhov’s play very well, most will simply forget about this short scene when they try to piece together a general interpretation after the performance is over. Directors should not pin their hopes for major interpretative breakthroughs on scenes that will soon vanish from memory. For the most part, though, both short-term and long-term memory will help spectators attend to performances with what Edelman calls “the remembered present” of consciousness.19 According to Edelman, human consciousness depends foundationally upon memory: we construct images (combining sound, sight, smell, etc.) in our mind’s eye (and its ears and muscles, etc., too) primarily by integrating immediate stimuli with past categories in the mind/brain. When audiences construct gestalt images a millisecond at a time to watch the actor playing Yelena cross the stage in Act I of Vanya, they rely on past as well as present information. Likewise, viewers use their remembered present of consciousness to construct thousands of gestalt images of the same actor as Viola during Twelfth Night, primarily through the operation of identity continuity. From one image to the next while Viola is interacting with the Duke in scene 4, the spectator’s mind/brains recall for their conscious awareness that this is the same actor/character in the present image who just a few milliseconds ago bowed to the Duke and is now wincing as the Duke claps her/ him on the back. Without working memory, every image generated in the mind/brain would be a unique singularity and the perceived world would tumble into confusion. Some of those conscious images in the minds of viewers involve what have been called “implicit” and “explicit memory.” According to D.L. Schacter and others, when a specific experience in longterm memory influences a person’s present action without that

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person’s awareness, implicit memory is operating. In contrast, with explicit memory, the person consciously connects a past incident with her or his present circumstances and uses the memory to help to interpret present experience. 20 Not surprisingly, implicit memories crowd into our minds all the time, while explicit memories are less frequent. Near the end of Scene 4, we may imagine that the Duke’s explanation of Viola/Cesario’s suitability for wooing Olivia in his place might trigger an implicit memory in some spectators. You are right for the job, he says, because you look and sound like a girl, not the boy that you really are. Because we have all momentarily mistaken another’s sex when trying to identify a person, this situation in the play is ripe for implicit memory. Viola’s line at the end of the scene, in contrast, may spark an explicit memory: “Yet a barful strife! / Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (II.4.41–42). The memory of talking up a loved one to convince another to like him or her may be a painful one for a spectator, especially if the object of one’s passion remained ignorant of the situation. If the memory is recent, the viewer has an added incentive to transfer it from private life and project it into the fictional play. A spectator’s explicit memories may also center on recollections of past performances. In The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Marvin Carlson recounts several of his own and others’ memories of moments of acting, playwriting, staging, and other discrete theatrical events that suddenly strike the spectator as moments they have seen or heard in the past. Carlson calls this phenomenon “ghosting,” the presentation of “the identical thing [spectators] have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context.” He traces some of the many ways a spectator’s recognition of such “identity” can “complicate” the reception process.21 If Edelman is right about memory, Carlson’s notion of spectators’ discovering an “identity” between a past and present moment in performance is an illusion. Audiences may think they are comparing a present image with a stable representation of a past image stored in their minds, but they are actually constructing this identity, not discovering it. Nonetheless, Carlson is surely correct that such explicit memories— such moments of theatrical déjà vu—have had an important influence on the understanding of spectators who have enjoyed many theatrical performances. For theatrical newcomers, however, and even for seasoned theatregoers, the memory of cognitive concepts will provide more foundational guidance for interpreting Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s comedy.

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Humans begin categorizing percepts into concepts soon after they are born. By “concept,” says Edelman, we do not mean a sentence or proposition that is subject to the tests of the philosopher’s or logician’s truth table. Instead, we mean the ability to combine different perceptual categorizations related to a scene or an object and to construct a “universal” reflecting the abstraction of some common feature across a variety of percepts. For example, different faces have many different details, but the brain somehow manages to recognize that they all have similar general features.22

In addition to the human face, cognitive concepts include such basics as the color “red,” a notion of “forward,” and the iteration of sounds in time intervals that we call “rhythm.” The concept of “identity” that audience members use to recognize the successive images in their mind/brains of all of the actor/characters in a performance of Twelfth Night is another. In most productions of the comedy, the Duke’s servants will be dressed in similar attire and the social superiority of the Duke to his men will be evident through speech and movement. “Clothing” and “hierarchy” are also cognitive concepts. Edelman and others term these “universal” because, as far as scientists can tell, such basic concepts unite disparate strands of percepts and memory across the brain around a specific group of neurons and these neuronal patterns appear to underlie every image constructed by the mind/ brain for an individual’s remembered present. Cognitive philosopher Mark Johnson emphasizes that concepts, far from being mental abstractions, are embodied and nonrepresentational: Concepts are not inner mental entities that re-present external realities. Rather, concepts are neuronal activation patterns that can either be “turned on” by some actual perceptual or motoric event, or else activated when we merely think about something, without actually perceiving it or performing a specific action.23

Watching actor/Yelena move across the stage, spectators may use mental concepts to think about her “eyes,” her “walk,” or the “orange” (perhaps) in her “dress.” Or they may even think about other “dresses” they have seen in the past that remind them of the character’s fashionable attire. None of these concepts in the mind/ brain will represent or abstract what these entities or actions look like in the external world. Spectators may even think about the patriarchal “relationship” that Yelena’s obedient trudge represents in the fictional

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world of the drama. “Relationship,” a mental abstraction that can be imbued with value judgments (when modified by patriarchal, for example), is also an embodied concept, with its own neuronal activation pattern. In short, mental concepts include a wide range of “universal” generalities, from material entities, to actions, relations, and abstractions. Cognitive scientists agree that cognitive concepts are an important anchor for memory, but they disagree about where such concepts come from. Is our development of the millions of cognitive concepts we use everyday controlled by innate drives and potentials organized by our genes or is it more open to lived experience as the mind constructs itself in infancy and beyond? In the controversy over nativism and emergentism, as these two positions are known— positions also called innateness and constructionism—Edelman and Donald take a generally emergentist point of view. Edelman’s 1987 book, Neural Darwinism, now widely accepted by many cognitive scientists, hypothesized that fetal brain development involves a massive overproduction of neurons and their connections, which compete after birth as the brain organizes itself for life outside the womb.24 The infant’s interaction with her/his environment literally sculpts the brain, as different mental structures emerge to aid the infant in survival. Such Darwinian competition at the neuronal level, however, occurs within innate constraints that regulate the timing and organization of neuronal processing. According to Edelman and others, our genes put some limits on the competitions and outcomes among our neurons, but the brain—environment interface sets up most of the patterning. Given the plasticity of an infant’s brain, it may seem surprising that the neural networks that emerge manage to produce most of the same outcomes for conscious experience. Two mature adults sitting or standing next to each other and processing nearly the same visual and aural inputs from Twelfth Night will share most of the same mental concepts from one image to the next. This commonality of experience has less to do with similar groups of neurons firing in each of their brains than it relates to the need of each person, when infants, to adapt their very similar bodies to much the same environment. Assuming that each of them was born with biologically normal, species-specific attributes, they had to adjust their bodies to an environment in which oxygen, gravity, human warmth, and many other factors provided the same constraints and possibilities. When infants, the mind/brains of our two spectators gradually organized both of

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them to adapt to, survive within, and take advantage of the ecological niche into which they were born. Consequently, they developed most of the same cognitive concepts. The mind/brain’s universal concepts are the building blocks of all cultures. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (L and J), who agree with most of Edelman’s and Donald’s premises, have studied how these universals structure language, a central feature of all human cultures. According to L and J, cognitive concepts arise, fundamentally, from the experience of the body in the world. As neural beings trying to survive in our environment, we make meaning with certain “spatial relation” and “bodily action” concepts, plus many other universal concepts arising from the interplay of minds, bodies, and the ecosystem. “Forward/back,” already noted, is a spatial relation concept in the mind/brain resulting from the fact that we have eyes in the front of our heads, not at the side. Regarding bodily action concepts, LandJ hypothesize that most humans learn the “source-path-goal” concept at an early age by crawling from a starting point to an end point. The concept of “balance,” of course, has to do with the body’s resistance to gravity.25 Not all cognitive scientists agree with L and J that our mental concepts derive from human embodiedness, but a surprising number of the concepts that have been identified as universal primitives can be related to body–world interactions. Daniel Stern, for example, speaks of “vitality affects” in infants that appear to be universal in all cultures. These sensory-emotional affects, which all infants perceive (and apparently categorize) in similar ways, are patterned changes over time that include such aural-visual senses as surging, fading away, sudden explosiveness, and fleetingness.26 David Olson and Ellen Bialystock have noted that many cognitive spatial concepts come in pairs. While their examples are in English, they note that all languages rely on similar dualisms when referring to many matters of spatial orientation: right–left; high–low; wide–narrow; front–back; and so on 27 (L and J would add that many of these dichotomies relate directly to the symmetry of the human form and our embodiedness in the world.) The figure-ground relationship and our sense of an enclosed or contained space also appear to be conceptual primitives. Basic-level concepts are also cognitive universals. The “basiclevel” of a category, typically a mid-level image, works to organize most of our knowledge of that category. Children of Englishlanguage speakers usually learn the basic-level word “chair” before

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they learn the superordinate category “furniture” or the subordinate category “kitchen chair.” In this example, as in all basic-level concepts, “chair” is the highest level of designation in which category members are perceived to have the same overall shape or color and, if they are objects, require the same physical movements from humans to be able to interact with. “House,” “road,” “face,” “actor,” and the color “blue” are also basic-level concepts for English speakers, with their counterparts in every other human language that has been studied. Significantly, people throughout the world will identify “true blue” as the same shade of blue. Like other basic-level concepts, colors are not socially constructed; they are produced alike by all humans through the interaction of the world, the body (specifically, the eye, in this case), and the mind. 28 Language use in our species grows out of basic-level categorization, a reality we will return to in the next chapter. Our genes may predispose humans to develop these and other universal concepts, but it is primarily our interaction with the world in infancy that causes them to emerge and to organize our minds for culture and survival. As L and J have pointed out, our embodied investment in “balance,” for example, shapes not only how we move but also a wide variety of our practical metaphors, including conceptions of health (“well balanced”) and justice (“balancing scales”) that appear to cross all human languages and cultures. While “balance” is a good example of our predilection to use our conceptual primitives to think metaphorically, we can also blend two or more concepts together to create new metaphors that move beyond the simple extension of basic concepts to new territory. Conceptual blending, as we will see in the next section, provides the cognitive basis of theatrical doubleness. Blending Identities After enjoying Fanny Kemble perform Bianca in a play called Fazio in 1833, Boston socialite Anna Quincy recorded her response in her journal. Quincy was particularly moved by the jail scene when Bianca visits Fazio, her husband, who is soon to be executed for a crime he did not commit: The moment which I think produced most effect on the house was at the moment when Fazio is to be led off to execution in the prison. She has just been imploring the jailer to delay a few moments in the most passionate manner, when the bell tolls, the sound of which seemed to

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turn her into marble. She stood riveted to the spot —her eyes fixed, her cheek pale and ashen. Fazio embraces her, but she is entirely insensible of it, and he is led off the stage leaving her a solitary figure. She stood, I should think, five moments, a perfect statue, and the deathlike stillness that reigned over the crowded audience, every person seeming to hold their breath, was very striking. “She stood the bloodless image of despair” until the bell tolled again.29

Theatre historian Julia Walker uses this quotation to point to Quincy’s “double consciousness of the theatrical event.” Quincy, says Walker, “is both imaginatively inside it, feeling what the character feels, while practically outside of it, appreciating Kemble’s technique as a discerning connoisseur.” What Walker terms the “oscillating dynamic” of these inside/outside shifts pervades the quotation.30 As Quincy oscillates between her inside and outside engagements, the “she” and “her” referents in the quotation above move among three different positions. When Quincy stands outside of the flow of the scene, “she” refers both to Kemble, the actor, and to Bianca, recognized by Quincy as a fictitious character in a drama. Quincy’s “She stood . . . five moments” comments on Kemble’s technique, while “she has just been imploring the jailer” probably refers to the character’s action in the dramatic fiction. Significantly, though, most of the “she”s and “her”s in the quotation cannot be fitted into either an actor or a character category. When Quincy is swept up in the action, “she” is both the actor and the character together—Kemble/Bianca, an actor/character. “She stood riveted to the spot” and “she is entirely insensible of it” are moments when Quincy was clearly inside the flow of the action, feeling with the actor/character. Even in recollection, the Boston spectator was so rapt in the onstage moment of Kemble/ Bianca’s insensibility to Fazio’s embrace that Quincy forces her past memory into present tense to better capture the continuing thrill of her engagement in the performance. The “oscillating dynamic” of Quincy’s conscious attentiveness moves between performer and fiction when she is on the outside and fixes on the present actions of an actor/character when she is inside of the performance. Quincy’s experiences are typical of theatrical spectatorship. Any viewer who knows the rules of the theatregoing game can step back from an imaginative immersion in the onstage action to consider the relative skills of the players (and of the designers, the director, etc.) or to think about the fictional world of the script (and perhaps about the art of the playwright). Arguably, connoisseurs of the theatre, like Quincy, take more of their enjoyment from such considerations than

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do amateur playgoers. Most of the time, however, both connoisseurs and amateurs want to experience the performance from the inside. As Walker concludes, “[The theatre] is an art form devoted to just this kind of oscillation, offering us a glimpse of the world as it can be imagined from an objective analytical viewpoint and an experience of the world as registered within our body’s viscera in the form of an affective engagement that is very much in the moment and real.”31 This doubleness and oscillation are not unique to the theatre, however. Spectators at sports events can oscillate among the same cognitive categories. The breaks between the scrimmages of American professional football, in fact, encourage spectators to shift their attentions from the external world of strategies and rules to the affective world of action where player/positions (e.g., Joe Montana/Quarterback) make real physical contact. The cognitive concept of identity, plus the ability of the mind/ brain to do conceptual blending, makes possible the doubleness of actor/characters (and player/positions). As Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (F and T) have noted in The Way We Think, audiences generally “blend” the actor and the character together into one image, one concept of identity, to enable their affective immersion in the performance. Like other conceptual universals, identity can work singly or can participate in the more complex cognitive operation of blending. According to F and T, blending is learned in infancy and soon occurs automatically to generate complex cognitive concepts, mostly below the level of consciousness. To create an actor/character, spectators take knowledge from three different mental concepts—certain qualities from the conceptual primitive “actor” (that he/she is alive, can move, has certain vocal characteristics, etc.), some knowledge about the “character” (that he/ she has a certain past, faces specific situations in the present, etc.), and the cognitive concept of “identity.” While identity relies directly on memory, audiences combine their general knowledge of the basiclevel concepts of actor and character with specific information about which actor and what character, taken from the performance they are watching as well as from memory. Spectators immersed in Streetcar, for instance, knew what all actors could do in general and soon combined it with what they saw Marlon Brando doing specifically on stage. They knew how characters are usually meant to operate in plays and combined it with the specific behavior that Tennessee Williams gives to Stanley. Spectators did not transfer all of this knowledge to the blend of Brando/Stanley, however. While enjoying the actor/ character in Streetcar, they temporarily forgot that Brando had

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another life outside of the theatre and that the character began initially as words on a page. All conceptual blends are selective in these kinds of ways. The imaginative process of creating actor/characters begins for spectators with the conceptual universal of identity as a kind of template and then transforms it to create a new, more specific, and complex identity, such as Brando/Stanley in Streetcar. While engaged with actor/characters in performance, spectators “live in the blend.”32 Actors play a similar game of make-believe to enable their performing. As Fauconnier and Turner note, in the actor’s blend “his motor patterns and power of speech come directly into play, but not his free will or his foreknowledge of the [dramatic] situation. In the blend, he says just what the character says and is surprised night after night by the same events.”33 Because of its flexibility, conceptual blending structures and enables all role-enacted games of make-believe, from playing with dolls to professional tennis. Interestingly, the Roman critic Horace used the term “blend” (in Latin) to describe the goal of art. “The poet’s aim is . . . to blend in one the delightful and the useful,” he said.34 Although Horace knew nothing of the neuroscience and psychology of conceptual blending, he hit on a definition of art that suggests the necessity of blending to enable dramatic impersonation: “useful” actors must combine with “delightful” characters before a blended actor/character can emerge. F and T’s idea of blending rests on the same theoretical premises as Edelman’s and Lakoff and Johnson’s notion of conceptual universals. Conceptual blending is a more accurate term to understand the doubleness of theatre for spectators than Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dictum about “suspending disbelief,” which tells us little about a spectator’s positive engagement in performance. The reader’s immersion in a good poem, said Coleridge, should involve “that willing suspension of disbelief that for the moment that constitutes poetic faith.”35 Coleridge telling us to momentarily suspend our skepticism that Edmund Kean or Kenneth Branagh cannot really be Hamlet suggests that theatrical believability occurs when the spectator willingly surrenders a part of his/her agency. This leaves the impression that involvement in a good performance is akin to a religious experience touched by God; put aside unbelief, and Belief (Coleridge’s “poetic faith”) will flood in. According to Coleridge, spectators oscillate between faith and skepticism while watching a performance. Pace Coleridge’s religiously charged metaphor, engaging with an actor/character on stage involves imaginative addition, not

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subtraction. Spectators are active agents in the process of combining actors and characters into blended actor/characters. This is not an extraordinary ability involving a leap of faith; children playing house have the same capability. And like them, at any moment, what the mind/brain has blended together, the mind/brain can take apart. Children performing “mommy and daddy” can drop their roleplaying for each other and quickly revert to more singular identities. Spectators can slip out of the blend of performance to adjust their bodies in their seats or to mentally note that an actor’s costume fits him poorly. Coleridge emphasized the “willing” suspension of skepticism, but blending theory states that oscillating in and out of blends is mostly unconscious. Some “willing” may occur at the start of a performance and intermittently throughout, but it is clear that spectators do not need to make conscious decisions about blending and unblending. As viewers, we oscillate millisecond by millisecond among blends and singular identities, not between skepticism and faith.36 Fauconnier and Turner’s theory implies that audiences can and do use blending with flexibility. When spectators blend identity with actors and characters to create actor/characters, they can add more or less of each ingredient to whip up their theatrical recipes. If a star actor with a strong persona is playing a role, the spectator might mix in a cup full of “actor” with only a teaspoon of “character” to create a particular actor/character in their mind/brains. When spectators today watch Brando as Stanley in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, they probably add more of the actor’s filmic persona than Williams’s character into their blends. (Hollywood, of course, continues to induce spectators to see and hear mostly star personas rather than dramatic characters when they watch a movie.) In a high school production of Streetcar, however, adult spectators may prefer to see much more of the Stanley of Williams’s script than to focus on the untrained, unthreatening, and probably unsexy student actor playing the part. They will likely add a teaspoon of “actor” to a cup of “character” to create a believable actor/character blend for themselves for much of the performance. This cognitive adjustment is actually easier than it might seem. The passion displayed by amateur sports enthusiasts, especially parents, for the player/positions on their teams, especially when filled by their children, suggests the cognitive ease with which amateur actor/characters might gain believability if U.S. culture valued theatre as highly as sports. That fights among parents do not break out in high school auditoriums is one of the unnoticed side benefits of the culture’s lower esteem for theatre.

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Parents tend to see their children as future athletic (or sometimes theatrical) stars because, like all spectators, they tend to view the person as more important than the role in the blend. As Jacqueline Martin and Willmar Sauter relate, “Several explorative studies on the relationship between actor/role and spectator have indicated that the spectator basically reacts to [what s/he takes to be] the personality of the actor. Only when this reaction produces a positive communication is the spectator prepared to perceive any fictional content.”37 The cognitive reason for this response may be partly due to the fact that the actor’s material body and voice are on stage and available for inspection and engagement right away, at the actor’s first entrance, while disclosing the nature of a dramatic character always takes time. Further, as we will see in the next section of this chapter, spectators are looking for good partners in play, the underlying emotion of theatrical engagement. Audiences usually want to believe that actors are outgoing and eager to be engaged, qualities that generally translate as having a good personality. Even when a performer is playing a nasty, introverted character, spectators want to sense that the actor is willing to share that character with them. We learned as children that we do not enjoy playing games of make-believe with people who do not share. Great actors often seem to be sharing their innermost secrets with individual auditors, even when these individuals are only one in a thousand spectators at a performance. After Sigmund Freud saw Sarah Bernhardt perform, he wrote: I can’t say anything good about the piece itself . . . but how that Sarah plays! After the first words of her lovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me; I believed at once everything she said.38

Other spectators were more rapturous about the Divine Sarah. “I weep, I tremble, I grow mad, Sarah, I love you,” gushed an eighteenyear-old, and even the aging Victor Hugo wrote with some surprise in 1877, “Madame, you were great and charming; you moved me, me the old warrior, and, at a certain moment when the public, touched and enchanted by you, applauded, I wept.”39 Through her voice, costuming, and movement, Bernhardt made it clear to the audience that, whatever else her character was doing, she, the actress, was on stage for each of them. Her persona and technique invited them to watch and share in her playfulness, sufferings, and triumphs. Reflecting on the combination of her small size and emotional vulnerability, the

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critic Jules Lemaitre remarked that she put into her roles “not only her soul, her spirit and her physical charm, but her sex. Such bold acting would be shocking in anyone else; but nature has deprived her of so much flesh and having given her the looks of a chimeric princess, her light and spiritual grace changes even her most audacious movements into exquisiteness.”40 Although Lemaitre has to push the envelope of acceptable critical language in his era to explain her charisma, it is clear that the shuttering of raw emotional energy through her “chimeric” body, combined with an acting technique that made it available for all to see, was an important key to Bernhardt’s international success. The logic of applying conceptual blending to understand the doubleness of performance is borne out by its near fit with what phenomenologist Bert O. States has termed “the three pronominal modes” of the actor–audience relationship. His Great Reckonings in Little Rooms does not approach actor–audience relationships through the metaphor of blending (or my extension of it into cooking), but his three pronominal modes end up in much the same place. In brief, these are: the self-expressive mode, in which the actor struts her or his virtuosity; the representational mode, in which the actor immerses his or her self within the character; and the collaborative mode, in which the actor emphasizes her or his commonality with the audience to suggest, in effect, that “we are all in this together.”41 As States insists, these universal modes are embedded in the nature of the actor– audience relationship and are not the same as theatrical styles, which are historically specific. Nor do these modes ever occur in their pure form; an actor may be working predominately in the self-expressive mode while performing an aria-like speech, as did Bernhardt for her big moments, but a part of her or him will also remain as the representation of the scripted role for the audience. Although States emphasizes the ways in which actors relate to audiences, he acknowledges that theatrical communication is always “a two-way street.”42 From a spectator’s perspective, then, these actorly modes of relating to audiences can be understood as inducements to view their performances primarily through the lens of virtuosity or characterization. In effect, spectators are invited to blend in more “(self-expressive) actor” with their “(representational) character,” or vice versa, and flavor to taste.43 This returns us to the doubleness of engaging theatre. On one hand, spectators collaborate with blended actor/characters when they are immersed in the affective flow of the performance. Audiences happily adjust their perceptions to accommodate theatre artists who

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push the blend toward the actor or the character end of the continuum. On the other hand, if spectators are considering the person on stage simply as an actor or are thinking about the character written by the playwright apart from the performer playing the role, they have momentarily reversed the blend; its component parts fall into the separate concepts of actor and character. We oscillate between these inside and outside positions throughout all theatrical performances. And, as with all forms of conscious attention, we can shift from inside to outside perspectives in a matter of milliseconds. Before leaving spectator oscillation and blending, it is important to emphasize the rich and diverse theatrical experiences that these modes of engagement afford. Recently, Mark Rylance brought his all-male production of Twelfth Night from the Globe Theatre in London to Pittsburgh. Among the many comic delights of their performance was Rylance himself as Olivia, who played the role somewhat in the style of a squeamish but sexually omnivorous pantomime dame. Although I have seen the play often and taught it for years, I was still amazed to discover how easily Shakespeare’s verse could support what was for me a startlingly new interpretation of the Countess. In addition to marveling again about the role as written, I enjoyed comparing several moments of Rylance’s performance to specific moves and turns of phrase from other actor’s I had watched in the role, including a fine performance at the University of Pittsburgh and Helena Bonham Carter in a recent film of the comedy. Mostly, though, I stayed in the Rylance/Olivia blend to enjoy his/her fidgety, stuttering lust beneath the necessary show of courtly decorum. Playing with Counterfactuals Rylance on stage in Pittsburgh commanded the same kind of attention that “Big Ben” Roethlisberger commands as Quarterback for the Steelers. No one would call a Steelers game an “illusion,” but theatre artists and the theatregoing public often refer to events on stage as illusory and even unreal. From this point of view, the ontological difference between a tennis match and a performance of Uncle Vanya is the fictional world of the play; the actors and the machinery of the production may be real enough, but the fictional world on stage somehow trumps the fact of material actors doing real things with other people and objects. We can blame such thinking on Aristotle, if we wish. In The Poetics, tragedy is both an action and an imitation of an action; the ontological status of a theatrical event remains teasingly ambiguous. Sometimes Aristotle seems to be talking about

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actor-protagonists performing genuine actions and at other times what happens on stage appears to be an imitation of some real phenomena off stage, thus reducing what actors do to a kind of copy of an original. The theory of mimesis conventionally attributed to Aristotle makes the onstage action of Oedipus the King less real than the physical exertions of ancient Greek Olympic athletes. But why should we accept Aristotle’s word on this? Semiotics takes the imitation side of Aristotle’s ambiguity about theatrical reality and imitation and pushes it further. For semioticians, reality is never directly available to audience members, who must decode the signifiers in the illusory world of the performance to figure out their connections to the signifieds of reality. In her book Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, for example, Susan Bennett maps several approaches for understanding spectators at the theatre onto a semiotic framework. She states that “at the centre of the [theatrical event] is the combination and succession of visual and aural signs which the audience receives and interprets, some fixed but the majority in flux, and which, as we saw earlier, signify on a number of levels. It is the combination of these signs which permits the audience to posit the existence of a particular fictional world on stage with its own dynamic and governing rules.”44 If the “fictional world” of the performance imitates the real world in some way, spectators must be able to work back and forth between their knowledge of the real world and the fictional one to be able to interpret the signs of the stage world and connect it to their real lives. Semiotics divides the world between empty signifiers and real signifieds. For some poststructuralist theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, who build on the assumptions of semiotics, spectators rarely get beyond illusory signifiers; they are mostly doomed to a world of simulations that can never touch the Real. But is this assertion true, from a cognitive point of view? We have already seen that the world on stage is not entirely fictional. Its chief components are actor/characters, a blend of real people and fictional figures whom audiences readily credit with real intentions and emotions when they live in the blend while watching a play. Performance, it seems, mixes up our usual categories of actuality and make-believe all of the time. The theory of conceptual blending that imaginatively links actors to characters can be extended to all of the aspects of theatre. Brando/Stanley picks up a beer during the initial performance of Streetcar in 1947. From a point of view outside the flow of the performance, the bottle of beer is both a material object put on stage by a props assistant

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and an item noted in Williams’s script (or only in the promptbook for the production; it does not matter which). The spectator can think about the beer in both of these ways, if she or he wishes. In the blend, however, the material object/fictional item for spectators in 1947 became simply Brando/Stanley’s beer, with its actuality and fictionality merged together. The original production of Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899 featured painted backdrops that also shared actual and fictional properties for Moscow spectators. Muscovites at the production could go with the blend and see the backdrop for Act I of the play as the garden of Vanya’s estate or pull apart the blend and consider the backdrop as a construction of paint, canvass and wood and/or as a necessary artistic indication put on stage by Chekhov and Victor Simov, the designer, to set the fictitious scene. Blending even applies to spoken dialogue. “What country, friends, is this?” (I,2,1), says the actor/ Viola in his/her first line of dialogue. Auditors can focus on the material sound produced by the actor’s musculature and the spatial dynamics of the auditorium or they can think about Shakespeare’s happy marriage of verse and character in the stage fiction. More likely, though, they will blend both together because they, too, want to know where the action is set so that they can play the game of theatre placed before them.45 Like other parts of a performance, blended dialogue may contain more or less actuality and fictionality. Spectators expect a high level of actuality in the dialogue of documentary theatre, for example. In his 1965 docudrama The Investigation, Peter Weiss used dialogue taken directly from official transcripts of an investigation into the Auschwitz extermination camp set up by the Nazis, and the audience apparently appreciated the play’s attention to historical actuality. At the same time, they realized that Weiss’s play could present only an abbreviated version of the events of the trial. Knowing this, spectators readily accepted his editing as a minimally intrusive level of fictionality in the dialogue. In contrast, other kinds of plays contain dialogue that is far removed from historical facts and everyday speech. Musicals and operas even mandate a higher level of fictionality in the sounds emanating from actors’ mouths by requiring their performers to sing. Perhaps the furthest distance from actuality in a performed dialogue occurs when good actors use nonsense sounds to shape an improvisation. In the stretch from naturalistic mumbling to abstract vocalization, the human voice can communicate to audiences along an enormous continuum from actuality to fictionality.

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As this continuum suggests, theatrical viewers do not parse the differences between actual and fictional dialogue when they are engaged with speaking or singing actor/characters. Put another way, spectators do not believe they are participating in an unreal illusion when they “live in the blend” of performance. Rather than terming the fictional part of a play performance unreal, it makes more sense to acknowledge it as make-believe, in contrast to the actuality of actors, props, scenery, and sound, and to insist that this make-believe can be a part of reality. When spectators blend together actuality and fiction, the blended images they produce in their minds retain their reality for them. In places other than playhouses, people often inject fiction into their realities and can move in and out of these half-fantasized blends with little conscious thought. Fauconnier and Turner, the initiators of conceptual blending theory, discuss the case of some Britons in the 1980s who, according to social psychologists, suffered genuine depression when they did not win a lottery, even though they knew that their chances of winning were very slim. “The interpretation given by the therapists,” note F and T, “was that in the two weeks or so between the purchase of the ticket and the drawing for the winner, these victims had fantasized, consciously or unconsciously, wittingly or not, about what they would do upon winning the lottery. The actual lottery made them lose everything they had acquired in the fantasy world. In that world, they did indeed suffer a severe loss.”46 The point here is not to reduce spectators to delusional victims, easily lost in the fantasies of stage fiction. After all, the lottery players realized “in another part of their brains,” as it were, that they probably would not win. F and T conclude that the victims of lottery depression were “running multiple conceptions simultaneously, some of them conflicting with each other, and it seems that the brain is very well designed to run such multiple and potentially conflicting conceptions.”47 Following philosophical and psychological discourse, F and T term such half-fantasized blends “counterfactuals” and note that counterfactual thinking occurs every time people “pretend, imitate, lie, fantasize, deceive, delude, consider alternatives, simulate, make models, and propose hypotheses.”48 And watch a play. In other words, our ability to engage in make-believe is evolutionarily adaptive, for a hundred reasons, even though it can also impair our ability to see the world clearly. Like the lottery players in the example, theatre audiences oscillate between counterfactual blends and perceptions of their actual, material circumstances. While counterfactual blending may do lottery players some shortterm psychological harm, the theatre provides a safe haven for the

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same mental activity. This is because spectators go to the theatre knowing that for the “two hours traffic” of the performance they can engage in collaborative play. As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, play is fundamentally an emotion, a neuronal and chemical system in the mind/brain. As the background emotion underlying all theatrical engagement, playing frames and qualifies the sometimes negative feelings that a performance can arouse in audiences, assuring them from the start that any psychological pain they might experience will be temporary and perhaps even purgative. Within theatrical play, humans can almost always distinguish between a stimulus of fear or panic emanating from the stage and a stimulus that directly threatens their lives. Spectators may vicariously experience Blanche Dubois’ panic within the make-believe of Streetcar, but if the scenery catches on fire and people are rushing for the exits, the perceived threat to life and limb will put an abrupt end to play time. If a theatrical performance goes as expected, play continues throughout, usually encouraging the audience to let go of their mundane perceptions and engage in counterfactual blending. All higher mammals engage in forms of play. “Most mammals have identifiable visual, auditory, tactile or olfactory signals that serve to initiate or maintain social play or to denote that ‘what follows is play,’ ” according to one researcher.49 Dogs wag their tails and cock their heads and monkeys bounce on their legs and relax their jaws. While playing, humans and other mammals get an infusion of energy, which they usually attempt to maintain at an optimal level. As Michael Ellis notes in Why People Play, this energy leads humans to seek “intermediate novelty” in their play activity; too little stimulus produces boredom while too much can create confusion. “Intermediate novelty seems to be preferred,” say Ellis. “Complete or absolute novelty poses problems in that there are no extant categories against which the new experience can be compared. The absolutely novel experience presumably carries an adversely high arousal potential.”50 Clearly, high, intermediate, and low levels of arousal will vary with each spectator. What seems utterly fascinating to the novice theatregoer may strike the sophisticate as conventional and shopworn. More than the differences between average men and women, the novice and the sophisticate may have very different responses to the same performer’s Yelena in Uncle Vanya. Several theatre scholars have noted the effects of play on audiences. According to Willmar Sauter, playing, which he defines as similar to the Baktinian notion of carnival yet more widespread and ordinary, encourages explosions of energy and may serve moderately subversive

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purposes.51 Empirical performance scholar Peter Eversmann underlines the importance of play for audiences in his essay, “The Experience of the Theatrical Event.” In their interviews with Dutch spectators, Eversmann and his students found that nearly all of their respondents enjoyed “the feeling of being carried away by the performance, of losing oneself in the world of the stage, of forgetting everyday reality.”52 He reports “feelings indicated by expressions such as ‘admiration,’ ‘joy,’ ‘a true feast to go to,’ ‘very pleasurable to remember,’ or even ‘completely in love with the performance’ ” among the interviewed theatregoers.53 To analyze these reported experiences, Eversmann borrows Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of “flow.” He finds that spectators involved in the “flow” of a performance experienced, in part, “a sense of concentration, of freedom, clarity, control, wholeness and sometimes transcendence of ego boundaries,” regardless of the genre of theatrical event attended.54 To go with the flow, of course, is nearly synonymous with “living in the blend.” According to Sauter and Eversmann, many spectators experience what they term joy, wholeness, freedom, and other effects of playing after attending theatrical performances. Other spectators bring the attitude of play with them. Audience researcher John Tulloch reports a conversation he had with a woman in Australia about what she regarded as the magic of theatre: The thing I love about going to the theatre is you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen . . . . How are the performers going to connect with me? And even if it’s a fourth wall type of production or there’s no direct address to the audience, just every now and then the actor’s eye looking out into the audience can seem to catch yours. You’re in the space there with them, when they’re making the magic happen, instead of having it recorded on film . . . where you know that they’ve done seventy-five takes to get it right. And it can sometimes be as exciting when something goes wrong, to see how they’ll deal with it . . . . You know that it’s real, you know that it’s there and then, that it’s live. That’s the special part of theatre. (Ital in original)55

Tulloch’s theatregoer validates more than the inherent playfulness of performance. For her, its characteristics of play and liveness also make it “real.” Definitions of “reality,” however, usually bow to historical contingency; some historical societies have been unwilling to include playing with fiction as a part of legitimate reality. During the Terror of 1793–‘94, for example, what James H. Johnson terms the “gospel of the [French] Revolution” taught audiences to “equate fiction with

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falsehood” and reduced the doubleness of acting to duplicity. As Johnson explains, this “gospel” was based on Rousseau’s ideal of individual transparency, which would eliminate all role-playing in favor of sincere expression and sentimental unity. “The fault line of fiction that divided spectators from actors and made performance inauthentic, the weakened human bond as spectators forgot each other in a dim hall but found pity for unreal characters, the lack of moral instruction that produced sympathy for villains and a distaste for the upright: these obstacles to true communion of sentiment that Rousseau had outlined [in his Lettre a M. d’Alembert] seemed to be overcome—willingly, even enthusiastically—in theatres during the Terror.”56 Rousseau’s antitheatrical call for transparency—which we might translate into the cognitive commandment, “Thou shalt not play with counterfactuals”—echoes throughout Western history, from Plato to Artaud. But playing with blends, perhaps because it is a natural activity, has been harder to suppress than Rousseau and others have supposed. As in the playful activities of all higher mammals, play frames a theatrical performance as an event set aside from other kinds of activities, a practice with its own rules and conventions. Philosopher Gregory Bateson used the analogy of a picture frame to suggest how this psychological change of gears can transform viewing: “The picture frame tells the viewer that he is not to use the same sort of thinking in interpreting the picture that he might use in interpreting the wallpaper outside the frame.”57 While dogs and monkeys also frame activities as play, no other animal can play at the level of counterfactual blending that stimulates humans to engage with a performance. The term “frame” recalls Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis. For Goffman as for Bateson, framing allows a perceiver to mark off a social activity from the normal, messy flow of everyday life. A play performance, an interview, and a graduation ceremony are all framed events with specified roles and conventional scenarios. While Goffman recognizes that a “play frame” separates fictional, make-believe action from other kinds of activities, he emphasizes the similarities among all types of framed events, not their sometimes-distinctive ontological differences.58 A play performance, however, rests on counterfactual premises in a way that a high school graduation does not. Regardless of their role-playing at the time, the students are not pretending to be graduating and, at the end of the ceremony, their status in society will have changed. Their families and friends will henceforth think of them as “graduates,” not as performers who have returned to their social roles as high school seniors after the ceremony

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was over. Play events may have cognitive, emotional, and cultural consequences in the real world but do not usually directly effect changes in social or economic status. Goffman’s theory provides a useful introduction to the sociology of all framed activities, but its broad scope leaves it little to say about playing with counterfactuals, which occurs in theatrical and sports activities.59 While play frames set up the potential for counterfactual blending, they cannot mandate it from spectators. If they wish, people at a performance can refuse to imaginatively transform the actors and objects before them into actor/characters and material objects/ fictional items. Similarly, small children taken to baseball games do not always understand that they must blend player and position together and learn some of baseball’s rules if they want to enjoy the game. For them, the experience of the event might remain simply a bunch of guys in funny clothes doing things together with balls and bats in a big grassy field. To transform the activities of actors or baseball players into a performance or a game requires spectators to do counterfactual blending. This process can also work in reverse. That is, some people, when watching a high school graduation for example, may view it as a theatrical performance, despite its normative basis in “factual” rather than counterfactual reality. From the point of view of those in the ceremony and most of those watching it, people who totally theatricalize a graduation ceremony will be misperceiving it, but this need not stop their counterfactual blending or even their refusal to accept the change in social status that graduation confers. Put another way, the differences between fact and fiction for humans can only ever be normative, never absolute. Theatricalizing “factuals” can lead to social delusions such as occurred with the lottery losers, but the mental basis of theatre can also free the imagination. In his recent essay, “Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance,” David Z. Saltz helps to clarify what blending counterfactuals does for spectators.60 Although Saltz relies on aesthetic theories based in the assumptions of Wittgenstenian philosophy and not on an intermediate theory of cognitive science, his conclusions are surprisingly close to the framework of conceptual blending that I have been applying to performance. Saltz dismisses semiotics and phenomenology as productive ways of viewing spectatorial engagement, for example, because Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing as” offers an alternative more in accord with most viewers’ experience. As Wittgenstein explained in his Philosophical Investigations, people do not try to figure out aesthetic objects as

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signs of something else; instead, they engage with paintings or watch plays by seeing them differently. Saltz cites a passage from E.R. Gombrich’s famous essay, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse,” to illustrate his (and Wittgenstein’s) point: “[I]f the child calls a stick a horse . . . [t]he stick is neither a sign signifying the concept horse nor is it a portrait of an individual horse. By its capacity of serving as a ‘substitute’ the stick becomes a horse in its own right.”61 Childhood games of “let’s pretend” are ontological paradigms for theatrical performances. In cognitive terms, audiences that enjoyed the “flow” of Streetcar in 1947 primarily “saw” Brando and Stanley together “as” Brando/Stanley; Brando was neither a sign for Stanley nor was he the only possible actor for the role. Of course, spectators do not need to make this cognitive shift; they may de-blend their perception of the performance and think about its component parts, if they wish. Most spectators most of the time, however, will choose to “see” the performance “as” a blend of factuals and counterfactuals, as well as occasionally shifting back to separate its facts from its fictions. As Saltz explains, spectators actually use fiction twice in a performance. First, as we have seen, to become engaged in the flow of the action, a deployment that Saltz terms “infiction.” “Insofar as spectators use the narrative as an infiction,” says Saltz, “the primary focus of their attention is the performance itself . . . Our metaphorical redescription of these actions is what I am calling the outfiction . . . The story of Hamlet as I read it off a performance of Hamlet is an outfiction” (ital in original).62 Spectators will engage in occasional metaphorical redescription during a performance, of course, and such redescriptions will tend to be serial and combinative, as we will see in a later discussion of narrative. Most viewers will hold off making full redescriptions of the narrative action, however, until playtime is over. Spectators generally wait to ask what Hamlet is about and what it means until after a performance of the tragedy, or at least until the first intermission, especially if they have not read or seen the play before. (Interpretation-driven academics are not average audience members, in this regard.) As Saltz notes, most of our present theories of representation focus on how people extract meaning from artworks, “a tendency most obvious in semiotic theories,” and ignore our moment-to-moment engagement with art.63 Saltz acknowledges that theatre encourages spectators to view the real actions on stage as metaphors for other actions within reality. But before we can redescribe the “outfiction” of a performance, we must be able to process its “infiction.”

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Basic-Level Architecture, Scenery, and Costumes In accord with the empirical results and intermediate theories of the cognitive science that inform my discussion, I have been emphasizing spectatorial agency in the act of viewing and hearing performances. Spectators make some conscious decisions about what they will pay attention to on the stage. Even the cognitive concepts in their memories and their ability to blend actors and characters into single identities depend upon mind/brain dynamics that were once partly conscious before they became habitual. This final section of the chapter explores and applies an intermediate theory about vision that continues this emphasis. In Ways of Seeing, Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod elaborate what they call their theory of “visual intentionalism.” Applied to spectatorship, their theory suggests that viewers come to the theatre with two visual systems in place and switch back and forth between them, millisecond by millisecond, on the basis of perceived human intentions.64 Jacob and Jeannerod synthesize much of the recent psychological and neuroscientific work on vision to put forward a dual model of human visual processing, based on anatomical and neurological differences. On one hand, humans viewing the inanimate world generate “visual perceptions.” On the other hand, humans intending to act upon the world or watching others act in intentional ways use a different mental system to generate “visuomotor representations.”65 The first system kicks in when we look at a landscape; the second when we reach for a coffee cup or see another person reach for one. Extensive evidence supplied by the authors ranging from the examination of patients with brain lesions to psychophysical experiments supports their dual vision conclusion. For Jacob and Jeannerod, human vision is always selective and discriminating; it is never passive. They agree with other scientists such as Alain Berthoz, who has written, “the brain is not a reactive machine”; rather, it is a “proactive” organ “that investigates the world.”66 Let us imagine a male Greek spectator in the fifth century BCE sitting in the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, located on a slope of the hillside below the Parthenon. He is awaiting a performance of Oedipus the King (which historians believe was probably produced at the City Dionysia in 427 BCE). As this viewer moves his eyes down the hill to watch the audience and the preparations for Oedipus, he shifts easily between visual perceptions and visuomotor representations. Watching one spectator squeezing a wine skin to enjoy a drink before the

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tragedy begins, our viewer deploys visuomotor representation. As he looks at the stage altar in the middle of the orchestra area and at the skene house behind it, he shifts to visual perception. Now the performers, one who will play an old priest together with several children, have moved into the orchestra to prepare for the beginning of the tragedy and our viewer watches them (visuomotor representation). Next, he shifts his view to the southern sky over the skene house (visual percept). Finally the play begins, and our viewer sees the actor playing Oedipus emerge from the skene house and walk toward the actor/priest (visuomotor representation). Jacob and Jeannerod emphasize that their conclusion about the two visual systems “runs both against untutored intuition and against much philosophical tradition.”67 Because seeing happens so automatically and the dual systems reinforce each other in most respects, humans can gain little knowledge of the dual function of sight through introspection alone. Further, most philosophers have emphasized the role of vision in gaining knowledge about the physical world and assumed that representations linked to human intentions were a part of that function. Put another way, the two major approaches that theatre scholars have used to understand how we process visual information from the stage— phenomenology and semiotics—cannot, by themselves, reveal our dual modes of visual processing. Heightened conscious awareness and the bracketing off of some perceptions to focus on others, the usual mode of phenomenological understanding, will not lead to Jacob and Jeannerod’s complex theory. While their visual perception system seems to operate with some of the attributes of semiotic signs, visuomotor representations do not; semiotics makes no foundational distinctions between looking at the physical world and watching intentional human action. It should not be surprising, then, that several theatre semioticians have elided the distinction between watching the play of human intentions among actor/characters in a live performance and looking at the scenery and costuming of that production. Likewise, others, such as Philip Auslander in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, discern no fundamental differences along the continuum separating “live” and “mediated” performances. Auslander argues that live performances of The Phantom of the Opera, for example, especially after its one-thousandth franchised showing, are little different from a film of the same production; audiences will have much the same experience at both. Not so, counters analytic philosopher Noël Carroll: Liveness matters because there is a crucial ontological difference between our

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perception of intentional acts and of material motion. Once a film is “in the can” and in distribution, the only intentional action at the time of its showing for an audience involves turning on a projector. In contrast, the intentions of actors, stage managers, technicians, and others, especially in their changing responses to an audience, continue to matter at each live show. Even after two thousand performances of Phantom, the actor/Phantom could fall off of his gondola and stumble into the audience, an accident impossible in a film (the fun of The Purple Rose of Cairo notwithstanding). Mechanical repetition is not the same as intentional communication, and the audience will know the interactive difference between them. “The art of drama as performance, though perceptually very much akin, in many respects, to the mass fictions projected by movies, is nevertheless radically, categorically different,” concludes Carroll.68 Carroll’s categorical difference carries over into visual cognition; we process liveness differently from landscapes. Because visuomotor representations are a part of our neurological mirror systems and play a major role in our social and emotional interactions, I discuss them in the next chapter. The remainder of this section will focus on visual perceptions. Surveying the details of his visual surround, our imaginary spectator at the Theatre of Dionysus in the fifth century BCE would be aware of several fundamental properties that help him to distinguish among many objects and people; size, shape, color, distance, texture, and motion are some of the most prominent. These qualities are unique to the visual mode; hearing and smelling will not yield the same knowledge of the world, for example, and touching a texture is not the same experience as seeing it. People with reliable visual processing whose eyes are properly linked to their other cognitive functions can learn a great deal about the world from normal visual perception. Exactly how this occurs, however, is a matter of some controversy. Looking at a landscape does not produce an instant “photo in the head.” Scientists know this because the processing of color, distance, size, and the other properties that constitute perception occur in separate areas of the mind/ brain and must be put together to create images (percepts) that shift with changes in our attention. Obviously, these images are reliable enough—despite the blurring of peripheral vision, our inability to focus simultaneously on near and far objects, and other shortcomings of normal vision—to allow us to function effectively in the world. Although evolution has equipped our species with extremely keen

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vision, we cannot see the world precisely as it is; percepts are always constructed. How does the mind/brain construct these images? From among the several competing theories that attempt to account for this complex process, I will briefly synthesize Edelman’s and Jacob and Jeannerod’s views.69 As you may recall from an earlier section in this chapter, Edelman terms primary consciousness “the remembered present,” which includes our consciousness of the visual surround. For Edelman, the mind/brain generates percepts by processing inputs from our perceptions of the external world, from several nonconscious sources in the body, and from specific memories in the mind/ brain in order to create the images we “see.” Jacob and Jeannerod emphasize the importance of perceptual inputs in this process and downplay the role of memory. They recognize that percepts provide the basis for visual memories, but suggest that the actual images that people experience are always more complex and fine-grained than any thoughts based in memory that people can recall. And of course this is true. We have all had the experience of telling ourselves that we will never forget a certain sight and then discovering only two minutes later that our memory of that visual moment is already washed out and overly schematic. Edelman would insist, however, that this experience does not mean that visual memories play no formative role in our moment-to-moment construction of visual percepts. One way through these differences between the theorists is to focus on attention, which, as we have seen, is a property of higher order consciousness especially relevant in theatregoing. As visual intentionalists, Jacob and Jeannerod recognize that intending to pay attention to a particular stimulus can guide the mind/brain in constructing visual images. When our imagined Athenian viewer looks down at the “dancing space” of the orchestra, for example, he might focus on the stage altar set for the performance of Oedipus. Among the many reasons that might draw his eyes there is the fact that this locale, roughly in the center of the space, has often provided the axis around which significant stage movement has occurred. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, building on Edelman’s insights, would term his spatial orientation to the altar in the orchestra a “center– periphery” cognitive concept, one of several spatial relations concepts that the mind uses to organize spatial thinking.70 Our viewer’s memory of the past use of a stage set piece placed in the middle of the orchestra would guide him to focus at the center of that space. Regarding this sighting, Jacob and Jeannerod would have us consider

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the many properties of the altar—its shape, distance, size, coloring, and so on—that cannot be encompassed by the center—periphery abstraction in our viewer’s head. While it is true that mental concepts are never as detailed as visual percepts, the most important of these visual qualities for the spectator, and the one that likely drew him to the altar in the first place, was his knowledge of the unit’s orientation in the center of an open, bounded space. This knowledge, based in memory, consequently folds the visual percept of the altar into his “remembered present.” In moments of focused visual attention, it is likely that memories spark intentions that will guide the selection and ordering process of visual perception. If percepts are largely guided by memory, the whole range of spatial relations concepts that anchor visual memories comes into play in normal visual perception. In addition to “center–periphery,” spectators at the Theatre of Dionysus would deploy the concepts of “near–far” to compare approximate distances among theatregoers and actor/characters, “verticality” to judge the height of an actor/character against the skene behind him, “link” to see how the rest of Athens connects to the architecture of the theatre, “figure-ground” to catch the positioning of actor/characters vis-à-vis the earthen orchestra floor, and “containment” to discern actor/characters appearing from and disappearing into the skene house. Spectators going to watch A Streetcar Named Desire in a proscenium theatre would use several of same spatial relations concepts to generate the visual percepts of their experience. If they were looking at the initial 1947 production with Jo Meilziner’s scene design, they would likely gaze at the “verticality” of the wrought iron staircase leading to the upstairs apartment as it facilitated Kim Hunter/Stella’s seductive descent to her howling husband, Meilziner’s manipulation of “near–far” as the upstage lighting penetrated the gauze of the apartment walls to reveal the nightmarish figures of Jessica Tandy/Blanche’s imagination, and the “containment” of Blanche in the back bedroom as Brando/Stanley circled in for the rape. Spectators use basic-level as well as spatial relations concepts to generate visual perceptions. According to Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues, who have done extensive experiments with this phenomenon since the 1970s, basic-level concepts organize much of our knowledge about objects.71 As we have discussed, a level of semantic categorization is “basic,” or prototypical, when members of that category have the same general shape and will sustain a single mental image. Jacob and Jeannerod use the words “mustang,” “horse,” and “animal” to illustrate their explanation of prototypical categories. “When you ascend from the basic level (horse) towards more

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superordinate concepts (e.g., animal),” they state, “you sacrifice much informativeness without gaining enough distinctiveness. When you descend from the basic level towards more subordinate concepts (e.g., mustang), you gain little informativeness at the cost of much distinctiveness. Thus the basic conceptual level is easiest to recall in memory.”72 Basic—level categories, like the spatial relation primitives of near–far, center–periphery, and so on, are mental concepts; they enable the mind to sort percepts and memories into useable chunks of information. When spectators look at the scenery of a production, they first sort it into basic-level categories. For example, they will see a “room,” “a bed,” and “a chair” before they pay very specific attention to the décor of the room, the size of the bed, or the type of the chair— designations that are subordinate to the basic level of the objects before them. In Streetcar, Tennessee Williams, like other predominately realist playwrights, often specified particular kinds of rooms and objects, and designers such as Meilziner usually tried to include such details. But anyone who has ever seen a low-budget production of Streetcar, with only the outline of the necessary rooms and cube rehearsal blocks for the required furniture, knows that such basic-level scenery is sufficient for a believable production. Realism moved playwrights and designers to specify the subordinatelevel of objects on stage, but realistic scenery—like the move from “horse” to “mustang” in the example above—gained little informativeness at the cost of much distinctiveness. (All of which makes the historical emergence of realism as a dominant style more curious than inevitable.) In Shakespeare’s time, the artists producing Twelfth Night and other plays probably rearranged the same furniture (thrones, stools, tables) on stage for the entire action, regardless of the fictional locale. No scenery was changed to indicate the shift from Orsino’s to Olivia’s palace; the same chair served as Orsino’s and Olivia’s throne. Spectators can be induced to look at realist scenic details, of course, but all they require to make sense of the action is basic-level scenery. Costuming, too, must work at a basic level of recognition for viewers before it can help them to shape more specific responses. This is especially true for large-cast shows, when audiences catch only a quick initial look at a character and then must identify him or her immediately in a following scene. When spectators in the seventeenth century first saw the costume for the actor playing Duke Orsino, for example, they likely recognized it as the dress of a male aristocrat. Later on, they might have noticed that its fabric and design connoted the

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costume of a specific kind of nobleman and they might also have gained a general awareness that he was clothed rather than naked, but neither of these other levels of categorization—subordinate (Duke’s attire) and superordinate (clothes)—would matter very much for their initial recognition and memory. Similarly, the spectators needed to be able to see “steward’s dress” when they looked at actor/Malvolio, “jester’s costume” when they saw actor/Feste, and “nobleman’s page” when they gazed at actor/Viola disguised as Cesario. Actor/Viola/ Cesario’s costume, of course, must match that of her twin brother, actor/Sebastian, to facilitate the identity confusion of the central plot. Shakespeare and his players knew the importance of basic-level costuming to enable audiences to peg actor/character identity and remember it. This is not to say that scenery and costuming need serve only basiclevel spectatorial requirements. Here is Tennessee Williams’s description of the opening image of Scene Three of Streetcar, which he subtitled “The Poker Night”: There is a picture of Van Gogh’s of a billiard-parlor at night. The kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colors of childhood’s spectrum. Over the yellow linoleum of the kitchen table hangs an electric bulb with a vivid green glass shade. The poker players — Stanley, Steve, Mitch, and Pablo —wear colored shirts, solid blues, a purple, a red-and-white check, a light green, and they are men at the peak of their physical manhood, as coarse and direct and powerful as the primary colors. There are vivid slices of watermelon on the table, whisky bottles and glasses. The bedroom is relatively dim with only the light that spills between the portieres and through the wide window on the street.73

Williams’s image will easily satisfy the requirements of scenic and character recognition for his spectators. Despite the different lighting, spectators will use their memories and spatial relations concepts to identify the setting. The audience has already met the actors playing Stanley, Mitch, and Steve and heard them talk about playing poker. Even though they are now wearing shirts in the “raw colors of childhood’s spectrum,” their faces and bodies are the same from one scene to the next. Actor/Pablo is a newcomer, but given the context, audiences will immediately assume that he is another poker buddy. Of course, the cognitive concepts spectators deploy to interpret the “Poker Night” image will likely engage spectators beyond matters of scenic and actor/character identification. As Williams suggests,

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many viewers would understand that the scenery, props, and costumes of this scene work to underline the loud masculinity of Stanley’s world in Streetcar. When Stella and Blanche enter the stage a few minutes later, dressed up for a night on the town, the contrast between the male and female worlds of the play is unavoidable. Like Van Gogh, Williams also color-codes his scene. Some spectators may already have connected the redness of the watermelon slices and of several of the men’s shirts in the Poker Night image to the red meat that Stanley threw to Stella and the “Red Hot” call of the hot tamale vender in the first scene. By the time Stanley puts on his red pajamas near the end of the play, Williams expects viewers to associate Stanley with that color and to use it to understand his explosive temper and sexuality. As spectators learn to link Stanley’s intentions with the color red, however, they are shifting their processing from visual perception to visuomotor representation. “Red” does not operate like a semiotic sign that the mind/brain decodes in a uniform way because viewers come to understand various reds through different mental processes. When spectators seek to identify an actor/character by costume (e.g., Orsino dressed as a nobleman or Mitch as a poker player), visual perception takes control. When they want to understand what an actor/ character is doing with a particular costume (e.g., Malvolio in crossgartered stockings wooing Olivia or Stanley in red pajamas taunting Blanche), viewers engage their visuomotor representation. In this instance, because spectators are primarily interested in an actor/character’s intentions, cross-garteredness and redness are secondary effects, not the focus of attention. Semioticians often use “costuming” and “color” as general categories for signs related to an actor/character’s clothing, and this category has a certain common sense validity for theatre people. But these categories, like many semiotic categories, try to account for the meanings of a group of signs that are processed very differently by the mind/brain; they are not cognitively coherent. Saussurean semiotics does not account for the differences between visual perceptions and visuomotor representations.74 As we have seen, viewers generate visuomotor representations when they watch actors. This system works in concert with conscious attention, human memory, and conceptual blending to enable spectatorial engagement in performance. Visuomotor representations function as a part of a viewer’s “mirror neurons” to stimulate empathy, typically the first step toward our emotional and social engagements in the theatre. Social cognition is the subject of the next chapter.

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Chapter 2

Social Cognition in Spectating

We are social animals. Because evolution has equipped our species

with more sensitivity to the needs and emotions of others than is evident in other mammals, we carry these cognitive capabilities with us into theatrical viewing. As we will see, our social cognition builds upon and overlaps with the general cognitive processes examined in the previous chapter. In particular, the visuomotor representations mentioned previously provide spectators with the ability to “read the minds” of actor/characters, to intuit their beliefs, intentions, and emotions by watching their motor actions. This mode of engagement, also known as empathy, extends to our understanding of actors’ use of props and even their gestures and spoken language. Empathy is not an emotion, but it readily leads viewers to emotional engagements. In addition to experiencing unconsciously the six basic emotions, spectators often gain a conscious awareness of their emotional commitments, which encourages them to form sympathetic or antipathetic attachments to certain actor/characters. As spectators, we want to be moved to emotional extremes; laughter and tears provide a kind of catharsis that is good for our bodies. Chapter 2 concludes with an overview of cognitive evolution that places these modes of engagement in evolutionary perspective and prepares for the discussion of cultural-historical cognition that follows. Mirror Neurons and Empathy About fifteen minutes into the first scene of Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, the audience learns about the quasi-historical Pope Joan. As related by the actor playing the role, Joan began disguising

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herself as a boy early in her life in medieval Europe and, due to her academic brilliance, she was eventually elected Pope. Auditors soon discover that she became pregnant, gave birth to her baby in the midst of a procession in medieval Rome, and was promptly stoned to death by Catholic believers. Actor/Joan’s story breaks the competitive cross-cultural chitchat of the scene in which women from several cultures and historical periods have been dining and discussing their lives with each other and with Marlene, a figure living in present-day London. In performance, Churchill’s play gives the actor doing Pope Joan an opportunity to stand up and indicate through speech and gestures her memory of these events for the other women at the table. The moment, an early emotional high point in Scene One of the play, invites spectators to adopt the perspective of actor/Joan and experience the painful memory of her stoning from her point of view. What happens cognitively when spectators project themselves into the emotional life of an actor/character on stage? Sometimes this process is called “identification,” but this vague and encompassing word usually mixes empathy with sympathy, terms that most cognitive psychologists prefer to separate. Before spectators form a sympathetic response to actor/characters in most dramatic situations, they must ascribe beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions to them; they must be able to “read their minds.” To do this, spectators simulate the experiences of actor/characters in their own minds. Simulation, for many cognitive psychologists, is synonymous with empathy.1 How spectators read the minds of actor/characters on the stage is fundamentally no different from how people intuit each other’s attitudes and intentions in real life. In brief, people watch and listen to others for facial, postural, and vocal clues and process this information through their bodies and minds. Our attributions of states of mind to others are not always accurate, but most people can gain a general sense of what others are experiencing by simulating that experience for themselves. Evidence has been mounting since the 1970s that empathy relies primarily on our ability to embody others’ emotional states. In “Embodiment in the Acquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge,” authors Paula M. Niedenthal et al. demonstrate four major claims through their summary of this evidence: “(1) Individuals embody other people’s emotional behavior; (2) embodied emotions produce corresponding subjective emotional states in the individual; (3) imagining other people and events also produces embodied emotions and corresponding feelings; and (4) embodied emotions mediate cognitive

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responses.” Niedenthal and her coauthors rely on the following definition of emotion for their argument: “Emotions are defined as short term, biologically based patterns of perception, subjective experience, physiology, and action (or action tendencies) that constitute responses to specific physical and social problems posed by the environment.”2 Although nearly all definitions of emotion are contentious in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive psychology, this relatively neutral position is adequate for most present purposes in the newly emerging field of emotion and cognition. Niedenthal et al.’s thesis and summary of the evidence for their first claim has obvious applications for understanding how audiences read the minds of actor/characters. In situations where empathy is encouraged (such as theatrical viewing), note the authors’ imitation and embodiment tend to be heightened. While watching and listening to actor/Joan describe and partly pantomime the birth of her baby and her subsequent stoning by the mob, spectators will embody the emotions they sense in the actor’s face, body, and voice. Citing many studies that rely primarily on monitoring electromyographic responses in perceivers of angry faces, comedy routines, and other stimulating experiences, the authors conclude that “individuals partly or fully embody the emotional expressions of other people.” Further, these studies also suggest that such embodiment is “highly automatic in nature.”3 Our muscular, chemical, and neurological responses to others’ emotions are often so small that they escape conscious recognition, but they can have a significant impact on our behavior. In other words, evolution has equipped us to attune our bodies to the emotions of other people; this basis for our sociality as a species is inherited and embodied. Embodying other’s emotions produces emotions in us, even if the situation is an imagined or fictitious one. Many psychological experiments have tested and affirmed these effects. Put two babies in a room together, and if one of them begins crying the second will cry as well, in empathetic response to the first. The facial, postural, and vocal expression of anger, or any other emotion, whether in earnest or in a game of pretend, is catching. Emotional contagion entails “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally,” note Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson.4 “You can catch an emotion, just as you can catch a cold, without knowing whom you caught it from,” says philosopher Robert M. Gordon, who writes about emotional contagion in the theatre as well as in everyday life.5 Along with other philosophers of

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cognition and emotion, Gordon has developed “simulation theory” (ST), which demonstrates that humans come to know the world and themselves largely through simulation.6 The implication for those playing the make-believe game of theatre is that most spectators are virtual Typhoid Marys when it comes to catching emotions and passing them on to others. In performances of Top Girls, most spectators will probably catch the actor/character’s remembered fear of her birthing and stoning, experience that fear themselves, and spread it to others in the auditorium. Auditors can catch emotions through sounds as well as sights. Niedenthal et al. do not investigate the cognitive effects of sound and rhythm, but this branch of music research is directly relevant to emotions and embodiment. Had spectators closed their eyes during Actor/Pope Joan’s stoning episode, they would still have heard her voice and would probably have embodied her fear. Anna and her son “Whistle a Happy Tune” in The King and I and, chances are, most auditors in the theatre will pick up their happiness. Rhythmic patterns lock in motor responses at the neurological level, usually producing emotions below the level of consciousness. According to Michael H. Thaut, Several key findings in rhythmic synchronization research have emerged that contribute to an understanding of the neurobiological basis of music and temporal information processing in the brain. Musical rhythm rapidly creates stable and precise internal templates for temporal organization of motor responses. The motor system is very sensitive to arousal by the auditory system. Neural impulses of auditory rhythm project directly into motor structures. Motor responses become entrained to the timing of rhythmic patterns.7

At another point in his essay, Thaut states that “since changes in brain wave power are a function of more neurons firing together in synchrony, the use of the analogy of neurons working like a rhythm band when detecting timing changes is tempting.”8 Embodied rhythms and sounds involve much more than spectatorial toe tapping, although that may be one outward expression of this complex motor, chemical, and neurological response. Niedenthal et al.’s final point is that embodied emotions, whether generated by a response to the nonhuman environment or socially transmitted by others, shape subsequent cognitive processing and generate meanings. As they explain, “When a person’s body enters into a particular [emotional] state, this constitutes a

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retrieval cue of conceptual knowledge . . . In turn, other cognitive processes, such as categorization, evaluation, and memory, are affected. As an embodied state triggers an emotion concept [i.e., a specific neural network response] and as the emotion becomes active, it biases other cognitive operations toward states consistent with the emotion.” 9 In other words, emotions generated through simulation change how people think. Before revealing what had happened to her, actor/Pope Joan was chatting with Marlene and the fantasy figures in Top Girls and telling the story about her pregnancy as a joke. Churchill’s stage direction for the other actor/ characters following Joan’s revelation that they “stoned me to death” is equally abrupt: “They stop laughing.”10 After acknowledging that the baby died, too, and pausing in silence, the others pick up the conversation again, but “very quietly,” says Churchill.11 We can imagine that most auditors will feel the same sudden shock of fear and share in the silence that likely pervades the auditorium during the actors’ pause. Next, the conversation on stage turns haltingly to the fate of each of their children, and it is clear that the shadow of fear, as Niedenthal et al. would say, “biases [the women’s] other cognitive operations.” No group of actor/characters can control the particular meanings in spectators’ heads, but Churchill’s sudden injection of fear into the bodies of her actors and spectators will probably prejudice most of the adjacent meanings generated by the audience. Churchill’s particular villain in this case is the Catholic Church and its patriarchal belief system, but most spectators would have no trouble seeing that many manifestations of patriarchy in history have visited murderous violence on the bodies of women and their babies. By this time in Top Girls, the audience already knows, in general, that this will be a play about history, women, economic success, and children; Churchill need not belabor the point. Most spectators will empathize with actor/Joan because, like most of the population, they do not suffer from autism or a severe case of Asberger’s syndrome. If they did, their empathetic capabilities would be severely impaired and they would have difficulty reading the minds of the actor/characters on stage. Lacking the ability (to a greater or lesser degree) to put themselves in another person’s shoes, autistic people have particular trouble with mind reading and its everyday uses in interpersonal communication. Autism is apparently inherited, and its initial symptoms, “the lack of the usual flexibility, imagination, and pretense,” according to Simon Baron-Cohen,12 usually manifest themselves around two years of age. Other impairments

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include deficits in understanding what others believe, when others are lying, and complex emotions experienced by others. Little interest in fiction and storytelling is also symptomatic of those troubled by autism. While most children can distinguish between their own emotions, intentions, and desires and those of others by the age of four, autistic children have difficulty doing so and this impairment continues throughout their lives. Some adults manage to cope with this cognitive affliction by identifying and memorizing typical human interactions so that they can respond appropriately in social situations. Neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks reports the case of a remarkable woman, Temple Grandin, who, despite severe autism, achieved a PhD in agricultural science and successfully taught university students. To compensate for her autism, states Sacks, Grandin built up a kind of mental “library of videotapes, which she could play in her mind and inspect at any time—‘videos’ of how people behaved in different circumstances. She would play these over and over again, and learn, by degrees, to correlate what she saw, so that she could predict how people in similar circumstances might act.”13 Grandin’s case points up a significant difference between natural and learned social interaction. Instead of relying, as non-autistic individuals can do, on her natural mind reading ability, Grandin had to teach herself how to get along with others. For this reason, perhaps, Grandin and others like her who partly overcame their autism in this way might enjoy the challenge of attending a play; it would test their mind reading of actor/character interactions. But without this conscious, long-term effort, Grandin would be lost at a performance of drama. She told Sacks that she remembers being “bewildered by Romeo and Juliet” when assigned to read it in school. “I never knew what they were up to,” she admitted.14 Autistic impairment suggests that simulating others is not simply a useful cognitive advantage; for humans, it is nearly a social necessity. Recent research on mirror neurons has revealed an important part of the neurological basis of simulation. In the early 1990s, some Italian researchers noticed that many of the same groups of neurons in the brain of a monkey fired when the monkey watched a male scientist bring a peanut to his mouth as when that monkey brought a peanut to its own mouth. Doing an action and watching someone else do the same action brought a similar neurological response. As Vittorio Gallese has written, the mind/brain has “an action observation/execution matching system.”15 Neuroscientists have discovered in subsequent experiments that similar networks of mirror neurons also exist in other animals, including apes and probably

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elephants, dogs, and dolphins. Humans appear to have a more highly evolved mirror system than other animals, allowing them to access the emotions as well as the actions of others through direct simulation. By putting actions and emotions together and using other cues, people can use simulation to attempt to understand others’ general intentions. On this basis, Gallese and his coworkers identify the mirror system as “the basis of social cognition.”16 A similar kind of “mirroring” apparently occurs with sound and rhythm. As we have seen, spectators paying attention to performers will automatically mirror their rhythms, whether the performers express them in movement or sound (or both, as in many moments in operas and musicals). Both visual and aural mirroring operations link neurological response directly to the motor system, which, in turn, is mostly hardwired to our emotions. Spectatorial empathy appears to be strongest when combinations of sound and movement entrain our bodies. Before theatre studies turned toward semiotics, scholars of performance investigated empathy, but they were not able to draw on much scientific evidence to understand its immense importance for audiences. Perhaps the scholar who came closest to contemporary simulation theory in applying empathy to audience engagement was Bernard Beckerman. His idea of “empathic parallelism,” published in 1970, anticipates some aspects of our present knowledge about the mirror system and its simulative capabilities. Involved spectators, said Beckerman, “leaning forward in [their] seat[s] . . . mirror the forward thrust of the dramatic action. . . . Imaginatively we follow a path that runs parallel, not to the events themselves, but to the shifts of tension either between characters or between ourselves and the performers. This process may be called empathic parallelism.”17 More specifically, Beckerman defined this term as the spectator’s body’s response to “the patterns and rhythms of tension” on stage and in the auditorium.18 Although this explanation is too general to satisfy neuroscientists and psychologists today, it is clear that Beckerman was on the right track thirty-five years ago. Among contemporary theorists, David Krasner has turned scholarly attention back to empathy, but his discussion actually derails Beckerman’s promising start. Krasner ignores much of the present cognitive evidence by specifying several conditions that must be met before empathy can occur in the theatre and also by confusing empathy with emotion. According to Krasner, spectators must know where to focus their “attention” on stage, they must gain “substantial understanding” of the major characters in the play, and they

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must “have a grasp of the narrative” before their empathy will kick in.19 Actually, Krasner gets the process backward. Spectators do not wait to deploy empathy, but engage it unconsciously right from the start of every performance to help them figure out where to focus their attention, who these characters are, and what their story is about. Empathy is a proactive search engine that is always ready to engage intentional onstage action and mirror it for meaning. Krasner also conflates empathy with “identification, compassion, sympathy, and understanding.”20 Empathy can lead to these results (or something like them), but our mirror neurons need to engage with other emotional and cognitive processes to make them happen. In discussing empathy, it is best to hold to a minimalist scientific definition; claiming too much for it only muddies understanding. As we have seen, our facility for empathy encourages spectators to imitate the emotions and actions embodied by actor/characters. Together with the dialogue, the response of other characters, and similar information, spectators can use empathy to piece together the intentions of actor/characters. Our mirror systems generate what Jacob and Jeannerod have called visuomotor representations of others’ intentional actions. As they state: “[T]he perception of biological motion automatically triggers, in the observer, the formation of a motor plan to perform the observed movement. . . . Thus, motor imagery lies at the interface between the planning of movements and the observation of others’ movements. Arguably, in humans, the capacity for motor imagery may have unique adaptive value, since the observation of others’ bodily movements is a crucial source for the learning of skilled gestures by imitation.”21 Jacob and Jeannerod’s conclusions, together with the work of Gallese and others, suggest that “imitation” must be retained as a component of performance. But notice what has happened here: The location of Aristotle’s “imitation of an action” has shifted. In conventional mimetic theory, playwrights and actors do the imitating. Cognitive scientists and philosophers, in contrast, have strong evidence that it is audiences who mirror the actions of those they watch on stage; cognitive imitation is a crucial part of spectating. Perhaps playwrights, actors, and others also engage with visuomotor representations when they write a script and put together a production, but this is a separate process, removed from the moment-tomoment interaction that occurs between actors and audiences in performance. Evidently, evolutionary changes in our species’ mirror networks aided early hominids in initiating and coordinating group action,

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an obvious advantage for survival among our ancestors. Small groups of hominids that could work together cooperatively would have had a better chance of surviving than groups with no natural inclination to do so. Sensitivity to and participation in socially generated rhythms, of course, is evolutionarily adaptive; rhythm enhances group solidarity. Hence it is likely that visuomotor representation and the neurological bases for sharing rhythms evolved later than general visual and aural perception. Neuroscientific research into human mirror neurons, dependent on brain-scanning techniques, suggests that mirror networks may mediate and facilitate many of the psychological processes involved in empathy. This research has just begun, however; nearly all of the experiments with mirror neurons so far have been performed on nonhuman subjects, mostly monkeys. It is too early to make firm links between mirror networks and the range of engagements related to mental simulation in humans. Spectators must distinguish intentional human movement from other kinds of movement before visuomotor representation is possible. In an experiment with theatrical repercussions, one scientist in the 1970s attached light sources to the moving joints of two people and a mechanized dummy, and instructed one of the people to sit still and the other to move. The scientist then turned out the lights, brought in observers, and asked them what they saw. None of the observers had any difficulty distinguishing the moving human being from the movements of the mechanized dummy and the stationary person. In subsequent experiments, observers were able to identify the disparate actions of individuals in the dark with light sources at their joints who were jumping, dancing, boxing, ironing, and hammering. Under the same experimental circumstances, most observers could tell the difference between men and women walking across a room. Even three-month-old infants, as Jacob and Jeannerod explain, “are visually sensitive to the difference between the ‘biological motion’ of dots produced by a walking person and the random, artificially produced, nonbiological motions of similar dots.”22 Other experiments demonstrate that, when in doubt, we tend to identify random human motion as intentional movement. None of this is news to good actors and directors, of course. Theatre people have long known that even the smallest, unintended movement on stage can draw unwanted spectatorial attention and interpretation. Mental images of people interacting intentionally with their environment can be described as images of “affordances.” This term is

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James J. Gibson’s, who used it beginning in the 1960s to describe how humans evaluate their own and others’ movement possibilities within a given environment. Gibson’s “ecological” understanding of visuomotor perception continues to be widely influential in cognitive psychology.23 The arrangement of benches, chairs, tables, and so on in the performance area for Twelfth Night, for example, “afforded” a variety of possible moves for the actor/characters within the space. The backdrop, chairs, and tea table on stage for the first act of Vanya left those actor/characters with some options for movement and eliminated others. The notion of affordances, in other words, accords with common theatrical practice. Directors consider affordances in furniture and other scenic unit arrangements every time they block a scene. Spectators are subliminally aware of the affordances actor/ characters are working within. If the actor playing Pope Joan is standing behind a restaurant table with bodies on either side of her, the audience knows that she cannot move very broadly while she is depicting her stoning. Ulric Neisser notes that affordances set up “anticipatory schemata” that shape expected human movement: “In my view, the cognitive structures crucial for vision are the anticipatory schemata that prepare the perceiver to accept certain kinds of information rather than others and thus control the activity of looking.”24 We look where we expect to find some interesting human action; for audiences at the theatre as in everyday life, the process of activating visuomotor representations is proactive. As actors and directors know, spatial affordances on stage can affect the tone of a scene, the muscular tension between the actor/characters, and their possible range of emotional communication. All of this translates into various possibilities for empathetic involvement on the part of spectators. In Top Girls, for example, the intimacy of the actor/ characters around the table will increase the empathy felt by the other characters and, consequently, by most in the audience. Our mirror systems bridge actor–audience communication where intentional physical movement is concerned. While bodies provide general cues for mind reading, faces usually betray more specific hints. The eyes and the muscles around them are especially revealing; not surprisingly, two-month-old infants spend more time looking into their mother’s eyes than at any other part of her face.25 In most theatres, spectators will try to sit or stand near enough to the action on stage to watch the eyes of the actor/ characters in order to catch their emotions and intentions. This raises an important question about masked performance: In theatres

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where masks were conventional, such as the classical Theatre of Dionysus, did the wearing of masks by the actors interfere with spectators’ empathetic engagement? Probably it did, to a degree, but it is likely that the actors knew how to compensate for the loss of their facial expressiveness through other means that encouraged empathetic mind reading. In the case of the initial performance of Oedipus the King, the actors probably used a wide range of vocal expressiveness that denoted the emotions of their characters. As we will see in a later section of this chapter, the voice is largely a product of muscles and manipulated air; spectators can feel muscular tension in the voice just as they experience it in the tension of other muscles that are more available for visuomotor perception. In addition, masked actors could use the muscles of the rest of their bodies in movements and gestures to encourage empathetic engagement. This includes the muscles of the neck and head for lowering, raising, and tilting the masked face, all of which movements can be very expressive. Engaged spectators watching the first scene of Top Girls will use their mind-reading skills to try to figure out why Marlene and her fantasy figures are behaving as they do. Although it is soon clear that Marlene wants the others to help her celebrate her promotion as the Managing Director of the Top Girls Employment Agency, the audience must discover the intentions of the others through close attention and empathy. Unlike the characters of Shakespeare or even Chekhov, Churchill’s figures rarely announce their goals and strategies. To enable them to read the intentions of the actor/characters, viewers will listen to what they say, but they will pay more attention to their tone of voice, their facial expressions, and their physical gestures. Soon after the start of the play, some may figure out that Isabella Bird, the nineteenth-century Scottish explorer, is primarily seeking sympathy from Marlene and the others, despite her bluff talk. Others will watch the actress playing Lady Nijo, the Emperor’s courtesan from medieval Japan, and peg her as a vain poseur, eager to impress the others with her clothes and poetry. Dull Gret, Brueghel’s peasant warrior, takes a little longer to interpret, but when she empties the bread basket of the restaurant into her apron, most will see her motive as thievery. In each of these instances, the spectators will use their mirror systems to simulate the onstage actions and emotions of these actor/characters, generate visuomotor representations in their minds’ eye, and then hold the actions of these imitated models in their working memories and add other clues to deduce their intentions.

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Infants and the Arts Empathy as simulation for mind reading is a different notion of empathy than that understood by many modernists and critics in the theatre. Bertolt Brecht, for example, conflated empathy with sympathy and feared that empathizing audiences would turn passive. Assuming a dualism between reason and emotion, Brecht believed that an emotional response from audiences tied to empathy, unlike a response based in reason, would “wear down the capacity for action” in his auditors. Worst of all, strongly emotional actors might “go into a trance and take the audience with them.” Under the spell of empathy, said Brecht, “nobody will learn any lessons.”26 Like most westerners at mid-century, Brecht misunderstood the cognitive process of simulation. Empathy may produce sympathy, but the ability to simulate another’s state of mind is usually prior to the kind of judgment that induces sympathy or antipathy.27 Spectators interested in the intentions of the actor/Lady Nijo, for example, would have to empathize with her before knowing whether they would want to sympathize with her or not. In old-fashioned melodramas, viewers must empathize with the actor/villain in order to figure out his intentions toward the heroine. As we will see in a later section of this chapter, spectatorial judgment nearly always comes between a spectator’s initial simulation and his or her feeling response to an actor/character. Brecht, ever eager to maintain his spectator’s enlightened judgment during a performance, would hardly have objected to this process (and its specific results in Top Girls). Had Brecht begun with a definition of empathy from contemporary cognitive science (fifty years in the future), it is unlikely that he would have discarded empathy as a welcome response in the theatre. The empathetic mirroring of physical movements, after all, is central to the enjoyment of prizefighting, a kind of spectatorship that Brecht held up as a model for theatrical engagement.28 As noted, Brecht was also interested in sparking the agency of spectators during a performance and this interest is echoed in recent research into how infants and children use their mirror systems to learn new skills when imitating adults. Andreas Wohlschlager and Harold Bekkering bring together several psychological and neurophysiological findings to suggest that human mirror systems privilege a child’s understanding of a person’s intentions over exact imitation while they are learning. As they point out, imitation “is particularly interesting in children, because they must perform the

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translation [of a specific behavior from an adult to themselves] despite the obviously great differences in orientation, body size, limb lengths, and available motor skills.”29 Because children seek to imitate adult behavior right from birth but cannot precisely perform what they see adults do, Wohlschlager and Bekkering suppose that “it is primarily the goal of an act that is imitated.”30 Then they pull together experimental evidence to support that supposition. As they realize, “perceiving the goal of an action would be a prerequisite for such goal-directed imitation,”31 and they use the findings from mirror system research to support their conclusion. They note that mirror networks prompt even day-old infants to form goals and become active agents in pursuing them. Other scientists agree and some, including psychologist Patricia Greenfield, have extended the implications of these findings to link our mental mirror systems to the general dynamics of cultural learning, maintenance, and change. According to Greenfield, “[N]ow we see that mirror neurons absorb culture directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation, and observation.”32 Our mirror systems animate proactive agency and learning. This would have been welcome news to Brecht. The centrality of mirror systems in spectatorship opens up a mostly new perspective on the human need for and enjoyment of theatre and similar games of make- believe. In her Art and Intimacy (2000), aesthetician Ellen Dissanayake proposes that the rhythms and modes of interaction between parent and infant provide the basis for specific psychosocial goals and desires that help to sustain human sociality and the arts among cultural groups. As Dissanayake outlines in her “Introduction,” caregiver–infant bonding enculturates children to seek relations of mutuality and love, to join social groups, to probe for meanings in life, to develop “hands-on” competences for living, and to elaborate these experiences through the arts. “It is my overall contention,” states Dissanayake, “that in our species’ development of culture, as in our own individual development from birth to maturity, the rhythms and modes of love and art have been critical, inasmuch as they have affected these five psychosocial needs or propensities.”33 Crucial to Dissanayake’s argument is the similitude she forges between parent–infant interaction and the rhythms and modes of the temporal arts, such as music, theatre, and dance. She looks closely at the dynamics of facial interactions, the rhythms of baby talk and response, and the satisfactions that bond mother and child together.

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As she points out, infants and caregivers seek to enjoy “sounds, facial expressions, and movements (vocal, visual, and kinesic signals) that are temporally and spatially patterned, dynamically varied, multimodally presented [i.e., through sound, movement, touch, etc.], and multimodally received.” Parents and infants, for example, prime each other to perform surging, explosive, and fleeting sounds and movements that are more structured than general social interactions. These rhythmic-modal patterns and exchanges, notes Dissanayake, “apply to the rudiments of creating and experiencing the temporal arts.”34 Many experiments in music research have validated the sound side of Dissanayake’s insights. Iain Cross summarizes these findings: Over the past ten years a considerable amount of research has demonstrated that caregiver–infant interactions in many cultures have musical or proto-musical attributes, incorporating exaggerated pitch contours and periodic rhythmic timings in their structure, involving turn-taking and close linkage between sound and movement, with similar or the same “musical” interactions occurring in a wide variety of contexts. Even very young infants can engage in music-like or proto-musical behaviours—which involve not only sound perception and production but also movement. (Ital in original)35

The proto-musical engagements of infants and caregivers, especially when conjoined with movement, are also proto-theatrical ones. Dissanayake concludes that the performing arts played a significant role in our evolutionary success as a species: “In this view, the arts evolved not as stratagems for male competition (though like any activity they can be used for such) but as physical correlates of psychological concern. The inborn rhythmic-modal sensitivities of mutuality, through cultural elaborations, became adaptive means for arousing interest, riveting joint attention, synchronizing bodily rhythms and activities, conveying messages with conviction and memorability, and ultimately indoctrinating and reinforcing right attitudes and behavior.”36 Arguably, music, theatre, and other time-based performances have continued to serve these goals. Cognitive literary critic Brian Boyd points out that one of Dissanayake’s signal achievements in her several books has been to undercut the Kantian distinction, still dominant in the West, between the impracticality of art and the practical operations of much of everyday life. If caregiver–infant interactions are foundationally artistic, as Dissanayake claims, art provides a kind of psychological orientation

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that can boast of its own utility. “From this and other recent findings,” says Boyd, significant implications follow for understanding art and its relation to religion and ritual. Art has no immediate physical function but only an immediate psychical one: to appeal to attention and emotion. . . . [A] harvest song does not by itself gather crops but alters the attitude of the harvesters; a story does not bring about its own outcome but causes an audience to feel and respond as if they had witnessed the events. In each case, the effect is on those who encounter the artwork, whether design, music, or story.37

Or on those who encounter a theatrical performance, for which attention and emotion are both crucial and life-affirming. Dissanayake’s marriage of anthropology and cognitive science opens up another break with Kantian rationality and aesthetics, a break with direct implications for semiotics and phenomenology. Semiotics and phenomenology assume that subjects are looking at art objects when spectators look at the elements of a performance, including the actors. Whether the actors are signs that correspond to something in the objective world or images that somehow relate to the subjective imagination of the perceiver, both semiotics and phenomenology divide the viewing experience between subjects and objects. In contrast, the science noted above, especially Dissanayake’s, Gordon’s, Gallese’s, and Jacob and Jeannerod’s, posits an ongoing, interactional relationship that occurs prior to any cognitive distinctions between subjects and objects and that does not rely on signification. When they pay attention to intentional human action (in a performance or anywhere else), spectators unconsciously mirror the actions of social others and use this cognitive information to read their minds directly. Although audiences must also interpret spoken language and engage in other mental operations when they watch actors performing, interactional simulation seems to be primary. Put another way, the mind does not need to generate signs or holistic images and manipulate these complex representations to understand much of what actor/characters do on the stage. If the mind/brain is mirroring their intentional motor actions (and coordinating inputs from sound and sight in the process), semiotic and phenomenological mental operations become largely superfluous for gaining information about the beliefs, emotions, and intentions of actor/characters. As a recent article by linguist George Lakoff and Gallese suggests, the activation of mirror neuron networks provides a direct stimulus to the conceptual operations of the brain.38

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These scientific conclusions are consistent with Lakoff’s and philosopher Mark Johnson’s theory of “embodied realism.” As they point out, their conceptual system differs from the orientation of much previous science and philosophy: Embodied realism can work for science in part because it rejects a strict subject–object dichotomy. Disembodied scientific realism creates an unbridgeable ontological chasm between objects which are “out there,” and subjectivity, which is “in here.” Once the separation is made there are only two possible, and equally erroneous, conceptions of objectivity: Objectivity is either given by the things themselves (the objects) or by the intersubjective structure of consciousness shared by all people (the subjects). . . . The alternative we propose, embodied realism, relies on the fact that we are coupled to the world through our embodied interactions. . . . What disembodied realism misses . . . is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. (Ital in original)39

Embodied realism undercuts one of the basic premises of semiotics and phenomenology regarding spectatorship.40 Dissanayake acknowledges that mirroring plays a role in mother– infant dynamics, but, writing before there was much information about mirror neurons, she says little about simulation and the neural networks that support it.41 Nonetheless, it is clear that the mirror systems of engaged mothers and infants provide significant pathways for the mutuality, learning, and enjoyment that flows between them. Mirror systems and the simulations they facilitate, as neuroscientists and psychologists have explained, link parents and infants (and performers and spectators) in multimodal ways and trade in interactive rhythms to rivet attention and synchronize movements. This suggests, in turn, that empathetic engagement has made possible and has undergirded the cultural elaborations of our hominid ancestors and that such engagement remains an important key to our enjoyment of theatre today. In significant ways, we seek elaborations of the same cognitive and emotional experiences in the theatre that we enjoyed as infants. Synthesizing simulation-mirror theory and Dissanayake’s naturalistic aesthetics opens up a fresh perspective on the audience’s likely response to Pope Joan’s narrative of her stoning in Top Girls. The abrupt emotional shift from pleasant joking to simulated fear was probably pleasurable for many spectators because it sparked memories of similar shifts that they had experienced as infants in their mother’s arms. In both past and present events, the emotional

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jolt was performed and received multimodally (orally, visually, kinetically) and shared by parent and infant (later, by actors and spectators) through mirror networks. Both events were goal-directed activities, intended by parents (artists) and understood as an intentional practice by infants (spectators) within the mutually engaged emotion of play. In part for this reason and also because the emotional jolt was embedded in highly patterned rhythmic-modal interactions, the jolt of fear produced pleasure rather than a fight-or-flight response. To put it another way, spectators know that the theatre provides a safe haven for empathetic engagement without the fear of real-world consequences. The Pope Joan moment, as well as the production as a whole, “elaborated” specific “meanings” about “competencies for living” and provided insights into relations among “social groups,” to use some of Dissanayake’s terms for the aims of artistic expression. As it happens, Top Girls provides an interesting example to explore parent–child relations—a negative example, actually, because Marlene is failing to provide her daughter with the love and support that Churchill suggests ought to be a part of mother–daughter relations. To illustrate one side of this actor–spectator interaction, I temporarily put actor/Joan in the role of parent and cast my engaged spectators as infants. But these temporary “roles” get traded back and forth all the time in live performance. In the next major moment, actor/Joan and the other actor/characters on stage will need to sense when the audience’s silence in the pause they have all created has deepened sufficiently before they can begin talking again, “very quietly.” Not all spectators have been mothers, of course, but we have all been infants. And, as cognitive psychologists know, babies both initiate and respond to their caregivers; they play both actor and spectator in the interactive performance of enculturation. Like infants and parents, performers and audience members deploy their mirror systems to cue each other within the web of mutuality their art has created. The mirror system at the heart of social interaction for cognitive scientists is very different from Jacques Lacan’s proposed “mirror stage” for human development. Following a scientific consensus that was prevalent fifty years ago, Lacan stated that the mirror stage (when an infant is able to recognize his or her own image as a unique self) is part of an infant’s “imaginary” engagement with the world. Until children begin to acquire language around the age of one year, believed Lacan, their relation to the real world is “imaginary”— largely delusory, inflexible, and lacking in complexity. Psychotics

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unable to socialize with others have reverted to the “imaginary” stage, said Lacan.42 This outdated contention (embraced, nonetheless, by numerous literary and theatrical theorists) contradicts much of the current evidence that stands behind the mid-level theories of cognitive scientists working on infant development as well as Dissanayake’s use of this evidence for her approach to infancy and creativity. Contrary to Lacan, infants are rapid, proactive learners in their search for sociality; they use their mirror systems with significant others to build numerous capacities for later interactions, including social relations basic to language and the arts.43 The centrality of our mirror systems calls into question the conclusions of several other theorists who have used Lacanian assumptions to shape their ideas of audience response. As extended by Dissanayake’s discussion of the arts, the science of human mirror systems proposes that performance is both interactive and intentional. Judith Butler’s theory about the performative construction of gender, in contrast, denies significant intentionality to infants, who only gain subjectivity after their enculturation; Butler’s position replaces intentional interaction with one-way behavioral conditioning. In the midst of their interactions, parents and infants often lock eyes in mutual gazing, but “the gaze,” according to some Lacanian performance theorists, leads later to Othering and objectification, not an elaboration of learning and pleasure. Lacanian Othering assumes that the self and social others are often natural antagonists. In contrast, the mutual mirroring that occurs all the time between the self and others assumes that there is a natural basis in infancy and social relationships for human cooperation.44 Of Props and Puppets Among the capabilities that caregiver–infant bonding ensures, says Dissanayake, is a “hands-on” competence for living. An important part of this competence involves parents’ helping infants to learn how to manipulate objects. Actors typically demonstrate their own hands-on competence and that of their characters every time they handle a prop. In The Stage Life of Props, Andrew Sofer defines and discusses stage properties in a way that is consonant with the findings of cognitive science. Objecting that semiotics dematerializes props into signs, Sofer insists on their material importance in his definition. A prop, says Sofer, is “a discrete, material, inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor in the course of performance.”45 This definition distinguishes between props and other material items on

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stage on the basis of the object’s use by an actor. A beer bottle on the table in the Kowalski’s kitchen of Streetcar is just set decoration until actor/Stanley picks it up. Some items, such as a chair, can serve both as set decor and stage property. If sat on, the chair remains furniture. If manipulated by actor/Mitch to stand on and hang up the paper lantern that actor/Blanche wants to use to cover the light bulb in her sister’s bedroom, the piece of furniture becomes a temporary prop. Put another way, until an actor picks them up and manipulates them, “props” are really only props-in-waiting. Manipulation, when it occurs, links the prop to an actor/character’s intentionality. The moment of manipulation is a crucial transition for spectatorial vision. At that instant, the audience ceases to look at the potential prop as a part of the visual surround and shifts its gaze to generating a visuomotor representation to attempt to understand how the actor is using the prop-in-the-hand to support her or his character’s emotions and intentions. Sofer’s discussion of General Gabler’s pistols in Hedda Gabler provides a good example of this transition.46 The dueling pistols prominently displayed over the mantelpiece on the set of Ibsen’s play are ominous symbols of Hedda’s paternal legacy and of the rigid codes of honor and respectability that constrain her. If they are following the action, audiences will generate visual perceptions that connect the pistols to these factors in Hedda’s background and environment. When Hedda takes the pistols down from their prominence as set décor, however, audiences will shift their attention to how and why she is going to use them for her present purposes. She gives one pistol to Lovborg to induce him to commit a beautiful suicide and eventually fires the other into herself to fulfill her deadly aesthetic project. As actor/Hedda is performing these activities, spectators will unconsciously use their mirror systems to generate visuomotor representations that help them to read her mind. The pistols still carry the same symbolic weight as before, but now that weight has been brought to bear on the present action. Props-in-waiting have become props in deed. In much the same way, a stage costume can become a prop. In It, his meditation on the charisma of many performers, Joseph Roach states that “nothing intensifies interest in clothes—or in the person wearing them—quite like putting them on or taking them off.”47 Roach gives as two examples the staging of Dorimant’s morning toilet that begins The Man of Mode and modern striptease acts. As Roach notes, strippers nowadays sometimes work their act backward, starting completely naked and gradually putting on their clothes. In either mode, the stripper’s handling of her clothes zips flesh to intention,

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heightening the erotic appeal of both in the minds of most spectators. Apart from some of the great strippers of show biz history, the most successful deployment of costuming as prop was probably Loie Fuller’s evocation of diaphanous immateriality through fabric, light, and dancerly intention around the turn of the previous century. Fuller patented a technique that allowed her to swirl and sculpt yards of billowing silk through the movements of her legs and by manipulating long wands embedded in her costume and attached to her hands. Under the right lighting—usually from below, above, and behind-Fuller could create the dynamic illusion of a flowering violet, an ocean wave, or a slithering Salome.48 Fuller’s injection of life into fabric is akin to puppetry. Recall the transition that a hand puppet undergoes from when it is lying on a table as a loose lump of cloth with a “dead” head to when a person places her or his hand inside the puppet and begins to animate it. Spectators watching this transformation are invited to shift abruptly from visual perception to visuomotor representation. Not surprisingly, the instant “life” that human intentionality gives to the object and the shift in vision it produces often create a wonder and joy akin to infant happiness. When this extension is pushed to the limits in the Japanese puppet theatre of Bunraku or in some of Julie Taymor’s productions involving actor/puppets in fantastical costumes, spectators often thrill to the widening of human possibility that such spectacles reveal. Watching actor/puppet-giraffes in The Lion King lope across the stage, for example, engages and stretches our mirror systems and other parts of our minds to puzzle out how human beings can coordinate their muscles for such curious purposes. Because both are linked to human intentionality and to the mirror systems of spectators, props and puppets have much in common. The performances of object-animators such as Paul Zaloom, who make scrub brushes and soup cans “talk” and “walk,” lead to the conclusion that there can be no hard-and-fast distinctions between the two.49 As these examples suggest, props often serve as human tools. If we enlarge our usual understanding of a tool to include anything that extends the capabilities of the human body, many props that serve diverse purposes actually become tools. Othello’s pillow used for smothering Desdemona is an extension of the hand, Strindberg’s speaking tube in Miss Julie enlarges the capabilities of speech and hearing, and Mother Courage’s wagon furthers the human capacity to carry things and the mind/brain’s and hands’ ability to engage in trade. The prop–tool connection takes us back to human evolution.

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In this important sense, stage props may be said to derive from the specialized stones that hominids crafted for cutting, scraping, mixing, and killing. Crossing the divide between the actor’s material body and the fictional narrative, props are theatre’s representational tools. The bottle of morphine that Voynitsky has stolen from Dr. Astrov’s medicine bag when Act IV of Vanya begins suggests several of the ways that props may function for audiences. In the initial production of 1899, and probably in most subsequent productions, the bottle looked like one that a country doctor might procure from a local chemist—perhaps the Moscow Art Theatre had actually purchased the right kind of bottle at a nearby shop. As Bert States has noted, the rise of stage realism involved the “progressive colonization of the real world” for the theatre; directors, designers, and technicians moved more and more of the material world onto the stage. Part of this colonizing process was likely the placement of a real morphine bottle in Voynitsky’s desk for the start of Act IV. In addition to validating the believability of the realist world of the play, Chekhov’s and the MAT’s bottle of morphine in Vanya functioned like all tools that extend our physical capabilities—in this case, for comforting or killing each other and ourselves. We can imagine that actor/Astrov’s insistence that the morphine be returned to him and actor/Voynitsky’s denial that he has taken it was the focus of a roughly five-minute argument between them in the MAT production. Sofer points to many functions that props often play in onstage action, and the morphine bottle likely fulfilled several of them in 1899 for the duration of the scene. The drug “motivate[d] the stage action,” was “fetishized” by Voynitsky, and “absorb[ed] dramatic meaning [to] become [a] complex symbol,” but in the end was “defamiliarized.”50 Curiously, actor/ Voynitsky’s denial that he is hiding the bottle constituted a kind of fetishization of the object; the morphine represented his desire to end his despair through suicide and, in his mind, giving up the bottle would have meant accepting a life of pain. In the course of their argument, the morphine likely accreted several layers of symbolic meaning for the auditors. Spectators saw that Voynitsky has always been in denial, that he has drugged himself with romantic hopes for much of his life, and that these hopes, while comforting, are also potentially deadly. Finally, actor/Sonya’s tenderness accomplished what the doctor’s argumentation could not, and Voynitsky returned the bottle.

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Significantly, this was the first time in the scene that the audience actually saw the morphine, and then only for less than a minute. What had become freighted with fetishization and symbolism was suddenly an ordinary medical bottle in 1899. Its familiarity effectively deflated its meanings and it became defamiliarized, in the sense that it pointed only to itself rather than to other referents. Actor/Astrov’s handling of the prop, as he checked the bottle and unceremoniously packed it away in his medical bag, probably underlined its ordinariness. Like his seagull in the play of that title—a prop that becomes both a meaningful symbol and a mere dead bird— Chekhov kept his morphine bottle on a tight naturalistic leash. He was too much the medical doctor and environmentalist to allow his audience to fetishize and symbolize his props with the same free reign as his protagonist. Although the morphine bottle emerges briefly from Voynitsky’s desk only to vanish again into the doctor’s bag, other props and their manipulators soon populate the action at the end of the play. The rise of realism encouraged dramatists to make copious use of objects on stage—walls, furniture, and décor as well as props—and Chekhov kept the MAT stagehands hopping to alter these objects at each of the act breaks of his major plays. Phenomenologist Stanton Garner observes that stage realism “made possible a liberation of the ‘thing,’ as prop joined setting in a new ‘objectness,’ a materiality increasingly freed from the illustrative and the instrumental. As stage objects proliferated and asserted an increasing density, manipulability gave way to an independence from—and eventually, an antagonism toward— the human subject’s attempt to appropriate and humanize its spatial surroundings.” Garner concludes that it “is an easy jump from Hedda Gabler’s scenic claustrophobia to the cluttered junkshop of David Mamet’s American Buffalo. . . .”51 While Garner’s observation is true for some plays, it does not apply to Uncle Vanya. Chekhov understood that objects linked to actors’ manipulability—that is props— could be more oppressive than objects cut loose from human intentionality. The final scene of the play surrounds Voynitsky with other characters using props to pursue their immediate goals—Telegin strums his guitar, Mama reads her book, Nurse clicks her knitting needles, and Sonya busies herself with ink pen and abacus to resolve the accounts of the estate. This situation of prop-heavy normalcy, of course, only heightens Voynitsky’s isolation, impotence, and sadness for himself and the audience. As does Beckett in Godot (think of Estragon’s shoes), Chekhov emphasizes the link between objects and

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human agency, if only to point up the often painful absurdity of human beings trying to effect their will in a material world. Gestures and Speech In performances of Vanya, as in all stage productions that include props, actor/characters must integrate the props they handle into their own gestures. For many cognitive scientists, gesture is directly linked to speech. Among scientists who study the relationship between gestures and speech in everyday life, an older tradition posits that these communicative modes are separate systems, which occasionally join together when speakers feel the need to support or emphasize their talk through gesturing.52 More recent experimental evidence, however, suggests that gesture and speech are a part of a single communicative system. So tight is the coupling between speech and gesture, according to this point of view, that the disruption of one of these modes will have an adverse effect on the other. In his Gesture and Thought (2005), David McNeill synthesizes much of this recent evidence to make a strong case for the single-system approach. “It is profoundly an error to think of gesture as a code or ‘body language,’ separate from spoken language,” McNeill asserts. “[G]estures are part of language” (emphasis in original).53 Needless to say, this understanding of speech and gesture as a single communicative system has profound implications for theatrical spectatorship. McNeill presents a wide array of experimental evidence to substantiate his claim. By “gestures,” McNeill means the kind of common gesticulations of hands, arms, head, and so on that accompany everyday speech, not the more formalized movement patterns of pantomime or of sign languages for the hearing impaired. Scientists who have videotaped thousands of conversations note that speaking and gesturing (among populations without severe disabilities) occur in synchrony; in these gesture-speech events, the mind seems to be doing the same thing in two ways. Further, these moments are “co-expressive.” “Co-expressive, but not redundant,” notes McNeill: “Gesture and speech express the same underlying idea unit but express it in their own ways”—ways that are dialectically reinforcing.54 A close look at these videos also shows that gestures tend to be strongly metaphorical. McNeill had several of his subjects explain what they saw in a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon, for example, and notes that all of them used a gesture that combined upward movement and interiority when they spoke about one cartoon figure chasing another

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up through a drainpipe. Because gestures and speech are mutually informing, the metaphoricity of most gestures helps to account for the prevalence of metaphor in everyday speech. Of course, there are times when speakers do not gesture. McNeill’s experiments suggest that this occurs when there is little thought behind what is being said; a speaker’s memory may have failed or the speaker may be reciting something by rote. Amateur actors focused on their memorized lines often suffer from the latter problem, of course, and appear “wooden” on stage. Perhaps McNeill’s best evidence comes from an impaired man he calls IW. At age nineteen, IW suffered the neurological loss of all sense of touch and spatial awareness below the neck, with the result that he could not do simple manual tasks like shaving and eating without carefully watching himself perform them. His speech and other cognitive functions were completely unaffected, however. McNeill hypothesized that if he prevented IW from watching his hands and arms and asked him to speak about a topic of interest to him, IW would nonetheless gesture while he was speaking. If gestures are hardwired to speech in the brain but not connected to instrumental motor actions, IW should gesture while talking, despite his disability. Many experiments confirmed McNeill’s hypothesis. The gestures that accompanied IW’s conversation were completely normal in terms of the variables tracked by McNeill and his associates. He concludes, “Control of the hands and the relevant motor neurons is possible directly from the thought-linguistic system. Without vision, IW’s dissociation of gesture, which remains intact, and instrumental action, which is impaired, implies that the know-how of gesture is not the same as the know-how of instrumental movement.” 55 In terms of the operation of the mind/brain, speech and gesture appear to be part of a single system. McNeill, in fact, calls both kinds of expressions gestures—articulatory and manual gestures. Both rest, finally, on physiological motor operations. Actors bond articulatory and manual gestures together in the rehearsal process. Modern, Western actors usually allow their manual gestures to emerge spontaneously after they put down their scripts and begin to work up their interactions with other actor/ characters; they rarely plan specific gestures ahead of time, although they may consciously shape some of their gestures after they have arisen in rehearsal. In cultures where the manual gestures of actor/ characters are more formalized, actors may learn the conventional gestures that are meant to accompany certain kinds of passages in a

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script before they learn the actual words of a particular play. David Garrick and the actors of eighteenth-century Europe worked in this way. Performers of kathakali, the Indian dance-drama, take this a step further. Because separate performers vocalize the script while others dance the characters, the simultaneity and co-expressiveness of speech and gesture demand close coordination between the vocalizers and the dancers in kathakali.56 Whatever the style of theatre, performers in all cultures try to ensure that articulatory and manual gestures are mutually reinforcing. “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action”—Hamlet’s advice to the players about gesturing and speaking—appears to be a cognitive mandate for all performance. Long before cognitive science discovered it, actors have always treated gestural (articulatory and manual) events as single units of communication. We can take as an example excerpts from Blanche’s “Don’t hang back with the brutes” speech in Streetcar to examine, at least hypothetically, how some of these units may occur in performance. Blanche’s bravura speech is the highpoint of Scene Four, the morning after the poker party, when Blanche tries to pry her sister loose from her libidinous thrall to Stanley. After berating Stella for marrying a man who is not a gentleman, Blanche let’s her have it with both barrels: He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There’s even something—subhuman—something not quite to the stage of humanity yet. Yes, something—ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I’ve seen in—anthropological studies. . . . His poker night!—you call it—this party of apes! Somebody growls—some creature snatches at something—the fight is on! God! Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella—my sister—there has been some progress since then. . . . In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching. . . . Don’t— don’t hang back with the brutes! (ital in original)57

Like many of Williams’s speeches for his leading ladies, this monologue works as much in the self-expressive as in the representational mode, to use States’ helpful terminology. Because Blanche is pulling out the rhetorical stops to save her sister (as she believes), the actor performing this aria has a clear license from the playwright to impress the audience with all the appropriate emotional pyrotechnics she can muster. In an excellent performance, theatre savvy spectators will

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oscillate between a rush of several emotions for the actor/character and rapt admiration for the actress. A simple reading of this speech already suggests that Williams melds implicit manual gestures into his dialogue with such ease that good actors have a panoply of riches to choose from when they embody and give voice to Blanche at this point in the play. As McNeill explains, speech-gesture units in everyday conversation emerge from the thoughts of the participants, and their thoughts follow from their intentions and emotions. McNeill draws on the ideas of social psychologist Lev Vygotsky to explain this phenomenon. The manual and articulatory gestures that express a thought, said Vygotsky, are not the product of other thoughts. “[A thought] is engendered by motivation, i.e., by our desires and needs, our interests and emotions. Behind every thought there is an affective-volitional tendency. . . .”58 Vygotsky’s sequence occurs in performance on stage. In common actor parlance deriving from the ideas of Stanislavsky, actors engender the thoughts of their characters by playing the intentions and working within the emotions of their roles. By altering their intentions and emotions, actors trigger a different “beat,” a new unit of thought distinct in speech and gesture from the previous one. Stanislavsky’s “system” and its spin-off in American Method acting is one way to ensure that new gestural events emerge from new intentions and/or emotions. While director Elia Kazan and his actors used this approach in 1947, all systems of acting find ways of organically marrying a shift in motivation to a shift in gestural behavior for actor/characters. Although the actor doing a “beat analysis” of “Don’t hang back with the brutes” has many options to choose from, the general structure of Williams’s speech will guide most performers in their choices. Blanche begins by speaking about her disgust with Stanley, hoping to invoke the same disgust in her sister. As she builds up the picture of Stanley and his poker night, Blanche moves from disgust to ridicule. When her sister fails to respond to that strategy, Blanche invokes a Manichean contrast between the progress of civilization, to which she and Stella belong, and the Neanderthal existence of Stanley and his pals. In addition to these major shifts, there are several minor ones, generally noted by a “dash” in the punctuation, that usually indicate a new thought, often motivated by a sudden change in emotion. Throughout, as her sister fails to respond to her pleading, Blanche’s fear and panic increase; the actress must be close to hysteria by the end.

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On stage, as in everyday life, new thoughts lead to new units of gestural communication. Looking at Williams’s words and thinking about the probable “beats” that actor/Blanche will embody and articulate, it is not difficult to predict where some of her major manual gestures will likely occur. In the excerpts of the speech cited above, Williams provides several probable gestural moments for actor/ Blanche as she speaks the following syllables and words: “animal,” “subhuman,” “ape-like,” “poker,” “apes,” “growls,” “snatches,” “God!,” “sister,” “some,” “grow,” “cling,” “Don’t,” and “brutes.” Actor/Blanche’s moment-to-moment thoughts, motivated by changes in her intentions and emotions, will spring these words from her mouth and, following McNeill, animate concurrent gestures from her body. We can easily imagine what actor/Blanche might be doing with her hands, arms, head, and shoulders when she says “ape-like,” “sister,” and “cling.” These and the other vocal-manual moments outline the major developments of the entire speech and also suggest the increasing hysteria and speed that embodying these movements and voicings will demand of the actor. The actual physical movements of most of actor/Blanche’s manual gestures will vary from night to night, but her timing of these gestures, because they are linked to the words and “beats” she is playing in the scene, will generally remain the same. How will the audience understand these conjunctions of articulatory and manual gestures? Spectators in the theatre need not be aware that speech-gesture events are single units of communication to respond to them as such. In fact, as McNeill points out, a spectator’s mirror system will handle both kinds of gestures as orchestrated motor actions. Neuropsychologists have long identified Broca’s area in the frontal lobe of the brain as the coordinator of human speech. Cognitive scientists are now broadening that definition to include all systems that coordinate goal-directed actions, including our mirror system. Says McNeill, “Broca’s area is more than a ‘speech center.’ It is the area of the brain orchestrating actions under some significance— that is, it is the area of the brain that assembles sequences of movements and/or complexes of moving parts into performance packages unified by goals, meanings, and adaptability” (ital in original).59 Injury to Broca’s area results in a type of aphasia (a neurological disability, interestingly, mentioned by Lucky in Godot). Those who suffer from Broca’s aphasia cannot orchestrate their articulatory and manual gestures, with the result that their vocalizations and hand gestures have great difficulty supporting communicative meaning.60 Because it

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impairs the mirror system, spectators with Broca’s aphasia could not mentally coordinate the simultaneous speech and actions of actors/ characters on stage to understand what they are communicating. Most humans, in contrast, do this automatically when they are watching a play. When they are enjoying actor/Blanche in the midst of her “Don’t hang back with the brutes” speech, then, audiences will see and hear her vocal and manual gestures as mutually supportive and use these gestural events to understand her intentions and emotions. They will not read language and gesture as separate sign systems, nor will they usually assume that the actor/character’s words are more important than the manual gestures that accompany them (or vice versa). Spectators must also figure out what the words that they are hearing probably mean, but these acts of memory are a part of the more general mental effort to understand communicative gestural units. As a system of grammar and semantics, discourse works alongside of movement for audiences; it does not stand alone. This means that the emphasis on written language as the primary carrier of meaning in the theatre in several poststructuralist theories, including deconstruction, has been misplaced. Written language is not unimportant, but it must be transformed into gestures by actors and recognized visually and aurally by audiences before it matters for meaning. In the case of actor/Blanche and her vocal and manual gestures, spectators will likely see that she is trying to separate her sister from Stanley and they will be variously sympathetic to and/or appalled by the emotions that drive her to do it. The emotional involvement of viewers is the subject of the next section. Emotional Contagion While it is a truism that most audiences go to the theatre to be moved emotionally, the nature of human emotions and their affect on spectators has only recently attracted scientific attention. Both behaviorists and cognitivists sidetracked emotion as relatively unimportant until the mid-1980s. Emotion seemed neither to play much of a role in social conditioning nor could it explain anything about cognition in the computer models of the mind/brain that dominated cognitive science. With the decline of behaviorism and first-generation cognitive science, more scientists turned their attention to emotion. There is now widespread recognition that emotions regulate thinking and behavior in numerous ways, but its precise causes and effects are subject to wide debate.

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Although cognitive scientists are approaching the general topic of emotion from several angles, no consensus has emerged about how to study or even define it. From a neuroscientific perspective, emotion is located in the brain, elicited by other brain activity as well as by external stimuli, and expressed through the release of chemicals, the activation of muscle systems, and the allocation of specific cognitive resources. Many cognitive psychologists begin with an “appraisal theory” of emotion, which links the expression of an emotion to the appraisal of an external situation. A subject walking through African grassland sees a tiger, appraises the danger to himself or herself, and experiences the emotion of fear, for example. The prototype approach, favored by some cognitive sociologists, examines social interactions as scripts for nonverbal emotional expression and traces the elicitation of these behaviors to social causes. Finally, there are some social constructionists who discount neuroscientific explanations and hold that societies construct emotions through discursive norms. They look to the symbolic expression and negotiation of emotional definitions and roles in media as well as behavior as causal factors.61 From among the four general theories noted above, I will adopt approaches to emotion in the theatre that rely on the first three. Social constructionist accounts of emotion sometimes arrive at interesting conclusions, but, from my perspective, the materiality of the mind/brain must play a major role in any credible account of emotional life, and the conclusions reached by the social constructionists can be arrived at through other, more materialist means. I will base my discussion on a recent attempted synthesis of neuroscientific, psychological, and sociological findings offered by Luc Ciompi and Jaak Panksepp in their “Energetic Effects of Emotions on Cognitions: Complementary Psychobiological and Psychosocial Findings.”62 Drawing on over a hundred books and articles, Ciompi and Panksepp examine the emotional and cognitive processes of the mind/brain as distinct but fully interactive. From their point of view, emotions, which evolved earlier than many cognitive operations, continually exert regulating and energizing influences on cognitive processing, which, in turn, can help to channel emotional energy into social action. Recognizing that scientists differ about the number and kind of emotional systems in humans, Ciompi and Panksepp base their six systems on Panksepp’s twenty-five years of neuroscientific research with higher mammals. His main criterion for an emotional system is “whether a coherent emotional response pattern can be activated by

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localized electrical and chemical stimulation along specific brain circuits, and whether such arousal has affective consequences as measured by approach and avoidance responses.”63 I will identify these basic emotional systems in capital letters throughout for the rest of the book so as not to confuse these terms with their more ordinary uses: FEAR, R AGE, PANIC, CARE, PLAY, and SEEKING. These systems entail lower-level emotional states as well, such as “anxiety” in the FEAR network and “loneliness,” a less extreme form of PANIC. The authors note that these six systems are also responsive to more primitive desires and appetites, such as thirst, hunger, safety, and lust, and that each of this neurological, chemical, and muscular activity attempts to regulate our overall bodily experiences of pain and pleasure. (This is not to deny that other cognitive operations can sometimes override our emotional regulation of pleasure and pain.) In this, Ciompi and Panksepp agree with most cognitive and biological scientists. Antonio Damasio, for example, provides this summary of the two chief biological functions of the emotions: The first function is the production of a specific reaction to an inducing situation. In an animal, for instance, the reaction may be to run or to become immobile or to beat the hell out of the enemy or to engage in pleasurable behavior. In humans, the reactions are essentially the same, tempered, one hopes by higher reason and wisdom. The second . . . is the regulation of the internal state of the organism such that it can be prepared for the specific reaction. For example, providing increased blood flow to arteries in the legs so that muscles receive extra oxygen and glucose, in the case of a flight reaction, or changing heart and breathing rhythms, in the case of freezing on the spot. In either case, and in other situations, the plan is exquisite and the execution most reliable.64

As this summary suggests, the major emotional systems are unconscious and universal to all average humans at the neuronal and chemical levels of operation, although their expression in behavior will vary among different cultures and individuals. From their review of the literature, Ciompi and Panksepp discuss several “general operator-effects” that all emotions produce on cognition. Emotions: • stimulate or, on the contrary, inhibit cognitive activities, that is they act on them as energy-regulating “motors” or “brakes;”

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• focus the attention on emotion-congruent cognitive objects, thus tending to establish an emotion-dependent hierarchy of perceiving and thinking; • preferentially store and mobilize emotion-congruent cognitions in memory; and • tend to link emotion-congruent elements and to combine them in larger cognitive entities. A good example is the emergence of global affective-cognitive judgments of the type “a nice person,” “an ugly town,” “a wonderful country,” etc. that are the result of an agglomeration of a great number of single affective-cognitive elements of corresponding affective value.65 Ciompi and Panksepp also recognize that emotions are catching.66 As we have seen, the empathy activated by our mirror system puts us in touch with the intentions and emotions of others, allowing us to catch their emotions ourselves. Again, empathy is not a type of emotion, per se, but the mental simulation triggered by others’ intentional actions often leads to the transfer of emotions from person to person. In the theatre, empathy is el camino real linking the emotional entanglements of actor/characters to the mirror neurons and chemical changes in the brains of audiences. We experience actor/Blanche’s PANIC and feel PANIC ourselves. Voynitsky is enR AGED at the professor and many spectators will share the actor’s R AGE with him. In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby, Andrew Aguecheek, and Feste engage in PLAY late into the night—a PLAYfullness typically enjoyed by the audience as well—until the actor/characters (and implicitly the spectators) are chastened by actor/Malvolio. When actor/Oedipus is SEEKING to discover his parentage, many auditors will empathize with his actions and share his emotion, even if they already know the horrible truth. Job applicants at the Top Girls Employment Agency and Angie, Marlene’s biological daughter, FEAR actor/Marlene’s power over their lives, and the audience will register some of this FEAR in their response to her. Finally, several actor/characters, including Duke Orsino, Doctor Astrov, and Marlene, CARE for others, either out of affection, lust, or motherly concern (or some combination of these and other desires), and their CARE momentarily transforms the emotional lives of spectators as well as themselves. Even merely competent performances of these plays will usually hook us into the emotional situations of these characters and the actors performing them. As spectators, we want emotional engagement and

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the chemical changes it brings to our brains; empathy often provides the means for a direct jolt. A significant body of research tracks how people mirror and catch emotions from others through empathy. Other research, done before the discovery of mirror systems, provides evidence that people can reliably view others’ bodies and faces to figure out their emotional conditions. One such study concludes that spectators use “six specific body cues to infer people’s different emotional states,” including upward arm movements, muscle tension, leaning forward, and directional changes in the face and torso. Another study shows that people deduce the emotional state of others and may catch others’ emotions by observing how they walk.67 Psychologist Paul Ekman has long claimed that specific facial expressions indicate to others the whole range of basic emotions; people use specific kinds of facial muscles for R AGE, for example, that others, regardless of their culture, will interpret as that emotion.68 Although more recent research suggests that people read the facial emotions of others partly through the lens of culture, Ekman’s work still retains substantial value for insight into what audiences see in actor’s faces, primarily because actors and spectators usually share the same culture. By mirroring faces and bodies in action, spectators catch the shifting emotions of actor/characters on stage. Further, audiences can experience the neuronal and chemical changes brought on by emotions without moving from their seats. Other research demonstrates that auditors can catch the emotions of a performance thorough sounds and voices. Experiments show that film viewers often pick up the mood, the pace, the psychology of characters, and significant turning points in the narrative from the film score.69 There is no reason to think that theatrical spectators do not use their ears and minds in the same ways, even though music typically plays a smaller role in performances of drama. Music researchers have found that musicians can communicate general emotions to listeners “with an accuracy approximately as high as in the facial and vocal expression of emotions,” regardless of whether the auditors have musical training. In part, this is because most compositions “use primarily the same emotion-specific patterns of acoustic parameters that are used in emotional speech.” 70 The usual musical features of anger (or what Panksepp would term R AGE), for example, include fast tempo, minor mode, dissonance, high sound level, high pitch, and sudden rhythmic changes. Like speech, music is linked to gesture and intention, as David McNeill understands this linkage, and the animation of motor and chemical

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responses brings emotions in their wake. In the presence of musical or spoken R AGE, audiences will recognize and embody this emotion, or any other. Put us together in an auditorium and our bodies and minds are like the inside of a good violin; we resonate and amplify emotions with each other. Emotional contagion in a theatre is automatic and usually very quick. Audiences will tend to laugh, cry, and even gasp simultaneously. The more spectators join together in one emotion, the more empathy shapes the emotional response of the rest. As Jill Dolan acknowledges in Utopia in Performance, the feeling of communitas that sometimes unites an audience can provide hope for political change. “This, for me, is the beginning (and perhaps the substance) of the utopian performative; in the performer’s grace, in the audience’s generosity, in the lucid power of intersubjective understanding, however fleeting,” says Dolan.71 I agree, but would add that grace, generosity, and intersubjective understanding are most likely to occur in the theatre when CARE is present to wrap spectators and actors together in communitas. Dolan is also right to emphasize that performances can touch us in a way that opens up the possibility of moving beyond identity politics and “reanimating humanism as a desirable goal.”72 The species-wide levels of much cognition, including empathy and emotion, do provide a basis for the goals of humanism. But, of course, they also provide a basis for a social life that is nasty, brutish, and short—a life stuck in FEAR, PANIC, and R AGE. Emotional contagion does not always animate humanistic emotions. Uniting a theatre audience through empathy is not as easy as it used to be, however. When Western audiences could see each other in lighted auditoriums, the facial expressions and bodily movements of others in their seats—in addition to their audible vocalizations— helped to evoke a more uniform response among spectators than today, when darkened houselights inhibit emotional contagion. Writing in 1758, Denis Diderot marveled at how quickly emotions had ignited the mostly male Parisian audiences in the recent past: Fifteen years ago our theatres were tumultuous places. The coolest heads got overheated on entering and reasonable men more or less shared the transports of the mad. . . . People became agitated, moved about, pushed one another, spirits went wild. What mood could be more favorable to a poet? The play commenced with difficulty and was interrupted often, but when a good part was reached . . . the enthusiasm went from the parterre to the loges, and from the loges to the boxes. The people had arrived

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flush with excitement; they left the theatre intoxicated. . . . It was like a storm that would dissipate far in the distance, a storm whose rumbling would last long after it had moved on. That was pleasure.73

Although Diderot mourned the passing of extreme emotional contagion in the playhouse, the audiences of his own time were scarcely less flammable than before. The emotional audiences of Diderot’s era spawned Parisian clacquers. This is the French term for a group of spectators hired by an actor to respond with enthusiasm when the performer needed a lift from the house. Clacquers could use the full range of gestures— manual, vocal, and bodily—to rouse other spectators to their level of feigned admiration and delight. Significantly, clacque work diminished with the dimming of house lights; it is harder to infect others with enthusiasm through auditory gestures alone. Watching plays in the dark with others—actors as well as fellow spectators—still provides for the circulation of emotion through empathy, but the conditions of most spectating today render the dynamics of empathy in the auditorium closer to contemporary film viewing than to most theatre before 1850, when interaction among spectators and actors was common and energizing. A performance by the American star Edwin Forrest before his devoted working-class male fans in the 1840s animated behavior among spectators that was more like a hockey game than a play performance today.74 The shift in empathetic engagement over the past one-hundred and fifty years cannot be blamed entirely on dimmed house lights, of course, but that change did play a significant role. Sympathy and Antipathy While most actor/characters and dramatic narratives continue to press spectators’ neuronal buttons connecting empathy to emotional response throughout a performance, plays also seek to engage our feelings. According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, feelings are emotions or other bodily states made conscious: “Emotion was probably set in evolution before the dawn of consciousness and surfaces in each of us as a result of inducers we often do not recognize consciously; on the other hand, feelings perform their ultimate and longer-lasting effects in the theatre of the conscious mind.”75 Damasio assumes that feelings emerge from emotions when the mind/brain organizes neuronal patterns that interact with other networks sparking and regulating consciousness. In their synthesis of the neurological,

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psychological, and social processes that stimulate and regulate emotions, Ciompi and Panksepp recognize that emotions can work their way into consciousness, but (partly because the basis for this neurological mobility is poorly understood) they make no firm distinction between emotions and feelings. Nonetheless, such a distinction is useful, if only for heuristic reasons. Conscious emotions or feelings, whichever they are called, play a significant role in audience judgment and interpretation. In the theatre, feelings are usually registered as sympathy or antipathy. While they are experiencing actor/Blanche’s rising PANIC in her “Don’t hang back with the brutes” speech, many spectators will transform their directly mirrored emotion into a more general, conscious feeling of sympathy for the actor/character. Other audience members, put off by Blanche’s manipulations, may transform her PANIC into their antipathy. In her Reading With Feeling, aesthetician Susan Feagin elaborates the cognitive dimensions of sympathy and antipathy experienced by readers of fiction, and many of her observations are relevant to theatrical spectatorship. When readers sympathize with a fictional character, she says, they step back from direct empathetic engagement: “The degree to which one empathizes depends on the depth of simulation. A sympathetic response, however, does not involve simulating the mental activity and processes of the protagonist; it instead requires having feelings or emotions that are in concert with the interests or desires the sympathizer (justifiably) attributes to the protagonist.”76 Feagin acknowledges that empathy usually comes first because mind reading draws a reader (or spectator) into the emotions of the character (or actor/character) and deepens his/her understanding of the character’s (stage figure’s) situation and point of view. In the theatre, after the spectator “gets to know” the stage person, s/he may mentally shift gears from empathizing to sympathizing. Spectators can shift back again to empathy, and often do, but the two are separate cognitive operations. Rather than stepping into an actor/character’s shoes, sympathy involves the spectator in projecting her or his own beliefs and feelings onto the stage figure. Both sympathy and its opposite, antipathy, require conscious attribution and appraisal. With sympathy, says Feagin, we attribute desires and interests to another person and then “take on [that person’s] interests as our own.” 77 As a result, we feel with them in their struggles to gain their goals, rejoice when they are successful, and experience sadness when they fail. Because sympathy requires an evaluation that another person’s desires and interests are good, it brings emotions—the spectator’s and the

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actor/character’s—into consciousness. Most spectators, for example, will sympathize with actor/ Viola in performances of Twelfth Night and will know that they do so. Antipathy is also dependent upon spectatorial feelings. Instead of hoping for the best for an actor/character, antipathy constitutes Schadenfreude, the enjoyment of another person’s misfortune. As with sympathy, the mind/brain makes a judgment about another person’s relative goodness before the spectator is aware of “feeling against.” Similar to sympathy, audiences side with or against actor/characters on the basis of their desires and interests in the world of the play, not on whether they might like to live next door to such a person. Professor Serebryakov may make a nice enough neighbor, but very few people watching Uncle Vanya as Chekhov seems to have intended it will probably like him very much. Feagin’s ideas about reader and spectator sympathy and antipathy are based upon an appraisal theory of emotions. Keith Oatley’s appraisal theory, in particular, emphasizes that conscious appraisal always precedes emotional response. “. . . [E]motions are elicited not by events as such but by evaluations of events relevant to goals,” he states.78 The general goal of all spectator-evaluators is the same as the goal of every human being: to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, the two foundational values of our biological lives. While these goals are often complicated by other purposes, Feagin’s sympathy and antipathy are linked in a general way to the primal purpose of our emotions—survival. In this sense, sympathetic and antipathetic investments are best understood as general orientations to a spectator’s pleasure and pain experienced vicariously through actor/ characters during a performance. Actor/characters that bring mostly pleasure to others in their fictional worlds and to empathizing spectators are candidates for sympathetic engagement, while those that cause repeated pain are usually condemned to antipathy. Obviously, our appraisal of many actor/characters will not run to extremes of sympathy or antipathy, and some that initially inspire vague sympathy may later be condemned to violent antipathy (and vice versa). Much of this ongoing spectatorial evaluation hinges on appraising the plans, as well as the desires and interests, of actor/characters, according to Oatley. He also emphasizes that such appraisal invariably rests on social values. Social values are often tied to social prototypes. Recall that the human need to classify perceptions leads the mind/brain to form basic-level concepts, specific memories that accord with “chair,” “face,” and “road,” and so on. These categorical neuronal groupings

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are so basic to human life that they occur in all cultures. Cognitive linguists since the 1970s have noted that many of these basic level categories are organized according to degrees of typicality.79 In the category “bird” for English speakers, for example, robins are more typical of the category as a whole than eagles, eagles are more typical than penguins, and ostriches hardly seem to be birds at all. Because the mind/brain must classify, humans often typify other people in the same general way, as being more or less representative of a certain occupation, race, or age, and so on. Humans also recognize different kinds of prototypes within a general category. For the category, “the national character of America,” for instance, many people around the world could easily come up with social stereotypes, ideal cases, paragons, and other kinds of prototypes. Given our evolutionary inheritance, social categorizing is inevitable for humans. As we know, some categories can be socially and individually destructive, but all people have the ability to get past initial racist and sexist stereotyping, for example, through other modes of categorizing. All spectators carry social prototypes in their mind/brains when they enter the playhouse, and many of these figures have been prejudged along the continuum of sympathy and antipathy that typecasts them. We watch plays after having already made up our minds about middle-aged male drunkards and young female flirts, for example, and can generally spot these prototypes immediately when they appear on stage. Although critical parlance generally relegates minor characters to “types,” it is important to recognize that audiences initially classify all actor/characters according to social prototypes in their heads that are related both to basic level categorical universals and to the beliefs and values of the individuals and their historical cultures. To their first audiences at the start of the show, Oedipus was probably a prideful tyrant, Malvolio an overweening servant, and Uncle Vanya a love-struck fool. Of course, much of the fun of good theatre is to watch how actor/characters move beyond the initial prototypes we have assigned to them to deepen and complicate our sympathies and antipathies. Sometimes, however, they simply confirm our initial expectations. Feagin makes it clear that the orientations of sympathy and antipathy can lead to a variety of emotional responses from audiences during performance. Soon after a classic melodrama begins, the audience will likely regard the prototypical villain with antipathy. But this general orientation to the villain can prompt many responses as the melodrama continues. Spectators may experience FEAR (when the villain is planning to kidnap the heroine), joy, a cognate

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of PLAY (when the villain’s plot is foiled), and even CARE (when the villain pleads for his life and promises to reform). Note that these major emotional shifts in the audience’s response to the villain occur, as Oatley would predict, when the villain changes his plans. “Emotions emerge at . . . significant junctures in plans,” says Oatley.80 Actor/characters seeking to maximize their own objectives adopt subgoals, or plans, in pursuing the general goal of well-being. Oatley’s terminology of goals and plans is strikingly similar to Stanislavsky’s vocabulary of general objectives and specific intentions (or “beats”). As we have seen, spectators often register a change in an actor/character’s intentions with an emotional response, which could lead the spectator to reevaluate his/her own pleasure/pain orientation to that figure. Some actor/characters escape easy attribution. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is a good example of a figure that has ranged from comic, to pathetic, to villainous (and sometimes all three in a single production) in the eyes of actors and spectators over the four hundred years of his stage life. While Elizabethan spectators probably typed him initially as a humorous Jew, it is not clear how they judged him by the end of the courtroom scene. How European and U.S. audiences have understood actor/Shylock’s actions has undoubtedly had as much to do with changing stereotypes of Jews as with Shakespeare’s play.81 Arguably, Williams crafted his “Don’t hang back with the brutes” speech to induce an audience to project both sympathy and antipathy onto actor/Blanche, with the balance tipped slightly toward sympathy. Not all spectators, however, have been willing to sympathize with a PANIC-stricken southern woman of strong sexual appetites who threatens to break up the marriage of her sister. In fact, most audience members watching the original production of Streetcar in 1947, 1948, and 1949 sided with Brando’s Stanley over Jessica Tandy’s Blanche. As I recount in my American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War, Brando played Stanley as a vulnerable, explosive war veteran and Tandy interpreted Blanche as a quivering, often shrill neurotic, both with director Elia Kazan’s encouragement.82 Several critics condemned Blanche as a disturbed nymphomaniac who should not have tempted Stanley with her sexual availability. Likewise, most critics ignored or explained away the rape at the climax of the play. Harold Clurman, who did not share this critical consensus, commented: “The play [in performance] becomes the triumph of Stanley Kowalski with the collusion of the

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audience. . . . [T]his is natural because Miss Tandy is fragile without being touching,” while Brando as Stanley “was touching without being irredeemably coarse.”83 In my book, I claim that Kazan and his cast bear some of the responsibility for pushing the original Streetcar into film noir territory, but also that the culture of the early cold war encouraged and applauded such an interpretation of Williams’s masterpiece. The belief that Brando/Stanley was justified in his attempt to get rid of Tandy/Blanche was widely shared by the original audience. Using the 1947 production of Streetcar to explore how and why many in the audience came to perceive it as they did foregrounds the necessary importance of social beliefs and prototypes in the attribution of sympathy and antipathy in spectating. Basically, the family values of the postwar era worked in collusion with Brando and Tandy’s performances to encourage negative feelings against Blanche and positive ones toward Stanley. Kazan had directed Tandy to emphasize Blanche’s negative qualities in the first four scenes, expecting, as he recorded in his notebook, that the audience would later come to realize “how warm, tender, loving she can be.”84 But this assumes that the audience will not already have judged and dismissed her as overbearing, hypocritical, and predatory. While different actors have interpreted Blanche’s growing insanity in different ways, it seems that Tandy’s desperation and hysteria convinced most of the audience that she was crazy by the time of the first intermission. In addition, many spectators probably judged her as a home wreaker after her “Don’t hang back with the brutes” speech. Settling down, buying a home, and raising a family was a social mandate for the generation that had suffered the loss or delay of home and family as a result of the Depression and the war. Put another way, because Blanche fit part of the stereotype of the sexually aggressive home wrecker, many in the audience probably FEARed her. The dominant culture idealized marriage and family, even if the husband was confused and violent. Tandy/Blanche’s hysterical manipulations, from that point of view, threatened to permanently alienate a troubled but loving young couple from each other. Despite his bad behavior in Scene Three, when he hits Stella, Brando’s Stanley offered the postwar audience much to commend in the first few scenes of the play. He was down to earth, where Tandy/ Blanche put on airs; forceful, while the crazy sister vacillated; sincere and loving, rather than theatrical and bossy. Some spectators may have worried about the character’s explosiveness, but most had seen

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veterans returning from the war with hairpin triggers on their emotions. From their point of view, Brando/Stanley’s condition was unfortunate, but forgivable. By the end of Scene Four, it was evident to most spectators that Brando/Stanley loved his wife and had succeeded in keeping his marriage together. For many, this was a major triumph! The war had also taught audiences—and mainstream American culture—to idealize male forcefulness and cunning. By the first intermission, it was apparent to most in the audience that Brando/ Stanley was a winner and that he was right to look out for his own interests—no one else would! Tough male qualities had just won a world war and these qualities, more important than the softness and sensitivity of Hunter/Stella, would help families to battle the difficult realities of postwar America. Williams does paint a warmer, more even-tempered Blanche beginning with Scene Five, after the intermission. And Kazan’s hunch that the audience might come to view her more sympathetically in later scenes has proven right in other productions.85 But the casting of Brando and Tandy, the cultural biases of the postwar era, and Kazan’s prejudices in his directing of Streetcar probably locked in the sympathies and antipathies of most of the audience at intermission time, when the audience had a chance to review their feelings. As previously noted, spectators tend to focus on “emotioncongruent objects” once their evaluations of people and situations, including actor/characters, are established. Several of the next three scenes after the first intermission provided enough of those “objects” in Williams’s script to confirm most spectators in their earlier feelings. Scene Five features the newsboy incident, when Blanche considers seducing a young man. In Scene Six, Blanche tells Mitch about her first marriage to a gay husband and his suicide after Blanche “outed” him on the dance floor. Today, the scene will likely evoke tremendous CARE for Blanche and the hope, a variety of SEEKING, that she and Mitch will marry. In postwar American society, however, near the height of the U.S. culture’s PANIC about homosexuality, Blanche’s unfortunate marriage would have branded her as decadent and doomed her relationship with Mitch. Scene Seven contains Stanley’s revelations about Blanche’s past. Many in the audience would have added nymphomania to Tandy/Blanche’s sins during the performance of that scene. At the same time, they would probably have understood Brando/Stanley’s roughness with Stella as the necessary tough love of a man eager to get his wife back. Kazan’s production made it easy for a 1947 audience to conclude that Blanche had to leave

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the Kowalski household, one way or another, because she was poisoning their marriage. These sympathetic and antipathetic engagements did not prepare the audience very well for the rest of the play. Williams makes it clear that Stanley’s decision to tell Mitch about Blanche’s past ruins their likely marriage. The script is also unambiguous about the fact that Stanley’s rape tips Blanche into madness. An audience primed to take Brando/Stanley’s side against Tandy/Blanche, however, cannot accommodate this information. The result of this cognitive dissonance for most of the Broadway critics was evasion, misinterpretation, and outright denial. On the other hand, there was a certain logic to this critical myopia, for if Blanche were already crazy, Stanley’s acts against her, including rape, could matter very little. More likely, though, it was not the logic of this position that carried most critical and, evidently, audience opinion. Emotions and feelings in the theatre can sweep all before them. Kazan and his two major actors led postwar spectators by their value-laden prototypes: early in the performance, they learned to CARE for a soldier-boy husband and to FEAR a sexually aggressive home wrecker. Once they perceived these prototypes and responded accordingly, most critics and spectators discovered other “emotion-congruent” situations in the rest of the production. By the final scenes of Streetcar, it was too late to reverse the effects of these emotion-driven prototypes and beliefs. Laughter and Tears Psychologists have long known that certain kinds of emotions and social situations will trigger laughter, but precise knowledge about laughing remains elusive. Critics and philosophers since the days of Horace have spun theories about laughter and humor, but few of these theories have been tested until recently. Robert R. Provine, who notes that “empirically based laughter and humor science is little more than 100 years old,” brushes aside most theories to deploy psychological and sociological observations and procedures in order to find out the who, what, when, and why of laughing.86 His conclusions set the stage for a closer, cognitive look at laughing. According to Provine and his students, laughter often has to do with maintaining dominant social relationships. Most people laugh with others; they seldom laugh alone. (Provine assumes that this probably accounts for the ubiquity of laugh tracks on TV sitcoms.)

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Social laughing, which spreads easily to others in every culture, tends to solidify friendships and build group solidarity. In experiments with tickling and rowdy PLAY, Provine found that surprise and feigned aggressiveness in “tickle monster” games usually brought the most laughter. Because reciprocity is important in tickling bouts, most people who suffer from autism cannot sustain the mutual touching and emotional reciprocity that tickling entails. This suggests, of course, that laughter in ticklish situations has something to do with empathy and mirror neurons. Provine bases most of his conclusions on observable behavior. The neuroscience of laughter, which attempts to link neurological activity to human response, is much more difficult to research. Panksepp’s investigations of the areas of the brain that produce PLAY in rats have some applicability to humans because of the evolutionary similarity of our primitive mammalian brains. Young rats begin playing at about seventeen days and emit joyful sounds that are the rough equivalent of human laughter. Although PLAY has its own neurological system, it is closely linked with other cognitive operations, according to Panksepp. Playful rats often assume “the outward behavioral hallmarks of aggressive fighting,” he notes, but in real fights rats quickly shift from pretend aggressiveness to different postures and movements.87 Moreover, the neurological systems that regulate and promote aggression—the systems of FEAR and R AGE—are not engaged when rats are playing. On the basis of his findings (and because of the proximity between the emotional systems of rats and humans), Panksepp concludes that PLAY has “many beneficial effects for both brain and body, including the facilitation of certain kinds of learning and various physical skills. Most important, PLAY may allow young animals to be effectively assimilated into the structures of their society.”88 He extrapolates that human PLAY helps to bond mothers and infants, teaches children about bullying and cooperative relationships, enables young people to develop courting and parenting skills, and helps people to accept defeat gracefully. Throughout his discussion, Panksepp notes that PLAY invariably generates a sense of well-being among those who are playing, in people as well as rats. Perhaps more than any other emotion, PLAY has a strong, positive affect on our “homeostasis.” W.B. Cannon coined the term homeostasis about a hundred years ago to define “the coordinated physiological reactions which maintain most of the steady states of the body.”89 As Damasio notes, the homeostatic system is roughly like “that of the thermostat in relation to climate control.” 90

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Sensors throughout the body take the “temperature” of all physiological operations moment-to-moment and report to the brain, which then sends out signals to adjust and regulate the body to maintain an overall “climate” of well-being. Along with basic metabolism and primal desires, the emotions play a crucial part in homeostatic operations. To continue the metaphor, the chemicals and muscular tensions produced by the negative emotions (R AGE, PANIC, and FEAR) push the body toward extremes of heat or cold, while the positive ones (especially CARE and PLAY) can provide countervailing cooling or warmth. As Damasio and Panksepp recognize, the laughter that comes from PLAY cannot overcome hunger, lust, or physical pain, but it can help with homeostatic regulation by easing tension. The relaxation produced by laughter is the key to Robert Latta’s “cognitive shift” theory of humor. A psychologist who has looked closely at numerous examples of funny situations in real behavior and in literature and performance, Latta finds that laughter almost always occurs as the third step in a three-part process. First, the person who will laugh becomes “unrelaxed,” a muscular-chemical state that may be produced by many causes. Next, some stimulus event produces a “cognitive shift” and the person realizes that the state of tension that he or she has adopted is no longer necessary. Finally, s/he “relaxes rapidly or fairly rapidly through laughter.” 91 This three-step process—tension, cognitive shift, relaxationthrough-laughter—recurs in real and fictional humorous situations, according to Latta. One of many examples Latta gives is the opening of the short story “No Kaddish for Weinstein,” by Woody Allen: “Weinstein lay under the covers, staring at the ceiling in a depressed torpor. Outside, sheets of humid air rose from the pavement in stifling waves. The sound of traffic was deafening at this hour, and in addition to all this his bed was on fire.” 92 As Latta points out, the first two-and-a-half sentences of this story is the setup; it produces some tension in the reader, despite the fact that we know that the story will be funny. “And in addition to all this,” by its awkward and nearly ungrammatical construction, tips off the reader to the fact that the first joke is coming; it produces a cognitive shift that suspends the initial tension. “His bed was on fire,” of course, is the punch line; the incongruity of a bed on fire in this situation relaxes the reader. The punch line also attacks and dismisses Weinstein as a fool. The reader may not laugh out loud, but if s/he were in a crowded audience and Woody had used the joke as part of a stand-up routine (when he was

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still doing stand-up), the spectator would likely have joined the rest of the audience in laughing. Although Latta does not bring the insights of Provine, Panksepp, and Damasio to bear on his theory of humor, it is apparent that his three-step process is congruent with major aspects of their psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. The PLAY context of humor is important in all of these explanations. When people are joking around, FEAR and R AGE must be put aside so that the mind/brain can operate the separate neurological system of PLAY. First, the humorist (Woody Allen, the tickler, even the rat who initially behaves like a fighter, etc.) must inject some tension into the situation that leaves the spectator temporarily unrelaxed. Second, some stimulus (the way a sentence is constructed, the difference between real and feigned R AGE from tickler or rat, etc.) signals the spectator that this tension is unnecessary. Third, spectator laughter (or its rough equivalent in reading) leads to relaxation. As Panksepp notes, PLAY often looks like a negative emotion (usually R AGE or FEAR), but spectators can always tell the difference, presumably through their ability to simulate the emotions of others. Once again, our mirror systems play a significant role in social interaction. Further, humorists can and often do target victims; we are invited to laugh at Weinstein, for example, for his foolishness. Provine is right about laughter creating and maintaining misfits, outsiders, losers, and similar prototypes in social hierarchies. Laughter often serves social roles and values, as Panksepp recognizes; no society is equally kind to all. Finally, in addition to regulating social norms, laughter helps to regulate individual homeostasis. In most of the above examples, there is a clear difference between the humorist and the target of his/her humor—the person who is laughed at. This occurs in dramatic performance, too, when one actor/character or a group of them makes a joke at the expense of another. The Malvolio letter scene in Twelfth Night provides a ready example.93 Shakespeare’s Maria sets up the situation and quickly draws Sir Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek, and Fabian into her plot. Many of the initial laughs in the scene are aimed at the actor playing Sir Toby. As Malvolio muses about the bliss of his fantasized marriage to Olivia, oblivious to the three characters watching him, Toby is fuming and roaring. After Malvolio dreams of calling “for my kinsman Toby” (II.5.51–52), Toby, out of sight but not (perhaps) out of hearing of the steward, loses his “Bolts and shackles” (II.v.53). Fabian’s next line, “O peace, peace, peace, now, now”

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(II.5.54), gives the actor playing Toby ample time to move from heightened tension, to a cognitive shift (when he realizes his outburst might catch Malvolio’s attention), to relaxation. If focus is kept on Toby and the actor performs well, he will carry the audience with him and laughter will likely come with his relaxation. Fabian has several other such “quieting” lines after Toby’s outbreaks of R AGE. Shakespeare knows where the potential laughs are in this situation and provides a third actor, Fabian, to restrain and temporarily calm Sir Toby. Andrew Aguecheek could not have provided this check to his R AGE and an actor/Toby who remained simply angry during this initial part of the scene would not produce much laughter. Most of the laughter in the letter scene, of course, belongs to the actor playing Malvolio. By this point late in Act II, spectators mostly view Malvolio with antipathy and generally hope the worst for him. (While it is possible to imagine an audience that might sympathize with Malvolio—perhaps an audience of Puritans—it is also evident that much of the comedy of the play would misfire for such a dour group.) Shakespeare sets up possibilities for many of the initial laughs after Malvolio discovers the letter by providing opportunities for the actor to alternate tensions and rhythms. At one moment, actor/Malvolio is tense and excited about what he reads and in the next he has to pause, take a cognitive shift, and think about what the letter might mean. “M.O.A.I. doth sway my life” (II.5.106), and the puzzlement into which this riddle spins him provides several of these opportunities. Shakespeare also builds the comedy of the scene through sexual arousal. He gives Malvolio a long passage of the letter to read, which includes “greatness thrust upon `em,” “let thy blood and spirit embrace them,” “the trick of singularity,” “[she] that sighs for thee,” and “ever cross-gartered” (II.5.138–46). Given the unity of gesture and speech, several of these lines will prompt gestures that may suggest sexual excitement. Because Elizabethan males eager to show off their sexual prowess and aggressiveness showed their calves to the ladies, the cross-gartered line probably prompted a funny gesture in the initial production. The speech climaxes with “thou art made, if thou desir’st to be so” and ends with “She that would alter services with thee, The Fortunate Unhappy” (II.5.146–51). Shakespeare gives the actor the option of playing the entire thing as a metaphorical sex act, from arousal, to ejaculation, to relaxation (presumably with the cognitive shift coming after the climax). The tension of the

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arousal section would be heightened and the comic payoff greater, of course, if the actor/Malvolio fought his physical turn-on in embarrassed, puritanical fashion. Most of the final lines of the monologue (152–70) feature Malvolio deciding to operationalize all of this advice in the near future. As Keith Oatley might have recommended, Shakespeare reveals Malvolio’s plans—he’ll “read politic authors,” “baffle Sir Toby,” “be strange, stout, in yellow stockings, and cross-gartered,”-both as a means of increasing audience antipathy for him and sending him up as a fool. The audience already knows his interests and desires, but now his plans have changed, creating more opportunities for laughter. Finally, there is Malvolio’s smile: “I will smile; I will do everything that thou wilt have me” (169–70). I have seen actors playing Malvolio take a full five seconds to produce a smile. The tension of screwing up facial muscles, opening lips, and showing teeth, topped by a glow of recognition (the cognitive shift that says, in effect, “I’ve made it; I am actually smiling”), followed by a complete drop of the expression because it is too hard to maintain, can be deliciously funny. Shakespeare must have had an actor to perform Malvolio in 1602 who could manage much of this kind of comedy, or he would not have written it as he did. In addition to providing some of the funniest moments in the play, Act II, scene 5 also confirmed what many in the audience already believed about Malvolio and his attempt to usurp his rightful place in the hierarchy of a noble household. For other spectators, the comic put-down of Malvolio may have influenced their beliefs about Puritans. In the previous section of this chapter, we saw that a spectator’s beliefs and social prototypes could help to shape his/her appraisal of the desires, interests, and plans of an actor/ character, thus leading the spectator to an emotional response. Beliefs also flourish at the other end of emotional engagement. In Emotions and Beliefs, the editors have collected several essays that empirically demonstrate the influence of emotions on beliefs and values.94 The essays show that beliefs often form at the interface of affective and cognitive processes, that emotions guide the attention of spectators and her/his selection of pertinent information in shaping beliefs, and that strong emotional experiences not only strengthen existing beliefs but can also lead to new ones.95 For spectators in 1602 who may have been relatively indifferent to Puritanism but enjoyed the letter scene, Shakespeare’s comic attack on Malvolio probably influenced them to believe that Puritans were seeking to violate historical hierarchies and would clamp down on the rights of Englishmen to PLAY.

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Like laughing, crying also helps to regulate a spectator’s homeostasis. According to Damasio, the mechanism for crying in the mind/brain is much the same as the one for laughing. The mind/ brain receives a stimulus from inside or outside of the body, appraises this stimulus as painful (in the case of sobbing), and then, in effect, “throws a switch” that initiates all of the expressive behavior we associate with crying. Another system in the mind/brain then takes control to modulate the sobbing according to the situation, the relevant social codes, and other contextual information fed to it by the senses. Although individuals may feel that they cannot stop crying (just as, in other circumstances, they may believe they cannot stop laughing), most people can turn off their tears if they decide to stop.96 As with laughing, people usually feel better after they have a good cry. Crying as a means of helping to modulate our physiological thermostats may be the closest that cognitive science can come to the Aristotelian notion of catharsis.97 If we assume, with other commentators, that Aristotle was discussing emotions experienced by the audience, tragedy’s ability to purge “pity and fear” is somewhat similar to what may occur from the relief that crying can bring. Pity (a variety of CARE), however, does not usually induce tears, and crying typically purges the emotion of PANIC, not FEAR. Natural disasters, family funerals, household moves, and social isolation may induce PANIC in humans. According to Panksepp, “this type of psychic pain probably emerges from a brain emotional system that evolved in the mammalian line to inform individuals about the status of their social environment and to help create our social bonds. . . . [The PANIC circuit] becomes aroused when young animals are separated from their social support systems.” 98 All mammals emit separation distress noises when suffering PANIC—typically high, piercing calls in lost young animals. Their rough analogues in humans are the sounds associated with the sobbing suffered by victims of posttraumatic stress syndrome. As we have seen, Streetcar explores the emotion of PANIC through Williams’s excavation of Blanche’s numerous losses. So, too, does Uncle Vanya. By the end of Chekhov’s tragicomedy, the dramatic action has deprived Voynitsky of much that he holds dear, especially his hope that Yelena’s love might transform and revivify his life. Sadness is a less extreme form of PANIC and Voynitsky’s sadness consumes him. In the last moments of the play his sobs continue to interrupt his work on the accounts of the estate and his interest in listening to Sonya’s attempts to comfort him. Voynitsky’s

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sadness accords very closely with Panksepp’s understanding of the condition: “Sadness, mourning, and grief have the vital function of loosening dysfunctional bonds by detaching emotional energies from lost objects and thus permitting [people] to re-establish contact with significant others after a severe loss.”99 Having lost Yelena and his hope for a new life, Voynitsky is using his tears to wash away those past bonds, even though, at this point, he has no faith that reestablishing his contacts with Sonya, Mama, and the others on the estate will lighten his despair. Stanislavsky’s 1899 production, which emphasized Voynitsky’s pitiable situation, probably called forth some sobs from the audience as well. Like Voynitsky, several in the audience were probably crying for their own as well as the actor/character’s personal losses. As we have already seen, spectators tend to respond to the unfolding action of a play by focusing their attention on “emotiondependent cognitive objects,” with the consequence that they build “an emotion-dependent hierarchy of perceiving and thinking” that structures their cognitive and emotional experience of the dramatic action.100 The spectators crying at the end of Uncle Vanya had probably paid attention to many other moments of sadness for Voynitsky during the play. Many people respond to events in their lives with the same narrowing of focus and emotion-dependent engagement. We all know others whose response to a social stimulus with one of the negative emotions (R AGE, PANIC, or FEAR) is out of all proportion to the actual threat posed by that stimulus. Ciompi and Panksepp take this insight a step further. On the basis of their review of the relevant scientific literature, they state: “Cognitions with a similar emotional value are preferentially assembled into higher-order affective-cognitive-behavioral units.” As they explain, “This assumption represents another important aspect of the reported operator-effects of emotion on cognition. It is at the basis of the attractor-like emergence of comprehensive affect-specific logics (e.g., ‘fear-logic,’ ‘hate-logic,’ etc.) and of specifically ‘coloured’ personal or cultural value-systems, belief-systems, prejudices, and ideologies . . . . Over time, such [emotion-dominated neural systems] might be stabilized and become chronic by various neuronal plasticity and kindling mechanisms.”101 In this way, people’s mind/brain’s can grow to reinforce all kinds of social behaviors, from religious belief and sexual attraction to the fear of foreigners and racist bigotry. Emotion logics wear grooves in the brain, as it were, that can channel short-term perception and response, such as perceiving many

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events on stage as stimuli for the same emotion, and long-term social behavior. According to Ciompi and Panksepp, the neurobiological basis for a wide range of “affect-specific logics” is one of several “working hypotheses” that connect the mind/brain to social and cultural life.102 They note, as well, that several of their hypotheses are already well supported. A variety of experiments substantiates the neurological and psychological reality of FEAR, R AGE, and PANIC “logics.” So much is now known about the logic of FEAR, in particular, that historians are writing books about periods of FEAR that have played out in various cultures of the past.103 The two years of “Terror” during the French Revolution and the months of FEAR after 9/11 in the United States are two likely examples. At issue for Ciompi and Panksepp’s neuro-sociology is the extent of these emotion-logics in widespread belief-systems and also how such negative logics might shape the neurological organization of the mind/brain for the longterm. Enough is already known about these affective-cognitive dynamics, however, to suggest that theatrical performance has played a role both in inciting and moderating the negative emotion-logics that have informed human cultures. Even a casual glance at theatre history confirms that theatrical performances have helped both to build up and tear down “affective-cognitive-behavioral units” that have shaped the incorporation of spectators into both positive and negative ideologies. These have included belief-systems and practices that privilege democracy and equity as well as others undergirding patriarchy and fanaticism. The example of Streetcar, however, demonstrates that this mode of ideological incorporation is not altogether predictable. Arguably, Williams wrote a play designed to extend the range of postwar American sympathies to include women caught up in social and psychological dislocations between a traditional past and a threatening future. Kazan, his actors, and most Broadway audiences, however, used the production of the drama to narrow their sympathetic engagement to their present values and prejudices. Instead of sympathizing with a PANIC-stricken outcast, many spectators turned on her with FEAR to stereotype and isolate her. From a social-historical perspective, the differences between Williams’s general intentions and the response of most in the audience point to a historical rift between the playwright and the mainstream American culture of the time, which included the culture of Broadway theatre. The logic of FEAR, not the possibilities of CARE, shaped the majority response to Streetcar in 1947.104 Perhaps this should not surprise us, however.

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FEAR logics have shaped many dramatic productions in all media for hundreds of years, from Oedipus the King in the fifth century BCE to the recent Tom Cruise Hollywood thriller, War of the Worlds. Performances based on the logic of R AGE also abound. Many noh plays from medieval Japan pit an angry, vengeful female spirit against a male Buddhist priest who is attempting to purge the R AGE of this wracked ghost. In Aoi-no-Ue, for example, the spirit of Lady Rokujo tries to take revenge on the present wife of Prince Genji, who was Rokujo’s lover during her life. The performance of this play uses the many devices of noh—a shite who sings and dances Rokujo’s R AGE, a chorus to share some of the singing of this figure’s emotion, and flute sounds and drumming with voiced guttural accompaniment—to vivify, amplify, and explore the emotional twists that R AGE produces in the actor/character. Finally, the priest figure in Aoi-no-Ue succeeds in releasing Rokujo from her R AGE so that her spirit may find salvation. Much of the aesthetic purity and force of noh drama comes from its tight focus on the primary emotion embodied by the shite’s character and elaborated by other sounds and movements on stage.105 This discussion of negative emotion-logics opens up the possibility of a new perspective on dramatic genres and history. Before we can pursue this discussion, however, we need to know more about how general and social cognition, together with emotion, operate within culture. This investigation, in turn, must rest upon a broader understanding of the role of culture in human evolution. Performance in Evolutionary Perspective Evolution has provided Homo sapiens with a broad framework of potentiality that enables humans to work out their individual-, cultural-, and species-specific lives in many modes of action, including the theatre. And it still does. In the final section of this chapter, I pull back from the immediacies of watching plays and examine how the attributes of cognition that make spectating possible got to be what they are. This section will also introduce the underpinnings of cultural cognition, a more specific mode of thinking, feeling, and doing than those I have termed general and social cognition. As we will see, Homo sapiens could only emerge as a species with the assistance of culture; without it, humans would not exist. Tracing cognitive

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evolution is necessarily a speculative exercise-no one can know for sure what our ancestors’ brains looked like, much less what they thought about and how-but putting together the clues to explain how our minds/brains probably evolved can open up a welcome perspective on cognition and theatregoing.106 Merlin Donald has won wide acclaim for his work on cognitive evolution. His 1991 book, Origins of the Modern Mind, brought together a range of evidence—skull size, tool using, symbolic communication, et cetera—to trace four major stages of our species’ mental development. In A Mind So Rare (2001), Donald summarized his earlier findings and noted the accumulating evidence that had since substantiated his major claims.107 In brief, cognitive evolution has proceeded through four stages, according to Donald: episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. Prehumans with “episodic” minds followed instinctual drives, generated strong emotions, and lived in the here-and-now, like many other higher mammals. At the “mimetic” stage, hominids developed pre-linguistic, gesture-based modes of communication. Our mind/brains at this stage allowed our ancestors to communicate through iconic and analog strategies, representing themselves and the world by means of perceptual resemblance. Out of this developed the “mythic,” or storytelling stage, the evolution of humans as symbol-users that remains dominant in Homo sapiens today. Vocal and visual symbols, in speaking, music, and art, brought with them a new system of representing reality. Donald’s fourth stage, the “theoretic,” involves no fundamental biological changes, but emphasizes the increasing ability of humans to store most of our symbolic knowledge outside of our biological bodies—in books, films, and Web sites, for example. According to Donald—and other cognitive scientists agree— the evolution of our minds allowed us to acquire new orientations and skills without leaving the older ones behind. Just because humans can now store their symbolic knowledge in computers does not mean that our emotions have subsided and that we have stopped wanting to satisfy our innate desires. At the episodic stage of human development, our ancestors were not far removed from other primates who roamed in packs, concentrated on finding food and shelter, avoided predators, procreated, and protected their young. Episodic awareness, as described by Donald, focused on present circumstances and only allowed for sufficient memory so that individuals could remember the consequences of “fighting with x” and “mating with y.”108 The basic emotions of SEEKING, R AGE, FEAR, CAR E, PANIC, and PLAY generated much of this

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prehuman behavior.109 We have inherited our emotional operating systems from our episodic-stage ancestors and these systems continue to work on us from the most primitive areas of our brains. Later cognitive developments modified the social expression of these emotions but did not change their energizing chemistry. As we have seen, our primitive emotions from the episodic stage continue to play a significant role in performance. According to Donald, our species’ emergence out of the relative solipsism of episodic consciousness and into the possibilities of shared culture occurred about two million years ago with the advent of the mimetic stage. “The formation of cognitive communities was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the biosphere, yet it seems to have been caused by a relatively simple expansion of the executive brain,” says Donald.110 One of these expansions was the likely development of networks of mirror neurons, which present-day chimpanzees also possess. This allowed ancient chimps and hominids to trace the movements of another body onto a body map of the self in the mind/brain and to place that self into the context of the world. Accompanying this ability to learn through empathy came the development of more working memory, leading to a degree of self-consciousness for the first time in protohuman history. By mirroring the facial expressions and sounds of their mothers and other caregivers, infants could now learn a whole repertory of skills. The result, notes Donald, was “to interlock the infant’s growing mind with those of its caregivers and ultimately the broader society. A hierarchy of habits for shared noticing, caring, feeling, and remembering are cultivated in this way and prepare the child’s growing mind for more ambitious forays into culture at a later stage. . . .”111 Early hominids built small-group cultures through their mimetic skills, which enhanced their survival. By sharing knowledge through gestures, sounds, and body language, these proto-humans fashioned early tools and cooperated in food gathering and mutual protection. Our ancestors at this stage were probably scavengers, who could use their muscles and stones to break open and scrape out the marrow from the bones of dead animals. Donald supposes that their culture likely centered on public action: “This was the birth of the actor, the tribe, and the gesture. Given its evolutionary proximity to primate social styles, it must have been dominated by direct expressions of emotion, and indeed, the control of emotion by public action and gesture would have been one of its first priorities.” Our mirror systems, which enabled proto-humans to envision their own

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and other bodies in motion, probably provided the cognitive core of mimetic culture; it allowed these hominids to generate actions, remember and review them, and rehearse them for future performance.112 In the course of these rehearsals and performances, proto-humans developed a keen sense of human action and objects in space. Donald assumes that mimetic cultures performed protorituals that emphasized gestural, rhythmic, and athletic skills to knit their groups together. Alternating episodes of spectating and acting—the performative basis for learning and doing in these cultures—likely flourished among our hominid ancestors. At the theatre today, our social cognition continues to depend on these evolved abilities. Mimetic cultures could use mime and gesture to share brief narratives in their performances. Hominid groups could likely celebrate a successful scavenging trip by performing a short series of coherent events out of their past, for example, or they could repeat a series of known events to plan for a trip in the future. But mime is insufficient for complex narratives involving longer-event-strings of cause-andeffect and part–whole relationships, as well as for stories with multiple narratives. These require language and other forms of symbolic communication. Mimetic culture was not symbol-based, but it provided the foundation for the evolution of language. Mimesis must be prior to language, notes Donald, because learning a language, like learning any skill, requires the ability to rehearse and refine, which comes with the mimetic mind/brain. Further, Donald follows David McNeill and others in linking together manual and vocal gestures.113 Our hominid ancestors at the mimetic stage no doubt accompanied many of their gestures with sounds, but these sounds were not yet speech. Donald would agree with Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd’s Not By Genes Alone that culture played an important role in the physical evolution of Homo sapiens.114 Once hominid culture appeared on the evolutionary scene and proved itself an aid in survival, hominids who were better suited to cultural interactions had an advantage over those who were not; greater numbers of the pro-culture population passed on genes to progeny that survived, which, in turn, facilitated more future enculturation. Not all cultural genetic adaptations led their populations to survive in every case, however. Richerson and Boyd speculate that natural selection probably favored conformist and follow-the-leader psychologies, habits that probably proved adaptive in most environments, but could be deadly in a few others. In the long run, though, evolution seems to have gradually nudged our ancestors

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toward greater levels of cooperation with strangers. “Eventually,” note Richerson and Boyd, “innate elements of human social psychology became tolerably well adapted to promote living in tribes, not just families.”115 One result of this development, they believe, led to social environments “that caused individual natural selection to favor empathetic altruism.”116 Roughly half a million years ago, our ancestors made the transition from a mimetic to a symbol-based culture, called the mythic stage of development by Donald because symbols led to enhanced narrative capability, which humans used to build myths. Before language could emerge, our vocal apparatus evolved in small ways to allow us to articulate more distinctive sounds and, perhaps more importantly, our species acquired more long-term memory capacity for the automatic retrieval of words and syntax. With language, the Cro-Magnons left behind their earlier precursors, flourished on the grasslands of Africa, and spread throughout the world. Proficient hunters, the Cro-Magnons devastated other species as they traveled. Their entry into Europe may have been part of the reason for the extinction of 50 percent of large animal species soon after their arrival, and it is likely that these ancestors of ours helped to kill off the last of the Neanderthals about 40,000 years ago. The CroMagnons apparently turned to agriculture when hunting became more difficult. Early Homo sapiens survived the last Ice Age, organized themselves into larger agricultural communities, and eventually invented writing, about 5,000 years ago, initially as a way to keep track of their harvests. All of these abilities would enhance the performative skills our ancestors had already gained at the mimetic stage of their evolution. Donald marshals evidence to suggest that the drive to clarify communication in mimetic cultures drove the evolution of language. This leads him to link language to narrative right at the start of the process: On a cultural level, language is not about inventing words. It is about telling stories in groups. Languages are invented on the level of narrative, by collectivities of conscious intellects. They went through many stages of evolution before they arrived at their present level of refinement, and categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives emerged only after episodic representations had been specified, first in mime and gesture and then in a less ambiguous form, in consensual symbolic systems. . . . [O]nce the cognitive habit of disambiguating expressive scenarios gathered momentum, there would have been tremendous

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pressure on the individual members of the founding group to adapt to the expanding language universe. (Emphasis in original)117

Donald agrees with Terrence Deacon and others who emphasize that language could only evolve so far as an add-on to mimesis. A distinctive feature of all languages is that the same phonetic units of sound can be recombined to produce all spoken meanings; past languages must have broken their analogical ties to mimesis in order to organize themselves as a mostly arbitrary, regimented symbol system to enable recombination.118 Children usually learn to do this by the age of four, when they can recombine the system of sounds they have learned as their “mother tongue” to tell stories about themselves and others. Just because the link between sound and meaning is mostly arbitrary at the system level does not mean that language use floats free of evolution. Our ability to use language emerged after several other systems of lower-level consciousness were already in place. As I emphasized in a previous section, spoken language is tied to gesture. One other consequence of the late evolution of language is that language and consciousness are not the same. People can think without language; newborns form thoughts and so do many aphasics who have lost language altogether. Donald cites the work of Lakoff and Johnson on language’s metaphorical roots to demonstrate its ties to our evolutionary past. The spatial relations and bodily action concepts underlying most metaphorical expression, notes Donald, tap a cognitive vein that precedes the development of language and reveals its direct links to episodic experiences in our primate past.119 As a species, we have piggybacked language onto culture, but this does not mean that we have erased the mimetic basis of culture from our mind/brains. The kinds of conscious awareness that our ancestors used to monitor their exchanges in mimetic culture two million years ago still watch over our exchanges of language today, often causing us to judge our use of language as inadequate. Communication through language may have been an improvement over mime and gesture, but, as we know, it remains more ambiguous than we would wish. Language may help to sharpen our thoughts, but we feel its inadequacies everyday. For Donald, the primacy of consciousness over language leads him to an important generalization: “We evaluate all symbolic expressions from outside the symbol system, from a region of mind that, in its principles of operation, is different from, and much more powerful than, the reach of any consensual expressive system.”120 As Donald recognizes, this point of view puts him in agreement with Wittgenstein’s

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position that language cannot be the sole foundation of truth. As previously noted, it also counters those post-structuralists who privilege language as the basis of meaning-making in the theatre and elsewhere. For spectators, Donald’s insight means that the attentions and emotions arising from our episodic minds will usually override “words, words, words,” even in performances of Hamlet, unless the words coming out of actors’ mouths are supported by more primitive cognitive mechanisms. Not only do actions speak louder than words in the mirror systems of our mimetic minds, but they are fundamentally linked to language when we speak. Playwrights and actors may combine words into narratives, of course, to entrance spectators with cultural myths, but the believability of these narratives teeters upon an evolutionary foundation that can bring them crashing down if the episodic and mimetic building blocks are yanked away. The believability of cultural myths—some of which become general narrative genres—is a subject discussed in the next chapter. As Donald recognizes, our symbol-generating minds are easily caught up in maintaining myths of our own making. No sooner did our ancestors acquire language and other symbol systems than they began to spin religious beliefs and ethical systems. Powerful groups and individual leaders in all symbol-soaked cultures, from tribal chiefs to empirebuilding presidents, have used cultural myths to advance their purposes. These myths also form the basis of enduring cultural institutions; they are built into culture at both the levels of belief and social practice. Donald’s fourth evolutionary stage, the theoretic (the storage of cultural knowledge outside of our bodies), may provide some checks on the excesses of religious and political mythmaking, but he recognizes that our evolutionary history should guard us against any easy optimism concerning progress in this regard. When economic and political institutions support potent myths to appeal to primitive emotions through affective rituals—when they line up the default modes of our episodic, mimetic, and mythic mind/brains for cultural purposes—stopping the juggernaut can be very difficult. Caryl Churchill attempted to alter the beliefs and institutions of patriarchy and capitalism in Top Girls, but no one (including, I suspect, the playwright) would say that performances of her play have been very successful in achieving that goal. The next chapter takes a look at the cognitive foundations of culture and how theatrical performances work within its structures.

Chapter 3

Cultural Cognition in History

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erlin Donald’s summary of our cognitive evolution underlines the fact that human cultures cannot simply sit atop our evolutionary success as a species and operate in ways that are unconstrained by nature. All symbolic cultures must accommodate our episodic and mimetic pasts, a cognitive substrate that constitutes most of what I have been calling general and social cognition. These modes of cognition might also be termed our “human nature.” Nonetheless, the evident diversity of cultural behaviors across the world makes it clear that individuals and societies have enormous flexibility with regard to how they will shape their cultures to work within our evolutionary heritage. This chapter elaborates a general notion of theatregoing as a cultural model. Theatregoing includes such diverse cultural practices as places for performance, casting conventions, the use of metaphorical language in dialogue, theatre as a forum for cultural ethics, differing norms of narrative construction, and the evolution of dramatic genres. All of these cultural practices, in turn, shape audience engagement. While my focus will be on cultural-historical practices and their relation to the dynamics of cognition, I will not lose sight of the constraints imposed on all cultures by our evolutionary past. Cultural Models and Historical Change Among the anthropologists who have explored cultures from a cognitive point of view, Bradd Shore’s ideas are generally consonant with the approaches of Edelman, Lakoff, Fauconnier, McNeill, and Donald. Shore acknowledges that conceptual universals constitute the primitive building blocks of all cultures. His Culture in Mind emphasizes

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our species’ cognitive dependence on both natural and cultural environments throughout our lives. Regarding culture, the mind/brain is neither “hard-wired” for certain cultural responses nor is it a “blank slate” or passive recorder that facilitates the direct transmission of individual and social experiences into memory. Rather, what Shore calls “the ecological brain” both enables and constrains perceptions and practices, leading enculturated humans to a range of culturalhistorical possibilities.1 People find their ways into the cognitive paths of culture by extending and specifying the conceptual universals that they acquired in infancy. Local cultural experiences and languages move universal primitives such as “containment” and “source-path-goal” into a web of blends, image schemas, and metaphors that constitute the cognitive level of all historical cultures. 2 Shakespeare’s audience could understand the Globe Theatre as a “wooden O,” so named by the Chorus in Henry V, for example, because the concept of containment in their minds allowed them to think about the wooden Globe as having an inside, an outside, and a boundary between them, just like the letter “O.” Globe spectators could use their mental concept to map the architecture of the theatre onto a letter in the English alphabet. They adopted a universal primitive—the concept of containment—for local cultural use. As infants learn a culture, just as when they are learning a language, they gradually narrow the deployment of their universal concepts to enable them to specify concrete meanings. Infants are initially open to learning all languages, but as they begin to link specific sounds to certain meanings they have a more difficult time associating those sounds with other meanings in other languages. Just as we can learn another language throughout most of our lives, however, we can also come to know the ways of other cultures. Historical cultures narrow and shape nearly all of the aspects of cognition and emotion discussed in the first two chapters of this book. Attention may be a species-level attribute of human consciousness, but culture helps people to learn what to pay attention to. Potentially, spectators have an enormous range of actor/characters to choose from, but their culture will always single out some blends as more appropriate and significant than others. Cultural languages will instruct spectators about what to call the nouns that denote the basic-level concepts of auditoriums, scenery, and costumes. In terms of social cognition, empathy will lead many in the audience to experience primitive emotions together, but culture will restrain and channel the expression of these emotions in public. What kinds of

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actor/characters should we FEAR, whom do we laugh at, when can we cry together in a darkened or lighted auditorium? In these matters, culture is more than a guide to good manners; it also shapes beliefs, ethics, and historical practices. Cultures are not closed systems, however. The cognitive revolution has moved beyond the traditional definition of culture as a whole way of life. Cognitive anthropologist Roy D’Andrade notes that one of the central features of cognitive anthropology since the 1990s has been the “breaking up of culture into parts . . . cognitively formed units—features, prototypes, schemas, propositions, theories, etc. This makes possible,” says D’Andrade, “a particulate theory of culture; that is, a theory about the ‘pieces’ of culture, their compositions and relations to other things.”3 If the cognitive “pieces” of a culture are semi-independent of each other, culture no longer functions like a gestalt where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and a change in one area will nudge a change throughout. Of course, the actual relations among the parts of any culture cannot be predicted in the abstract and remain a matter for empirical and historical investigation. One of the important pieces of all cultures for Shore are “cultural models,” which bridge internal cognition and external cultural-historical practice. Composed of mental schemas and elaborated social beliefs and practices, most cultural models are complex. Theatregoing in turn-of-the-century Imperial Russia, when a few Muscovites attended the premiere of Uncle Vanya in 1899, is one such example. Without unpacking all of the phenomena of the cultural model of theatregoing that made possible the premiere of Chekhov’s play, a few specifics about the mental and social operations that constituted this cultural-historical event will suggest its complexity. At the level of external cultural practice, before attending Uncle Vanya or any of the other hundreds of play productions and vaudeville performances offered in Moscow between 1890 and 1914, a Russian had first to think of himself or herself as a potential theatregoer. This exercise in social imagination would have excluded more than half of the population of Moscow right away, for reasons of class as well as income. In 1899, most groups of aristocrats, the intelligentsia, and the bourgeoisie were aware of and sought to enjoy the social practices and cognitive operations that surrounded playgoing in Russia. Although many others attended popular vaudevilles, most people living in Moscow at the turn of the century knew little about theatregoing of any kind. If a Russian’s background, class, and pocketbook

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made theatregoing an option, many other social considerations would have shaped this person’s decisions about going to a play, including the habits of family members and friends, the availability of theatrical information and leisure time, and the possibilities for purchasing tickets and transportation. At the internal, cognitive level of the cultural model of theatregoing, Russians attending an event like the Moscow Art Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya worked within many cognitive structures that both enabled and constrained their enjoyment. These included extensions of the cognitive concepts of containment and identity and basiclevel categories embedded in language. Russian spectators expected to find a contained enclosure when they went to the playhouse, but contained spaces deemed appropriate for watching performances have varied widely among cultures. The MAT had to rent the old Hermitage Theatre in Moscow and then clean and repaint the auditorium to make it “bearable for cultured people,” as Stanislavsky wrote in his journal, before the theatre could move in.4 Specifications of the cultural concept of identity helped to determine who could and who could not serve as actors for the actor/character blends necessary to embody the play. Olga Knipper, already celebrated for her acting talent before the founding of the MAT in 1898, could perform a wholly acceptable Yelena in Uncle Vanya. In contrast, a boy actor in the role could not. Nor could actors classified by turn-of-the-century Russians as “negro” or “oriental” have performed Yelena in 1899; Russian spectators would have dismissed such casting as ridiculous. Finally, everyone on stage had to speak Russian. If the actors had used Hungarian or English words instead of the Russian ones for the basiclevel categories that recur in all languages, most of the audience would not have understood them. As these examples suggest, the cognitive level of cultural models is mostly commonsensical for those within the culture. But of course that is the point; people tend to take their own culture for granted until it is questioned or compared to the culture of others. Cultural performances such as games, political campaigns, and theatrical events are especially revealing for anthropologist Shore; they nicely demonstrate “the complex relations between the external structures of rules and norms and the personal [cognitive] experiences that these make possible.”5 For models to function effectively in culture, their institutional and cognitive dynamics must be mutually reinforcing. Regarding the cultural model of playgoing, for example, people must learn to understand and accept its social conventions as a legitimate cultural practice and also to experience the structures and

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emotions of enough specific performances so that theatregoing can become a model for other practices in their lives. The first step primarily involves general enculturation and the second, as we have seen, cognitive attention, engagement, memory, mirror systems, and so on. For audiences to fully enjoy Uncle Vanya in 1899, for example, they should already have watched enough plays so that they could easily extend some of the basic schemas of spectating to other cultural domains. They should be able to speak casually about a Russian politician “stealing center stage,” for instance, or criticize their daughter for “making a scene.” Shore calls this extension of one schema into a different arena of cultural discourse “analogical schematization.” “All the world’s a stage,” to take another example, also extends the schema of theatre into untheatrical territory—in Jacques’ speech in As You Like It, into the “stages” of a typical man’s life. What is required to legitimate cultural models, in other words, is internalizing the external structures of the theatrical game at the cognitive level and externalizing the emotional-cognitive experience of theatregoing onto other events in the world through analogical schematization. This ongoing give-and-take between internalization and externalization legitimates, maintains, and can alter every cultural model, according to Shore. In later sections of this chapter, I will look at different cultural models of theatregoing to focus on some of their more significant aspects for spectators, including the places for performance, conventions of casting, salient meanings of language, ethical issues that engage audiences, dramatic narratives, and recurring dramatic genres. Before moving into these sections, however, we need to know more about the power dynamics of cultural models and how these can change over time. No cultural model is historically neutral. Though constructed from conceptual universals at the cognitive level, they must function on the social, institutional level as well. In one sense, mental schemas at the cognitive level are abstractions waiting to be filled with socialhistorical content. In 1899, Russian audiences could easily accept certain kinds of content for the major concepts of their mental schema of theatregoing, but would reject other possibilities as tasteless and absurd. For them, as for everyone in every culture, some architectural containers were better than others for a theatre building, some kinds of identities seemed to work well for actor/characters on stage, and some types of source-path-goal narratives were deemed more appropriate than other stories for a play. Chekhov, Stanislavsky, and the financiers of the MAT knew this, of course, and strove to work

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within most of the cultural expectations of their spectators. In this sense, historical content puts flesh on the bones of the abstract mental schemas and their cognitive concepts underlying every cultural model. In another sense, though, the “flesh on the bones” metaphor for specific historical practices and institutions is only partly appropriate. The style of the theatre building, the social class of the actors, and all of the language of Chekhov’s play did not float above cognition and consciousness. Because all historical cultures depend on signs, symbols, and representations, including language, these historical specifics were also connected to the deep, universal levels of cognition. The structural signs for language and the symbol systems for other modes of cultural communication are mostly arbitrary, as Saussure and other semioticians have recognized, but sign and symbol usage is not; the reasons people choose some symbols and phrases over others are tied to their embodied minds and their memories. Because our species has a cognitive concept of containment, for example, Russian audiences, producers, and playwrights could envision and speak or write about people having an “essential self” that resides within the container of their outward social roles. (As L and J recognize, people use several metaphorical concepts to think about themselves.6) Containment, balance, force, and other universal concepts shape language usage in every culture. All cultural modes of representation are embedded in cognitive operations. The picture painted thus far suggests that cultural models like theatregoing, at both the mental schema and institutional practice levels, will be highly resistant to historical change. Russian audiences and producers shaped their mental schema of theatregoing from past and present practices and used it primarily to reinforce the institutional arrangements that maintained the theatrical status quo. In this important sense, the dialectical give-and-take between the mental and the institutional appears to be a vicious circle. Furthermore, Russian audiences in 1899 used their engagements with Uncle Vanya to legitimate other schemas, blends, and practices in their broader culture. Through their empathetic involvement in the play, most spectators would have seen and accepted the present social hierarchy of lateTsarist Russia, with peasants at the bottom and the intelligentsia near the top. (Arguably, Chekhov’s Vanya criticizes a part of the intelligentsia, but not the whole class.) Spectators would also have watched, and most will have understood as natural, the separately gendered spheres of action in the play. (Clearly, Chekhov’s women could not be professors or doctors in the world of Vanya.) If both mind and matter

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conspire against historical change in cultural models—as seems to have been the case with even a liberal play by a progressive playwright produced by an innovative theatre company—how does change occur? One path for progress (and also for regression) is through the conceptual universals that we all share. Regarding the cultural model of theatregoing, our imaginations may be tied to historical specifics, but they are also free to explore other kinds of content with which to furnish the empty rooms of their abstract schemas. Sometimes change comes to theatregoing abruptly, from the outside, and spectators must make rapid adjustments. In the next twenty-five years, some viewers who enjoyed Uncle Vanya in 1899 would be looking at productions that flourished during and after the Russian Revolution. The Storming of the Winter Palace, a mass spectacle held outdoors in 1918, would teach them that theatrical events do not need to be contained by an auditorium and proscenium. Others watching The Magnanimous Cuckold, directed by Meyerhold in 1922, would learn that the blends that constitute actor/characters are much more varied and challenging than what they assumed to be possible at the turn of the century. And when they saw Blue Blouse troupes performing their agitprop pieces in village squares, they would realize that sourcepath-goal narratives can be structured to push ideas most had found abhorrent or absurd only a few years before. Many bourgeois spectators who cut their theatregoing teeth around 1900 might initially resist these changes mentally and institutionally, but the empty abstractions of their cognitive concepts would allow them to accommodate them. By 1925, most Russians who attended plays would have had little difficulty understanding all of these events as different versions of the cultural model of “theatregoing.” Because our minds operate with conceptual universals as well as historical specifics, we are potentially more open to historical change than many theories give us credit for. Some people embedded in their cultures are more changeable than others, however. For the most part, this relative flexibility has to do with age. In his Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change, Bruce E. Wexler points out that the dynamics of human development initially enable and eventually constrain cultural learning for most people. “Learning and action are in an inverse relationship throughout the lifespan,” states Wexler. “We learn the most when we are unable to act. By the time we are able to act on the world, our ability to learn has dramatically diminished.” 7 From infancy through adolescence (and into early adulthood in

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some cultures), individuals are busy embodying the external world as internal concepts, schemas, blends, and metaphors. After they reach what their culture considers adulthood (somewhere between twelve and twenty-four), however, individuals gradually shift to perceiving the external world through the lens of their internalized culture. Wexler emphasizes “the importance of internal-external consonance” for human well-being at all stages of life,8 a point that links his work to the process of internalizing and externalizing cultural models in Shore’s understanding of culture. For Russian audiences in the example above, the younger members of the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie would have had a generally easier time adjusting to the wrenching changes in the cultural model of theatregoing than their elders. While revolutionary changes sometimes force spectators to accommodate sudden shifts in the conventions of theatregoing, gradual development is more common. Despite the move from performing in the town square to performing on a hillside near the outskirts of the city, Athenians probably saw few major changes in playgoing festivals during the fifth century BCE. Citizens in London eager to see a show between 1580 and 1642 faced piecemeal innovations in theatregoing, but no sea change until Cromwell and the Puritans made spectating a subversive activity. Although the entertainments on stage have changed substantially in the United States. since the 1880s, the social practices surrounding commercial theatregoing have moved comparatively at a snail’s pace during that time. In terms of what we might call the casting conventions that predominate in cultural models, the past century of U.S. baseball offers an instructive example of gradual change. Baseball emerged as a major entertainment primarily for middle-class men and boys at the turn of the last century, a time when color consciousness in the United States forced the racial segregation of baseball teams and pushed the playing and enjoyment of baseball in highly gendered ways. As a cultural performance, baseball evoked strong associations with an idealized agricultural past, but it was also preeminently a city game, dependent for its institutional support on trolley lines, sports investors, and beer merchants. Most spectators at a baseball game a hundred years ago carried with them social schemas that folded it into the cultural norms of the time. Just as clearly, though, some of the concepts that made up the mental schema of baseball in 1908 were not connected to historical constructions of race, gender, and class. The idea of a home run in baseball depends crucially upon

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L and J’s source-path-goal concept, a bodily action abstraction unrelated to the social construction of the game. Applied to baseball, this abstraction moves a player from home plate (source), around the bases (path), and back to home plate (goal); the race, class, and/or gender of the moving player are irrelevant to the cognitive concept. These and similar concepts helped to ensure that people could gradually reinvent the institution and reimagine their social images of baseball over the next century. Not surprisingly, though, change was slow. With social-cultural pressure, but few obligatory changes forced on baseball from the outside, it took predominately younger participants and fans to alter this cultural model over time. A similar story (though containing important differences as well) could be told about American theatregoing. Because cultural models contain historical as well as universal constituents, all cultural models are subject to the vagaries of cultural power. As the example of baseball demonstrates, the constraints of structure and the possibilities of agency operate at the cognitive level as well as at the external level of cultural practice. Despite the dominance of racism and sexism in the American social imagination, some baseball managers and spectators could and did play with mental images of all-female and racially integrated teams as well as with less homogeneous audiences for the sport. For other, mostly older managers and spectators, however, the game in their minds would remain male and white, regardless of historical changes and the consequent pressure to adjust the cultural model of baseball. Nonetheless, social pressures for equity led to changes at the cognitive as well as the institutional levels. Most Americans began extending the schema of baseball to women’s as well as men’s lives; by 2000, for example, few had any problem with the metaphor that girls could “hit a home run” in their daily lives just as well as boys, an analogical schematization that would have seemed absurd to most Americans (male and female) in 1900. This is not to say that such a development was natural and inevitable, of course. Cultural change only occurs when people push against the barriers that impede it. The gap in cultural models between the institutional and the mental levels, though usually bridged by pressure from the powerful, helps to facilitate change. Bradd Shore emphasizes this capacity: “Because it is always an active construction by an intentional, sentient, and creative mind, analogical schematization introduces a gap, a crucial life-giving contingency, between the conventional forms of cultural life and their inner representations in consciousness. This gap guarantees the ongoing regeneration of conventions

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through practice just as it makes possible intersubjective meaning.” 9 The old cliché that you have to imagine cultural change before you can make it happen turns out to be true. Those who have been pushing for cross-racial and cross-gender casting in the U.S. theatre, for example, must first get others to imagine how such casting conventions might work in the cognitive operations of their spectators. The kind of cognitive-cultural-historical process I have sketched here is much the same as Joseph Roach’s notion of surrogation, the master trope of his Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. For Roach, surrogation is a matter of filling in the blanks in ongoing cultural performances.10 As Roach reports, just as the actors following Betterton’s Hamlet could never quite live up to his glory, so surrogates in all cultural models typically fall short of expectations, especially for older critics. (Think of the problems Hank Aaron faced when he “filled in” for Babe Ruth, a difficulty complicated by race as well as the general dynamics of surrogation.) Roach grounds surrogation at the level of social roles rather than actor/character blends, and his schemas for cultural models are generally more elastic than the examples I have used. Nonetheless, it is clear that the kinds of continuities in social roles and cultural models he traces rest on the same cognitive foundations. Although he does not draw on explanations from cognitive studies, the basics of Roach’s argument depend upon the kinds of cognitive dynamics that Edelman, Shore, Fauconnier, and L and J have elucidated. Consequently, when Roach traces the genealogy of U.S. cultural models that sexualize black women, for example, the same basic cognitive concepts may be said to structure the commonalities he finds among the performances of black women at slave auctions, the staging of The Octoroon, and the role-playing of prostitutes in the Storyville brothels of old New Orleans. What Roach does not examine, however, are the changes in the cultural imagination of mainstream American culture that have occurred for black (and brown) women since the civil rights movement. Massive continuities with the past remain, of course, but the divide between (some) internal cognitive representations and external institutional arrangements will continue to make progressive change possible. Lacking an articulated cognitive level for his social-historical narrative, however, Roach is more pessimistic about progressive change than Bradd Shore’s cognitive anthropology might lead him to envision. Successive surrogates do not march in lockstep with past roles and expectations;

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analogical schematization allows for more fluidity in cultural history. Nonetheless, Roach’s general strategy for Cities of the Dead—tracing role-playing surrogates and their performances through time—is an appropriate historiographical move for cognitive performance history. Places of Performance Conceptions of place have figured prominently in recent scholarship about theatre and performance, and for good reason.11 Theatres, like places for worship and spectator sports, hold memories of the past in addition to providing a practical and cognitive framework for performance events in the present. As we have already seen, different cultures set aside different kinds of places for performances, and such sites are always significant in the ongoing operations of cultural models. What has not been discussed, however, is the importance of place, rather than space, for spectatorial perception and the ramifications of “placeness” for all performance. Simply defined, a place is a bounded area denoted by human agency and memory. Space is boundless and abstract, but place is always human, specific, and singular—a place. The ancient Greek word for the area where spectators watched performances of their plays was theatron, literally “seeing place”—not any general space for spectating, but a particular hillside below the Acropolis in ancient Athens. Theatre and place have been bound together for a long time. In the following discussion, I will draw primarily on the work of J.E. Malpas, whose Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography echoes much of what I have already said about how our two ways of seeing (visual perceptions and visuomotor representations) influence theatrical engagement.12 Malpas counts Bachelard, Heidegger, Casey, Merleau-Ponty, and other phenomenologists among his major influences and credits Seamus Heaney and Marcel Proust for much of his inspiration. Although his argument is not based primarily on cognitive science, he does cite Mark Johnson, James J. Gibson, and a few other cognitive scientists in the course of his discussion. Malpas recognizes that place is not wholly an experience of sight—we know some places primarily by their sounds or even by their smells—but when we think about past performances we usually place them initially in a visual schema. Toward the end of Place and Experience, Malpas summarizes the major claim he has been arguing for six chapters. Despite its length

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and complexity, the summary is worth quoting in its entirety to gain a sense of the breath of Malpas’s synthesis of experience, space, place, knowledge, and humanity: The very possibility of being a creature that can have thoughts and that can have experience of a world is dependent on being a creature that has the capacity to act in relation to objects within the world. And this, in turn, is dependent on being a creature that has a grasp of both the subjective space correlated with its own capacities, as well as with features in its immediate environment, and the objective space within which the creature and its environmental surroundings are located. To be a creature that has such a grasp is also to be a creature that can distinguish between its own perspective on the world and that of others. To be a creature that can have thoughts, then, and that can have experience of a world, is not merely to be a creature located in a physically extended space, but rather to be a creature that finds itself always located within a complex but unitary place that encompasses the creature itself, other creatures, and a multiplicity of objects and environmental features.13

Malpas demonstrates, in effect, that our always existing in “a complex but unitary place” is a necessary prerequisite for experiencing what it is to be a human being. Although stated as dry, deductive propositions, much of Malpas’s summary rings bells that should sound familiar; his emphasis on agency, experience, seeing objects, and seeing others chimes with the major themes of Jacob and Jeannerod. Like Malpas, Jacob and Jeannerod also affirm the reality of “objective” and “subjective” seeing, which may be correlated with Malpas’s objective and subjective space in the above summary. Like Jacob and Jeannerod, Malpas privileges agency as necessary for memory and both as vital for constructing experience. Interestingly, Malpas arrived at the distinction between seeing objects and seeing people primarily through phenomenological reflection, not cognitive science. These two points of view, however, are mutually reinforcing. In fact, both as vital Malpas and Jacob and Jeannerod assert that place is a necessary prerequisite for having any point of view; one must be standing someplace to see the world and to gain the knowledge that the self is distinct from the world of objects and of others. According to Malpas, a human body with a mind/brain must be in a place before consciousness and action are possible. The strength of his argument lies in its simplicity. Greek citizens on their hillside looking down at the orchestra (“dancing place”) and preparing to watch Oedipus the King knew

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that their theatron was nested within their city-state, and their citystate was a part of the world. Malpas underlines the fact that our ability to nest places within other places gives us memory and knowledge of our place in the world. Cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser, cited by Malpas, builds on the cognitive ecological insights of James J. Gibson to discuss the conjunction of nested spatial and memorial operations. “[Spatial cognition] operates on a domain that has a clearly nested structure. . . . The system allows us to ‘mentally revisit’ places that we have once encountered without actually returning to them,” he says. Neisser continues, “Our memories of our own past are also organized in terms of nested units . . . they also preserve information for very long periods of time and with great richness of detail. Autobiographical memory enables us to ‘revisit’ previously visited places. . . .”14 Audiences, of course, carry these nested memories with them into theatres—memories that often shape their understanding of what they see and hear. For many male Athenians around 427 BCE, this meant images of the recent plague that devastated Athens and, for some, vivid memories of recent military campaigns against Sparta and other enemies in the ongoing Peloponnesian War. The knowledge of the “otherness” of others and of objects that one gains from spectating also depends upon place. Without relating the following statement to the experience of audience members in a theatre, Malpas remarks that “whenever different observers converge on a single object as the common cause for their individual perceptions and as the common object of their thoughts and experiences,” the observers realize that they have different but related points of view.15 Malpas is commenting on looking at objects, but the same conclusion applies to looking at others or to looking at both on a stage. Where you sit in an audience necessarily limits your view and leads you to acknowledge the limited views of other spectators. While it may seem a truism that no two observers ever see the same play, this simple truth actually has profound implications. The ancient Greeks experienced this problem head-on every time their judges voted for the best playwright at the end of the Festival. This straightforward observation helped to lead Athenians to an early form of democracy, and its truth remains a significant justification for all democratic procedures. It helped to lead Malpas to the recognition that our mental concepts of self, others, and objects “must be understood as interdependent and irreducible.” Or, as he puts it elsewhere, “the interconnection between the concepts of self-subjectivity, other-subjectivity, and objectivity implies that these three concepts come as a package

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deal—to have a grasp of one is to have a grasp of all.”16 Again, place— the place of the observer and the places of others and of objects—is at the center of this insight. The necessity of place for human experience and knowledge raises significant questions for theatre artists and scholars. Certainly it renders impossible the modernist hope for an “empty space,” a theatre building devoid of experience and memory in which artists might inscribe new images on a spectator’s tabula rasa, Locke’s master metaphor for the mind/brain as a blank slate.17 As humans, we make all building spaces into places and fill them, even as we are seeing them for the first time, with the world that is in our minds. Because the mind is not a tabula rasa, theatre buildings can never be empty spaces. All theatres come to spectators freighted with a history and culture that will partly control how spectators look at performers. In the ancient Theatre of Dionysus, the Athenians, seated on wedges of the hillside surrounding roughly half of the staging area, looked expectantly at the middle of the orchestra. For the performance of Oedipus, this spot contained an altar—not the altar for the ritual sacrifices of the bulls (which was located behind the skene house near the Temple of Dionysus in a grove further down the hill), but a removable prop altar necessary for the action of the tragedy. Under the altar, probably, was a low stone known as the thymele, which marked the center of the orchestra. Athenian citizens returning to their theatron for another festival would know that the thymele, or a prop placed over it, had often served as the focal point for the action of the play and for the movement of the chorus. In this regard, the ancient Athenians used the mental concept of “center-periphery” to orient themselves to the staging. As a concept, center-periphery defines the center of an area as more important than the periphery around it, with power accruing to those who are closest to that center. Center-periphery staging leads spectators to ask, “Who or what is at the center of things and who or what is not?” Other universal primitives combined to create the viewing schema that placed Athenian spectators in relation to their performances. The Greeks seated in their theatron unconsciously deployed the concepts of “near-far” to compare the approximate distances of downhill spectators to the orchestra, “verticality” to judge the height of the skene against the height of the Temple of Dionysus beyond it, “link” to see how the rest of the city connected to the orchestra through each parados (entrance and exit ways on either side of the orchestra), “figure-ground” as they looked at the relations among

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actor/characters and actor/chorus members in the orchestra, and “containment” as they watched these figures disappear into and reappear from the skene house. Put together, these mental concepts added up to a specific cultural schema for viewing plays in ancient Athens. Using the concepts of center-periphery, verticality, near-far, figure-ground, and containment, any Athenian citizen could call up a schematic image in memory of the entire place. This is true of all theatre architecture for playgoers throughout history. For viewers sitting in the auditorium of a modern proscenium theatre (such as the London Royal Court for the performance of Top Girls), for example, containment continues to be important, but in different ways. The proscenium arch itself “contains” and generally separates the performance space from the viewing space. In addition, smaller “containers”—box sets, wagoned platforms, and specific areas isolated by lighting and other devices within the proscenium frame—emphasize a modular quality to proscenium spectating that was unknown to the ancient Greeks. Further, these contained worlds are no longer linked, visually and architecturally, to the city in which they occur. Instead of center-periphery, fullstage proscenium viewing tends to emphasize “balance,” so that designers and directors (and audiences) become semiconscious of an imagined fulcrum center stage and work to maintain equal “weights” on either side of it. Because many spectators do not see the feet of actor/characters firmly planted on the stage floor and the frame itself provides a point of comparison for the height of actor/characters, scenic units, and images on backdrops, an emphasis on “verticality” takes the place of figure-ground in most proscenium productions. Indeed, “verticality” generally places figures on a hierarchy of visual importance; who or what towers over others gains in prominence and dominance. Given the cognitive logic of proscenium viewing, it is not surprising that this mode was initially adopted and came to be prized by the royalty and aristocracy of Europe. The proscenium stage provided appropriate places for the theatrical realization of Baroque allegories of power. As numerous operas and musicals attest, it continues to serve similar functions.18 While theatrical places always influence spectatorial percepts, they cannot fully determine them. Top Girls at the Royal Court provided a good counterexample to the authoritarian possibilities of proscenium viewing, as we will see in a subsequent section of this chapter. All viewing positions entail the recognition (even in a darkened house) that others in the auditorium have slightly different “points of view” on the actions of actor/characters on stage,

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as Malpas would remind us. Baroque allegories on seventeenthcentury proscenium stages oriented toward the eyepoint of the ruler in his box could no more ensure the obedience of their spectators to royal absolutism than can Hairspray to the values of consumer capitalism today—although both places pushed their ideologies. Viewing positions are important for perpetuating cultures, but never omnipotent in their influence. The landscape theatres of the ancient Greeks and the proscenium auditoriums for modern audiences are only two of many possibilities for theatrical spectating, of course. Trestle stages set up in public squares, performances inside places of worship, processional staging, theatre-in-the-round orientations, puppet shows in the streets, and what historian David Wiles, borrowing from Plato’s performing-andeating spaces for his symposiums, terms “sympotic spaces”—all call forth various spatial relations concepts from spectators that they bring to bear when they watch the performance. As Wiles points out, a more complete history of performance spaces can awaken the historian (and the contemporary producer) to many more possibilities than are dreamed of in our usual modernist focus on theatre as an artistic product to be set apart from audiences and admired as a discrete work of art.19 Further, within several of these historical places for performance, different spectators will see very different performances, depending on where they are sitting, standing, or lying. In each of these situations, the spatial arrangements and individual orientations within them will lead spectators to emphasize some mental concepts over others. All spectators will put together the primary spatial relations concepts they used in order to form a general schema of the performance place in their memories, but these schemas for the same place, though similar, cannot be completely identical. This means that any history of the spaces used for performances that seeks to incorporate the full range of spectatorial orientations must be a very complex history indeed. Within a given culture, however, certain spatial orientations will tend to predominate in theatrical viewing because these orientations are common to many other ways in which people in that culture look at the world. Part of the reason for the importance of “center-periphery” for the ancient Athenians was because it was a significant way for them to organize and understand spatiality in several areas of their culture. The spatial arrangement of Greek temples, built to draw worshippers to their centers from surrounding areas, underscores this orientation. Ancient Greek biologists understood the heart to be at the center of the body and wrote

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about blood circulations as a flow from the center to the periphery and back again. When the Greeks drew maps of the world, they placed Greece at the center and arranged other lands around it. All people in all cultures have the full range of spatial relations concepts as lenses for their perceptions, but each culture will favor some spatial organizers over others. When the Greeks watched Oedipus the King, they witnessed the spatial concept of center-periphery in the action of the tragedy as well as in the staging. As classicist Rush Rehm notes about many ancient Greek plays, “characters are pulled in from far away [to a center] as if drawn by a magnet.”20 This occurs throughout Oedipus. Actor/ characters come from the periphery—from nearby parts of Thebes, and from Delphi, Corinth, and Mount Cithaeron—enter through one of the paradoi, and cross to the altar in the center of the orchestra, the religious and political center of Theban power. And at the end of the tragedy, Oedipus convinces Kreon to ostracize him from Thebes. Next to death, ostracism was one of the most onerous punishments a Greek city-state could level on a citizen; it banished the man from the center of civic, familial, religious, and social life to the periphery beyond its borders. Oedipus must give up his power and leave behind his children, Ismene and Antigone, to wander forever outside of Thebes. The concept of center-periphery organized much of the dramatic action, as well as the spatiality of the performance, of Oedipus the King for the Athenians. In 427 BCE, the production of Oedipus at the Festival of Dionysus was what we might now call community-based theatre. One of the hallmarks of community-based performance is its attempt to produce plays and events that draw from and give back to a community, a group of people typically defined by their location in a geographic place.21 Even if a community is dispersed, some of its members can gather in one location for a performance. Most community-based plays, such as Swamp Gravy that is produced in a small town in Georgia, celebrate the community’s sense of place and the memories evoked by its objects, buildings, and people. 22 Although modernists object that this commitment to localism limits the affective range of community-based theatre, the nested relationships of place and memory that all audience members bring with them to the theatre—their ability to fit one container of place inside or outside of another—contradict this concern. Swamp Gravy, for example, attempts to forge an interracial religious community by deploying a variety of techniques that locate the town of Colquitt within the American South, within the United States, within the world, and,

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finally (as in the letter scene in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town) within the “Mind of God.” Other, less religiously oriented communitybased theatres have also invoked complex, multilayered containers of place and memory with their base in a small community. Cornerstone Theatre, for example, has adapted the plots of plays by Shakespeare and Brecht partly to teach local citizens that their problems resonate with problems that people in many cultures and historical eras have overcome.23 The nested relationships that many community-based theatres forge between their local communities and the rest of humanity suggest that this kind of theatre is not really a distinct genre of performance. To be sure, some of the production strategies of community-based theatre—building a script from local input, addressing local political concerns from a progressive point of view, finding a performance space that has local resonance, and employing locals for a range of production roles—do set it apart from most contemporary, mainstream theatres. From the perspective of world theatre history, however, these attributes of community-based performance are similar or even identical to many other modes of making theatre that are heavily dependent on place. A local army general named Sophocles could write a play that focused intense community concern on the immediate problems of the plague, political leadership, and religious duty and the Athenian spectators at the Theatre of Dionysus understood the relevance of Oedipus the King to their communal lives. In addition, without compromising its local relevance, the performance touched on what the Greeks in the audience understood as universal truths. The usual clichés about community-based theatre apply to their 427 BCE production. Sophocles understood that “all theatre (like all politics) is local.” Plus, the general and his actors were “acting locally and thinking globally.” To focus on local concerns and suggest wider relevance is simply good theatre making; placebased theatre artists—there are no other kind—have understood this for centuries. 24 Cultural Casting Conventions The cultural-historical place of a production also shapes the casting conventions of its performance. As we have seen, casting is often historically variable even as other conventions in a cultural model of theatregoing may remain the same. By 2000, “who’s on first” in baseball could be white, black, brown, or female, even though the

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player had to be a white male in 1900. Who played Jokasta in Oedipus or Viola in Twelfth Night in productions of both plays in 2000 was probably a female actor, even though the performer had to be a male in both original productions. Social values, discourses, and ideologies invariably intersect with casting conventions in all kinds of performances. And both come together in the blend of performer and role. Shakespeare used conceptual blending with dexterity to keep his Elizabethan audience in a playful mood about the sexual implications of boys playing females, especially the boy actor cast as Viola, during the performance. First, he has the shipwrecked Viola dress like a boy so that she may approach the Duke for employment as a male page in his court. Masquerading as Cesario for most of the performance, the actor actually looked and sounded for the audience like the boy actor beneath the character of Viola. In addition, Shakespeare nudged his spectators to unblend the boy actor/Viola/ Cesario mix by reminding them both of the dramatic masquerade and the theatrical casting convention at strategic moments in the play. At their first encounter, when asked by Olivia if he is a “comedian” (i.e., an actor), boy actor/Viola/Cesario says to boy actor/ Olivia, “No, my profound heart; and yet (by the very fangs of malice I swear) I am not that I play” (I.5.176–77). Later, after Malvolio gives Viola a ring from Olivia, boy actor/Viola puzzles out the difficulty of her situation in soliloquy after she realizes that the Countess loves him/her: I am the man. If it be so, as `tis, Poor lady, she were better love a dream. Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness Wherein the pregnant enemy does much. How easy it is for the proper false In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms! Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we, For such as we are made of, such we be. How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly; And I (poor monster) fond as much on him; And she (mistaken) seems to dote on me. And what will become of this? As I am man, My state is desperate for my master’s love, As I am woman (now alas the day!) What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe? O Time, thou must untangle this, not I; It is too hard a knot for me t’untie. (II.2.25–41)

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Shakespeare renders the levels of gender identity and sexual desire intentionally playful and dizzying for his Elizabethan spectators in this soliloquy. At the level of the dramatic fiction, with spectators separating the blend of boy actors as female characters, Viola’s soliloquy suggested romantic and sexual confusions and possibilities that were funny and tantalizing enough. Poor Viola-disguised-as-aboy is trapped between her love for a man and a woman’s love for her! When spectators stepped back from those two singular identities to consider its pieces at the theatrical level of casting conventions and to recognize that both Viola and Olivia were performed by boys, the generally hetero-normative difficulties of boy actor/ Viola’s position took on very different possibilities that in contemporary critical parlance could only be called the queering of her situation. With lots of help from Shakespeare, the soliloquy invited Elizabethan auditors to enjoy romantic and sexual possibilities among various combinations of men and boys, with one and sometimes two of them dressed up as women. “As I am a man,” says the boy actor, “My state is desperate for my master’s love.” With women cast in the female roles, the usual convention of modern productions, Twelfth Night presents a generally conservative notion of sex and gender roles. In the early 1600s, in contrast, Twelfth Night, like other romantic comedies of the era, clearly had homoerotic appeal for some members of the audience. How the homoerotic charge of this play and others actually worked among males onstage and off in the Elizabethan auditorium will probably remain an open question. Excitable puritan critics of the theatre, however, who objected to any public display of sexual desire (hetero or homo), did single out the dangerous eroticism of beautiful boys on stage. In his The Anatomie of Abuses in Ailgna (1583), Philip Stubbs polemicized against “the whoredome & unclennes” of boy actors, their player-abettors, and their spectatoradmirers: “[For proof], but marke the flocking and running to Theaters and curtens . . . to see Playes and Enterludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdie speaches; such laughing and fleering; such kissing and bussing; such clipping and culling; such wickinge and glancinge of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. These goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate . . . and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomits, or worse.”25 While Stubbs is obviously a biased reporter, his overheated critique does suggest, at the least, that the players trained their boy actors to flirt with some of the male spectators. Imagining

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a teenage boy dressed as Viola/Cesario who used the above soliloquy to arouse some male spectators at the Globe may not be our culture’s idea of appropriate behavior at the theatre, but we must not rule it out as a possible mode of actor-audience interaction during the period. Lower-class boys had good reason to court upper-class men around 1600. Patriarchy kept upper-class males in authority over those beneath them on the hierarchy, including lower-class males and women of all classes. A patriarch could enjoy sexual relations with boys of other classes and also with women, whether wives, mistresses, or prostitutes, with no sacrifice of social prestige; the socially ascribed identity of “the homosexual,” which would limit the upper-class privileges of Oscar Wilde and others, was still nearly three hundred years away. During Elizabethan times, adult male liaisons with boys in households, schools, and shops were common and raised no eyebrows unless they challenged the social system and dominant ideology. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men probably employed at least four boys in their company—Twelfth Night requires three for the female roles and likely needed one more for Sebastian— and these apprentices lived in the homes of company members, like other apprentices of the era. What these apprentices did or were expected to do on and off stage cannot be known, but places for illicit gaming, drinking, and coupling surrounded all London theatres.26 We can be sure that the teenage apprentices knew what was going on in the neighborhood and, like lower-class girls, may have sometimes found it necessary to trade sexual favors for social protection. Some of the boys, as Stubbs and the puritans alleged, may have been involved in prostitution. Looked at from this perspective, it may not be surprising that the English theatre kept women from performing on the stage until 1660. Even then, Charles II, who had enjoyed women actors at the French court, had to specify this mode of casting in his royal patents regulating performances. Before the Restoration, patriarchal males had occasionally applauded women on stage when commedia dell arte troupes visited London. And English merchants and sea captains had certainly watched women perform during their travels on the continent. These men knew that women could more fully embody female characters than the beardless boys in woman’s weeds who fretted and strutted on London stages. But there seems to have been little social pressure to accept women into theatrical companies or onto the stage. Indeed, all-boy troupes

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continued to be successful well into the seventeenth century, sometimes topping the adult companies in social prestige. Many men connected to the theatre apparently had a commercial stake in the casting status quo. As this example from Twelfth Night and Elizabethan culture suggests, the intersection of casting conventions and gender roles varies enormously from historical culture to culture, much of it dependent on cultural power and/or social legitimacy. The history of kabuki in Japan has similarities to Shakespearean theatre in England, although, luckily, documents concerning governmental intervention allow historians to know more about this performance tradition than about male cross-dressing for the stage in London. Female prostitutes began kabuki by performing all male and female roles in satirical playlets and bawdy sideshows for their customers around 1600. Soon, male prostitutes were competing with the women in their own kabuki productions, again assuming all of the roles. Several government bans outlawed women from performing in the emerging entertainment genre and, in 1652, young male prostitutes were also forbidden. The government’s decision to limit the casting of all kabuki roles to older men had more to do with class than sexuality; the samurai rulers were concerned that lower-class actors of either sex might entice their upper-class young men to form liaisons with the lower classes and consequently threaten the social hierarchy. In the ongoing regulations about who could and who could not play male and female characters on the kabuki stage, however, there seems to have been no discussion about the believability of these various blends. Spectators were apparently willing to accept female or male prostitutes or older men in all kabuki roles, regardless of the age, sex, or class of the character.27 Many spectators today are also open to a variety of blended actor/character possibilities on stage. Gender-bending and other forms of nontraditional casting are now commonplaces in theatrical practice and their study a cottage industry in theatre research. I have worked in this industry as a performer, a director, and a scholar and marveled as cross-racial, cross-gender, intercultural, and disability casting continue to proliferate. What had initially been a mode of protest—“wait a minute, a black, female, or disabled actor can play that role written for a ‘normal’ white male”—is now used for a wide variety of political and aesthetic purposes. In her article about Ong Keng Sen’s direction of Desdemona, a piece that cited Othello but used very little of Shakespeare’s play, for instance, Yong Li Lan reports that the casting strategically paired and divided the

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two major characters. 28 Two female actors performed different versions of Desdemona—a Singaporean actor as a Chinese Desdemona and an Asian performer of mixed ethnicity playing a character called Mona, who appeared only in fragments on a projection screen. There were also two Othellos—an Indian male, who acted in kutiyattam style, and an Indian female, who approached the role as a kathakali performer. As these blends of nationalities, genders, and styles suggest, Ong deliberately set about to deny the hunger for aesthetic and cultural authenticity that usually accompanies intercultural performances. Instead, notes Yong, Ong “dramatized the breakdown of cultural dialogue” for her mostly Asian spectators. 29 Ong’s Desdemona suggests that playful and political doubled identities will continue to proliferate on stages around the globe. Playing with Salient Meanings Desdemona put some of Shakespeare’s language from Othello into the mouths of Ong’s actors, but relied on superscript projections to translate this and other spoken dialogue into the dominant language of specific audiences as the production toured the world. The proliferation of superscript translations for global and intercultural theatre has somewhat shifted the responsibility for intelligible language in the theatre from the author to the translator. From another perspective, however, this is hardly a new practice in Western cultural models of theatregoing. In productions of “foreign” Shakespeare, translators have been updating Shakespeare’s old language into the contemporary words and phrases of German, French, and Russian since the eighteenth century. Likewise, English-speaking auditors at the theatre have been hearing updated Euripides and Moliere for a long time. In most productions, the playwright’s original choice of words still matters, of course. Good translators will usually struggle to preserve something of what they believe to be the author’s intended meaning in a play’s new language, even in the most a la mode translation. But how does language matter to audiences? How do auditors make meaning of the words coming out of actor’s bodies? Until recently, most linguists accepted an interactionist model of oral language processing. In brief, people seeking to know what a speaker means would watch her/his gestures and listen to the speaker’s words and phrases to induce intended meaning from the overall context of the communication. For a phrase meant ironically, such as “Thanks for your

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help,” the context of the conversation would prompt immediate understanding so that the listener would not need to analyze the literal meaning of the words first before reaching comprehension. The interactionist model privileges social context over lexical memory in the construction of meaning. In contrast, psycholinguist Rachel Giora proposes a graded salience model of aural comprehension. She opens the first chapter of her book, On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language, with a telling example to demonstrate the issue. Recently, she says, when passing a shoe store in Tel Aviv called “Body and Sole,” the first meaning she gave to “Sole” was the one for the inappropriate homophone “s-o-u-l,” despite the fact that she was looking at a display window full of shoes. Giora recognized that the storeowner depended on this substitution of meanings and she knew that she had been taken in by the sign. Her point, though, was to underline that in this case (as in many others) the salient meaning of a word trumped the immediate context.30 What is it about lexical memory, asks Giora, that often proves more important in generating initial meaning than the dynamics of contextual cognition? Another of her examples centers on a joke: “Two men walked into a bar and the third men ducked.” As Giora explains, the joke initially activates the salient meaning of “bar” as a place for drinking liquor and then requires listeners to suppress it and substitute the less salient meaning of “bar” as a length of metal. Lots of jokes do this, of course. For Giora, salient meanings are due to “conventionality, frequency, familiarity or prototypicality.”31 It is these meanings that retain prominence in the lexical memory of the mind/brain and are activated first when the word or phrase is heard again. Giora’s On Our Mind demonstrates that the salient meaning of words usually determines an auditor’s initial comprehension, regardless of context or presumed intent, and provides an important key to the workings of metaphor and irony on the stage. Giora’s experimental research is part of a broadscale, international effort among many psychologists and linguists who have been investigating such questions for over three decades. Salience theory began in the 1970s with the work of Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues; it is related to Rosch’s work on basic-level categories and prototypes. Experiments with salience and discourse have also challenged neuroscientists to come up with models of minding that can accommodate degrees of salience. Giora and her fellow scientists depend upon several sophisticated experimental techniques, which include the grading of salient meanings in general word

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usage, monitoring the time it takes subjects to complete word fragments, using eye-tracking devices to measure the speed of word comprehension, and even scanning the brains of subjects who are reading. Several of these instruments can track response times in milliseconds. In her chapter on metaphors and idioms, Giora demonstrates that salient meanings are more important for comprehension than literal ones. Although many linguists have long assumed that literal meanings are more immediately accessible than metaphors, Giora tested subjects on familiar metaphors (such as “adventure is a roller coaster”) and found that people understood the phrase just as quickly as they did an equivalent literal phrase. Less salient, unfamiliar metaphors, however—Giora gives as an example, “Her wedding ring is a ‘sorry we’re closed’ sign”—took longer than literal phrases to process.32 She finds that degree of salience, not literality, determines the speed of processing. “The relevant distinction is not between literal and nonliteral language but between salient and non-salient language,” Giora concludes.33 Among other things, this suggests that our brains, when it comes to processing discourse, are not inherently bound by the either/or logic of many of our conventional structuralisms but are highly sensitive to matters of degree. It also shows, as the embodied realism of Lakoff and Johnson has affirmed, that salient metaphors, metonymies, and analogies are often more foundational to thinking than literal meanings. Irony, simply defined as meaning the opposite of literal denotation, should also be included in the list of tropes that shape cognition at fundamental levels. Irony has long been a problem for linguists who hold a referential understanding of the relation between the mental lexicon and the world beyond, because ironic phrases turn literal, apparently referential meanings on their heads. As with metaphors, familiar and conventional ironies are processed right away, while less salient ironic phrases take more milliseconds. If a friend says “Big deal” in a sarcastic voice, you know immediately what s/he means. In this case, the literal meaning of the ironic phrase, says Giora, “functions as a reference point relative to which the ironized situation is to be assessed and criticized.”34 Irony is not just playful inversion, as some linguists have supposed. Along with other researchers, Giora concludes that an ironic utterance also functions as a critique; the real situation has fallen short of our expectations, of some norm, and irony is a mode of complaint. What should have been a “big deal” is not, and the friend’s sarcastic irony marks his/her disappointment.

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Giora’s enhanced definition of irony has several potential applications for understanding audience response in performance. Situations of dramatic irony, for example, when playwrights remind the audience of things they know that their characters do not, occur frequently in the theatre. At the end of Brecht’s play, Mother Courage speaks of hoping to meet her older son Elif, not knowing, as the audience does, that he is already dead. When Oedipus tells the Chorus that he will seek out and banish the slayer of Lauis, most spectators, including the initial Athenian audience, knew that he is damning himself. As Giora might have predicted, in these and other instances of dramatic irony the superior knowledge of the audience encourages critique. Brecht and Sophocles wanted their spectators to stand back from their protagonists and judge their situations with some critical detachment. Giora’s linkage of irony and criticism is not a new perception, but it does confirm the insights of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Kenneth Burke, and others regarding this use of irony in drama.35 What is new in Giora’s cognitive approach is the potential to apply her research to understand how audiences process dramatic irony while they are experiencing a production. Her results demonstrate that words and metaphors can become more salient over the duration of a performance. If the actions and utterances of the performers return many times to the same words and metaphors, we can expect that the cognitive processing time of these tropes will decrease as they become more familiar. Also, the meanings attributed to these words and metaphors will gradually narrow to the salient ones intended by the playwright, eventually becoming taken-for-granted attributions in the minds of the auditors. In effect, the playwrights use the bodies and sounds of the actor/characters in order to shape the working memories of their spectators to focus primarily on what are becoming the salient meanings. Such lexical conditioning is the mark of a good wordsmith. In Oedipus the King, the metaphor “seeing is knowing” pervades many of the play’s speeches, gradually narrowing the salient meaning of “seeing” until spectators equate all actions and gestures related to seeing, including its opposite, blindness, with knowing or the lack of it. In addition, Sophocles gradually links the meaning of knowledge to purity and to its opposite, pollution, by channeling the meaning of knowing to knowing one’s fate. By the time Oedipus comes to the full realization of his crimes, the linkage among sight, knowledge, and pollution, ironized both in words and actions, has

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created what might be called a “salience effect” that drives the action to its inevitable conclusion and massively shapes spectatorial interpretation. A brief look at passages from Robert Bagg’s 2004 translation of Oedipus the King allows us to examine how this process might have worked in the initial performance of the play in classical Athens. Bagg is a well-known and respected scholar-translator; his translations of ancient Greek plays have been performed in more than sixty productions in the United States and abroad.36 Like other scholars, Bagg is aware that Oedipus was probably performed in 427 BCE, when the Athenians were recovering from a plague that ravaged their city. The plague struck soon after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE, in which Athens had already suffered some early reversals. This context is important because Sophocles, an Athenian army general, set his tragedy in ancient Thebes as a partial mirror of contemporary Athens, a convention understood and expected by his audience. As Bagg knows, the playwright invited Athenian spectators to examine the crisis in Thebes for parallels to their own lives. To evoke memories of the recent plague in Athens, Sophocles began Oedipus (in Bagg’s translation) with a scene in which an old priest, surrounded by children and the props of plague fighting, begs Oedipus for help in lifting the curse from the city that has led to its pollution. Sophocles relies on his spectators’ knowing the myth of Oedipus and links his protagonist’s incest and murder—his personal and familial impiety—directly to the pollution of the city. From the start of the action, then, Sophocles encouraged a visceral response from his audience to Oedipus as a plague carrier. As Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War makes clear, no one in Athens was untouched by the plague. Family members watched the bodies of loved ones erupt in pustules and ulcers and stood by helplessly as they twisted from spasms and retching. The smell of burning plague bodies lingered over Athens for two years.37 The first scene of Oedipus recalled the gut-wrenching and heartbreaking realities of the plague for the audience. And throughout the action, Sophocles returned to images of pollution that never let them forget it. Following this initial scene that evoked collective memory, Sophocles worked carefully with images of seeing and knowing that specified the pride of his protagonist. He linked these images to polluting in the episode between Oedipus and Tieresias. In the penultimate speech of this scene, seeing is knowing and knowing is cursed.

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This tangle of salient meanings begins with this speech by the prophet: Since you have thrown my blindness at me I will tell you what your eyes don’t see; what evil you are steeped in. You don’t see where you live or who shares your house. Do you know your parents? You are their enemy in this life and down there with the dead. And soon their double curse – your father’s and your mother’s – will lash you out of Thebes on terror-stricken feet. Your eyes, which now see life, will then see darkness. Soon your shriek will burrow in every cave, bellow from every mountain outcrop of Kithairon, when what your marriage means strikes home, when it shows you the house that took you in. You sailed a fair wind to a most foul harbor. Evils you cannot guess Will bring you down to what you are. To what your children are. Go on, throw muck at Kreon, And at the warning spoken through my mouth. No man will ever be Ground into wretchedness as you will be.38

For the Greek spectators, this speech may have served partly as a reminder of the mythic story they already knew. Mostly, though, it emphasized Tieresias’s knowledge of the pollution at the heart of the Theban polis. The speech puts together “house,” “parents,” “curse,” “marriage,” “foul harbor,” “evils,” “children,” “muck,” and “wretchedness,” setting up a chain of associations that derives from seeing and knowledge and links back to the plague. As well, almost from the start, Sophocles knits utterance to stage action, in this case through the movement of Tieresias, whose blindness necessarily limited the actor/character’s physical movement on stage. Speeches by the leader of the Chorus, Oedipus, and Kreon kept the linkages among sight, knowledge, and pollution alive in the minds of the audience. In the next major incident, Oedipus relates his mental image of the man he killed on the road to Jokasta’s

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description of Laios. Oedipus then re-embodies his remembered vision of the slaying, bringing past sight into present stage action. His next utterances, laden with actual and metaphorical seeing, deepen the links between sight, knowledge, and impurity that Tieresias had foreseen. The speech begins, “Can’t you see that I’m evil / my whole nature utter filth?” (948–49), and continues with references to “mother,” “father,” “birth,” “the truth” and “men’s eyes” (954–62). The ending of the succeeding choric ode enhances and broadens these ties by depicting Zeus looking down on impious mortals. The Chorus fears that “if prophecies don’t show the way” (1035), then men will no longer honor the gods, and godly power will “lose force” (1049). Remembering the plague that afflicts the city, the Chorus seeks help from the gods and fears the polluting consequences of impiety. Jokasta prays to Apollo in the next scene and is interrupted by the Messenger, who is simply “looking” for the king’s house. Again, speech and action mix health and seeing to ironically suggest their opposites, pollution and ignorance. The Messenger blithely drives home this irony when he wishes Jokasta and her family the kind of “joy / that comes when a marriage bears fruit” (169–70). Next, Oedipus and the Chorus Leader trade remarks about the approaching Herdsman, and Oedipus says, “Some of you will know him by sight” (1264). By this point in the action, any reference to seeing and knowledge, even this commonplace remark, will remind the audience of the web of impiety that already ensnares the tragic hero and the city. The salient ironic linkages already established among sight, knowledge, and purity overdetermine audience response to the meanings of these apparently innocent phrases and actions. By the end of this short scene, Oedipus’ blindness, knowledge, and impurity have become his fate: “I am / the child who must not be born. / I loved where I must not love, / I killed where I must not kill” (1339–42). Sophocles has piled up and narrowed the salient meanings of children, birth, love, and death; for an audience, these many-meaninged words have come to have very specific referents. When Oedipus runs into the palace to find Jokasta hung, and then blinds himself with her broaches, the dramatic irony of the play ends. The characters and chorus now have the same knowledge as the audience; spectator criticism of Oedipus concludes and something like catharsis begins. The unholy triad of seeing, knowing, and polluting continues for the rest of the play in several speeches and actions, but the audience’s point of view about the protagonist’s entanglement in his fate shifts from critical horror toward concerned sympathy.

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The salience effect that I have traced supports the views of those critics who emphasize the victimization of Oedipus by the gods. The seeing-knowing-polluting linkage underlines the power of a daemon in determining the protagonist’s life. While some critics have tried to read free will into the arc of Oedipus’ fate, others, including Bagg, deny this. “It’s possible,” he says, by using a good deal of wanton ingenuity, to claim that Oedipus exercised free will and that his choices led him unaware into catastrophe. But our first and overwhelming impression prevails: the gods have willed Oedipus to do what he did. Oedipus and all the other characters come to this conclusion; the design and verbal texture of the play confirm it. (Ital. in original)39

The salience effect produced in the minds of audiences by the repetition and narrowing of seeing, knowing, and polluting helps to confirm Bagg’s conclusion. This is no small matter for theatre history and the interpretation of the Greek classics. From the days of Maurice Bowra and H.D.F. Kitto, Greek scholars have battled about the relative importance of free will and fate in interpretations of Oedipus.40 Giora’s cognitive approach to salient meaning can help to resolve similar controversies involving audiences, language, and meaning. Among modern Anglo-American playwrights, David Mamet and Harold Pinter are two of the best practitioners of focusing and narrowing salient meanings for their auditors. In Glengarry Glen Ross, for example, Mamet piles on real-estate lingo to emphasize the obsessive, claustrophobic competition that chains his salesmen characters to their jobs and their disintegrating masculinity.41 The repetition of “leads,” “sits,” “sheets,” “board,” and “closing,” together with “fuck,” “balls,” and “action,” reduces his figures to dogs fighting over bones. Pinter narrows much of his significant language to familial terms that mock the absence of family love among his characters in The Homecoming.42 “Family,” “Daddy,” “Uncle,” “wife,” “boys,” “home,” along with phrases such as “a nice cuddle and a kiss” that should signal affection, contrast ironically to the aggressiveness, alienation, and greed of his dissolute English family. Like Sophocles, Pinter underlines his ironies with actions. At the end of the play, Max, the father of the family, crawls over to Ruth, who has become a vampiric mother figure among them, to beg her with a childlike moan for a kiss. Salience effects alter conventional meanings in Mamet’s and Pinter’s plays and charge their language with power and menace.

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Ethics in the Theatre How do theatrical spectators process the ethics of a play as they are watching it? More narrowly, how did Shakespeare induce his audience to praise or condemn certain fictional actions on moral grounds and to reach conclusions that separated “good” from “bad” characters in Twelfth Night? As in responses to the language of Oedipus, repetition and salience figure prominently in this cognitive operation as well. Theatre historians are generally quick to acknowledge that different audiences often judge situations and characters in the same play differently from one century to the next, but does this mean that the cognitive dynamics of moral judgment are entirely relative to historical context? Will the response of a twenty-first century audience to the ethics of Twelfth Night have very little in common with the response of Shakespeare’s spectators in the early 1600s? If this is so, can the historian, mired in present ethical prejudices, ever reach any probable conclusions about that first audience’s understanding of the ethics of Shakespeare’s play? Lakoff and Johnson would argue that, in terms of recognizing ethical problems and making moral decisions, we probably use the same macro-level mental processes as the Cro-Magnons. Historical context matters, but the basic operations of moral understanding have not changed all that much since the initial performance of Twelfth Night. L and J’s chapter on “Morality” in Philosophy in the Flesh builds on numerous empirical studies and major scholarly insights.43 In this regard, Johnson’s single-authored 1993 book, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics, provided the breakthrough on which their coauthored 1999 work is based. In his “Introduction,” Johnson wrote: Moral reasoning is a constructive imaginative activity that is based, not primarily on universal laws, but principally on metaphoric concepts at two basic levels: (1) Our most fundamental moral concepts (e.g., will, freedom, law, right, duty, well-being, action) are defined metaphorically, typically by multiple metaphoric mappings for a single concept. (2) The way we conceptualize a particular situation will depend on our use of systematic conceptual metaphors that make up the common understanding of members of our culture. In other words, the way we frame and categorize a given situation will determine how we reason about it, and how we frame it will depend on which metaphorical concepts we are using.44

On the basis of this link between ethical reasoning and conceptual metaphors, Johnson was able to conclude that both moral absolutism

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(e.g., Kant and Mill) and moral relativism (e.g., Nietzsche) could not meet the empirical tests of an ethics grounded in a cognitive perspective. Although Johnson did not propose a new ethical system in Moral Imagination, he, like Owen Flanagan and several other ethicists influenced by cognitive science, carved out a position of moral naturalism, which simply argues that an ethical system, to be valid, must take account of how people actually use their mind/brains to make moral judgments.45 In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson refine and extend Johnson’s earlier insights. They draw on cross-cultural empirical experiments to demonstrate that the kinds of “systematic conceptual metaphors” that Johnson noted also undergird ethical thought and action in several world cultures. These various conceptual metaphors, which they now term “metaphorical systems,” cannot be built into moral absolutes, but, at the same time they do constrain the range of possible ethical positions, so that complete historical relativism is also ruled out. Where Johnson identified only a few such systems, Philosophy in the Flesh lists eleven of them. In each, morality is primarily about enhancing the wellbeing of oneself and others and overlaps with other fields of human activity. These metaphorical systems for morality are, in brief: 1. Moral well-being is wealth and can be counted. (“She owed him a debt of gratitude.”) 2. Moral well-being is the pursuit of self-interest. (“My profits benefit everyone.”) 3. Moral well-being is living a strong and upright life. (“He’s an upstanding citizen.”) 4. Moral well-being is obeying legitimate authority. (“The President demands patriotism.”) 5. Moral well-being is following the dictates of nature. (“The strong should protect the weak.”) 6. Moral well-being is following the right path. (“Keep on the straight and narrow.”) 7. Moral well-being is embedded in an inner essence. (“Her soul protected her.”) 8. Moral well-being is purity. (“Beware of impure thoughts.”) 9. Moral well-being is health. (“His immorality will infect the neighborhood.”) 10. Moral well-being is empathizing with others. (“I feel your pain.”) 11. Moral well-being is nurturance. (“I will help you to become a better person.”)

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Lakoff and Johnson do not claim that these metaphorical systems encompass all of the ways through which people in various cultures and historical eras have defined and reasoned about moral problems, but their explanations leave no doubt that these systems have been pervasive and significant. In the following discussion, I will frequently put these systems in bold type to distinguish them from other uses of these terms. Shakespeare invited his London audience to use most of these metaphorical systems to understand the ethics of his characters and their actions in Twelfth Night. Chief among them, as we shall see, were moral well-being as wealth, strength, nature, the right path, inner essence, health, and empathy. In performing the comedy, the actors embodied these ethical metaphorical systems in their physical characterizations, their onstage activities, and occasionally in their use of props and costumes as well as in their delivery of Shakespeare’s words. There is no single, master system of ethics that organizes and subordinates the others in the comedy; the attempt to find a metaphorical “key” for the play that unlocks all of its ethical meanings is probably as misplaced in criticism as it is in life. At the same time, these groups of metaphors produced enough coherence for spectators so that their moral judgments about the drama would not likely be random or completely relative. While the historian can never know how well these systems actually resonated with Shakespeare’s initial spectators, s/he can discuss the general readiness of the audience to understand and accept them. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed Shakespeare’s comedy at the Middle Temple in February of 1602, their primary spectators were the male students (mostly the sons of the English nobility), honored guests, and the faculty of this Elizabethan law school. Among the students at the Middle Temple in 1602 were several young gentlemen who would go on to write plays for the London theatre, including John Marston, John Ford, and John Webster. Middle Temple education encouraged the occasional writing and performing of feast-day plays; a London publisher printed extracts from the boys’ Christmas Revels play in 1597/98, for example. These privileged young men and their masters knew the conventions of the contemporary stage and most must have looked forward to this holiday visit from Shakespeare’s company. Shakespeare also knew his Middle Temple audience. Thomas Greene, a final-year student in 1602, later lived with Shakespeare and his family at Stratford and the playwright may have been on friendly terms with other students as well. Certainly he knew enough about the social

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life and architecture of the Middle Temple to include several injokes about them in Twelfth Night. He named two of his dramatic characters after the nicknames of two prominent students, Fabian and Curio, and when Feste describes Olivia’s house, he describes the great hall used for dining and performing at the school. In addition to these in-jokes, frequent legal allusions in the dialogue suggest that Shakespeare may have written or revised the play specifically for this audience.46 By schooling the sons of the rich, the Middle Temple legitimated the legal authority of the crown and helped to extend the reach of the law into the lives of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. As Linda Anderson points out in A Kind of Wild Justice: Revenge in Shakespeare’s Comedies, “The monarchy had long been attempting to establish itself as the sole source of justice by substituting law for the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the feud.”47 In 1602, however, when most gentlemen went armed on the streets of London, the code duello continued to legitimate the settling of many wrongs by private rather than public means. Honor often drove men to seek justice through revenge, not the law. Although Shakespeare’s audience of barristers, judges, and legal students had a general interest in extending the legitimacy of the law in settling private quarrels, they would not have been immune to the pull of Anglo-Saxon honor and the cause of old-fashioned revenge. Twelfth Night examines this conflict between law and revenge, which must have been of special interest to the Middle Temple spectators. Not surprisingly for a play that centers on love, however, the ethics of seeking justice are folded into larger ethical questions about faithfulness and nature. Nonetheless, perhaps responding to a major concern of his audience, Shakespeare began Twelfth Night with a focus on the difficulties of reciprocation, a problem that, if unresolved, can lead to legal retribution or personal revenge. Shipwrecked actor/Viola finds herself on an island where the two major ruling houses are frozen in a conflict that hinges on the ethics of reciprocation. Actor/Olivia, stuck in the past, believes she must “pay a debt” of love to her dead brother before she can marry. Actor/Orsino, tied to a vision in the future, believes Olivia must “repay” his capacious love for her by eventually falling in love with him. Neither moral debt, of course, can be paid in the present. Shakespeare dramatizes the implications of this stalemate by teasing out its underlying metaphorical system, moral-well-beingis-wealth. The general ethics of this group of metaphors demand that if one person does something good for you, you owe that person a good turn of equal value. Or, alternately, if someone commits a crime

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against you, you have the right to retribution, either through legal suit or personal revenge. With regard to both rights and wrongs, the moral mandate is reciprocity, a final “balancing of the books.” This moral accounting metaphorical system also undergirds the traditional image of justice as a pair of scales, an image that encourages the observer to understand the need to balance the punishment against the crime and thereby achieve just retribution. The moral-well-beingis-wealth system of metaphors had obvious appeal to the audience of lawyers and law students at the Middle Temple. Actor/Viola’s entrance onto the scene as Orsino’s page Cesario complicates the ethical dilemma of reciprocation in Twelfth Night. Olivia quickly falls in love with Viola/Cesario and soon both Olivia and Orsino are playing games of moral blackmail within the system of moral accounting to win the ones they love. That is, both attempt to pile moral debt onto their beloved by giving them money, rings, and jewels, in the expectation that the beloved must finally “pay them back” through affection. Initially, Olivia tries to give a purse full of coins to Viola/Cesario and the page refuses to accept it. Next, she sends actor/Malvolio after Viola/Cesario to give “him” a ring and again Viola refuses to be drawn in. In their next scene together, Olivia admits to Viola/Cesario that her attempt “to force [the ring] on you” was a “shameful cunning” (III.1.115). But Olivia repeats the gambit later on, giving Viola/Cesario a jeweled locket with her picture in it. Earlier, the Duke gave a jewel to Viola/Cesario to present to Olivia, telling his page to “Say / My love can give no place, bide no denay” (II.4.123–4). The problem of expecting love as a just payment for wealth plays out in the subplot as well. Actor/Andrew Aguecheek has spent two thousand ducats, mostly to carouse with actor/Sir Toby Belch, in the hope of eventually winning Olivia in marriage and capturing her wealth. Although most of the action and dialogue within the moral-wellbeing-is-wealth system produces results that are clearly immoral, one set of interactions embedded in this metaphor works well for all concerned. In the first three acts, four different characters pay actor/ Feste for a song or a bit of foolery and Feste always delivers value for money. Toby and Andrew pay him sixpence each to sing a love song, the Duke rewards him for a melancholy song about unrequited love, and Viola/Cesario pays him two coins for his witty begging. As in the scenes with Olivia and Orsino involving rings, jewels, and money, Shakespeare anchors the controlling metaphor of the Feste scenes in action involving the exchange of material stage properties as well as in the dialogue. These interactions with Feste, however, are meant to

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contrast with the scenes of moral blackmail. Clearly, achieving reciprocity can work well when money and service are in the scales, rather than money and love. Twelfth Night is critical of moral accounting when applied to the ethics of love, but leaves open the possibility that this metaphorical system of ethics can produce good results in other fields of human action. Another group of metaphors that organizes the play’s initial action is the moral-well-being-is-obeying-legitimate-authority system. Shakespeare primarily uses these metaphors to differentiate Orsino’s household from Olivia’s. From the opening moments of the play, when Orsino is requesting the musicians to play, to repeat “that strain again” (I.1.4), and then to cease playing altogether, it is apparent that the Duke commands his household staff with an easy authority and that they willingly obey. The evident peace and well-being of the Duke’s household make it easy for Viola/Cesario to rise in Orsino’s favor and provide possibilities for intimate conversation between them that quickly lead to their mutual love. Olivia’s household, in contrast, has no clear lines of legitimate authority. Although she complains about Sir Toby’s late-night drinking, Olivia does not rein him in. In the hierarchy of a well-ordered house, a steward should have authority over a chambermaid, but it is clear that actor/Maria has been refusing actor/Malvolio’s orders for months and Olivia has not corrected her. The disarray and consequent moral chaos of Olivia’s household is made evident in Viola/Cesario’s first visit, when Maria pretends to be her mistress to trick the Duke’s emissary. Olivia soon puts aside such petty dissembling, but she has “ursurp”ed herself by facilitating the incident (I.5.180), as Viola states; she has temporally overthrown her authority and sown unnecessary confusion. This small episode sets the stage for a much larger usurpation, of course, when Maria, again in the guise of her mistress, will write a letter in Olivia’s hand to gull Malvolio. Significantly, though, Twelfth Night rarely returns to obedience as a necessary spring of moral behavior. The lack of obedience to legitimate authority sets up a situation in which Sir Toby can run riot in Olivia’s household and the gulling of Malvolio can believably occur. But Shakespeare is not finally interested in judging Toby, Maria, and the others for disobeying the rules of a properly managed household. More generally, simple obedience to others higher up on the hierarchy could not begin to untie the complications of the comedy. Obedience becomes a minor, even inappropriate virtue in the later scenes of the play.

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Instead, Twelfth Night uses the moral vacuum caused by Olivia’s usurpation of her authority to posit a more general question: how should one behave in such an ethical quagmire? Two major metaphorical systems, linked together, primarily organize the play’s response to this ethical problem. First, moral strength, willpower, and courage are needed and metaphors from this moral-well-being-isliving-a-strong-and upright-life system are closely aligned with the need to draw upon one’s moral character, the moral- well-being-isembedded-in-an inner-essence system. In general, the play uses the Belch-Aguecheek and the Malvolio scenes to develop “bad examples” of both ethical systems and contrasts these with the “good example” of Viola, whose action exhibits all the good traits within these two systems that the others lack. Andrew, Toby, and Malvolio believe they are strong, upright men of good inner character, but Shakespeare loses no time in exploding their pretenses for comic effect. Maria and Toby “put down” (I.3.77) an upstanding Andrew in his first scene on stage and Toby also tricks him into revealing his poor talent as a capering dancer. “Is it a world to hide virtues in?” (I.3.123), asks Toby, encouraging Andrew to display his inner “virtues” through dance. By cheating Andrew of his money and setting him up for repeated failures, Toby reveals a mendacious and aggressive inner nature. Lacking moral uprightness, Toby is also a drunk. Physical balance is a property of strong and upright morality, and Shakespeare invites the actor playing Toby to lose his balance frequently as he weaves across the stage. If a drunken man is “drowned,” as Olivia and Feste agree (I.5.131), Toby can never claim moral uprightness during the course of the play. Malvolio, in contrast, is a parody of exaggerated uprightness. For this characterization, Shakespeare suggests that the actor play nearly unbending rigidity, especially in the presence of his lady. Where Andrew’s inner essence is empty and Toby’s is mendacious and aggressive, Malvolio’s is full of self-love. This quality, of course, is what hooks him in the letter scene. Part way into reading the letter, Malvolio stumbles initially over “M.O.A.I.,” but determines “to crush this a little” so it will “bow to me” (II.5.131–32). Believing that the world revolves around him, Malvolio “crushes” everything to his egotism, including the love of his mistress and his desire for advancement. Shakespeare relies on physical characterization and movement as well as images in the dialogue to underline the moral shortcomings of Andrew, Toby, and Malvolio. For comically different reasons, none has the virtue of inner worth or upright character.

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Keeping one’s promises is a moral quality of the strong and Viola maintains her faithfulness to the Duke in this regard throughout the play. She continues to woo Olivia on his behalf, even though this pledge becomes increasingly futile and even painful. Shakespeare gives Viola images of steadfastness to concretize her promise. When asked by Olivia how “he” would woo her as the Duke, Viola/Cesario responds that “he” would, “Make me a willow cabin at your gate / And call upon my soul within the house; / Write Loyal Cantons of contemned love / And sing them loud even in the dead of night;/ Haloo your name to the reverberate hills / And make the babbling gossip of the air / Cry out `Olivia`” (I.5.257–63). In a later scene with the Duke, Viola/Cesario recognizes that she is pining away for his love, but will nevertheless continue to sit “like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief” (II.4.114–15). Viola aches for his love, but remains planted at Olivia’s gate and struck in stone before the Duke to fulfill her promise. While Viola’s allegiance to her pledge is evident to the other characters (until Act IV, when several mistake her for her brother), many of Viola’s other virtues are hidden to all but the audience. Because of her disguise, other characters do not see her moral courage or her success at maintaining honesty, and only fleetingly glimpse her altruism. Viola is not counting her own good deeds or those of others in any attempt to balance the moral books between herself and other characters. She freely gives her love to the Duke, insofar as her honor and disguise will allow, believing that she will get no love in return. Empathy is another of her inner, mostly unseen virtues. Moralwell-being-(often rests)-on empathizing-with-others, but in Viola’s case the positive results of her empathizing do not come to fruition until the end of the play. The young boy playing Viola might have taken some moments to gaze silently at Orsino to show Viola’s pity and concern, but the character is very guarded, as Viola must be, in expressing overt empathy for the Duke. Viola must also hide her sympathy with Olivia from the Countess, so as not to encourage her love for Cesario. Consequently, most of her empathetic statements emerge unambiguously only in her soliloquies. “What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?” (II.2.39), says Viola after the ring scene with Malvolio. Empathy may create bonds of virtue between people—and Shakespeare does allow such a bond to provide the basis for the mutual love between Orsino and Viola—but for much of the action, Viola’s empathetic involvement with others only brings her isolation and emotional pain. This unfair result, however, does heighten two of Viola’s other virtues, forbearance and faithfulness.

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In another sense, however, Shakespeare has created an ethically impossible situation for his protagonist. Her position in the strange love triangle among Olivia, Orsino, and herself demands that she continue her disguise, but Viola also recognizes that her disguise is a “wickedness / Wherein the pregnant enemy [i.e., the devil] does much” (II.2.27–28). Poor Viola is damned if she maintains the disguise and damned if she doesn’t! Recognizing her situation, she can only wait for “Time” to untangle the “knot” of her problem. At this point in the play, however, it is not at all clear that Time will work toward moral ends. Toby Belch, in fact, threatens to turn Time upside down at the start of the very next scene. Although it is after midnight, Toby claims that he and Andrew are up “betimes:” “To be up after midnight, and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes” (II.3.6–8). If Toby’s drunken sophistry is correct, clock time cannot organize the day and the regular moralities that are a part of a normal twenty-four hours—such humble virtues as rising early, doing the chores, and putting off personal enjoyments until later—become impossible. Whether or not the passage of time can lead to an ethical life is a question that falls within the moral-well-being-is-following-the-right-path metaphorical system. In this system, life is a journey and it is important for people to know the right way, avoid areas that are “off limits,” and keep moving toward one’s “final destination.” Although it is clear that Toby and Andrew are on the “wrong road,” it is not evident that Viola has chosen the right one. Given the ongoing stalemate in the romantic triangle, she may be running out of time for love. In the same scene that Toby turns Time topsy-turvy, Feste sings: “What is love? `Tis not hereafter; / Present mirth hath present laughter; / What’s to come is still unsure; / In delay there lies no plenty; / Then come kiss me, sweet, and twenty, / Youth’s a stuff will not endure” (II.3.45–50). Further, Viola’s path, like the sea, is fraught with danger. “Will you hoist sail, sir? Here lies your way,” says Maria to Viola/Cesario in her first audience with the Countess. “No good swabber; I am to hull here a little longer,” replies Viola/Cesario (I.5.195–97). Despite their bantering tone, the implications of such metaphors are ominous. From the exposition, the audience already knows that the sea is a place for shipwrecks and disaster. The longer Viola tacks between the two palaces—and there are numerous images of seagoing that mark her back-and-forth travels—the more likely is her journey toward love and happiness to end on the rocks. With Viola’s voyaging stuck in dangerous crosswinds, the Countess and the Duke hung up on moral accounting for love, and the minor

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characters lacking in balance and inner character, the action of Twelfth Night veers sharply into the territory of ethical illness for much of the last half of the comedy. The metaphorical system moral-well-being-ishealth dominates these scenes, as several characters turn “mad.” For the most part, this plague of madness spills out from the characters in Olivia’s household to infect others. “What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus?” (I.3.1–2) is Toby’s first speech in the play and images of illness fester and proliferate in all of the scenes set at Olivia’s after that. By the middle of Act II, Toby is drunk and afflicted with “lethargy” (I.5.120), Malvolio is “sick of self-love” (I.5.86), Olivia believes she has caught “the plague” from Cesario (I.5.284), Andrew “care[s] not for good life” (II.3.36), and even Feste has a “contagious breath” (II.3.52). General images of illness tend to coagulate into the specific plague of madness after Maria and the others have gulled Malvolio. Soon after the steward has swallowed the lure and left the stage, Toby exclaims, “his very genius hath taken the infection of the device [i.e., the letter], man” (III.4.123–24). And Fabian adds, “Why we shall make him mad indeed” (III.4.127). Malvolio’s “madness” soon leads him to his smiling, cross-gartered scene with Olivia, which lands him in a dungeon where he is further mocked for his “malady” by Feste as Sir Topas. Meanwhile, the moral problematics of “disguise” carry the disease to others. Toby and Fabian incite a duel between Andrew and Viola/Cesario that involves the two plotters’ disguising both combatants to evoke anger and revenge— another form of madness—in their dupes. Antonio chances into the contest and, thinking Viola/Cesario is Sebastian, offers to defend the youth. Here, disguise leads to another version of mistaken identity and ethical problems. When Viola/Cesario refuses to give Antonio some of the money that Antonio entrusted with Sebastian, Antonio answers within the same ethical system of moral accounting that drives Orsino and Olivia: “Will you deny me now? / Is’t possible that my deserts to you / Can lack persuasion? Do not tempt my misery, / Lest that it make me so unsound a man / As to upbraid you with those kindnesses / That I have done for you.” (III.4.333–38). With only superficial changes, this speech could be delivered by Orsino to Olivia and by Olivia to Viola/Cesario. After two more speeches that also relate Antonio’s problem and his anger to the two noble patrons, an officer takes him away with the words, “The man grows mad” (III.4.356). By having Antonio mirror the disease that is afflicting the Duke and the Countess, Shakespeare again disdains the application of moral accounting methods to romantic relationships.

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Antonio’s mad scene, however, is also a kind of turning point in the action. Although more madness is to come—in particular, Sebastian’s bewilderment when accosted by Andrew and Toby and Orsino’s desire for revenge when he discovers what he thinks is Viola/ Cesario’s marriage to Olivia—Time, for the first time in the plot, may now be on Viola’s side. Before he leaves, Antonio calls Viola/Cesario by the name of “Sebastian.” This leads Viola to hope that her brother may still be alive: “O, if it prove, / Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love” (III.4.368–69). The spectators know that Sebastian has survived, of course, and now both they and Viola have a right to believe that she may be on a path that will lead her toward a moral destination. In addition, this scene explores an ethical metaphor that the comedy has touched on but not yet developed: moral-well-being-is-following-the-dictates-of-nature. Part of this elaboration in the Antonio scene hinges on Shakespeare’s double use of the word “kind.” Tempests may be “kind,” in the sense of sympathetic and beneficial, but “kind” may also refer to natural biological relationship, as in “she and her brother are of the same kind.” Both of these meanings are implicit in Antonio’s use of the word in his final speech to Viola/ Cesario: “Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame. / In nature there’s no blemish but the mind; / None can be called deformed but the unkind” (III.4.351–53). Through rich dramatic irony, the speech allows Shakespeare to remind his audience that Viola’s “good feature[s]” connect her to her brother, not to shame, and that kindness, the very quality that Antonio links two lines later to the work of “the devil,” may actually lead Viola to an ethical resolution of her problems. From this point forward, the metaphorical systems of nature and time gradually intermingle to work toward a moral (and happy) ending. The recognition scene between Viola and Sebastian seals the timely triumph of “natural” ethics in Twelfth Night. With help from the company’s costumer, two boy actors, close to sharing “one face, one voice, one habit” (V.1.211), passed as “identical” brother-sister twins in 1602 at the Middle Temple in the climax of the comedy. Orsino exclaims in the same speech that their appearance is a “natural perspective [i.e., an optical illusion of nature] that is and is not” (V.1.212). The initial framing of this doubleness as the result of nature is important. Although the audience already knows that Viola and Sebastian are twins, the other characters on stage might have understood what they saw as another effect of madness or even of divine intervention. Shakespeare draws out the actual recognition dialogue between them

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to leave no doubt that nature is the underlying cause of their likeness. They talk almost exclusively about the natural ties that bind them together—their parentage, their birth, the death of their father, and even a characterizing mole that he had on his forehead. The naturalness of the twins (even though male and female identical twins is a genetic impossibility) soon produces other “natural” effects. Recognizing that Olivia married him in the belief that he was his sister in male attire, Sebastian excuses the Countess’s mistake—a mistake with serious moral consequences—by explaining that “nature to her bias drew” (V.1.255) her to him, and not to Viola. In the next speech, the Duke announces that he expects to share as well in “this most happy wrack” (V.1.261). And Viola embraces his affection by linking her steadfast love for him with the immense force of a nature that “severs day from night” (V.1.267). For the happy couples, nature elevates the ethics of their love for one another and all look forward to the “golden time” (V.1.375) when a double wedding will unite their souls. As noted earlier, the blending and unblending that spectators likely processed as they watched teenage boys in drag pair-off with adult males had already queered the action for the audience. Evidently, the mostly male spectators could understand both male– male and female–male couplings as equally “natural.” Time, however, seems a fickle friend of morality in Twelfth Night. Where the noble couples can look forward to a “golden time,” “the whirligig of time” only brings “revenges” (V.1.370) to Malvolio. Does the steward deserve his final suffering? Examined in the context of the major metaphorical systems of morality at play in the comedy, Malvolio’s punishments and final isolation are just. Malvolio, whose inner essence remains self-regarding, unhealthy, aggrandizing, and unnatural, lacks empathy for others and continues to follow the wrong path. For him, as Feste sings in the final song, “the rain” will “raineth every day” (V.1.385). And, from all of the points of view in the major metaphorical systems concerning ethics in Twelfth Night, he will deserve all the rain he gets. This is not to say that all spectators everywhere and for all time will find Malvolio equally guilty on all of the relevant metaphorical counts. The ethics of specific cultures, historical periods, and subcultures within those larger frameworks will induce spectators to weigh differently the various metaphorical systems that shape their valuation of Malvolio at the end of the comedy. And a significant part of their interpretation will depend upon the actors and the emotions they encourage the audience to experience. Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphorical systems approach does not mandate that all spectators will

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arrive at the same meanings and conclusions regarding ethics as they experience a play. Indeed, it is likely that the Elizabethan audience at the Middle Temple gave more weight to the moralities of nature, purity, and legitimate authority than will many spectators watching the play today. Lakoff and Johnson would insist, however, that the metaphorical systems at play in any dramatic production will set general normative limits on spectators’ interpretation of ethical meanings. They can point to persuasive evidence that the same metaphorical systems for social morality operate across historical and cultural differences. “Normative” is a necessary qualifier, however, just as “average” was earlier; there will always be the odd individual spectator who will insist that Malvolio is the ethical hero of Twelfth Night, despite the response of fellow audience members to the contrary. How different audiences actually experienced the ethics of Twelfth Night is still a historical question, but all history is only possible within the larger framework of evolution and the species-level capabilities of the human mind. Understanding Narratives Unlike Shakespeare, Churchill toyed with the chronology of her plots. Many spectators watching the final scene of Top Girls in 1983 were probably confused, at least initially. In the previous episode on stage, actor/Angie had come to London, to the Top Girls agency, to visit her “aunty” Marlene, but in the next scene actor/Marlene is greeting her with presents in her sister’s kitchen and they are talking as though Marlene has not seen Angie for several months. Watching for a few moments more, most spectators probably figured out that this scene between actor/Marlene and actor/Joyce occurred earlier, long before the time of the other scenes in the play, and before actor/ Angie came to London. If they had checked their programs, audiences would have found “a year earlier” printed next to the scene designation. At most performances, today as in the 1980s, audiences expect that the present, onstage action of the play will unfold in chronological order. They count on learning about past events relevant to the characters’ present lives when some reliable dialogue fills them in. This is the function of conventional dramatic exposition and it has worked just fine for spectators since The Persians by Aeschylus. Even unreliable flashback or daydream scenes set in the past, as occur in Death of a Salesman for example, are usually embedded in chronology and framed as temporary departures from the unfolding

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action. Churchill’s scrambling of narrative time in Act II, Sc 2, the final scene of the play, does not follow conventions that audiences in 1983 had learned to anticipate. Audiences expect dramatic narratives to move toward the future and to end at a later fictional time than they began. Why does Churchill mess with a good thing? Before asking why Churchill might have done this, it is worth stepping back from this question to explore the cognitive dissonance that this radical departure from conventional narrative structure creates. Why do modern audiences come to the theatre with the expectation that a play will unfold in chronological order? Is this biologically determined or do we learn it as a part of our enculturation? Or both? As with most intersections of cognitive science and the study of blended narratives, there are several answers to this question. I will draw most of my explanation from the work of Edward Branigan, whose Narrative Comprehension and Film has been widely influential in cognitive and cinema studies.48 To begin with, we can recognize that audiences watching Top Girls face a disjunction between what narratologists call “story” and “discourse.” As the term suggests, story is a complete narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end, containing agents, actions, and causal sequences that occur in a fictional time and space. Discourse, in contrast, is the presentation of these disparate story elements by a single or collective narrator—the playwright and the rest of the production team, in the case of theatre. As in most murder mysteries in book or theatrical form, readers or spectators must construct a coherent story from the jumble of clues presented in the discourse. For Top Girls, spectators must piece together the fictitious chronological story of Marlene and her daughter Angie from the out-of-order real-time scenes, the no-time fantasy scene at the beginning of the play, their insights into the characters gained through empathy, and other fragmentary clues that the production team throws their way during a performance. While this is an unconventional way to present the discourse of any play, audiences certainly have the cognitive skills to solve the puzzle and they are induced to do so by the expectation that the complete story of Marlene and Angie will reveal some of the larger meanings of Churchill’s drama. By 1983, Churchill could count on fifty years of modernist experimentation in novels, films, and radio (for which she wrote her early plays) to prepare her audience for this kind of puzzlesolving in the theatre. It is probably true, however, that a performance a hundred years earlier, in 1883, that required spectators to

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do this kind of narrative integration would have failed. London spectators in the Victorian era had the cognitive ability to piece together a dramatic story from similar fragments, but they would likely have been irritated and bored, if not angry, at the writer’s impertinence for requiring them to do so. (In this regard, some spectators today have changed little from their Victorian predecessors.) Just because audiences have the cognitive skills to accomplish a specific narrative task does not necessarily permit a culturally embedded production team to challenge them with it. Theatregoing is first of all a cultural model with conventional practices; the narrative structure of a play must work within this larger model (or not depart too far from it) before its spectators will be willing to play innovative games. As film theorist David Bordwell has noted, spectators at a movie assemble “cues” from the filmic discourse and run these cues in their heads to figure out causal sequences involving recurring characters within ongoing situations.49 In this way, they put together the basics of the plot. Theatre spectators develop possible stories from the discourse of a play in the same way, but neither audience proceeds without a cognitive map, as it were. Film and theatre spectators always extract cues and construct causal sequences with a schema in mind, a cognitive template for a probable narrative action. “A schema is an arrangement of knowledge already possessed by a perceiver that is used to predict and classify new sensory data,” says Branigan.50 People in every culture have mental scripts in their mind/brains that help them to organize a beginning, middle, and end for their stories while they are unfolding. Narrative schemas guide spectators toward possible meanings. As Branigan explains, “story comprehension involves the continuous generation of better-specified and more complicated expectations about what might be coming next and its place in a pattern. Thus a perceiver will strive to create ‘logical’ connections among data in order to match the general categories of the schema.”51 For Branigan, these general narrative categories are the conventional ones that scholars of dramatic structure have elaborated in the past: introduction, exposition, initiating action, complicating actions, outcome, and denouement. As Top Girls reveals, playwrights may scramble this sequence to invite spectators to construct much of the story in their heads; most of the exposition, front-loaded in conventional plays, occurs in the final scene of Churchill’s play, for example. Branigan knows that his categories for a narrative schema may occur in various sequences and cites many films that require the

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same kind of cognitive rearranging in the space of a spectator’s working memory. Audiences use these schematic categories to build narrative comprehension both from the ground up—moving from millisecond moments, to actor/character exchanges, to scenes, and so on—and from the top down—imposing major schematic categories on causal sequences of action—in order to gain coherence. When a spectator engages with the narrative of a stage play, then, he or she “works forward and backward in an uneven manner in constructing large-scale, hierarchical patterns which represent a particular story as an abstract grouping of knowledge based on an underlying schema,” according to Branigan.52 Like other schemas, narrative schemas are both universal and cultural. Many conceptual primitives make up a narrative schema, including source-path-goal, link, part-whole, and identity. The source-path-goal cognitive concept organizes micro and macro versions of all narratives on stage, from the beginning of an actor’s gesture, through its path, to the end of it (a micro-narrative), up to the entire dramatic story (the largest macro-narrative) of a performance. “What links to what to become a causal chain of action?” is one question that spectators ask when constructing narratives. The partwhole universal primitive helps audiences to incorporate more and longer strands of these causal sequences into a general narrative schema; spectators recognize that one strand is a part of a longer whole and that this whole, and so on, becomes a part of an even larger whole, and so on, as they elaborate a nested hierarchy of incidents to shape their narrative comprehension. As previously noted, narratives also depend on spectators’ recognizing the ongoing identity of the same actor/characters from one scene to the next. Top Girls, of course, plays with the concept of identity to invite spectators to find the links between the different characters that are performed by the same actor. Branigan’s narrative schema is also culturally specific. While it functions very well to set up expectations of narrative coherence for modern audiences, his specific idea of narrative would not have the same utility for medieval Japanese spectators watching a Noh play or for audience members at a seventeenth-century performance of kathakali dance-drama in India.53 These non-Western spectators used the same cognitive concepts to anticipate and construct their dramatic narratives; source-path-goal and the other cognitive universals still apply. But they also imported into their schemas notions of time, space, human–divine relations, and other materials specific to their cultures that resulted in conventional narrative structures distinct

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from the prevailing western notion of story. As well, these non-Western spectators folded their narrative schemas into very different cultural models of theatregoing. No narrative schemas are culturally or historically stable. Indeed, Hans-Thies Lehmann predicts that the narrative schema for performed drama that has dominated Western culture for generations is now giving way to what he calls “postdramatic theatre.” “Postdramatic theatre is the replacement of dramatic theatre with ceremony,” he states. It is a kind of theatre that includes “events of peculiarly formalized communality; musical-rhythmic or visual-architectonic constructs of development; [and] para-ritual forms. . . .”54 Lehmann gives as examples the dreamlike stagings of Robert Wilson and the performance installations of the late Tadeusz Kantor. As Lehmann notes, these kinds of theatre pieces generally omit a through-line narrative or relegate it to the background. Nevertheless, I believe it is important to recognize that postdramatic theatre cannot do without narrative of some sort. Even Kantor’s ceremonies center on events—schoolroom lessons, executions, farewells, and so on—and events, however partial and fragmented in performance, still evoke narrative expectations that spectators will witness with narrative schemas in mind. Kantor’s The Dead Class may be a long way from the narrative structure of the well-made play, but its moving images—both in the sense of the physical work of the performers and the emotions evoked in its spectators—rely on strands of narrative. As in more conventional dramatic theatre, spectators are invited to use source-path-goal, link, and identity to make sense of these pieces. Part-whole, however, the cognitive operation that builds toward the hierarchy of a complete plot in conventional dramatic theatre, may be less necessary than before, replaced, to some extent, by the cognitive concept of “iteration,” which predominates in most rituals. Top Girls, of course, also challenged the narrative schema that most contemporary westerners carried around in their heads. While all schemas are mutable, concepts are not. Unless we evolve very different mind/brains, the cognitive concepts that constitute a culture’s schema for narrative will remain universal. This is why contemporary spectators, with an effort, can comprehend ancient narratives and also why some spectators today are finding more enjoyment in postdramatic theatre. Presumably, a desire for some kind of narrative schema is universal as well. How conceptual universals are put together and the pressure each culture exerts to fill the content of these conceptual abstractions will ensure that narrative schemas

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remain historical. The popularity of Top Girls suggests that some spectators in the 1980s in English-speaking cultures enjoyed solving narrative puzzles when they went to the theatre. Churchill leaves it up to her audience to consider what will happen to Angie in the future. For spectators, resolving the mother–daughter conflict is important because of its implications for the major ethical and political meanings of the drama. Churchill challenges her spectators to understand the Marlene-Angie story as a representative microcosm of larger social and historical narratives. The underlying reasons for what happens and why to mother and daughter connect to the causal factors shaping the place of women and children in Thatcher’s England, and those same factors, the play implies, have structured women’s lives throughout history. Unless they have read and thought about the play before going to see it, most spectators must speculate about this after the performance is over. By refusing to complete the narrative schema shaping the Marlene-Angie story in her spectator’s heads, Churchill challenges her audience to take these problems home with them. In other words, Churchill wants audiences to use her play to think clearly about familial, social, and historical causation. Branigan realizes that narrative always shapes causal explanations about human affairs: A narrative schema, together with a host of related schemas, encapsulates the interest we take in the world as humans. These schemas are a way of working through cultural assumptions and values. Thus “causes and effects” emerge, as it were, after the fact as explanatory labels for a sequence of actions viewed under a particular schematic description. (To have fallen in love, it was sufficient to. . . . In order to protect one’s trust, it was necessary to . . .) Our concept of narrative causation must be powerful enough to include these social and ethical factors. . . . In this sense the epilogue of a narrative merely makes explicit the social judgment already contained within the causal chain; or, perhaps it would be better to say, the spectator makes a judgment about probabilities based upon life as experienced through the probabilities of his or her society.55

In terms of L and J’s metaphorical systems of morality, Top Girls points to a chain of events that primarily demonstrate what happens when the protagonist follows the moral code, well-being is the pursuit of self-interest. While Churchill invites spectators to write their own resolution to the Marlene-Angie story, she has also constructed causal chains in the drama that allow for few probable outcomes.

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By the end of the play, audiences will have a better sense of Angie’s likely fate, even though several questions will remain. The last scene makes it clear that Marlene abandoned Angie and left her with her sister Joyce to find success in London. Like her biological mother before her, Angie also left home to become a “top girl” in London and arrived at the agency in Act II, Scene 1, when Marlene was preparing to take over her new position. Angie seemed slightly retarded, has dropped out of school, and has no marketable skills, but she believed her “aunty Marlene” will house and feed her and provide a model for her climb to success. Marlene, of course, had other ideas. Angie, she said, might make a “[p]acker in Tesco” (a grocery store chain), but her summary judgment about her daughter’s future, which ends Scene 1 of the second act, was brutal: “She’s not going to make it.”56 Marlene’s morality, even for her own daughter, is rigorously individualistic. Spectators will already have heard Marlene’s assessment before the final scene in Joyce’s kitchen and can play it back in their working memory. This earlier scene in the story, now at the end of the play, also concludes with a kind of prediction about Angie’s future. Awakened by a bad dream and still half asleep, actor/Angie comes downstairs for some comfort from her “Mum” (Joyce), but finds actor/Marlene instead. Looking at her “aunty” she says, “frightening,” twice, before the lights go out and the play ends.57 Churchill leaves the audience to construct the denouement of her play. How will spectators decide what will happen between Marlene and Angie in London? In chapter 1, I used David Saltz’s definitions of “infiction” and “outfiction” to distinguish between the initial cognitive processing of blended fictional and actual phenomena on stage and the later interpretation, the “outfiction,” that spectators do when they redescribe, to themselves or others, what they have understood from their ongoing processing. By leaving the story of her play incomplete, Churchill demands “outfiction” from her viewers at the end of it. Some spectators will probably shrink from this challenge and others may jump to a sentimental, non-“frightening” ending. But given what they know about Marlene and Angie (from both actors as well as from Churchill’s script), most auditors will take up the challenge and likely come to a pessimistic conclusion. They will probably suppose that Marlene will continue to try to keep daughter Angie out of her life—by setting her up in a dead-end job and ignoring her, packing her off on a bus back to Joyce, or maybe even abandoning her on a London street. Audiences want completed stories and the narrative logic of Churchill’s tale leaves them nothing but grim choices for an ending.

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Having chosen an ending for the story, audience members will also have backed themselves into thinking about the meaning of the play as a whole. Although academics often lust to articulate meaning (mea culpa here, too), many regular spectators stay at the emotional and narrative levels of a performance and rarely try to put all of the pieces together. By refusing to end her play, however, Churchill tricks many in her audience into making larger meanings; we want to give it an ending, so we must play out the narrative logic of Churchill’s characters and situations. “One of the most important yet least appreciated facts about narrative is that perceivers tend to remember a story in terms of categories of information stated as propositions, interpretations, and summaries,” says Branigan, “rather than remembering the way the story is actually presented or its surface features” (ital. in original).58 This is because we strive to encapsulate past experiences before moving on to new ones and our working memory dumps nearly all of the information we stored temporarily to process the narrative as we were engaged with it. While theatre people will usually remember much more about a recent production than others, primarily because they have trained themselves to do so, most spectators in a week’s time will mainly recall only their moments of intense emotional involvement and the gist of the narrative they watched, if they can even remember that. Churchill’s no-resolution strategy tries to get around this problem by ensuring that her audiences will not forget their overall interpretation of her story because they had to end it themselves. I can imagine spectators emerging from the Royal Court Theatre in 1983 and summing up their understanding of Top Girls as a warning: “Watch out when you let ambition get the best of you or you will lose your ties to your family.” Or perhaps others put the gist of the narrative in more personal and emotional terms: “Sad and horrible— sad for Marlene to be so alienated from her own daughter and horrible for Angie, who must suffer the consequences of abandonment.” Others, more politically inclined, probably saw Churchill’s play as an attempt to counter Thatcher’s individualism with Labor Party socialism. “A liberal feminist female capitalist is still a capitalist,” might be how they sum up their interpretation. This meaning may also have mobilized in such viewers a silent or vocal call for action: “Time to kick the Tories out.” These “propositions, interpretations, and summaries,” as Branigan calls them, are only a few of the likely meanings, the “outfictions,” that spectators in 1983 London may have used to tag their experience of Top Girls. Some will think silently about one

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or another or several of these meanings and others will share them with those who accompanied them to the playhouse. The idea that spectators will use contemporary discourses to shape their summary interpretations of a playgoing experience is consonant with Annette Kuhn’s understanding of spectatorship as a discursive construct. In the examples above, I have supposed that spectators in 1983 drew on the discourses of liberal feminism, popular psychology, and socialism to articulate their “outfictions.” For Kuhn, all constructions of the meaning of a dramatic experience could be: seen as a series of interconnected social discourses, certain discourses possessing greater constitutive authority at specific moments than others. Such a model permits relative autonomy for the operation of texts, readings, and contexts, and also allows for contradictions, oppositional readings, and varying degrees of discursive authority. Since the state of a discursive formation is not constant, it can be apprehended only by means of inquiry into specific instances or conjunctures.59

As Kuhn makes clear, all spectators (including critics) who articulate an “outfiction” must be understood culturally and historically. Some of the same general discourses that shaped London spectators in 1983 would still be current if a production of the play were mounted in New York City in 2008, for example, but because the discursive formations of liberal feminism, pop psychology, and socialism (among others) have shifted significantly in the last twenty-five years, how contemporary spectators tagged the meaning of the show would also be different. By challenging her spectators to create meaning by making an ending, Churchill adopts a Brechtian strategy. Several of Brecht’s later plays—notably The Good Person of Setzuan and Mother Courage and her Children—also refuse complete resolution for the same reason; they invite the audience to make a better society so that the bleak narrative logic of the implied ending can be avoided. Both Top Girls and Mother Courage, in fact, present women trapped between motherhood and capitalism and, arguably, both playwrights wanted their spectators to feel the same mix of emotions after watching their plays. “Sad and horrible” might easily sum up the experience of both plays. As we have already seen, Brecht’s interest in audiences’ watching his plays in the same way that they would engage with a sporting match aligns his theatre with one aspect of a cognitive approach to spectatorship.

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Verfremdungseffekt is another. Brecht wanted to distance his spectators from the kinds of emotional involvements that could reduce them to passivity in the face of historical oppression. According to critic Reinhold Grimm, Brecht envisioned verfremdungseffekt as a triadic process for audiences—from contentment with the normal, to bewilderment about its strangeness, to the insight that the normal must be transformed. During the course of watching Mother Courage, for example, Brecht believed that spectators should shift from accepting Courage’s actions as normal and natural, to bewilderment and even outrage as she sacrifices her children to profit from the war, to a final determination to reject Courage’s narrow point of view for enlightened socialism and progressive action. Grimm points out that this was Hegelian process for Brecht: “Our initial, both imperfect and incomplete, comprehension equals a Hegelian thesis; this gives way, if only temporarily, to a total incomprehension equaling a Hegelian antithesis; and this, in turn, provokes the final and genuine comprehension, which is tantamount to a Hegelian synthesis or a Hegelian ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung), in the triple sense of negation, preservation, and elevation to a higher level.”60 Like Mother Courage, Top Girls strategically reverses audience sympathies at key moments in the action. Churchill’s primary technique for accomplishing this is by evoking what Susan Feagin terms “metaresponse.” In brief, a meta-response involves audiences in a reversal of their feelings; a spectator first responds one way to a character or situation and then reacts against her/his first response when new information alters the spectator’s judgment.61 Audiences will likely sympathize with actor/Marlene in the first scene of Top Girls, when she is struggling to enjoy her promotion with her fantasy figures in the restaurant, for example. In the next scene, however, as they watch her manipulate Jeanine into the same kind of job that she has just left, many spectators will reject their first evaluation of Marlene for a negative one; they will quickly trade their initial sympathy for a measure of antipathy. Meta-response leads spectators to reverse their feelings, as they jump from one belief about a fictional figure or event to a different judgment. Brecht sets up several similar juxtapositions in Mother Courage; audiences will shift from sympathy to antipathy for Courage and perhaps back again several times over the course of Brecht’s action. It is clear that the first two steps in the process of verfremdungseffekt, from contentment to bewilderment, are one possible version of the two-step reversal that Feagin terms meta-response. And it is likely that many spectators experienced several such alterations

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in their feelings while watching Top Girls. Feagin would agree with Brecht that the first two steps may prepare the way for the spectatorial transformation involved in the third, but she would likely add that there could be no certainty that they must do so. Metaresponse does induce what might be called “second thoughts” in spectators, but this does not mean that they will necessarily reach Brecht’s conclusion that history must be transformed so that the normal can become the utopian. As we have seen, some spectators may have reached a socialist or even communist conclusion by the end of Top Girls, but there can be no guarantee that the play will produce that meaning for all spectators. Of course, spectators need not take that third step when they are watching Mother Courage, either. Enjoying Theatrical Genres Like many modernists, Brecht and Churchill did not write in conventional dramatic genres. Top Girls and Mother Courage do not fit within the usual categories of tragedy, melodrama, comedy, or farce. Although most musicals and domestic comedies in the last hundred years have helped to prime their audiences with the kinds of expectations that a standard genre can provide, genre itself seems to have faded as a reliable indicator of the entertainment-to-come for spectators. On the Broadway stage of the 1980s, for instance, auditors listening to Sondheim’s “concept musicals” had to revise their old expectations based on Rodgers-and-Hammerstein kinds of shows and even Neil Simon could no longer be counted on to provide some laughs and a happy ending. Film and television still provided reliable, conventional dramatic genres for viewers—horror flics, whodone-its, thrillers, sitcoms, and so on—but most plays for the theatre needed to appear more innovative and non-formulaic than typical Hollywood scripts. Perhaps the tickets cost too much. But is this apparent creeping of live theatre toward mixed or even non-generic forms of theatre really accurate? Can spectators enjoy a performance as much if they do not have some idea beforehand about its likely story and their probable emotional engagements? If this were true, the relative indifference of contemporary audiences to stable dramatic genres would be a historical anomaly. For hundreds of years, spectators went to theatres mostly knowing what to expect from stock characters, standard plot situations, and conventional themes, in tragedies as well as comedies. Generic designations played a significant role in providing what Hans Robert Jauss has called a spectator’s

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“horizon of expectation” for many cultural models of theatregoing.62 Elizabethan and Jacobean auditors, for instance, attended most plays knowing how their narratives would end. Auditors could count on reconciliation, often marriage, when they watched a comedy and they knew that dramas termed tragedies had to conclude with the death of the hero and a stageful of corpses; no extant comedy or tragedy departs from this formula. As critic-historian Jeremy Lopez demonstrates, this foreknowledge of the ending made it possible for spectators at the Globe and elsewhere to tolerate and even encourage all sorts of strange plot twists and fantastical, even contradictory, characters along the way.63 Rather than constricting dramatic possibilities, conventional dramatic genres in the early modern era expanded playwriting invention and spectatorial delight. This insight leads Lopez to question the usual historical approach to Elizabethan audiences. The scholarly tradition established by Alfred Harbage, Ann Jennalie Cook, and Andrew Gurr, notes Lopez, encourages historians to segment spectators into sociological groups, such as “coterie,” “plebeian,” and even “artisan,” on the assumption that each group responded to performances at the public theatres somewhat differently. Lopez concludes that this “increasing exactness, especially in the economic focus, of audience study may have moved us away from facile discussions of ‘the common man,’ but it may also have begun to be unnecessarily paralyzing, making it seem as though we cannot talk about the effects of a play on an ‘audience’ until we understand the exact composition of that audience.”64 On the contrary, says Lopez, playwrights and actors aim to turn disparate social groups at the theatre into a temporary unity so that they may respond as one. Although this collective utopian goal is rarely reached, emotional contagion, as we have seen, does provide a common experience for many spectators at significant moments of a performance if the show is “working” as it should. This is not to say that all theatrical meanings would be equal for all groups; some with more cultural knowledge and experience of theatregoing would create richer blends and build toward wider-ranging “outfictions.” Nonetheless, to expect that different social groups had wholly different emotional and cognitive engagements at a good performance of an Elizabethan comedy or tragedy flies in the face of our knowledge of engaging theatre. Lopez’s critique raises the general question of the relation of dramatic genres to historical audiences. He rightly opposes an overriding role for social construction in the making of dramatic genres. As we have seen, the general elements of theatregoing in all cultures are

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constituted both by evolutionary universals that transcend historical contexts and by distinctive historical interactions specific to time and place that function within evolutionary constraints. Following Lopez, we can expect that dramatic genres will evolve and function in the same ways. But what if dramatic genres are no longer relevant to theatrical spectating today? This view, as we will see, has more to do with the inadequacy of our standard generic classifications than with some mysterious decline in generic expectations and engagements in the theatre. To frame this discussion of theatrical genres, it will be helpful to inquire first about the likely evolution of the larger genre of drama itself. In his “What Happens in Hamlet? Exploring the Psychological Foundations of Drama,” Daniel Nettle uses evolutionary theory to consider why Homo sapiens probably began performing plays. Nettle notes that the cultural evolution of any ongoing, long-term practice like drama is usually “some combination of direct factors (such as the universal psychological appeal of a particular form or story) and indirect ones (such as the prestige of the people who happen to champion it, and so on). . . . As long as some of the variation in the persistence of dramatic forms is directly related to psychology, then a universalist Darwinian theory of drama is possible. It is not an alternative to historicist studies; rather, it is a set of general principles and parameters within which historicist work should be nested.”65 Nettle begins with the observation that the dramatic mode, to gain popularity and staying power, must have imitated some form of activity that most hominids would have found innately enjoyable. In much the same way that monkeys and apes enjoy grooming each other, humans love to tell stories and engage in conversations, especially about themselves, their close relatives, and their social relationships. This leads Nettle to the hypothesis that drama may be “a contrived conversation that stimulates the mechanisms of reward that evolved for natural conversation.” (Merlin Donald would likely add that such “conversations” were probably carried on first through mimetic shows accompanied by many sounds, not necessarily in language as we would now understand it.) Nettle supposes that such conversations would need to be intensified versions of normal life situations to hold the attention of others. “One is reminded,” he says, “of the supernormal stimulus effect in animal behavior,” such as the way “an egg elicits nesting behavior from a female gull.”66 From an evolutionary perspective, this hypothesis predicts that our ancestors would want their “supernormal conversations” to concern the “fitness stakes” of small, tightly knit social groups, such as

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predominated among our hominid precursors on the plains of Africa for thousands of years. As Nettle says, “one person’s opportunity to maximize fitness [in this social situation] was closely bound up with the attempts to do so by all others, especially with regards love and status.” Further, “the outcomes in terms of fitness changes should be the most extreme logically possible”—marriage in the case of mating and death with regard to status. “Those are the logically maximal fitness changes in the domains human beings are interested in,” concludes Nettle, “and, thus, dramatic genres will tend to evolve toward them.”67 Nettle realizes that his hypothesis, though logically cohesive and grounded in knowledge of human evolution, cannot stand as an objective test of evolutionary prediction. But he is also happy to point out that his conclusions are in accord with the general scholarly consensus about comedy and tragedy in the Western theatre; many comedies do end in marriage, just as many tragedies conclude with death. (Nettle acknowledges that his limited knowledge of world theatre may compromise the linkage he forges between human evolution and dramatic genres, but he supposes that major dramatic forms in all cultures will deal foundationally with the “fitness stakes” of mating and status. In this he is generally correct, although his predicted finales of marriage or death accord less well with the evidence; dramatic endings appear to be more culturally various.) Nonetheless, Nettle emerges with some prototypical principles of drama that are fairly universal and do help to account for drama’s continuing psychological appeal, whether performed live on stage or in recorded formats. To summarize, these are: (1) drama tends to convey social information about relationships in small, tightly knit groups; (2) these groups often interact in smaller, more intense social units (such as a family or a clique); (3) protagonists in drama often attempt to maximize their biological fitness by protecting themselves and their kin, seeking mates, and enhancing their status; (4) dramas that explore extreme fitness stakes and fitness changes (i.e., mating and status) will tend to be more captivating than those that do not; (5) protagonists who push to maximize these fitness stakes for themselves will bring about conflicts that will provide more dramatic appeal than protagonists who do not. Nettle recognizes that these generalizations about the genre of drama apply just as well to the latest murder mystery on TV as to the plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles. It seems that the primary social concerns of our precursors still drive our dramas. Nettle’s evolutionary perspective leads him to a typology of four major kinds of plays that may usefully inform discussions of dramatic

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genres. Regarding both status elevation and mate choice, two primary outcomes are likely for the protagonist, negative and positive. A negative outcome in an attempted status change results in what Nettle terms “tragedy”; he gives as examples Richard III and Taxi Driver. A protagonist’s success in elevating his or her status leads to “heroic drama”; he notes Henry V and Die Hard as examples in this category. With regard to mating, a negative resolution leads to “love tragedy” (e.g., Romeo and Juliet and Hedda Gabler), while a positive one leads to “comedy” (Twelfth Night and When Harry Met Sally). Applying this typology to the four remaining major plays that I have examined in this study leads to the following classifications: Oedipus (tragedy); Top Girls (heroic drama, undercut but not generically altered by strong dramatic irony); Vanya and Streetcar (both love tragedies). Nettle states that his four-genre typology does not claim “that all dramatic works can be easily pigeonholed in this way but that an astonishing number of the most popular ones can.”68 He is right. His generic types usefully emend the four conventional genres of drama—tragedy gets updated, comedy remains about where it was, and melodrama and farce are dispersed—while dispensing with unnecessary subtypes and cross-genres. Romances are classified in one of the two positive modes and tragicomedies turn mostly into love tragedies. Nettle’s four-part typology relies on simplicity, consistency, and a common evolutionary base. While Nettle’s genres underline the universal appeal of drama with regard to fitness stakes, they are less successful in linking dramatic genres to history and culture. The historical means that protagonists have used to gain status or mating advantages and a culture’s evaluation of those means (and the motives behind them) have varied widely and evoked a wide range of emotional responses. For this reason, it is useful to complicate Nettle’s evolutionarily based terms with Gregory Currie’s historical perspective. In a recent essay on “Genre” in his Arts and Minds, cognitive philosopher Currie makes a strong case for considering dramatic genres as historical groupings of similar kinds of audience experiences. “I will argue that genre classification is essentially historical, and for good reason,” he asserts. “What counts as relevant similarity from the point of view of genre is determined by the capacity of an audience to respond appropriately to the similarity, and this capacity depends in turn on how the similarity came about.”69 For Currie, just because a play has a tragic hero and other characteristics that might formally identify it as a “tragedy” (in either Nettle’s or Aristotle’s sense), it is not a tragedy unless those features produce a certain kind of

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experience for an audience—an experience that the culture defines as “tragic.” Further, spectatorial response to several such tragedies on stage (or in front of television, film, and computer screens, etc.) must set up future expectations about tragic plays that will usually be confirmed in subsequent experiences of the genre. In Currie’s definition, genres begin as psychological and aesthetic responses and flourish as broadly social and ethical engagements that shape ongoing theatrical experiences and social norms. A philosopher and film historian oriented toward cognitive studies, Currie primarily uses examples from popular movies in his essay. He acknowledges that most film audiences have a relatively weak and even porous notion of what constitutes a “thriller” or a “romantic comedy,” and believes that this is an advantage for genre studies. Without such a recognition, critics and theorists may claim more for the experiences generated by genres than they can support. As Currie states, “Northrop Frye has written as though he thought genre could be invoked to explain why a particular work has the features it has; this has been criticized on the grounds that citing membership in a class does not explain why the object possesses the class defining properties.”70 In contrast, Currie privileges the ongoing interplay between artists and spectators in explaining how genres emerge and flourish. Genres, for him, are contingent upon matters of cognitive and emotional salience and are specific to historical context. For some audiences some of the time, some plays will be more “tragic” than others; “tragedy,” like other genres, is a matter of population averages. Currie’s approach to genre has much to recommend it for theatre scholars. His definition acknowledges that the shaping of genres is deeply historical; dramatic productions lead to audience responses which lead, in turn, to more (or less) productions of a similar kind, and so on, in the ongoing feedback loop of theatrical history. Historically, different agents have entered into this loop to modify and nor even redirect the process. Dramatic authors have pushed against generic audience expectations and channeled them in new directions. Directors, designers, and actors have catered to some spectator appetites in order to challenge their hunger for other expectations within a given genre. Critics have written reviews that encourage audiences to harden their generic desires or to soften their readers’ past expectations to make room for new ones, even in the midst of old genres. Of course none of these agents was ever free to act outside of historical constraints; to have any long-term effectiveness in the theatre, all of those involved in the process must

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acknowledge the present needs and desires of their audiences, including the past weight of generic expectation. One can see these historical dynamics at play in such disparate examples as the Ibsen campaign in London and the debates in Tokyo about modernizing kabuki to suit a modern Japan, which both occurred in the 1890s. By keeping genre historically contingent, Currie invites a welcome range of critical and historical inquiry. Nonetheless, it can be argued that Currie’s approach is less useful for historians than it appears to be. It may be too immersed in the flow of history to provide the historian with sufficient comparative leverage. A historical example will clarify what I mean. No one would dispute the fact that melodrama was a major genre in nineteenthcentury theatre. Producers, critics, and audiences used the term “melodrama” to both applaud and denounce a certain kind of theatre that featured narratives in which villains persecuted sympathetic victims primarily to evoke FEAR, PANIC, and CARE from wide audiences. Theatre artists and spectators might disagree about melodrama’s various subgenres, dispute its historical development, and quibble about its actual range, but no one denied that the immensely popular genre existed. In the twentieth century, however, to judge from critical and popular use of the term, “melodrama” as a genre nearly disappeared. For some sophisticated audiences, it eventually became “meller-drama,” as when actors in parody productions of old plays encouraged laughter at conventions that their grandparents had taken seriously. Yet a casual glance at many popular dramas, film westerns, and radio soap operas in the 1930s and ‘40s suggests that the dramatic experiences provided by old-fashioned “melodrama” continued to flourish in genres that few wanted to call melodramatic. And today on nightly television, new forms of villainy continue to terrorize sympathetic victims in ways that involve us in expectations and responses that are not all that different from the situations of the melodramatic stage one hundred and fifty years ago. The point of this example is that historians need to be able to explain the continuities as well as the differences that link similar dramatic experiences over time, despite changes in terminological designations and the popularity of new media. Currie’s approach to genre relies on popular conceptions linked to specific audience formations, both necessarily limited in duration. Studying the interactions between spectators and artists that produced film noir, musical comedy, or Elizabethan revenge tragedy can certainly open up the historical sociology of these genres, but Currie’s definition of genre falls short for long-term historical explanation. By limiting

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“melodrama” to its nineteenth-century uses, he could not tell us what happened to the experience of this dramatic genre in the twentieth century. Currie’s approach can be reinforced by Panksepp’s insights into emotion systems. If nineteenth-century melodramas often stirred up PANIC in their spectators and some twentieth-century dramas evoked the same emotion system, both could logically be termed PANIC plays, rather than “melodramas” and “thrillers,” for instance. R AGE and its less inflamed cousin, anger, have pervaded many kinds of dramas over the centuries, from The Agamemnon to Noh drama to Hamlet to avenger flics. R AGE dramas certainly constitute a specifiable type of audience expectation and engagement. Comedies featuring a trickster figure as a protagonist mainly engage the emotion system of rough-and-tumble PLAY; these include British pantomime and many Moliere farces. Panksepp’s system of SEEKING, which “makes animals intensely interested in exploring their world and leads them to become excited when they are about to get what they desire,”71 however, must be reserved for all dramatic protagonists. SEEKING, and its analogue in Stanislavsky’s system of acting known as “playing objectives,” underlies every dramatic genre; all actor/ protagonists are inherently seekers. Pegging dramatic genres to Panksepp’s emotion systems, while an improvement over Currie’s historicist limitations, can get unwieldy and even a little silly, however. The emotion system of CARE, which underlies both nurturant and sexual behavior, pervades such disparate productions as The Winter’s Tale, The King and I, and burlesque shows. These performances may share some commonalities, to be sure, but a generic system that forced them together would stretch credibility. As the previous discussion of narrative makes clear, spectators want to share common emotional experiences but they also care deeply about narrative endings. Lopez, too, reminds us that endings provided the primary mode of distinguishing comedies from tragedies for Elizabethan audiences. This brings us back to Nettle’s four-genre typology. His approach is a useful complement to Currie’s emphasis on emotional engagement and historical terminology, especially when Panksepp’s emotions are added to the mix. Most of Panksepp’s emotion systems operate as dominant moods among all four of Nettle’s genres. Several neuropsychologists classify moods as extended periods—an hour to several days—when the same primary emotion predominates.72 The usual play or film lasts long enough to enable a basic emotion to emerge from and dominate the

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action, take hold of spectators, shape their feelings, and prejudice their appraisals. For audiences, the mood of a dramatic action will shape their emotions during a performance without altering the background emotion of PLAY, which continues to inform the general experience of theatregoing. As Damasio notes, emotional moods and background emotions are distinct.73 In the cognitive multi-tasking that theatre involves, spectators can usually distinguish what they are doing in the PLAYhouse from their oscillating engagements with the mood of the dramatic action before them. At the time of the curtain call, most audiences today will put the mood of the play behind them to celebrate the PLAYing that they have enjoyed with the actors during the performance. FEAR provides a useful example of a basic emotion that can come to dominate the mood of a performance. In many heroic dramas, including nineteenth century melodramas like The Gladiator and in “disaster films” today, external villainy—whether in the form of aggressive aristocrats or invaders from outer space—induces widespread FEAR in other characters and in audiences, a FEAR that is usually countered by the brave action of a heroic figure, often joined by a select “band of brothers.” But FEAR and anxiety play a central role in many tragedies as well. Without the ongoing FEAR of a plague in Thebes motivating its action, Oedipus the King would have become a different play for its fifth century BCE Athenian spectators. And Death of a Salesman, largely centered on Willy’s FEAR of proving a poor breadwinner and a bad father to his son Biff, touched on similar FEARs among his spectators. Love tragedies often feature FEAR as the dominant emotion; the fighting between the two gangs and the anxiety from Tony and Maria that others will discover their love—all heightened by Bernstein’s music—drives much of our engagement in West Side Story. FEAR even predominates in some comedies. The slamming doors of Feydeau farces, such as A Flea in Her Ear, are usually motivated by the bourgeois FEAR of their protagonists that others will discover their social indiscretions and challenge their respectability. The Gladiator, Oedipus, West Side Story, and A Flea in Her Ear are “Dramas of FEAR” and heroic dramas, tragedies, love tragedies, and comedies, respectively, within Nettle’s typology. Their endings distinguish them in significant universal ways, even as their dominant emotions link them to specific historical concerns. A focus on plays that relied heavily on PANIC further reveals the historical dimension of this merging of several approaches to dramatic genre. What might be called postrevolutionary stress syndrome

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provided fertile historical ground for the growth of heroic plays centered on PANIC and loneliness in France after 1800. The first popular melodrama by Guilbert de Pixerecourt, Coelina, or The Child of Mystery, in fact, is nearly a perfect example of PANIC rendered in dramatic form. Knowing that the protagonist is a secret heiress to riches, Truguelin, the villain of the piece, connives to have Coelina marry his son. When that fails, he drives the heroine out of her happy village, persecutes her through thunderstorms and mountain passages, and finally relents when Coelina’s mute father—his tongue cut out by Truguelin to prevent his telling the secret—saves her from his clutches. The melodrama begins by celebrating the happy social bonds of village life, shatters those relationships to plunge the heroine into isolation, and finally restores them through the efforts of fatherly CARE at the end. The events of the French Revolution caused many extreme emotions, of course, but it is likely that isolation, bewilderment, loss, and other emotions associated with the PANIC system were among the most widespread, leading to long-lasting memories. Audiences still suffering the psychic scars of the Revolution applauded the PANIC plays of Pixerecourt and his imitators at Parisian Boulevard theatres after 1800. The emotions associated with PANIC have been an enduring part of American drama for two centuries. Spin-offs of Pixerecourt’s plays were popular in the 1820s as many urban Americans yearned for the security of a rural “home, sweet home.” The new industrial city threatened to separate and swallow up respectable families in the heroic plays (a.k.a., well-made melodramas) of Boucicault and his imitators in the 1850s and 1860s. At the turn of the century, New England women who ventured into the Wild West felt the PANIC and alienation of unfamiliar circumstances in comedies like The Great Divide. Yank in O’Neill’s tragedy, The Hairy Ape, sought a place where he might “belong,” but ended his life in human isolation. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche fled in PANIC from funerals in Mississippi only to encounter a frightening society that rejected and raped her in New Orleans. As in Williams’s love tragedies, many of Sam Shepard’s characters live out their family lives on the edge of PANIC, isolated from parents and siblings who should be their loved ones. Angels in America in the 1990s can be understood as Kushner’s attempt to work through a national PANIC attack about AIDS through the genre of comedy. It remains to be seen if the dramatic response to “9/11” and “Islamic terrorism” will help to dispel or inflame our current American PANIC about social otherness and isolation.

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Gregory Currie notes that genres speak directly to social concerns and help to generate and regulate social norms. As this quick historical survey of the PANIC genre in the United States suggests, there have been many reasons that Americans have been prone to PANIC— loss of a rural past, the alienations of city living, westward expansion, the failure of intermediate social networks, patriarchal sexism, family fragmentation, and fear of sexual Others, to name only those suggested by the plays above. PANIC about these problems helped to establish new social values and norms that were both reflected in and solidified by many subgenres of PANIC plays in the American theatre. Sometimes U.S. audiences could applaud the positive resolution of these conflicts as heroic dramas or comedies, while at other times and for different historical reasons, these PANIC attacks had to end in tragedy. These and similar insights about the linkage between emotional engagement and types of plays only begin to map an enormous agenda for those critics and historians interested in pursuing a definition of dramatic genre based in evolutionary psychology and the neuroscience of emotions. Both fitness stakes and emotion systems ground critic-historians in significant universals of our primitive past. When coupled together to provide a complimentary system of genre classification, however, both can do important historical work in the present.

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Epilogue

Writing Cognitive Audience Histories

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his Epilogue is primarily an appeal to the imagination of theatre historians interested in taking the cognitive turn in their future audience histories. Given my narrow intended audience, some readers interested in the general dynamics of spectatorship may not wish to pursue this more specialized subject. Nonetheless, I encourage you to stick around. Cognitive historiography is a logical and (I believe) necessary extension of much of the argument of this book. Although I have relied on historical examples to investigate the ways in which conceptual blending, empathy, cultural models, and other cognitive dynamics situate spectators at the theatre, I have mostly taken synchronic snapshots of past auditors in their acts of theatrical engagement. With some exceptions, Engaging Audiences has not examined the challenges of explaining and narrating how spectators, and with them entire cultures of theatregoing, changed diachronically. This historiographical challenge, of course, could constitute an entire book. Rather than diving into a systematic examination of this topic, however, my strategy will be more impressionistic and (I hope) evocative. Through a few specific examples, I will sketch some possibilities for audience histories, but will leave the development of such narratives to future historians. What is Audience History? Before embarking on my sketch-and-run strategy, however, I want us to consider a fundamental question: what is audience history? For the past thirty years or so, theatre historians have tended to assume that

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this subfield of investigation primarily centers on the composition and behavior of past theatrical spectators and how and why they changed. Most of our best audience histories, including Andrew Gurr’s Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Jeffrey Ravel’s The Contested Parterre, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow’s Reflecting the Audience, and Richard Butsch’s The Making of American Audiences, have proceeded from this basic premise.1 This type of history has involved often painstaking empirical research requiring historians to scan numerous primary documents—from police reports, to city directories, to collections of personal letters, to journalistic articles, and so on—for relevant information. Audience historians must look at drawings of past auditoriums and records of theatrical companies for clues about the physical conditions of spectating and for such matters as pricing and public relations. In addition, this kind of research has meant the close reading of many mediocre plays or promptbooks and imaginative reconstructions of their likely performances as historians have tracked the teasing implications of prefaces, dialogue, and scribbled stage directions for hints about actor–audience conventions and interactions. Because most of this information cannot be trusted to “speak for itself” about past audiences, these historians have had to sift, weigh, and interpret what they have found in order to translate it into useable evidence. This initial research and interpretation, of course, constitute only a few of the many steps historians must take to construct their narratives about past audiences. I have great respect for this mode of scholarship and do not question its usefulness—indeed, its necessity—for answering certain kinds of historical queries. Nonetheless, Engaging Audiences suggests that spectator history can range beyond this focus on explaining the composition and behavior of past groups of auditors. Toward the end of chapter 3, I noted that Jeremy Lopez’s position on the Elizabethan audience’s engagement with the genres of comedy and tragedy contradicts the working assumption of Andrew Gurr that social occupation and class played a significant role in shaping the responses of disparate groups of spectators to the actors and plays they enjoyed. Lopez does not allege (nor would I) that social position played no role in constructing spectator response. By examining the expectations that generic conventions established for the audiences of the time and how these horizons shaped the kinds of plays being written, however, Lopez suggests that genre was just as important, if not more so, than the usual social markers (gender, education, age, class, etc.) for explaining the experience of auditors in Elizabethan playhouses.

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In their history of theatregoing in nineteenth-century London, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow reach conclusions that indirectly endorse Lopez’s position. Through rigorous empirical research, the authors punch gaping holes in previous generalizations by critics, journalists, and historians about “typical” audiences for West End, East End, and south London theatres between 1840 and 1880. Davis and Emeljanow conclude that: London theatre audiences in the mid-nineteenth century were so diverse that generic definitions are clearly inappropriate. This diversity existed not only across London but also within specific theatres and neighborhoods. London theatre audiences were far more mobile socially and physically than previous accounts have implied. . . . Our examination of specific neighborhoods and individual theatres demonstrates the difficulty of making broad assumptions of any kind, of even the notion that an audience for a specific theatre is representative of a specific community.2

At the Britannia Theatre in the East End, for example, Davis and Emeljanow report that the theatre catered not only to the kinds of respectable, attentive neighborhood workers noted by Charles Dickens, but also to patrons with a range of incomes and visitors from other parts of London. Further, Britannia regulars also roamed to other theatres nearby and enjoyed a wide range of dramatic fare, from equestrian melodramas to French plays, religious dramas, and an occasional opera. The authors explode the idea that working-class spectators would mostly patronize certain kinds of entertainments and avoid others. Davis and Emeljanow find no correlation between the demographics of audience groups and the imaginative range of their theatrical tastes. This is not to say that Victorian constructions of class and gender had no impact on the experiences of spectators at the Britannia and other London playhouses. Davis and Emeljanow are interested in the composition of audience groups and their external behavior before, during, and after performances; they do not speculate about the internal mental and emotional experiences of their viewers while enjoying productions. Like Gurr, Ravel, and Butsch, Davis and Emeljanow rarely look at how groups of spectators engaged with performances of specific entertainments. While they recognize that such imaginative engagements were important, the questions they ask and the methods they pursue draw them toward social history rather than cognitive investigations—areas of scholarship that they

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assume to be distinct. A focus on social dynamics to the exclusion of cognitive engagement is typical of audience history, in the way it has come to be practiced. One important reason for this narrowing of focus has to do with the history of our field. The simultaneous rise of both continental theory and social history in the academy in the 1970s legitimated this separation between theorizing psychological response and meaning-making, on one hand, and historicizing social conditions and behavior, on the other. At roughly the same time as critics and theorists began to investigate and apply mostly ahistorical notions of theatrical reception, the revelations of “history from the ground up” energized theatre historians to examine the social dynamics of spectators. Initially, this led to some silly posturing in our field that pitted “theorists” against “historians,” with one side claiming that the new revelations made “history” impossible and the other that “theory” led to empirically groundless speculation. Although some middle ground was eventually recognized and defended in the midst of these battles, many “theorists” and “historians” decided simply to ignore the other side and go on about their business. This resulted in an informal division of labor between performance theorists and audience historians in theatre and performance studies that continues to this day and, arguably, has hobbled both approaches. With the separation and empowerment of both of these academic areas, few critic-historians interested in audiences attempted to ride both discourses. Perhaps the most ambitious of the few attempts to cross the academic divide between spectator demographics and audience psychology has been Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (1995), by James H. Johnson.3 In his prize-winning book, Johnson asks a simple question and pursues two complex modes of inquiry to answer it. “Why did French audiences for opera and concerts between 1750 and 1850 gradually fall silent and begin listening for musical complexities?” he wonders. Realizing that the changing conditions of performance and reception are part of the answer, Johnson takes the usual route of audience historians to examine who was listening (or talking), their social and architectural constraints, and their ideological preoccupations. In addition, though, Johnson uses phenomenological approaches to investigate how listeners began to attend to the music, the new aesthetic expectations that emerged from this kind of attention, and the musical innovations these expectations helped to make possible. As Johnson explains, “The popular comprehension of new aesthetic styles stands for more than just artistic

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innovation. It signifies the emergence and refinement of new modes of perception. This helps to explain why listening—no less than reading or seeing—is historically constituted and changes over time.”4 In his “Afterward,” Johnson reflects on his combined social and aesthetic approaches to audiences in music history: To generalize about listening is to place collective experience within two independent but related historical fields, the socially acceptable and the aesthetically accessible. These are the structures that circumscribe experience, defining the possibilities for behavior and gently pushing back the boundaries of the conceivable. The pace of change in listening is dependent upon the pace of change in political ideologies, social structures, and musical innovations. And because there are always possibilities for musical innovation and change in patterns of sociability, listening continues to evolve.

“Theatrical spectating” (or a synonym for it) could be substituted for “listening” in this quotation and it would begin to make good cognitive-historiographical sense. In 1995, Johnson was not yet writing what I would regard as cognitive audience history, but his book points toward its possibilities and the kinds of rewards this mode of history can yield. A key term in the citation above from Listening in Paris is “experience.” As Johnson defines it, experience encompasses the socially legible characteristics of historical behavior, the preferred focus of most audience history, but it also includes the cognitive attributes of consciousness, memory, emotions, and the psychological level of culture. In chapter 3, I sketched how this double focus might open up Shorr’s cultural model as applied to theatregoing in history and gave as an example the playgoing experiences of Russian audiences between the premiere of Vanya in 1899 and the success of Meyerhold’s postrevolutionary productions in the 1920s. In little more than twenty years, many Russian spectators were asked to make a rapid shift in what Johnson calls “the socially acceptable and the aesthetically accessible.” As this parallel between Johnson’s and my own interests suggests, cognitive science has much to offer those of us committed to crafting narrative explanations about changes over time in the full range of past spectatorial experiences.5 The rest of my “Epilogue” borrows shamelessly from other historians to sketch some possibilities for exploring the kinds of audience experiences and engagements that I have in mind. My borrowings from and extensions of these histories are not meant as critiques; all

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of these investigations cogently demonstrate their main points without relying on cognitive studies. Nor will I attempt to improve them; they require no help from me. Rather, I will jump on examples from three excellent histories by William Mahar, Gary Jay Williams, and Julia A. Walker and use them as springboards into my discussion of possible cognitive audience histories. Although none of my exemplary historians consciously deploy cognitive science, their narratives, as we will see, allow for (and even invite) this orientation. The general question, “How might future performance historians begin to construct cognitive audience histories?” will be my focus. Simulating Minstrelsy Spectators First, performance historians might deploy simulation, cognitive notions of laughter, and conceptual blending theory to begin to figure out shifts in audience perceptions over time. My first example draws on William Mahar’s nuanced history of pre-Civil War minstrelsy, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture, to explore this possibility.6 Without citing a cognitive definition of simulation, Mahar, nonetheless, understands the historical uses of empathy. He cites copious evidence to put himself and the reader in the shoes of antebellum minstrels and, based on that cognitive operation, comes to several conclusions, which he announces up front in his “Introduction.” Blackface entertainers, says Mahar, “borrowed” from several musical and theatrical traditions, denigrated women in their music and skits, even as they “established acceptable standards for the expression of male sentimentality,” developed a “popular, accessible, and profitable commercial product,” and “contributed to the sometimes contradictory American beliefs and attitudes about race, gender, and class.”7 As Mahar recognizes, several of these attributes of early minstrelsy assume that “burlesque was one of minstrelsy’s essential traits and that, existing as [the performers] did in a postcolonialist society without a strong indigenous music style, blackface music and theater began with parodies or imitations of African American, English, Italian, and Anglo-American sources.”8 Mahar acknowledges that his focus on burlesque puts him at odds with the conclusions of Eric Lott, who assumed that the racial representations in minstrel performances commented on interracial and class-based relations in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. Rather, says Mahar, minstrelsy’s satiric targets were usually respectable white folks, including ministers, politicians, suffragettes, and the rich. The mostly working-class

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spectators at minstrel performances primarily enjoyed the derogatory stereotypes as comic exaggerations of white representatives of respectability, not as purportedly real portraits of American blacks.9 Take minstrelsy’s parody versions of Italian opera, for example. These followed in the wake of other theatre managers who had successfully burlesqued foreign opera, primarily for working-class spectators. Manager William Mitchell, for instance, turned Bellini’s La Sonnambula, an opera about a sleepwalker, into Roof Scrambler in 1839, and minstrel parodies of Bellini’s popular piece continued to flourish into the 1850s. Mahar puts the plot, the characters, and some of the music of La Sonnambula and the “Travestie” version of the opera done by Buckley’s Serenaders back-to-back in one of his chapters.10 In effect, he invites his readers to put themselves in the place of the minstrel adapters and parodists in order to examine how and why they changed the material as they did. This exercise in historical simulation leads Mahar to suggest that minstrelsy both simplified the music of Italian opera for American ears and also used it to attack the class pretensions of American operagoers. As Mahar explains, “The criticism displayed in the opera burlesques had social as well as musical origins. The social origins stem from the fact that support for imported opera was linked to the conscious attempts by New York’s elite to use European cultural forms as a mark of class membership.” Mahar adds that the minstrels inverted the elite social order “by exalting the American vernacular both in language and music and by criticizing class exclusiveness because it ran contrary to the egalitarian philosophy underlying the blackface comedians’ sense of an egalitarian social order.”11 Minstrel opera burlesques may have been casually and indirectly racist, by the standards of today, but their primary target was upper-class whites, not lower-class blacks. Mahar’s empathy gets him “behind” the burnt cork, as his title promises, to an examination of the motives of minstrel producers and the reasons for their love of burlesque. This strategy allows him to sidestep the entanglements of racial guilt that haunt some contemporary scholarship on minstrelsy. Although Mahar notes in his “Introduction” that he will avoid speculation about how antebellum spectators interpreted what they saw and heard on the minstrel stage, it is not difficult to move some of his observations about minstrel parody into a general investigation of the experience of the minstrel audience. Because a minstrel performance would die without laughter, one primary question for the historian is what were the auditors laughing at and why? Recall that

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laughter, from a cognitive point of view, is an attempt by the body to restore equilibrium, or homeostasis. It also sets up and enforces social hierarchies by pointing out the fools, crazies, comic villains, and other shunned outsiders who can be laughed at by amused insiders. As we have seen, Malvolio’s self love, nastiness, and puritanical qualities nominate him for humorous treatment by others in Twelfth Night and, consequently, by the audience. To the general question, what did minstrel spectators laugh at and why? one response of the historian will certainly be, when? Most minstrel shows featured several kinds of acts; the butt of the joke and the reason for laughing might shift rapidly from one act to the next. In the opera burlesques, for example, Mahar’s research suggests that spectators might laugh at the musicians for changing suddenly from Italian style music to a ribald tune, at a singer for howling out an operatic song about some dogs at play, and at a sleepwalking actor/ character for walking into a wall. “Wench acts” were popular minstrel turns. Typically, in these performances, a large blacked-up white man with big feet in an ugly dress and a wig would dance and make amorous advances to the men on stage (and perhaps to some in the audience), while the musicians played a popular tune. Mahar supposes that laughing at a man in drag (and at those he stepped or sat on) was a part of the pervasive misogyny of minstrelsy. Minstrel entertainers also targeted advocates of women’s rights in many of their parody speeches, another common act in most shows. In addition, they harpooned commemorative speakers, lecturers on phrenology and magnetism, politicians, preachers, and P.T. Barnum. To the delight of most working men in the audience, minstrelsy generally took aim at respectable women and at white men who were above them in status. Sometimes, though, as in many of the comic exchanges between the end men, Tambo and Bones, antebellum minstrel shows simply invited laughter at foolish black figures. Did the antebellum minstrel stage induce its audience to laugh at African Americans as an inferior race? Mahar knows that many scholars have attempted to answer this question. He disagrees with musicologist Nathan Huggins, for example, who argued that “the minstrel ‘Negro’ . . . [was] a symbolic scapegoat alter ego into which whites projected sinful, guilt-provoking wishes otherwise suppressed by puritan consciences.” Harboring both “fascination and dread” of the minstrel mask, whites primarily laughed at this figure, according to Huggins.12 Mahar’s own view is closer to that of cultural historian Robert Cantwell, who stressed that whites most often laughed with, rather than at, blacked-up entertainers. “[The minstrel] had

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consciously or unconsciously entered into a many layered satire of Anglo-American life,” says Cantwell.13 Mahar also cites historian of American racism David Roediger, who believed that some members of the audience probably thought that the performers were actual black people and, consequently, would not have taken seriously their social satire.14 Mahar notes, however, that “there have been no compelling arguments demonstrating that the ‘mask’ seemed to be real to the vast majority of audiences.”15 In the end, Mahar comes to no firm conclusions about minstrelsy’s point of view toward African Americans and its probable effects on spectators. His content analysis of minstrel skits and music pulls him toward insights about the production, not the reception of this entertainment. Mahar is surely correct that minstrelsy focused on much more than racial issues and that most spectators never assumed that blacked-up white guys were actual African Americans. Further, there are too many moments in several kinds of minstrel acts when spectators are invited to sympathize, not just to empathize, with lower-class characters played by actors in blackface who delight in outsmarting powerful white males and putting down women who threaten their gendered superiority. Nonetheless, Mahar acknowledges that all of the actors on the stage wore the mask of blackface. If satiric attack were the primary intention of minstrelsy, why did the white men primarily burlesquing other white men complicate their entertainment by blacking-up? The actors parodying lecturers and commemorators played these white figures in blackface and encouraged the audience to laugh at them. In this instance, who or what was the object of ridicule in the 1840s and 1850s? A straightforward semiotic analysis of minstrelsy would suggest that the audience simply read the performance for its signs. If spectators behaved like semioticians, they would treat the black mask and other material objects on the stage as signifiers and discard their importance when they figured out the satiric point that they signified. But we know that spectatorship is more complicated and interesting than this. Conceptual blending theory, in contrast, allows for the possibility that spectators at minstrel shows mixed actors and the characters they represented into different kinds of momentary blends. Prompted by the performers themselves and their use of the material, spectators would sometimes take the white actor underneath the blackface and blend it with what they took to be the “Negro” character that the actor was portraying. This actor/character blend was likely the most straightforward possibility on the minstrel stage. Second, audiences might imaginatively erase the burnt cork on the

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actor’s face and blend the white actor with the white politician, suffragette, or other satiric target of minstrel burlesque. Third, in a kind of two-step blend, the spectator might imagine that the white actor played a black male character who, in turn, was portraying a white man or a white or black woman. This kind of blending through disguising occurs in Shakespearean comedy, of course, as when a boy actor plays Viola who, in turn, plays Cesario. These three options seem to have been the major combinations of blended actors and characters encouraged in antebellum minstrel shows. And there is suggestive evidence in minstrelsy that supports all of these possibilities for spectator blending. So, were antebellum minstrel shows racist? The question is too broad to allow for a single answer for all of the acts and for many of the moments within each act that constituted minstrelsy. As the blending combinations above imply, minstrelsy involved some moments of ugly racism, in which black people were singled out and denigrated simply on the basis of presumed inferior racial characteristics, and other moments when race, per se, did not much matter. Exactly how much racism was present must have varied, of course, not only because of different performers and their acts, but also because different spectators would blend the possibilities of masked actors and their many characters in different ways. A man of racist sensibilities could no doubt confirm his beliefs, but those with little predilection to racism might see much of the entertainment as racially innocent fun. This is not to say that continued exposure to minstrel shows might not sway the beliefs of some spectators toward racism. If conceptual blending theory is correct, however, blanket generalizations about antebellum minstrelsy and racism are impossible to make. A careful sifting of the evidence, however, with attention to the probable blend intended by the performers, can indicate the likely impact on most antebellum spectators most of the time. What about the development of blackface entertainment in U.S. history? Having established the general frequency of certain kinds of blends in the 1840s and 1850s, the historian could compare that mix with the likely mix of blends in later periods. Historians agree that minstrel satiric attacks against the respectable pieties of the age declined after the Civil War, as minstrelsy won a wider audience. Probably this meant that audiences were more often blending white actor with “Negro” character, and skipping more complex blends involving thieving politicians and domineering women. (The “only Leon’s” minstrel drag, popular in the 1870s, however,

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interestingly complicates this picture.) By 1900, the demise of minstrelsy as a separate genre of entertainment shifted most blackface acts onto the vaudeville stage and into large “plantation” shows, in which actual black performers played many of the characters—and played them in blackface makeup to conform to the expected look of minstrelsy. In these instances, white auditors would still have blended actors with characters, but if both parts of the blend were racially “black,” it would have been much easier for spectators to conflate actor and character and to conclude that most black actors were like their characters, often comic grotesques or razor-wielding coons. Spectators enjoying blacked-up white performers in vaudeville were invited to do less racially charged blending, but if the black characters did not usually represent satirical portraits of respectable white people, the end result for them was also likely to be the racial denigration of those actor-characters that they enjoyed. If this were true, the historian could chart a rise in racist audience perceptions from the 1840s to the early 1900s. In short, audience historians interested in racism and the U.S. stage can use simulation, cognitive laughter theory, and conceptual blending to examine this topic and forge a narrative. Blending theory, especially, opens up complexities that historians of minstrelsy have yet to explore and explain. Victorian Erotic Engagements My second example draws on the insights of Gary Jay Williams’s Our Moonlight Revels, a production history of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In general, Williams develops a narrative that explores the complex and sometimes contradictory relationships between performances of Midsummer and its many social contexts. As he says in his brief Epilogue, “[Midsummer’s performance history] is much more complicated than the old history truism that the theatre reflects its times or the new history truism that dominant ideologies inscribe themselves upon it. . . . Productions of this play have often simultaneously affirmed and challenged cultural practices of the social mainstream. . . . [T]he theatre . . . thrives on and gives testimony to, contradictory social energies, staging them, not resolving them.”16 The strong evidentiary base of Our Moonlight Revels provides historians with copious inducements to explore further the book’s substantial interest in audience history. As several of Williams’s middle chapters demonstrate, productions of Midsummer for most

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of the nineteenth century excited English heterosexual males with several erotically charged spectacles. Victorians (and later, Edwardians) turned Shakespearean playing conventions on their head with regard to the comedy’s fairies, casting all of them, including the male characters Oberon and Puck, as women. Williams uses the term “gaze” to describe how these productions induced male spectators to look at the women in their revealing fairy costumes, but strips the term of its unfalsifiable Lacanian baggage. Gone from Williams’s analysis is the suggestion, common in Lacanian interpretation, that certain givens about male development and sexuality, coupled with illusionistic stage practice, forced men in the audience to objectify women in these productions. Rather, this gazing was a matter of biological and historical contingency that resulted from the collusion of sexual appetite and cultural prompting, in the form of suggestive casting, costuming, and movement. As Williams recognizes, there is a big difference in the writing of history between the indeterminacies of historical possibility and the loaded dice of psychoanalytic determinism. He works in a way that allows the historian with a cognitive orientation to build upon his already substantial construction. The London performance of Midsummer that initially turned many male spectators into sexual voyeurs occurred in 1840, when Madame Vestris mounted a production at Covent Garden. Breaking with previous casting precedents, Vestris played Oberon to stage her strong contralto voice and appealing figure. In a single paragraph, Williams encompasses the many implications of this revealing theatrical decision: A woman fairy king would have addressed the patriarchal Victorian culture in complex, fascinating ways. Once again, a woman was on the English throne, and in this production of a play resonant with the anxieties of Elizabethan men not in control of their women, as Louis Montrose has suggested, an eroticized woman theatre manager stepped into the role of a male ruler. Victorian males perceived women in terms of their sexuality, their reproductive role, and their emotions, and women were regarded as closer to nature and the irrational; they were, at one and the same time, eroticized as sexual companions, feared as predators, and idealized as creatures of the spirit. . . . A female fairy king was just that much more ethereal. On the other hand, a woman in this role was unquestionably sexually appealing; she was the adorable, diminutive enchantress in a child’s fairy world, Lolita as well as angel.17

Williams goes on to say that Vestris’s role as the manager of her company raised the sexual stakes of her embodiment of Oberon; not only

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did her costuming and movements seem to make her sexually available, but she also likely threatened and appealed to men as a kind of manageress dominatrix. One major reason that Vestris probably believed that she could get away with sexualizing part of the male spectator’s experience of Midsummer was that most Victorians, by 1840, understood the comedy as nationalistic, imperialistic, and sentimentally romantic. A popular 1816 production had already turned Midsummer into a musical pageant that linked England to the glories of classical Greece, celebrated the nation’s triumphs in the Napoleonic wars, and (partly by manipulating and expanding the conflict between Oberon and Titania over the Indian boy) glorified Britannia’s imperium in India. In this production and similar ones before 1840, a forceful and paternalistic Theseus, the embodiment of power and reason, staged a concluding triumphal pageant that wrapped the mechanicals’ Pyramus and Thisbe into his and England’s glory. Although Vestris restored much of the traditional ending, she kept the links to Greece, patriarchy, and nationalism (and some of the music from the 1816 production) that had come to be associated with the comedy. Critics praised the staging for its scenic evocations of Periclean Athens and of a magical fairyland. The male critics said nothing about the sexual allure of Vestris and the many shapely fairies that flitted about the stage in the flimsy, low-cut, and knee-length costumes of romantic ballet, however. As Williams states, sexual desires could not be admitted in the church of Shakespeare. Vestris’s Midsummer was an immense success and established several precedents for subsequent productions. Until 1914, Oberon stayed a woman and increasing numbers of sexy fairies skipped, tripped, and primped on London stages. What can the cognitive historian interested in the experiences of Victorian and Edwardian audiences do with this material? Many things, of course, and Williams’s insights provide an excellent starting point. Staying just with English productions of Midsummer, the historian might be curious about alluring “improvements” in the costuming, movements, and songs of the fairies between 1840 and 1914 and the response of spectators to them. How far could producers of the play push heterosexual male fascination with female display without offending “public taste?” What role, if any, did the critics play as enforcers of conventional morality in such instances? Did some productions “cross the line” and, if so, what was the response at the box office? Clearly, in Foucauldian terms, productions of Midsummer provided an enticement to talk about female sexuality. Did these and similar productions alter the kinds of sexual discourse that predominated? Such an investigation would involve the usual sources

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for production history, but would also ask about critical and spectatorial engagement. To better gauge the response of the many different groups of males that enjoyed productions of Midsummer, the historian would need to know a great deal about the kinds of images and movements that excited these groups. She or he could not assume that all males between 1840 and 1914 would have had the same response to the sexualized fairies, of course. This historical work would likely involve research that examined varieties of Victorian pornography and other groups of images and performances that aimed at mild titillation. Grounding this kind of investigation would be a cognitive approach to sexual arousal. As we saw in chapter 2, Ciompi and Panksepp recognize that psychosocial and psychobiological engagements usually work together in human behavior.18 Their approach takes the psychoanalytic mystifications out of sexual desire and understands lust primarily as an appetite, like hunger or thirst. Seeking to satisfy lust in human societies, however, necessarily involves a whole range of emotional systems, typically SEEKING itself, and often CARE, PLAY, and sometimes R AGE. When primal desire and its possible emotional involvements move into the theatre and onto the stage, the background emotion of PLAY, which anchors all fictional performances and necessarily infects the audience, would certainly help in the arousal of a viewer. Probably for most spectators, the kind of eroticism in the performed drama would also shape their expression of sexuality in the auditorium. On the basis of general knowledge of the characters and plot of Midsummer, the historian can begin with the assumption that Victorian productions of the comedy tied sexuality to SEEKING (the two pairs of lovers, Pyramis and Thisbe), PLAY (the fairies, Titania and Bottom, Pyramis and Thisbe), and CARE (all of the sexualized situations in the comedy). A careful look at the sources, especially surviving scripts, promptbooks, and illustrations, could help the historian to discern the likely emotional engagements for spectators prompted by these dramatic actions in various productions. As I have suggested in previous discussion, the new insights into cognition and emotion allow for a range of subtle interpretations of spectator engagement. By comparison, the old-fashioned handling of sexuality in the theatre by Lacanian theorists is ham-fisted. Williams’s look at Victorian society through the lens of Midsummer productions provokes other possibilities for historians as well. As

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Williams shows, especially through his illustrations, the conventions of romantic ballet predominated in the attire and dances of the fairies. As far as I know, theatre and dance historians have not fully investigated the erotic charge of this costume for mid-nineteenth-century audiences, especially for heterosexual males. These Romantic costuming and movement conventions were an integral part of popular burlesque extravaganzas in both Britain and the United States—types of entertainments that influenced the development of operetta and of all-female burlesque and minstrel productions on both sides of the Atlantic. Williams’s insights, coupled with cognitive analysis, suggest a range of diachronic investigations in audience history for the historian. First, as I have noted, tracing the several ways that Victorian producers “pushed the envelope” of allowable male excitement between 1840 and 1914 in specific productions of Midsummer. Second, how did this gradual widening of the propriety of sexual arousal spill over into other Shakespearean productions and, more broadly, into “legitimate” entertainments that offered little of the prestige (and respectable cover) of Shakespeare? Third, while the spectators for Vestris were mostly male, London theatre audiences were sexually mixed (for the most part) by 1870. How did this change in gender balance relate to the strategies and realities of male arousal in playhouses, if it did at all? Fourth, what happened to this dynamic with the shift to electric lighting and darkened houses after 1890? As we have seen, emotions catch fire and spread more easily in a lighted auditorium. Did this change dampen male spectator spirits or, by inducing more private imaginings, inflame them? Finally, did the need to retain and increase the numbers of aroused male spectators in mixed-sex houses with darkened lights help to lead to new theatrical genres after 1900? The obvious candidate in this regard is musical comedy, which rose rapidly in popularity on the London stage after the turn of the century. As with cognitive investigations of minstrelsy and racism, no blanket statements about male sexual engagement in the theatre are possible here. But this has been true of good audience history for a long time; no population, in Darwinian and cultural terms, has ever been uniform. The goal of such investigations is to determine, insofar as possible, the major (and shifting) sexual-rhetorical allurements from the stage and the likely response of different populations of males (in changing social and theatrical contexts) to such inducements.

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Modernism, FEAR, and Hegemony My final example begins with Julia A. Walker’s Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre, in which she creatively explores the divide between the agency of individual expressionist dramatists and the structural constraints that shaped their lives and plays.19 Locating American theatrical expressionism as a cultural response to the historical conditions of modernity, Walker notes in her “Introduction” that Part I of her book will examine those conditions, especially as they altered the work of the theatre. Her Part II, she says, will demonstrate how her four playwrights (Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, John Howard Lawson, and Sophie Treadwell) responded to modernity through their dramas. Walker’s “Introduction” tackles the agency-structure problem head-on: “[Modernism] functions as a culture’s attempt to represent itself to itself. This is not to say that the artist is an impersonal node through which a culture inscribes its meanings. Rather, as I discuss below, artists often respond in highly personal ways to the cultural and historical changes which find expression in their art.”20 This general strategy aligns her Expressionism and Modernism with what historiographer Mary Fulbrook terms a “moderate structural explanation.” In Fulbrook’s words, Walker focuses her curiosity on “the conditions under which certain intentions could or could not be realized.”21 This strategy is consonant with a fundamental principle in cognitive Darwinism (and in most Marxisms) that the environment always limits the possibilities of human change. The three chapters of Walker’s Part I establish the constraining and enabling conditions within which her four expressionist playwrights could realize their intentions. She notes the gradual shift in the power dynamics in theatre as an institution from actors to playwrights around the turn of the last century, as the new technologies of photography, electricity, and film undermined the traditional actor–audience relationship and created a demand for more realist plays. The technologies of the telephone and the phonograph separated the voice from the body, however, leading to a perceived split between playtexts and performances that undercut the new freedom of the dramatist and degraded the prestige of performance. Although new copyright laws and their improved enforcement gave playwrights legal protection, they did little to bridge the widening gulf between playwriting as a literary art and as effective theatre. After 1918, when some writers turned to expressionism, dramatists were creating autonomous art objects, a key part of modernism, but faced

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a literary-theatrical divide. From Walker’s point of view, the material conditions of the theatre and its relation to the institution of playwriting crucially shaped the kinds of plays the expressionists could create. Within these constraints, however, Walker’s four playwrights found that by ironizing S.S. Currie’s modes of “expression,” a popular regimen that married elocution to body language, they could project their personal and professional difficulties into plays that bore witness to their often anguished alienation. Walker demonstrates that in The Emperor Jones (1920), for example, O’Neill could imaginatively resolve his Oedipal revolt against his father and his father’s traditional mode of melodramatic acting as well as assuage his professional anxieties about the literary worth of his drama by using Currie’s expressive culture movement as the “primary source” for the play’s “psychological portraiture” and “experimental form.”22 Similarly, Sophie Treadwell elevated herself from secretarial duties and lowpaying journalism, as well as defying the patriarchal forces that controlled much of her life, by writing Machinal (1928), a play about a woman who marries out of desperation and eventually kills her husband. Treadwell, too, relied on an ironized version of Currie’s expressive culture as her primary performative mode. She based the story of the Young Woman of her play on journalistic reports about the trial of a lonely woman convicted of murdering her husband to gain her freedom. Like O’Neill, according to Walker, Treadwell exercised significant professional and creative agency within the confines of her historical circumstances. From a cognitive point of view, Machinal is primarily about compulsion, one of several embodied concepts in the mind that allow humans to think about modes of action. In his comments on the embodied nature and gestalt cognitive structure of compulsion, Mark Johnson notes, “Everyone knows the experience of being moved by external forces, such as wind, water, physical forces, and other people. When a crowd starts pushing, you are moved along a path you may not have chosen, by a force you seem unable to resist. Sometimes the force is irresistible, such as when the crowd gets completely out of control; other times, the force can be counteracted or modified.”23 Johnson’s remarks on compulsion provide an apt metaphorical description for the major action of Machinal. Forces beyond her control push the Young Woman into an office job, into marriage to her boss, whom she does not love, into having a baby, and into the arms of a lover. At this turning point in the play, however, the Young Woman awakens to her own possibilities for freedom

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and authenticity, and, in the next scene, she rejects her marriage and kills her husband. Despite her attempts to push back, the Young Woman never gains the ability to free herself from compulsive forces; she is never able to define and shape her own life. Interior voices inviting her to “free” herself drive her to murder. Even here, she is not in control.24 Also driven by societal compulsions, the press and the jury find her guilty at her trial. The Young Woman is locked away in a cell and electrocuted at the end of the play. Walker notes that the Young Woman’s situation has some similarities to Judith Butler’s understanding of the performative construction of a woman’s gendered identity, but Walker takes only what she needs from Butler’s position and rejects some of her larger claims.25 As the product of compulsion and attempted resistance, the Young Woman is meant to evoke some sympathy from spectators. Walker does not extend her discussion of Machinal into an examination of the involvement of the 1928 audience, but she provides sufficient information about the play and production to begin such an investigation. As we have seen, spectators sympathize with actor/characters after they consciously judge them to be worthy of their concern. Treadwell made this appraisal easy for viewers by specifying in her stage directions that “only the Young Woman is to be played as a straight, realistic performance.”26 She instructs the other actors to perform their parts as stereotypes, with little facial and gestural flexibility. Historian Ronald Wainscott stated that, in production, “the business and line delivery [of the supporting actors], designed to overwhelm the protagonist, . . . were carefully choreographed and orchestrated” by director Arthur Hopkins.27 While the other actor/ characters offered no resistance to their social roles, the dialogue and stage directions indicate that the Young Woman, played by Zita Johann in 1928, chafed under the masks of employee, wife, mother, and accused murderer that she was forced to wear. Hopkins ensured that the actor/automatons maintained their indifference to her pain, keeping her isolated and alienated from society. Only after the Young Woman makes love with her adventurer does her body, face, and voice relax into natural and vivacious expressiveness, according to the script. Spectators will usually sympathize with people suffering under compulsion, even convicted murderers, because they can see and feel their struggle for authenticity and freedom in the midst of a world of uncaring others. Audience sympathy for Johann/Young Woman probably evoked several emotions during the 1928 performances of Machinal, a

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moderate success by the standards of the day. Those spectators who were empathetically engaged and sympathetically committed likely experienced Johann/Young Woman’s SEEKING, her occasional PANIC, and her overwhelming FEAR—a FEAR that partly drove her compulsion—at several moments of the production. A reading of the script suggests that CARE, PLAY, and R AGE were seldom present. Only in the scene with her lover is the Young Woman relaxed enough to allow CARE and PLAY into her world and she is generally too bewildered and confused to move from FEAR into R AGE, at least for very long. Perhaps Johann/Young Woman’s SEEKING was the dominant emotion of the 1928 production, as the actor/ character sought help from potential friends, her mother, her husband, a doctor, and others to gain freedom. At the end of the play, the audience hears her last words from a darkened cell, “(Calling out) Somebody! Somebod-,” when her SEEKING is cut off by her execution.28 Because SEEKING underlies audience engagement in all types of dramatic performances, however, it is necessary to get more specific about her intentions. In most of the scenes in the performance of Machinal in 1928, Johann/Young Woman sought romantic love and freedom from restrictive social norms. Her failure to achieve these goals primarily induced FEAR. In terms of my previous discussion of genre, it is clear that Machinal can be classified as a love tragedy that mainly evoked the emotion of FEAR in its spectators. The “fitness stakes” of the drama, in Nettle’s evolutionary understanding, centered on the protagonist’s goal of fulfilling her desire for marriage and children with a man whom she could love. I qualified Nettle’s discussion of genre through the more historically and emotionally nuanced approach of Currie, who links genre to audience response. The Young Woman’s battle against those forces preventing her goal primarily led her to FEAR for her individual freedom, a FEAR communicated to the audience. Assuming this is a fair reading of Machinal in 1928, the historian would next want to know if there were other popular plays around that time that fit within this genre. Two come to mind immediately, O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, produced in 1924, and Rain, by Colton and Randolph (based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham), the tale of a missionary who lusts after a streetwalker when both are stranded on the island of Pago Pago during the monsoon season. (The play is best known today by the Joan Crawford film of the same title released in 1932.) In all three dramas, a compulsive woman FEARs

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that social forces will prevent her from fulfilling her desire for romantic love; all end in tragedy. Next, the historian will likely hunt for more plays that fit this type and begin to ask about the cultural-historical dynamics that made these plays significant for a particular audience. One way to approach this problem is to consider these love tragedies based in FEAR as a subgenre of a larger type. From this perspective, Machinal, Desire, and Rain may be grouped with plays in which compulsive male and female protagonists are fighting for their individual freedom against social forces that threaten to overwhelm them. In addition to these love tragedies from the 1920s, the historian could find several popular plays from the 1920s through the 1940s that fit the other three categories produced by Nettle’s genre mapping: Death of a Salesman, a status tragedy in 1949; The Show-Off, a status comedy in 1923; and You Can’t Take It With You, a love comedy in 1936. FEAR was a prominent emotional response in all of these productions: Can Willie Loman overcome his shame and guilt to make peace with his family and avoid suicide? Can Aubrey Piper survive his economic ruin in George Kelly’s comedy and save his marriage? Can the loveable bohemians in Kaufman and Hart’s comedy avoid conformity and arrest to find fulfillment? As in Machinal and the other love tragedies, each of these examples evoked FEAR from spectators about the imminent loss of freedom and control in their lives. No doubt, the historian could find many more plays from this era centered on protagonists whose FEAR for the loss of their freedom primarily drives their narratives, including such disparate examples as It Can’t Happen Here, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Winterset. This culturally and cognitively attuned understanding of genre might next lead the historian to ask about the spectators for these kinds of plays between 1920 and 1950. Who made these and similar plays popular during these years and why might these auditors have applauded them? As David Savran and other scholars have noted, the primary audience for Broadway plays during this time was the professional-managerial class (the PMC).29 According to Barbara and John Ehrenreich, the PMC emerged around 1900 primarily to facilitate the management and acceptance of modern corporations and to mediate class conflicts between capitalists and workers.30 These bureaucrats, engineers, teachers, accountants, lawyers, writers, and others doing mental rather than physical labor increased rapidly and became the primary audience for theatrical and many other cultural events after 1920. The question for the performance historian is why this class embraced these kinds of plays.

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A theory of cultural hegemony is well suited to answer this question. But is Gramsci’s notion of domination by consent consiliant with a cognitive approach to cultural history? With regard to this question, one difference between the Raymond-Williams version of Gramsci’s theory that is common in English historiography and the cognitive notion of cultural dynamics that I advocated in chapter 3 is their definition of culture. Like several other Marxists and anthropologists of his era, Williams referred to culture as an organic totality, a web of practices, behaviors, and beliefs that was bigger than the sum of its parts. Consequently, for Williams, a hegemonic culture shaped the “whole lived social process.”31 This meant that a change in one part of a culture would necessarily nudge changes in other domains. If culture comes in discrete parts that are only loosely related, however, shifts in the dynamics of cultural domination in one area might effect little change in another. The particulate theory of culture articulated by cognitive anthropologists Roy D’Andrade and Bradd Shorr is at odds with Williams’s commitment to organic totality.32 A particulate theory of culture, of course, renders the processes of cultural hegemony more complex and makes cultural-historical explanation more difficult than Williams supposed. If a culture is in cognitive pieces, no single “structure of feeling” (Williams’s term) or anything like it evident in the theatre or other areas of culture could encompass and correlate the forms and emotions produced by a dominant culture with its wider milieu. Nevertheless, hegemony works through domination by consent and this can still occur even if the cultural schemas inside the heads of a commonly enculturated people are not all the same. Although the cognitive dynamics maintaining a dominant culture will differ within a population, those exercising intellectual and moral leadership in different domains of a culture will still be able to manage and manipulate significant chunks of those internalization and externalization processes. In effect, the various “historical blocs” that make up a dominant culture can now be understood in cognitive terms; organic intellectuals in each bloc organize and maintain a particular cognitive field and may compromise their differences among each other to maintain their authority. Among those “organic intellectuals” in the U.S. theatre between 1920 and 1950 were certainly popular playwrights. A particulate notion of cultural hegemony forces us to modify Williams’s notions of structure and agency, but there is no reason to abandon these crucial concepts and the necessary tension between them. Although a cognitive theory of cultural hegemony must be more flexible than Williams’s old

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model, it will likely be better attuned to the realities of an increasingly complex and modern world. Merging Shore’s cultural models with a traditional notion of hegemony theory also requires some adjustments to Williams’s terminology. Williams distinguished among dominant, residual, and emergent kinds of culture. For Williams, residual culture meant past cultural constellations still current and available for use in the present. Emergent institutions and practices, as the term suggests, put forward cultural innovations. Although both residual and emergent cultures might be deployed to confirm or disrupt conventional dominant forms, Williams generally looked to innovation to challenge the status quo. From a cognitive point of view, however, the well of human experience available in the mind/brain has room for many residual cultures and even includes concepts for building any new cultures that might become emergent. Schemas for cultural models are indeed historical, but they are also built from universal primitives. They also come injected with universal emotions, which help to guide cultural participants in making practical, everyday choices. Opposition to a present dominant culture can draw upon the emotional evocations and connotations of either a residual or an emergent culture, or both, to imagine and effect change. The analogical extension of old or innovative metaphors to new targets in history, of course, can also quell progressive reform. Williams’s notions of residual and emergent culture remain useful but require some modification along these lines. When applied to an investigation of the production of popular plays in the 1920–1950 period, this cognitive definition of cultural hegemony opens up some interesting questions for the historian. Plays about FEAR, like all professional productions in the United States, were part of the cultural model of theatregoing during this time, a model that was chiefly oriented to the needs of the PMC. Walker’s study, Expressionism and Modernism, is especially sensitive to the problematics of agency and structure in the writing and production of the expressionist plays she examines. Within the structures of the cultural model of theatregoing prevalent in 1920–1950 period, what were the possibilities for individual agency and how did various artists take advantage of those options? How did these dynamics help to shape audience engagement with plays centered on FEAR? Was this genre part of an emergent culture of the PMC in the 1920s or did it emerge earlier? In terms of the class structure of U.S. society, the PMC was located between capitalists and workers. Did this precarious location and the FEAR of falling in status help to shape some

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of the dramas that appealed to the PMC? (In the case of my two examples, Death of a Salesman and The Show-Off, this FEAR is palpable.) Was this true for other status tragedies and comedies as well? The PMC FEAR of losing status and loved ones was probably exacerbated in the 1930s, during the Depression. Many popular plays during this decade, from Awake and Sing to The Time of Your Life, center on fearsome situations for their protagonists and certainly evoked FEAR in their audiences.33 Were plays of FEAR in all four of Nettle’s categories—tragedies and comedies of status and tragedies and comedies of love—part of the dominant culture during that decade? What happened to this genre after 1945, when the realities of the cold war began to shape professional theatre in the United States? (My own cognitive investigation of this era in American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War suggests that plays of FEAR continued to be a part of the dominant culture, even as anxieties about status changed to accommodate sexual, racial, and apocalyptic FEARs.34) In short, examining a group of plays through Nettle’s and Currie’s genre theories, Shore’s idea of cultural models, and a modified version of Gramsci’s hegemony theory opens up a variety of investigations that may result in several interesting historical narratives. Conclusion I hope that these three explorations of possible cognitive audience histories are understood as suggestive rather than exhaustive examples. There is no reason I can see that the approach, concepts, and procedures I have outlined in this study cannot be applied to audiences for any group of performances in the past. This would include Roman spectators enjoying the plays of Plautus, celebrants at the masques of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, participants in the rioting that greeted Ubu Roi, spectactors at a forum theatre production in Brazil put together by Augusto Boal, a ritual-like piece of hybrid theatre performed before Maori tribespeople and white New Zealanders, and sidewalk gawkers at last year’s Gay Pride March in New York City. The possibilities of historians’ joining past social realities with ongoing cognitive dynamics open up an enormous range for the writing of new audience histories.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Unfortunately, some performance scholars have understood “live” and “mediated” performances as dichotomous, even oppositional, terms. This is true both of Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993) and of Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), although Auslander initially attempts to trouble this dichotomy. A singer–actress on a Broadway stage illuminated by electric lights and singing into a microphone is both “live” and “mediated.” I critique Auslander’s ontological assumptions about theatre in chapter 1 of this book. 2. In The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Richard Butsch discusses what he terms “embedded audiences,” whose main focus is on immediate social interaction, not the viewing of the dramatic fiction (10–12). Television viewing in the American household, for example, is typically embedded in the dynamics of family interaction. Butsch notes that western theatrical spectatorship before 1850 was also often embedded in the community dynamics of peer group audiences. Historical audiences rarely paid attention to actors in the ways that contemporary spectators do, but they usually listened and watched intermittently to catch the high points of the action. 3. See, for example, Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003). 4. See, for example, Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1998). 5. Several reader-response theories from 1960s and 1970s, even some very sophisticated ones, assume that the words of the author carry primary agency in the reader’s construction of meaning. See, for example, Norman N. Holland’s The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) and Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

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6. See, for example, John Tulloch’s Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2005). 7. Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 238. Also see David Sloan Wilson’s “Evolutionary Social Constructivism,” in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Literature, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), which points out that most positions of social constructivism and evolutionary psychology are not very far apart. 8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), ix. 9. I’ve encountered such resistance at several conferences where I’ve presented papers on cognition and spectatorship. One scholar even accused me of “abandoning” my previous neo-Marxism to embrace “science.” I have usually countered that Marx himself strove to be empirically responsible and that a scientific approach to emotions and the mind is a more responsibly materialist orientation than a Freudian or Lacanian one. 10. Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 61–62. See also Peter Dickens, Social Darwinism: Linking Evolutionary Thought to Social Theory (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000). Dickens, a socialist, uses evolutionary theory to argue against the notion of an essential human nature and worries that capitalism may be transforming the flexible nature of Homo sapiens in directions that make radical change less likely. 11. For more on the theoretical implications of cognitive science for theatre and performance studies, see Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, eds, Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). The anthology features essays that explore the differences between cognitive approaches and semiotics and psychoanalytic points of view, and also notes commonalities with phenomenology. In addition, I have published essays on the historiographical and theoretical implications of cognitive science for theatre studies. See, for example, “Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians,” Theatre Journal 53, 4 (December 2001): 569–594; “Using Cognitive Science to Understand Spatiality and Community in the Theater,” Contemporary Theatre Review 12, 3 (2002): 97–114; “A Cognitive Approach to Brechtian Theatre,” Theatre Symposium 14 (2006): 9–24; and “Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies,” Theatre Journal 59, 4 (December 2007): 553–577.

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12. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; reprint; London and New York: Routledge, 1992). For a recent overview of Popper’s views on many topics, including epistemology, see Raphael Sassower, Popper’s Legacy: Rethinking Politics, Economics, and Science (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). Although falsification remains an important principle and process in many areas of scientific practice, most philosophers of science agree that, by itself, it cannot guarantee a good outcome. Thomas S. Kuhn, in his The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) and Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: NLB, 1975), have pointed out that scientists can always make adjustments in their theories, even adjustments in their logical principles, to avoid the falsification of a particular theory. I am indebted to Mark Johnson for this insight. 13. For a representative sampling of credible theories in theatre and performance studies, see Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007) and Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002). I have commented on the falsifiability of these theories in my essay, “Falsifiable Theories,” cited above. 14. See, for example, T.J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 567–593. In this essay, Lears demonstrates that a historian could falsify a claim of cultural hegemony from another historian by showing that different, potentially competing historical groups actually shared the same consensus values. 15. See, for example, Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), 51–196. 16. Wilma Bucci, Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science: A Multiple Code Theory (New York: Guilford Press, 1997), 9–10. 17. See, for example, Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 18. For recent research on the cognitive basis of acting, see Rhonda Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 19. Bucci, for example, who disparages the scientific basis of Freudianism, wrote Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science to point to some of the cognitive reasons that psychoanalytic therapy seems to be effective. One good example of scientists helping therapists is the Neuropsychoanalysis Society, recently cochaired by researchers Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp. Their Web site explains that “a need for sustained scientific rapprochement between researchers and clinicians is essential to learn about and enhance each other’s perspectives and knowledge on matters of mutual interest”

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21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

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(http://www.neuro-pas.uk/npsa, accessed February 9, 2008). Panksepp is interested in helping psychoanalysts even though (as will be apparent when I discuss his theories in chapter 2) his neuroscientific ideas about emotions are based on a very different model of the brain than were Freud’s and Lacan’s. In his Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995), Joseph Carroll makes the following relevant point: “For critical commentary to be susceptible to rational evaluation, critical propositions must be ‘falsifiable,’ that is susceptible to being declared mistaken on the grounds of logic and evidence that would be ratified by all reasonable, informed observers. At the current time in [poststructuralist] literary theory, the only general principles that are widely accepted deny the possibility of objective knowledge about any subject . . .” (126). In Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on poststructuralist philosophy directly. They note that four major claims of poststructuralism are “empirically incorrect:” “(1) The complete arbitrariness of the sign; that is, the utter arbitrariness of the pairing between signifiers (signs) and signifieds (concepts); (2) The locus of meanings in systems of binary oppositions among free-floating signifiers (differánce); (3) The purely historical contingency of meaning; (4) The strong relativity of concepts” (464). See also evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald on the likely evolution of language in his A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001), 252–300. Brian Vickers, “Masters and Demons,” in Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, ed. D. Patai and W. Corral (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 249. The population’s general ignorance of scientific protocols has been the subject of much recent writing. See, for example, Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). One exception to our discipline’s lack of knowledge (and even interest) in science is Tobin Nellhaus, whose “Science, History, Theatre: Theorizing in Two Alternatives to Positivism,” Theatre Journal 45 (December 1993): 505–528 takes two theatre historians to task for their misperceptions about physics. Geoffrey Harpham, “Response,” New Literary History 36 (2005): 105. See Paul A. Boghossian, “What the Sokel Hoax Ought to Teach Us,” Times Literary Supplement 13 (December 1996): 14–15. The editors of Social Text accepted Alan Sokel’s parody of the “postmodern” implications of modern physics as a serious article and published it in their April 1996 issue. Sokel later revealed his parody. See Alan Sokel, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, 62–64.

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26. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 87. 27. According to a recent overview of emotion studies, four major approaches are competing for prominence. From a neuroscientific perspective, emotion is located in the brain, elicited by other brain activity as well as by external stimuli, and expressed through the release of chemicals, the activation of muscle systems, and the allocation of specific cognitive resources. Many cognitive psychologists begin with an “appraisal theory” of emotion, which links the expression of an emotion to the appraisal of an external situation, such as a threat to the self. The prototype approach, favored by some cognitive sociologists, examines social interactions as scripts for nonverbal emotional expression and traces the elicitation of these behaviors to social causes. Finally, there are some social constructionists who discount neuroscientific explanations and hold that societies construct emotions through discursive norms. They look to the symbolic expression and negotiation of emotional definitions and roles in media as well as behavior as causal factors. See Anne Bartsch, “Emotional Communication—A Theoretical Model,” (paper presented at the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media conference, Edmunton, Alberta, August 3–7, 2004), available from www.arts.ualberta.ca/igel; accessed October 16, 2007. 28. Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” in Hens Teeth and Horses Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 254. 29. See C. Mantzavinos, Naturalistic Hermeneutics, trans. Darrell Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 30. For the past ten years or so that I have been publishing in the emerging field of performance and cognitive studies, I have altered as well as extended my ideas about cognition. Were I given the opportunity to revise my earlier work, I would change a few of my ideas, either because they were based on too little reading in cognitive science at the time or because the scientists themselves have changed their minds. A close reader of my scholarship in theatre and cognitive studies will realize that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work played an important role in orienting me to this new field and also providing me with many of my first tools of analysis. Their Philosophy in the Flesh was especially influential. Based on their discussion in that book, I distinguished between “advisory” and “empathetic” projection in American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2003) and repeated these terms in “Selves, Roles, and Actors: Actor Training in the West,” in Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). Wider reading has led me to

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conclude that the advisory-empathetic distinction, although it probably remains valid, also misleads readers into assuming a much smaller role for empathy in the theatre than actually occurs. In chapter 3, I note that Lakoff and Johnson changed many of the universal primitives that they had been calling “image schemas” into “concepts,” although they (confusingly, to my mind) retain the term “image schema” for other uses. Although I deploy both of these key terms, my change did not follow their’s until five years later. 31. As noted in my acknowledgments, I have profited from conversations with several cognitive scientists and philosophers of science and I anticipate that Engaging Audiences will provide a calling card for more. 32. The main lines of the controversy among “cognitivists” and “Freudians” in film studies may be traced through the ongoing disputes between David Bordwell and Slavoj Zizek. Bordwell and Noel Carroll’s Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) initially pointed up the differences between cognitive science and Lacanian psychotherapy. Zizek responded in the first two chapters of his The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001). Bordwell rebuts Zizek’s attacks on his blog, “David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema” (April 2005), http://www.davidbordwell.net (accessed February 5, 2008). David Saltz, “Editorial Comment: Performance and Cognition,” Theatre Journal 59, 4 (December 2007): i–ii, provides a useful summary of this controversy. In the course of these debates, Noël Carroll has emerged as Bordwell’s “bulldog,” to borrow a term from the cultural history of the controversies over evolution in the nineteenth century. Perhaps Bordwell’s most stinging critique of the Freudians on his blog is his summary of the position taken by Carroll in his anthology essay, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” and his mention of Zizek’s nonresponse: “Carroll argues that proponents of Grand Theory embrace a monolithic conception of theorizing, conflate theorizing with interpreting specific films, use political correctness to attack their opponents, unwontedly charge opponents with formalism, and exhibit a bias toward the concept of truth. Remarkably, Zizek responds to not a single one of these charges” (davidbordwell. net/essays/zizek, 5); accessed October 16, 2007. Among those in theatre studies who have some familiarity with cognitive science and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Mark Pizzato urges a synthesis of the two sides. Pizzato mentions the Bordwell–Zizek controversy in his Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), but does not discuss it in detail. Rather, he argues that “neurology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science should be combined with Lacanian theory for further insights

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about the natural and cultural (i.e., the Real as well as Imaginary and Symbolic) dimensions of cinema” (4). He justifies his interest in folding the cognitive sciences into Lacanian theory by conflating some results of Lacanian psychoanalysis with empirical science, a kind of conflation that many scientists have condemned and that I discussed earlier in this chapter. While Bordwell and Zizek at least recognize that cognitive science and Lacanian theory share little empirical and epistemological common ground, Pizzato shoves them together anyway, ignoring fundamental differences. 33. The cherry-picking of selected scientific ideas to enhance ascientific notions of theatre and performance is apparent in Daniel MeyerDinkgrafe’s “Consciousness, Theatre, and Terrorism,” Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts 4, 3 (December 2003). Meyer-Dinkgrafe states, for example: “Just as every other academic who deals with consciousness studies, I, too, have chosen one model of consciousness from among the abundance of models available. . . . The model I chose is based on Indian Vedanta philosophy, as conceptualized over the past twenty years by Indian sage and philosopher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. . . . Vedic Science proposes . . . ‘an architecture of increasingly abstract, functionally integrated faculties or levels of mind’ ” (2). These include the states of “cosmic consciousness” and “unity consciousness,” which is when a “person is able to perceive everything in terms of his own transcendental self” (2). MeyerDinkgrafe’s implicit claims of an academic free-for-all and extreme cultural relativism rhetorically sidetrack any questions about the kinds of empirical tests that might provisionally validate or falsify “Vedic Science.” 34. I recognize that there is a long tradition of empirical studies into audience behavior, much of it still quite useful. See, for example, Performance Theory, Reception, and Audience Research, ed. Henri Schoenmakers, Advances in Reception and Audience Research, 3 (Amsterdam: Tijdschrift voor Theaterwetenschap, 1992), which also includes, as appendix, the proceedings of the Centre for Theatre Sociology from 1970–1986. Jacqueline Martin and Willmar Sauter provide a good summary of European reception studies in their Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 1995), 26–34. John Tulloch’s book, noted earlier, continues and updates this tradition. I agree with Martin and Sauter that “reception research has contributed considerably to the development of performance theory” and I will note some of these contributions in Engaging Audiences. Much of this social-psychological empirical work, however, rested on assumptions based in semiotics and behaviorism; it took little account of advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. It may now be possible to do some new empirical studies of audience perceptions (they can no longer be termed reactions or responses) on the basis of current science and I would support

216

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35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

such research. The general position of this book, however, is that there is already a great deal of empirical evidence to support significant generalizations about spectatorship—theatre scholars simply have not recognized it as such. For an overview of this work, see Dorothy Miell, Raymond MacDonald, and David J. Hargreaves, eds., Musical Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Producable Interpretation: Eight English Plays, 1675–1707 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 10. The authors also warn against imposing “false generalizations” regarding “audience composition and response” to facilitate “tidy interpretations,” (23). I shall endeavor to follow this advice. Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, English Version by Charles Laughton, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 66–70. Daniel Goleman, “Can You Raise Your Social IQ?” Parade, September 3, 2006, 10. At this writing (February 2008), I am aware of two exceptions to this generalization: My own piece, “Falsifiable Theories,” and Amy Cook’s article, “Interplay: The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Scientific Approach to Theatre,” in the same issue of Theatre Journal 4, 3 (December 2007): 587–591.

1

General Cognition for Theatre Audiences

1. See J. Palmer, “Attentional Limits on the Perception and Memory of Visual Information,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 16 (1990): 332–350. 2. J.C. Johnston, R.S. McCann, and R.W. Remington, “Chronometric Evidence for Two Types of Attention,” Psychological Science 6 (1995): 365–369. 3. G.M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992) and Donald, A Mind So Rare. See also Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 4. Among those who consider consciousness to be epiphenomenal are Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991) and Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997). 5. Elizabeth Wilson, Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (New York: Routledge, 1998), 6; Richard P. Honeck, A Proverb in Mind: The Cognitive Science of Proverbial Wit and Wisdom (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 264; and Wilson, Neural Geographies, 160.

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6. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 137–148. 7. Ibid., 57. 8. Condillac quoted in Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 54. 9. Melissa Hines, Brain Gender (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4. 10. Ibid., 213–214. 11. Ibid., 227, 228. 12. On “fashionable female audiences” around the turn of the nineteenth century, see Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 122–126. 13. Noted by Gerald Edelman and Guilio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 26. 14. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 40. 15. Ibid., 58. 16. Edelman and Tononi, Universe of Consciousness, 95. For overviews of memory theory, see John B. Best, Cognitive Psychology, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999), 89–169 and Henry Roediger and Lyn M. Goff, “Memory,” in A Companion to Cognitive Science, ed. William Bechtel and George Graham (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 251–263. 17. Most cognitive psychologists distinguish between “working” memory and “long-term” memory. See, for example, Best’s discussion of memory types in Cognitive Psychology, 28–29. In addition, however, Donald, A Mind So Rare, notes the existence of “intermediate memory,” which allows humans to sustain ongoing conversations and to engage with complex works of art (195–200). Few experiments have been done on intermediate memory. 18. John Tulloch, Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 142–146. 19. Edelman and Tononi, Universe of Consciousness, 102–110. 20. Schacter’s work noted in E. Eich, “Memory for Unattended Events: Remembering With and Without Awareness,” Memory and Cognition 12 (1984): 105–111. 21. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 7. 22. Edelman and Tononi, Universe of Consciousness, 104. 23. Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 157. 24. See Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1987). For an overview of the dispute between innateness and emergentism, see Elizabeth

218

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

NOTES

Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett, “Innateness and Emergentism,” in A Companion to Cognitive Science, 590–601. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 16–45. See Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985). David R. Olson and Ellen Bialystock, Spatial Cognition: The Structure and Development of Mental Representations of Spatial Relations (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983). Eleanor Rosch, “Principles of Category Formation,” in Cognition and Categorization, ed. Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1978), 27–48. Quoted by Julia Walker, “The Text/Performance Split across the Analytic/Continental Divide,” in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, ed. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 36–37. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38–39. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 179–180, 266–267. Technically, F and T term this “double-scope blending,” which they describe as involving four separate “spaces”: a generic space, two input spaces, and the blend itself. In my example of spectators perceiving actor/characters, identity is the generic space, actor and character are the two input spaces, and actor/character, the completed blend, is the fourth. F and T’s blending theory is compatible with Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of metaphor. See Joseph E. Grady, Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson, “Blending and Metaphor,” linked to Mark Turner’s Web site: http:// markturner.org/blendaphor.html. Ibid., 267. Horace, quoted in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: From the Greeks to Grotowski, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1974), 71. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Biographia Literaria,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 314. On conceptual blending as the basis for theatrical make-believe, see also Amy Cook, “Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science,” SubStance 35, 2 (2006): 83–99. Jacqueline Martin and Willmar Sauter, Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 1995), 34. Although these results

NOTES

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

219

came out of empirical experiments that may not be wholly valid in scientific terms, they are suggestive of cognitive realities. Freud quoted in Willmar Sauter, The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 118. My remarks on Bernhardt’s acting are based on Sauter’s chapter, 117–145. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 126. See Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 157–197. Ibid., 160. Conceptual blending theory can usefully revise States’s notion of the collaborative mode of actor–audience relationship. For States, the comic aside, in which an actor-character speaks directly to the audience, usually to share a confidence, epitomizes the collaborative mode. The problem with this example, as with his general discussion of this mode, is that performing collaboratively minimizes neither the actor nor the character for the audience while they are enjoying it. When an actor playing Joseph Surface in A School for Scandal confides his frustration with Lady Teazle to us in the midst of the screen scene, we in the audience may both enjoy the (actor’s) vocal arrangement of Sheridan’s witty phrases for comic effect and also recall that Lady Teazle has been frustrating Joseph’s (the character’s) seductive intentions for most of the action. While the combination of performer and character in this example does indeed enjoin the audience to collaborate, as States suggests, his other two modes remain in full force. Some level of collaboration between spectators and actors is necessary for theatrical engagement to occur at all. In short, States’ notion of collaboration is not a separate mode, but a sine qua non for all theatre—consequently, for both the self-expressive and the representational modes of actor–audience relationships. Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 140. This is an example of how blending in one area of a network (in this case, a play performance) can be extended to encompass the dynamic structure of the entire network. For other examples of this, see Gilles Fauconnier, “Compression and Emergent Structure,” Language and Linguistics 6, 4 (2005): 523–538. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 231. Ibid., 232. Ibid., 217. In their article, “Consider the Source: The Evolution of Adaptations for Decoupling and Metarepresentations,” Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, ed. Dan Sperber (New York: Oxford, 2000), 53–116, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby present a different theory about how humans process fiction.

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49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

NOTES

According to Cosmides and Tooby, we understand all fictional narratives—from oral bedtime stories to complete novels, films, and stage performances—as intentional representations, which they term metarepresentations. In metarepresentations, the content works within the context of an intending source; only in the context of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, for example, can “Shylock is a Jew” be a true statement. For Cosmides and Tooby, the human mind always distinguishes between the fictional and the real. They implicitly deny that the real and the fictional can be blended, as F and T argue occurs with actor/characters. Critic Lisa Zunshine adopts Cosmides and Tooby’s point of view in her Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006). Paul Martin, “The Whys and Wherefores of Play in Cats,” in Play in Animals and Humans, ed. Peter K. Smith (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 87. Michael Ellis, Why People Play (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 92. Sauter, The Theatrical Event, 79–82. Peter Eversmann, “The Experience of the Theatrical Event,” in Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames, ed. Vicky Ann Cremona, Peter Eversmann, Hans van Maanen, Willmar Sauter, and John Tulloch (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), 155. Ibid. Quoted in Ibid., 146. In their The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990), M. Csikszentmihalyi and R. Robinson understand “flow” to apply to the experience of static visual art, not to time-bound artistic experiences like theatre, film, and music. Further, they fragment that experience into four “dimensions” (perceptual, emotional, cognitive, and communicative), which make little sense from the perspective of cognitive science. Despite these limitations, the concept of “flow” still manages to capture much of the playfulness of theatregoing. Quoted in John Tulloch, Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 295. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 120, 121–122. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Evolution, and Epistemology (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972), 187. See Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959). My position on the ontology of theatre differs from J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory. “Performative”

NOTES

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

221

utterances, for Austin, make something happen in the social world; “I now pronounce you husband and wife” has “performative” power. It transforms the suppositional (“she might marry me”) into the real (“she is my wife—at least until the divorce”). Crucially, though, Austin relegated theatre to the nonperformative because he supposed that it (unlike a wedding) could make nothing happen in the real world. Like Cosmides and Tooby, Austin assumes that the mind always distinguishes between the fictional and the real and he builds his speech-act theory on this base. See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Blending theory parses “reality” differently. It assumes that people know the difference between the actual and the fictional, but that both are a part of reality. Consequently, blending with counterfactuals does have effects in the real world. (Among other effects, it changes the neurons in our mind/brains.) David Z. Saltz, “Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Theatrical Fiction in Theatrical Performance,” in Staging Philosophy, 203–220. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 215. Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). The authors note that their dual system approach “has no ontological implication whatever with respect to the mind–body problem” (xii). Ibid., xii–xvi. Alain Berthoz, The Brain’s Sense of Movement, trans. by Giselle Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1. Also see Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), which explores the philosophical implications of our dual system of vision. Jacob and Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing, 45. Noël Carroll, “Philosophy and Drama: Performance, Interpretation and Intentionality,” in Staging Philosophy, 119. Jacob and Jeannerod, Ways of seeing, contrast their theory of visual intentionalism with “sense datum” theory and “disjunctivism” (3) in their first chapter, 3–41. My synthesis of Edelman’s and Jacob and Jennerod’s theories in this paragraph is based only on a close reading of both, not on experimental evidence that speaks directly to its possibilities. In this synthesis I have avoided the vexed problem of whether the visual percepts created as I suggest are truly “representational” in a way that would satisfy both Edelman’s and Jacob and Jeannerod’s definition of this term. On their spatial relations concepts, see Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 30–36.

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71. See Eleanor Rosch, “Human Categorization,” in Advances in CrossCultural Psychology, ed. N. Warren, vol. I (London: Academic Press, 1977), 177–206; “Principles of Categorization,” in Cognition and Categorization, ed. E. Rosch and B.B. Lloyd (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Press, 1978), 27–48; and Eleanor Rosch, Mervis, C.B., Gray, W.D., Johnson, D.M., and Boyes-Braem, P., “Basic Objects in Natural Categories,” Cognitive Psychology 8 (1976): 382–439. 72. Jacob and Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing, 141. In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson point out that the cognitive reality of basic-level categories, plus subordinate and superordinate levels, cannot be made to accord with metaphysical realism the philosophical basis of Lockean thinking (and of much modern linguistics, including Saussurean semiotics), 25–30. 73. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951; New York: Signet, 1975), 45. 74. See, for example, the discussion of sociosemiotics and actors in Jean Alter’s A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 12–30 and 257–269. Applying Saussure to acting, Alter notes “actors participate in theatrical semiosis both as signs and as producers of signs” (262) (ital in text). Both functions, however, are close to what Jacob and Jeannerod would understand as “visual perception.” Alter does not recognize that spectators’ must deploy a different cognitive process to understand an actor/character’s intentions. This is not to say that semiotic perception is a cognitive impossibility. If viewers decide to use semiotics as a secondary or tertiary means of sorting their initial visual perceptions and visuomotor representations into categories, they can apply a semiotic method to their experience of playgoing. The mind/brain can certainly accommodate the semiotician. According to Patrice Pavis, “To analyze [a performance’s] codes and signifying systems is . . . to organize the performance and the text as a possible circuit of meaning whose productivity and coherence are more or less great according to the theatre event in question, but also according to the analyst,” Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 195. Following Pavis and others who understand semiotics as a mode of structuralism, analysts using semiotics can organize phenomena to generate meanings for those analysts who accept their structures. But these structures appear to have no necessary relation to our default modes of cognitive processing. Further, the mind/brain does not use the kinds of classical categories that Saussure and other semioticians have assumed to be at work in the human interpretation of the world. Rather, when looking for visual percepts in the “Poker Night,” viewers will look for basic-level categories—chairs, shirts, green and red colors, and so on—and each of these categories is necessarily “fuzzy” at the edges. Saussure

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assumed that people looking at a chair would be able to distinguish it from a stool, but basic-level categories do not admit of the “either-inor-out” property of classical categories. Shirts and jackets, for instance, merge together at the edges of both categories, but humans know that a prototypical shirt looks different than a prototypical jacket. Likewise, green is a fuzzy category that begins to shift to blue or yellow as we move across the spectrum, but there is a true green that all humans recognize as such. On the necessity of category fuzziness and the differences between classical and basic-level categories, see Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 11–40. “Fuzzy” categories are another massive stumbling block for classical semiotics, which renders even visual percepts only superficially like semiotic signs. Nonetheless, some researchers are attempting to reconcile cognitive science and semiotics. See, for example, Thomas C. Daddesio, On Minds and Symbols: The Relevance of Cognitive Science for Semiotics (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995).

2

Social Cognition in Spectating

1. For many researchers, simulation is a part of a more general “Theory of Mind,” ToM for short. D. Premack and G. Woodruff first used the term in 1978, in their “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1978): 515–526. In 1988, Premack distinguished among three classes of ToM in “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? Revisited,” in Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, ed. R.W. Byrne and W. Whiten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 160–179. Premack hypothesized that animals (including humans) “reading the minds” of other animals might understand (1) what the other is seeing (perceptual); (2) what the other is intending (motivational); and (3) what the other is believing (informational). While some researchers limit empathy and simulation to motivational ToM, others understand it more broadly. For an overview of ToM, see Alison Gopnik, “Theory of Mind,” in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank Keil (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 838–834. Following philosopher of mind Robert Gordon and others, I use empathy and simulation to mean “our everyday ability to attribute mental states and predict and explain human behavior,” an operation that involves all three of Premack’s classifications. See Robert M. Gordon and Joe Cruz, “Simulation Theory,” Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (in press). Entry now available in draft form at: www.umsl.edu/~philo/Faculty/ Gordon/MindSeminar99/papers/Gordon/np-enc.html (last accessed July 22, 2007). See also Gordon, “Folk Psychology as Simulation,” Mind and Language 1 (1986): 158–171. To avoid confusion, I have

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2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

not used the term “Theory of Mind” in the text of this book. As Gordon and others acknowledge, psychologists continue to define “empathy” and “simulation” in several competing ways. Paula M. Niedenthal, Lawrence W. Barsalou, Francois Ric, and Silvia Krauth-Gruber, “Embodiment in the Acquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge,” in Emotion and Consciousness, ed. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal, and Piotr Winkielman (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 22. Ibid., 25. E. Hatfield, J.T. Cacioppo, and R.L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5. Robert M. Gordon, “Sympathy, Simulation, and the Impartial Spectator,” in Mind and Morals: Essays on Cognitive Science and Ethics, ed. Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy Clark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 168. See the “Introduction” and chapters by Robert M. Gordon, Georg Vielmetter, David Henderson and Terence Horgan, and Hans Herbert Kogler in Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences, ed. Hans Herbert Kogler and Karsten R. Steuber (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000) for the epistemological ramifications of simulation theory. I have used simulation theory to critique Lacanian approaches to theatre history in my chapter, “Cognitive Studies and Epistemic Competence in Cultural History: Moving Beyond Freud and Lacan,” in Performance and Cognition, 52–75. Michael H. Thaut, “Rhythm, Human Temporality, and Brain Function,” in Musical Communication, ed. Dorothy Miell, Raymond MacDonald, and David J. Hargreaves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 184. Ibid., 179. Niedenthal et al., “Embodiment,” 40. Caryl Churchill, Top Girls (New York: Samuel French, 1982), 29. Ibid. In addition to the play itself, I have consulted the following works on Churchill and the production of Top Girls at the Royal Court: Elaine Aston, Caryl Churchill, 2nd ed. (Plymouth, UK: Northcote House Publishers, 2001); Amelia Howe Kritzer, The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1991); and Phyllis R. Randall, Caryl Churchill: A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988). Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 60. See also Baron-Cohen’s “Autism and the Origins of Social Neuroscience,” in The Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Behavior, ed. A. Easton and N.J. Emery (Hove and New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 239–255. Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 259–260.

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14. Ibid., 259. 15. Vittorio Gallese, “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, 5–7 (2001): 36. Also see Damasio’s discussion of empathy and mirror neurons in his Looking for Spinoza, 115–118. Damasio discusses mirror neurons as a part of what he terms the “as-if-body-loop,” wherein body and mind interact in response to an image of an action, an “as if ” situation similar to the theatre. This view of empathy and simulation, which understands mind reading primarily as the work of mirror neurons and emotions, may not extend to “reading” other people’s beliefs and desires. See S. Nichols and S. Stich, Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) for an alternative view of mind reading. 16. See Vittorio Gallese, Christian Keysers, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “A Unifying View of the Basis of Social Cognition,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 1–8; rpt. www.sciencedirect.com (last accessed July 24, 2008). Interestingly for theatre studies, the authors speak of empathy as an “as if” performance: “Side by side with the sensory description of the observed social stimuli, internal representations of the state associated with these actions or emotions are evoked in the observer, ‘as if’ they were performing a similar action or experiencing a similar emotion” (5). Jean Decety and Philip L. Jackson, “A SocialNeuroscience Perspective on Empathy,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, 2 (2006): 54–58, also link research on empathy to Gallese’s work on mirror neurons. 17. Bernard Beckerman, The Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis (New York: Knopf, 1970), 149. 18. Ibid., 151. 19. David Krasner, “Empathy and Theater,” in Staging Philosophy, 257. 20. Ibid., 258. 21. Jacob and Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing, 227. 22. Ibid., 221. 23. See James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1979). Jacob and Jeannerod, Ways of Seeing, accept the first two of what they believe to be three separable strands in Gibson’s argument: (1) the amount of information in the visual array; (2) the dual emphasis on affordances and the role of action and movement in capturing visual information; and (3) the nonrepresentational directness of visual perception (157–159). 24. Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976), 20. 25. See Mark H. Johnson and John Morton, Biology and Cognitive Development: The Case of Face Recognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

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26. Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 37; and Brecht, “A Dialogue About Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre, 26. 27. For a good discussion of the differences between empathy and sympathy, see Susan Feagin, Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 113–142. 28. I have developed this argument about Brechtian aesthetics in greater detail in my piece, “A Cognitive Approach to Brechtian Theatre,” Theatre Symposium 14 (2006): 9–24. 29. Andras Wohlschlager and Harold Bekkering, “The Role of Objects in Imitation,” in Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language, ed. Maxim Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2002), 111. 30. Ibid., 112. 31. Ibid., 112–113. 32. Greenfield quoted by Sandra Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds,” The New York Times, January 10, 2006, F-2. Greenfield’s and Blakeslee’s conclusions, however, anticipate a kind of scientific validation that has not yet occurred. As Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), points out, “In this regard, the following reasonable hypothesis can be formulated: when the neonate sees another person perform a specific motor act, for instance a tongue protrusion, the visual stimulus initiates the firing of the same mirror neurons that are involved in the infant’s own performance of that motor act. Although precise experiments that would verify this hypothesis have not been carried out, this kind of mechanism would go a long way toward accounting for the capabilities of imitation we see in neonates” (77). 33. Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 8. 34. Ibid., 130. 35. Ian Cross, “Music and Meaning, Ambiguity and Evolution,” in Musical Communication, 37–38. 36. Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy, 139. 37. Brian Boyd, “Evolutionary Theories of Art,” in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 164. 38. Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology 21 (2005): 1–25. 39. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 93. 40. For the same reasons, Lakoff and Johnson’s “embodied realism” contradicts the assumptions of poststructuralism. “There is no

NOTES

41.

42.

43.

44.

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poststructuralist person . . .” they state, “no completely decentered subject for whom all meaning is arbitrary, totally relative, and purely historically contingent, unconstrained by body and brain. The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in” (5–6). Embodied realism, concretized in the mirror neurons, embodied concepts, and emotional dynamics of Homo sapiens, is radically at odds with the theories of Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, and other poststructuralists. In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson also demonstrate that the following general tenets of poststructuralism are “empirically incorrect”: “(1) The complete arbitrariness of the sign; that is, the utter arbitrariness of the pairing between signifiers (signs) and signifieds (concepts), (2) The locus of meaning in systems of binary oppositions among free-floating signifiers (differánce), (3) The purely historical contingency of meaning, [and] (4) The strong relativity of concepts” (464). Building on their work together, philosopher Mark Johnson has elaborated an approach to aesthetics in his most recent book, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), that echoes many of the ideas of Dissanayake. In her earlier book, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why (New York: Macmillan, 1992), Dissanayake treats “empathy theory” and its “psychobiological substrates” as “a plausible framework for a universal species account of aesthetic experience” (185). Oddly, however, she does not discuss empathy in Art and Intimacy. Interestingly, elephant cows treat their young with much of the same interactive attentiveness as human mothers. See Cynthia Moss and Martyn Colbeck, Echo of the Elephants: The Story of an Elephant Family (New York: William Morrow, 1992). See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978). I critique Lacan and Lacanian-based history from a cognitive studies point of view in my “Cognitive Studies and Epistemic Competence,” in Performance and Cognition See Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, especially 15–129, for an overview of the current research on infants and their bodily images. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). My coeditor for Performance and Cognition, F. Elizabeth Hart, persuasively critiques Butler’s position in her article, “Performance, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Turn,” in Performance and Cognition, 29–51. Laura Mulvey’s notion of “the gaze,” which derives from her reading of Lacan, may be found in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”

228

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

NOTES

Screen 16, 3 (1975): 6–18. In The Literary Animal, cited above, Dylan Evans recounts his passage as a critic “From Lacan to Darwin,” 38–55. At the end of his essay, Evans acknowledges, “many literary scholars still rely on Lacanian theory.” “This strikes me as very sad,” he adds. “Perhaps their continuing reliance on Lacan is due to their poor understanding of science, just as mine was” (54). Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 11. Ibid., 167–183. Joseph R. Roach, It (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 93. See Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007). See Ron Jenkins, Acrobats of the Soul: Comedy and Virtuosity in Contemporary American Theatre (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), 3–22. Sofer, Stage Life of Props, 23–26. Stanton B. Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 91. While I agree with Garner’s initial comments about objects on the realist stage (which I have quoted), phenomenology’s difficulty in distinguishing between Jacob and Jeannerod’s two modes of seeing ultimately leads him astray. Garner believes that “the mundane materiality of the object” under realism “precipitated an alienation of the illusionistic field from itself” (93). He cites as an example G.B. Shaw’s “open touring car,” placed onstage in Man and Superman, which, says Garner, “effected a perceptual shift in which the automobile became more than itself, its ‘automobileness’ all the more dazzling in the theater whose conventions and frames it both evoked and violated” (93). From my point of view, however, Shaw (as usual) gets the last laugh. The open touring car may be an object, but it is also a potential prop and becomes a true prop (though certainly larger than most) when Tanner’s driver manipulates it to motor away at the end of the scene. Instead of acting as an oppressive object that threatens to overwhelm humanity, the car nicely illustrates Shaw’s point that the ruling class must depend on technicians if they are (literally) to get anywhere. Theatre critics and theorists have too casually used terms like “perceptual shift” without knowing enough about actual vision and perception. See Brian Butterworth and Uri Hadar, “Gesture, Speech, and Computational Stages: A Reply to McNeill,” Psychological Review 96 (1989): 168–174. David McNeill, Gesture and Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 4. McNeill’s approach combines what he terms “static and dynamic” approaches to language production (63–163). In brief, this involves creative borrowings from

NOTES

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

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Saussure, a mostly exhausted tradition (from McNeill’s point of view), and Vygotsky, who still has much to teach us (believes McNeill). Ibid., 22. Ibid., 245. See Philip B. Zarrilli, The Kathakali Complex: Actor, Performance, Structure (New Delhi: Abhinav Press, 1984). Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947; New York: Penguin Putnam, 1975), 72. Vygotsky quoted in McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 149. McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 212. McNeill, Gesture and Thought, relates his understanding of vocalgestural production to its breakdown in Broca’s aphasia (211–218). See also his discussion of Wernicke’s aphasia, his overview of other experimental evidence on right hemisphere imagery, and the implications of his conclusions for a new brain model (218–232). For an overview of these four types, see Anne Bartsch, “Emotional Communication – A Theoretical Model,” (paper presented at the biennial IGEL Conference, Edmonton, August 2004, www.arts. ualberta.ca/igel) (last accessed June 24, 2008). Also useful is Deborah Lupton’s The Emotional Self: A Sociocultural Exploration (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 10–38. Luc Ciompi and Jaak Panksepp, “Energetic Effects of Emotions on Cognitions: Complementary Psychobiological and Psychosocial Findings,” in Consciousness and Emotion: Agency, Conscious Choice, and Selective Perception, ed. Ralph D. Ellis and Natika Newton (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2005), 23–56. Ciompi and Panksepp recognize that Panksepp’s neo-Jamesian theory and the appraisal theory of emotions, identified with the work of Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), are usually thought to be in tension. For Ciompi and Panksepp, however, Oatley’s notion of “appraisal” need not be fully conscious to elicit an emotional response. Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 14. Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 53–54. Ciompi and Panksepp, “Energetic Effects,” 35–36. For psychological experiments and findings on emotional contagion, see Elaine Hatfield, John R. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, “Primitive Emotional Contagion,” in Emotion and Social Behavior, ed. Margaret S. Clark, Review of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 14 (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992), 151–177. See Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 255–259.

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68. See P. Ekman, R.W. Levinson, and W.B. Friesen, “Autonomic Nervous System Activity Distinguishing Among Emotions,” Science 221 (1983): 1208–1210; Paul Ekman, “Strong Evidence for Universals in Facial Expressions: A Reply to Russell’s Mistaken Critique,” Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994): 268–287; and The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, ed. Paul Ekman and R ichard J. Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 69. Scott D. Lipscomb and David E. Tolchinsky summarize this research in “The Role of Music Communication in Cinema,” in Musical Communication, 383–404. 70. Patrik N. Juslin, “From Mimesis to Catharsis: Expression, Perception, and Induction of Emotion in Music,” in Musical Communication, 94, 95. 71. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 62. 72. Ibid., 141. From my perspective, Utopia in Performance has much to recommend it, but it could benefit from a scholarly engagement with emotion. 73. Diderot quoted in Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 55. 74. See my description of Forrest and his fans, plus the conventions of the star system mid-century, in Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 69–83. 75. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 37. 76. Feagin, Reading with Feeling, 114. Several literary scholars are also beginning to pay attention to the feelings of readers. See, for example, David S. Miall, Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). 77. Feagin, Reading with Feeling, 114. 78. Oatley, Best Laid Schemes, 98. While Oatley’s understanding of emotions arguably involves conscious feelings, in Damasio’s sense of the word, the two scholars have different definitions of emotional response. For Oatley, the evaluation that is a part of feeling acts as an elicitor that precedes emotional response, while for Damasio feelings only arise after emotions work their way into consciousness. These points of view are not necessarily antithetical, however, as Ciompi and Panksepp recognize. 79. On cognitive categorization, see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and Eleanor Rosch, “Human Categorization,” in Studies in Cross-Cultural Psychology, ed. N. Warren (London: Academic Press, 1977). Murphy

NOTES

80. 81.

82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

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distinguishes among several theories of cognitive categorization in his second chapter (41–72). I have relied on Rosch’s theory of prototypes, as elaborated by Lakoff. Oatley, Best Laid Schemes, 25. For insight into two examples of this in 1930s Sweden, see Sauter, The Theatrical Event: The Dynamics of Performance and Perception, 205–223. Bruce McConachie, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 92–101. Clurman’s 1947 review quoted in Philip C. Kolin, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Plays in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 24. Kazan quoted in Ibid., 10. Ibid., 40–148. Robert R. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Viking, 2000), 18. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 286. See pages 280–299 for Panksepp’s overview of PLAY among rats. Ibid., 280. Cannon quoted in Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 138. Ibid., 140. Robert L. Latta, The Basic Humor Process: A Cognitive-Shift Theory and the Case Against Incongruity (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), 44. As his subtitle suggests, Latta finds the incongruity theory of laughter, a dominant theory in the field, to be an insufficient explanation. In a closely reasoned argument, Latta shows that some versions of incongruity theory are actually examples of cognitive shifts, while other versions do not produce the laughter their advocates predict, 99–235. Ibid., 82. For a historical insight into Twelfth Night, and this scene in particular, I have drawn on Paul Edmonson, Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Text and Its Theatrical Life, The Shakespeare Handbooks (Houndmills, Bassingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); C. Walter Hodges, Enter the Whole Army: A Pictorial Study of Shakespearean Staging, 1576–1616 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 140–146; Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and The Shakespearean Stage (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2004), 212–218. All citations are from Shakespeare, Twelfth Night or What You Will, ed. Jonathan Crewe, The Pelican Shakespeare (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thoughts, ed. Nico H. Frijda, Antony S.R. Manstead, and Sacha Bem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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95. See Klaus Fielder and Herbert Bless, “The Formation of Beliefs at the Interface of Affective and Cognitive Processes,” in Emotions and Beliefs, 144–170; Gerald L. Clore and Karen Gaspar, “Feeling is Believing: Some Affective Influences on Belief,” in Emotions and Beliefs, 10–44; and Nico F.H. Frijda and Batja Mesquita, “Beliefs Through Emotions,” in Emotions and Beliefs, 45–77. 96. See Damasio’s discussion of crying and laughing in Looking for Spinoza, 73–80. 97. See Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 61,78. Also see Marvin Carlson’s discussion of catharsis in his Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 18–19. 98. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 261. 99. Ciompi and Panksepp, “Energetic Effects,” 38. 100. Ibid., 37. 101. Ibid., 46. 102. Ibid., 44. 103. See, for example, Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago Press, 2005). Bourke draws on the relevant scientific literature to craft a history that has relevance for our current “war on terror.” 104. See McConachie, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War, 126–166 and 199–250. My analysis of cold war women and the fear they sometimes inspired was not based on negative emotion-logics, but it is congruent with the cognitive side of such logics. 105. On February 23, 2007, I witnessed a performance of Aoi-no-Ue at the University of Pittsburgh performed by The Uzawa Noh Troupe from Japan. See program for details. On noh generally, see “The Silent Bell: The Japanese Noh Play, Dojoji,” in Theatre Histories: An Introduction, 136–147. 106. In Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 191–217, Patrick Colm Hogan notes the lack of scientific rigor in the work of a few cognitive scientists who have used dubious evolutionary psychological theories to advance their political agendas. In particular, Hogan critiques the ideas of John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Steven Pinker. Hogan concludes, “In sum, the principle of examining our psychological endowment in evolutionary terms is valid and valuable. It will no doubt contribute significantly to our understanding of literature and the arts. But as the field is currently constituted, evolutionary psychological analyses are often deeply flawed. They routinely begin with unwarranted presumptions about what is biological and what is not. They fabricate just-so stories that provide pseudo-explanations for conclusions that are typically based more on dominant ideology than on rigorous empirical study (which should include the generation and testing of hypotheses that do not

NOTES

107.

108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113.

114.

115. 116. 117. 118.

119. 120.

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conform to common stereotypes, adherence to the principle of simplicity, etc.),” 202. In this section, I rely primarily on the work of neuroscientist Merlin Donald, who is careful to avoid the pitfalls that Hogan critiques. In addition to Donald, other evolutionary psychologists appear to have been more rigorous. See David Sloan Wilson’s summary of some of this science in his, “Evolutionary Social Constructivism,” in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 20–37. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) and A Mind So Rare. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 200–202. This is Panksepp’s list of six basic emotions from his Affective Neuroscience, 3–5. Although Donald has a slightly different list, his meanings concerning the evolution of the emotions is not changed by the substitution. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 253. Ibid., 255. Ibid., 263, 271. Among these others is Michael Studdert-Kennedy, who has written “The Particulate Origins of Language Generativity, From Syllable to Gesture,” in Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases, ed. J.R. Hurford, M. Studdert-Kennedy, and C. Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 202–221. Studdert-Kennedy has found that phonemes, the smallest units of speech, are made up of tiny gestural components. Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Ibid., 15. Ibid., 238. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 292–293. See Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 92–101. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 282–283. Ibid., 278.

3

Cultural Cognition in History

1. Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3. I have used Shore’s cognitive understanding of culture as a bridge to effect a cognitive understanding of Raymond Williams’s notion of cultural

234

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2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

hegemony in “Towards a Cognitive Cultural Hegemony,” in An Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming). Regarding the application of cognitive science to anthropology, also see, Roy D’Andrade, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). In this model of cognition, the image schemas that constitute culture derive from conceptual universals. In much of my earlier work, I based my use of the term “image schema” on Lakoff and Johnson’s pre-1999 work. With the publication of Philosophy in the Flesh, however, Lakoff and Johnson mostly deployed the term “concept” to name such primitive cognitive structures as “containment” and “source-path-goal.” This accords with Edelman’s use of the term, as I noted in chapter 1. Image schemas remain in Philosophy in the Flesh, however, and are sometimes used (confusingly) as synonyms for concepts. In Engaging Audiences, to avoid confusion, I have followed Lakoff and Johnson’s primary designations and make what I hope is a clear distinction between concepts and image schemas. D’Andrade, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology, 247. Quoted by Nick Worrall, The Moscow Art Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 50. Ibid., 312. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 267–289. Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 143. Although Wexler does not deploy or discuss Shore’s notion of a cultural model, his insights about cultural change are fully consonant with it. Ibid., 144. Shore, Culture in Mind, 372. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1–31. See for example Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Iain MacKintosh, Architecture, Actor, and Audience (London: Routledge, 1993); Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993); and David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). J.E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Ibid., 157. Neisser, quoted in Malpas, Place and Experience, 103. Malpas, Place and Experience, 143. Ibid., 142, 144.

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17. See Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968). 18. In my American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 166–178, I use the spatial relation concepts of Lakoff and Johnson to analyze the scenic and lighting designs of Jo Mielziner and his postwar colleagues in the American theatre. 19. See Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space, 131–162. As Wiles notes, the semiotic approach to theatrical space “fails to challenge the Cartesian theatrical dichotomy: the split between stage and auditorium, between the performance as object and the spectator as disembodied subject” (11). Wiles relies primarily on the materialist and phenomenologist theories of Henri LeFebvre. From my point of view, LeFebvre is a clear improvement over the Saussurean-derived ideas of Anne Ubersfeld and Patrice Pavis, but his theories fall short because they do not incorporate the findings of cognitive science. 20. Rush Rehm, The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 44. 21. On community-based theatre, see Dudley Cocke, Harry Newman, and Janet Salmons-Rue, eds., From the Ground Up: Grassroots Theatre in Historical and Contemporary Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Community Based Arts Project, 1993); Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus, eds., Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Eugene van Erven, Community Theatre: Global Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). All of these books attempt to work through the knotty problem of defining “community” and how theatre might engage community-based audiences. 22. For comments on place in Swamp Gravy, see my “Using Cognitive Science to Understand Spatiality and Community in the Theater,” Contemporary Theatre Review 12 (2002): 97–114. The piece represents an early attempt on my part to apply the spatial relations concepts of Lakoff and Johnson to some community-based performances. 23. See Sonja Kuftinec, Staging America: Cornerstone and CommunityBased Theater (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). 24. In her Local Acts, Jan Cohen-Cruz notes community-based artists’ commitment to local, popular audiences and lists what she believes are four distinguishing features of this kind of performance: (1) “Community-based performance emerges from a communal context”; (2) it involves “reciprocity,” a relationship between community-based artists and participants that is “mutually nourishing (albeit often challenging)”; (3) it has as its goals “both

236

25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

NOTES

efficacy and entertainment,” with efficacy ranging from the political to the spiritual; and (4) it endorses the idea of “active culture,” which translates broadly as inclusiveness, diversity, and a commitment to everyone’s artistic potential (91–100). These are certainly worthy principles and goals, but they do not denote a distinct genre of performance. By these standards, the production of Oedipus in ancient Athens was more tied to the local community than most community-based productions today. This is not to denigrate contemporary community-based theatre, which continues to produce many challenging and progressive performances under very difficult circumstances. Rather, my point is to contest our usual narrow definition of these performances and broaden our understanding of the ubiquity of community-based theatre in world theatre history. Stubbs quoted in S. Brown, “The Boyhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines: Notes on Gender Ambiguity in the Sixteenth Century,” Studies in English Literature 30 (1990): 250. For a discussion of Twelfth Night in the context of Renaissance sexuality, see my “Case Study: Shakespearean Sexuality in Twelfth Night,” in Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 208–215. Also, M. DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Lisa Jardine, “Twins and Travesties: Gender, Dependency, and Sexual Availability in Twelfth Night,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (New York and London: Routledge, 1992); and Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991). See Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988). On brothels and theatres, see 143–147. See Donald H. Shively, “Bakufu Versus Kabuki,” in A Kabuki Reader, ed. Samuel Leiter (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 33–59. Yong Li Lan, “Ong Keng Sen’s Desdemona, Ugliness, and the Intercultural Performative,” Theatre Journal 56, 2 (May 2004): 251–273. Ibid., 256. Rachel Giora, On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 14. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 94.

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35. See Bert O. States, Irony and Drama: A Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), xiii–16. 36. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles, trans. Robert Bagg (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). I have worked with a Greek scholar, Paul Wilson, to check the references I will cite against the original and can confirm that the repetitions of words and phrases that I note are also present in the original text. Consequently, Sophocles’ audience probably heard most of them. 37. See Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954), 123–129. 38. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in Oedipus Plays, lines 498–522. Subsequent lines of the play will be cited in the text. 39. Robert Bagg, “Greek Theatre in the Time of Sophocles,” Oedipus Plays, 21. 40. See Maurice Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 162–211 and H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 142–149. 41. David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross (London: Methuen, 1983). 42. Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1966). 43. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 290–334. 44. Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 2. See also Johnson’s “Ethics,” in A Companion to Cognitive Science, 691–701. 45. On moral naturalism, see Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, Andy Clark, “Introduction,” in Mind and Morals: Essays on Cognitive Science and Ethics, ed. L. May, M. Friedman, and A. Clark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) and several of the essays in this anthology. Also Owen Flanagan’s, Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 46. See Anthony Arlidge, Shakespeare and the Prince of Love: The Feast of Misrule in the Middle Temple (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 2000). 47. Linda Anderson, A Kind of Wild Justice: Revenge in Shakespeare’s Comedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 14. I am indebted to Rick Kemp for his discussion of revenge in Twelfth Night in a seminar paper at the University of Pittsburgh. Other sources that have been useful for my discussion of the ethics of Twelfth Night include Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Edmondson, Twelfth Night, The Shakespeare Handbooks; Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66–68, 71–72, 91–93; and

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

NOTES

Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 53–57, 81–82. Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 29. Branigan, Narrative, 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. See the case studies on noh theatre and kathakali dance-drama in Theatre Histories: An Introduction, 136–147, 240–254. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen JursMunby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 69. Branigan, Narrative, 29–30. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 98. Branigan, Narrative, 14–15. Annette Kuhn, “Women’s Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera, and Theory,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), 347. Reinhold Grimm, “Alienation in Context: On the Theory and Practice of Brechtian Theatre,” in A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion, ed. Siegfried Mews (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 42. Feagin, Reading with Feeling, 130–131. See Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). See Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Ibid., 17. Daniel Nettle, “What Happens in Hamlet? Exploring the Psychological Foundations of Drama,” in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 61. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 66–67. Ibid., 71. Gregory Currie, “Genre,” in Arts and Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 43. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 52.

NOTES

239

72. See, for example, Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 341–342, note 10 and M.D. Lewis, “Emotional Self-Organization at Three Time Scales,” in Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development, ed. M.D. Lewis and I. Granic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37–69. 73. On background emotions, see Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 51–53.

Epilogue: Writing Cognitive Audience Histories 1. Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999). 2. Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 226. 3. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Johnson’s book was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize given by the American Historical Association in 1995 and the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History awarded by the American Philosophical Society in 1994. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. In an article for Theatre Journal in 2001, I embraced this notion of experience without knowing that Johnson had already done so. I argued that a cognitive approach to performance history could take historians beyond the narrow paths of behaviorism (the default position of some audience historians) and discourse theory (the preferred route of many poststructuralists) to a broader notion of experience that encompassed rhetoric and aesthetics as well as the lived material realities of past artists and spectators. See “Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians,” Theatre Journal 53, 4 (December 2001): 569–594. In the article, I stated, “To paraphrase Marx, people, not texts, make history, though they never make it in [social] ecologies and with brains of their own choosing” (580). In retrospect, I was offering an approach to history that would, in part, allow historians to yoke together and narrativize Johnson’s “socially acceptable and . . . aesthetically accessible.”

240

NOTES

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

My American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2003), which examines audience dynamics as well as artistic practices, was one result of this revitalized notion of experience. William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana, IL and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Ibid., 2. Ibid. For my own analysis of the differences between Mahar and Lott on antebellum minstrelsy, see the middle section of “Cognitive Studies and Epistemic Competence in Cultural History: Moving Beyond Freud and Lacan,” in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, ed. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (New York: Routledge, 2006), 60–68, where I use both of their takes on minstrel wench acts as a case study to get at the differences between psychoanalytic and cognitive approaches to cultural history. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 103–126. Ibid., 154–155. Huggins cited in Ibid., 330. Cantwell cited in Ibid., 335. Roediger cited in Ibid., 349. Ibid., 350. Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theatre (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1997), 259. Ibid., 93–96. See Luc Ciompi and Jaak Panksepp, “Energetic Effects of Emotions on Cognitions: Complementary Psychobiological and Psychosocial Findings,” in Consciousness and Emotion: Agency, Conscious Choice, and Selective Perception (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2005), 23–55. Julia A. Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Walker, Expressionism, 6. Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 127. Walker, Expressionism, 125. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 45. See “Episode VII” of the play in Sophie Treadwell, Machinal, in Plays by American Women, 1900–1930, ed. Judith Barlow (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1985), 232. Because she is compelled by forces beyond her control, says Walker in Expressionism, the Young Woman’s life is mostly “the by-product, as

NOTES

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

241

Butler would have it, of social structures reproducing themselves through the compulsory actions of their subjects. Like Butler, Treadwell takes a rather bleak view of the defining power that social institutions have over women’s lives” (217). Walker keeps her distance from Butler, however, by demonstrating that, for Treadwell, the protagonist’s performance of prescribed roles and codes do “not appear to be natural; the Young Woman’s tragedy lies in her inability to perform [her gender] role[s] with emotional conviction” (215). Further, from Walker’s point of view, it is clear that Treadwell herself was not doomed to perform the roles her society had carved out for her. She had more agency than Butler’s behaviorist assumptions could explain. Ibid., 215. Ronald Wainscott, The Emergence of the Modern American Theater, 1914–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 138. Treadwell, Machinal, 255. See David Savran, “The Search for America’s Soul: Theatre in the Jazz Age,” Theatre Journal 58, 3 (October 2006): 459–476 and my discussion in American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment (Iowa City, IA: Iowa University Press, 2003), 3–4. Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “The ProfessionalManagerial Class,” in Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 5–45. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 109. See my article, “Towards a Cognitive Cultural Hegemony,” in An Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming, 2008). See Mark Fearnow, The American Stage and the Great Depression: A Cultural History of the Grotesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See my discussions of Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, and several plays responsive to the threat of The Bomb in American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War, 43–50, 181–197, 199–282.

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Index

Abbe de Condillac, 28 Aeschylus, 163 affordances, 73–4, 225 anticipatory schemata, 74 antipathy, 19, 76, 98, 99–103, 109–10, 172 aphasia, 91–2, 229 appraisal theory, 93, 100, 213, 229 Aristotle, 20, 47–8, 72, 111, 177 audience demographics, 31 Auslander, Philip, 57, 209 autism, 69–70, 106, 224 Bagg, Robert, 147, 150, 237 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 69, 224 Baudrillard, Jean, 11, 48, 227 beat analysis, 90–2 Beckerman, Bernard, 71 Beckett, Samuel, 32, 86 behaviorism, 3, 92, 215, 239 Bekkering, Harold, 76–7 Bennett, Susan, 48, 209 Bernhardt, Sarah, 45–6, 219 Bialystock, Ellen, 39 Blackface Minstrelsy, see minstrel performances body language, 87–8, 116–17, 201 Bordwell, David, 15, 165, 214–15 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9 Boyd, Brian, 78–9 Boyd, Robert, 4, 117–18 Brando, Marlon, 42–4, 48–9, 55, 60, 102–5 Branigan, Edward, 164, 165–6, 168, 170

Brecht, Bertolt, 3, 17, 20, 34, 76–7, 138, 146, 171–3, 210, 216, 226 Broca’s area, 91–2 Bunraku, 84 Burke, Kenneth, 146 Butler, Judith, 82, 202, 227, 241 Butsch, Richard, 31, 186, 187, 209 Cacioppo, John, 67 Cantwell, Robert, 192–3 Carlson, Marvin, 36 Carroll, Joseph, 212 Carroll, Noël, 15, 57–8, 214 casting conventions, 19, 121, 128, 130, 138–42 Chekhov, Anton, 16, 24–5, 34–5, 49, 75, 85–7, 100, 111–13, 123–6 The Cherry Orchard, 34–5 Churchill, Caryl, 12, 16, 65–6, 69, 75, 80–1, 120, 163–73, 224 Ciompi, Luc, 93–5, 99, 112–13, 198, 229, 230 Clacquers, 98 Clurman, Harold, 102–3 cognitive concepts, 32, 36–9, 42, 56, 62, 124–6, 127, 130, 166–7 basic-level, 39–40, 60–1, 100–1, 124 emergentism, 38, 217, see also constructionism nativism, 38

244

INDEX

cognitive evolution, 65, 115–16, 121 cognitive laughter theory, 195 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 43–4 comedy, 2, 36–7, 47, 67, 109–10, 153, 156, 160–2, 173–9, 182, 186, 194, 196–9, 204 community-based theatre, 137–8, 235–6 Cornerstone Theatre, 138 Swamp Gravy, 137–8, 235 compulsion, 201–3 conceptual blending, 18, 40, 42–3, 46, 48, 50, 54, 63, 139, 185, 190, 193–5, 218, 219 connectionism, 26 consciousness, 6, 8, 18, 23–5, 27–8, 31, 35, 41–2, 59, 68, 80, 98–100, 116, 119, 122, 126, 129, 132, 189, 215, 230 constructionism, 38 containment, 60, 122, 124, 126, 135, 234 Copernicus, 12 costume(s), 25, 31, 56, 61–3, 83–4, 122, 153, 161, 196, 197, 199 counterfactuals, 47, 50, 53–5 blending of, 48, 50, 54, 221 frames, 53–4 Cross, Iain, 78 The Crucible, 12 cultural models, 19, 121, 123–31, 185, 206–7 baseball, 54, 128–30, 138 black women, 130 The Octoroon, 130 theatergoing, 121, 143–4, 167, 174 Currie, Gregory, 8, 177–80, 183 Currie, S.S., 201, 203, 207 Damasio, Antonio, 8, 94, 98–9, 106–8, 111, 181, 225, 230 D’Andrade, Roy, 123, 205 Darwinism, 5, 25, 38, 175, 199, 200, 210

Davis, Jim, 186–7 Deacon, Terrence, 119 The Dead Class, 167 Death of A Salesman, 25, 163, 181, 204, 207 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 11, 227 Desdemona, 84, 142–3 Desire Under the Elms, 203 Diderot, Denis, 97–8 Dissanayake, Ellen, 77–82, 227 Dolan, Jill, 97 Donald, Merlin, 8, 25–7, 38, 39, 115–20, 121, 175, 212, 217, 233 Edelman, Gerald, 8, 25–7, 33–4, 35, 37, 38, 39, 43, 59, 121, 130, 221, 234 Ekman, Paul, 96 Elizabethan Theatre, 102, 109, 139–42, 153–4, 163, 174, 179, 180, 186, 196 casting conventions of, 138–42 homoerotic aspects of 139, 140 Ellis, Michael, 51 embodied realism, 80, 145, 226–7 Emeljanow, Victor, 186–7 emotions, 6, 7, 8, 19, 48, 65–75, 79, 83, 90–100, 102, 105, 107, 110, 111, 112, 115–16, 120, 122, 162, 167, 171, 180–3, 189, 196, 199, 202–3, 205–6, 210, 212, 213, 225, 229, 230, 233 appraisal theory of, 93, 100, 213, 229 contagion of, 67, 92, 97–8, 174 embodiment of, 66–8, 197 six systems of, 93–4; CARE, 94, 95, 97, 102, 104, 105, 107, 111, 113, 115, 179, 180, 182, 198, 203; FEAR, 94, 95, 97, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112–14, 115, 123, 179, 181, 200, 203–7; PANIC, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102,

INDEX

104, 107, 111–13, 115, 179, 180–3, 203; PLAY, 94, 95, 102, 106–8, 110, 115, 180, 181, 198, 203; R AGE, 94, 95–7, 107, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 180, 198, 203; SEEKING, 94, 95, 104, 115, 180, 198, 203 empathy, 2, 7, 18, 19, 27, 63, 65–7, 71–6, 95–9, 106, 116, 122–3, 153, 158, 162, 164, 185, 190, 191, 214, 223–4, 225, 227 The Emperor Jones, 201 ethics, 5, 121, 123, 151–4, 156–63, 237 Eversmann, Peter, 52 expressionism, 200–1, 206 Eyre, Richard, 34–5 Fauconnier, Gilles, 42–4, 50, 121, 130, 218 Feagin, Susan, 99–101, 172–3 flow, 27, 41, 47, 48, 52–3, 55, 220 Foucault, Michel, 11, 14 Freud, Sigmund, 9–10, 11, 45 Freudian, 3, 210, 211, 214 Fulbrook, Mary, 200 Fuller, Loie, 84 Gallese, Vittorio, 70–2, 79, 225 Garner, Stanton, 86, 228 gaze(ing), 24, 25, 29, 60, 62, 82, 83, 158, 196, 227 gaze tracking, 24, 31 gender, 4, 20, 29–31, 82, 126, 128, 129, 142, 143, 186, 187, 190, 199, 202, 241 cognitive differences, 29–32 gender-bending, 142–3 hormones, 29–30 genre, 19, 52, 114, 120, 121, 125, 138, 173–83, 186, 199, 203–4, 206, 207, 236 gesture, 9, 18–19, 65, 66, 72, 75, 87–92, 109, 115–17, 118, 119, 140, 143, 146, 166

245

Gibson, James J., 74, 131, 133, 225 Giora, Rachel, 144–6, 150 Goffman, Erving, 53–4 Gombrich, E.R., 55 The Good Person of Setzuan, 171 Gordon, Robert M., 67–8, 79, 223–4 Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 205, 207 Grandin, Temple, 70 Greek theatre, 16, 48, 56–7, 131–8, 147, 148 orchestra, 57, 59–60 skene, 57, 60, 132–5, 137 Theatre of Dionysus, 56, 58, 60, 75, 134, 138 theatron, 131, 133–4 thymele, 134 Greenfield, Patricia, 77, 226 Griffiths, Trevor, 34–5 Grimm, Reinhold, 172 Gurr, Andrew, 174, 186, 187 Habermas, Jürgen, 9 Harpham, Geoffrey, 12 Hatfield, Elaine, 67 Hedda Gabler, 83, 86, 177 Hegel, Georg, 146, 172 hegemony, 9, 200, 205–7, 211, 233–4 heroic drama, 177, 181, 183 Hines, Melissa, 29–30, 31 Hopkins, Arthur, 202 Horace, 43, 105 horizon of expectation, 173–4 humanism, 97 identification, 66, 72 imitation, 27, 47, 48, 72, 76–7 infiction, 54–5, 169 The Investigation, 49 irony, 144, 145–6, 149, 161, 177 iteration, 37, 167 Jacob, Pierre, 56–7, 59, 60, 72–3, 79, 132, 221, 222, 225, 228 Jameson, Frederic, 4–5

246

INDEX

Jauss, Hans Robert, 173–4 Jeannerod, Marc, 56–7, 59, 60, 72–3, 79, 132, 221, 222, 225, 228 Johann, Zita, 202–3 Johnson, James H., 52–3, 188–9, 239 Johnson, Mark, 8, 37, 39, 43, 59, 80, 119, 131, 145, 151–3, 162–3, 201, 212, 213–14, 218, 222, 226–7, 234 kabuki, 142, 179 Kantian philosophy, 78–9 aesthetics, 79 rationality, 79 Kantor, Tadeusz, 167 kathakali dance-drama, 166–7 Kazan, Elia, 90, 102–5, 113 Kemble, Fanny, 40–1 Krasner, David, 71–2 Kuhn, Annette, 171 Kuhn, Thomas S., 211 La Sonnambula, 191 Lacan, Jacques, 9–11, 14, 81–2, 212, 224, 227, 228 Lacanian theory, 10, 82, 196, 198, 210, 214–15, 224, 227, 228 Lakoff, George, 8, 13, 39, 43, 59, 79–80, 119, 121,145, 151–3, 162–3, 212, 213–14, 218, 222, 226–7, 234, 235 Lan, Yong Li, 142–3 language, 6, 11, 13, 16, 18–19, 25, 27, 39–40, 65, 79, 81–2, 87, 92, 117–20, 121, 122, 124–6, 143–5, 150, 151, 175, 191, 212, 228 Lawson, John Howard, 200 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 167 lexical memory, 144 liberal feminism, 171 linguistics, 11, 222 Lopez, Jeremy, 174–5, 180, 186–7

Lott, Eric, 190 lottery, 50–1, 54 love tragedy, 177, 203 Machinal, 201–4 Mahar, William, 190–3, 240 Malpas, J.E., 131–3, 136 Mamet, David, 86, 150 Martin, Jacqueline, 45, 215 Marxism, 200, 210 masks, 75, 202 McNeill, David, 8, 9, 87–8, 90–1, 96, 117, 121, 228–9 Meilziner, Jo, 60, 61 melodrama, 31, 76, 101, 173, 177, 179–82, 187, 201 memory, 2, 19, 23, 27, 29, 32–8, 42, 59–63, 66, 69, 88, 92, 115–16, 118, 122, 125, 131–5, 137, 138, 189, 217 collective, 147 constructive recategorization, 33 explicit, 35–6 implicit, 35–6 long-term, 34–5, 118, 217 short-term, 34–5 as storage, 33, 95 visual, 59–60 working, 34, 35, 116, 166, 169–70, 217 metaphorical systems, 152–3, 157, 161–3, 168 meta-response, 172–3 Middle Temple, 16–17, 153–5, 161, 163 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 195 Miller, Arthur, 12 mimesis, 48, 72, 115–17, 119, 120, 121 cultural, 117–19 theatrical, 115–18 mind reading, 27, 75 minstrel performances, 190–5, 199, 240 wench acts, 192, 240

INDEX

mirror neurons, 20, 23, 65, 66, 70, 72–3, 77, 80, 95, 106, 116, 225, 226–7 mirroring, 18, 71, 76, 79–80, 82, 96, 116 Miss Julie, 84 Mitchell, William, 191 modernism, 200–1, 206 Mother Courage, 84–5, 146, 171–3 myth, 11, 115, 118–20, 147, 148 narrative, schema, 165–8 naturalistic aesthetics, 80 care-giver and infant interaction, 77–8, 81, 82, 116 Neisser, Ulric, 74, 133 Nettle, Daniel, 175–7, 180–1, 203, 204, 207 neural network, 38, 69, 80, 112 Niedenthal, Paula M., 66–9 Noh theatre, 114, 166, 180, 232 Oatley, Keith, 100, 102, 110, 229, 230 Oedipus the King (Oedipus Rex), 16, 19, 48, 56–7, 59–60, 75, 95, 101, 114, 132–4, 137, 139, 146–51, 177, 181, 236 Olson, David, 39 O’Neill, Eugene, 182, 200, 201, 203 Othello, 84, 142–3 outfiction, 54–5, 169, 171, 174 Panksepp, Jaak, 8, 93–5, 96, 99, 106–8, 111–13, 180, 198, 211–12, 229, 230 parallel distributed processing, 27 particulate theory of culture, 123, 205 passive audience, 3 Pavis, Patrice, 222, 235 Pavlov, Ivan, 10 The Persians, 163 The Phantom of the Opera, 57

247

phenomenology, 14, 54, 57, 79–80, 210, 228 Pinter, Harold, 150 placebo effect, 30 Popper, Karl, 8–9, 211 concept of falsifiability, 8 postdramatic theatre, 167–8 poststructuralism, 11, 212, 226–7 professional-managerial class (PMC), 204, 206–7 props, 16–17, 18, 48–9, 50, 63, 65, 82–6, 147, 153 function in Hedda Gabler, 83, 86 manipulation of, 83 Provine, Robert, 105–6, 108 Pyramus and Thisbe, 197 Quincy, Anna, 40–2 racism, 129, 192–5, 199 Rain, 203, 204 Rapson, Richard, 67 Ravel, Jeffrey, 186, 187 resistant reader, 3 rhythmic synchronization, 68 Rice, Elmer, 200 Richard III, 177 Roach, Joseph, 83, 130–1 Roof Scrambler, 191 Rosch, Eleanor, 60–1, 144–5 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 53 Rylance, Mark, 47 Sacks, Oliver, 70 salience theory, 144–5 Saltz, David, 54–5, 169 Sauter, Willmar, 45, 215, 51–2 scenery, 18, 50–1, 56, 57, 61–3, 122 Schacter, D.L., 35–6 schadenfreude, 100 semiotics, 3, 9–10, 48, 54, 57, 63, 71, 79–80, 82, 210, 215, 222–3 sexual desire, 140, 197–8

248

INDEX

Shakespeare, William, 1, 32, 36–7, 47, 49, 61–2, 75, 102, 108–10, 122, 138–40, 142, 143, 151, 153–61, 163, 176, 816, 194, 196–9, 220 Shore, Bradd, 121–5, 128, 129, 130, 206, 207 The Show-Off, 204, 207 simulation, 8, 48, 66–71, 73, 76, 79–80, 95, 99, 190–1, 195, 223–4, 225 Singer, Peter, 5 social constructivism, 4, 210 Sokel hoax, 12 Sophocles, 16, 138, 146–50, 176 spatial relations, 7, 59–60, 62, 119, 136–7, 235 spectatorial attention, 24, 73 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 10–11, 90, 102, 112, 124–6, 180 States, Bert O., 46, 85, 89, 219 Stern, Daniel, 39 A Streetcar Named Desire, 16–17, 19, 42–4, 48, 51, 55, 60–3, 83, 89, 102–5, 111, 113–14, 177, 182 Stubbs, Philip, 140–1 surrogation, 130 sympathy, 19, 53, 66, 72, 75–6, 98–103, 149, 158, 172, 202 tabula rasa, 134 Taymor, Julie, 84 Thaut, Michael H., 68 theatrical doubleness, 7, 42, 43, 46, 53, 161 oscillating dynamic, 41 suspension of disbelief, 18, 43 Top Girls, 16, 19, 65–9, 74–6, 80–1, 95, 120, 135–6, 163–8, 170–3, 177 tragedy, 47, 55–7, 111, 134, 137, 147, 173–4, 176–9, 183, 186, 203–4, 241 Treadwell, Sophie, 200–2, 240–1

Tulloch, John, 35, 52, 215 Turner, Mark, 42–4, 50 Twelfth Night, 16, 17, 19, 32, 35–8, 47, 61–2, 74, 95, 100, 108–9, 139–42, 151, 153–63, 177, 192 Uncle Vanya, 16, 24–8, 47–9, 51, 86, 100–1, 111–12, 123–7 Utopia in Performance, 97 Van Gogh, Vincent, 62–3 verfremdungseffekt, 172 verticality, 4, 60, 134–5 Vestris, Mme., 196–7, 199 Victorian theatre, 165, 187 and eroticism, 195–9 Vinegar Tom, 12 visual intentionalism, 56, 221 visuomotor perception 56–8, 63, 65, 72–5, 83, 84, 131, 222 Vygotsky, Lev, 90, 229 Wainscott, Ronald, 202 Waiting for Godot, 32 Walker, Julia A., 41–2, 190, 200–2, 206, 240–1 Weiss, Peter, 49 Wexler, Bruce E., 127–8, 234 Wiles, David, 136, 235 Williams, Gary Jay, 190, 195–9, 213 Williams, Raymond, 9, 205–6, 233 structure of feeling, 205 Williams, Tennessee, 16, 42–3, 44, 49, 61–3, 90–2, 102–5, 111, 113, 182 Wilson, David Sloan, 210, 233 Wilson, Elizabeth, 26 Wilson, Paul, 237 Wilson, Robert, 167 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 54–5, 119–20 Wohlschlager, Andreas, 76–7 You Can’t Take It With You, 204