1. What is Theater?
In this chapter Wilshire defines theatre as a place where two processes take place: standing-in and authorization. The actor embodies the character before the audience and enacts all the character’s actions for the audience, thus standing-in for the audience members, living, for the time of the performance the life of the character for them to experience through the actor. This authorizes the existence of each member of the audience both as “beings of inexhaustible particularity as well as indefinitely extendable horizons of human concern and identification.” (10)
2. What is Phenomenology?
In this chapter Wilshire compares theatre and phenomenology, showing some of the phenomenological elements in theatre. He also sets his phenomenological grounds as based in Merleau Ponty and Heidegger.
3. Theory of Enactment
Theatre only happens when the fictional “time” and “world” of the play intersect with the prescribed performance time and world in which actors and audience meet.
Theatre happens because identification with others happens both in life and, more consciously, in art. Through theatrical enactment we “discover our power over possibility. Together the audience and the actors engage in incarnated imaginative variation on the meaning of human being and doing. Together they experiment on the nature and extent of mimetic involvement, identification, and sympathy—and on how these relate to the individual’s identity.” (24) Moreover, theatre enable us to acknowledge our experience of being “by-for-with-in” others and, thus, to experience variations of being others than our own (26).
4. Theory of Appearance
Here Wilshire’s main argument is that “theatre allows us not only to see and to grasp an appearance of what something is when the actual thing is not present, but to see it better.” (32)
5. Variations of the Theatrical Theme of Standing In and Authorization.
In this chapter Wilshire looks at three major plays—Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, and Waiting for Godot—and follows up on the way standing in and authorization take place within the “world” of the play and the world in which the play was originally conceived and performed (i.e. the world of its original audience). He claims that in Greek time theatre blended into the life of its audience, in its structure, location and themes as well as in it being a part of a larger ceremonial tradition. When analyzing Hamlet, Wilshire explores the questions it arouses in the viewers on the one hand, and the structure of the theatre encompassed “social, historical and cosmic articulations.” (83) Contemporary theatre With the destruction of traditional interpretation in its contemporary “realistic” incarnation—the cliché of the living room or the drawing room—we are left with the stark realities of space, time, and the interrogation of those irreducible human capacities presupposed by any factual account of persons.” (83)
6. Theatre as Metaphor and Play as Disclosure
Wilshire claims here that “theatre is a physiognomic metaphor” (110) and a bracketed part of human existence that demonstrates and discloses existence’s potentialities. Emotions, for example, are felt and acknowledged at the same time. One always has an attitude toward and an understanding of the emotional state he or she is physically going through. In the theatre this is enacted, and bracketed as a real acting of a fictive act (103). That is, the actor’s emotional state is a physical metaphor of the character’s emotional state which discloses for the audience member the potential state they can experience.
7. Second Set of Variations on the Theatrical Theme of Standing In and Authorization
In this chapter Wilshire looks at three examples of contemporary theatre—Ionesco, Robert Wilson, and Grotowski. According to him The Chairs exemplify the existential role of roles we play in relationship to others and the potentiality of being with others: “Ionesco set up a model—however negatively ironically or indirectly—for human being; he does not merely reflect what is already there.” (116)
Wilson’s theatre, says Wilshire, reveals to the audience the conditions of their individual existence by presenting nonlinear, deconstructed actions, events and characters. “Must not we, who must make sense in order to be, also make sense to some degree of our making sense, and how can we do this without an art-form that returns to us the strange ones, with their strange ways of making sense, as an ineluctable foil for us? Contrast presupposes kinship.” (124)
Grotowski’s theatre (specifically in Apocalypsys cum figures) exposes the actor’s so that the body lets the self, with its impulses and emotions, be in more direct contact with the audience. Through this exposure there is a sense of both fragmentation and fusion: “it confirms a fragment of the community in the very dissonance and changeableness of its members’ impulses, in its fractionalization, and in the disturbance of the question with which it is left.” (134-5)
8. Theatre and the Question of the Truth in Art
In this chapter Wilshire summarizes the first part of the book. I chose two quotes that give the gist of what he asserts: “But we can say here that the work pertains to out identity because it mediates us and reveals us and as essentially natural and essentially idealizing and conventional; and because it sums up, funds, and gives presence to more absence than our daily acts ever could. Thus, since the self—as we shall see—is an activity of cumulatively giving presence to absence art pertains to our identity as selves. We need art or at least the art-like to be ourselves.” (137)
“We can now see how it is possible for theatre to be true of actual life while being iself a fiction. It can be true if it can exemplify the essences, sorts, types, universals which make actual persons and things what they are.” (138)
9. Space Time and Identity of Self
Wilshire’s concern in this chapter is the question of identity of self, how it can be determined and how it pertains to theatre. He claims that theatre, as practically a phenomenological investigation, or theatre-like activities play a role in returning the subject from the perceived back to itself and its identity. He determines that identity is in large part embodied and that by observing how theatre constructs identities on stage we can learn about the construct of identity in life.
In chapters 10-12 Wilshire discusses the construction of self as body-self that is always intersubjectively structured (i.e. in relation to others), mimicking the other’s expectation of one’s behavior. When people enact their habitual body-self, they in fact play “roles” that are defined through their relationship to the others. Roles operate latently and people self deceive them selves about their true roles. “In order to conceptualize this falling into pre-set and common ways of behaving and being, and into prescripted and prescribed attitudes toward others and oneself, we find that the most fitting and natural idea is the theatrical metaphor of “role”. To begin to become a self one must play a “part” designed by others. To be at all one must be with others. And to do this one must learn a language of bodily “expression” that is only partially and occasionally verbal; fundamental structures are silent.” (186)
In chapters 13-14 Wilshire deals with engulfment, or identification, as taking part in the ambiguous process that creates the sense of self. On the one hand, mimetic identification takes part in constructing a child’s behavior and, hence, her self. On the other hand, as individual subjects we may become aware of these habitual patterns and change them. He also adds that using theatre as a metaphor for life “begins to break down just where we would expect it to do so: the dailiness of life, the dailiness of caring (or failure to care), the stickiness of our personae, their relentless, monotonousness, and momentousness—the mood of satiety with self—all this can find no direct parallel on the stage with its actors and characters shining there for a few hours. Moreover, there is something unspeakable in day by day living—unspeakably particular and private—and all art can do is to show in revealing was that and how there is the unspeakable; it cannot live it in the way we must offstage.” (211) There are, however, parallels between theatre and life: “language, verbal and non-verbal, […] role, onstage literally, and offstage as those common ways of being together mimetically […] there is understanding as the projection of possibility […] theatrical art’s disclosure of the belongingness of mood to situation lets us see this pervasive, difficult to see belongingness offstage.” (211)
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