Tag Archives: Theatre

Flashpoints

I once read a quote by one of my favorite playwrights, Beth Henley. She said that, to get a script moving, you take two characters, and you get them into an argument.

A couple of months ago, I was working on a script that had stalled. So, I took Henley’s advice. I put the protagonist and her sister into a fight that had been a long time brewing, and suddenly the protagonist found her voice for the first time. I could hear her in my head exactly the way she would sound! That’s one of those events that a writer hopes will happen in every project.

There’s something about a dramatic exchange motivated by frustration and hurt that removes the inhibitions we subject ourselves to under normative societal expectations, and permits what’s in our souls to pour out…the good, the bad, and the ugly, all of which would likely have been otherwise self-censored. Two people discover exactly what is on the other’s mind, and the elephant in the room is abruptly revealed in those “heated exchanges.” In the script of my life, I hate it when it comes to that point. Karen and I have experienced a few of these “heated exchanges” in our marriage. None of them have been pleasant, and, at least at first, were the result of small things that could have been talked out calmly instead. In more recent times, however, I’ve found these arguments to be catalysts. When you place two lives together, they move on a continuum. Ideally, they move forward together, and make progress. Sometimes, like my script, they stall. I’ve found a profound truth, however, in the fact that you never stay still on a continuum for very long. You either regain momentum, or begin to slide backward.

Karen and I had two ground-breaking discussions recently that have been incredibly healthy for our marriage. They were the result, at least in part, of an argument that occurred because a handful of issues had overheated. Now, ideally, those issues would have been handled individually before they reached that point. Not as dramatic, and it doesn’t make for nearly as good a script, but it’s better for my blood pressure when I’m the one arguing. This recent argument became a catalyst that propelled us forward, restoring momentum when we had began to drift backward.

I suppose that, when two people stall out, you can take them and put them into an argument…

I’m thinking of this tonight as I listen with a heavy heart to the sounds coming through the wall of our apartment. As well-constructed as our building is, you cannot help but hear when someone yells at a certain volume. That particular argument was punctuated by “blah blah blah” and “f***k you.” Not pleasant to hear. I’m aching for the people (I presume a couple) involved. I’m hoping that this serves as a catalyst to restore forward momentum for them, so that they won’t digress backward.

When an actor is preparing a script, two of the first questions that they ask themselves are: what does the character want, and what is keeping him from getting it? That is the motivation for our theatre of life, as well. These moments of friction occur because we are experiencing frustration at an inability to get what we feel we (sometimes desperately) need. Psychology tells us that behaviors are a way of getting what we want, or obtaining a desired result. Theatre calls this conflict, and it is the essence of a story. Without conflict, the plot doesn’t move. How unfortunate that, no matter how hard we endeavor to make it otherwise, we don’t seem to experience the positive until we’ve waded through the negative. As Buechner would have said, we have to experience the tragedy before the comedy, and both before the fairy tale.

I hope that your conflicts…these unfortunate flashpoints that ignite between us and those we love… always move you toward a more positive place.

And now, perhaps I should re-visit that script from a few months ago…

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Disbelief in Disbelief

Okay, so being the super-hero nerd that I am, I couldn’t get to the theater fast enough last weekend to see Spider-Man 3. I wasn’t disappointed. The movie was full of great web-slinging action. It was also full of forgiving thoughts and redemptive images. Very much so, actually…I walked extremely impacted with the essence of forgiveness, redemption, and second chances. I’m grateful that I’ve received more than my share, and I find myself with a renewed determination to give this forgiveness as well. My personal studies have been about grace for the last two weeks, and this is sort of a culmination of those readings. It happened by divine appointment, I’m sure.

As I sat in the theater this weekend, the lights went down, the preview loop finished and the feature started began, I was caught up in that excitement you experience as you realize you are about to experience a story. There’s a knowledge that you’re about to permit yourself to be drawn into that story, apprehended by what it has to say. In theatre, we call this the willing suspension of disbelief. It is when you stop realizing that the story isn’t part of the real world, and start believing that what’s on the screen or the stage is real. It is then that the story has you.

If you’ve been here before, it comes as no surprise to you that I have difficulty accepting the validity of hyper-conservative Christians. It boggles my mind that we can turn our beautiful faith into such a strict set of rules, regulations, and fear that we can’t breathe. For several years of my childhood, I was engulfed in just such an environment, however, so I can at least empathize if not understand it. Along these lines, there are people (who call themselves Believers…I’m not always so convinced) that reject this concept fearing that somehow their souls will be drawn into the fiery abyss if the permit themselves to be taken in by the story. They freeze like deer in headlights because they fear the possibility that they may see/hear/read something that (gasp!) offends them. And certainly, God never wanted us to be offended, right?

(If you need to pause to roll your eyes or experience some other violent and involuntary physical response to this nonsense, go ahead…I completely understand)

In fact, our churches have largely rejected story altogether. The attitude seems to be the Falwellian principle that, if didn’t really happen, then we shouldn’t be interested in it. Fiction is for children. Real Believers focus on good, solid devotional and theological non-fiction, right?

Well, ignore with me for a moment the fact that 98% of the devotionals lining our bookstore shelves are crap and that theology will always end in heresy if followed to its logical conclusion. Instead, just think about Scripture for a second (you know, Scripture…it’s what people used to read before there were devotional writers). Jesus told these wild things called parables. Parables, while occurring within the realm of what is possible, are, by definition, fictional stories. Jesus used fiction to illustrate spiritual reality. Jesus was a story-teller. His apostles were writers. Yet, the modern church seems to shy away from this as a viable medium of communication.

Fortunately, as the emergent church movement begins to take a stronger hold in both mine and the next (occasionally even the previous) generations, there seems to be a return to story. The emphasis has rightly returned to reading Scripture as narrative literature instead of the analytical picking apart of each individual word that many seminaries tend to favor.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning nonfiction. In fact, it’s probably my strongest genre as a writer. However, when we look at Scripture, we see that God uses all types of genres in His writing: the straight-forward non-fiction of Paul and James, the poetry of David, the historical records of Chronicles and Samuel, the vision-casting apocalyptic writing of Revelation, the fictional parables of Jesus. Some have even posited theories that the Song of Songs was originally penned as drama. So many different styles to God’s literature. So many lives changed by all of the above. So many people offended by much of its content.

So, apparently, God wasn’t too concerned about offending people with His writing.

There is an important component to all good art: if you haven’t offended someone, then you really haven’t done it right. People think when they are offended. They engage in self-examination. They see themselves and their environment differently. All of these are things that art is supposed to bring about.

We’ve become so interested in enclosing ourselves in a bubble as Believers that we immediately disregard anything that may offend us. We’re afraid of seeing a play because a character may swear. We’re afraid of going to a movie because it may be too violent, or contain magic. We’re afraid to read a novel because it may contain a point of view with which we don’t agree.

And, in doing so, we’ve stagnated our own growth. We’ve become still, we’ve become irrelevant, we’ve become paralyzed.

We’ve become, in a word, pathetic.

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