Drama 102
Formal Qualities Lecture
Spring 08

In the essay you read for last class, Elinor Fuchs encourages us to squint at a play in order to understand its qualities.

What I would like to do now is offer a set of TOOLS with which to help you do this.

I would like to suggest that there are two levels of meaning within any Dramatic Text: Facts and Formal Qualities

Facts

Story, characters, location, individual events.
Relatively easy to identify, articulate
What the Characters say (and Stage Directions)
Opening lines of Tempest.
We know we are on a boat that is about to run aground because the characters say so
It tells us what is happening, but not the quality of the world in which it is happening.
Necessary to understand a play, (we will spend more time on this aspect of textual analysis week after next) but not by itself enough to allow us to come to grips with the play as a world…
2nd level of meaning.

Formal Qualities

Compare the opening lines of 1.1 vs 1.2
Tone, flavor, feeling.
Not what the characters say but how they say it.
Not what happens in the play, but a point of view on those events.
Strongly felt by reader but difficult to articulate, difficult to be precise.

Rhythm, Timbre, Diction, Imagery (See 2.2 Pg 207 &208)

Rhythm : The pattern of strong and weak accents, and of sound and silence.

At the local level, meter.
At the level of dramatic structure, the architecture of the play. Many short scenes or few long ones? Many locations or just one?

Timbre : Tone color.

The qualities of the SOUND of the language.
Resonance.

Diction : Word choice.
Imagery : The quality of the images used to represent objects, actions, or ideas.

The nature of the figures of speech.

Meaning is created by the way these two levels interact.

Our understanding of the world(s) of the play is based on the emotional and thematic value we assign to the events based on the coloring imparted by the Formal Qualities.
The facts are relatively stable. All careful readers will come up with very similar sets of fact for any play.
The Tone, however, is subjective. Each person will respond to the same FQ’s differently.
Because the Formal Qualities always function in relationship to the Facts they are being used to express, and the interpretation of the meaning resulting from this juxtaposition is open to multiple interpretations, there are always multiple ways of assigning worlds

It is through the analysis of the way that Facts and Formal Qualities interact that a production creates the “Small Planet” to which Fuchs refers. The World or Worlds of the play

Tempest

The facts are that both Ariel and Caliban are something other than simply human. An analysis of the FQ, however, reveals that they speak very differently. Are they one world or two? How would audience experience be affected by emphasizing the similarities between the two sets of island “natives”? By emphasizing their differences?
The shipwrecked royal party all speak in Blank Verse, but the clowns Stefano and Trinculo speak in prose. Do all these characters belong to one world by virtue of the fact that they all come from “off-island” or do they constitute different worlds by virtue of the quality of their speech? How would each of these choices color the meaning of the play?
And what about Miranda? Is she “of the island” by virtue of the FACT that she was raised there or is she of Ferdinand’s world since she seems to speak much the same way he does?

Careful examination of the FQ’s is thus a useful way to arrive at decisions about what version of the text one wishes to stage.

Further (and this is the really cool part) FQ’s provide not just a tool for understanding a play. They actually provide the fundamental key for turning the text into theatre.

It turns out that when staging a play, theatre artists have the same two variables authors do when writing one:

Facts and Formal Qualities.

Chairs, for instance

Fact = Chair

Formal Quality =organic material, warm golden color; rounded, substantial shapes, singular composition

Fact = Chair

Formal Quality = plastic, cold metallic, black, mechanical shapes, sharp, hard, thin; strongly contrasting composition, opaque top and spindly bottom

These are both chairs. Both will fulfill a need for a character to sit down onstage. But audience seeing the wooden one onstage will have a very different experience from one seeing the same action involving the metal one.

It is impossible to put this or any thing on stage without also assigning a Formal Quality as well

In fact all visual phenomenon can be reduced to the Formal Qualities of Shape, Color, Composition

Audience Experience results from the interaction between the givens and the inflection imposed upon them by the FQ’s .

How is this helpful? If you can clearly identify the FQ’s which resonate for you in the text, then you need only translate them from the intellectual vocabulary of textual analysis to the visual vocabulary of the stage.

Rough, hard speech rythms into tough, angular movement of the actors
Natural imagery into an organic composition of space
Cold, percussive timbre into cold, percussive aural landscape

Thus the Formal Qualities of the Text provide the key for not only the understanding of the world of the play, but provide a key to the creation of the visual manifestation of that world