Beyond the Dialogue

BEYOND THE DIALOGUE

Observations About Storytelling Beyond Words:

1. There is power in silence. A play is clunking along with all these goddamn words and suddenly someone is in action, but they aren’t saying anything. They are intent, determined, filled with energy and purpose—even more than when they were mooing out their lines. We are no longer and audi­-ence, we are observers, collecting information through only one sense instead of two. We are suddenly alert and more aware of the play than we were a moment ago. As playwrights, we can use this known phenomenon of silence to our advantage.

2. A dumbshow can be one of the most powerful spectacles in your arsenal. Use it wisely. Above all else, ask yourself how the events in the dumbshow consciously support or refute your theme, and/or how do the events in the dumbshow advance the plot of the story, reveal character, etc.

3. From Wikipedia:

a. Dumbshow, also dumb show or dumb-show, is a traditional term for pantomime in drama, actions presented by actors onstage without spoken dialogue. The term is most often used in regard to Medieval drama and English Renaissance theatre, though it can apply in other pertinent contexts as well, as with the dammari pantomime of Kabuki theater.

b. The most famous dumbshow in English literature occurs in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act III scene ii, in the play within a play staged by Prince Hamlet and the players at Elsinore Castle for King Claudius. Other instances of dumbshow are common throughout the dramatic literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A long list of English Renaissance plays include dumbshows: Gorboduc, Locrine, Antonio's Revenge, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The Duchess of Malfi, The Prophetess, The Queen of Corinth, and many more — though by the Caroline era the technique of dumbshow had come to be regarded as outmoded.

c. Dumbshow generally passed out of fashion with the revival of English drama when the theatres re-opened in 1660 at the start of the Restoration period. Eventually, dumbshow became a risible subject: in Henry Fielding's The Author's Farce (1729), the protagonist Author intends to have his Epilogue acted in dumbshow...by a cat.

d. A rare modern instance of dumbshow, under highly unusual circumstances, occurred at the premiere of The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge, at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in January 1907. The tumultuous reaction of the audience forced the latter portions of the play to be performed in dumbshow. A few twentieth-century dramatists made more deliberate experiments with dumbshow. André Obey included a narrated dumbshow in his Le Viol de Lucrèce (1931). The most famous modern instance of dumbshow in theatre is to be found in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953).

4. Examples from my own plays:

a. Hamlet, The Ghost of Denmark. This masked piece was a 17-minute version of Hamlet told from the Ghost’s point of view. The only lines in the play were the Ghost’s lines, while everyone else mimed their stories and relationships.

b. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. I was a ballsy turd in my grad days and believed that Brecht had actually left something out of his little masterpiece. I wrote three separate dumbshows (akin to dance pieces) in which we follow two characters: a poor woman, and a blonde-haired man. We see the woman move through the pieces from poor to being a doctor at a concentration camp. She moves up the social chain as does Nazi character from street thug to SS Guard. He is constantly taking care of her, and only asks that she abandon her morals in return.

c. Shakespeare. Due to casting constraints in The Winters Tale, I changed scene Vii into a dumbshow and actually performed everything that the Lords describe. In the same show, I wanted to get the audience on the side of Hermione, so I created a dumbshow where we see her give a painful birth.

d. Poe 2000. Full disclosure: this was originally Cheryl Cluff’s idea in 1998. We adapted Poe’s Tell Tale Heart into a silent one-act because the only sound we wanted in the whole piece was the beating heart. The scene was set in the 1950s and it is the wife that whacks her husband.

5. Dumbshow or “beyond dialogue” does not necessarily mean dead silence. You can underscore the scene with a piece of music.

a. The Possessed. This was the first play I ever wrote, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel. In one scene, a vagrant has been encouraged to kill the hero’s wife and father in law. The man enters, reveals his razor, and proceeds to slice the two innocents to death—all to the tune of Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers”.