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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Playwrights, directors, and theatre teachers interested in understanding the theatrical possibilities and functions of monologue soon discover that critical analysis in this area is limited alike in extent and depth. In the following analysis of contemporary dramatic monologue, Paul C. Castagno therefore begins by exploring its more expected or traditional uses, and proceeds to examine its present expanded function with particular reference to the plays of two contemporary American playwrights, Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman – both multiple Obie Award-winning writers, whose dramaturgic techniques have been highly influential yet who remain largely overlooked in the critical arena. He concludes that monologue in the new dramaturgy is actually moving in various and often complex ways back towards a kind of dialogism. Paul C. Castagno, who is himself a practising playwright, is director and dramaturg of the New Playwrights' Program at the University of Alabama, where he has developed a number of new playscripts for award-winning productions. He has published articles in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Text and Presentation, Theatre History Studies, and Theatre Topics, among others, and will shortly be taking on the editorship of the journal Theatre Symposium. His study The Early Commedia dell'Arte, 1550–1621: the Mannerist Context is due for publication by Peter Lang in 1993, and he is is currently preparing a playwriting text that explores elements of the new dramaturgy.
1. Todorov, Tsvetan, Mikhail Bakhtin: the Dialogical Principle, trans. Godzich, Wlad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984), p. 107Google Scholar. I have modified Bakhtin's definition somewhat. For instance, he writes that ‘monologism denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights.’ This statement does not stand up under the scrutiny of practical theatrical uses such as the Messenger character, or when the monologue is delivered specifically to an ‘other’, unless the class distinction is reinforced linguistically, as in master addressing slave, father chastising children, or God pronouncing to man.
2. Including the use of repetition, figures of speech, as well as negative space, clarified through pauses, silences, or ellipses.
3. For examples of the former, see journal of Narrative and Life History, I, No. 1 (1991), p. 41–69.
4. Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 5Google Scholar.
5. It is important to note that in defining the forms of poetry, Aristotle distinguishes the dramatic from the narrative forms of the epic and the lyric, which are essentially monologic. Aristotle thus implies a clear relation between dialogue and the dramatic.
6. While most effective in the theatre, the monologue is usually disastrous in the image-oriented medium of film, where it is most often relegated to a voice-over status.
7. This may seem to present a contradiction, since most playwriting theorists and teachers would agree that the best dialogue is that which implies, or may even seem to be coded, as in much of Pinter's work. Monologue serves its purpose in allowing the audience telescopic glimpses of characters outside the realm of conversational discourse, thus ensuring a greater possibility of ‘knowing the character’, beyond her more limited realm as an ‘agent of the action’.
8. Cohn, op. cit., p. 5, citing Mann, Thomas, ‘Versuch über das Theater’, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt, 1960), Vol. X, p. 29Google Scholar.
9. Wendy Wasserstein, Tina Howe, A. R. Gurney, and August Wilson to name a few. Certainly Tennessee Williams was one of the first to open up the psychological world of the character through monologue. Part of the static nature of Anton Chekhov's plays, and certainly a significant amount of their current appeal, can be tied to the characters' monologic rhapsodizing.
10. So-called ‘southern comedies’ such as Steel Magnolias are sprinkled throughout with humorous anecdotes which, while entertaining, may not serve any essential dramaturgical function
11. ‘Realistic’ is used in this context to define the characters as imitative of or derived from real life – as in John Guare's ‘re-telling’ of the scams perpetrated by the ersatz son of Sidney Poitier as the basis for the action and characterizations of the play. Realism defines the content rather than the formal or structural elements of the plays.
12. Fornes, Maria Irene, Plays (New York: PAJ, 1986)Google Scholar.
13. Kramer, Sherry, The Wall of Water (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1987)Google Scholar. Ms. Kramer set her monologues in a bathroom, an obvious separate or liminal space that allows her characters to expose their innermost thoughts, while the space itself offers a kind of comic counterpoint.
14. In play development, monologue interpolation between sections of dialogue is sometimes a very effective means of opening the text, thereby expanding character functions and thematic values without massive internal redrafting of scenes. In developing Southern Girls, a new play by Dura Temple and Sheri Bailey, fifty minutes of playtext was nearly doubled, as each of the six girls (three black and three white) was given a monologue which flashbacked from the present to the 'fifties, 'sixties, and 'seventies. This new play was chosen as best new play from the Southern Region of the American College Theatre Festival.
15. Hare, David, The Secret Rapture (London: Faber and Faber, 1989)Google Scholar.
16. The dramatic effectiveness and demand for monologues such as the above has in fact sparked editors to publish anthologies of monologues divided into gender subdivisions. See, for example, Harrington, Laura, ed., One Hundred Monologues: an Audition Sourcebook from New Dramatists (New York: New Dramatists, 1989)Google Scholar; Pike, Frank and Dunn, Thomas G., eds., Scenes and Monologues from the New American Theater (New York: New American Library, 1988)Google Scholar. Separated from its context within the play, the monologue in this sense stands alone as a piece of theatre. (A distinction is made between the contextual monologue, or its presence as sub-genre, and the larger monologic form of the one-person show or monodrama which has been handled elsewhere by various critics and historians.) This sub-form is particularly adaptable to the time constraints of the audition, and most crucial to the demands of the performer – whose one minute showcase represents a make or break supplement to the actor's resumS and glossy. And to the playwright: Molly Newman intimated at the recent playwrights conference, ‘Gathering at Big Fork’, Big Fork, Montana, 1–6 May 1991, that the recognition gained through publication in a monologue anthology brought her play Quitters to the attention of a number of producers.
17. Mukarovsky, Jan, The Word and Verbal Art, trans. Burbank, John and Steiner, Peter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 110Google Scholar.
18. Ibid., p. 102: see Section IV, ‘Dialogue in Monologue and Monologue in Dialogue’. The ‘psychic event’ may seem problematic, particularly in the case when the addressed ‘other’ is we, the audience. Although the monologic speaker addresses us, the audience, in a way which simulates dialogic interaction, the conditions are monologic: no reply is expected, the events narrated may be different from those staged, the speaker is foregrounded from the dramatic event. The foregrounded speaker ‘penetrates’ the matrix of the fourth wall by drawing us directly into the fictive world of the play (the stage-manager in Our Town); or into the emotional interior of the character (Salieri in Amadeus).
19. Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas, 1981), p. 246–7Google Scholar.
20. Thus the stage-manager in Our Town breaks the matrix while addressing the incoming audience as theatregoers (cajoling late-comers, for example) while through his involvement in the dramatic action he addresses the audience as onlookers. For further explorations into the distinction between onlookers and theatregoers see Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis (1974)Google Scholar.
21. Jenkin, Len, Careless Love (author's unpublished copy). Portions of play performed (as Angel Baby) in workshop at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 1–2 11 1990Google Scholar, directed by the author.
22. Jenkin, Len, American Notes (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1988), p. 30Google Scholar.
23. Quoted monologues are frequent in realistic novels, where the quote is followed, for example, by ‘he said’, or ‘she thought to herself’, or ‘she exclaimed’. See Cohn, op. cit., Chapter 2, p. 58–99.
24. Mac Wellman, , Albanian Softshoe (working text from San Diego Repertory Theatre Production, 1989)Google Scholar.
25. Walter Shoen, dramaturg and literary manager, posited that the audiences couldn't stay with it, and many subscribers threatened to cancel or not renew in the subsequent year if the San Diego Repertory continued to produce plays of this ilk.
26. The heterogeneous worlds of Albanian Softshoe are magnified as Wellman begins Act II on a distant planet inhabited by space warriors. Moreover, Act I is seen to have been nothing more than an entertaining, miniaturized ‘puppet show’ for these alien characters.
27. Jenkin, Len, My Uncle Sam (New York: Dramatists Play Service 1983)Google Scholar. Jenkin won an Obie award for this play and for Limbo Tales.
28. Ibid., I, i, p. 5.
29. Matejka, Ladislaw and Pomorska, Krystyna, Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1978), p. 82Google Scholar. ‘Motivation’ for change in scene is provided by a literary device rather than by a character's psychological motivation or need, for example.
30. This principle is also at work in Len Jenkin's Kid Tiuist, in which the main character, Kid Twist, is confined within a hotel room awaiting trial as a federally protected witness. In this play, the characters' ‘calls’, framed as the Kid's dreams, transport the action to various worlds outside the motel room.
31. The term ‘title’ here refers to its use in radio drama, where it establishes place or situation – it sets the scene.
32. During Jenkin's workshop at the University of Alabama in November 1990, I asked him about this mixing of the narrative and dramatic elements, which he regards as quite natural. Jenkin spoke of his interest and love for the hard-boiled private detective novels of the 1940s, in which this kind of laconic reportage stands side-by-side with the action. The technique is more pervasive in film, and may even seem to have a comic book flavour whereby individual frames are captioned, dialogue is present in the boxes, and the images (characters) are two-dimensional.
33. Jenkin, Len, Dark Ride (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982)Google Scholar.
34. Note the structural similarity of this passage to the beginning of American Notes, where the monologue of the mayor is delivered to the mentally slow Chuckles. After telling Chuckles he might be able ‘to place a man of his talents’, he says, ‘Look around’, at which point he makes reference to Pauline, the desk clerk of the motel, as lights go up on her area and segue us into the next dialogic scene.
35. The monologic spatial fields seem to be moving towards an interactive modality whereby each utterance shifts both the spectator and the actor to a defined ‘other’.
36. Mac Wellman, , Whirligig (New York: New Dramatists, 1988)Google Scholar.
37. Mac Wellman, brought these ideas forth at the conference, ‘New Directions in American Theatre’, Key West, Florida, 11–14 01 1990Google Scholar.
38. Holquist, Michael, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (New York: London, 1990), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Holquist posits the relation that Bakhtin first articulated between Einstein's theory of relativity and Bakhtin's dialogism.
39. See Note 17, above. Gregg, Susan, Associate Artistic Director at the St. Louis Repertory, during the ‘Gathering at Big Fork’, Big Fork, Montana, 1–6 05 1991Google Scholar, described Wellman's plays as ‘private’, in this sense closed to a general audience.
40. Interview with Rick Ponzio, 3 November 1990. Ponzio, a core member of the Minneapolis Playwrights' Center, played the part of Senator Armitage in Mac Wellman's Bad Infinity, also staged at the Brass Tacks Theatre.
41. Mac Wellman, , Terminal Hip (New York: New Dramatists, 1984, 1986, 1989)Google Scholar.
42. Gussow, Mel, New York Times, 12 01 1990Google Scholar.
43. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, as cited in Bentley, Eric, The Theory of the Modern Stage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 55–6Google Scholar.
44. Ibid., p. 55.
