Critical Questions and Authorship in Theatre

I think the critical questions Hobbes gives about authors/audiences, messages/meaning, representation/reality, go right along with creating and otherwise participating in theatre. I think these questions can be asked in a classroom after reading a script or as students perform scenes for one another or even as the class devises a piece of original theatre. In the first instance, the questions could help students engage critically with the script and give them permission to not look at a written play as some sort of gospel that you can’t argue with. It also helps to contemporize scripts that may feel removed from the students’ time and place (which will be most of the work you study in a high school setting). What I mean by contemporizing the script is that it helps the students see they can engage with an older script just as they could with a newer script. The questions would also be a helpful thing to use after students perform for each other. Using the critical questions will help student audience think more critically and deeply about their peer’s work, again giving permission to think critically about theatre. It also will help the student actors become more responsible, deliberate theatre practitioners, as they realize that their work will need to be able to stand up to the questions in those three areas. This responsibility is exactly what would make these questions useful when devising a piece. Taking a moment to self-reflect on the theatre the class is making, using these questions will help them know if the story and message they are wanting to portray is being communicated.

I may modify the questions about author and audience. I think the question given “Who is the author and what is the purpose?” is a fine question and would be useful for reading theatre but perhaps it also needs some clarification for adolescents. You can look at several types of authors in theatre: there is the playwright (which is one kind of author, perhaps the original author of a written play), the director (who writes the full vision of the world of the play), or you could say that a designer is an author (i.e. the costume designer is a co-author of the visual world of the play and the characters) and you could argue that actors are authors of characters as their choices bring to life the person on the page. Perhaps for Hobbes, the most useful author to look at would be the playwright but I believe that thinking about these other people in theatre as authors as well is rather an interesting and potentially powerful thing. It’s important to see that maybe it’s not so cut and dry when it comes to authorship, especially when it comes to theatre, which is so collaborative in nature. So I would make sure that we created a working class definition for which author we’re looking for when we talk about this question. Is it different in a written piece than performed? Professional vs. amateur? Does it depend on what we’re studying at the moment?

I think I could use Retrospective in my classroom to discuss media analysis/evaluation in a theatre classroom. It is one way to begin a conversation about how we analyze the visual elements of a production and how that may affect the message/meaning of the play just as much as the words. This particular piece is also interesting look at evolution of a project. I could begin a devising project by looking at these photos, analyzing them and then talk about how when you devise, things change over time. Then the photos and the class analysis of them could be used as the basis or inspiration of a devised piece.