Story Time
As a race, humans take pleasure in hearing a good old fashion story. Forbidden loves, a bank robbery, a jail break, are all just stories that keep our minds wondering and whirling throughout the day. Adolescents fantasize about bedtime stories, wishing their reality to appear. Stories are what motivate a lot of us to be the people we are today. Stories of elders for instance, motivate and guide us to our own paths. There are certain stories the mind can remember and throw away. Most all of us remember the stories that were told the best, making us fantasize, wonder and wish. Since the fourteen hundreds, plays have been extremely popular storytellers. Plays cut out the middle man, the story teller, providing no boundary between you and the story.
Experiencing theater live is the most refined way of storytelling. There is not a single thing holding the audience back from being completely engulfed and submerged into the play. Hovering above a whirlwind of conflict and characters makes one forget about reality and what is rational and irrational. During a play, it is rare that someone leaves early just because they don’t like it. People in general have a tenancy to stick with a story until the conflict is resolved or the story ends. Although someone might have hated the play, a story, no matter how bad, interests us all.
People don’t listen to a man on the street preaching about the problems in another country. We simply don’t have the patience. But when a story can convey an issue, when actors can pour their heart and soul into a role, when we aren’t being forced to make a stand, we listen. Plays are one of the easiest ways to make the public recognize a problem. They tell a story and subsequently plant ideas in our minds to absorb. Racism, Social Justice, Ethics, Religious prejudice, name it and somebody has written a play on it. It is the greatest form of manipulation there is. “Master Harold and the Boys” was a play that made it to Broadway about the reality of the Apartheid in South Africa; making a lot of Americans realize what was going on. “A Raisin in the Sun”, a play about racism in the 50’s, brought attention to racism, and how it could rip a family to shreds. Or a more recent play, “Ruined”, débuted in 2008, promoting the issues that lie beneath the surface of the Republic of the Congo. A play about what life is really like for some around the world, living in suffrage. There are obviously a myriad of plays that I haven’t mentioned that also capture issues about our society. The lesson however, is that a problem in a story is much more relatable to the audience than a problem in the real world. Sadly, society just doesn’t have the attention span.
Movies are also described as great form of storytelling. Although sometimes emotionally provoking, movies are usually not anywhere near the caliber of storytellers as plays. There is no objection that a great movie can provoke us to change, but what brings it back to the surface is its two dimensional form. Plays are four dimensional. There is something quite special about actors performing live, playing a role in a story in which the audience can really get to know. No different camera views, just seeing it as it is. The set in a play is so much more interesting than any other form of storytelling. There are many times in a play where the setting is in just one place. A lot of the action happens outside of the set and is brought back to the set with the characters. It makes for a much more intriguing story line than seeing all of the action happen. In cinema, the action that takes place outside of the main setting rips any imagination away that the audience might have had.
Theater has rich history and culture as well as so many different aspects to enjoy. The most interesting aspect or element of a play is its ability to tell a story. History is comprised of factual stories, every work of art can tell a story, family members and friends tell stories, but do any capture our attention and time like a play does? The short answer is no. As a culture we have made it a duty to remember great theater. William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and others have traveled into our schools to be remembered, cherished, and learned from. What a better way to learn history than from a play? Is there a better way to keep students consistently interested in a story than through a play? No method that I am aware of. Religiously, geographically, historically, stories have created the world as we know it today; theater is just one way of experiencing the retelling of it.
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