What lends a work of drama its theatricality? Is it the earnestness of the audience giving itself up to the alternate reality of the stage? The cool indifference of the actors toward the real world as they pursue their onstage intrigues? Or, alternatively, is it the simple ‘eventness’ of the event, the shared assurance, on the part of audience and actor, that something will happen, change, turn over, in the course of dramatic time?
Whatever the case, it seems that theatricality manifests itself not as the degree to which the dramatic work can be called ‘theatrical’ but in the degree to which the audience and the actors anticipate the event. Theatricality moves across the stage and through the audience because both have assumed the anticipatory stance of waiting. The audience waits as it watches; the players, too, wait as they play, everyone equally unsure of what will happen when the cumulating eventness of the event reveals itself in its totality.
Readers of drama are perhaps even more engaged than playgoers in that they must enter the drama stripped of the usual visual references. The text moves on the page but it is, for some reason, not the same as when the human body slinks across the stage. Reading a play demands something else of us, some other kind of engagement, one that is able to conjure theatricality and eventness out of the simple dialogical encounters that human beings have with one another.
In this issue, Literary Laundry presents ‘The Anniversary Gift,’ a one-act play that is laden with the unassuming eventness of everyday conversation. Yvette and Charles, two American Francophiles celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary in Paris, find themselves in a quibble over a ‘gawking look’ that Charles supposedly gave to the hostess at the restaurant where they are dining. The plot unfolds entirely within the lighthearted yet monumental conversation that ensues after this alleged ‘look,’ which, unsurprisingly, awakens Yvette’s jealously. Yvette grapples with her jealousy through semi-serious reflections on her lapsed Catholicism; Charles offers his two cents on their marital health by comparing their situation with his favorite French films. In this mundane conflict between two people who clearly love each other, the reader realizes that clever conversation is not merely a tactic for easing the mood during a conflict but the bearer of the cumulative intimacy of twenty years of marriage. Yvette and Charles love one another through their caustic wit and this is primarily what happens in the play. But even knowing this in advance, nothing is spoiled, for the real eventness of ‘The Anniversary Gift’ lies not in the ultimate outcome of the plot but with these two fluent conversationalists who, believing they are dining alone, reveal the heroic theatricality of rich dialogue.