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The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched |
Author: Paul Woodruff
Published: 2008-04-30 |
List price: $27.95
Our price: $19.36
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Needed- Good Watchers
Paul Woodruff a professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin has written a book with an intriguing title. The Necessity of Theatre is a kind of philosophical treatise in which he attempts to parse, diagram and define the art of theatre. Using a Socratic method, Woodruff hypothesizes a definition of theatre and then sets out to test it from several different angles.
The one sentence definition he presents:
"Theatre is the art by which human beings make human action worth watching, in a measured time and space."
The ensuing examination takes us from college sports stadiums to how Brecht's theories triumphed in spite of himself. This is philosophy and so it reads much more methodically, and with less colorful examples than books written by such critics as Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein and even Brooks Atkinson. And it does not have the urgency of Brecht or Artaud's rallying cries. However, by giving equal time to both sides of the sacred space, ("watchers and the watched",) Woodruff opens up some new avenues into exploring theater's continued relevance and survival.
His emphasis on the art of WATCHING is unexpected, welcome, and refreshing. While we often focus our attention, and rightly so, on what is being practiced on stage, we rarely examine, beyond declining attendances and the graying of hair, what is happening on the other side of the lights.
If we really are to pursue the value of theatre as being a human connection, then we have to start defining what makes a "good watcher." Who is the ideal watcher? When are the times when we are at our best as theatre audiences? It is a complex investigation, and sometimes a counterintuitive one.
Woodruff does an admirable job of probing and defining the complicated and unique symbiotic relation of audience and artist in this most interesting of art forms.
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