On Text, Actors, and Interpretation

One of my pet peeves is when critics make arguments about characters played by multiple actors (for example, in theatre) based only on the text of the script.

We see this kind of argument a lot in when, for instance, historians assess the accuracy of plays that depict historical figures, such as Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen or Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Often, they’ll pick out lines that characters say (or lyrics they sing) to prove that the play as a whole encourages a particular view of an historical figure like Niels Bohr or Aaron Burr. However, many critiques of this nature zoom in on the words to the exclusion of the other languages of theatre and film.

Specifically, I want to focus on the language of the actor’s* presence.

What do I mean by that? Well, cast two different actors in the same role, have them say the same words, dress them the same, tell them to do the same gestures, stage them on the same sets, light them with the same lights, do them in the same make-up (maybe not exactly the same for, you know, not-spreading-pink-eye reasons), and you’ll still have two different performances.

But even those of us trained as experts in the humanities don’t get practice interpreting the whole embodied performance of a text. Instead, outside specific subject areas where embodiment is obviously relevant, like Film Studies or Drama, our education focusses on how to interpret, analyze, and critique written language. (Heck, even at the more elementary levels of those fields, students are often encouraged to approach classic scripts, like Shakespeare’s plays, as written words in classes focussing on scripts/literary theory and as interdisciplinary, malleable texts in classes focussing on production/application, without explicit connection between the two.)

When we apply skills created to examine literature — words on a page, whether fiction or non-fiction — to a different medium, our tools are insufficient.

For example, most humanities scholars are well trained in identifying, analysing, and responding to a written argument, such as an essay. We’re less well trained in doing the same with perceived factual claims embedded in a work of fiction (e.g. historical details in an historical novel), but many of the same tools carry over: close-reading, reviewing an argument’s structure and logic, identifying and assessing symbols, interpreting a writer’s tone, connecting claims to evidence etc.

(Even in purely written forms like novels, subject-expert critics can sometimes inappropriately apply non-fiction standards without taking into account the purpose, context, and conventions of fiction, but that’s another blog entry.)

However, we same humanities scholars are often ignorant of tools to analyse the non-verbal aspects of a piece of work, such as the physical presence of bodies in the space of performance. It’s not that humanities scholars are unintelligent or completely incompetent in this field — even the most pedantic historian understands that Hamilton‘s casting of actors of colour, especially Black and Latinx actors, as white historical figures is purposeful and meaningful. It’s that we haven’t been trained to give physicality, presence, and context the same weight as language, and we haven’t been taught the theory to assess it.

Many (but certainly not all) theatre scholars and scholars in other humanistic or social-science disciplines where the physical body is key (e.g. Sociology of Sport — hi, Debra!) do study these tools and theories, and, as a result, they approach multimedia texts like live performances differently. They’re more capable of distinguishing between script and end product and of analyzing how the actual production choices create meanings, sometimes meanings that counter what’s “in the script.”

(Sometimes playwrights purposely leave room for these alternative meanings, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they do their best to strangle that potential. For instance, Samuel Beckett famously refused to allow women to play roles he intended for men.)

So when academics who are highly trained in interpreting writing but untrained in interpreting other kinds of meaning-creation attempt to analyze works that create meaning in a collaboration of media, they tend to ignore, minimize, or address only superficially the rest of those media.

Let’s go back to what I was calling “actor’s presence.” By this, I mean the impression the audience gets from the actor’s actual physicality — how they look, how it feels to be in the same room with them, how they move.

The concept is slippery to describe in words, so I’d like to give some more concrete examples. Imagine two actors of the same gender presentation and same build/height/etc. — except they’re racialized differently. Even if they deliver the exact same lines with the same intonation and gestures, audiences will read them differently. Or imagine a feminine-presenting person and a masculine-presenting person — again, same reading/movement, different interpretations.

Does it sound like I’m talking about racism/sexism/etc. — judging people in systemic ways based on their bodies and appearance? In a way, I am. People’s physicality changes the way the world interacts with them and therefore how they interact with the world — who they are and how they think. Today’s Western world unfortunately includes “racism” and “sexism” — for example, Black bodies interact with a society founded on white supremacy in a systemically different way than white bodies. All this informs how audiences interpret the presence of certain bodies, so it may be the case that some of the meaning produced is based on, for example, the perception of race or gender.

However, this isn’t to say that all bodies perceived as the same gender would produce the same meaning: this isn’t about any intrinsic properties of the bodies themselves. This is about the norms and conventions of the culture that exists around the body (or the many cultures/different experiences of the same culture — not everyone in the audience may attach the same meanings to the same bodies, and that’s not only OK but really cool!). Generating meaning — that is, communicating — is always time-, space-, location-, and culture-specific, and although that can freak out folks who feel more comfortable with apparently universal, quantifiable laws like those of mathematics or physics**, you can’t really get away from it.

Plus, we’re not always talking about the kinds of physicality that can be lumped into culturally determined categories like race, gender, or ability. Hair colour and style, timbre of voice, height, build, posture, ways of moving — all of these things (and more) can change the audience’s perception of a performer and hence of the character they’re playing.

For instance, think of the part in The Taming of the Shrew where Petruchio starves his new wife, Kate, in order to “tame” her. If the actor playing Petruchio is larger and more muscular than the one playing Kate, it reinforces Petruchio’s power.

However, if Petruchio is physically unimposing but Kate reads as strong and powerful, the scene plays very differently — implicitly, Kate could stop his cruel tactics through physical violence, so we’re seeing not crude power win out over marginalization but, perhaps, cunning win out over brute force — or maybe Kate having her bluff called and being unwilling to actually use her strength to hurt others — or we’re feeling more acutely the unfairness of the power of the patriarchy, because we see how it gives a cruel weakling control over someone who should be free — or — or — or…, depending on the context of the rest of the play, including text, casting, staging, etc.

When critics analyse a script as though it’s a novel or another strictly textual form, they miss this and other aspects of the multimedia collaboration of the art form. That’s not to say that one can’t make claims about whether, for example, a historical play corresponds in certain ways with historical facts. It just means that the analysis has to be more careful and thorough about the creation of meaning in theatre.

* I’m gonna go ahead and follow my betters in appropriating “actor” as a gender-neutral term here. Because we don’t have “doctors” and “doctresses.”

** Though, popping on my “historian of science” hat for a sec, I would argue that even those don’t necessarily embody context-free meaning. I would argue that. Except not here, because this is already pretty long and relatively technical.