The Play's the Thing, Really

Play is basically frivolous.  Children play.  We stop work and we play.  We are playing when we are not working. Those who fool around are playboys and playgirls.  Those who are idle play cards, games, and sports, or with each other, or just ducks and drakes.  One can play hooky, play fast and loose, play the field, or play havoc.  One goes to a theater to see a play by and large to be entertained; theater-going is generally understood to be a leisure activity, and enjoyment means freedom from seriousness.  Le roi s’amuse, et nous aussi.  I go to all kinds of performance -- opera, ballet, modern dance, concert, movies sometimes, and plays, these mostly Off-Broadway, rarely on Broadway.

Among the spectators in a theater, there are, of course, those who are serious about the plays they go to see: scholars, critics, playwrights, and directors and actors, for whom theater is a profession.  Asked what is the best thing about being an actor, Audrey Brisson, who recently portrayed the Girl in The Wild Bride at St. Ann’s Warehouse,  answered: We get to play for a living.  Play is play, work is work; but for professionals play is work. 

So, when I say that I go to theater almost every night, as I have been doing in New York since my retirement from college teaching (instead of carrying on research in my special field of art history), I give an unfortunate impression that I am wasting my life in debauchery. There is a bit more respectability if I spent most of my time in a concert hall; it would be decidedly respectable if I spent my retirement in a library reading novels.  Sitting in a theater is seemingly a passive activity, like being a couch potato away from home, in contrast to playing golf or tennis, or piano or kazoo, or even painting or throwing pots or puttering in the garden. 

I am serious in my theater-going, however. I go to see a play to study it -- critically and analytically, not very differently from what I did in my art history.  I read or re-read the play, if it is available in print, and prepare myself in advance for a fuller experience; I think, above all, how it might be staged and, after the play, how differently it might have been directed and performed. For this purpose, I take a seat near the stage, where suspension of disbelief is hampered by the proximity to the action, and, precisely for that reason, I can observe and scrutinize the staged play in the making. I take a particular pleasure seeing the actor and the role together. in one person. All plays I choose to go to see, good or bad or middling,therefore interest me.  They make me think. But since I don’t make a profession of my play-going, I remain a dilettante, the word that is sadly as misleading as the word ‘play.’ which suggests frivolity.  So, it is still hard to convey my seriousness even to my friends who, I am afraid, claim to understand but not really, unless I write reviews for publication, especially if I admit that, yes, I enjoy watching a play in a theater totally, precisely because I don’t make it into work.  So far as I am concerned, play is play, oh but it’s serious.

All through my life, I was hard put to make a categorical opposition between work and play, as though work is all onus and play all amusement -- a common presupposition.  I took my teaching and scholarly career seriously and worked hard on my job; but I tried to make sure that I enjoyed what I was doing.  As is true of any employment, mine, too, was not free of less pleasant aspects; but I learned to make the best of them to lighten their burden by finding some way of making them amusing.  During my working career, I made work into play, like old-style craftspeople who take pride in what they make and enjoy their work totally.  Playfulness made my life a happy one.  So, in my life of retirement, attending theater, play is my work which I turn into play. 

Indeed, to think of it, play-making, whether putting down on paper or putting on stage, requires in its germination a playful mind, unfettered by reason and, therefore, let open and free to doodle, even to run amok. Playfulness is where imagination is engaged and creativity nurtured.  This is, of course, true of all forms of art-making, as has been amply explained by Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens, subtitled A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.  Art, visual, musical, theatrical, or literary is essentially playfulness in all its seriousness.