A Good Story Well Told

A good story, read on the pages, does not necessarily make a good storytelling.  I am always prompted to think this after attending a play by Connor McPherson, as I did most recently The Shining City at the Irish Rep.   

When we read a story, we might read it aloud to ourselves; but reading is usually done silently by sight.  When we read a story to someone else, even to a child at bedtime, or perhaps especially when we read to a child, we do so expressively by modulating the voice and articulating the pauses, and this way we capture the interest and attention of the listener every step of the way, allowing no moment for the listening mind to wander or even wonder.  We don’t want to miss a single word and we don’t have time to think about what is being said while listening. This is good storytelling.   A story well told addresses individual listeners and engages them.   A story as a written text exposes but does not address an individual; it addresses a generalized audience.  Lectures do that, as do essays; we are allowed to reflect as we listen, to pause and ponder while listening, to wonder and wander. 

A good play is thrilling when it is a good storytelling, when it speaks to us individually rather than collectively.  Saying this, I don’t mean that the actors in a play break the fourth wall and address the audience, as Brecht did; the effect, then, is distanciation rather than captivation.  A play achieves the latter, when it is akin to good storytelling in its continuity and modulation.  These are certainly in the domain of the director’s art of pacing.  But some plays display them already in their written text.  We are then more liable to be smoothly drawn into the world of the narrative much like the experience we remember from our childhood as we listened to a good bedtime story.  When we say that Irish playwrights are good storytellers and write good plays, we become aware of the oral tradition of storytelling in Ireland.  In the age before printing, stories were only told in vocal recitation and remembered as an auditory experience by those who later told the same stories.  As I insistently claim, a poem should be read aloud for full effect, even though admittedly it can be a visual text to be experienced visually and mentally. 

A good theater can be a spectacle, a primarily visual and aural affair, presented to an audience.  But a good play is a good story well told.  A story, good or not, could sprawl, narrated or performed.  The recent play by Dan LeFranc, Rancho Viejo, sprawled; Stephen Karam’s The Humans rambled.  If a play goes on lecturing, even if it happened to be a good lecture, I can’t help thinking I’d then rather go hear a lecture than attend a play.  What I call a good play may be just one kind of good play; but a good story well told is to me very satisfying.