Marilyn and I spend the bulk of our entertainment budget on live theater. We see some movies and go to some concerts also, but theater is our passion. We have season tickets at the Milwaukee Rep and at American Players Theatre in Spring Green. We see some shows in Madison and at the Fox Cities PAC. We go to all of the local community theater and high school shows, too.
So what is it about live theater that’s so attractive?
Well, theater is a place where you can go and suspend disbelief and enjoy aspects of life you’d never be able to experience in your life. It’s a little like the vicarious thrill you can get from a well-written novel, only someone is playing it out in front of your eyes.
When you watch a well-written and well-acted play, you can believe it and not believe it at the same time. It makes you use a part of your brain that has to do with the tendency we have to be skeptical about what we’re experiencing in our lives. The play is real and yet it isn’t. After you’ve seen a play that you really liked (or even one you didn’t!), you can go out into the real world and look at life and love and politics and war and religion and all kinds of other human phenomena in the same way that you looked at the play. It’s real — and yet it isn’t!
When I taught “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to my junior honors kids, my students sometimes said, “Mr. V, that’s so unbelievable. It just couldn’t happen!” That was my opening to talk about “suspension of disbelief,” a term which was first attributed to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the author of “The Ancient Mariner,” back in the early 1800s.
“The Ancient Mariner” is a fantastic (as in fantasy) tale about three guys who are on the way to a wedding celebration when an old sailor (the Mariner) stops one of them at the door. Using his hypnotic eyes to hold the attention of the Wedding Guest, the mariner starts telling a story about a disastrous journey he took.
The wedding guest really wants to go to the party, but he just can’t pry himself away from this grizzled old sailor. The Mariner begins his story. They left port, and the ship sailed down near Antarctica to get away from a bad storm, but then they got caught in a dangerous, foggy ice field.
An albatross shows up to steer them through the fog and provide good winds, but then the Mariner decides to shoot it. All sailors know it’s bad luck to shoot an albatross, and the rest of the story tells about the amazing adventures the mariner experiences as a result of his crime.
Yeah, so the story is really incredible. Not believable. Because Coleridge infuses it with enough human interest and a semblance of truth, you have to suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative. Suspension of disbelief is a major part of most fictional works of the action, comedy, fantasy and horror genres, and it definitely applies to plays.
When you watch a play, you have to be willing to overlook the limitations of truth. It’s like watching a magician cutting a person in half. No one expects you to believe that the magician actually performs the act of cutting someone in half, but the suspension of disbelief makes it possible to enjoy the spectacle.
Ghosts and goblins, zombies and monsters, serial killers and superheroes: they’re all possible because we can suspend disbelief if they’re well enough portrayed. Love conquers all, right beats wrong, and “truth will out!”
That’s what theater is all about. That’s why it’s so much fun.
Categories
