Dialogues, 2/9

I find it interesting that in monologues--unless a character is supposed to be speaking to another character rather than the audience--much of the conflict gets internalized; dialogue, on the other hand, allows for conflict to be externalized. In dialogue, characters get a chance to vent their problems, like in Death of a Salesman, or they can actually battle over them, like in Henry IV. There still some asides to the audience ("Attagirl" says Bernard in Arcadia), but not like how monologues are mostly long asides.

Having another character to interact with in a dialogue can help flesh out another character. It also gives answers to an audience for questions they might be asking. In Orphans, Treat revels in the purchasing power of Harold's American Express card, which causes Harold to say, "You're developing a sense of style, Treat, that's fine...but remember, please, everything in moderation." Treat replies that he doesn't know much about moderation, to which Harold responds, "I can see that, Treat." From these lines, we can deduce that Treat has probably never been able to buy the sorts of clothes he has been buying, and he is very naive about how money and consumption work.

Whereas monologues are fairly straightforward in their narrative, dialogues allow for more of a dramatic build. In Angels in America, Harper confronts Joe about his sexuality. It would be boring if the interaction consisted of nothing more of, "Are you gay?", "Yes/no." Instead, Harper anxiously has to try and pull his confession out. Joe denies that he is a homosexual, and then deflects her question by stating that he is "a very good man who has worked very hard to become good" and accusing her of wanting to destroy his image. In dialogue, the verbal back-and-forth gives the audience a much more complex narrative.

Dialogues also provide a chance for juxtaposition. In Closer, the audience observes two couples at once--Dan and Alice, and Anna and Larry. Dan has cheated on Alice, and Anna has done the same to Larry. While both sets of dialogue start out fairly the same, they come to very different ends. Alice, while still angry, is mostly in grief over Dan's decision to leave her. Larry, on the other hand, is much more furious and distraught over Alice's actions.

Tectonics

The Laramie Project interests me because it's a lot like a play I read earlier in my college career, Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror. Like Fires, The Laramie Project takes excerpts from actual interviews to help tell about a true event from a large collective of witnesses and people affected by the event. But while Smith decided to divide up her play into long spans of uninterrupted monologue, Kaufman and his fellow Tectonic Theatre Project members decided to weave all their characters together into what they refer to as "moments." As it is explained in the notes about the text, a moment is "simply a unit of theatrical time that is then juxtaposed with other units to convey meaning." Reading the play, I felt a little bit like I was watching a documentary about Laramie and Matthew Shepard, with many different individuals chiming in on a particular subject, i.e. Shepard's personality, whether McKinney should receive the death penalty, etc. But from a theatrical standpoint, I also saw these moments mostly as dialogues that are composed of monologues...at times, the way the lines were weaved together, it seemed like completely unrelated characters were having indirect conversations with each other. I found this to be a very compelling way of telling the story.

Another thing I really liked about this play is that it is essentially telling two stories: one, the most obvious, being the life and death of Matthew Shepard; the other being the nature and fate of his tormentors. While Shepard is described in detail, almost just as much time goes into describing Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. The third act is basically framed by the question of whether or not Henderson and McKinney will receive the death penalty for their crime. I think this is important for not only telling the audience what kind of tragedy happened, but also for shedding light on why it happened.

I worried that by including themselves in the narrative, the TTP would make the play too much about their personal experiences with Laramie's citizens. Thankfully, they managed to keep their appearances at about the same level as all the other people interviewed.

Unfortunately, their inclusion adds to an already overflowing cast of characters. By allowing everyone to get their say about the string of events in Laramie, many of the characters do not get a lot of time to establish their identities. I kept forgetting who some of the people were and turned back to the cast list a number of times. I have no way of knowing, having not seen this play before, but I imagine that the confusion might be even worse if actors did not characterize well. Thank goodness they had the initiative to include a narrator, or Laramie Project would be a mess.