Stage Direction: Entering the Theater of Insanity

Last weekend the Loeb Drama Center was a place of madness. Literally. With Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III opening on the Mainstage and Lanie Robertson's The Insanity of Mary Girard in the Ex, aberrations of the mind took center stage at Harvard. Insanity poses an interesting dramatic problem. As Alan Bennett admits in his preface to The Madness of George III, a loss of sanity usually entails a loss of dramatic action.

It's an interesting conundrum, the impracticality of having a character go mad. Bennett went through several drafts of Madness before he developed a subplot compelling enough to take the place of the king's personal tragedy in the second act of his play. A descent into insanity and a recovery from it are both dramatically tenable situations, but the state of madness itself leaves little room for engaging action. Hence the emphasis on affairs of state and the line of succession which fills the later parts of Bennett's playelements which were absent in his early drafts.

For Robertson, focusing on one character's descent into madness becomes a means of avoiding the madness trap. Not until the end of the play does Mary Girard admitor rather, accepther insanity. But she is surrounded from the very beginning by nameless characters whose abnormal mental states are already well established, making her the only persona in the drama with any degree of development. The Furies, as Robertson calls them, are dramatic constants, little more than moving pieces of scenery in the story of Mary's fall from sanity. But this dramatic bracketing of the other characters on stage and the corresponding emphasis on Mary Girard is not a defect; it is most likely the very intent of Robertson's writing. It is her version of Bennett's recourse to Parliamentary politics.

But why is it that playwrights as talented as Bennett and Robertson must resort to such shifts in focus in order to tell the simple and compelling story of a man or woman gone mad? Countless novels, from Notes from Underground to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, depict the inner lives of deeply troubled individuals, as do untold numbers of movies. But novels and movies share a subjectivity that drama categorically lacks. Both can get inside the heads of their characters in a way that no piece of theater can.

This subjectivity can be as simple as first-person narration in a novel or point-of-view camera work in a film. More frequently, it comes in more complicated forms: the careful selection of descriptive passages in a novel, the precise cinematography of a well-made film. Both narrative and film can create a specific perspective from which their audiences can view a character gone insane. This perspective serves a dual purpose. First, it can allow the reader or viewer to more closely follow the inner development of a person in the throes of madness, a development that to an outside observer may simply appear a continuous and unchanging stream of irrational behavior. Second, it creates a type of dramatic development in the audience itself. Even if the condition of the central character remains constant, the way in which that condition is viewed can be manipulated and changed by the author or director so as to bring the audience from one point of knowledge about the character to another. And just as on a train it's impossible to tell if you are moving forward or the landscape is moving backwards, in a novel or film it's difficult to distinguish between a shift in a given character and a shift in the ways you are allowed to perceive that character.

But the dramatist is denied these techniques. Theater cannot create perspective with the same precision as fiction and film. A playwright may only present what a character does and says or what others do and say with regard to that character. He or she cannot force the audience to look at those actions or words from a specific point of view. Thus, in the case of madness, the inner development of a victim of insanity cannot be easily conveyed, for an audience will be prone to classify all varieties of irrational behavior and speech as more or less the same. Madness itself permits for little development. Nor can a dramatist force the audience's perspective on that madness to change over timeunless, of course, he or she uses another character's reactions to madness to inform those of the audience. But in such a case, the madness becomes nothing more than a vehicle for the development of the reacting character, not a source of dramatic development in itself.

Essentially, madness is a state which one must enter alone, a place into which nobody, not even the audience in a theater, can follow you. They can follow you to the very brink of madnessand follow you with great interest if your name is Hamlet or King Lear. But they cannot cross that threshold with you; they can only watch the play develop around you once you have become little more than a set piece, a constant force of irrationality. There is a reason that the conflicts of government play a larger role in the second part of Bennett's play than the first. And, more to the point, there is a reason Robertson's play ends with Mary declaring herself insane. From that point on, there can be no further story to tell.