The theatrical stage, therefore, is first and foremost a place that has been cleared out in the perceptual world. As an enactment, the theatrical performance deflects, so to speak, the presencing act of being which is taking place in nature and makes it happen at this new site. Accordingly, its activity cuts deeper than the socio-political landscape. Of course, it includes this landscape. But, in theatre at its best, there is always more at stake than the social, political, or even the moral, meaning of what transpires onstage. What the theatre sets before us is a stage which functions as a threshold: a threshold across which a world of characters and events comes to presence. And the theatrical performance which negotiates this crossing makes happen on the theatrical stage what happens on the stage of the world: namely, things come to be.
As such, the theatre supplies us with an apt metaphor for a discourse on what has traditionally been the subject matter of metaphysics. The point of metaphysics, let us recall, is to articulate intellectually being qua being: that is to say, things and events as they are caught up in the act, or the performance, which brings them to presence. In nature, as in the theatre, what comes to presence does so together with the performance that presences it. And what metaphysics attempts to do is to thematize this performance. In essence, metaphysics is a reflection on what theatre enacts.
To be sure, in both the theatre and in life, the act which presences “that-which-is” remains elusive. Herein lies the importance of the theatre experience to philosophy, especially at this particular time in the latter’s history. The theatre serves to reminds us that, elusive though it may be, the performance which brings to presence is something with which we are always in contact along with that which it brings to presence. There is no confusing the two in the theatre. This fact is attested to by the phenomenon of the curtain call where the performance is singled out for special attention. In applauding the actors, we are explicitly acknowledging the fact of our having been aware of the presencing act together with what it made present onstage at the time it was taking place.
The performance which is taking place on the stage of the world, however, does not admit of a curtain call. We are not offered a vantage point from which the performance of being exhibits itself as having anything like a beginning, a middle and an end. Herein lies philosophy’s problem. And, for this reason, it is constrained to use a “borrowed” language: that is to say, a language which the performance has fashioned for itself during its time in the theatre. Borrowed though it may be, it is nevertheless a language that articulates the act which presences.
If we think, for example, of the performance of being as a theatrical performance which has no beginning or end, thereby removing all traces of an offstage, we find that we can speak of the performance as something that “is” in the absolute sense of that term: that is to say, as something that is not conditional or relative to anything else. Everything else—namely, that which appears onstage—”is” conditional or relative to the performance which is bringing it forth. Parmenides was essentially correct when he said that otherness, or the negation which establishes distance, must not be attributed to being in its primary sense. Such categories attach themselves not to the performance of being, but to that which the performance makes present. They form part of the constellation of characteristics which define the nature of presence.
What the theatre experience teaches us, then, is that whenever a metaphysical discourse allows the notion of presence to enter into its inquiry into being qua being its subject matter will inevitably be deformed. To speak of the performance as if it were controlled by a prior presence (ideal or otherwise) is to end up with a specious performance, a performance which is not the act that is bringing things to presence in person. This is what happens in the theatre when the performance is an act of pretending. What comes to presence on the stage is a representation of something and not the thing itself. The metaphysical notion of presence, then, turns out not to be an originary notion. It is determined by our prior understanding of the presencing act. Whenever this relationship is reversed, the result is a metaphysical deformity.
The theatre experience also teaches us something more. It shows us that if we engage the world intellectually as a threshold (as a stage) it becomes possible to do metaphysics in a way that does not issue into anything like a discourse that privileges presence. The world conceived of as a stage opens itself up to us as a temporal state of affairs: that state of affairs which lies beneath, so to speak, that spatial arrangement which makes up the totality of being. Like the theatrical stage, the world exhibits the kind of temporality which enables it to be the site of a performance. The notion of time which enters into the fabric of this performance contains a “thickness” that we rarely associate with time. The performance which the theatre enacts is not only a flow which is being held together by a present that constitutes it as something live and on-going, but it is also a flow whose present confers on things their ontic capacity to be that-which-is-present. In other words, the passing present of this performance is a present which brings to presence.
Philosophy, then, reveals itself to be a discourse on what transpires in the “theatre of the world,” and metaphysics a reflection on the performance that gives us the play which is coming to pass on the world’s stage. I am not suggesting that metaphysics is bereft of its own resources. Clearly it brings to the discourse notions which it has not borrowed from the theatre: notions such as substance, form, unity, identity, even the notion of God. What I am suggesting, however, is that by re-interpreting these notions as elements of a theatre, they afford us the means of articulating the nature of the temporality which underlies the realm of presence.
It is the theatre metaphor which makes this discourse on being as performance possible. It not only enables us to construct an ontology of presence on whose stage the totality of being appears. But it does this as a product of a metaphysics which moves beyond presence itself to the performance of being which maintains this stage as an on-going threshold. And finally, if we find ourselves called to do so, the theatre metaphor makes it possible for us to reach even beyond the stage, to an abiding summons to which the performance is responding.
Theatre Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958.
Marowitz, Charles, The Act of Being: Toward a Theory of Acting. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1978.
Stanislavski, Constantin, An Actor’s Handbook, trans. Elizabeth H. Reynolds Hapgood. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1963.