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a spell
An elongated and heightened (rest). Denoted by repetition of figures' names with no dialogue. Has a sort of architectural look.
This is a place where the figures experience their pure true simple state. While no "action" or "stage business" is necessary, directors should fill this moment as they best see fit.
The feeling: look at a daguerreotype; or: the planets are aligning and as they move we hear the music of their spheres. A spell is a place of great (unspoken) emotion. It's also a place for an emotional transition.1
Scene 19: A Scene of Love (?)
The Venus
The Baron Docteur
The Venus
The Baron Docteur
The Venus
The Baron Docteur
The Venus
The Baron Docteur
The Venus2
Suzan-Lori Parks's one-page "Scene of Love (?)" from her 1996 play, Venus, dares readers, performers, and directors of printed drama to ask the question-what are we to do here? A name is printed on the page of a playscript: we expect it to be followed by a line of dialogue or a stage direction, but we only have the name until the next line where another name is printed, and so on. At first glance, Parks's short scene of "spells" refuses to impart guidelines on the passage of performance time or the determination of performance space and performing bodies. But what if different guidelines apply? And what if these elusive guidelines exist outside of the accepted conventions of dramatic writing and theatrical practice? Suppose we consider this formal shift from determinacy to indeterminacy as functioning to expand, rather than confound, the frameworks through which readers and practitioners make specific interpretative decisions. Then, we can also begin considering the processes by which the material specificity of performers within a performing space can be activated, paradoxically, by refusing the particularity of one formal framework for either readerly or directorial interpretation, in order to specify the alternate material condition of specifically raced bodies.
The ostensible illegibility of this kind of formal experimentation from an African American writer has been met with criticism; as Harry Elam and Alice Rayner point out, "[Parks's] craft has been vilified by some African Americans for being incomprehensible."3 Indeed, New York Times writer Monte Williams has disclosed that "some blacks have complained that...