What Makes a Great Play?

I’d like to start out this blog post with a question: What makes a great play?

Statue of Aristotle in front of a university building in Freiburg, Germany. Photo by Martin aka Maha, licensed as CC BY-SA 2.0

When you leave a theater totally jazzed about the story you just experienced, can you put your finger on why? What were the elements that captured you and held your attention?

How do we decide what defines a great story?

Western theater analysis and critique is heavily influenced by one document: Poetics. Open any script analysis textbook in the Western world, and this short work attributed to Aristotle around 330 BCE is likely to be front and center. The work itself may have been compiled from the lecture notes of one of Aristotle’s students, but the concepts are thought to be his. The influence of this work is even more astounding when we find out that about half of it is missing.

Aristotle may have developed the arguments in the Poetics as a response to his teacher, Plato, who was not a fan of theater or any “mimetic” art forms—art that mimicked or copied real emotions. He thought they were dangerous. If the audience saw someone on stage depicting a murder, they might get the idea to commit murder themselves.

Plato may have been partly right. There is a kind of mirroring going on when we watch a play. Contemporary neuroimaging studies have shown that we have “mirror neurons” in our brains. For example, when we see a baby smile, we automatically smile, too. When we observe a person who is sad, our brains allow us to experience that same emotion, even if we don’t have any idea why they’re sad. We don’t just think about them being sad; we actually feel it, too.

Aristotle’s view was also partly right, according to today’s science. He gave the audience a bit more credit and argued they were unlikely to run out after a show and commit murder just because they saw an actor do it on stage. Aristotle instead viewed theater as a useful art form for society in general. Among its many benefits was the experience of catharsis. Catharsis is a purging of emotions. The official definition, according to the American Heritage Dictionary (5th edition) is "a purifying or figurative cleansing of the emotions, especially pity and fear, described by Aristotle as an effect of tragic drama on its audience."

An attentive audience would experience emotions played out on stage and develop empathy for the characters and a greater understanding of the message behind the show, but that did not automatically lead to homicide in the real world. Watching the performance gave the audience a chance to release pent up emotions without lethal consequences. Therefore, Aristotle argued, storytelling provided a vital social role in communities.

The argument on both sides continues today for theater, film, video, and especially animation. In an article from the Indian Journal of Psychiatry entitled “The Cartoon Character Syndrome: Navigating the Impact on Childhood Development in the Digital Age,” the conclusion states, “While cartoons contribute significantly to creativity, language skills, and cognitive abilities, concerns arise regarding potential risks such as increased aggression, distorted reality perception, reinforcement of gender stereotypes, exposure to inappropriate content, and conflicting moral values.”

What do you think? Is theater a safe release of emotions or dangerous indoctrination?

In the textbook I’m working on, we will go into Aristotle’s six elements of a great play and apply them to productions today. But is this our only guide to theater analysis?

Nope. Not even close.

There are numerous theater treatises around the world and throughout time. I will unravel several of them in the textbook I’m working on, but I’ll give you one more example to chew on here.

About a hundred years after Aristotle’s Poetics, a very influential manuscript was written in India called the Natyashastra. It is often attributed to Bharatamuni, but it may have been developed by many artists over a long period of time. Scholars haven’t pinned down an exact date for the work. They usually say sometime between 200 BCE and 200 ACE . . . or maybe the source material is older.

I had never heard of this work until I was well into a professional career in performance, and I feel a bit cheated that my college professors didn’t include it in our studies. It seems to be far more detailed than Poetics and has a very different take on theatrical performance and how it benefits the audience.

Similar to Poetics, the Natyashastra describes many elements of great storytelling, but my favorite section of the Natyashastra by far is the idea of Rasa.

“The word Rasa is derived from the root ‘rasah’ meaning sap or juice, taste, flavour, or relish. The extract of a fruit is referred to as ‘rasa,’ which itself is the essence of it, the ultimate flavour of it,” explains R. Thiagarajan in Indian Aesthetics and Fine Arts.

The audience “tastes” emotions that the performers depict on stage. Going to a theater production can be a banquet of sumptuous emotions for us to sample. I am captivated by the word “taste” to describe experiencing emotions. It expands my idea of what theater can do for us as audience members besides simply purging pity and fear. This change of perspective allows us to be participants in the art form in a different way. Personally, I prefer the idea of “taste” over “purge” any day, but maybe that’s just me.

In the textbook, I plan to also look at Zeami’s written works on Noh theater practices in Japan in the 1400s, as well as the Brazilian artist Augusto Boal’s ground-breaking writing of Theatre of the Oppressed in 1974.

If there are other critical works on great storytelling that you think I should include in the book, please leave me a comment below. I appreciate your suggestions!