3 Responses to Causal Rewrite-toastedflatbread

1. davidbdale says:

   November 2, 2021 at 4:52 am

   I really want to help here, Flatbread, and I will, but the bulk of the work is in just a few words.

   You say, “Puppets view the real world through a unique lens,” and you ask, “how puppets’ unique presence on stage connects with a human audience.” And you say and ask them as if you have described something.

   It won’t be easy to describe them, but that’s the core of your paper. Can you break down the steps by which we gain access to scary parts of our emotional core through the agency of clearly manufactured objects that pretend to be animate?

   It’s SUCH a compelling question.

   How about this? You SHOW the process. Here’s a sketch:
   1. We’re in the audience for a play about death.
   2. We’re safely in our seats not dying or watching anybody die.
   3. But we’re actually here hoping to feel something that frightens or saddens us.
   4. Otherwise, why come to the theater?
   5. An actor playing a dying person is eloquent and compelling and convincing, but . . .
   6. so much of our reaction is a critique of how well the actor mimicked death.
   7. The performance aspect, the actor’s skill or lack thereof, distracts us from the visceral response to the reality of death.
   8. It isn’t real, and the difference is a shortcoming.
   WHEREAS
   5. A puppet playing a dying person is clumsy and utterly unconvincing in portraying death, but . . .
   6. very little of our reaction is distracted by critique.
   7. The performance aspect, the puppet’s “skill,” are irrelevant to our experience. We don’t see death or its portrayal “coming at us” like a fact. We supply the reality ourselves.
   8. The onstage death isn’t meant to seem real. It’s just a location for us to bring death to the stage for ourselves.
   9. The drama takes place in our hearts.

   That’s how I see it. I need you to respond. Thanks.

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2. toastedflatbread22 says:

   November 3, 2021 at 1:25 pm

   First of all, I’m sorry I haven’t responded to many of your comments yet; I appreciate them so much and they help me a lot; I just have been overloaded with work lately. I am hoping to respond to them soon though! Anyway, for this post, I really like how you described that! So my causal claim should bring the reader into a situation so that they can understand why puppets are so compelling? I like that approach and I think it will break down this idea in an understandable way. Do you have suggestions on anything else that may need to be in this claim? Maybe about the difference between the actor’s “world” onstage, compared to the puppet’s “world” and how the audience explores these realms differently? I’m just thinking out loud. Thank you again for your feedback; it means a lot to me that you are spending time to help me out!

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   • davidbdale says:

     November 3, 2021 at 3:03 pm

     What a brilliant question!

     The puppet’s world! Of course. In some productions, the puppets and people are meant to occupy the same theatrical place. In some, that place is supposed to be the audience’s reality. In others, the production makes no pretense of representing the reality outside the theater. I don’t have advice offhand on how important the distinction will be to your claim that puppets give us unique access to our genuine human emotions, but clearly their type of reality will matter. Very intriguing.

     Thiink for a minute about “puppets” in a film (not theatrical) vehicle like Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The human actors who occupy the “reality” space are of course Level 1 artifice. But the human actor who plays the boy robot puppet David is Level 2 artifice. His teddy bear can’t possibly be Level 2 also, can he? Or can he? Which gives us the most access and why? How about Jude Law’s robot male escort character? Unlike the clueless boy puppet, the adult robot is utterly aware of his manufactured status. But he declares his actuality in his last speech, saying, “I was! I am!”

     Not every puppet on stage grapples with its own existence or even recognizes levels of irreality, but you’ve opened a rich vein here, Flatbread. This is really fun for me. Thank you for inviting me along for the ride.

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