First Principles

This Petty Pace

Performance on a stage occurs in space, and directors these days are obsessed with that space: what does the stage look like, where to move and position actors to make the best stage pictures.

But performance on a stage also exists in time, and that I find is where many directors fail, mostly by paying insufficient attention to this crucial fact. Just as important as the movement in space is the movement through time. Which aspects of the performance, which parts of the play, should go faster or slower? This is also important for actors. How do the actors handle particular moments, to emphasize something? Gestures, reactions, even small movements, take place in time, and can focus attention on an act, a word, an emotion.

These days, it seems to me, directors mostly ignore pace: the manipulation of time. They seem much more interested in speeding along as fast as they can go, so the attention span of the audience isn't tested. They want to keep the thing moving, or get from one stage picture to the next.

But slowing down and speeding up are crucial tools for the director and the actors. They are essential for the audience. They can help create tension or exhilaration, suspense or release. Above all they focus moments. Performance in time is about flow, but also about focusing attention to emphasize something or create an effect. Moments ask and answer questions for the audience. These moments work best when the pace is designed, with the proper contrast.

Yet directors who work their design and production people hard to create arresting visual and aural effects, neglect to work with actors to create arresting effects by sculpting time. Just as the stage can be divided into areas where physical objects are placed or not, the two or three hours of a play is a stage made of time, where individual effects can be created and placed within an overall scheme. Performance may take place visually in space, but drama and comedy are created mostly in time.

Pace is also important for handling language. It's as crucial in Mamet, Pinter and Beckett as it is in Shakespeare, where the meaning is as much in the rhythm of speech and the words themselves ("creeps in this petty pace from day to day") as in the literal definitions.

Stage directors can make pictures, but they don't have the film director's tools of closeups, two-shots, medium and wide shots, to focus audience attention. They sometimes have to do it partly by risking the creation of a little anxiety in the audience by making them wonder what will happen next wherever it is they're supposed to be looking. And sometimes that effect is created by doing almost nothing, but small gestures and movements. From slow to fast, from one speed to another, creates contrast, which is what we as human animals pay attention to. Contrast makes meaning.

I'm going on about this because I've noticed that in my reviews, and in my conversations about plays I don't review, I often complain about pace. So this is what I mean. And I find the problem in regional, university and major city theatre as well as community and local theatre.

I can only speculate on why pace is given short shrift. Partly I suppose it's because of rehearsal periods that are too short before a play must be mounted. There's the cliche of this being a visual age, which is questionable. Perhaps also it's about the rise of the director versus the star actors, who took charge of their time on stage and gloried in making effects, and eventually overdid it. Perhaps it takes very confident actors to command the moment. And there is the nervousness over audience attention span.

It takes a lot of time and effort just to get a play on its feet. If actors keep active during a run of the play, they may find moments to emphasize, or patches to speed through. That's why I'd rather see a play after it's been up for awhile, but that's not often possible if I'm writing about it. Still, if directors paid more attention to pace as they map out their production, they might see that they've got a pretty handy tool for improving it.

Time is as important--or more important--than space on stage in another way as well. Actors talk about being "in the moment": being alive to what's happening in the scene, between characters, for instance. It is the ability to be in character and yet to be in that moment that often provides the audience with the most riveting and real theatrical moments--moments when time seems to stand still. It's a vital part of the magic and the mystery of live theatre.