A Brief Exploration of Direct Address in Three Plays

"If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended/That you have but slumber'd here while these visions did appear," concludes Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In a tip of the hat to meta-theatre, Puck "breaks the fourth wall" and, in one of the most famous examples of employing such a technique, directly addresses the audience as if the actors and the viewers all share the same world.

Direct address, when used appropriately on the stage, establishes a connection between a character and the audience by evoking an emotional response. But the absence of direct address does not necessarily indicate a shortfall, either. When poorly used, direct address comes across as corny or even desperate; it fails to elicit any reaction from the audience, besides perhaps a yawn or awkward cringe. Examples of three contemporary plays that expertly handle the issue of direct address, however, include Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House, and David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole. The Year of Magical Thinking demonstrates how direct address can successfully help the audience identify and empathize with a character while The Clean House shows how direct address can triumphantly clarify the plot for the audience and even make them laugh in the process. Meanwhile, Rabbit Hole proves that a play can still appeal to the audience by avoiding direct address altogether; Rabbit Hole shows how excluding direct address and using the third-person objective preserves the plot's mystery and realism.

The Year of Magical Thinking employs direct address throughout the entire play, which personalizes the story and emotionally appeals to the audience. Thanks to direct address, Joan enters the audience's lives like a newfound acquaintance and becomes more real, believable, and likeable. The moment she begins talking, she already shows a familiar tone: "This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem like a while ago but it won't when it happens to you./And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you./That's what I'm here to tell you" (Didion 1). Essentially, she promises the audience that at some point in their lives, they will suffer her same pain. That kind of dire forewarning hooks the audience because they want to know what exactly will happen to them. Without direct address, the audience would see Joan as a caricature of a lonely woman in a tragic situation talking to herself on stage. Considering that the play is a one-person show, Joan has nobody to interact with but the audience by default. If she does not interact audience, then she appears flat and becomes a sad ghost story because she has no context. Direct address forces the reader to move beyond pitying Joan. If she were only talking to herself on stage, the audience would have sympathy for her but not empathy.

Empathy evidences direct understanding---the empathizer had the same or similar experience as the person currently suffering or at the very least can imagine being in that position of suffering. Sympathy is merely pity for another. Joan craves empathy, which is why she never explicitly cries at the audience and goes at great length to describe her strength and pragmatism. Practically and obsessively, Joan single-handedly dealt with John's insurance matters, inspected his hospital records, and arranged his funeral; she even started to study medicine in the hope that she could resurrect John. She states, "On most surface levels I seem rational" (Didion 16). When Joan describes the concept of 'magical thinking,' her line of logic almost sounds plausible because she has already appeared so intelligent and capable. Joan wants the audience to realize that she experienced more than grief after her husband's, and later daughter's, death. She experienced a whole spectrum of emotions and degrees of vulnerability and needs to show that to prove that to someone. Without directly addressing the audience, she might even appear heartless because of her cool, collected façade throughout most of her grieving period. After John's funeral, she proclaims, "I had succeeded. I had convinced them...I had done it. I had made this happen. I had played along, I had followed the ritual...I had done this in as public a way as I could conceive" (Didion 24). The audience would never suspect all of the complicated and fickle feelings boiling within her; they would only note that she dealt with the situation perfectly. They might fail to wonder about the discrepancy between perception and reality, between what is seen and what is.

Similarly to The Year of Magical Thinking, The Clean House regularly uses the technique of direct address (most memorably through Matilde) but with a different purpose lingering in the playwright's mind. Matilde serves as something of a classical Greek chorus in this 'metaphysical melodrama comedy' (a genre in and of itself); she smoothes the transition from one event to another and keeps the plot united. Matilde always delivers some kind of moral or adage that foreshadows or clues the audience in on important themes. Matilde opens the play with a joke and she ends it with an eloquent line about jokes: "I think maybe heaven is a sea of translatable jokes. Only everyone is laughing." Perhaps her most memorable part in the play is her monologue, beginning and ending with: "The perfect joke makes you forget about your life...A perfect joke is somewhere between an angel and a fart" (19-20). In the words of high school teacher K. Phillips, "Without [the chorus], the audience would have no background information, and the play would be more confusing." Such is the case with The Clean House, where no coincidence is too coincidental. Furthermore, Matilde's use of direct address, from her jokes to her clever insights about humor, lightens the mood of the play. Without her, the audience would feel much less inclined to laugh and probably demand some explanation about the plot (consider Act One: Scene 14 as an example of impossible weirdness: Lane imagines Charles kissing Ana in her questionable gown-hospital or ball?-and Matilde walks by and asks who the lovers are, as if she can effortlessly enter Lane's mind. Or maybe Charles and Ana are right there in the living room; it is unclear but Matilde at least can clarify for the audience who the lovers are). Without Matilde's flippant direct address, The Clean House would just be another story about a betrayed workaholic wife who regrets not spending more time with her husband. Matilde's tendency to laugh with the audience, despite the tragedy of Lane's position as the betrayed wife and Ana's imminent death, makes the story more digestible. Direct address makes the play the fun yet poignant adventure that it is.

Rabbit Hole, on the other hand, completely lacks direct address yet it successfully relates the story of a family in mourning over the death of their little boy. The play relies on the third-person objective, which explains why the characters do not directly address the audience: Becca, Howie, Nat, Izzy, and Jason are unaware of the audience's existence. This fishbowl environment suits Rabbit Hole because its plot is more true to life and therefore more ambiguous than The Year of Magical Thinking and The Clean House. For instance, Rabbit Hole brings up two major questions within the plot: Is Howie cheating on Becca and did Becca intentionally record over the family tape containing scenes of Danny? Just as would probably happen in real life, neither one of these questions is explicitly answered within the text. The truth is up for debate. The absence of direct address allows the audience to observe Howie and Becca individually, watch for clues, and draw their own conclusions. With direct address, the play would not be as ambiguous, which would actually weaken it.

One of Rabbit Hole's great strengths is its vagueness and reoccurring uncertainties; after all, the play is named after the amorphous concept of parallel universes and alludes to Lewis Carroll's chaotic Alice in Wonderland (through the mention of rabbit holes and the storybook, Runaway Bunny)for a reason. Direct address, especially in the sense of having a Greek chorus like Matilde, would clarify the story's details too neatly for the audience. Clarification would devastate Rabbit Hole because the crux of the play revolves around the hope for change and chance. The existence of parallel universes, as Jason explains, means "...there's a never ending stream of possibilities...So even the most unlikely events have to take place somewhere, including other universes with versions of us leading different lives, or maybe the same lives with a couple things changed" (Lindsday-Abaire 56). Upon hearing this, Becca believes that someone out there in the universe, she and Danny live happily because Danny never died. That thought comforts Becca. Carroll's Alice famously says, "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?" In Alice's world, Danny's death would be nonsense, a figment. Direct address could not more keenly capture Becca's hope for other possibilities to Danny's life story. The audience should guess that hope themselves; after all, in real life Becca would probably never reveal that hope. Again, Rabbit Hole is a realistic portrayal of a grieving family, not a dramatic one.

Another example of Rabbit Hole's realism includes the scene revolving around Izzy's birthday celebration, where direct address would, again, bust the play. Nat brings up the topic of the Kennedy's "curse" but nobody in the room truly focuses on her staggering point (Lindsay-Abaire 23). The conversation bounces from birthday cake to airplanes to wine to hubris to a bathroom set. In other words, it completely mimics how people really speak; the scene is natural and unstructured. Everyone's talking over one another and the focus diverges. If one of the characters suddenly jumped out and spoke to the audience, it would ruin the spontaneity, humor, and authenticity of the conversation.

In conclusion, each play treats the technique of direct address differently but fittingly. The Year of Magical Thinking and Rabbit Hole represent oppositesin that respect whereas The Clean House serves as an intermediate between the two. The Year of Magical Thinking thrives upon direct address because of the story's need for emotional appeal. The Clean House uses direct address to point out themes to move along the play, all with a humorous slant. But unlike The Year of Magical Thinking and The Clean House, which both employ direct address to their advantage, Rabbit Hole is much more organic so direct address would seem amiss. Each play is a well-concocted recipe with all the right ingredients. Some soups need salt while others do not and, in this case, some plays need direct address whereas others would taste unappetizing with it.

WORKS CITED:

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Vintage International, 2007.

Lindsay-Abaire, David. Rabbit Hole. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 2006.

Phillips, K. "Ancient Greek Theatre: Ancient Greek Actors." Rich East High School. http://www.richeast.org/htwm/Greeks/theatre/actors.html.

Ruhl, Sarah. The Clean House. New York: Samuel French, Inc., 2007.