A Guide to Studying the Relationship Between Engineering and Theatre

by Debra Bruch

Home

The Experience of Theatre

How Theatre Happens

Directing Theatre

The Relationship Between Engineering and Audience

-- Introduction

-- The Space

-- Technical Conditions

-- Climate Conditions

-- Safety

-- Theatrical Conventions

-- Performance Conventions

-- Style Conventions

-- Creativity

Theatrical Conventions

Magical

Suspenseful

The Unexpected

The Revelation

The Revelation

The Revelation is a theatrical convention that means to show the mechanism that makes an engineering product work during performance. When the theatrical artist/engineer shows the mechanism that makes the product work, the audience becomes more psychologically distant than if the artist/engineer employed the Magical convention. The audience knows - they are reminded - that they are in the theatre. The patron breaks away from the theatrical story to some extent. The emotional involvement is consequently diminished.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a production wants the audience to primarily think. Theatrical artists/engineers use the Revelation to help keep the patron from being completely emotionally engaged with the performance so the patron can more easily focus on an experience that strikes the intellect. Piscator (1893-1966) and then Brecht (1891-1956) wanted to do this. Brockett explains that Brecht

wished to assign audiences an active role in the theatre by making them watch critically rather than passively. Consequently, he arrived at the concept of "alienation" (verfremdungseffekt), or making stage events sufficiently strange that the spectator will ask questions about them. To create this thoughtful contemplation and to prevent the spectator from confusing stage events with real-life events, Brecht wanted theatrical means (such as lighting instruments, musicians, scene changes) to be visible and as simple as possible.(1)

The negative possibility of the Revelation theatrical convention happens when the audience is so accustomed to seeing the mechanism that makes things work, that they come to the theatre for the excitement of watching the machinery. By then, the focus has shifted off of the story and onto the engineering product. Throughout history, this has happened from time to time. There seems to be a relationship between a focus on the play and the characters and a focus on the machinery that makes things work. When audience expectation shifts too much to the machinery, then the quality of playwriting seems to suffer.

  1. Oscar Brockett, History of the Theatre, 8th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999) 469.

© Debra Bruch 2005