The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment

by Bess Rowen

What is the purpose of a stage direction? These italicized lines written in between the lines of spoken dialogue tell us a great deal of information about a play's genre, mood, tone, visual setting, cast of characters, and more. Yet generations of actors have been taught to cross these words out as records of previous performances or signs of overly controlling playwrights, while scholars have either treated them as problems to be solved or as silent lines of dialogue. Stage directions can be all of these things, and yet there are examples from over one-hundred years of American playwriting that show that stage directions can also be so much more. The Lines Between the Lines focuses on how playwrights have written stage directions that engage readers, production team members, and scholars in a process of embodied creation in order to determine meaning. Author Bess Rowen calls the products of this method “affective stage directions” because they reach out from the page and affect the bodies of those who encounter them. Affective stage directions do not tell a reader or production team what a given moment looks like, but rather how a moment feels. In this way, these stage directions provide playgrounds for individual readers or production teams to make sense of a given moment in a play based on their own individual cultural experience, geographic location, and identity-markers. Affective stage directions enable us to check our assumptions about what kinds of bodies are represented on stage, allowing for a greater multitude of voices and kinds of embodied identity to make their own interpretations of a play while still following the text exactly. The tools provided in this book are as useful for the theater scholar as they are for the theater audience member, casting director, and actor. Each chapter covers a different function of stage directions (spoken, affective, choreographic, multivalent, impossible) and looks at it through a different practical lens (focusing on actors, directors, designers, dramaturgs, and readers). Every embodied person will have a slightly different understanding of affective stage directions, and it is precisely this diversity that makes these stage directions crucial to understanding theater in our time.

258 pages, Paperback

Published October 18, 2021

About the author

Bess Rowen, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She coined the term "affective stage directions," which are stage directions written in ways that engage the physical and emotional responses of future theatre makers. She earned her PhD in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY and her MA in Performance Studies from NYU. While at CUNY, she was the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Public Humanities as well as a Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship. She is a member of Actors' Equity Association and has studied acting at Michael Howard Studios, The Berkshire Theatre Festival, and The Gaiety School of Acting in Ireland. She also works as an Intimacy Choreographer. Her article “Undigested Reading: Rethinking Stage Directions Through Affect” can be found in the September 2018 volume of Theatre Journal, which was also covered in Episode 27 of "On TAP: A Theatre & Performance Studies Podcast."

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are many scholarly reviews available for this excellent book, so I will just say that I love the way in which Dr. Rowen provides both a theoretical framework for looking at and understanding affective stage directions, and practical actionable ways that this framework can be applied in the classroom and on stage. It's rare to see such a well balanced scholarly theatre book that understands and clearly communicates both theory and practice.

[Sarah McKinney · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Bess Rowen gives great insight to the modern idea of stage directions, their versatility, and importance, her book is a dense read. If her book was not required for a course, I would not have made it past the introduction, which is more of a first chapter. In fact I wasn't able to fully absorb her writings until the 3rd chapter. This is not a quick nor easy read, however it will change how you view and utilize stage directions as a reader, director, designer, and actor.