Insight and Change:
Anagnoresis and Peripeteia
By Joel Plotkin
This material is made publicly available by the Centre for Playback Theatre and
remains the intellectual property of its author.
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Insight and Change
Anagnoresis and Peripeteia
This is a much-abbreviated version of an article I wrote in 1995 for the then-new
Applied and Interactive Theater Guide, revised to focus on Playback Theater. I had been
visiting workshops and conferences of several action methods: drama therapy,
psychodrama, theater of the oppressed, and I had been working with a company that
used structured improvisation for workplace training. I was excited by the
commonalities I found among the different practitioners, and concerned about the lack
of interaction among practitioners of the different modalities.
I looked for a way to show that these forms were, in fact, theater as I had known,
practiced, and defined it since college. I found in the classic by Aristotle, The Poetics,
elements and terms that were useful. Free yourself from prejudices about Aristotle,
largely engendered by the Renaissance and Neo-classical theorists who used him as a
club to punish innovation, but also echoed by Brecht and Boal, who associate him with
dreadful and drippy well-made plays.
See him simply as an amazingly perceptive communication theorist who, as one of the
15,000 audience members in the Theater of Dionysus, managed to get many things right
in trying to understand the power of the most influential communications medium of
his time. Here are some of his observations:
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain
magnitude; in language embellished with each type of artistic ornament, the several
kinds being found in several parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative;
through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions
Aristotle, The Poetics, Book VI, ll.2-3 (tr. S. H. Butcher)
Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality:
namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song.
Book VI, l.7
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For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in
action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.
Book VI, l. 9
the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy, i.e.,Peripeteia or Reversal
of the Situation, and Recognition scenes, are part of the plot.
Book VI, l. 13
Here is my effort at rewriting these to account for contemporary action methods:
Theater, whether in its several literary genres(1) or its non-scripted,
improvisational forms(2), is both an imitation of human interaction(3) and
an exemplar(4) of human interaction--between and among characters,
performers, audience, and community. Its grammar is language,
movement, spectacle, relationship, and emotion, configured through
empathy(5) and suspense(6) to both depict and to create a powerful
experience(7) of Awareness or Insight(8) , and a subsequent Reversal or
Change(9), potentiated by the group mass and its sharings(10). Emotion in
theater is transformed from its experiential rawness, distanced and
rendered a safer savor(11) of the original, so that audience and performers
can balance between complete involvement(12)and aesthetic distance (13),
dipping now one way, then the other.
(1) Tragedy, comedy, tragico-comical-historical-pastoral, etc.
(2) Playback, TO, Improv, psychodrama, etc.
(3) On stage
(4) i.e., theater is REAL, not a mirror
(5) Pity
(6) Fear
(7) Catharsis
(8) Anagnoresis
(9) Peripeteia
(10) Crowd effect, pheromones, knowledge of current events or context
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(11) rasa, in Sanskrit
(12) Rapture, loss of self, emotional transport
(13) Critical awareness, Brechtian alienation, judgment
With that as my starting point, I could reconcile my academic training and my
fascination with the new forms. The emphasis is on Insight and Change. Catharsis, the
arguable point for many theorists throughout history, is the name given to the mental
gasp that accompanies insight and change. Freed from having to wonder whether the Cword meant Purgation, Rectification, or Healthy Exercise, I had no difficulty seeing the
essence of theater both on stage and in DT or TO workshops.
I concluded my article in 1995 by saying that scripted theater was at a point of major
paradigm change, devolving into Broadway theme park spectacles and elitist regional
theater menus on the one hand, and esoteric and precious experimental performance
and conceptual art on the other. The commitment to personal and social change I saw in
the new action methods gave me more hope for the future of theater than any other
work that I saw. Committed to emotion, safety, creativity, and movement, applied and
interactive theater artists were creating a theater that would survive the aggrandizement
of drama by the sensory-rich media of film and TV, and would, indeed, surpass anything
that virtual reality could offer (In 1995, Howard Rheingold and other futurists were
telling us that VR would be a commonplace in 5 years).
Why Playback Theater?
Perhaps a story will help. In 1997, my mother was dying of uterine cancer. I had moved
down to Florida to help be with her for the last few months. For a few weeks, my family
spelled me off, and I went to Toronto for a Theater of the Oppressed conference,
organized by Mixed Company. The time away was for me a period of healing and
recharging among many wonderful people. One of the presentations was by a group of
women, many from Washington, DC, doing Playback about women and their issues.
During the opening, asked for audience input, I raised my hand first and spoke about
my mother and her impending death. I remember the microsecond of hesitation in the
leader before she called on me. I imagined her thinking: At a presentation on women,
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the first one with a hand up, of course, is a man.
Raw and hurting from my caregiving, I found the performance cathartic, an hour and a
half of insight and change. And I remember thinking that this method, so simple and
gentle, was yet one of the most powerful for the receptive audience. And how it built
receptivity into its methods. Playback remains, for me, the form I want to work with
most and most often, because of its honesty, its humility, and its strength. I feel that we,
all of us, need to look at ourselves and our world with that unique sensibility of theater,
able to teeter and dip into the realms of both immersive emotional rapture and cool,
self-aware detachment. And Playback is a fine way to help audience and performers
realize their humanity in all its complexity, diversity, and astonishment.