Jamie: Blog 1

Early on in Witmore’s “Phatic Metadrama…” he mentions that “children’s proverbial cognitive incompleteness, sexual immaturity, proclivity for mimicry, and appetitive absorption…came to invest child actors with extraordinary symbolic power as exemplars of the theater’s unique capacity to affect its audience at a distance” (96).  Although animals do not necessarily share all of the above facets that Witmore posits were historically ascribed to children, Sandy’s first appearance in theAnnie Jr. clip certainly suggests that they too have an extraordinary power to affect audiences (something which calls to mind the famous quip in which W.C. Fields also linked the two).  I’m curious about what precise qualities children and animals possess that frequently engender such affective responses in audiences.  Do some of the items enumerated by Witmore in the context of English children’s theater of the 1600s still hold true for us today?  Might it be that underlying all the cheers and applause captured on the video is an unspoken assumption that a child actor would not know how to handle the situation “like a pro” (cognitive incompleteness?) and thus delight can be taken upon the comical reversal of such expectations?  Interestingly, several of the YouTube user comments responding to the video are more focused on the experience of the dog (one expresses concern that the animal was frightened and even declares “It is a good thing I wasn't there, I would told the audience to SHUT UP!”).  Clearly not all highly affective responses are of a piece and it would seem that the mere presence of animals and children can lead to the raising of certain ethical concerns (mildly voiced, but voiced all the same) even in an innocuous context such as this.  This too would suggest that audiences continue to see children and animals in different categories—as they do in life—that become all the more obvious in the context of the stage.