1. First, just a quick thought on Dorothy's point about the girl in the Annie, Jr. clip and what it suggests about the current training (and treatment) of child actors. She, I think rightly, states, “In a different context, an older actor might make a snide comment, something to provide a little wink to the audience that, yes, perhaps an untrained dog was a bad idea.” This observation seems to assume something about the different way child and adult actors are trained. That child actor's training is, perhaps, somehow less complete or that they are given less complicated instructions? If the director’s pre-curtain line to the child is simply “stick with it” (no matter what the dog does), and the line to the adult actor includes more complicated instructions about how to handle uncontrollable situations through improvisation, are we still treating our child actors (and, maybe to reach further, children in general) as “cognitively incomplete” (Witmore 102)?
2. I'd also like to pull together some comments from Iris' and Cody's responses. Iris observed that the dog pulled her out of the illusion of the play: “I'm no longer immersed in the story, I'm watching the middleman, the dog- who doesn't comment on the show like George or Nell, but just as constantly reminds me that I'm watching a play.” I had this same sense while watching the clip and it definitely suggests that moments of semiotic excess that cause actors to essentially lose control of the play have the dangerous potential to break down the entire illusion of the theatrical apparatus. Kelly’s responding question, then, becomes particularly pertinent: why do we keep doing it? Or, more specifically, why are there so few versions of Annie that use a fake dog?
To begin to answer this, I want to turn to Cody's use of States: “No longer is the dog merely an illusory image of another dog—that dog is a dog.” As States argues, “The illusion has suddenly become a field of play, of ‘what if’? The illusion has introduced something into itself to demonstrate its tolerance of things. The illusion has stolen something from the world in order to display its own power" (States 34). By saying, “I
can choose to include a dog and deal with whatever comes from that choice” illusion invests itself with
an incredible amount of versatility, essentially with the power to overcome the real. In accepting part
of “the real” or “the natural” into its artifice, the illusion dares itself to overcome any indication that this thing (or animal) is “real.” The important thing, I think, for theater, is that we, as the audience, want it to do that. Why do we keep putting the dog on stage? Because we can’t wait to see that one performance of Annie where the dog “performs”
perfectly. Where the theatrical illusion has become so powerful that it is able to control the uncontrollable.
But does this potential desire turn us into the very antithesis of Brecht's "audience of the scientific age?" And is there something slightly shaming about wanting to be put into such a powerful trance (so powerful that even the dog becomes swept up into it) in a post-Brechtian age of theater?
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