One moment that I found to be an
interesting example of theatricality in To
Kill a Mockingbird was the moment when, during the trial, it is revealed
that Tom Robinson’s left hand is crippled. The theatricality (in Tracy Davis’s
sense of the word) of this moment functioned, for me, on numerous different
levels. At the moment in the trial where the audiences, both of the trial
onstage and the play itself, find out that Tom’s hand is crippled it seemed
surprising to me that I hadn’t noticed earlier the strange way that he was
holding his hand. Was he holding it like that throughout the entire trial
scene? Or does he emphasize it only at the moment of revelation? Because that
feature only becomes noticeable when it is revealed to the audience, I do not
know the answer to this question. Instead, it becomes interesting as a
representation of the actor’s skill in playing his part. The crippled hand
provides a nice intersection between ideas of skilled acting and skilled
casting. It seemed safe to assume that the actor’s hand was not actually
crippled and functioned normally, yet there was no way to actually know that at
this point. So the acting seemed well done because the actor was able to make
his body seem like another man’s body, a man with a crippled hand. Yet would he
seem as good of an actor if his hand was actually crippled? Where does the
skill of the ruse lie? This moment, because it is about the actor’s body as an
object reveals these inconsistencies in the ways that we evaluate quality in
acting. It seems that the actor is able to represent what a crippled hand would
actually look like, and so we, like the onstage audience, get to feel the
surprise of the moment of revelation.
This moment is further complicated
(as it seems most moments in the play would be) by the curtain bow that occurs
after the end of the play but before the audience leaves. At this time, you see
the actor who played Tom Robinson bowing and waving, with full use of both
hands. Now we know that he was a good actor and that his representation of his
crippled hand was acting. This
strange moment at the end of the play where we see the actors, still dressed as
their characters but out of character, seems to reinforce the fact that all
that came before was acting and that these people, if their prior performance
was convincing, are good actors because we can now see that they were in fact
acting all along. The body of the actor seems to be an important site at which to explore these questions.
1 comment:
This is an interesting observation, Courtney. While reading the book and watching the filmic version, this issue of the performance of Tom's crippled hand isn't exactly paramount and, indeed, the revelation of this characteristic is a far more significant plot point. One of my addendums to this line of analysis is the issue of narrative voice/perspective. The book and, to a lesser extent, the performance both present the diegesis as mediated through the memory and voice of an older (adult) Scout. Accordingly, we are reading and seeing events take place as they are recalled (technically) by a heterodiegetic, and far from omniscient, narrator, meaning that there are bound to be numerous, descriptive gaps within the narrative discourse. But, of course, a theatrical performance can “describe” or, rather, “show” more than a written narrative—the performance may, in fact, show TOO much. If we understand the narrative’s trajectory as dictated by the narrative voice (the adult Scout), then the performances of the individual actors must conform to this narrator’s descriptive trajectory, that is, if we so desire such continuity. Otherwise, if their acting and character performances reveal more than what they “should,” we would receive an odd moment of metalepsis or diegetic contradiction—though, the latter seems inevitable given the medium of the theatre. As such—and I think this is what you are getting at—the actor’s over-performing of Tom’s hand reveals or could reveal that there are always multiple narrative and/or authorial "voices" funtioning in a theatrical performance--the original author’s, the director’s, the actor’s/actors’, etc.--and that theses multiple voices will probably contradict.
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