**2. Limit Experience and Metatheatre 1, 2, 3**

Metatheatre, in plays as written and as performed, is a matter of encountering limits and crossing boundaries. So metatheatre lends itself, prima facie, to limit dimensions in experiences construed as

<sup>2</sup> Tracy 1975, pp. 92–103.

<sup>3</sup> A central issue in religion and arts is *how* a work with specific genre traits—a lyric poem, painting, novel, sculpture, oratorio—generates effects (aesthetic, affective, semantic) *through its form* (actually a hybrid of forms) at intersections with religion. Elsewhere I sketch approaches to religion and art to keep 'in play'—phenomenological, hermeneutical, historical, and deconstructive—in my "Religion and Literature: Four Theses and More" (Bouchard 2009). The present essay elaborates my suggestion that metatheatre can link drama to religion via limit questions, such as "Why theatre?" or "Why humanity?" in "Dramatic Ways of Being Religious" (Bouchard 2014).

<sup>4</sup> Abel 1963, 2003.

<sup>5</sup> See Konkle, 2018, on *Our Town* and *The Skin of Our Teeth* "as Proto-Postmodern Drama." He cites Mudasir 2011: "[P]ostmodern drama foregrounds the notion of 'self-reflexive referentiality'" (nearly a definition of metatheatre).

<sup>6</sup> McLaughlin 2016.

<sup>7</sup> McLaughlin understands Sondheim musicals to be contextualized by postmodernism (p. 27), with *Sunday in the Park* also reclaiming the realism of how artifice can capture "the dynamic, fluid chaotic world" (p. 167).

religious, spiritual, moral, sacred, numinous, mysterious, and the like. Tracy does not define religion as limit but notices that where we find religion, howsoever defined, we tend to find limit phenomena.

Easiest to visualize are *limit questions*, which ask about conditions for the possibility of the domain from which the question arises. For instance, "Why physics?" can be asked *within* physics if the *why* seeks a causal (physical-mathematical) explanation. Yet "Why physics?" asks about the conditions for the possibility of physical causation itself; it is a question about the very meaning of physics and thus points beyond its limit or horizon. Diagram physics as a circle, and the question can be an arrow starting from within physics and arcing over the limit into an undefined area. Queries like "Why chemistry?" point to physics, the limit-of chemistry, for their terms are congruent. Whereas "Why physics?" would require different language altogether (philosophical, mythical, poetic). Tracy takes up another question, "Why morality" or "Why be ethical?" Again, the terms come from ethics, so the question is not meaningless in its domain, yet its arrow points 'beyond' ethical discourse. "[W]e cannot really produce a moral argument for being moral."<sup>8</sup>

For Tracy, two sorts of experiences go with limit questions. We can construe "limit-to" as encountering a given domain's horizon from within. It is a felt as well as logical limit; "why keep promises?" pushes us up *to* a sense of morality's edge. Yet "limit-of" experiences infer an 'other side' *of* the limit, now felt as a horizon opening into ontological uncertainty. Logically odd forms of language often accompany religious limit-of experiences: symbol, metaphor, myth, prophecy, mysticism, articulating beliefs or practices purporting to 'answer' limit-to questions. In Christianity, grace (limit-of) transforms situations of sin and finitude (limit-to). In Hinduism, *moksha* (experienced as limit-of) releases one from the karmic cycle of births and deaths, *samsara* (limit-to). By itself, however, the logic of limit does not necessitate that limit-of experiences be liberating, transformative, or trust filling. A symbolism 'beyond the limit' might bode nemesis, chaos, threat, tragic fate, and undermine 'basic trust' in reality.<sup>9</sup>

Metatheatre's 'limits' need not be religious or mysterious and rarely make us ponder 'conditions for the possibility' of theatre. Metatheatre wants to delight and intrigue. But its analogy to limit experience is in the play-within-a-play structure. Since the outer play frames the inner play, it is like the limit-of area beyond the inner play. The world of *Hamlet* frames "The Murder of Gonzago," or "Mousetrap." The world of *Our Town* frames George and Emily's wedding. *Sunday in the Park with George* is more complex. From one angle, the Chromolume device in Act II, an electronic light sculpture, is limit-of for the pointillist painting from Act I, simply because the Chromolume 'refers' to (projects images or impressions from) Georges Seurat's *A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte*. From another angle, it is the painting—source of Act I's characters—that frames *Sunday in the Park*. The musical is figuratively a play within a painting, which is literally a painting within this play.<sup>10</sup> Yet metatheatre is not always a play within a play. When the Stage Manager tells us about *Our Town*, *we* become the frame of this play, indicative of its 'beyond,' and participate—more than audiences usually do—in its limit-of dimension. The "our" of the title, like the "in" and "with" of *Sunday in the Park with George*, signals our being incorporated into these worlds while remaining at a distance from them, at their limits.

It may well be that all theatrical drama is implicitly metatheatrical. Theatre demarcates and crosses differences between show and non-show, appearance and reality, script and performance,

<sup>8</sup> Tracy 1975, p. 102; his analyses of limit credit philosopher Stephen Toulmin on the issue.

<sup>9</sup> On Tracy and limit-of, see Shapiro 1983, pp. 6–7. On the tragic vision: see Ricoeur 1967, pp. 211–31. For Victor Turner in "Betwixt and Between," Turner 1967, liminality in rituals and social dramas can involve dangerous passages across limits, passages often framed by religious or quasi-religious lore. See his also his analysis of 'social dramas' and the story of Thomas Becket (Turner 1974, pp. 60–97).

<sup>10</sup> The play also recapitulates meta aspects of the painting. On the 10' <sup>×</sup> 6.5' painting itself, see Herbert and Harris 2004, cited further below. McLaughlin 2016, p. 154, observes that as the play begins, it shows that Seurat, the figures he composes, and "the audience, are always both inside and outside the painting."

stage spaces and other spaces, show time and other times,<sup>11</sup> persons playing persons and persons playing roles. Nevertheless, metatheatre becomes a more distinctive feature when it intensifies our awareness of such crossings and stimulates thought and feeling. I have found it useful to distinguish three overlapping sorts of metatheatre:

*Metatheatre-1* (MT-1) comprises times when a play or performance more-or-less explicitly refers to itself, as with Wilder's Stage Manager and Vivian in Margaret Edson's *Wit*. Shakespeare's soliloquies and asides play as MT-1, inviting us into the play or into a character's (or actor's) 'theatre of the mind.' Brecht's alienation effects and placards can be MT-1 in *Galileo* ("You will not resent, we hope, The truth about his telescope"12); so too the numbers or songs in musicals. MT-1 ('breaking the fourth wall,' though all metatheatre does that) makes apparent the limit or edge of the play's 'world.' The audience is made distant yet close to this edge; in effect, we become part of the play's limit-of.<sup>13</sup> Sometimes, a play's edge draws attention to limits and horizons of our worlds—or such reflecting may happen simply as a matter of course.

*Metatheatre-2* includes other edges: performances within performances, the outer becoming limit-of for the inner. Plays-within inevitably mirror the framing play and, again, can evoke questions about limit dimensions in our worlds—as with *Hamlet*. In staging Mousetrap, Hamlet is testing both his uncle's moral guilt (limit-to) and the nature of the Ghost ("spirit of health or goblin damned"—limit-of). In Suzan-Lori Park's *Venus*, the exhibitions (theatrical and 'scientific') of Saartjie Baartman also fit MT-2. So may performances other than theatrical in a story: thus Nora's dancing the Tarantella to distract her husband in Ibsen's *Doll's House*. Trial scenes can be MT-2, such as the mock trial in *Lear*. The sheep deception in the medieval Second Shepherds' Play looks like MT-2. So does Dionysus in Euripides' *Bacchae*, when he tells us he is a god impersonating a mortal; we are in MT-1 and near MT-2.

*Metatheatre-3* is less straightforward. It draws attention to theatrical and performative dimensions of ordinary life, where "life is a dream" (Calderon) or "all the world's a stage" (Shakespeare). The world stage includes 'parts we play' and social or vocational roles, often overlapping and hybridized, with codes and ideologies.<sup>14</sup> Every role, action, and reception implies a temporal-social-cultural world of limits and horizons, surpassable and unsurpassable.<sup>15</sup> MT-3 also spotlights performative action: 'effective' speech and gestures such as promising, confessing, embracing, performed for others to interact with or witness.<sup>16</sup> MT-3 stages the performance metaphors so frequently applied to ordinary life. While social dramas (Turner) can be represented by plays within, MT-2, they may figure as MT-3, where persons improvise parts in political conflict, as in T. S. Eliot's *Murder in the Cathedral* and Wole Soyinka's *Death and the King's Horseman*.

Since we all inhabit potentially conflicted roles, with more integrity or less; and since drama purports to represent us all; and since theatre and performance are 'in' the worlds drama mirrors,<sup>17</sup> then with MT-3 we see the convergence of metatheatre with the theatrical generally. To be sure, this third category is vaguer. Perhaps to qualify as metatheatre, theatre-like moments from life must be made noticeable in the plot or text. Yet distinguishing 1, 2, and 3 is not the point. The point is that the

<sup>11</sup> See Gillespie 2019, on "showtime," referring to running time and time as experienced in a play/performance's world. *Our Town* ends at "Eleven o'clock in Grover's Corners," just when an eight o'clock three-act show would end.

<sup>12</sup> *Galileo*, Brecht 1966, p. 55.

<sup>13</sup> In his appreciation of Calderon's metatheatrical allegorical play, *The Great Theatre of the World* (1635), Hans Urs Von Balthasar 1988, pp. 19–20, 163–66, observes that God occupies all niches of the theatrical limit-of: author, director, audience (and in Christ the decisive, though invisible actor).

<sup>14</sup> On performative selves, see Goffman 1959; Butler 1990; and also Bakhtin 1981, on hybridized social speech in the novel. <sup>15</sup> On theatre expressing pluralistic 'worlds,' see Quigley 1985. Of Yeats' play, *The Countess Cathleen*, Quigley writes, "The sense of remoteness and distance is one that is registered by the implied universality of the world motif. [. . .] We are invited to stand with Cathleen *inside* her world and contemplate *from within* the notion of its distant and remote horizons" (p. 9).

<sup>16</sup> J. L. Austin's *How to Do Things with Words* (Austin 1962) is a text usually in the background of discussions of performativity.

<sup>17</sup> On theatrical drama mirroring itself, see what Driver 1970, calls "theatrical positivism," pp. 348, 375–76.

limits-to and limits-of personal and communal existence are *disclosed* and *explored*, delightfully and critically, 'at' and 'in' and 'through' the limits of theatrical drama.<sup>18</sup>
