**5. Conclusions**

That drama and religion connect through ritual must be qualified by the observation that theatrical drama comes into its own only when it is no longer ritual but, say, entertainment or education.<sup>56</sup> Even when 'to entertain' deepens to 'discern attentively,' the ritual-drama relation can be a puzzle. Does ritual discern? Does entertainment ritualize? Well, 'both,' or 'sometimes,' no doubt. That issue aside, this essay proposes to understand religious dimensions in theatrical drama through concepts of limit. Limit experiences and questions speak to orientations and disorientations toward 'the real' as they become pertinent to theatre, ritual, and religious traditions. Metatheatrical relations can lead us to explore where embodied worlds and horizons meet, differentiate, overlap, and make claims on us. Theatrical drama invites, even impels, us to discern limits and 'otherwise' possibilities of life, together.

Metatheatre-3 is probably the hardest case for my claim, even though the mode registers the "histrionic sensibility"<sup>57</sup> of human experience. Namely, that (1) we 'play' or are 'played' by multiple social-personal roles and parts; (2) we enjoy imitating, for others, such play; and (3) we especially enjoy witnessing and learning from theatrical imitations. The word *histrionic* signals the problem. As with much theatre lingo transferred to life, it is pejorative, suggestive of feigned hyperbolic emotion, insincerity, or inauthenticity. The opposite insight, though equally old—that by rehearsing social parts to the point of in-habiting them we become who we are with and for one another—does not seem so quickly to come to mind. I sense antitheatrical bias in some performance theory that would expose a cultural achievement or some purported universal as being *merely* a power-inflected construct or illusion. Universals, however, straddle the difference between limit-to and limit-of. As Plato and Aristotle differently argued, universals are immanent in our particular constructs of experience, yet also transcend them, making our meanings finitely shareable. Metatheatricality explores this straddling of the limits 'to' and 'of' shared experience. Yet an unacknowledged preference for solitary authenticity is detectable in "Putting It Together." Most of its characters not only assume we should have no illusions, but that it would be better if our lives, somehow, were *not* contingently and artificially constructed, even though we know better. Ambivalent critiques of this sort neglect to explore possibilities of honestly collaborative constructs, in social life or in art. A construct can point beyond itself and give rise to feeling and thought.

Metatheatricality in *Our Town* can also seem antitheatrical in its minimalism. ("There's some scenery for those of you who think they have to have scenery.") Wilder's claim, however, is that by minimizing the smoke and mirrors and allowing us to see how they actually work, the play substantiates the universals it hopes we acknowledge but cannot 'see.' That is, life-transcending value—immanent "way down deep" in every moment and nexus of life—is made real through discernment and bodily proximity. We are to feel the weight of universals pressing on our skin as we are side by side with people constructing and querying them. In *Sunday in the Park*, the emphases on constructing and deconstructing are more elaborate; the play's bravura design both minimizes and maximizes the 'magic of theatre' and risks 'shorting out.' But in so doing, it reveals and values limits and possibilities in different ways than *Our Town*.

*Our Town* was so metaphysically confident in inherent, quotidian value that it could leave the ultimate limit-of unarticulated. We know only that as we wean from the cares of this world (limit-to), we await and prepare for "something" eternal. If, like Emily, the dead in their in-between state choose to see their finite interrelationships *sub specie aeternitatis*, it can be devastating, unless with a saint's eye or poet's. By contrast, Act II of *Sunday in the Park* has little metaphysical confidence as it exposes the pragmatics that puts art together. Yet Act I, which also shows art to be socially as well as aesthetically constructed,<sup>58</sup> does have confidence in ordinary perception. It is in the eye and ear (limit-to) that

<sup>56</sup> See Friedrich 1983.

<sup>57</sup> Driver's phrase (1970), p. 262; his point is that technological modernity loses this impulse, to the detriment of drama.

<sup>58</sup> McLaughlin 2016, p. 155.

the performative universals—design, tension, harmony—mix to manifest the plethora of possibilities (limit-of). There, as the play ends on the island, a simpler magic of theatre allows us see, with George, a transcending 'more': Dot enters, *there* and *now*, across times and spaces. *Sunday in the Park* is confident that those among the living will perceive possibilities of love and art in the moving 'now,' *sub species aeternitatis et theatrum*.

Oh—just as I had a notion for restaging the *Grand Jatte* tableau at the end of Act II, I have one for the Chromolume. Be apophatic. Do not show the machine, not even its piercing lasers or dancing dots.<sup>59</sup> Just show the faces of the guests being illuminated by light—I suggest a wash of bright but calm light, with quieter music—as they make of the Chromolume what they will, differently. Let their faces show the limits and possibilities of that new story.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
