DEFINITIONS, SHERRY KRAMER

Sherry is teaching a class that rests largely on the idea of metaphor.

One of her principle assumptions is that theater is AUDIENCE-centric, that whatever we do onstage is really about Making Something Happen in the Audience. She thinks that there should always be hope in the room...not sure what that means yet, but I'm putting it here anyway, to think about later. These are some definitions she threw us on the first day of class.

Metaphor: To transfer or carry. A fusion chamber creating fresh comprehensions of the world. A transfer of ENERGY, a sharing of POWER, part of a system.

in my words: When one thing becomes a way of talking about something else, and that substitution asks you to rethink both. A juxtaposition.

Symbol: Represents or suggests another thing because of a relationship or convention. Unlike metaphor, there's no surprise, no doubleness in a symbol. There is already a clear relationship, because of our own pre-existing understandings or assumptions, between signifier or signified.

So actually, over time, metaphor can BECOME symbol. Think, for instance, of the broken-horned unicorn in THE GLASS MENAGERIE. By now, we all know that as a symbol of broken dreams, lost hope, etc. But when Williams wrote the play, it still operated on the level of metaphor, where those connections were new, surprising (and as a result probably MORE poignant).

Then there's ALLEGORY: "arbitrarily assigning meaning to things" -- meaning, says Sherry, is the "heaviest thing there is -- flattening and collapsing dramatic arc wherever it lands...so bring in the meaning at the end, or folks are going to say "oh, the play's about X" and stop paying attention.

All interesting to think on.