Three Dimensions of the Fourth Wall

Garrett Wood Mark Easby Writing 121 11/3/11 Essay Number 2

The heroic detective has just walked in to a dark and spacious warehouse- he looks around warily, sees nothing. He continues to walk, step by step, further into the darkness, when suddenly there enters a second man, from stage left- the gaunt and sinister murderer, fugitive from justice, holding his signature chefs knife. The killer prowls without making a sound and walks right up behind the detective; he is close enough to smell him. The audience is hanging on the edge of their seats. With only a moments hesitation, the killer lunges, brings his arm around the detective, and stabs him. The detective gasps and lurches forward, but then, against all expectation, he looks toward the men and women in the aisles, making eye contact with several of the theatre-goers. He coughs, and opens his mouth to speak. Why did no one warn me I was being followed?! He asks the audience, before keeling over melodramatically. The detective has just broken the 4th wall. In what Oscar G. Brockett, a theater historian from the University of Texas, describes as the three-walled environment shared by theater, film and television, the 4th wall is a transparent one through which the audience voyeuristically looks. [1] In other words, it is an

imaginary wall an audience puts between itself and the separate reality of the fictional characters found on the stage or screen. Denis Diderot, a French philosopher and art critic who lived in the 18th century, wrote critically about the French theatre of his time. In doing so, he provided some of the earliest advocation for natural acting and staging. He suggested that the actors go about their business as if they were really doing what they pretended to do, behind an invisible fourth wall. [2] For the sake of clarity, divide the breaking of the fourth wall into 3 different layers of security, the first being concrete. When actors on a stage remain entirely within the confines of their world, without acknowledging the audience, the fourth wall is concrete. The second, intermediary level of security occurs when the fourth wall is a little loose, or malleable. In this environment, the actors may reference the existence of the audience, or acknowledge that they are fictional entities. The third level, when the wall is most broken, occurs when the actors engage the audience directly, or even interact with them. These varying levels of fourth wall security may be used to wrest a variety of different emotions and reactions from an audience, to heightened comedic and dramatic ends. Firstly, there is the concrete fourth wall. Plays and bits of media with a realist perspective and a fully intact fourth wall have become common enough in the 2 recent centuries that a piece of art which fits the bill is more like part of a non-category; it often goes unsaid that a fictions fourth wall is intact. Often only when a work deviates from this norm does there typically follow an acknowledgement, but such a work is easily identifiable by the lack of direct acknowledgement of the audience. August Wilson, in his 1983 play about the emerging black experience of the 1950s, Fences, employs a consistent fourth wall, in a consistently well-defined

three. The extent of the play takes place in a single and familiar location, the somewhat unkempt front yard of its protagonist, Troy Maxson. The stark and fourth-wall heavy realism leads his play to be immersive and engaging. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria that said, regarding the role of a certain level of realism in his works, [] it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination

that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.[3] The next level of removal from a strict fourth wall occurs when characters may acknowledge the existence of an audience, writer, or reader, acknowledging their fictional status. Often this is played for laughs. In one of the earliest known examples, Aristophanes, the ancient Greek playwright, has the protagonist of his play Peace hoisted upon a giant dung beetle into the sky. The original set design called for a crane operator to hoist him, and this protagonist Trygaeus acknowledges this by telling him to be more careful: Ah! Machinist, take great care of me. There is already a wind whirling round my navel; take great care or, from sheer fright, I shall form food for my beetle.... [4] Finally comes the fully broken fourth wall, when the border between actor and character becomes blurred, as the onstage players interact directly with the audience, not just acknowledging them with a reference but with direct contact. William Shakespeare uses this technique in his drama Othello to put across tragic irony that would otherwise not be so obvious-

Iago, the silver-tongued villain, lets us know in confidence just how he plans to manipulate Othello; this communication bypasses dialogue to show the audience directly the inner thoughts and feelings of Iago, showing what could not be shown with dialogue, as he hides some of his secrets from all he encounters. In addition to lines delivered by characters, Fourth-wall breaking can take the form of actions taking actors outside of the established stage area. In a Copenhagen production of 1967s Hair, a musical about the 60s counterculture, the actors, thinking the nude scene in the script too tame, walked in the nude up and down the aisles of chairs during the shows prelude. [5] While not directly affecting the plot, the already controversial nude content in combination with the invasively close proximity of actors to audience heightened the controversy, as the audience was confronted with nudity. The thoroughly broken fourth wall helped to push the boundaries of public decency and the attentions of the onlookers. The fourth wall, when present, serves to contain a portrait of a place, time and people, separate and distinct from the onlookers. The lack of disruption helps the audience to maintain the suspension of their disbelief, allowing the imagined piece of world to appear as real. The same wall when mitigated can serve a comic end by absurdly combining the fictional in-world circumstance of a character with the tangible world around us, jarring themselves out of seriousness. The fourth wall, when its pants have been removed so that we may laugh at its state of undress, can have an equal and opposite immersing effect to the method of a containing fourth wall; it can let characters tell us directly just what is going on in their minds, and force us to acknowledge elements of the production by showing them to us rather than only presenting from a distance these elements for observation. Each stage of reality-centrism can be employed for a multitude of reasons.

Breaking the fourth wall, even as I do it right now in the first sentence of the last paragraph of my research paper, is a technique both novel in the reactions of mental immersion it produces, and time-honored in the sheer age of its continued use from ancient Greece into modern cinema. Even as I am about to finish the last sentence of this paper, I feel the technique is here to stay.

WORKS CITED [4] Aristophanes. Peace. The Internet Classics Archive. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. n.d. Web. 11/3/2011. [1] Brockett, Oscar. The Theatre: An Introduction New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,1969. Print. [3] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Sas.upenn.edu. University of Pennsylvania. n.d. Web, 11/03/2011. [5] Horn, Barbara Lee. The Age of Hair: Evolution and the Impact of Broadway's First Rock Musical. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Print. [2]Stevenson, John. Playbacktheatre.org. Center for playback theatre. n.d, Web. 11/03/2011.