Page 46 [46]
BEING IN THE SITUATION — THREE RE-INTERPRETATIONS OF LTD
tension grows among characters inner voices are added. “The scene ends with
a threat of violence and the characters trapped in their isolation”.'°® In a final
task a timeline is created mapping Frank’s isolation in different moments of
the narrative.
Participants are offered the starting point of the story and can define
their interest through their interventions in and out of role, which O’Neill
picks up on and builds into the narrative. Participants constantly get
new opportunities to define their relation to the problem as it is being re¬
placed in a new task. They can float their roles almost throughout, keep to
it and develop it, or try out another stance. It is only in the second part of
the session that three specific roles are defined and work continues through
the perspectives of Frank, his son and the son’s mother. But the tasks leave
space for different members of the group to step into these roles and engage in
the problem from a distance they prefer. The structure described by O’Neill
offers the possibility of engaging with different elements of the problem
from different perspectives. While the shifts in the Frank Miller drama are
subtle, it is clear from other lessons in her book that this shift can happen
in larger steps as well. O’Neill’s drama on Little Red Riding Hood'™ starts
out in a laboratory where wolves have been taught to speak, first looking at
the problem as journalists or the wolves themselves. Later the role offered to
participants changes to that of cabinet members who need to decide about
the fate of the wolves after the sudden death of the professors leading the
secret institution. Here the pre-text of the talking animal is carried forward
while the perspective on this narrative element changes. This constant shift
in perspectives is present in other O’Neill dramas and the episodic structured
used by her offers the possibility of leaps forward or back in time, a strategy
she often employs.
The quasi-role often offered to the participants seems close to the mode of
being in the free dramatic play of children, while the dramaturgy of the drama
lesson, the forms and structure offered, is closer to theatre art. O’Neill states
that participants move between different kinds of engagement, shifting
between the five ‘categories of identification’ defined by Morgan and Saxton.°
These categories differentiate between the acting behaviour of participants in
different modes of drama; while participants are being themselves in a make¬
believe situation in dramatic playing, they have a certain perspective in
Mantle of the Expert; in roleplaying they are representing a particular point
of view; characterising means the representation of an individual lifestyle,
and acting brings about a selective use of movement, voice and gesture to
153 O’Neill: Drama Worlds, 3.
154 Ibid., 45.
155 Norah Morgan — Julianna Saxton: Teaching Drama: a mind of many wonders, London,
Hutchinson, 1987, 30.