Dancing at Lughnasa: Unexcused Absence

Abstract

Though the memory play represents an increasingly familiar and substantial sub-genre of drama, its conventions — and what might be called its "ontology" — have generally avoided direct scrutiny. By asking the audience to accept the framing narrator's substantiality, but to take the other characters as aspects of that narrator's memory, the memory play poses something of a metaphysical puzzle: namely, how to account for our ability to see into the world of the narrator's memory. Do we assume some telepathic contact with the narrator, or does he possess the ability to make the objects of his memory materialize? Admittedly, similar questions were raised about how the audience at a Shakespearean drama could account for being so swiftly transported across the Mediterranean, and were famously dismissed as shortsightedly pedantic by Samuel Johnson. One of the most often noted hallmarks of modem drama, however, is the employment of metatheatrical techniques that implicitly or explicitly challenge spectators to a conscious examination of their assumptions toward what they observe behind the curtain.