The Concept of the Paratheatrical

Abstract

We live in the age of the para: para-this, para-that, parapsychological, paramedical, paratheatrical. Traditional classifications of human activity are not adequate to contain our behaviors, and we try to convert borderline areas into more or less legitimate classes of acts. All that is solid melts into air, as Marx said in The Communist Manifesto. We push, bend, and overlap our categories, but we are not quite sure what they contain and what they exclude. We improvise with the paramilitary, for example, to-capture strange activity. How about a man who is recruited through Soldier of Fortune magazine to fight in a revolutionary band in a foreign nation? What is his status? When he kills is this murder or killing in the line of duty? It depends on the matter of legitimacy, and this is just what is in question. The most intriguing of the para's is, I believe, the paratheatrical. In a certain way it is even the most disquieting. For when we extend the idea of the theatrical beyond its traditional confines of artistic performance we are crossing the line which divides fiction from fact and attempting to apply categories of fiction to the domain of fact. What is a human activity which is an artistic performance? An essential feature of this activity is that it be bounded and protected by a playing area of some sort. The boundaries are spatial, temporal, and cultural, and they radically limit the influences which can pass between events in the playing area and events in the outside world. Nothing is to occur in the playing area which generates consequences in the outside that are considered there to be illegal or seriously destructive. Thus a murder which occurs as an event between characters in a play is not to involve the death of the person who enacts the murdered character, for, obviously, this person is expected to continue to exist in the larger world. Likewise, nothing is to happen in the outside or in the audience which intervenes in the play's world in a way which is considered destructive of it. Thus the playing area is sealed off from the outside in ways which are sufficient to call what occurs there a fiction. However, the sealing is far from total, and much factual reality is involved in creating the fiction.