by Albert Bermel

Many of the undergraduates who study theatre and film with me in the Bronx hold badly paid jobs all day. They take evening and Saturday courses. In high school they were steered through--indoctrinated into--novels, plays and poems but do not look back on them fondly. Few have ever looked a portrait painting in the eye or sat through a concert of anything but rock or rap. Certain teachers pounce on them for their cultural deficiencies. Certain politicians and representatives of the tax-paying and tax-evading public demand to know why ill-prepared immigrants and poor natives are given an education at a public institution, for about one-ninth of private university fees.

In a beginners' course, "The Art of the Theatre," I start with an assumption: These young and middle-aged seekers are for the most part impelled, driven. If they left college, their families would gripe less. They'd escape the accusation that they're not equal to what they set out to do. My assumption applies with even more force to those who major in the humanities when they could go for more "vocational"--mercenary and crowded--lures like accounting and business management. But the evening class of 30 or more freshmen and sophomores includes hardly any theatre majors.

It's not easy to get to know that many people who meet only once a week. Most of them remain reticent. One semester, to draw them out, I invited each student to hand in a paper of about two pages in length no later than a couple of weeks after our first class. I wanted them to recall an incident from their lives that might generate a play. Since some had never attended a theatre, I wondered if they would have any sense of what is dramatic in life. The outcome astonished me: visceral dramas, a number of them running to seven, ten, fifteen pages.

What startled me was not so much the primal (which is to say, theatrical) content of the stories, nor their personal frankness, but their forms. More than half had artistic shape. A woman whose infant died described how she stared at the tiny coffin before she moved into a flashback. Fifteen months earlier, her husband insisted they make love one night when she felt unwell. He beat her into submission. After the baby was born, her second child, she resented it. She'd hoped to go back to school. The baby proved fretful, troublesome, as though it recognized that it was unwanted. At six months of age it succumbed to crib death. The mother felt she deserved to be punished. The memory of the dying baby haunted her...and so she returned to her opening image: her remorse at the funeral, standing next to her husband as they both wept in the rain.

A young Puerto Rican woman who'd been raped at age 12 couldn't bring herself to report the two offenders to the police. Years later her sister, then pregnant, was also raped and the life of her unborn child endangered. The student tormented herself: "Whose fault is it? Mine and only mine. It's been seven years now and I still can't stop crying at night." An author who recounted repeated and unsuccessful operations to excise her kid brother's brain tumor and her parents' expense after ruinous expense added a figurative touch as she compiled a bitter metaphor of making a cake by stages, from mixing the ingredients to spreading the frosting.

If some stab of prescience had warned me to expect a formal element in the papers, I'd have looked for versions of the well-made story--exposition, complications and climactic resolution--not because this pattern is a natural one (it isn't) but because it's the stock-in-trade of pop films and TV drama, including soap opera. Yet the three forms that dominated the papers were musical: the theme and variations of orchestral and chamber music, opera's hill-and-valley profile of arias and recitative, and counterpoint.

The theme and variations appeared in the rape story as the author related, first, how she was violated; second, the assault on her sister; and third, the conviction that her spirit was raped and borne down by guilt. An aria-and-recitative, the most popular form in the papers, and one closest to epic structure, showed up in 12 stories based on conflictual encounters between the authors and such opponents as balky relatives and bureaucrats. The teenage boy's tumor, alternating with the cake-making, illustrated a counterpoint form.

If most of the students had no familiarity with classical concerts or recitals, they may have unintentionally lifted their structures from the vocal, commercial music dinned at them all the time, with its verses and choruses (arias and recitative), its insistent repetitions, sometimes modified and transposed (theme and variations), and its contrapuntal, counter-rhythmic arguments between the melody line and the "back-up."

I don't pretend that the papers unveiled fine writers or even one potential writer. But these students' imaginations did devise formally, like those of artists, especially playwrights. Strindberg fashioned his theatre musically: think of the three movements of The Ghost Sonata. Musical forms also inhere in the drama of Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, O'Neill, Brecht and Beckett. Nor are the musical forms in dramatic structure specifically modern. Greek drama was chanted and sung, not spoken, and in addition to Euripides' operatic monologues, choruses and segments of counterpointed stichomythia, his individual lines present themselves as word music, as literary melody, and not simply as conjunctions of meaning.

I haven't done anything special with the discovery of musical propinquities among our mix of African-American, Spanish-named, Asian and other undergraduates. But whatever happens in future theatre classes, I'm thankful that batches of men and women whom ignorant people might call uncultured have reminded me that the arts are indivisible because the muses are sisters--and we are all susceptible to them.

Albert Bermel's most recent book is Comic Agony (Northwestern University Press, 1993). He teaches in the speech and theatre department of Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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