The Fourth Wall: Representation vs. Presentation
© James D. Miller, August, 2000
"As the house lights go down he [the Stage Manager] has finished setting the stage and leaning against the right proscenium pillar watches the late arrivals in the audience. When the auditorium is in complete silence he speaks: This play is called 'Our Town'. It was written by Thornton Wilder and is produced and directed by..." From this, the very first line in his Pulitzer Prize winning play Wilder has clearly torn down the invisible "fourth wall" between the audience and the actors on the stage, acknowledging the audience's presence and directly addressing them.From a playwright's perspective representational theater forbids the playwright from addressing the audience, directly pointing things out, or making comments upon the scenes he shows by building an invisible wall between the audience and the actors on the stage. Thereby if an actor looks in the direction of the audience he pretends to see only what would be there, be it a living room wall or Main Street in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. In effect its as if the front of a house has been ripped away, exposing the daily lives of its unknowing residents and in its place a new invisible wall has been erected.Each audience member brings with them to the theater a willingness to suspend their disbelief, thereby constructing their own fourth wall by denying that they are in a theater filled with people, watching performers on a stage who are acting out a story.Presentational theater on the other hand admits the obvious and demolishes the fourth wall, thus freeing one (as in a narrator) or all of the characters to acknowledge the presence of the audience, often making contact with them, speaking to them, or even making entrances and exits through them.Sources:
Card, Orson Scot, Characters & Viewpoint, p. 134-9
