The dramatic character is a result of the same factors that create all human psychology. It is a composite of our experiences, relationships, and environment in interaction, perhaps in conflict, with the society in which we live.(33) Norma Haan, in a study conducted on the subject of caring and personal experience, found that the best environment for moral development is one in which the person can experience moderate amounts of interpersonally based conflict.(34) Narratives, and more specifically theater, provide just such an arena for this confrontation by involving the student in the action of making choices and working creatively toward resolution with the consequences of those choices.

The roles we play as we live are all rooted in our personal psychology. When a student plays a character, he creates a new psychological being whose thoughts and behavior patterns may be quite different from his own, but with whom he may have discovered some illuminating, albeit disturbing, similarities. From this company he has chosen to keep for a time, he will have gained a perspective on himself that will render him different from when he began. New perspectives on how he views himself will be gained from this relationship with this new friend. Booth and Hauwerwas would both insist that if the true character building potential of this experience is to be maximized, that the metaphor be appropriate and portray a [page 52] truthful picture with a high degree of honesty. Only in this way can the essential connection be made between the moral lessons learned in the narrative and choices to be made in real life. In this way the student is given an opportunity to personalize these moral choices and not be forced to accept arbitrarily imposed maxims.

This kind of understanding permits empathy. As the student's understanding of her character grows throughout the rehearsal process, empathy deepens until she can step inside her character's emotions. She begins to understand more fully why the character behaves the way she does, why she makes the choices that initially seemed so inappropriate. As long as the student stands in judgment of a character, the character can never stand inside her. In this way the character becomes a real person; without the mimesis-empathy confrontation those people often remain objects or categories.(35) The ability to justify this thought and action is at the base of any honest character portrayal, and moves the student closer to a personal moral identity that includes a perspective of her fellow man that cannot be gained by mere observation or contemplation. It is only through this bond of intimacy that she can begin to experience the liberating grace of God at work in the world, and most specifically with a sense of personal gratitude. Grace helps us keep going amid the moral conflicts we cannot resolve. It is these inequities that the student faces as she assumes these character-making choices.

Some studies claim to show that just about everybody in the modern world is afraid of being found out as an impostor, guilty of hypocritical performances.(36) The word hypocrisy originally meant simply the playing of a role on the stage: dramatic acting - hypocrisis, from hypo (under) plus crinen (to decide, determine, judge). To give the signs of choosing in a certain way on stage or off was to convey a character of a certain kind, in hypocrisy. Thus the two words character and hypocrisy suggest a challenging analogy: actors play roles as characters with hypocrisy.(37) What Booth goes on to emphasize here is that in our universal condemnation of hypocrisy, a kind of play acting with characters, is one of the main ways that we build what becomes our character.(38) Theater is a perfect laboratory to practice character [page 53] traits and explore values through the lives of dramatic characters, without having to deal with consequences inherent in taking these risks in the real world. Students are allowed to try on the whys and not just contemplate the "whats."

Those character traits are truest, the most honestly ours, that are the most fully understood. This understanding comes through close examination and exploration, through rehearsal and repetition. The rationale of rehearsal is that repetition continues to bring a deeper understanding of the motivation and the action of the dramatic character, which if continued in truth and honesty will lead to a credible performance. The intent of the investigation and exploration leading to an honest adoption of a character trait seems to be the key. Isn't it possible that one also develops character traits (good or bad) through repetition until it becomes habitual?

The propensity to mask the inner self with a protective outer image is at the core of Moliere's comedy, Tartuffe. For Tartuffe, religion is a means to an end. Ambitious, he is using the blind naiveté of Orgon as his tool. The mask of hypocrisy is almost a perfect fit, and ensures a steady increase of power to the wearer. The part he plays is of vital importance to him; it assures his well being and his domination over his fellows. The audience is allowed to see through him, to observe the contrast between what he says and would like to say, what he does and what he thinks. To further illustrate the machination and game playing of the drama, as director of a recent production at the Arena Theater at Wheaton College, I chose to have all of the cast wear masks. It was only when speaking in honesty, without pretense, that a character dropped the mask to address the other characters on stage.

As the play deals very pointedly with religious hypocrisy, using the term to suggest practicing an attitude or action that one does not possess, surely for his own benefit, the cast learned much about spotting facades in others, particularly in the religious community. With the unmasking of revered religious leaders, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, we are all too aware of the Tartuffes of our day using the façade of religion to further their own selfish aims. But much more importantly, cast members were forced to deal with their own propensities to put on masks. During the rehearsal process the students were asked to design masks that would best communicate the image that they would like to have projected and behind which [page 54] they would feel safe. Wearing the masks in the ensuing exercises seemed exciting, powerful, and comfortable; removing the masks became very traumatic. An acute sense of vulnerability was experienced by most. The actors found that life becomes at once much easier when we don a mask. We are not forced to deal with our own humanity or that of others when we can simply apply the desired mask to handle the rigors of the immediate situation. Journaling throughout the rehearsals gave the students an opportunity to observe the hypocrisy in many of their interactions with other students on campus and even professors. No one seemed exempt from the machinations of the mask.

Aren't we all guilty of wearing the mask of expectation designed by those around us to define our role in their lives? Is it not simply more convenient many times to wear the expected masks? What was discovered during the process of rehearsals was that, with the placement of these facades, with absence of truth and honesty, confidence in others becomes more suspicious, friendships superficial, since none can be sure that the mask is genuinely the man/woman, or what is behind it.

This no longer became just a play in preparation for performance, but a character-building experience for everyone. Through character study and improvisation the students found that there is indeed a connection between character and conduct. Actions and behavior patterns may well be indications of character, but they may also be applied to mask unacceptable inner realities, or even facades socialized into us without inner conviction. For the responsible agent there is a oneness, an integrity of being. Investing time with the characters of Tartuffe conversely affected the actors as they became aware of, and then were sensitized to, the need to mean what one says and does. Inner reality must correspond to outward appearance.

The difference between productive hypocrisy, aspiring and emulating, which Booth would assert is necessary for character development, and the vice that the word is used to name above, must surely be in the motive and direction of the practice. Why are we doing what we are doing?

To have character is necessarily to engage in a pattern of discovery, for by our continuing action we discover new aspects and implications of our descriptions that we had not anticipated. Few plays have better dealt with this process of self-discovery than has [page 55] Sondheim's musical, Into the Woods, based on the actions of several well-known fairy tale characters. The actors are led on a journey into the woods, faced with choices as difficult as any they will ever confront in real life. This journey forms the dramatic action of the play. It is through their quests that the characters experience growth and change, and ultimately achieve some degree of self-knowledge.

The woods, a dark tangle of branches, roots, and spidery trunks, becomes an arena for the characters to explore their secret wishes and fears, where the dark sides of personalities, the jumble of repressed desires, appetites, and suppressed passions are given free rein. The woods represent different things to different characters. The frightening characteristic is that they appear to be as enticing as they are repulsive. As designer for this production, I created a maze of ramps and platforms that completely encircled the audience with forest paths. These ever changing paths helped to support the concept of the traumas faced on life's uncertain trek. In this case the audience as well as the actors was ushered into an environment of growth. In Act I, searching for "happily ever after" seemed a bit of a naïve adventure, paths were fairly clear and well lit. However, once that destination was reached at the end of the act, and initial goals eventually seemed boring and inconsequential, the woods became thicker, darker and more unpredictable. It is the role of the designer to reinforce this experience for the actor and to enhance it for the audience. In this case, the audience was also very much involved in the action.

Though the play is handled in the style of a fairy tale, in the first act the fears of the woods are the trauma of growing up, the loss of sexual innocence, money, starting a family, and the importance of image – being pretty/handsome. In the second act, the woods, which have become darker and more ominous, are filled with adult terrors and disillusionment: death, failed marriages, the recognition of personal mortality and individual responsibility. What happens when one discovers that "happily ever after" is as illusive as the mirage on the horizon? Or perhaps worse, that once attained, it simply is not enough any more. These are the questions the actor is forced to wrestle with as she becomes involved in the action of the play, as she is faced with the same choices she will have to make in the real world.

Dickens understood that the imagery of fairy tales helps children better than anything else in their most difficult and yet most important and satisfying [page 56] task: achieving a more mature consciousness…The minds of children can be opened to an appreciation of all the higher things in life by fairy tales…The fairy tale is therapeutic because the patient finds his own solutions for inner conflicts at this moment in this life.(39)

In preparing for this play, actors were faced with the challenges of leaving behind all that is safe and secure, and of journeying into adulthood with all of the rights and responsibilities incumbent upon that state. Choices, frivolous and deliberate, were made, and consequences experienced. Through repetition of action in rehearsal, the truths discovered on the journey can be indelibly impressed on their moral identity. The students were given the opportunity to ask questions necessary to build character while developing their characters.

Theater interprets the human condition in both outward manifestations and its inner reality. It provides not just illustrations of moral problems, but insights into the ambiguities, tensions and complexities of moral life. In the world of Getting Out, Marsha Norman has created a gritty exposure to the world of ex-offender Arlene as she is released from prison and begins to find her way in a world that seems committed to defeating her. We come to know Arlene both from her real experience as well as through flashbacks to her as a much younger woman, Arlie, as she is first incarcerated. Selection of this play for Wheaton College was a risk, but I found Arlene's story of grace so compelling, I knew it could be a life changing experience for our students; I was not wrong.

The world of Getting Out, the life that Arlene was forced to live was hard and rough. The students developing these roles were given an invaluable opportunity to understand rather than just observe the lives of the disenfranchised. To help the students explore the lives of the characters, we spent a good deal of time immersing ourselves in the realities of prison life, spending time at Cook County jail in Chicago, talking to the women inmates of their lives both inside and outside the walls of the prison. We were lucky enough to find an ex-offender to work with us on the play. It was as though Arlene had been given to us herself to help us in our task of understanding the decisions that Arlene made in her attempts to make it in the real [page 57] world. Improvisational experiences developed from these interviews lead to a reality of experience for all working on the production.

The students moved slowly from a position of judgment of Arlene/Arlie and her choices and actions to one of deep compassion and understanding. The choices were difficult and complex. This movement required facing life with a fiber of truth and honesty, embracing Christ's model of love and justice, of compassion and respect and appreciating fully the working of God's grace. Several students found that they were not so different from Arlene, just luckier. Robert Coles suggests that this kind of experience nurtures moral imagination, elicits empathy, and provides the wisdom to see things whole. As I had hoped, it was a profound experience for all involved in the production; mere observation became a reality as the students moved on the journey towards assuming a believable character. Many of these actors have continued to act on these new found convictions today as they continue to work with the seemingly unlovable.

IV. The Outcome – Realization of the Super Objective

Through identification and consequent empathy, dramatic literature offers the self the sort of nourishment that is essential for development. By exercising and strengthening our capacity to identify and feel into others, this literature provides us with an ability that will allow further growth and adjustment as we encounter new realities.(40) Theater interprets the human condition in both its outward manifestations and its inner reality. It provides not just illustrations of moral problems, but insight into the ambiguities, tensions and complexities of the moral life, and a realism about moral ambiguity. Character study allows the student to experience values in conflict and thereby gain new perspective on the outcome of choices. It seems the key word here is experience, because in experiencing these ambiguities, the student is able to move past the cognitive image of the affective behavior. This then nurtures moral imagination, elicits empathy, and provides the wisdom to see things whole.(41)

[page 58] This process of introspection, which is required of anyone attempting to understand and present a believable character involved in plausible action, requires that students learn to understand and accept facets of themselves that many would rather not recognize, and, in admitting them enlarge their capacity for identification. Above all Hagen emphasizes that students who want to act must become self-observant enough not only to recognize their needs and define feelings, but to connect them to the behavior which ensues. This is the same sense of responsibility to which both Holmes and Hauerwas allude. The continuing job of learning to pinpoint her responses – and even more importantly, the myriad of consequent behaviors that result – will help an actor to fill her warehouse with sources upon which to draw for construction of character.(42) This process forces the student to search within herself for the resources, and at the same time the experiences enriches and builds those resources, if she has been truthful and honest in the search.

By delving deeply into the hearts of the characters in the play, it has been suggested that the student is allowed a consciousness raising and sensitizing experience as he is forced to deal with the inequities causing the dramatic conflict, and the choices made by the characters to right these injustices. By so doing the student can further activate and develop his own moral imagination as he clarifies and evaluates the values involved in the resolution of the tension. In responding as the characters in the decision making process he is well on the road to developing the proper habit of the heart.

The super objective of the actor is to discover a through line of action for the play that will give him a reason to be. This super objective for moral education is accordingly concerned that students become consistent and responsible adults acting out of a core of compassion and respect - who care about people, treat them justly, and do something about ethical issues in society. Students must learn to analyze what is going on to understand themselves, to think through issues and to make wise decisions based on sound moral competencies; moral principles which have been made their own through the rigors of experience and empathy.

The point seems to be that the emphasis needs to be placed on the process rather than just the end product. The metaphor of the journey is and surely should be the primary one for articulating the shape of Christian existence and living. Hauerwas' emphasis on the process of becoming has been helpful in aligning the work of theater in the liberal arts context with that [page 59] most important objective of education our students in value development and the ethics of character.

Appendix –

The research and writing of this paper has had a dynamic effect on my approach to teaching at Wheaton. The concepts were not necessarily new to me nor profound in nature, but when considered in the context of the nature of the classes I teach, especially acting, and directing production work, it has greatly influenced my whole approach to the experience. In teaching theater as part of a liberal arts education, we are not so much about professional vocational training as we are about assisting the student on his or her journey toward self-discovery, of becoming a responsible agent for action and change in the world. Designing this laboratory experience has been a tremendous time of growth for myself as well.

Endnotes

1. Arthur Holmes, Shaping Character, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.)
2. M. James Young, "Moral Issues in Theater," unpublished essay.
3. Holmes, 89.
4. Aristotle, The Poetics.
5. Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1975) xxvii.
6. Hauerwas (xxx).
7. Hauerwas, 10.
8. Hauerwas, 13.
9. Hauerwas, 114.
10. Holmes, 10.
11. Hauerwas, 7.
12. Hauerwas, 12.
13. Hauerwas, 9.
14. Hauerwas, 10.
15. Hauerwas, 10.
16. Paul Vitz, "The Use of Stories in Moral Development: New Psychological Reason for an Old Education Method," American Psychologist, June 1990: 710.
17. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 227.
18. Booth, 227.
19. Booth, 488-89.
20. Patricia Ward, "An Affair of the Heart: Ethics, Criticism, and the Teaching of Literature," Christianity and Literature, Winter 1990, 185.
21. Ward, 187.
22. Booth, 256.
23. J. A. Robinson and L. Haupe, Narrative Thinking as Heuristic Process, (New York: Praeger), qtd. in Vita: 713.
24. Booth, 224.
25. Booth, 144.
26. Uta Hagen, Respect for Acting, (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1973) 8-10.
27. Hagen, 8-10.
28. Hagen, 24-25.
29. Booth, 239.
30. Holmes, 11-12.
31. Mira Felner, Free to Act: An Integrated Approach to Acting (Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1990), 200.
32. Felner, 201.
33. Felner, 216.
34. Norma Haan, "Process of Moral Development: Cognitive or Social Disequilibrium?" Developmental Psychology 21: 996-1006, qtd in Vita: 714-15.
35. M. James Young, "The Theater Artist as Prophet," ms., 1994, 29.
36. Booth, 251.
37. Booth, 252.
38. Booth, 253.
39. Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 51.
40. Marshall Alcorn and Mark Bracher, "Literature, Psychoanalysis and the Reformation of the Self," 351, qtd. In Booth appendix.
41. Holmes, 76.
42. Hagen, 26.

Bibliography

Aristotle,"Poetics"

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Bruno, Richard. A Study Guide for Into the Woods. New York: 1989.

Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories, Teaching and Moral Imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989.

Felner, Mira. Free to Act: An Integrated Approach to Acting. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1990.

Hagen, Uta. Respect for Acting. New York: MacMillan Pub. Co., 1973.

Hauwerwas, Stanley. Character and The Christian Life. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1975.

Holmes, Arthur. Shaping Character. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991.

Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1948.

---. Building A Character. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1946.

[page 60] Vitz, Paul. "The Use of Stories in Moral Development: New Psychological Reason for an Old Education Method." American Psychologist June 1990: 709-720.

Ward, Patricia. "An Affair of the Heart: Ethics, Criticism, and the Teaching of Literature." Christianity and Literature. Winter 1990

Willis. J.Robert. ed. The Director in a Changing Theater. Palo Alto ,Calif: Mayfield Publishing, 1976.

Young, M. James "Moral Issues in Theater." Unpublished essay, 1982.

---. "Theater Artist as Prophet, The." Ms. 1974.