Trust the tale, we're often told, and not the teller. But in theater, the way artists choose to tell the story is all the story we get. Only if we have history, or some other accumulation of outside data, such as a source novel, to act as a corrective, do we have something against which to measure what we're being told. Otherwise, it's strictly the theatermaker's sense of reality against ours; the extent to which the two match is one measure of a play's validity. But then, of course, you run into another problem with theater: It isn't "reality," at least not in the same sense as the world offstage, and no law requires it to represent that world literally. And playwrights, those notoriously tricky creatures, love nothing better than taking advantage of the disparity to bend reality out of shape, in the process doing the... More >>>