Playing Scared Read Online Free PDF

at the highest level of his profession, a lawyer who had argued more than a hundred high court cases. But this one became a train wreck. At the beginning of his oral argument, he stumbled and stammered. When he paused to sip from a glass of water, the ice cubes clinked louder than his words. He lost his place, repeated himself, his voice quivering as he asked the justices to excuse him. A blogger from Mother Jones compared his performance with that of a teenager giving a high school oral presentation for the first time and opined that Verrilli should be grateful the Supreme Court didn’t allow cameras in the courtroom. Anotherpublication derided him as “a case of stage fright that skipped right past funny and went directly to pitiable.” If Obamacare went down, as so many prematurely predicted, it would be the fault of Verrilli’s “pathetic” performance.

    According to one theory, stage fright is a phenomenon of modernity. Nicholas Ridout, a British cultural theorist, dates it to the introduction in 1879 of electric lights in theaters across England and Europe. Prior to that time, auditoriums were never completely darkened; now, with a flick of a switch, a hall could be blackened, leaving the performer isolated in the spotlight, staring out at an invisible void. The theaters of ancient Greece had been outdoor affairs, designed to take advantage of sunlight, while those of the Renaissance depended on oil lamps, torches, and candles. A painting from 1670 of the Comédie-Française in Paris shows a stage lit by six chandeliers and a bank of thirty-four “footlights,” large candles requiring a crew of candlesnuffers to extinguish. By the eighteenth century, the Drury Lane Theatre in London had introduced a “float,” a long metal trough filled with oil, in which metal saucers, each holding a flickering wick, would bob like buoys. The trough was lowered into a hatch in the stage floor by ropes and pulleys, to create a dimming effect.
    The inception of gas lighting in the early nineteenth century allowed for still greater control. Now, a near blackout could be achieved. But theater operators weren’t interested in darkness: They understood that the ruling classes went to the theater to see and be seen, to flirt and conduct business, to show off their costumes and jewels. In nineteenth-century novels, from Madame Bovary to The Mill on the Floss and War and Peace , the opera glass is turned on the audience more frequently—and to greater plot effect—than on the stage. The opening scene of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (published in 1920) is a classic case. When Newland Archer trains his opera glass on his fiancée’s box, he catches sight of another woman—the tempting princess Ellen Olenska, “with brown hair growing in close curls about her temples and held in place by a narrow band of diamonds.” So much for the opera.
    The social role of the theater demanded a brightly lit auditorium. But composer Richard Wagner and other radicals of the second half of the nineteenth century were pushing a different agenda. Wagner’s Bayreuth audiences sat in utter darkness, eager to merge with the composer’s metaphysical epics—with his Gesamtkunstwerk , the grand unification of the arts. The theater gradually was becoming less a social setting than a quasi-mystical one, no small thanks to the power of electricity.
    In his book Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems , Ridout says that the introduction of electricity in 1879 coincided with these changing ideas about the role of theater and paved the way for a major shift in the balance of power between performers and their audiences. Now the center of attention belonged more fully to the actor and musician, whose social roles were simultaneously undergoing major changes. No longer retained by the court, they were becoming independent contractors and thus newly vulnerable to the economic approval of the modern-day audience or “entertainment