論考集

アメリカ演劇 "Care through Telling and Being Told Stories"(英語論考)

Care through Telling and Being Told Stories

The Importance of Narrative in the Rabbit Hole

1, Introduction

　David Lindsay-Abaire (November 30, 1969-) is a leading American playwright, film screenwriter, and lyricist. After studying theater at Sarah Lawrence College, he joined the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at The Juilliard School from 1996 to 1998, where he began his early career studying with Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang. After presenting Kimberly Akimbo (2000), Dotting and Dashing (1999), Snow Angel (1999), and A Devil Inside (1997), Rabbit Hole premiered on Broadway in 2006. The play was selected for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for a Tony Award, making it one of his best-known plays. Since then, he has also built a career in film screenwriting, including Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), and in 2016 he was named an instructor in the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program, which he once participated in himself.

　　Rabbit Hole is a play about a mother who lost her young son in an accident eight months ago and is striving to forget that she even had a son because of it. At the beginning of the play, there is a noticeable friction with her newly pregnant sister and discord with her husband who, unlike her, is trying to overcome the accident and move on, but through dialogue with them and especially with Jason, the boy who unfortunately ran over her son, the film shows how she overcomes the loss of her son. In this essay, I would like to mention the story explicitly/implicitly cited in Rabbit Hole and examine the effect of storytelling, an essential element of theater, on the psychological care in this work.

2, Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Rabbit Hole

　 Various stories are cited in this work, including two novels by Dickens and the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Individual stories may have contributed to Becca's recovery, for example, Dickens is actually used by Becca to forget about her son and family. And also, the situation of Orpheus and Eurydice not being able to get over the death of their loved ones and having to lose them again by looking back at the trajectory they have taken reminds me of Becca, who has tried not to face Danny's death, and Howie, who lost his son and the tape containing his record of his death. Among these stories, I would like to discuss Rabbit Hole, which seems to have the most important meaning since it is also the title of the book, and Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, which can be considered as the source of the quotation. The title Rabbit Hole is actually taken from a Sci-Fi story that will be discussed below, but most all audiences, when hearing the title for the first time, will find it derived from White Rabbit in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, meaning “to go down a path of no return, to get off the main path, to have a strange experience.”

　 Alice’s adventures in Wonderland is a story of nonsense and absurdity that will always be loved. Based on a story improvised by author Lewis Carroll to entertain the three Liddell sisters, the play on words and mathematical games that abound around every corner still delight many readers today. What is important in Rabbit Hole may be that (1) Alice is a primitive story which is orally told and created, and (2) Alice is an absurdist play.

　 First, entertaining people through improvised storytelling can be considered a form of care. Alice's story, told in an improvisational manner, took on the caring role of parenting the three Liddell sisters, who were bored. This is nothing less than proof that the story of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland itself was born from the fundamental power of storytelling. By quoting Alice, we can remind ourselves about continuing to tell stories.

　　　Second, it must be recalled that the story of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland has a plot that is full of nonsense and absurdity, and yet, in the end, returns to a straightforward reality. This fact can be read overlaid with the Rabbit Hole. This is because Rabbit Hole is the story of Becca's continued escape from the absurd facts of an unforeseen accident and her reorientation to face reality as she experiences strange events, such as meeting the perpetrator's son.

　 In addition to Rabbit Hole, there are other plays that cite Alice's (1) power of storytelling and (2) absurdist plays. Hideki Noda's latest work, 兎、波を走る, is a particularly good example. 兎、波を走るsends the message that many people must talk about the fact that they were abducted by North Korean kidnapping agents, or at least those who saw the play must remember. Hideki Noda also mentions the absurdity of a young girl named Alice who is forever separated from her mother because she has seen the abducting agent and has lost her precious time in an instant. However, by knowing and facing the truth of this absurdity, Alice's mother in 兎、波を走るcould have shed tears and expressed her feelings of sadness, instead of living with an empty loss. Even though the development and inspiration of the story is quite different from that of Rabbit Hole, I felt that the significance of the explicit and implicit allusion to Alice’s adventures in Wonderland is somewhat similar.

　 This chapter considers examples of how various stories, such as Dickens, contribute to care, with particular attention to Alice's adventures in Wonderland. I believe that Rabbit Hole is successful in telling about care through metaphor by quoting stories. In the next chapter, I will consider how Becca and others are cared for through the actual telling and being told stories in the play.

3, Care through Telling and Being Told Stories

　 Just as the "narrative approach," a movement to rethink care and counseling for troubled individuals from a narrative perspective, is gaining prominence in the medical and clinical psychology fields, stories and the act of storytelling are useful for physical and mental recovery. For example, Table Talk Role-Playing Games, also known as TRPGs, in which participants act out roles and create a story together, are used in medical settings to relieve or eliminate post-traumatic stress disorder and other disorders. The narrative approach is based on social constructivism, which holds that things are shaped by interactions with society, and that reality is not objective, but can be influenced and changed, and is constructed among people through words. The method is based on the idea that the storyteller and listener interact with each other through the narrative, changing the story and changing ideas and issues.

　 　The scene of Jason and Becca's dialogue seemed to be the very site of care where this storytelling changed attitudes and issues and moved on to the next stage of loss. Jason, who wrote a science fiction novel for Danny called Rabbit Hole about the Parallel Universe, talks to Becca about the origin and significance of the idea, and Becca gains an opportunity to move into the future through a deeper understanding of the setting.

　　Jason: So even the most unlikely events have to take place somewhere, including other universes with versions of us leading different lives, or maybe the same lives with a couple things changed.

　　Becca: And you think that’s plausible.

Jason: Not just plausible – probable. If you accept the most basic laws of science.

（ellipsis）

　　Bacca: And those other versions exist. They’re not hypothetical, they’re actual, real people.

　 Through the Parallel Universe that Jason teaches Becca in the dialogue scene just before the last scene, Becca changes her way of thinking that life is not linear, but that there are infinite parallel universes within an infinite universe, and although there is no big trigger, she is certainly trying to overcome the accident. The idea that there may be another version of herself out there somewhere, making pancakes and spending time at the pool instead of spending time with Jason, suggests that Becca's view of the world has indeed changed. She decides to give up on selling the house she spent time in with Danny and to continue her life, staying in the house that Jason told her was a beautiful home.

　 In addition, as noted in the previous chapter, there are many other situations that deal with the healing of wounds through storytelling, such as Becca's story of how telling the Dickens story in Lifelong Learning made her feel happy as a woman and not as a person, even if only for a short time.

　 In the form of theater, where the development is driven by the actors telling stories to the audience as characters, I felt that the structure of care provided through storytelling is a metafictional one. Becca is saved by beginning to tell her story about Danny to others, including Jason, and the audience is also saved by listening to Becca tell her story of the pain of losing her son.

4, Conclusion

　 This paper discussed how narrative and the act of storytelling play a role in helping Becca overcome the too great loss of her son's death, touching on the stories cited and the process of Becca's spiritual recovery through actual storytelling. Especially at the beginning of the first semester, I had no idea how Alice in Wonderland influenced this play, but after actually seeing the Rabbit Hole play and watching 兎、波を走るI felt I understood even a fragment of its meaning. I also felt that the practice of care through storytelling is a meta-structure in the theater form, which differs greatly from novels and poems in that in many cases the story is actually told aloud to advance the development of the play.

5, References

Lindsay-Abaire, David. Rabbit Hole. Nick Hern Books, 2016.

森瑞樹. “物語へのまなざし : デヴィッド・リンゼイ＝アベアーのRabbit Hole.” 広島経済大学創立五十周年記念論文集, vol. 下, July 2017, pp. 441–457.

“オルフェウス、エウリュディケーを２度失う！.” 1話5分で読めるギリシャ神話, 23 Jan. 2022, https://greek-myth.info/Hades/OrpheusEurydice.html.

長岡由紀子. “全体性の回復過程における物語の役割 －『はてしない物語』におけるバスチアンの再生から－.” 瀬木学園紀要, vol. 21, Mar. 2023, pp. 23–30.

“ナラティヴ・アプローチとは?「物語で問題を解決する」ってどういうことをするの？意味や手法など、わかりやすく紹介します.” りたりこ仕事ナビ, 20 May 2021, https://snabi.jp/article/174.

　月刊新潮. no. 8月, 新潮社, 2023.