Little children begin early with the need to pretend. "I am a princess." "I am a superhero." Watch me, Mommy. I am not me.
In young kids, this play-acting can become almost incessant, even resulting in pretend friends. For the most part, the play-acting does not worry parents. We can see that the kids typically do not get lost in their roles, and we even take delight in their ingenuity at splicing various roles--a little girl dressed up in a combination of ballerina tutu, princess crown, cowboy boots, and magic wand develops her individualized script hacked from Disney animations and story-books. We smile, and if we are good parents, we encourage such imaginativity.
Nearly every culture has some form of theater, though, at various points, some societies reign in the business of theater because of the ancillary immorality it produces--such as the English Puritans shutting down the theaters partly because of the crime, prostitution, and job-skipping that the theater of that time tended to encourage on the side. Even in such circumstances, the deeply human need to act out narratives could not be erased. Humans must play act, and the theaters came roaring back, bigger than ever.
 |
| Indonesian shadow puppetry, a highly developed art form |
(Interestingly, in the context of worldwide theater, Islam has seemed to universally frown on theater throughout its history. There have been no great Muslim dramatists compared to, say, those found in European Renaissance tragedy or classical Japanese Noh.)
Humans have an in-built, at times obsessive, need to pretend, to act (just look at the thriving cosplay world). We imagine stories, and we act them out. For the vast majority of Americans, we see this ubiquitous need now played out in movies. Someone takes on a role, speaks an invented dialogue, creates the personality of someone else, usually fictitious.
 |
"I am not me." Drama, theatricality, play-acting, pretending--things become other than what they are, at least for a little while. This is both play and flight. It is Edenic and infernal. Pretending to be someone else or watching someone do it well can delight, but it can also allow us to escape from real life. We can watch a play (or a movie) and enter in the unreal reality of the story and become better for it (Aristotle was getting at something real with his theorizing about catharsis). But we can also become obsessive with irreality and prefer pretense over facing our fallible dailyness with all its unwelcome drabness and failures (some of what the Puritans and Plato objected to, and they were genuinely on to something).
Humans were created in part to amplify, to unfold God's good creation. Would unfallen people have engaged in pretend, in theater? Probably, but without any of the perturbations that go with our fallen enchantments with pretending.
"The play is the thing," said Shakespeare. Both play in an Edenic sense, an innocent game of pretend, reflected in children dressing up ("I'm not me!"); and play in a more negative sense--we only play at being ourselves most of our lives, play at being important in the eyes of others, at taking on roles that cover over our unshriven ugliness as the broken children of Eden ("I hate being me"). Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites, invoking Greek theater in which actors put on masks. "I am Agamemnon." "I am Hercules." Or, in our daily dramas, we wear the masks of "I am righteous, I'm a good man."
Drama, acting out a story, reciting a script--this is a signal of transcendence, of our human condition. It is a God-given art to be cultivated to enhance, and it is simultaneously a strategy for avoiding life.