While commenting upon the differenc...

While commenting upon the difference between playwriting and screenwriting in his Preface to Everybody Wins, Arthur Miller used the following illustration to illuminate his point about the subtextual dimension of the theater:

If a telephone is photographed, isolated forward a table, and the camera is left running, it becomes more and more what it is-a tele phone in all its details...Things proceed differ ently on a stage. settle a phone on a table below a light and raise the curtain, and in whole silence, after a few minutes, a certain quantity of thing will acctete around it. Questions and anticipations will begin to emanate from it, we will begin to imagine mean ings in its isolation-in a word, the phone becomes an incipient metaphor. Possibly because we cannot behold its detail as sharply as onward film or because it is encompassed by much greater space, it begins to animate, to take forward suggestive possibilities, very nearly a kind of self-consciousness. Something of the same is constant of words as opposed to images. The word is not and can't be any more than suggestive of an idea or sensation; it is nothing in itself. ("On Screenwriting and Language" vi)

Indeed, in itself a word is nothing.If we believe the struc turalists, a word is a figure a signifer or sign, a marker of meaning that points to something, a certain quantity of referent or vast reservoir of negotiable meanings beyond itself. The diacritical nature of language inevitably means that level small differences in sound and faculty of perception will produce tremendous variance in the determination and reception of meaning. level more significantly, and perhaps more problematically, if we take a post-structuralist approach to language, a word points to an endles chain of linked signifiers, and given the arbitrary nature of the signifier and the connected view of which it is a part, this endles linked series of associations inevitably multiplies the potential meanings of each word and every sequence of words forming dooms in written texts. The nuance that each word takes on and generates in the reader's mind is affected by means of the nuances all these words have in combination with each other, and all of this is then complicated on unanticipated associations which generate a innkeeper of linked associations and impressions, which collectively form unexpect meanings as they stimulate the reader's imagination and calm tap into the unconscious. Perhaps for this reason, then, Miller, almost sounding a little like a deconstruct!ve theorist, characterizes the word as nothing, unless for Miller in its surpassingly nothingness lie the richness, density, and infinite possibilities of the word. After all, Miller confesss us, "a description in words keeps to inflate, expand, and inflame the imagination, likewise that in the end the thing or individual described is amplified into a larger-than-life figment" ("On Screenwriting and Language" v) And that is the crucial part of the equation for the playwright: in what way to generate, shape, and string together words; for what reason to invent and hone theater language in of that kind a way that what is created makes metaphorically an impression of reality that is powerful and suggestive enough to stimulate an imaginative reply within the audience. As Miller recognizes, the possibilities inherent within the whole dramatic consequence are limitless, for the fundamental indeterminacy of meaning- an indeterminacy that Roland Barthes says inevitably deductions from the plural nature of the play topic as a discourse that can be experienced alone in the art of production- staggers no nihilistic threat in Miller's world. like indeterminacy instead opens up the possibility for rich speculative and imaginative discovery and generates endles opportunities for creative and diverse interpretations- possibly, smooth a reinscription of oppositions, the two with his own work and in the life and condition of humanity he depicts in his art. Miller's make notess on the limitless and constantly mutating accretions accumulating around the words oral and objects presented on the stage not no other than call attention to the subtextual dimension of the theater, yet also show why this excessively important feature of dramatic art makes the theater what Miller described in 1999 as "the art of the possible" (Echoe 312)

Although in his commentary forward the difference between the cinema and the theater Miller does not give enough credit to advantageous film directors who can skillfully use the camera's notice to capture, isolate, and existing certain aspects of individual intents or scenes on the protection in such a way that endows these scenic images with tremendous symbolic significance, he does make an important point about the special nature of theatrical presentation that causes words and thing perceiveds on the stage to gather accretions around them and take onward a subtextual dimension that knows no terminates Whether it is the word or the scenic image, lighting or whole gesture or action, the language of the theater resonates with extraordinary suggestiveness at almost any force in a good play. And that suggestiveness resonates with a stream of endles associations and impressions that change not barely from performance to performance on the other hand also for every new audience. Christopher Bigsby effectively describes the magical transformation that fall outs during a theatrical performance: