ABSTRACT
Recalling the “Lungs” chart in Chapter 1, we see that Events can be likened to the vertebra of the play; the full column becomes the Supertask of the play, sometimes referred to as the “spine” of the play. As we shall see in Chapter 19 ahead, the start-to-finish moment-to-moment Sequence of Event is the Action of the play that reveals the Supertask. Any play will have many Events, often in the three figures. But some Events are more significant than others. Tovstonogov asserted that in a fully realized production there will be five key Events: The Initial Event, the Counter Event, the Climatic Event, the Denouement, and the Crucial Event. Two of these, the Initial and the Crucial Events, lie outside the borders of the text; both are prepared by the director and company, the first as an artistic lead into the production and the last as a self-created Event of the production which reveals or echoes the production’s intentions. The notion of a sequence of Events originated from the now oft-disparaged Aristotle, whose precepts were revised in the 1800s by Gustav Freytag, a German author who simplified Aristotle’s Events. “Freytag’s Pyramid” is the foundation of many current play- and film-writing courses. Tovstonogov’s Five Event Structure can still be detected, even in much post-dramatic work.
