It may seem curious to argue for authenticity in an aesthetic arena created on falsity, fantasy and the imperiled facade — but we all must strive for the authentic over the gimmick as we dare to present the world on stage.

Authenticity is not always factual. Authenticity is not always necessarily truthful. Authenticity goes to the core of a drama: Believability. Are we invested in the plot or not?

Have we successfully persuaded the audience to leave their treacly lives behind and join us in our ongoing definition of what is momentarily contemporary and intrinsically revelatory?

The most dangerous threat to authenticity is the gimmick, the scheme, and the intentional lie perceived to deceive instead of enlighten.

Gimmicks are crutches. Gimmicks are predictable. Gimmicks gin up the odds against your success and in favor of the destruction of your aesthetic in brittleness and betrayal.

Gimmicks have a tendency to appear more than once in a single production and a multiplicity of times over the arc of a career.

Gimmick Test: “Have I done this before? Am I being original? How would I feel if someone else did this in a production?”

If any of your answers in your Gimmick test are negative, take that testimony, reinvent the original intention, and construct something new. The investment of extra time and thought will pay off into a the honest transmogrification of authenticity.

We all have our bag of reliable, and proven, tricks to win over an audience
— but when we rely on slight-of-hand and misdirection instead of the brutal real and the raw authentic — we begin to become a mockery of who we are and what we were intended to be in the living of a live performance.

5 Comments

  1. David Boles – New York City – David Boles was born in Nebraska and holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher who writes across the live stage, print, radio, television, film, and the web. With more than 50 books in print, David continues to write 2MM words a year and has authored over 25K articles. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, and founded The United Stage advocacy platform on the principle that playwrights have a duty to direct their own work. Read the Prairie Voice Archive at Boles.com | Buy his books at David Boles Books Writing & Publishing at BolesBooks.com | Study with Script Professor at ScriptProfessor.com | Touch American Sign Language mastery at Hardcore ASL at HardcoreASL.com | Explore the Human Meme podcast at HumanMeme.com | Train with Boles Bells at BolesBells.com.
    Gordon Davidescu says:

    David,
    I wonder what you consider to be a really gimmicky career arc? Or a really gimmicky production?
    I like the idea of investing time into creating something that is raw and authentic.

  2. David Boles – New York City – David Boles was born in Nebraska and holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher who writes across the live stage, print, radio, television, film, and the web. With more than 50 books in print, David continues to write 2MM words a year and has authored over 25K articles. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, and founded The United Stage advocacy platform on the principle that playwrights have a duty to direct their own work. Read the Prairie Voice Archive at Boles.com | Buy his books at David Boles Books Writing & Publishing at BolesBooks.com | Study with Script Professor at ScriptProfessor.com | Touch American Sign Language mastery at Hardcore ASL at HardcoreASL.com | Explore the Human Meme podcast at HumanMeme.com | Train with Boles Bells at BolesBells.com.
    David W. Boles says:

    It’s difficult to give an example in the theatre, because there are so few people who actually see the same performance.
    In the movies, one quick example is director Michael Bay’s exploding things. He doesn’t just explode one thing one time. He explodes one thing five or six times with inter-cuts and repeated angles on the same explosion making the one explosion falsely seem bigger, and more intensive than it really is or was.
    Some say those single-multi-explosions are a “Michael Bay Signature” or a “Michael Bay Trademark” — I call it what it is: Gimmickry.

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