Destabilizing Plot, Displacing the Status of Narrative

The larger aim of this essay is to suggest the need for a way of describing principles of dramatic organization independent of plot considered in the traditional terms of the presentation of a story. It is a goal shaped in large part by a suspicion that to regard drama as a mode of narration analogous to the novel (as many discussions of dramatic plot seem to do) is essentially incongruous and by a conviction that recent experiments in performance art, theater as event, when they eschew storied plot, uncover in its absence other forms of order present, if not necessarily prominent, in all drama. (One might note in passing that, as Herbert Blau and Anne Ubersfeld, among others, have pointed out, performance art, though it may reject story, never escapes representation-to perform means inevitably to represent for an audience and that it differs in emphasis rather than in kind from more traditional drama.') The immediate focus of this essay is the organization of two plays-Harold Pinter's Old Times and Sam Shepherd's A Lie of the Mind-in which, I argue, the pattern of a traditional storied plot cannot wholly dominate and is destabilized, to some extent displaced, by principles of order derived instead from what seems a local, smallerscale pattern: mathematical or perhaps syntactical and rhetorical repetitions, series, permutations, and combinations.2 While in Pinter's plays the destabilizing influence

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