Brandon BedoreTheatre 19/15/13The five actions of a play are used in Next to Normal to create an emotional experience for the audience, and to focus on the struggle of the Goodman family dynamic. Set movement, plot movement, playwright stage directions, character journey, and to an inferred level, actors choice, work in sequence. Every choice that has been written into the book shows the varying levels of craze that Diana goes through and, by association, her whole family. The first action used is the movement and arrangement of the set.Despite minimalistic setting descriptions, what we are given is important to the continuity of the show. At times the set is designed to be split to encompass two distinct but related scenes that often work in tandem. One instance of this is when Natalie and Henry are kissing goodnight and Diana goes into a hallucination where she imagines a younger Dan proposing to her all over again. The scenes are both related because they show new love but the addition of Dianas lunacy darken the seemingly happy relationship. It was important the scenes be almost mirror images right down to the Rugby shirt both Dan and Henry wear in to show the tragic similarities between mother and daughter. Another split scene is in the hallucination of Natalie and Diana. Natalie is in the club high on her mothers pills while Diana is experiencing the ECT head buzz. Where each woman says Wish I were here at the same time. To Natalie she wishes she could always be high in order to escape her mothers issues and to Diana she wishes that she was able to function properly. The magic of these scenes are in how well the dialogue works inside the context of each separate scene. These allow the text to develop a new meaning. They show that the emotions and struggles that are experienced by Dan and Diana radiate out to affect Natalie as well.The set is also used to show the various delusions Diana experiences and to make clear divisions between our reality and Dianas. For instance, when Diana first meets Doctor Madden she sees him as a rock star and the lights react to her delusions and return to normal when she is coherent. As well as being comical the lighting is extremely important to distinguish what we are to perceive as real. Similarly, the scene shifts to Dianas birthday delusion when she brings in a cake for Gabe. We discover that what we had just heard was all a delusion and that Gabe is dead. In the musical this shift is shown by abruptly ending the music but I feel if it was purely a play a light shift from a sepia to a harsher light would show the change just as well. The weight of such a simple setting action would be clearly felt by the audience. These specifics are vital to the vision of the play and how we emotionally connect to it. The playwright also gave specific directions in the script to enrich the story. First and perhaps most importantly he made sure that Gabe is never seen by anyone but Diana until it is revealed hes dead. Obviously it would disrupt the entire understanding of the play but it also creates a divide in character relationships. Diana and Gabe have a very close relationship but Gabe is not good for Diana and her sanity whereas Dan refuses to even say his sons name and grieve until the end of the play. If this distinction hadnt been made in the playwrights script the significance of this relationship could have been missed.Another specification made by the playwright is was the way Diana waits for Gabe at the start of the play in the dark just as Dan was crying over Gabe. The stage direction Dan sits unmoving as Gabe approaches (Yorkey pg. 98) is vital to the character journey of Dan and his grieving process, but it is also very specific that these stage directions be the same as Dianas Diana sits alone in a chair waiting, Gabe enters (Yorkey pg. 7). Natalie replacing Dan as the one who turns the light on completes her emotional arc by making her the rock of the family. Next, the plot movement shows the intricate relationship between Dianas psychosis and her family.From start to finish, the story focuses around Dianas mental health and the effects Gabe has on each member of the family. The movement of the plot is also centered on the character journey as each person copes with it. Diana starts out and ends in a state of lunacy, but in the end she is having profound moments of true lucidity. Natalie goes through many forms of teenage angst where she takes drugs in order to cope with her broken family and plays the piano to escape. It is not until the end when she finally relies on Dan to get through her grief over her life. Gabe has an emotional journey of finally letting go of Diana and in return he opens a door to his father that has been shut for 16 years. The plot is moved forward by the constant attempts to cure Diana involving the drugs, the therapy, and the ECT and each failure is echoed in the failure of the other family members. The family dynamic shifts from a dysfunctional mess to a type of normal that they are able to deal with. They accept that Gabe isnt a problem but in fact he is a must in the healing of the Goodman family. Once they have all dealt with his loss then each character move on with their lives. The final action type of the play, which is hard to describe without having seen a live performance, is the actors actions.The personal choices each actor makes about their character can vastly influence the interpretation of the show. Whether the actor playing Gabe was to approach his role as a loving son, a jealous protectorate, or a persuasive harbinger of deaths clarity would affect the way he reacts to Diana and people who try to get between them. Yorkey also understood that he had to leave room for expression and made sure the key points of the show were to his liking and the rest hed leave to the actors.Action is a word that has a connotation in todays usage in movies of high flying stunts and explosions but in plays action can mean so much more. In all of Next to Normal there are examples of each action type deigned to show the deep and abnormal family dynamic that the Goodmans have.

Yorkey, Brian, and Tom Kitt. Next to Normal. Theatre Communications Group, 2010.