05/06/2026
Interview: Paul Sills Reflects on Story Theatre by Laurie Ann Gruhn, The Drama Theater Teacher, Vol. 5, No.2
Paul Sills: The stories I find appropriate for story theatre are, like fairy stories, in action, without psycho-socio analysis of characters. Stories are not literature; they are like teachings, which stress the unity of genuine life. The teachings have useful knowledge, good counsel. As Walter Benjamin wrote, "Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tales had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest." Story speaks in its symbolic images directly to the unconscious, to who you are (without knowing it) - your self, your whole hidden self. This self, of which I am unconscious, cannot be merely psychic or physical, but something else, the unity preceding the division into one or the other: my wholeness, not to be realized in a thought or through the senses, but only in a unified deed. It is thus that I meet my self, the "unknown sage" of Nietzsche, from time to time. We may never learn to know ourselves by thought, said Goethe, as I read in Yeats, but by action only. No one comes near this secret who reflects upon it; one only comes near it by doing the pertinent deed. If this is difficult stuff intellectually, it is the joy of story. Cinderella is not allowed to go to the dance; Simpleton cannot be permitted to go into the forest to chop wood. But these most miserable creatures do overcome; they do the impossible thing as all heroes do; with help of the helpers they become whole, unified persons who live purposefully in the world and can expect marriage and half the kingdom. This is real teaching to my mind.
The stories are not moralistic, as is sometimes assumed, and a surprising number of heroes must steal the invisible cloak to accomplish the impossible. All must do what is on the face of it impossible: build castles in a single night, or die and come back to life. In this way stories point to the seemingly impossible task each of us is assigned, to become who we are intended to be the surprise self. My authority for this? The stories themselves; listen to Yeats: 'If we will but tell these stories to our children the land will begin again to be a Holyland. ... When I was a child I had only to climb the hill behind the house to see long, blue, ragged hills flowing along the southern horizon. What beauty was lost to me, what depth of emotion is still perhaps lacking in me, because nobody told me … That Cruachan of the Enchantments lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills.'
