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In the West, traditionally the audience was expected to become engaged in how the plot would develop and to be concerned primarily with the fate of the characters, and how they would free themselves from the knots of romance, murder, intrigue, etc., into which they have been thrust. In fact, Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, who set some of the early standards in the fourth century B.C.E. for our studies of biology, metaphysics, ethics, rhetoric, and so forth, also set the standards for Western drama. And he said that the plot was all-important, the very soul of good drama. And so we might wonder what it means in this traditional and serious drama, kabuki, for the actor of a character on the verge of killing someone for revenge to step out of the plot, to attract the audience's attention in one way, but then to distract the audience's attention away from the course of the dramatic action. The reason seems to be that people went to and still go to the kabuki theater for the appeal of the visual and aural color, the excitement of the spectacle, the actors' ability to perform, the theatricality, and the moments of emotional intensity. It is generally agreed that these features and not the plots themselves serve as the indicators of character and express the import of the unexpressible. These are the means to appreciating the problems of human beings caught in the snares of love, intrigue, murder, revenge, and honor. What is more important than the plot itself is how a person faces hardship and prosperity, love and death, sacrifice and gain. "By person" is meant the actor playing the role on behalf of the character. Kabuki allows a kind of objectification of the characters, a removal of them from the development of the plot so as to set them somewhat apart from the dramatic action in order to allow the audience become engaged in the theatrical moment rather than in the dramatic action, in the moments of a story rather than in the logical development of the plot. There is a story, but it has become relatively unimportant, except when an actor performs a storytelling scene, a monogatari. What happens in kabuki is a very different slant on drama than the one Aristotle prescribed. Aristotle said the soul of a serious play was its plot. He also said that what one merely sees was unimportant. The kabuki critic and enthusiast says the opposite: what one sees is the essence of kabuki. Aristotle said that plot should not be episodic. The stories of kabuki plays are episodic. That is to say, a play can be cut up and scenes performed by themselves outside the overall context without hurting a production or the integrity of the performance. For example, the play Shibaraku as it is now performed consists of little more than Gongorō's entrance and, after the famous interruption mentioned above, his successful defeat of the villain and his retainers. However, that scene, that moment, was derived from a much longer play in which originally Gongorō angers the Shogun in Act One. In the original play as a whole, now no longer performed, there are many intrigues along the way, including love affairs and murders, some of which develop out of this first act. But it does not matter that the first act was usually omitted. Some of the scenes in turn were simply added on without consideration for a plot line. For example, when Gongorō and a certain Tamemune with his wife stop at an inn for the night during their travels, they all have the same dream. The dream is enacted on stage for the benefit of the audience's viewing pleasure: in the dream Gongorō seduces Tamemune's wife and kills her when Tamemune calls him immoral in his actions. Then Gongorō, out of remorse over killing her, commits suicide. Kagehisa, Gongorō's brother, arrives and fights with Tamemune until they have stabbed each other to death. At this point the travelers awake from their dreams and continue on their travels. Not another reference is made in the play to the dream or the stage action.
Inasmuch as the audiences are in the theater to see particular moments, to appreciate emotional highpoints, and to be entertained, but not to become engaged in the development of a story, it does not matter that they do not see the story as a whole enacted on stage, or that a scene like this dream is presented in isolation from any larger context.
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