Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
In coming to the end of the first month of Superfluities' fourth year, I took the opportunity to trace back some of the high points of the blog, as well as some of the low points. What I've written here has engendered some controversy, not to mention mystification and even anger and insult: the Organum (which has grown nearly to the size of a book itself) and the "95 Sentences" -- a kind of Kantian prolegomena to the Organum -- have been responsible for some of it, but interestingly, the threads of my current concerns have something of a logical progression, even if many of the ideas in them don't. Easily, they had their origin in my 2005 review of Saint Oedipus, though many of the ideas in that review were first elaborated upon in 2006 elsewhere. But 2006 did see the launch of the Organum, which itself isn't fully explicable without my continuing writing on Richard Foreman and Howard Barker. More recent Organum entries are here.
Something of a low point was reached earlier this year, when after having spent 2006 writing reviews (about 75 of them altogether) for this blog, the New York Times and nytheatre.com, a crisis of faith manifested itself following a review of Jan Fabre's Je Suis Sang, but I pulled out of it (though I still have days on which I feel the same ambivalence). As I had to, bearing in mind Beckett's imprecation to "fail better" and Howard Barker's courageous insistence:
I do these things
Oh how I persist I am at least persistentAnd I ask
Does anybody want them?The answer comes back
Nobody at allSo I go on
I continue on from the point very much from which I started: with Oedipus and erotic tragedy; a few hundred reviews, six or seven plays of my own, a few other essays later, and this evening I hope to review the Greenwich Village 2007 Halloween parade. Not bad at all, really, and I've even started to get the files in order. So I go on. And a Happy Halloween to you, as well.
Posted at 11.11 pm in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 30 October 2007
I'm looking forward to the New York premiere (it opens tonight) of Howard Barker's A Hard Heart at the Epic Theatre Ensemble, and in about a month the New York Theatre Workshop will present four Beckett plays: the two Acts Without Words, Rough for Theatre I and an adaptation of the television play Eh Joe. Not a bad finish to the year. But what intrigues me about all of these plays is that they all fall quite early on in the careers of these writers. All of the Beckett plays date from the first ten years of his career in the drama, and the Howard Barker play was first published in 1992, fifteen years ago.
Barker is still going strong, though Beckett obviously is not. The intrigue, though, lies in that a great deal of the innovation that these dramatists introduced into the form took place rather later in their development. With his 1962 Play, Beckett introduced the concision and idiosyncratic mise-en-scene that constitute his most lasting aesthetic achievement in the theatre; Barker's conception of the exordium, as well as his more incisive and disturbing stage poetry, have developed considerably in the past decade and a half. Why, then, the decision to produce these fairly early works?
The Beckett decision is not hard to figure. If you've got Mikhail Baryshnikov on your program of Beckett shorts, the last thing you do is stick him in an urn and tell him to sit still for twenty minutes. (This would also explain the presence of both the mime pieces.) The Barker situation is harder to suss. Of the four Barker productions we'll have had here in New York by the end of 2007, all of them will have been of older plays: the Potomac Theatre Project's No End of Blame dates from 1981; the American Theatre of Actors staged the 1988 The Possibilities; QED Productions presented the 1985 Scenes from an Execution. There are reasons to produce all of these, of course, and they're all worthy plays. But why these, say, and not the 2004 Dead Hands or the 2002 Gertrude -- The Cry? Why those Beckett plays and not Ohio Impromptu and What Where?
Most dramatists mature over time; if we were to not produce any O'Neill plays beyond the middle of his career, we'd be stuck with Marco Millions and Dynamo. These early plays of O'Neill's may have some merit, but compared to his later, more mature plays, they're more in the nature of curiosities. (Speaking of curiosities, I'm particularly interested in Ian W. Hill's hint that he'll be staging one of Richard Foreman's first plays, Harry in Love, next August.) And for some dramatists, the preference is clear. Who wouldn't want Death of a Salesman over The Creation of the World ..., or A Streetcar Named Desire over Vieux Carre, regardless of the quality of these later plays?
In discussing some of these later plays of Barker's and Beckett's with other theatre professionals and critics, I gain a sense that they believe that these later works are somehow "ahead of their time" -- that audiences aren't ready for them, or at least, they'd be better prepared if they were exposed to the early work first. This is nonsense; artists are not singularly possessed of time machines that shoot them twenty years into the future, where they write plays that they then bring back to the present to sit in their drawers for another two decades. Every play, every work of art, is a product of its time. If the dramatist is ready for that expression, so is the audience.
Theatre continues to be infested with this backward thinking; the influence of Artaud and Grotowski continues to be primary in most contemporary performance, yet The Theatre and Its Double is 75 years old and Towards a Poor Theatre was published in 1968. As necessary and important as this work was at the time, it fails to foresee future developments of the art: the attempts at reasserting a lyrical language, a controlling individual aesthetic consciousness centered in words, in the midst of the Theatre of Cruelty, for example, and the completion of the attempt to present the fragmented narrative and character that began with Artaud and Grotowski, but didn't end there. Most other Western theatre practitioners have merely been rediscovering Stanislavsky for a media-saturated world, reintroducing a performative anachronism among video and television screens, themselves a surrender to the anti-theatrical.
If it weren't for the fact that the Epic Theatre Ensemble, the New York Theatre Workshop and the Potomac Theatre Project are all non-profit organisations, dedicated in their mission statements to new theatre and the avant-garde, I might understand that the more aesthetically ambitious work of these dramatists might be momentarily sidelined for their earlier, arguably more accessible work. But that's not so. There is also, for consideration, the argument that Milton Babbitt made in 1958 for the continuing development of new music in private performances or in the academy. But Babbitt's argument (the title of the essay, by the way, was foisted on Babbitt by the editor without consultation with him) holds water only if the operation of university research has not been affected by the same neo-capitalism that has affected every other public sector. (Interestingly, many of Beckett's later plays, and many of Barker's recent plays, have indeed had their world premieres within university departments rather than on the stages of commercial or subsidised theatres.)
I don't wish to unduly criticise or question the motives of these producing organisations. I'm very happy that these shows are being done at all, and it's heartening that these major organisations have thrown their weight behind these dramatists. A healthy skepticism, though, requires some dismay that both the Beckett evening and A Hard Heart are so front-loaded with celebrities, Baryshnikov, Akalaitis and Philip Glass in the case of the Beckett, Kathleen Chalfant in the case of A Hard Heart, especially given Barker's stated refusal to engage in marquee-name casting for his own productions. The proof is always in the pudding, but would these plays see these New York stages without the presence of these particular name artists?
Who knows what all this means? But it does seem to indicate that more aesthetically innovative work remains on the sidelines of the larger conversations about theatre and aesthetics. Perhaps we should begin to think of staging these works on other than commercial considerations -- for only one or two performances, say, instead of renting a theatre for four weeks to attempt a recoupment of expenses; most new music premieres take place for one night only, not for sixteen performances over four weeks. But for theatre, with its additional expenses, this is in most cases economically unfeasible. The other option is for these theatre companies to more assiduously cultivate the production of more ambitious work: to produce, not the most familiar or the most accessible, but the rarer and more challenging work to which they've offered dedication in their mission statements. If the plays are not ahead of their own time, they're not ahead of their audiences' either.
Posted at 8.55 am in /Openings
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