Superfluities Redux

A cruel family portrait.
(See entry for 5 February.)

After the cold winds and festival madness of January, the colder winds of February. One would have hoped for a bit of a breather, but alas, theatre struggles on. So do I, despite a lingering bout of discouragement at the thought of revising a new play for some elusive and vague possibility of future production -- what insane woman would want to perform the damn thing? leaving aside the question of who the hell would want to read, produce or see it -- and the continuing wisdom of trailing this blog farther than it's worth, along with the usual dour grumbling. Dare one call it "a disaffected postmodernist ennui"? Well, tough. And screw you, too.

I know, I hear you -- I should get out more. There's more than enough to keep me out of the house, tightly wrapped. So, a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:

Saturday, 2 February/Sunday, 3 February: Although you've missed the first few nights of the hotINK International Festival of Play Readings at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, no reason to miss the last few nights. Scheduled for 2-3 February are new plays from US dramatist Mac Wellman (1965 UU), Australian playwright Tee O'Neill (Best Possible World) and France's Bernard Da Costa (Boomerang), this last featuring Kathleen Chalfant. Schedule varies; full listing and details here.

Monday, 4 February: Just see Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland and can't get enough R. Foreman? Hie yourself down to The Housing Works at 126 Crosby Street at 7.00pm tonight and join Foreman as he discusses "art, behavior and his latest collection of work [from TCG Books], Bad Boy Nietzsche! And Other Plays" with Eric Bogosian. He'll sign your book for you too, apparently; a reception follows. Details (only a few, but details nonetheless) at The Housing Works' Web site. When you get home, put the book down next to your computer; you may want it nearby as you read Nicholas Birns' excellent essay on Foreman's recent work, "Mediated Understandings," in Hyperion -- an Internet magazine quickly becoming a required visit for anyone interested in the condition of contemporary American and world theatre.

Tuesday, 5 February: Artaud's sole complete stageplay, his adaptation of Shelley's The Cenci, opens in a brand new translation by Richard Sieburth and produced by John Jahnke's Hotel Savant theatre company at the Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster Street. Whether this example of the Theatre of Cruelty will be able to compare with today's New York/Super Tuesday Presidential primary is anybody's guess. But it's no ordinary revival, this: "It is the Hotel Savant's intent to impugn The Cenci, an infamous but neglected work, with an aptly modern theatrical language. Jahnke and his company will portray the fall of the house of Cenci -- powerful and doomed, victimized and victimizing -- inspired by what it most resembles today: a tabloid comic tragedy. Specters of the past, the Cencis also prefigure our modern day obsession with private lives lived publicly and sensationally, knowingly pursued yet simultaneously trapped by the media attention they invite." Hmm ... considering Bill and Hillary's history, maybe there's more to the comparison than I thought. Jahnke's last New York show was the 2006 world premiere of Susan Sontag's play A Parsifal, and this production features work by downtown stalwarts Peter Ksander (designer) and Tony Torn, Lauren Blumenfeld and Todd d'Amour (performers). Act now; it runs only through 23 February. Tickets and information through Theatermania.

Wednesday, 6 February: At 6.00pm tonight, join Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi and Claudia Castellucci, the principals of the Italian theatre group Societas Raffaello Sanzio, for an open discussion about their company's work at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at CUNY's Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue. The group is perhaps best known for its epic work Tragedia Endogonidia (a YouTube clip of the haunting production is available here). The name of the company is a reference to Raffaello, "the Renaissance painter (Raphael) who combines the perfection of the shape with the inquietude of a world which is quickly losing its reference points; therefore he is the witness to a dramatic tension and a dynamics of technique that are trends always present in the company's works." It's free; details from the MESTC Web site here. And if that's not enough for you ...

Thursday, 7 February: ... the group's latest work, Hey girl!, opens tonight at Montclair State University's Peak Performances series at 7.30pm. "In this new piece, Romeo Castellucci examines the language of gesture. The genesis for this play came to him while stopped at an intersection; he saw a group of girls waiting for their buses," the promotional material says. "In Castellucci’s masterful hands, nuance is everything: a nod, a finger pointed, a raised eyebrow, or a moment of recognition. Hey girl! examines the relationship of what is going on in the mind of our everyday girl. What is her destiny? Who summons her to appear?" Intriguing questions. Hey girl!'s limited run closes on 10 February. To get more information, visit the page for the show at the Peak Performances Web site.

Friday, 8 February: Israeli choreographer Deganit Shemy arrives at PS122 for Iodine [YOD], her new dance piece for five women who "move between control and abandon, between being victims and victimizers, as well as between vision and blindness, dependency and individuation. They long to be a part of something larger but also fear losing their identity in the throng." Don't we all? The show runs 5-9 February at 8.00pm, Sunday 10 February at 6.00pm. More information at PS122's Web page for the show.

UPDATE, 28 January: Noah Diamond responds here. My apologies to Amanda Sisk for having misspelled her name in the first paragraph of my original post.

Going unremarked to date is this recent post from nytheatre.com founder and editor Martin Denton. It concerns the cancellation (or postponement, or what have you) of a play about democracy's tendencies towards totalitarianism, Zeitgeist 2030 by Noah Diamond and Amanda Sisk. Diamond and Sisk had been planning to self-produce the show through their Nero Fiddled company this season. But on 24 January they made this announcement:

Denton's response: "I applaud Diamond and Sisk for doing the right thing here. Let's greet the election with the optimism and promise that it’s supposed to signify: let's embrace the idea that we can select the right people to run our country, people who will move it forward positively and justly. In 2000, a lot of people said they couldn't tell the difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Those people were letting a disaffected postmodernist ennui rule their thinking. We can't afford that ... not in the arts. ... The point is not what your politics are -- the point is to have some -- to have convictions and to stick to them. Bravo to Noah and Amanda for setting a great example."

We've been down the path of the self-suppression of political speech before, with the My Name is Rachel Corrie/NYTW controversy in 2006, and though this instance is unlikely to generate the general wailing and gnashing of teeth of that particular instance, many of the threads seem similar. Here is a work of art, generated from the sincere intent to express a broad political issue and investigate it fully, pulled from a season for reasons unrelated to the quality of a work, but for a reason directly related to its content. And, like the Rachel Corrie "postponement," it's related to the timing of the production: "It’s just not where we want our heads to be during this election year. Our hope for the Nero Fiddled political shows is that they might inspire our audience to become more politically involved. The bleak vision of Zeitgeist 2030 seems more likely to have the opposite effect. It seems to be saying that the outcome of the 2008 election is irrelevant, because look how bad things are, either way, in 2030."

No play, or other work of art, is either ahead of or behind its time; it is always precisely of its time; art is not created in time machines. If Diamond and Sisk found it a work they wanted to create now, then now is the time for it (and they must have felt it somehow necessary to do so as artists, or it would not have been conceived in the first place). And, to my mind, the description of the show -- "that the outcome of the 2008 election is irrelevant, because look how bad things are, either way, in 2030" -- is a perfectly valid if unpopular position to take, and one more implicitly radical in a political sense than its opposite (not to mention an entirely justifiable, and urgent, message precisely in an election year). In his 2006 book on pessimism and political action, UCLA professor of political science Joshua Foa Dienstag states the case for political and personal activity in the context of a philosophy of pessimism: "For centuries, much philosophy ... has been premised on the idea ... of a gradual improvement of the human condition. But what if we grapple with the possibility that such a melioration cannot be expected, that we must make do with who and what we are? Pessimism is the philosophy that accepts this challenge. ... Pessimism's goal is not to depress us, but to edify us about our condition and to fortify us for the life that lies ahead. ... [Pessimism] must suggest a kind of fortification of the self against an enemy that is already inside the gates of the soul."

Denton's casual dismissal of such messages as "a disaffected postmodernist ennui" is simplistic, arrogant and, as Dienstag's book demonstrates, just plain wrong (Dienstag begins his discussion with the eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers Rousseau and Leopardi, whom few have claimed for the postmodernist clan). Worse is that he thinks that "we can't afford that ... not in the arts," makes me wonder just where he does think we can afford it; it suggests a profoundly limited vision of just what the possibilities of political theatre are. Not to mention that chilling proposition that the arts are not the place for one kind of expression or another, at any time.

But it's not my intention here to call the wrath of God down upon any playwright or critic. What concerns me is what concerned me about the Rachel Corrie controversy: that it brings to light certain unspoken and/or unexamined assumptions in the New York theatre community about the kinds of expression that are or are not welcome on stages here; the extent to which an artist or production organisation will suppress his, her or its own speech in the interest of some higher ideological "good" (in this case, political progressivism); the perceived need to undermine even some of the darkest, most sublime artwork of our time with a call to a false "hope"; and the question as to whether or not this may be a concern that has relevance to the broader decision-making process as to which plays are granted that vague label of "producible" at a particular place and time. Perhaps the sentiments of Diamond, Sisk and Denton are held by only a minority of New York theatre artists, producers and critics. But perhaps they're only the tip of the iceberg.

Diamond and Sisk's decision says just as much about the tendency of democracy towards totalitarianism as their play could, perhaps; what need do we have of government, corporate or institutional suppression of political speech when we so readily suppress it within ourselves, a sad (if inevitable, according to Adorno) internalisation of the totalitarian urge? And not only that, but to be congratulated for it; Denton's "Bravo to Noah and Amanda for setting a great example" is, to say the least, a problematic statement from a critic who claims to support the broad efforts of what he calls the "indie theatre" movement. ("Bravo" for a decision to hide a play -- any play -- from the light of day?) For any New York City dramatist who finds himself drawn to the possibility of theatre for the unique expression of difficult truths about human experience as he sees them, this is a very discouraging morning.

The Deborah Warner/Fiona Shaw production of Happy Days, running at BAM through 2 February, has given rise to many positive reviews -- but is it Beckett? Rainer Hanshe, in his essay "Stoic Nihilism and the Beauty of Oblivion" for the online journal Hyperion, uses the occasion to offer extended thoughts on Beckett's contemporary reputation in American culture. After considering this production and the American canonisation of Beckett as some kind of aesthetic saint (and highbrow Dr. Phil) since Beckett's death in 1989, Hanshe turns to the urge of performers and directors to "reinterpret," counter to Beckett's wishes, his theatrical work:

But this is only part of a much longer meditation on Beckett, Nietzsche's vision of art and the role that literature itself plays in the character of Happy Days' Winnie. As an antidote to a current common conception of Beckett as some kind of hope-dealer, it's worthwhile to examine once more one of the most oft-quoted passages of Beckett's work, from the last page of his 1950 novel The Unnamable:

Hanshe's essay reminds us that those final seven words can be read in a variety of ways, only one of them an assertion of courage. They are also, in the musical decrescendo cadence of this passage, a dying of the light, a tortured expression of inevitable painful existence towards an inevitable death. And, too, a third perspective: that the narrator does, indeed, "go on," but as a being-in-words, as a linguistic memoir of suffering and pain -- as the "stain upon the silence" that Beckett wished to leave as his legacy. It is in this last sense that the imposition of directorial arrogance upon Beckett's work most desecrates the work itself. As the writer's nephew points out, Beckett's dramatic texts (and texts like it) are unique in that each word, even the words of the stage directions, counts. Unlike most plays, you can't just go through the texts with a black marker, eradicating the stage directions (to provide room for directorial and interpretive "creativity"); in many cases you'd have little play left. If one respects Beckett (at least, if one asserts that one respects Beckett), one must also respect that being-in-words that his dramatic texts represent as well. If this is too much of a constraint for those "middling directors and actors" whom Hanshe castigates, well, there's nothing stopping them from writing and devising their own new texts and productions -- writing and staging their own poetic visions. And more power to them. But they don't need Beckett for that; paper and pens are available at most local corner stores. And Beckett doesn't need them.

Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (England, Japan & New York): A Richard Foreman Theater Machine. Written, directed, designed and scored by Richard Foreman. Managing director: Shannon Sindelar. Technical director: Peter Ksander. Stage manager: Brendan Regimbal. Sound engineer: Travis Just. With Joel Israel (Man in Striped Suit), Caitlin McDonough Thayer (Girl in Sailor Hat), Fulya Peker (Girl with Black Hair), Caitlin Rucker (Girl with the Golden Dress), Sarah Dahlen (Girl with the Tiara), and Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim and André Malraux (Voices on Tape). A production of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street. Running time: 62 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 17 January performance. 17 January-13 April 2008. Ticket and schedule information at OvationTix.

Two grand pianos and a graceless hummingbird provide new challenges to Richard Foreman's characters

Fishing for reality?
Caitlin Rucker, Joel Israel, Fulya Peker, Sarah Dahlen and Caitlin McDonough Thayer in
Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland
(Photo: Paula Court)

UPDATE: I was remiss, I realise, in not congratulating Foreman's fine performers in Deep Trance Behavior in the original post this morning -- they're central to much of the comedy and emotional tenderness of the evening. Deep Trance Behavior frees the Foreman performer more than I've seen in recent years. So here's to the generously comic bravado and clumsily masculinist fustian of Joel Israel, Caitlin McDonough Thayer's whispered sweetness, the dark and sexy vampishness of Fulya Peker, Caitlin Rucker's glamorous awareness, and Sarah Dahlen's fetching and flirtatious skepticism. As Foreman moves ahead, his casts grow younger and more energetic. But their worlds are one.

The piano, like the two diminutive grand pianos that dominate the stage in Richard Foreman's latest play, is among musical instruments one of the most complicated and mysterious -- mysterious because most mechanical. Anyone familiar with the actions the machine must make through the disciplined, trained hand of the performer to produce a sound knows that the piano's "action" (the proper name for that mechanism) is made up, like the human hand with its bone, muscles, nerves, flesh and blood, of dozens of parts, wood, felt and steel; what's more, unlike those of the flute or the violin, the mechanism is usually invisible to both performer and audience. The mechanism, like the mechanism of consciousness, can be explained in its physical and physiological existence. But what of the sounds it makes, the dying away of the note once attacked, or the dying away of the perception once recognised? What's left after it dies? We're not in the realm of science now, but of art and philosophy.

We're also in Richard Foreman's realm. For the 40th anniversary production of his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Foreman continues to be fascinated by digital media (a new kind of machine, all ones and zeroes to be processed by elaborate technical equipment), and so are his characters. The very first sequence of the play is a Girl in a Golden Dress (Caitlin Rucker) walking to center stage, facing the audience and elaborately swallowing a pill -- the trancelike state follows (though, according to the controlling consciousness of the play, sounding as usual through a tape, this is an odd pill: "Imagine a pill named O-X taken every day for a period of a year. And just once each day in the twenty-four hours of its effectiveness, it links the perceived data of a specific ordinary moment to universal truth"). The live performers seem to be urged to join the two-dimensional, flat characters on the screen behind them. Production intern Anna Friedlaender wrote on the production blog for the show:

In Foreman's current aesthetic, the tension between the two-dimensional surface of the projected image and the three-dimensional experience of the body is stretched to the breaking point, not irrelevant to his obsession with what he called "pancake people" in earlier plays. And in the subtitle to this new play, he introduces the consciousness of travel, of the cameras and cellphones we take with us as we fly from country to country, around the world, in those airplanes that so mystified Proust (who was also memorably mystified by telephones and revolving doors). "You understand me immediately," says a Japanese woman in the video, but we can't really understand her; she's not there, available for questioning. (And she, in her body now, doesn't see us; we're watching a digital shadow, an illusory nothingness.) Like the five performers, we may take her at her word, tranquillized by our own pills -- or, we can recognise that her image and sounds, as inviting as they are, aren't even the light captured by the photographic mechanism or the sound captured by an analog recording device, but only ones and zeroes. The digital video mechanism doesn't capture people; it doesn't capture light or sound either, but only numbers (and, therefore, the mysticism attached to numerology).

The mistake is in thinking that this simulacrum is reality itself, but without the mechanism to decode these numbers (like the mechanism we use to perceive the world in its three dimensions), they remain meaningless data. Deep Trance Behavior suggests that, as these videos and sounds are memoirs of experience, they're a far more fragile media of memory -- they're an illusory world, and our immersion in it invites us to lose our own three-dimensional existence in those ones and zeroes. The lie behind these memoirs, of course, is that they're not permanent. As a record of the past, they grant the illusion of immortality for those who believe they're captured within the two-dimensional screen; and they dull us to what is possible for us, experientially, as three-dimensional, knowing beings in this comic world. We can see characters on the screen, hear them -- but we cannot touch them, and they can't feel our touch.

The irrational desire for an impossible immortality, the Spanish philosopher Unamuno believed, defined the human being as a tragic figure. The illusory immortality of the screen blinds us to the very real mortality of our own bodies. In Deep Trance Behavior there is, for the first time in my memory of Foreman's work, a representation of death on-stage, and even a melodramatically wailing mourner. More to the point is the tableau that ends the play: as a curtain opens in the video, finally allowing metaphorical entrance to that two-dimensional realm, it's too late for the characters on stage, who are in various states of ... rest? Or something else? Foreman would have it as a state of relaxation -- "The actors are simply resting" is the last legend of the play, which we read over the fallen, motionless bodies of the performers onstage. This may be true, but it also calls into consciousness the possibility that they might also be dead, and that we may be prone ourselves to make that mistake were we not reminded of the metaphorical form of the theatre itself.

In watching a Richard Foreman play, we are invited to become aware of our own machinery of consciousness -- to recognise the two-dimensionality of the screened world, whether it's Japanese or English, as an invitation to escape our own three-dimensional, fleshed, very mortal bodies; and to recognise the tricks that these numbers play on our senses. And in this is a form of hope (Foreman is a comic, not a tragic, dramatist -- and there's enormous comedy in Deep Trance Behavior, not to mention the showmanlike flourishes for which he's known; Foreman's always had a lot of Belasco in him). The irony of mortality can be a comic irony as well as a tragic one. It's for us to decide, and recognise, as the play's own musing consciousness says:

"There is no way out of entanglement. The only responsible course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one's own existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell."

"Exile is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew."

"–Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning. ...

"–You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.

"–Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.

"–And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.

"His words seemed to have struck some deep chord in his own nature. Had he spoken of himself, of himself as he was or wished to be? Stephen watched his face for some moments in silence. A cold sadness was there. He had spoken of himself, of his own loneliness which he feared.

Lucian Freud. Esther. 1991. Etching.
Plate: 8 5/8 x 8" (22 x 20.2 cm)
Sheet: 17 3/8 x 15 1/2" (44 x 39.3 cm)
(See entry for 25 January.)

A highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:

Saturday, 19 January: One of our favorite companies, the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, is letting its hair down this winter and spring with Room for Cream, a continuing lesbian-themed soap opera, at La MaMa ETC, 74A East 4th Street. Episode 2, "The Flashback," is performed today at 5.30pm. Future episodes will appear on the first and third Saturdays of each month through June, same time, same place. "Join us," they write, "as we follow the espresso-laced exploits of dykes in distress, lesbians in love, queers in ... well, you get the point." I guess you do. More info at the La MaMa ETC Web site. Tickets are only $8.00.

Sunday, 20 January: Through 13 April, the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers blog.mode: addressing fashion, the first in a series of exhibitions examining the way we present our bodies to the world: through our clothes. The title of the show? A reference to one of our own new modes of communication, the blog.

Monday, 21 January: Down at his Flea Theatre, artistic director Jim Simpson directs the Flea's resident company, the Bats, in a revival of Peter Handke's 1966 Offending the Audience, one of the Austrian playwright's earliest metatheatrical works. Previews begin tonight in advance of a 31 January opening; a rare New York production of a Handke play. More information at the Flea's Web site.

Tuesday, 22 January: Karole Armitage's Armitage Gone! Dance Company premieres part three of their "Dream Trilogy," Connoisseurs of Chaos. Armitage and designer David Salle base this most recent piece on Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field. Tonight through 27 January, more information here. Armitage also choreographs the upcoming Broadway production of Passing Strange, the musical by Stew, Heidi Rodewald and Annie Dorsen, which opens in February at the Belasco.

Wednesday, 23 January: There's still time to catch Edward the Second, the Red Bull Theater's production of the Christopher Marlowe tragedy; it's been extended through 27 January. I wrote about the show on 17 December of last year; tickets at Ticket Central.

Thursday, 24 January: Brooke Berman's new comedy Hunting and Gathering, about that most terrifying of New York life experiences, the apartment hunt, begins previews tonight at Primary Stages, 59 East 59th Street, at 8.00pm. (I'd suggest it was more appropriate for an Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty approach, but opinions can differ.) Their production last summer of Opus, Michael Hollinger's play concerning the dissolution of a string quartet, was a highly pleasurable evening. More information on the show and ticket information at the Primary Stages Web site; the show runs through 1 March. And Ms. Berman also has a blog of her own.

Friday, 25 January: One of our most respected contemporary portraitists is the subject of a new exhibition called Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings at the Museum of Modern Art through 10 March. Along with 75 of Freud's etchings, the show will also include a selection of his paintings and drawings. There's an online exhibition as well. (If you're chafing at MoMA's $20.00 ticket price, not to worry; admission is free every Friday evening from 4.00 to 8.00pm.)

At the Guardian today I respond to Neil LaBute's recent excoriation of American playwrights:

(By the way, a correspondent points out that, in re my first post on the matter, a founding member of The Fire Department is ... wait for it ... Neil LaBute.)

UPDATE: Ironically, on the very same day as LaBute's article appears in the Guardian, a press release relating to The Fire Department's At War: American Playwrights Respond to Iraq winds up in my inbox. The show will present excerpts of new political plays by writers such as Jessica Blank & Eric Jenson and José Rivera, with a cast including Bebe Neuwirth and David Strathairn. Perhaps Neil's just on the wrong mailing lists.

As part of the Guardian's new Tetchy-Playwright-of-the-Week series (apparently launched with 3 January's interview of Edward Bond), American playwright Neil LaBute takes time out on the eve of the London premiere of his latest plays to excoriate writers on the other side of the pond:

While I yield to no one in my admiration for the British playwrights that he lists in his first paragraph -- and for Messrs. Shinn and Shawn, if not Mr. Mamet -- I sense more smoke than fire here, since the list of American playwrights he admires grows just as long as those of British extraction by the end of his essay. (And, to be fair to LaBute, he includes himself in the ranks of the American writers he excoriates as well.) After saying that he "can still count on a playwright like David Hare or Caryl Churchill to give a shit" (really? The Year of Magical Thinking director David Hare?), he promises, each time he sits down at his desk, "to write about a subject of some importance, and to do so with honesty and courage. The time for fear and complacency is past. Bravery needs to make a comeback on both sides of the footlights, and fast." More from the Gen. George Patton of the American theatre here. Consider your shit given, Mr. LaBute.

This Place Is a Desert. Conceived and directed by Jay Scheib. Produced by Shoshana Polanco. Scenic and lighting design by Peter Ksander. Sound and video design by Leah Gelpe. Costume design by Oana Botez-Ban. Camera by Karl Allen. With performances by Sarita Choudhury (Jeanette), Caleb Hammond (Bill Faulkner/Mr. Rowe), Thomas Keating (Jim Floyd), Aimée Phelan-Deconinck (Victorovna), Jorge Albert Rubio (Marcello), Eric Dean Scott (Richard Harris), Tanya Selvaratnam (Nurse/Mrs. Rowe), April Sweeney (Monica) and Karl Allen (Glenn "Haskell Wexler" Chick). A production of the Under the Radar festival. Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 13 January 2008 performance. At The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, 9-20 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at The Public Theater Web site.

Something's missing from Jay Scheib's elegant but unconvincing meditation on modern alienation

Trapped between a camera and a hard place:
This Place Is a Desert
(Photo: Julien Jourdes)

The three couples and their associated lovers in This Place Is a Desert express their bitterness, loneliness and desire exclusively through their bodies. The sound that echoes most through the Public Theater's cavernous LuEsther Hall during Jay Scheib's meditation on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, the locale transferred to the post-capitalist multi-ethnic United States, is the inimitable smack of flesh pounding into flesh, and its most memorable visual trope is the presence of male and female bodies in various states of elegant, posed deshabille. As they change partners, express affection and even engage in a most unpleasant-looking orgy through the nearly two-hour running time, though, their entrapment in their surroundings (and in the frame of the camera) begins to seem beyond the insights of the characters, and, unfortunately, beyond the conception of the work.

For even a theatre primarily of movement and images requires some kind of exploratory if implicit objective correlative, a way into what lies beneath the dynamics of the movement and images. Even so, there is narrative of a sort here. The marriage of writer Marcello (the artist figure) and Jeanette is fraying at the edges, not least because of his illicit liaison with the disaffected Victorovna; nuclear-power consultant Jim Floyd copes with his disturbingly unpredictable wife Monica; high-powered moneyman Mr. Rowe treats his relationship with his wife and those around him with all the crudity of cold hard cash. The physical confines of the boxy interiors in which these characters have been condemned to live their lives is paralleled by the entrapment of their facial features in the camera's frame. Love may or may not be possible. But then ... what?

The uncredited text and dialogue may underscore the entrapment of these characters linguistically as well: they speak, when they do, in a series of clichés. The prosaic quality of these dialogues rarely calls attention to itself, but one wishes that it would, especially from writer Marcello (and there's little indication here as to whether he's a good writer or not; he's a good friend with a dying character named "Bill Faulkner," but acquaintance doesn't necessarily breed talent, and the little pieces we get of his prose are about as unenergetic and colorless as the clichés that Jeanette and Victorovna trade when they finally meet at the end of the play -- indeed, one wishes that they'd drop the predictable, melodramatic dialogue and start smacking each other around instead; everybody else has been smacked around, after all).

That said, the cast and the design team (Peter Ksander, Leah Gelpe, Oana Botez-Ban) contribute brilliantly to the production, ever-watchable and dynamic, and Scheib remains one of the most sensuous, haunted young directors of the time. But the production fails to become more than the sum of its parts. And perhaps it's those elements of Antonioni's films that Scheib omits from his piece that lead to my dissatisfaction. Antonioni framed his characters not only in rooms, but also in natural landscapes, and while that can't be done given the confines of the theatrical form in which he works, Scheib doesn't really find a counter-valence for his interiors that exteriors represented for Antonioni. (The intimacy and invasiveness of the video camera mimics Antonioni's intimacy and invasiveness, but here too, little is added that video-in-theatre hasn't already explored, sometimes ad nauseam.)

And, though one hates to say it (and risks, admittedly, the charge of playing the age card), perhaps the fault here is the rawness of youth: there's not that reluctant, torturous resignation regarding the ennui in the modern world that comes with long experience. This Place Is a Desert has got the elegance right, and the sensuality, and the luxury, and the transitoriness of modern interior furniture, but not the ambivalence of that world's dark heart. At the end of This Place Is a Desert, Marcello and Jeanette step downstage, out of the boxy set, and only begin to communicate then. But in Antonioni's world (and indeed in the modern world), there's no downstage, conveniently situated outside of the boxes and traps of the set. Here, it seems a bit of a cheat. Resignation to surroundings and the objects within them is not only inevitable, but necessary: hence its tragedy, as the closing montage of L'Eclisse suggests.

I was reminded here particularly not of an Antonioni film but of Roberto Rossellini's 1953 film Voyage in Italy, a profound influence on Antonioni's work and a masterpiece of sorts that remains unavailable on DVD in the United States as yet. That film too detailed the dissolution of a marriage within a modern world that, first, holds no beauty and, second, numbs our capacity for the recognising the beauty of other individuals, experiences and worlds. George Sanders, the victim of this existence, is the very model of a desiccated elegance bored and smothered by ennui -- he is dead inside. But even he gets his moment of love, however fleeting, from Ingrid Bergman. It's that possibility that remains in the modern world; perhaps its recognition comes only with time, and years.

Journey to the End of the Night. Adapted from the novel of the same name and the life of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Created by The Flying Machine. Text by Jason Lindner. Directed by Joshua Carlebach. Sound design by Zach Williamson. Lighting design by Anjeanette Stokes. Set design by Anna Kiraly. Costume design by Brad Wilson. Performed by Richard Crawford. A presentation of The Flying Machine. Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 10 January 2008 performance. At The Gene Frankel Theater, 24 Bond Street, New York, 8-26 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at TheaterMania.

Richard Crawford's bravura performance as the notorious French novelist grounds a haunting examination of the anti-semitic author's life and work

Richard Crawford as Céline et al.
in Journey to the End of the Night
(Photo: Piotr Redlinski)

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1932 Journey to the End of the Night is among the dozen or so monuments of the modernist novel. Unceasingly, mordantly comic and epic in its sweep, the book is a cry of outrage at man's inhumanity to man, from the global and the personal perspectives, macrocosmic and microcosmic. Its narrator, Bardamu, winds his picaresque path from the First World War through imperialism in Africa and life as a doctor in a small village, seeing crime, cruelty and destruction everywhere (Bardamu himself far from blameless). Céline's prose style is a broken, shattered hash of prosaic shards (which, in his later books, became little more than sentence fragments strung together with ellipses); his work has drawn praise from writers as diverse as Albert Camus, Andre Gide and Charles Bukowski.

The writer himself became just as controversial as his work in the years following its publication. Beginning in 1937, Céline began to produce a series of vicious, grossly anti-semitic pamphlets, leading to his denunciation by the French government in 1944, his arrest and imprisonment in Denmark and finally his conviction in absentia of treason. Granted amnesty a few years later, Céline returned to France where he produced a further trilogy of stark novels and several lunatic texts for ballets, working as a doctor for the poor until his death in 1961. (Céline's life was also the inspiration for Howard Barker's play The Early Hours of a Reviled Man.)

The wonder is not that his work and the story of his life have been adapted to the stage at all, though its epic range beggars spaces like the 74-seat black-box Gene Frankel Theatre. The real wonder is that it's been done so well, in The Flying Machine's new one-person adaptation of Céline's life and work. Director Joshua Carlebach and writer Jason Lindner have devised a highly stagable text that alternates between scenes from Journey and a monologue by the author himself, a genial, gregarious hermit prone to launch into foul-mouthed gross denunciations of his critics, his neighbors, the world and especially the Jews. Added to this is the recital of a text from one of Céline's late ballets ("without orchestra, without music, without anything" as the author describes it) -- a bizarre, fevered and ludicrous mishmosh set in Olympus.

The conceit of the show is that the audience has been invited to the writer's apartment towards the end of his life for a conversation-cum-casual seminar about his work: an "evening with the author." Behind a desk, the center of Anna Kiraly's hopelessly cluttered, dusty and highly realistic set (a set which spills into the audience and lit just as realistically by Anjeanette Stokes), sits the author himself, in the person of Richard Crawford, who over the 75-minute running time impersonates not only the author but also a half-dozen characters from his most important book in a dizzying, detailed, disciplined and brilliant performance, only once rising from his chair. His face details a range of expressions, from those of his fellow soldiers to that of his moronic friend Robinson to that of Robinson's coprophiliac wife Madelon (as she's in the midst of a violent ass-fucking, no less). Employing a wide range of British and American accents, Crawford's impersonations are precise and dynamic in their variety.

In all the talk that's been going on about acting and performance styles in the blogosphere lately, here's a keen example of the evolution of style and technique. Crawford received his training at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, teaches the technique at SUNY Purchase and has directed clown work for the Cirque du Soleil and appeared as the lead clown in Slava's Snowshow. Though the text itself is based in character-delineation and realism, Carlebach and Crawford have apparently based their own approach not primarily as an exercise in Stanislavskian characterisation but in the intensely physical clown work of Lecoq. The production is an incisive and instructive example of the value of these new techniques towards the evocation of the theatricality inherent in seemingly realistic texts. Crawford's face, body movements and hand gestures, even anchored and rooted in one spot over the play's duration, give rise to as varied and engaging a performance as any interior quasi-psychological approach: a performance from the physical gesture inward, instead of the mental impulse outward.

A lesson in recent literary history, then, and a lesson in great acting. Journey to the End of the Night fulfills its ambitions on both counts. The show runs through 26 January.

Regrets? He has a few ...
(See entry for 13 January)

May I make a modest request? Put the kibosh on the festivals already. Currently underway are four festivals of downtown theatre, each of them packed with enough inviting performances and productions to make my head spin. That's more than 40 productions all told, and that doesn't cover all of the other openings of the next seven days. It's more than a middle-aged man with a full-time, 35-hour-a-week job (completely unrelated to theatre, by the way) can take. Where's Martin Denton when you need him?

The big one is the Under the Radar Festival, curated by Mark Russell at the Public Theater (17 individual productions), which continues to go strong with work by Jay Scheib, the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, Young Jean Lee, the brilliant British troupe rotozaza -- and that's just a few days. A few blocks east of the Public, Vallejo Gantner's PS122 is hosting Coil: A Winter Festival of Theatre, Dance and Performance (10 productions), which will include, along with a great deal of new work, encore visits from John Moran and Saori and Banana Bag & Bodice. But don't stop there; catch the crosstown bus to the West Village for HERE's 2008 Culturemart (12 productions), with new work from The South Wing and Ex.Pgirl. And Steven McElroy in today's New York Times also highlights the Barrow Street Theater's Fortnight festival (9 productions).

Winter doldrums indeed. I only hope the NyQuil holds out. That said, here's a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:

Saturday, 12 January: PS122's Coil festival brings the new British theater company 1927 to these shores with their show Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, tonight at 10.00pm. A hit at the Edinburgh Festival, Between the Devil ... "takes you to the wild woods and the shipwrecked seas, from the weird underbelly of the suburbs to the tweedy world of the old rich. Hapless cats, marauding gingerbread men and cross dressing devils all make an appearance, not to mention the sinister twins and their misfortunate guests," using the techniques of silent film. Through 27 January; tickets via OvationTix. (Now these festivals are ganging up, too: This is a coproduction with the Under the Radar.)

Sunday, 13 January: I hope you have your tickets, because monologuist Mike Daisey's new show at the Under the Radar festival, the intriguingly-titled How Theater Failed America, is already sold out. With luck, it'll be back. But if you don't have tickets, you can enjoy reading one of Mike's regrets for 2007:

Monday, 14 January: Paris Syndrome is the new dance theatre piece about culture shock from the Ex.Pgirl group, tonight at HERE's Culturemart festival at 8.30pm. "Through their trademark use of humorous video interviews, playful multi-lingual text, and hilarious physicality, Ex.Pgirl engages the ideas of madness, love, beauty, and cultural misunderstanding that surround this psychological condition," the Web page says. Tickets via OvationTix.

Tuesday, 15 January: Mike Leigh's critically-acclaimed latest play Two Thousand Years, about an assimilated Jewish family in London whose son turns to orthodoxy, sold out quickly when it opened at London's National Theatre in 2005. Now (and north of 14th Street, for a change), it gets its New York premiere via The New Group, who did a terrific job with Leigh's Abigail's Party a season or two back. Scott Elliott directs; the cast includes Laura Esterman and the always-welcome Richard Masur. Performances begin tonight at 8.00pm.

Wednesday, 16 January: Maybe after all that downtown theatre you might like to try to make some yourself. Courtesy The Foundry Theatre and rotozaza, you'll be able to do so in Etiquette at the Veselka Restaurant, 144 Second Avenue. "You sit across from each other at a table in a restaurant wearing headphones that tell you what to say to each other, or to use one of the objects positioned to the side," the press material says. "Etiquette exposes human communication at its most delicate and explores the difficulty of turning our thoughts into words we can trust. For it to work you just need to listen and respond accordingly." Not unlike rotozaza's excellent Five in the Morning at PS122 last season, except that you're at the center of it now. Audience participation never had it so good. From the Under the Radar festival; information here. And the Village Voice's Alexis Soloski has more.

Thursday, 17 January: You've no doubt seen the posters (they do crop up every January). Performances begin for Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (England, Japan & New York): A Richard Foreman Theatre Machine at the Ontological Theater at Saint Mark's Church, Second Avenue and Tenth Street. It's the 40th anniversary show for Richard's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre: "Plunging deeper than ever into ravishing abstract theater, Richard Foreman evokes the atmosphere of a séance, combining the tableaus filmed in Japan and England with five live New York actors who navigate a sinking grand piano." As if words could describe it. Here's a production blog, with entries from current Foreman performer Fulya Peker and former Foreman performer Juliana Francis Kelly. Tickets via OvationTix.

Alison reads Edward Bond's interview at the Guardian (UK) today, and her interest is piqued by a little terminological problem:

Some distinctions are useless and some useful; in terms of art and criticism, precision counts. News reports that point to "a dramatic rescue attempt" or "a tragic death" or a politician striking a "theatrical pose" use the words "drama" and "tragedy" and "theatre" in a rather looser manner than theatre critics or practitioners might.

Even then, there's more to it than meets the eye, as Alison's post and its associated comments indicate. My own view is there as well.

A belated welcome to Christine Evans, who's been writing writing.performance since last February and just popped up on my radar, thanks to Ben Ellis. Ms. Evans is an Australia-born playwright who has spent the last seven years in the US, which gives her a unique perspective onto the health of theatre, performance and criticism in both cultures.

She's just back in Australia following a reading of her new play, Trojan Barbie, at the Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco and a production of her play Weightless at Providence, RI's Perishable Theatre. Back in November, going over the reviews for Weightless, she wrote:

Amazons and Their Men by Jordan Harrison. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. Music by Matt Carlson. Set design and projections by Sue Rees. Costume design by Kirche Leigh Zeile. Lighting design by Garin Marschall. Sound design by Leah Gelpe. With Rebecca Wisocky (The Frau), Brian Sgambati (The Man), Heidi Schreck (The Extra) and Gio Perez (The Boy). A presentation of Clubbed Thumb, Maria Striar and Meg MacCary, producers. Running time: 70 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 5 January 2008 performance. At the Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster Street, New York, 3-26 January 2008. Ticket and schedule information at OvationTix.

Compromise with a corrupt system in the hopes of freedom is an illusion in Jordan Harrison's play based on the career of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl

Rebecca Wisocky as The Frau in
Amazons and Their Men.
(Photo: Carl Skutsch)

What Martin Heidegger was to philosophy, Leni Riefenstahl was to film history. The unquestionably talented director put her services to the work of the Nazi government in the 1930s, producing and directing films like Triumph of the Will and Olympia; later, Riefenstahl and Heidegger both sought to distance themselves from their contributions to the culture of Hitler's Germany. And, like Heidegger, Riefenstahl continues to influence her discipline to this day, especially in the final scenes of Star Wars, the composition of which George Lucas admitted was influenced by Riefenstahl's Triumph. When, later, Riefenstahl continued to make films, the reception of her work was tainted by her associations with the fascist government, regardless of the content of that work. (Whether the content of that later work itself was corrupted by her brush with Hitler and his minions is a question too complex to be gone into here.)

Jordan Harrison's new play at Clubbed Thumb, Amazons and Their Men, is a meditation on that story. His Riefenstahl stand-in, The Frau, is trying to make a film entirely for herself, a version of Penthesilea's story, in which she has cast herself as the Amazon warrior. Surrounding her are the actors and supernumeraries of her film -- those performers who are necessary but not sufficient to the completion of her new work. Also necessary to its completion is the money and cooperation of the Nazi government, which is funding the film. But it's 1939, and Hitler's government is far more interested in the eastern front than in film production. Despite The Frau's efforts to provide work and protection for the several homosexuals in her cast, the historical situation and her own arrogance lead to disaster for all but her.

Harrison navigates the churning waters of the issue with considerable deftness, aided by Ken Rus Schmoll's bare but kinetic staging; the only two setpieces are a comfortable leather chair in The Frau's apartment and a large modular structure on wheels. It swerves and circles during the sequences in which we see scenes from the film, in a dynamic and convincing imitation of The Frau's own camera movements. The four-person cast, too, is a convincing ensemble. Brian Sgambati and Gio Perez, playing two gay actors who portray Achilles and Patroclos in The Frau's film, offer considerable tenderness and tension as they find their own desires fired by their collaboration, and Heidi Schreck finds a woundedness as The Extra, doomed ever to die -- and live -- at the margins of The Frau's mise en scène.

But it's Rebecca Wisocky as The Frau who dominates the stage in one of the first memorable performances of 2008. Wisocky cleverly channels both Riefenstahl and Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond in portraying the arrogant director. There is an appropriate campiness to her performance (camp an element of both Nazi and gay aesthetics in some of their manifestations), but she keeps it admirably channeled towards a violent emotional intensity in the quieter scenes of the play.

Amazons and Their Men, despite its subject matter, is a brisk and often very funny 70 minutes (thanks in no small part to Heidi Schreck's gift for physical comedy), but admirably it doesn't lose sight of its issues, which are just as significant today as they were in Germany in 1939. Despite all the seemingly apolitical work she did after WWII, Riefenstahl's career continues to be tainted by her association with Hitler's government and institutions, as does Heidegger's philosophy. And today, during a politically charged year, it's good to be reminded that we all work within a system, within institutions (of which the military is only one; there are social, corporate and artistic institutions as well) which have their own ideological presuppositions. Some may choose, like Riefenstahl, to work within them, assuming that eventually they will have the liberty to express themselves fully. But compromise does not buy artistic freedom -- or any other kind. It buys us instead.

Yesterday I wrote the last words of the first draft of What She Knew, my latest play and the first, I think, to be written entirely with the Organum and its associated preface the "95 Sentences" behind me and the launch of a company before me. Which isn't to say that I wrote it with a print-out of the theory beside me as I wrote. The dramatist never does. But the interior drive that produced the Organum as polemic now produces a text as drama. Next comes the cold hard business of taking the red pen to it. A first draft is always a first step, an infant who develops to maturity through rewrites, production and performance. And, as with maturation, it's a process not of perfection, but of skimming the most blatant imperfections from the top, more in hope than in knowledge.

But the outlines of the infant are clear now; she has corporeal existence. Having based the play on the story of Jocasta in the Oedipus mythos, I wanted to re-center Jocasta's experience and role in the tragic narrative, an experience and role that may have been marginalised in the same sense that female experiences and roles were marginalised in the masculinist democracy of the ancient Greece that first produced her. (This was not always the case, even in the Oresteia; the Agamemnon is as much Clytemnestra's as the title character's, and after Sophocles Euripides keenly limns the tragic female experience.) Nonetheless, Jocasta's unique story testifies (as do all of the tragedies) to the spirit of ancient tragedy in that it remains with us today, for our contemplation, and something in these tragedies continues to bear upon our own experience of the world -- otherwise, we would not as a culture find them endlessly renewable on our stages. Far from anachronistic or irrelevant, their heartbeats pulse on for us.

So I leave her alone at center stage -- What She Knew is a long monologue in verse for a woman anywhere from thirty to fifty years of age, surrounded only by her memory, passion and desire. Although I've given only the barest thought to design yet, I see it in blacks, whites, and a broad spectrum of grays. But this practical consideration can now drive the rewrite and the thoughts and efforts that will eventually give rise to production: to casting, to sound, set and costume design. And direction. I'm not sure that I want to direct the play at this point, it may have to do with the performer and her own comfort.

But: the play arose and was completed with much assistance from my Albee Foundation fellowship last year, and was in part the result of Richard Foreman's suggestion that I take on a mythological subject. So thanks to them. Now, to the money part, and practice. (And also the next play, the adaptation of Lenz's 1774 The Tutor that I've been promising myself, a longer-form and more physically ambitious play that may or may not be a theatre minima production. But one thing at a time.)

Below is the text of my book review, "Playwrights Writing: Procedure and Polemic," which first appeared in the September 2007 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

Academics write about theatre for other academics. When playwrights write about theatre, their audience is simultaneously themselves and the general public: a view from the inside, as moles underneath their aesthetic ground, examining the soil from which the art of drama springs. In his Short Organum and The Messingkauf Dialogues, Brecht told theatre practitioners how to make theatre and audiences how to receive it, as did Shaw in his early theatre reviews and prefaces. The form of this polemic was straightforward: the essay, expository prose that had the air of practical utility. Among recent English-language playwrights, Suzan-Lori Parks' and Tony Kushner's writings on theatre share this same strategy.

But there are other more playful, suppler forms. It's not surprising that these forms, rather than the essay, have especially appealed to those playwrights who take language in and of itself as the subject of their dramatic work. Two recently issued book-length polemics on theatre, one from Mac Wellman in the United States and the other from Howard Barker in Europe, break free from the essay form to present evolving ideas about drama and theatre, and in doing so they demonstrate a variety of contrasts: between America and Europe, the comic and the tragic, the narrative and the aphorism. These books share, however, a goal of seeing theatre as a part of culture, both reflective and transformative of society itself. Wellman's avenue is towards cheerful satire, Barker's towards tragic apocalypse.

Having written many essays about theatre and drama in the past, Wellman turns in Q's Q to the novel to present his anatomy of contemporary American drama: a satiric allegory of the current state of the art. The story is set in the bucolic Sweet Thumb River Valley among individuals in a non-profit community theatre company: Chris Name, a New American Playwright (or NAP, as Wellman's characters abbreviate it: there are so many of these NAPs that this mere abbreviation can stand in for all of them), is assigned by the Great Wind Repertory Theatre's artistic director, Van Rensselaer Board, to adapt a massive, hopelessly convoluted myth from the Central European country of Perfidia for the stage. Dramaturgs and assistant dramaturgs all have their say, actors and directors push and pull Name's text into something resembling a piece of theatre -- a staged reading that provokes a riot, leading ultimately to the death of the artistic director at the hands of Great Wind's board of directors when he has the effrontery to suggest that the play be added to the theatre's next mainstage season.

Wellman's target here is the identity politics which infests contemporary American theatre, and for a writer as obsessed by the slipperiness of language as Wellman, identity is manifested in words -- words, however, which in their protean power have magical qualities. As well as the name of the novel, Q's Q is the name of the Perfidian national epic poem Name is asked to adapt, translatable to the eerie Weird's Weird. In working with the poem (from a text rearranged by Constantine, an irritable Perfidian invited by the artistic director to intern at the company; Constantine's main responsibility, however, seems to be to empty out the trash cans and run minor errands), Name manages to unleash and even to embody the strange violent lusts the myth evokes -- lusts which, at the staged reading, provoke the novel's comically violent denouement.

The American drama that the Perfidian epic disrupts is a paltry thing, though; Wellman suggests that it's the novelty of these unleashed forces that ultimately testifies to the power of the art, an art that in the United States has become desiccated over time. One of the most delightful aspects of the book is Wellman's parodic twisting of American dramatic tropes. Tennessee Williams and his brand of lyricism, especially as practiced by lesser writers, is exemplified by A Burnt Angel Called Tempt Me: "Everyone in the play swerved and swore and sweated a lot; drank iced tea, wine in wine coolers and rye whiskey in jars. They tore open their greasy tee-shirts to reveal the remarkable wounds they had gotten in the War and show how much they loved the girl who was called 'Tall Yaller,' had been a nightclub singer before she lost all her teeth in a fight and her leg to a disease too terrible to name. ... [They] worked the old emotional marimba like a son of a gun. It was very impressive, like watching a gorilla knot a necktie ..." Theatre academics themselves are parodied in the character of Pooh, the feminist dramaturg assigned to Name's play, who pledges allegiance to a bizarre mélange of academic PC-speak: "[the theory] allows for a ubiquity of grievance within the universal color-blind panopticon for unobstructed viewing of abuse, harassment, molestation, brutalization, rites of exclusion, silencing and erasure as a strategic mask-play in the oppositional grid that is the postmodernist's response to Phallocentric Patriarchy." This is a good set of words with which to construct a self-serving academic identity; not so good when it comes to putting a play on a stage.

And despite the PC identity politics that Wellman satirizes as a weakness of the contemporary American stage, ultimately this PC language serves not so much the community and collaboration, but the self. In using this language to protect their own self-image and self-importance, the characters -- playwright, adapter, dramaturg, performer, director -- send the collaborative process necessary to theatre-making to spinning: as a result of the centrifugal force of all this spinning, the art itself flies apart.

The last word in the novel belongs to Luna, the moon: the light which oversees Sweet Thumb River Valley, the light which shows the way to the front door of the theatre for the 8.00 pm curtain. Despite the awful state of American theatre, the moon hopes for the best: "To behold me is to become aware of the truly sublime; that is to say, there is a kind of drama that is wholly alien to that of the torn tee-shirt, that of the stunning revelation that has been so ham-fistedly foreshadowed ... that the revelation usually feels more like an instance of the stunningly obvious ...; than what is more rare and marvelous, the species of drama that is like stillness and quiet, but is not stillness and quiet; ... the variety of drama that is always approaching, approaching the inexpressible but never quite arriving at that place, just as the human heart approaches but never quite reaches the place called love, called hate, called home ..." Wellman seems to share the hope of his anthropomorphized satellite (Luna "ends it all on a note of lightness and hilarity"), his vision of the condition of the American theatre still a comic vision, ripe for his satire and parody, and possessed of the capacity for rebirth that the spirit of comedy represents.

This is an optimism for culture itself; Wellman's subject is not merely theatre, but the self and the world, as is Howard Barker's. While the ostensible subject of Death, The One and the Art of Theatre is drama and theatre, theatre for Barker is also all-encompassing: "All I describe is theatre even where theatre is not the subject" is a mantra that runs through the book, a Nietzschean collection of aphorisms that depends for its power upon its cumulative effect. And like Wellman, Barker is an extraordinarily productive dramatist (more than 40 plays over the past 37 years). But there the resemblances stop.

Howard Barker's work has been slow in coming to American stages, and even in his own country it is very rarely produced by institutional theatres like the National Theatre or the Royal Court. However, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in his plays; Oberon Books is now publishing a uniform edition of his plays, and several volumes of criticism have been published, with a volume of interviews with Barker scheduled for publication in the near future. His career, from the premiere of his 1970 play Cheek at the Royal Court to his more astringent recent productions with his own theatre company, The Wrestling School, is an attempt to revive the spirit of tragedy for a 21st century post-ideological philosophy based upon desire and seduction. Where Wellman's book is of the present of the theatre, Barker's book is of its future.

And this future must be wrenched from the roots of the art form, a radical reclamation. Barker differentiates between existing "theatre" and his vision of an "art of theatre," a divorce of the commercial and the artistic. "The theatre purports to give pleasure to the many. The art of theatre lends anxiety to the few. Which is the greater gift?" he asks early in the book. In emphasizing the present theatrical body as a dying body, Barker sees in contemporary theatre a violent attempt to deny the unique truths about the human spirit, its dynamic of pain and pleasure staged in full knowledge and awareness of mortality: a knowledge and exploration that the performer seeks to share with the audience.

Barker's metaphysics is not a playful metaphysics, as is Wellman's metaphysics of language; instead, playfulness constitutes a refusal of theatre's essence, which, in Barker's vision, is an awareness of the pain and violence inflicted by individual human beings upon each other. This is far from an identity politics or PC ideology. Indeed, it refuses both explicit politics and ideology through the sensual enactment of language, an enactment beyond the critical eye. "To stage death," Barker writes, "we must -- let us admit it, and affirm it -- abolish the critical regard -- a regard so fissured and cataracted as to have become in any case a condition of the blind ..." For the aphoristic polemicist like Barker, this doesn't lead to the abolition of criticism but an abolition of its traditional interpretive function, its use. It defines theatre and criticism as experiential rather than interpretive, a suppler brand of Sontag's erotic attitude towards the work of art.

This renders criticism and polemics of theatre themselves more nuanced and imaginative in the manner of Cixous. A new art of theatre requires a new art of theatre criticism, of theatre writing. The forms of Barker's past critical and theoretical work, particularly in his landmark Arguments for a Theatre (originally published in 1989 but now in its third edition), owed more to Brecht than to, say, Cioran: straightforward essays and speeches were interspersed with occasional dialogues and poetry. In Death, The One ..., the volume of aphorisms supplants the anthology of related but loosely arranged expository prose as an attempt at expressing a theatrical aesthetic. The fragmented nature of these aphorisms leads to a more imaginative approach to the criticism on the part of the reader. Like Barker's theatre, his theory is now provocative of a reader's response and encourages an immersion in the arrangement of the aphorisms on the page, similar to an immersion in the fragments and images of Barker's theatre practice itself.

Death, The One ... is a logical extension of Barker's recent poetics. He only began publishing his verse in 1985, 15 years after the premiere of his first play and at about the time of The Castle, his first major tragedy. More recently Barker seems to have honed his aesthetic to a more ascetic practice, as evidenced in this book (published to coincide with the premiere of his 2004 play Dead Hands, which marks a movement away from his former epic practice and more towards a chamber theatre, from The Castle's ensemble of more than 15 characters and 11 scenes to Dead Hands' three characters and one unbroken act). The evolution of Barker's theoretical style runs parallel to the evolution of his theatrical style, as Wellman's language-based identity politics in Q's Q runs alongside his examination of language's contribution to identity in his plays. As their theatres suggest a radical reconstruction of theatrical possibility, Wellman's and Barker's polemics suggest a radical reconstruction of the critical perspective through which these theatres can be experienced.

Given the start of Mark Russell's Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theater next Wednesday, downtown theatre is beginning 2008 with a bang. An ambitious bang, too; this year's festival features over a dozen shows, including work from the Classical Theatre of Harlem, Mike Daisey, Rotozaza and the Abbey Theatre of Ireland. A $99 All Access Pass will get you in to see all the shows; for individual shows, the ticket price is $15. Information on both options is here.

But there's plenty to see before then as well. So, for the beginning of 2008, a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:

Saturday, 5 January: It's opening night for Clubbed Thumb's production of Jordan Harrison's Amazons and Their Men, inspired by the life and career of Triumph of the Will filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Harrison explores the drives toward both fascism and beauty in a story about a director who casts herself as Penthesilea. Heidi Schreck, Gio Perez, Brian Sgambati and Rebecca Wisocky make up the cast. Ken Rus Schmoll directs the show at The Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster Street, through 26 January.

Sunday, 6 January: Curl up this evening with Peter Gay's massive new tome on Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. Gay leans a little heavily and moralistically on the modernists' tendency to take an antagonistic stance to bourgeois culture, and the book often reads like an undergraduate survey course in the period (he starts with Flaubert and ends with Frank Gehry over the book's 640 pages; Gay's compulsion to fit everything in seems somewhat unwise, let alone rushed). You'll end up wanting more, but given Gay's expertise, you'll be pointed in the right general direction.

Much more highly recommended is Stuart Kendall's recent Georges Bataille in the Reaktion Books Critical Lives series. Kendall provides a lucid introduction to the life and work of one of the 20th century's most profound writers on transgression, sexuality and economics; Bataille was also singularly responsible for the resuscitation of Nietzsche's work in the wake of the perverse Nazi appropriation of the philosopher's thought.

Monday, 7 January: Ken Urban's short play Tecmessa (a footnote) is one of five pieces offered tonight at Dixon Place's Little Theatre program for January, curated by Mike Taylor and Jeffrey M. Jones. Other items include work by Rob Erickson, Sonya Sobieski and Brendan deVallance. Dixon Place is at 256 Bowery between Houston and Prince Streets; curtain time is 8.00pm. More information at Dixon Place's Web site.

Tuesday, 8 January: Deborah Warner's National Theatre production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days comes to BAM, 30 Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn, for a limited engagement through 2 Feburary. Warner's long-time collaborator Fiona Shaw is Winnie; our good friend Jason Zinoman wrote about the production for the New York Times earlier this week. Ticket and schedule information at BAM's Web page for the show.

Wednesday, 9 January: Jay Scheib's new work This Place is a Desert, inspired by the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, comes to the Public Theater's Under the Radar festival at 425 Lafayette Street. "Partially seen and partially screened, four lovers demolish each other in an attempt to defy their irreparable loneliness," says the publicity material; and I believe it, given Jay's production of last year's Women Dreamt Horses at the BAiT festival. See the UTR Web site for more.

Thursday, 10 January: The start of performances for Journey to the End of the Night, The Flying Machine's new adaptation of the notorious Louis-Ferdinand Céline novel, at the Gene Frankel Theater, 24 Bond Street. Jason Lindner's adaptation intersects the story of the novelist with that of the novel's main character, Ferdinand Bardamu, as Bardamu thrusts his way through the First World War and its aftermath. Richard Crawford is the solo performer; the production was developed at the Public Theatre, Soho Rep and La Jolla Playhouse. More information at the show's Web page.

Friday, 11 January: Young Jean Lee's Church, first presented last year at PS122, returns for an encore production at the Public's UTR festival. Says the Web page for the show: "Playwright and director Young Jean Lee transforms her life-long struggle with Christianity into an exuberant church service designed to test the expectations of the religious and non-religious alike." She does so with four Evangelical Christian ministers and a choir. Church runs through 19 January.

From the Guardian (UK) today comes Michael Billington's conversation with Edward Bond, perhaps best known for his controversial 1965 play Saved. Bond discusses the length and breadth of his career to date (which, as I noted myself last year at the Guardian theatre blog, has become more visible in France than elsewhere).

A short excerpt -- Bond on Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, and his own compulsion to write:

It may take me a day or two to get things back up to speed following a New Year's trip to Vienna, where I was delighted to tour the Burgtheater (see top right of this page) -- a stunning theatre space inside and out. The auditorium itself is located between two paintings in either wing of the building -- one a rendering of Dionysus' altar, the other that of Apollo's, both by Gustav Klimt (and a physical, architectural representation of the Nietzschean tension between both, which creates the praxis of tragedy). And, interestingly enough, there is a gallery of paintings of current and past performers at the Burgtheater, the most recent installations including paintings of Klaus Maria Brandauer and Kirsten Dene by Austrian artist Elke Krystufek (Brandauer and Krystufek did not, apparently, get along; their mutual dislike is reflected in the painting). This suggests, at least, a continuing dialogue between the visual and performing arts in the public sphere.

Vienna's known as a stodgy city, but during my stay it seemed somewhat less stodgy than New York; one advertising poster, a notice of a new gallery show for Lucien Clergue, featured a beautiful black-and-white, full-frontal photograph of a female nude. The poster appeared all over Vienna. I can only imagine the heads exploding should such a poster appear on advertising kiosks and subway cars here. (Not to mention the ever-flowing champagne and potent glühwein freely for sale at numberless street kiosks through New Year's Eve.)