Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Sunday, 06 January 2008
The mother then of Oedipus I saw,
Fair Epicasta, that, beyond all law,
Her own son married, ignorant of kind,
And he, as darkly taken in his mind,
His mother wedded, and his father slew.
Whose blind act Heaven exposed at length to view,
And he in all-loved Thebes the supreme state
With much moan managed, for the heavy fate
The Gods laid on him. She made violent flight
To Pluto's dark house from the loathed light,
Beneath a steep beam strangled with a cord,
And left her son, in life, pains as abhorr'd
As all the Furies pour'd on her in hell.Homer, The Odyssey (c.700 BC), Book 11
Translated by George Chapman (c. 1559-1634)
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.)
Posted at 10.41 am in /Theatreminima
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