Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Friday, 29 February 2008
Fetish as a transcendence of subject
and object of desire.
(See entry for 1 March.)
There's been much blogosphere discussion of a variety of issues lately (especially this from Mike Daisey, with its resultant controversy), and if I've stayed out of it, it's because I have little to add; greater minds than my own, with more experience of the tensions and anxieties involved, are on these contemporary problems, and more power to them. (I also don't really understand the question involved, that theatre is supposed to serve or fail that bizarre idea of "America" in some way, whatever "America" is, not to mention China, or Australia, or Mozambique, and whether theatre is failing them, too; it scrapes against the intimation that art, by its nature, doesn't possess explicit cultural utility, but touches the individual instead; the idea itself smacks of that curious contemporary Western pragmatism that castrates theatre's possibilities; but I've been obtuse before and will be again.)
I do feel that what's on the stages of these theatres that we're talking about is at least as important as how those plays get there, and really that's all I've been trying to write about. We'd all like to see "more theatre" around America, I'm sure, but there's a McDonald's in every small American town and billions of their hamburgers are sold every year; I don't think you can say that America's physical health has been well-served as a result. That theatre can be once again an intersection of philosophy and poetry, the unique nature of theatre and drama a means of intense entry to that bodied experience of philosophy and poetry, not unlike the status of the ancient theatre, is really all the idea I've been toying with; that bodied nexus is still, often enough, missing in the theatre. There are a few theatre practitioners out there, I know, who believe as I do that compromise in the pursuit of exploring that intersection is fatal, that the stakes are too high to worry about anything but the construction of that philosophical vision and the exploration of the means to join both body and mind in the recognition of its darkest moments. (Of course, this has political and cultural implications as well.) Which means, really, that so long as we've got playwrights and critics making these facile distinctions between feeling and intellect, subjectivity and objectivity, body and word, the work remains urgent.
One of these days I'll get out some more; spring springs for all of us, me included. So apologies for the light posting lately. But here, as every Friday, is a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 1 March: At the center of the Neue Galerie's Gustav Klimt show is their recent acquisition Adele Bloch-Bauer I, one of Klimt's masterpieces: the ability of the fetish as exemplar of desire to transcend the subject/object dichotomy inherent in desire (note those eyes within the golden textile of the subject's skirt), was perhaps never more explicit than in this portrait. The show itself is a major U.S. retrospective of the artist, featuring eight additional paintings, 120 drawings (many tenderly explicit) and a replica of the receiving parlor of Klimt's second studio. You can also see a full-sized photographic replica of Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, the extraordinary original of which I recently saw for myself at Vienna's Secession building. The exhibition runs through 30 June at 1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street.
Sunday, 2 March: Hello Failure, a new play by Kristen Kosmas that previewed at the last Prelude festival, gets a full production which begins tonight at PS122 at 6.30pm (note the early curtain time). It is, according to the Web page, "a sprawling associative neo-realistic comedy of beauty involving seven submariners' wives, one counterfeit civil war ghost, one lusty renegade hairdresser and a poignant potted plant all making it through the day ... barely." Ken Rus Schmoll, late of Amazons and their Men, directs a cast that includes the playwright herself, Aimee Phelan-Deconinck and Maria Striar; through 22 March. PS122 is at 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street; more information and tickets here.
Monday, 3 March: Just arrived on my desk is Lovefuries, a new collection of plays by David Ian Rabey, a Welsh playwright/director and the artistic director of the Lurking Truth theatre company. These most recent plays (two solos -- one for a woman, another for a man -- and a two-hander) explore transgressive desires in the midst of loss and the urge to a self-realization denied by social conventions; The Contracting Sea is a response to Synge's Riders to the Sea that attempts to reify the elemental power of feminine desire to transcend mourning. Rabey is also one of the leading exponents of the work of Howard Barker, though his own work is quite different and just as powerful; I hope to write about it more soon. The book is available for pre-order now from Amazon.
Wednesday, 5 March: The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is offering "Sonic Meditations," a program of solo pieces for percussion performed by David Schotzko, tonight at The Tank, 279 Church Street between Franklin and White at 7.00pm. Schotzko will perform five pieces, including Alvin Lucier's "Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra for Solo Amplified Triangle" and Iannis Xenakis' "Psappha for Solo Percussion." Tonight's program is the first in a new series, ICETank, which will feature members of ICE in intimate and unusual programs on the first Wednesday of every month.
Thursday, 6 March: Up at the Segal Center, members of the Target Margin Theater company will discuss their recent two-year series "On the Greeks." The company's artistic director David Herskovits and others will also preview their upcoming production of Aristophanes' Frogs. (As you might imagine, this two-hear project has particular interest for me.) The program is free and begins at 6.30pm at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue; more information here.
Friday, 7 March: Performances begin this week for Ken Urban's The Happy Sad and Tommy Smith's The Break-up, both written for the Flea Theater's Bats company; there's a preview tonight at 9.00pm. For this commission, Ken's written his first musical, a comic one-acter about New Yorkers who "make unfortunate choices about love and sex"; Smith's play is about a man who falls in love with his drug dealer, "with disastrous results," the press release says. Both plays are directed by Sherri Kronfeld in the Flea's small downstairs space at 41 White Street, between Broadway and Church; the show officially opens on 22 March and runs through 7 April. Tickets at OvationTix, and to learn more about the show, drop by the Flea's Web site.
Posted at 9.15 am in /Openings
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Monday, 25 February 2008
There are few theatre designers on the Internet with blogs of their own, but now there's one more. Video designer Tal Yarden, responsible for the fine video work in Ivo van Hove's The Misanthrope at the New York Theatre Workshop earlier this season, is working with van Hove on a new Amsterdam production of Angels in America (his design can also be seen in Liberty City at NYTW, which opens shortly). Yarden concentrates very much on the nuts and bolts of video production in the theatre, but the nuts and bolts perhaps count more than anything else. An education, with illustrations; his blog is here.
From the Netherlands to the antipodes: Alison interviews German playwright Marius von Mayenburg today at Theatre Notes (and at the Guardian) on the eve of the Adelaide premiere of his play Moving Target. Von Mayenburg is unknown here in the U.S., even as his plays appear regularly at the Royal Court in London; in his native Germany he is a man of the theatre in the old sense:
If you were looking for a model of a writer in the theatre, you could do worse than point to Marius von Mayenburg: playwright, translator and, for the past eight years, full-time dramaturge at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, one of Berlin's major theatres. As he says, for a playwright he has the ideal job: it may at times be stressful, it may deprive him of sleep or even sometimes interfere with his own writing: but on the other hand, he is right where the action is.
"All my work is somehow related to dramaturgy," says Mayenburg. "I react to the traditions we are working with in the theatre, I react to the actors. And in my work, I am reading all the time. I'm always looking for what's 'missing,' for what isn't being addressed in the plays around me, and then I try to write those plays myself."
Better that than writing the plays that are already there, over and over again; good to have his own theatre for it, too. More here.
Posted at 11.55 am in /Miscellaneous
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Monday, 25 February 2008
"The horror-worn eyes linger abject on all they have beseeched so long, in a last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for nothing. And it is then a little breath of fulfilment revives the dead longings and a murmur is born in the silent world, reproaching you affectionately with having despaired too late. The last word in the way of viaticum." The condition of theatre minima is to present with the discipline of the aphorism and the anecdote (for time is short) a contemplation of the symbol-making human body in abjection: through contemplation, compassion. Prior to contemplation is experience, however, the investigation of the abject qualities of the solitary self, the probing of the wound, filled with infection. Because this horrifies (even beyond the viaticum of that contemplation), the dramatist is alone in his probing -- perhaps he seeks out the theatre, ultimately, both to gather company (I fear this is a hopeless and lonely task) and to share in communion of contemplation (which a media-saturated world doesn't desire). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are neither new nor old in demonstrating the means by which one human being can render another abject; the guilt of birth that leads to violence against another, instead of a recognition of the abject within the self. The twentieth-century gives us more effective tools for this, the technic as advanced as technology can be, but flesh reconceived as filth in the camp or beneath the sun of a nuclear explosion is a question of the cleverness of the contemporary human mind, not a novelty itself. (At least in Europe or Asia; in my experience there is precisely no room for this yet in the ideology that now drives the American theatre in nearly all its varieties; the historical imagination that permits us to see the past in the ground we walk upon and in ourselves as the children of the past does one thing: it prepares us.) Sophocles and Shakespeare knew this, this rendering of the human subject as object for refusal, as filth (Philoctetes, Oedipus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida) in the eyes of others.
In a creative community the abject can only be brushed upon, for abjection is solely recognized through the sensual experience felt only by that primary object, the individual human body: language the scalpel and probe of the self, alone. Contemplation is a different matter: it is the individual creation of a written play for the stage that permits collective contemplation, that provides those tools for the creative performative body; the dramatist begins to describe a circle which can only be completed by a performer, but this doesn't work the other way around. So the sentence quoted above, from Malone Dies, needs the light of day (as well as the novel from the conclusion of which it is drawn), needs to be prior to theatre: it is only after it is written that the dramatist can begin to write, a few months later, the first lines of the first draft of Waiting for Godot. Compassion must arise through personal, physical recognition if it is not to be an abstract thing, a mere self-serving slogan. Recognition is only possible through sight and sound and touch, all the bodied physical senses, never through mere thought, a puling pity and progressive politics. Theatre trains light, white and laser-like, on the abject, so that the individual audience member can more clearly recognize it as self and other -- as the intersection of subject and object, both and neither -- and have compassion for it.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 9.04 am in /Organum
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Sunday, 24 February 2008
Winter's finally caught up to the theatre season, and things are slowing down just a bit -- as they'd have to, given the past few months. But here is a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week or two ahead:
The New York Theatre Workshop has been having a splendid season, what with Ivo van Hove's Misanthrope and JoAnne Akalaitis' Beckett Shorts; they come stateside with their next production, Jessica Blank and April Yvette Thompson's Liberty City, which begins performances this month. Ms. Blank directs Ms. Thompson in this one-woman show, an autobiographical multi-character monologue about the history of her family: "Part history, part imagination, Liberty City is [Thompson's] personal story that illuminates the lives of one family through the context of social, cultural and political events" of the last four decades. More information at the play's Web site; it runs through 16 March. Lucky readers of Superfluities Redux can take advantage of a discount code, LCBLG88, when they buy their tickets through the Web at BroadwayOffers or by phone at 212.947.8844 -- you'll get $20.00 off the regular price of $45.00.
Untitled Theater Company #61, which has produced ambitious festivals of the plays of Eugene Ionesco and Vaclav Havel over the past few years, unveils its latest productions this month, with two plays running in repertory. Cat's Cradle is a calypso musical based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, adapted and directed by UTC's artistic director Edward Einhorn, with music by Henry Akona; Hiroshima: Crucible of Light examines the creation of the atomic bomb. Both plays are running at Walkerspace, 46 Walker Street, through 15 March. Tickets and information for Cat's Cradle through Theatermania here; those for Hiroshima: Crucible of Light here.
Our friend Ken Urban slips into town with a new play, The Happy Sad, written for the Flea Theater's Bats company, beginning previews on 6 March. Ken's first musical, a comic one-acter about New Yorkers who "make unfortunate choices about love and sex," runs on the same program as Tommy Smith's The Break-Up. Both plays are directed by Sherri Kronfeld in the Flea's small downstairs space, and tickets will go fast. To get yours, visit OvationTix, and to learn more about the show, drop by the Flea's Web site.
Posted at 9.29 am in /Openings
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Tuesday, 19 February 2008
Ibsen's ghost. What would we do with Ibsen now, sit him in front of the audience after a performance of Ghosts or A Doll's House for a Norwegian-accented talkback, rendering the problems of the spirit an issue of the hour, forgotten by the time we get home for the eleven o'clock news? (It's now the talkback, not the play itself, that provides the audience's catharsis.) Despite the creakiness of some translations and productions, the terrain of these plays remains ours: the suppression of secret, disease-ridden truths in the interest of maintaining connection and status within the community (Ghosts), the destruction that may be necessary to attain even a nominal freedom of the individual human spirit (A Doll's House). It was these, and not the issues of venereal disease or incipient feminism, that led to Ibsen's condemnation (an English critic on Ghosts: "a dirty deed done in public") in his time and his eloquent self-defense in An Enemy of the People.
We see an Ibsen play now as we might visit a museum on a rainy Sunday afternoon: safely ensconced in the past, no matter. Ibsen has had descendants, not aesthetic but spiritual, and their names sometimes surprise: Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Richard Foreman, Howard Barker -- valorising the freedom of the spirit and the power of the individual consciousness. A few of these now, along with Ibsen, have been absorbed into the post-capitalism that defangs them. In essence they remain unabsorbed. The same terrain that Ibsen surveyed -- of conventional morality, of the individual dead inside, of the pressures of conformity, of our responsibility for our own and others' suffering, of our willful blindness to both our complicity in this suffering and the possibilities that arise in critical contemplation of it -- remains with us still; indeed, it might be said that little or nothing has changed.
The freedom of individual consciousness is not a road to an illusory salvation, as the fatal avalanches at the end of Brand and When We Dead Awaken prove, but that does not mean that that freedom is either unnecessary or impossible; the value is in recognition of the destiny of death, to somehow be able to, in our contemplation of it, gain a kind of illumination about our condition. This illumination, to the community, is dark and valueless, not utile, not a comfort. To dismiss it, we call it Modernist, or its creator Romantic, thereby consigning it to the museum or to the margin of aesthetic history.
Community, in its number, can smother the single individual, can deny him or her access to the avenues of public expression; the individual can't do the same thing to the community, which has numberless avenues for expression. (So the suppression of the tragic in Plato's Republic, just for a start, but the approval of an art which provides succor, facile amusement and entertainment, and illusory hope.) In the twenty-first century the question may be more complex, but not by much. Calls for the theatre to cure itself by integrating the artist closer into the community, to ask him to share its values (one wonders what Ibsen would have thought of that -- no, on the other hand, one knows what he would have thought of that -- Ibsen understood those values all too well, but that understanding did not prove happy), to accommodate itself to post-capitalist business and marketing practices, is ultimately to deny and suppress the illumination provided by Ibsen and his followers -- to keep the theatre sick. (Not to mention the efficacy of this accommodation: one glance at the current health of the American economy, and you wonder just what it is that these business innovators have to contribute, if not a new form of suicide.) The kinds of plays that might be produced on our stages, given these assumptions of theatre's assumed social function and use, are easy to see. They are there now. And we also see (or read, if we care enough to seek them out) what plays are denied the light and air of production, given that assumed social function and use.
If the artist chooses to remain an exile from mass culture, it is premature -- and says more about us than it does about him -- to assume that this stance is not necessary, at least for him, and to condemn that as Romantic or Modernist (insofar as these have become terms of condemnation) is an avenue to blindness towards what he might contribute to our illumination. And there are negative labels we ourselves can place on the idea that it is only the community, and not the individual's capacity for wonder and recognition, the artist's attempt to chart within him or herself the ecstasies possible with a daring, disciplined and uncompromising exploration of the extremes of consciousness, that gives meaning to our lives.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 8.57 am in /Organum
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Monday, 18 February 2008
Speaking of the new French novel and voyeurs, word comes via the BBC of the death of Alain Robbe-Grillet at the age of 85. His novels included The Voyeur and The Erasers; Robbe-Grillet also wrote the screenplay for the haunting and, to some, maddeningly opaque Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais.
Posted at 4.57 pm in /RIP
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Monday, 18 February 2008
Malone, voyeur:
"And it does not matter to me whether they have risen before dawn, or not yet gone to bed, or risen in the middle of the night intending perhaps to go back to bed when they have finished, and it is enough for me to see them standing up against each other behind the curtain, which is dark, so that it is a dark light, if one may say so, and dim the shadow they cast. For they cleave so fast together that they seem a single body, and consequently a single shadow. But when they totter it is clear they are twain, and in vain they clasp with the energy of despair, it is clear we have here two distinct and separate bodies, each enclosed within its own frontiers, and having no need of each other to come and go and sustain the flame of life, for each is well able to do so, independently of the other. Perhaps they are cold, that they rub against each other so, for friction maintains heat and brings it back when it is gone. It is all very pretty and strange, this big complicated shape made up of more than one, for perhaps there are three of them, and how it sways and totters, but rather poor in colour. But the night must be warm, for of a sudden the curtain lifts on a flare of tender colour, pale blush and white of flesh, then pink that must come from a garment and gold too that I haven't time to understand. So it is not cold they are, standing so lightly clad by the open window. Ah how stupid I am, I see what it is, they must be loving each other, that must be how it is done. Good, that has done me good. I'll see now if the sky is still there, then go. They are right up against the curtain now, motionless. Is it possible they have finished already? They have loved each other standing, like dogs. Soon they will be able to part. Or perhaps they are just having a breather, before they tackle the titbit. Back and forth, back and forth, that must be wonderful. They seem to be in pain. Enough, enough, goodbye."
Samuel Beckett
Malone Dies (1947-48)
Posted at 4.43 pm in /Quotes
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Friday, 15 February 2008
Serving up more than Kiki.
(See entry for 20 February.)
(Photo: Melissa Hom)
I've added Jonathan Kalb's Hot Review to the list of "Other Theatre Web Sites" at right, and glancing over recent entries there have found a few interesting dissents from the critical acclaim accorded some recent Broadway shows: see, for example, Alexis Greene's response to August: Osage County and Shawn-Marie Garrett's short essay on Spring Awakening.
Otherwise, a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 16 February: Mark Schultz's play Deathbed is about "the boundaries of human compassion in the midst of personal suffering," in the context of seven people seeking to come to terms with death. Mark's work has appeared in the past at the Public Theater and the New York Theatre Workshop. Deathbed runs through 1 March at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre, 2162 Broadway at West 76th Street; tickets through Theatermania.
Monday, 18 February: Take advantage of your day off and get to your local bookstore for a copy, fresh off the press, of Bonnie Marranca's new collection of essays Performance Histories. Marranca's a broad-ranging critic of extraordinarily catholic tastes, and her new book includes essays on Wallace Shawn, Maria Fornes, the Wooster Group and food, as well as interviews with Romeo Castellucci and Susan Sontag, among others. (Full disclosure: I copyedited the book, quite happily.) You can pre-order the book, which should ship soon, from Amazon.com.
Tuesday, 19 February: Richard Nelson, until recently the head of the playwriting program at Yale, opens his new play, Conversations in Tusculum, at the Public Theatre, 425 Lafayette Street, at 7.00pm. Set during Julius Caesar's reign in ancient Rome, Nelson's story of "the country you love and the values it represents ... being destroyed by a misguided leader" (oh, that old chestnut) includes a tempting cast, among them Brian Dennehy and David Strathairn; Nelson also directs. More information at the Public's Web page for the show; it runs through 23 March.
Wednesday, 20 February: Tonight at 8.30pm, Justin Bond & Friends brings its new show, Lustre: A Midwinter Trans-fest, to PS122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street. A celebration of queer cabaret, the show also features Our Lady J, Glenn Marla and other "surprise guests"; you may know Bond better as one-half of the performance duo Kiki & Herb (he's Kiki). The show runs through 9 March; tickets and schedule information here. And on Thursday, 6 March, the 2008 Ethel Eichelberger Award Ceremony will take place just after the performance (Bond won the 2007 Eichelberger award).
Thursday, 21 February: Also at PS122 this week is Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road), the latest from Temporary Distortion. The troupe, which "has a reputation for pushing the boundaries of theatre by staging plays in claustrophobic boxlike structures, with little physical movement and a unique restrained style of acting," has staged this piece as a hybrid of theatre and cinema -- an onstage road movie. Earlier iterations of the piece appeared at the Ontological-Hysteric's Incubator series and at the Chocolate Factory; from here it tours to France. Through 23 February only; schedule and ticket information here.
If you find yourself in the West Village instead, troop on over to NYU's Loewe Theatre, where Marilyn Nonken will be performing a program of "New Music for Piano and Electronics" at 8.00pm. Marilyn will be offering world premieres by Chris Bailey and Tom Beyer, along with pieces by Alvin Lucier, Beth Wiemann and Jonathan Harvey; she'll be joined by guest artist Kathleen Supové on the Beyer. While you're there, pick up Marilyn's latest, beautiful recording of Chris Dench's "Passing Bells: Night," just out on Beyond Status Geometry, a compilation album of Dench's music from Tzadik.
Friday, 22 February: It is one of the great problems of having a full-time, non-theatre-related job that I can't get to events like this year's NoPassport conference at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, being held today from 10.00am through 9.00pm. The theme of this year's conference is "Dreaming the Americas/The Body Politic in Performance," and participants in the scheduled panels include Caridad Svich (who founded NoPassport), Erik Ehn, Betty Shamieh, Jay Scheib, Jason Grote, Ken Urban and literally dozens of others. More information on the history of NoPassport is here; the Segal Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue. The program is free, but a $5.00 donation is suggested.
Posted at 8.35 am in /Openings
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Thursday, 14 February 2008
Recommended Reading: The Old Guard and the New
This weekend I hope to have enough time to read through the entire "The Critic as Thinker," Roger Copeland's discussion with Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein and Stanley Kauffmann just published in TCG's American Theatre magazine. I liked this from Bentley particularly:
My concern with the topic of this panel today is: Where is the theatre going to come from? What's it going to be, for people who have ambitions towards theatre criticism today? In my view, what distinguishes the good, valuable theatre critic is that in a review, or certainly in the current of his reviews, you sense that he's writing about a cause -- about a theatre in his or her mind. The criticism he is writing is possibly in some ways cloaked, but is a crusade. Bernard Shaw said he'd spent years and years crusading in his criticism for a new drama. Then he found out there wasn't any, and he had to write it. But he was crusading.
The article is distilled from a panel discussion held last October at New York's Philoctetes Center; the full transcript of the discussion is here. Jonathan Kalb, editor of Hot Review, also attended the conference and said there:
And what are we going to do about this problem of the disappearance of critical culture? You have to find ways to be sneaky, to be clever, and to find little avenues to continue it. I think that the world is kind of mixing up right now, and trying to figure out what the place for judgment and discrimination is in this new mediated, wired, info-age world. We all, I think, have spent time being depressed about this "everyone's a critic" ethos on the Internet. And everyone is a critic. But on the other hand, there's a couple of really good bloggers out there. So why take aim at all blogging?
Someone said to me the other day, "Hey, I saw the HotReview. What an idea -- an edited blog!" And I thought, "Wow, is that what I'm doing? I thought it was called a journal." You know, an edited blog used to be called a journal, where you're interested in the quality of the writing and you edit the writing carefully. That used to be called, you know, a journal. So maybe there are places for us to meet in the future, when all of this equalization sends up all of its dust. Everybody gets a chance to express the fact that they're a critic, and then becomes hungry again for the views of people who know a little bit more about the subject. So I don't know. Yes, I'm dismayed, I'm discouraged, but I also am in my 40s and have to look, hopefully, to a long life of figuring out what to do about this and I'm not giving up, regardless of what Eric says.
Many thanks to Slay at Theatreforté for the links.
Posted at 11.50 am in /Miscellaneous
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Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Tragedy lies at the origin of theatre and the origin of philosophy; contemporaneous with Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were the pre-Socratics, including Heraclitus; the Poetics of Aristotle did not appear until at least two generations after the Oedipus, Plato's Republic about fifty years after the death of Sophocles.
Tragedy lies, too, at the nexus of the Judeo-Christian Word, the Logos, and the representational sexed body. Hesiod, of the sixth century BC, saw the foundation of the world (and consciousness, and Imagination itself) as the product of a metaphysical, mythological sexual congress, quite apart from the authoritarian, all-encompassing consciousness of the unsexed, Judeo-Christian deity:
In truth, first of all came Expanse; and then
wide-bosomed Earth, seat ever safe of all
the immortals who hold the heights of snowy Olympus,
and murky Tartarus in the recesses of the wide-pathed land,
and Love, who is fairest among the immortal gods,
loosener of limbs, who in the breasts of all gods and all men
overcomes thought and prudent purposing.
From Expanse came Darkness and black Night;
and from Night came Ether and Day
whom she conceived and bore after joining with Darkness in love.Hesiod, Theogony 104-138
"Love ... overcomes thought and prudent purposing": the irruption of the Irrational at the moment of consciousness' birth from night and darkness. It was this Irrationality that Plato and Aristotle sought to repress (and therefore the repression, too, of the tragic in Plato's Republic, as well as the rationalism of Aristotle's otherwise far-from-simple discussion of the form). The origin of the Judeo-Christian tradition lies with the authoritarian creator of Genesis I, but also with the creation myth contained in the Gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
John 1
The light of consciousness is bodied, then, in Logos: word as life, the light of men.
If theatre is sick, then the sickness is a lack: the lack of the forgotten origin of the art. Between the irruption of the Irrational force surveyed in the pre-Socratics and its suppression in Socrates and Plato lies the period of the great Greek tragedies, the basis of theatre and drama, square one. If we worry that our examination of the tragic origins of the questioning consciousness is somehow ancient, recidivist, we must remember that the 2500 years between the time of the ancient Greeks and our own time is but the fraction of the time it takes to blink an eye, in relation to the long evolution of the race; even shorter than that, in the expanse of time and space of the cosmos. Even if it weren't: necessity consigns all contemplation of past and future to the immediate present. Science and technology may have progressed, but the bodied senses of consciousness have not. Nor, as Freud propounded, have we been able to suppress that Irrational force that leads to both ecstatic pleasure and ecstatic suffering, our awareness of which constitutes that original Beckettian sin of having been born.
Given this, why should tragedy be impossible now, as so many contemporary commentators on the form have it? The title of George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy speaks for itself, and even one of tragedy's most fascinating recent theorists, Walter Kaufmann, said in 1968:
[Contemporary playwrights] who try to write tragedies always run the risk of approximating contemporary architects who put up Gothic buildings. Whether they construct good copies or variations, their work cannot claim true excellence. Doing something really new and interesting with a form in which such great masters have performed so many towering experiments is so difficult that success in any number of other genres is much more probable. ... In comedy untried possibilities abound. It would be exceedingly surprising if the next hundred years should produce tragedies as great as the best we have. But they might well produce comedies as brilliant as any.
This, it seems to me, is surrender: a form of sour grapes, an unnecessary, cowardly and ultimately foolish rejection of possibility and imagination. In any event, it will not be for us to judge success and excellence (though critics egocentrically try to speak to some vague and ideologically-constructed standard); as any theatre artist knows, it is the here-and-now, and not posterity, with which we are concerned. Comedies we have, and we will continue to have. But if we are to have a theatre, whole and well, we need those tragedies too, those tragedies that reach for the torturous wonder at the cosmos and the lives and movements and language of men and women, the wonder that gave birth to tragedy and philosophy. In an age when both are desiccated, perhaps that coupling, too, can again give our theatre health.
Other material:
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 9.34 am in /Organum
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Wednesday, 13 February 2008
If you're still looking for a Valentine's Day gift for your drama-minded special someone, here's an idea: a piece of a show -- and I don't mean a percentage of the gross. Today and tomorrow are the final days of the purchasing period of Democracy in America, the new production from Annie Dorsen and The Foundry Theatre. At their Web site, and for as little as $10.00, you can purchase text, lighting cues, songs and various other ephemera that will be incorporated into the show to be presented at PS122 beginning 1 April. You can't argue with the quality of the performers who are willing to say your words or even get naked for a few sawbucks: Philippa Kaye, Okwui Okpokwasili and Tony Torn have put their talent on sale to the lucky (and, hopefully, wealthy) few.
So buy your honey a piece of Democracy in America. Who knows? It could be the beginning of a beautiful -- and bargain-minded -- friendship.
Posted at 8.28 am in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 12 February 2008
"If academics and critics -- and theatres -- overlook me, it's a poor response for me as a dramatist to complain. My job is to go on doing my job. ...
"In Britain, the term political is narrowly understood. And it tends to denote, of theatre, a drama that espouses a particular ideology or polemic, almost always toward the Left. I was never classed as a 'political' dramatist, rather as some wild marginal creature, unpolitical. Yet I've always felt that life has stationed me at the centre of the essential conflict where our authentic identity confronts all that is ranged against it. In that existential sense, I am political. ...
"It's not granted to us all, to be heroes or martyrs. But in our culture at least, spared some of the 'hierarchy of needs,' we have the energy and means -- I would say, the obligation -- continually to re-author ourselves. The impulse of political institutions will always be reductionist: to limit us to identities that stop growing, that can be mechanically satisfied, predicted and controlled. I believe it to be our moral human duty to subvert that. It's an anarchist stance, in the classical sense of that word. And if I look back over the protagonists in my drama, I see almost each one in a process of unruly becoming, virtually a coming to new birth. At last, each seizes his or her own life, wrests it from those forces that would seek to control it, and makes a naked gesture of starting to live. (One conspicuous exception is The Triumph of Death, a title which speaks for itself. And that it is an exception, that too speaks for itself.) However daunting the play's end-state, to the character on the space, that end is a beginning. I have been howled down by various political activists for not 'giving' my characters a creed or value-system to take into their new lives. That's the whole point. It is of such prescripts that we must be free."
David Rudkin
From "A Politics of Body and Speech"
Posted at 9.13 am in /Quotes
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Sunday, 10 February 2008
The Cenci by Antonin Artaud. Directed, conceived and adapted by John Jahnke, from a new translation by Richard Sieburth. Set design: Peter Ksander. Sound design: Kristin Worrall. Light design: Miranda K. Hardy. Costume design: Ramona Ponce. Choreography: Benjamin Asriel. With Anthony Torn (Cenci), Lauren Blumenfeld (Beatrice), Anna Fitzwater (Lucretia), Kobi Libii (Giacomo), Alexander Paul Nifong (Bernardo), Mauricio Tafur Salgado (Orsino), Todd D'Amour (Camillo), Joshua Seidner (Andrea), Tanisha Thompson (Assassin #1 [Olimpia]) and Alexander Lane (Assassin #2 [Marzio]). Running time: 75 minutes. A production of The Hotel Savant at the Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster Street. Reviewed at the 8 February performance. 6-23 February 2008. Ticket and schedule information at Theatermania.
Uneven casting weakens a curiously uninvolving production of Artaud's only complete stageplay
Taking a chance:
Members of the cast of
Hotel Savant's The Cenci
I confess that I've always been skeptical of the Artaudian project; though without Antonin Artaud we'd have had neither Jerzy Grotowski nor the Living Theatre, the essays and manifestoes that make up his classic 1938 The Theatre and Its Double, read in the cold light of day rather than the fevered darkness of the shadows, strike one as poetic, even inspirational, but hardly a firm basis for a new theatre practice. His calls (clichéd by now; they're more than seventy years old, much older than Stanislavsky's and Brecht's practices were when Artaud was writing) of "No More Masterpieces" and to the need for the performer to "signal through the flames" seem more suited to protest placards than as a basis for rehearsal room exercises. Artaud's own dramatic and performance work as it has come down to us remains available for reading (there once was a sound recording of this on the Internet, but I can't seem to track it down).
And through the text of his sole complete stageplay, of course, The Cenci from 1935, which John Jahnke's Hotel Savant is staging in a new translation through 23 February. As Mark Blankenship notes in his feature article on the production for the New York Times, the play is worth a revival for its curiosity value alone. While Susan Sontag said that Artaud's Cenci was "not a very good play," Jahnke in the same article begs to differ: "Is it a flawed piece? Absolutely. But does that detract from the fact that it's exciting onstage? No, not at all." Despite all the efforts of Jahnke, his inspired design team and his cast, however, the evidence here is that it's not very exciting onstage at all.
Based on Shelley's 1819 drama, the story concerns the grotesque maneuverings of the Cenci family in 1599 Rome; it's easy to see Artaud's attraction to the story, the tale of a perverse patriarch and his dealings with both his family and the Papacy. It's a grand guignol in many ways, filled with rapes and bloody deaths, and it calls for the heightened language and wild action of the Jacobean tragedy, which it most closely resembles in form. It calls, too, for that calculated, disciplined excess in both language and production to fully engage the performers and audience in the events of the play.
Finally, it's that excess that's lacking here, and lacking that excess the play and production are uninvolving. Peter Ksander contributes a maze-like, often anachronistic set (Cenci dictates into a tape recorder, and telephones play a significant part of the communications matrix of the production), imaginatively lit by both flourescent and incandescent instruments by Miranda Hardy, which, spread across the wide Ohio Theatre space, provides a broad chiaroscuro environment reminisicent of Italian historical painting. Perhaps it's that distance that swallows the possibility of engagement; the mazes trap the performers as well as the characters. On occasion, the production reaches heights which demonstrate its potential, especially in an elegantly choreographed (by Benjamin Asriel) banquet/orgy scene: no maze needed here for the presentation of perverse manners. Though Anthony Torn as Cenci and Todd D'Amour as Camillo throw their energies full-throttle into the violent events of the play and so are the greatest successes in the ten-person cast, the remainder seem oddly uninvolved. Lauren Blumenfeld has excellent moments as Beatrice, but at times she seems to oscillate between fear and terror (appropriate to Artaud) and mere petulance (which is not).
That said, I can't blame Ms. Blumenfeld or the rest of the cast; much of the fault must lie, as I've mentioned, with the script. Artaud's weak text lacks the pounding rush of violent lyricism that sustains the work of Marlowe or even Shakespeare in plays like Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida, and this has the effect of undermining the Theatre of Cruelty tropes that Jahnke bases his production upon. Ironically, a performance practice like this seems to need a masterpiece, a text equal to the passions that the bodied performers hope to demonstrate. You get the idea that these performers and characters lack a language equal to their actions, and rather than releasing bodied passions, this lack constitutes a repression, a missing element: the body needs language to elicit and limn the suffering that lies within, to make it theatrically communicable.
Artaud hoped to threaten quotidian, dead composure in his theatre; through the evocation of ecstatic suffering, he hoped to reawaken a part of the human spirit that rationalism had rendered dormant. Both Grotowski and the Becks then and Jan Fabre and Howard Barker now continue that project; perhaps it's time to say that we've moved beyond Artaud, to wonder if there remains any "there" there, that the creation of new texts appropriate for his example is our current need. But The Cenci doesn't threaten that composure, and the evocation remains wan. There is a program note, "There will be smoking on stage in one short scene," that seems to encapsulate the deepest flaw of the project; if second-hand smoke is all there is to be worried about, if that's the main threat to our composure, then the work remains to be done.
Posted at 10.53 am in /Notices
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Tuesday, 05 February 2008
More than 150 people turned out last night for the Richard Foreman/Eric Bogosian discussion at The Housing Works -- nothing to sneeze at, really. Bogosian conducted a wide-ranging discussion about Foreman's work and approaches, Bogosian obviously a fanatic for the Ontological-Hysteric, Foreman casual and accessible. News clips from the evening: that Foreman's next projects will be a play for Willem Dafoe and an opera with music by John Zorn, and that Foreman's favorite movie of the past few years is Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, the extended director's cut -- which, he says, reduced him to tears the last time he watched it.
Most of the audience last night, it was encouraging to see, was young: in their 20s and 30s, demonstrating the continuing appeal Foreman's work and example has for young theatre artists and young audiences generally. A variety of factors are behind this, of course, not least the Ontological-Hysteric's continuing Incubator series for new work. But there's more, I think; especially in the past few years, Foreman has featured very young casts, and his interns have often gone on to develop expressive, accomplished work themselves. It's not so much Foreman's techniques that have provided this inspiration, but his example. For over forty years and through fifty plays, the one aspect of Foreman's work and working methods that has never changed is his impregnable trust in his vision, his refusal to compromise. I'm guessing that this, more than any stylistic influence, has meant more than anything else to the emerging artists with whom Foreman has worked over the years.
A second aspect of his work that arose briefly in the discussion last night was Foreman's use of actors. He's known as a dictatorial director, carefully choreographing each move, word and vocal intonation, but it seems to me that the bodied presences on his stage have never been more free; they stand, after the arduous three-month rehearsal process, as essences of themselves -- shorn of sentimentality and pander, not of expressiveness or self. When the Foreman performers' eyes meet yours, you sense that you're staring into their absolute essences, and that the process has freed them to share themselves generously with the audience. Of course, the performers themselves (which have, over the years, included Dafoe, Jessica Walter and Steve Buscemi) will have to testify to the truth or error of my suspicion. But in that discipline of the rehearsal process, there's a freedom and liberty for the self that seems to reach over the footlights, through that communion with the individual audience member. Foreman's theatre shares this with several other theatres, of course, not least with that of Jan Fabre. But it also indicates that "robotic" performers are not to be found on Foreman's stage, but on the hundreds of other stages in New York, both downtown and uptown, that continue to pander to the urge for likeability and compromise. Far from robots, Foreman's performers are uniquely human, uniquely themselves: a distillate of bodied spirit.
Posted at 9.44 am in /Miscellaneous
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