Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Thursday, 20 March 2008
Irony and sentimentality. It is perhaps no surprise to find,
within a two-day period, the theatre blogosphere engaged in both a
peculiar brand of self-
Call it whimsy or call it whatever you want – something seems to be going on with a group of plays by young writers (some by women, some not), some new mix of irony and sentimentality that skirts the usual expectations of comedy or tragedy.
Call it the Kushner Syndrome: metaphor in the American theatre was
first exemplified for this generation of playwrights when a saucy angel
crashed through Prior's ceiling at the end of the first part of Angels in America in 1991. It was a far cry
from slow-
Since then American playwrights have wished to be on the side of Kushner's angels. Shepard's metaphorical gesture would not sustain the calls of "More life!" that ended Angels in America; in optimism there is comfort, but it is every bit as simplistic as the label of pessimism, and to the tragic consciousness hopelessly blind.
The theatre needs to see again those expressions of life that irony and sentimentality do not sustain, the irony and sentimentality that render theatre a sunny playground instead of the ecstatic nightmare of insight. They skirt those expectations of comedy and tragedy because they deny the piercing edge of the non-ironic expression (facile, jokey irony means never having to say you're serious), the refusal of easy sentiment. They cuddle innocent sentiment as if it were a tattered teddy-bear, an embarrassing refusal to give up childishness. As expression of ecstasy, jointure and nightmare, the language of mature eros and tragedy is itself a dramatic event: the surprise that language, written or spoken, affects our bodies at least as deeply as the touch of a hand upon flesh. Our plays today look. But they do not touch.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 3.18 pm in /Organum
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Thursday, 20 March 2008
Sometimes the longest way 'round is the shortest way home, and nowhere is that more true than at the JFK baggage carousel. However, I'm back in New York after a short trip to France – more musical than theatrical, perhaps. But I return having been introduced to the composer Gérard Grisey (whose work I hope to discuss here in a few days; an interesting interview with Grisey, who died in 1998, is here), visited the delightful small city of Caen, and (in Paris) made a small but moving pilgrimage. He rests; he rests.
In the meantime it seems I haven't missed too much in terms of theatre.
Some things follow you around. In Caen, for example, posters are
proclaiming the local premiere of Marius von Mayenburg's Eldorado – his work seems to be presented almost everywhere except the United States these days. An odd
kind of disciplinary self-
Posted at 9.53 am in /Miscellaneous
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