Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
If there is anything that my attendance at the Obies last
night taught
me, it is that there is plenty of theatre (and plenty of reviewers and
critics) to go around. Congratulations to those of my acquaintances and
friends who won awards and grants last night; Peter Ksander, the Two-
Headed Calf troupe and Heidi Schreck all are eminently deserving. I hope
this recognition spurs them on to greater heights.
In the meantime, the evening (along with Alison's post of Sunday) also spurs me to a greater consideration of my own work, which must come first. I wrote in January 2007 of my ambivalence to reviewing as well as writing this blog, and I still feel this ambivalence keenly. So perhaps there will be some slight, near-unnoticeable shift at Superfluities Redux -- more intently concentrated on the aesthetic of my own vision for theatre than a consideration of the aesthetic of others'. They have their own critics and writers, after all; my voice, at least in that arena, will scarcely be missed.
To you, the reader, there will probably be little difference; to me, the writer, there will be a slightly more focused perspective. So fewer reviews (if any), and rather fewer "Night Planners" published each Friday; postings here, too, will be less frequent. I'll continue writing for the Guardian on items of general interest. It will be nice, however, to have an inbox less cluttered with press releases and invitations; evenings for me are now better spent writing my own work than reviewing that of others. I've got three plays in mind right now, another that I hope to produce soon, and they need to have priority. But as I say, there's no lack of information available about New York shows, and no lack of reviews.
A conspiratorial theatre is best pursued in the shadows, on the
margins, and not in the light of day. I'll continue to look forward to
hearing from my co-
Posted at 9.01 am in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Originally posted 20 May 2007.
Though he has watched a decent age pass by,
A man will sometimes still desire the world.
I swear I see no wisdom in that man.
The endless hours pile up a drift of pain
More unrelieved each day; and as for pleasure,
When he is sunken in excessive age,
You will not see his pleasure anywhere.
The last attendant is the same for all,
Old men and young alike, as in its season
Man's heritage of underworld appears:
There being then no epithalamion,
No music and no dance. Death is the finish.Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.
The second best is to have seen the light
And then to go back quickly whence we came. ...
The tragedian's urge is to the pointless description of the light that the chorus of Oedipus at Colonus mentions, its expression through himself. The anatomization of that light is what the artist senselessly is compelled to express (the soul's work), in Beckett's formulation of the artist's activity ("The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express"): as Pozzo insists, "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." It is ironic that the Art of Theatre, then, is pursued in small dark rooms: not a Brechtian showing of the apparatus, but a demonstration of the difficulty of seeing clearly. In pursuit of that clarity the stage is ruthlessly stripped to its own devices: no commingling with television or film allowable. Given the difficulty of the artist's work, it's only fair not to burden him with media not his own.
Tragedy never loses sight of the dark: it is presupposed, the ugliness of existence upon which a human-made beauty is imposed. This is a difficult, sensuous beauty: it is not mere cosmetic prettiness (this is for melodrama). This imposition requires a rejection of Schopenhauer's Quietism: it is a call for action, not resignation. A transgression against the condition of man's illness, a finding of strength after the experience of profound, bitter recognition. And a movement, that expression, towards the awakening of possibilities within a world which would thrust and confine all experience into collective culture's own crude mold -- a mold first created to deny the catastrophic realization experienced at Colonus, and to validate its own illusory status as the only truth.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 8.43 am in /Organum
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