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, 28 August 2008
J.T. Rogers' Keynote Speech to ART/NY
I want to thank commenter RLewis, who in his response to this post called my attention to playwright J.T. Rogers' keynote speech to ART/NY on 16 June of this year. In contrast to Richard Nelson's speech last year, Rogers sounded a rather more constructive and frankly inspiring note, affectingly describing what kinds of human experience we might better be exploring on our stages, experience that remains hidden and remote from us, instead of the entertainment and spectacle we often see there now. Rogers said:
When I was in Rwanda last year I interviewed a young woman who was a genocide survivor. She spoke with me for an hour, laying bare both the nightmare she's been through and her hopes and dreams. As I was getting ready to leave she said she wanted to tell me something she hadn't told anyone else.
"'I am HIV positive,' she told me. 'I am going to die.'
"I asked her why she confided this to me.
"'Because you are in the theater,' she told me. 'This is why I am telling you this. The Theater is important for this. To tell this.'"
Not to sermonise or moralise about it (the proper sphere for that is the pulpit), nor to politicise it (the proper sphere for that is the political convention and the political rally), but merely to tell it pure, without the relief that undermines its immediacy, to explore it theatrically.
This Rwandan genocide survivor seems to have intuited more about the power of theatre, and recognised its potential as a means of communication and compassion (not to mention that she has a greater respect and higher regard for its audiences), than most contemporary US playwrights, directors, dramaturgs and critics. Rogers' definition of "relevance" reaches far beyond a nod to local and political culture; instead, it touches upon the darkness and light of human experience that remains suffocated beneath local affairs of the day. "I realized," Rogers said, "that as a playwright I had to lift my eyes from my navel and look out into the world. ... Our [own] stories are no longer what is driving this world." Extending Rogers' metaphor, I might add that we should be putting on our stages those parts of our own experience that remain distant from us, out of fear, ignorance or cowardice: the edges, the unexplored territories, of our own maps of the world. Nothing human – not our capacities for suffering and joy, for betrayal and compassion and cruelty and kindness, forgiveness, love and hate – is alien to any of us.
As RLewis notes, Richard Nelson's keynote speech to ART/NY received enormous attention from the blogosphere last year, Rogers' speech next to none. My thanks to RLewis again for bringing the speech to my attention; this will be one blog, anyway, that gives it note, however belatedly. The full text is available here.
Posted at 12.11 pm in /Miscellaneous
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