Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

Thursday, 15 January 2009

From the Archives

Originally written for the Organum and posted on 8 January 2007. Slightly revised.

"The Death of Tragedy." As if to say, at the beginning of 2007, that tragedy is no longer necessary? Accessible? Possible? As with most "death of ..." tropes, it represents wishful thinking more than anything else. Such phrases make good book or essay titles. The attempt to reinvent the old forms in the guise of the ancients or the Elizabethans falls short (mere archaeology, slapping bright paint on the pain of the ancients and wrapping it in Christmas lights, bringing joy to the childish). Contemporary Americans, it appears, have neither the history nor the vocabulary for it (ideologies of left and right, in seeking the ameliorist heaven on earth, a heaven politicians and ideologues think can be found at the center of hell, can't contain the tragic consciousness), and therefore not the interest. But this is merely appearance. The human craves a recognition of the tragic, the American as human as anyone else. If the theatre does not give it to him, he goes elsewhere. No wonder the stage so desiccated and sick. Some will insist upon their fun, and they shovel it onto the center of the stage. It reeks of waste.

The place for childlike play in tragedy, to find pleasure in the transgression of cultural and social bonds, to laugh, to have one's breath caught short in pleasure, surprise, even fear. But this is not the same thing as fun. Fun amuses, is safe, consumerist society and culture keep fun penned in the barricades of its puritan limits. Play, on the other hand, is dangerous: it leaps over the barricades of the allowable, it seeks excess and freedom. And is therefore liberating. Play is joy, irrational wonder, the laugh that shatters community. Fun finds ironic giggles, trivialization, nothing of the self or identity risked. (Laughter can close off discussion through ridicule, or it can recognize through surprise; nothing is value-free.) Fun can be incorporated in the Las Vegas spectacle; it constitutes no threat. The ecstatic cry of play, on the other hand, denies the validity of the mob's wishes. It is purely bodied pleasure, to which tickets can't be sold. Fun is amusement for the Costco shopper. Play places assumptions, conformity to any ideology, at risk. It imagines other places, other bodies, other possibilities. More, and perhaps most important, it is not afraid of limits to expression; it does not care what is culturally acceptable.

Of course tragedy is alive. It is alive in the work of Barker, Kane, and Crimp. It is alive in the late work of Beckett, in the sexual tragedies of Harold Pinter. In music: in Feldman, Barraqué, Murail. In painting (Rothko) and photography (Cava). Joy can be drawn from it, but it is not necessarily imposed, and it is, in its experience, hard-won and not a simple thing. This is not the case in the Microsoft Word documents of American playwrights in the early 21st century, or the stages to which MFA and play development programs grant them entry. Tragedy in America has yet to be invented. (Our poets have made a start, but their work remains pagebound.) Its place is the theatre. Rather, its place was the theatre. (Perhaps those who would like to integrate television and film into the theatrical experience should admit their professional ambitions – and the commodification and simplification of the human that drives the culture industry in which these disciplines thrive commercially – and go and work in television and film.) Greece had existed for hundreds of years before it staged its first tragedies; England for 500 years before the birth of Shakespeare. Perhaps one day on these shores; we had a beginning with O'Neill, Williams, Miller and Albee, but where is that daring now? Unless we trivialize ourselves out of existence and bastardize all human possibility into a series of YouTube videos long before then.

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Superfluities Redux home page

George Hunka home page

theatre minima home page

Long-form theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum II (2008-2009)
Critique of Tragedy (2010-continuing)

Notes
Howard Barker 1
Howard Barker 2
Samuel Beckett 1
Samuel Beckett 2
Bertolt Brecht
Richard Foreman 1
Richard Foreman 2
Je Suis Sang
Sarah Kane
Music
Marilyn Nonken
Saint Oedipus

Contact
geh@panix.com