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Thursday, 15 April 2010
UPDATE (17 May 2010): A few days after I posted the
below, an a propos story about an upcoming production of Sarah
Ruhl's Passion Plays appears in the Sunday 18 May New York
Times. Says Zak Berkman, artistic director of the Epic Theater
Ensemble, which is producing the plays in Brooklyn's Lafayette Avenue
Presbyterian Church: "I missed the sense of community religion gives you
growing up. Theater should feel like a secular church."
It is interesting to note that the theology of Jones' Peoples
Temple perhaps owed more to a secular, progressive, even Marxist
egalitarianism
than traditional Christianity itself. In any event, Celia McGee's full
article is here.
The final tableau:
The curtain comes down at Jonestown in 1978,
king's throne at center stage
Tragedy in America. Even one who defines himself as something
of an internal exile (aesthetically, if in nothing else) turns once in a
while to his own country: it is unavoidable, for this is where art first
and most intimately impinges on the self. In tracing the stream of tragic
consciousness through American drama, I am first faced with the dilemma
that this is a country deliberately founded, that it is early in its
evolution, unlike the millenia of civilization in Africa, Asia and Europe,
which was not ideologically deliberate. The tropes of American
self-invention, of new beginnings, of the conquering of a physical
frontier: these are unique to American experience, and such tropes suggest
a progressive, idealistic foundation: a "city on a hill," as Puritan John
Winthrop noted in 1630, alluding to Matthew 5:14. It is
based in work and faith as redemptive activities; and the suppression of
sexuality and Eros in the program of improvement remains with us to this
day.
Not that there isn't an American tragic consciousness, which first
emerged in the novels of Melville and Hawthorne, and early
twentieth-century American theatre too questioned the basis of this
foundation. In the 1920s, American tragedy was Expressionist (The
Adding Machine, 1923) as well as lyrical (Beyond the Horizon
[1918], Desire Under the Elms [1925]). In the following decade,
however, the American drama fell under the thrall of the progressive Left
and melodrama, not unlike Europe — Brecht visited the U.S. for the
first time in the mid-1930s; the establishment of the Group Theatre in
1931 not only pioneered American acting techniques but also a progressive
American drama in the work of Clifford Odets; and the Federal Theatre
Project established in 1935 was populated by artists with radical leanings
such as Orson Welles, John Houseman, Elia Kazan and Marc Blitzstein.
I noted the post-war emergence of a stream of American tragic
drama here, but further along in the postwar era the stream
thins to a trickle. But it is there if you look for it: in Edward Albee's
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tiny Alice and A
Delicate Balance; in Shepard's Buried Child and a few other
plays; even David Mamet's Edmond and Glengarry Glen
Ross. If not tragedies by Aristotle's definition (which is not the
only one), they are informed by an intent to look darkly into the American
abyss between American ideal and American reality, providing neither
redemption nor hope. It is interesting that
American formal experimentation with the form of drama is more evident in
these tragic plays than in the comic, which while influenced by absurdism
remained firmly domestic (such as the plays of Christopher Durang).
My thoughts are drawn to Jonestown. Like America, it was founded as a community
in exile, dedicated to social justice and in flight from perceived
religious persecution; it too aimed for a progressive, politically
ameliorist community; it too used sex as a means of control and submission
than free experiential exploration (despite a puritan sexual ethos).
Although the community itself was largely composed of black and poor men,
women and children, it was almost entirely administered by
upper-middle-class,
well-meaning, college-educated and white men and women (not
unlike our current government, and indeed the staffs and practitioners of
American institutional theatre today). Both in the U.S. and in its African
outpost, citizens of Jim Jones' church regularly gave theatrical
performances for themselves — quite apart from formal worship
services, though they partook of theatricality as well — but these
were hardly tragedies: they were
musicals, joyous, seeking to bind the community in a collective gesture of
self-congratulation. The tragic metaphysics of such a community
emerged not on its stage, but from around and beneath it: until the end,
when from that
same stage the king delivered his final soliloquy as the platform filled with the
dead.
This is the stuff of an American tragic consciousness as profound as
that of Europe's. Within the American ideal, it is unacceptable: and
rather than explored, it is ignored, though its traces linger in our
language. The phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" entered the language as a
result, but its meaning changed somewhat over the years, indeed diluted:
it has come to signify a firm belief, or a faith in what might possibly be
a delusion. But the Flavor-Aid that was drunk at Jonestown was not
laced with hallucinogens or opiates; it was laced with potassium cyanide,
and its product was not collusion, belief or social amelioration, but
death. Perhaps this is some thread of a possible American tragedy: and in
its identity with the community conformity of the men and women of The
Adding Machine, perhaps a clue to a tragic theatre of catastrophe for
American shores.
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here.
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