Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

Wednesday, 21 April 2010

Time waits for no man

Matthew Freeman asked yesterday, "How much time can we have for artistic expression that doesn't pay, when our decisions affect the comfort and health of someone helpless? ... If you have, or are starting, a family ... how has it affected your approach to your work in theater, if at all?"

Well, I'm here to tell him that it's all in the timing. While the past three months or so have been exclusively devoted to my wife and my two daughters (as well as the day job that helps keep us all fed), the last two months or so of 2009 were spent writing, proofing and planning. And what I plant in winter blossoms in spring. My review of Marc Robinson's The American Play: 1787–2000 appears in the new May 2010 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art: the tantalizing first page of the review is here (subscribers can download a .pdf of the full article). Also due in May 2010, my long essay "The Booking of the Play" will be published in Theater magazine from the Yale School of Drama; Hyperion: On the future of aesthetics will publish my talk about Samuel Beckett, Richard Foreman and Howard Barker, delivered at the University of Aberystwyth last summer; and I write a short piece about sex and the contemporary American drama for the upcoming issue of Contemporary Theatre Review. And the University of Hertfordshire Press has announced an October 2010 publication date for Karoline Gritzner's Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance, for which I wrote a chapter on German and Austrian music, film, theatre and prose between 1918 and 1933; other writers appearing in the book are David Rudkin, David Ian Rabey and Howard Barker. Last, but certainly not least, was the gratifyingly successful workshop reading of What She Knew in February.

Hunkamania? Not really. As my wife points out, this wouldn't be a bad annual crop of publications for a tenure-track academic, which I'm not and never have been, possessing a mere BA in Languages and Literature from Bard College from the long-ago year of 1983. But all this — and this blog, and a full-time job, and theatre minima's Howard Barker at the Segal Center event, and two daughters as well — without (much) pay, or an institutional theatre, academic or editorial affiliation either. (Sometimes I dream of what I could do with one of those, but you can't always get what you want, as philosopher Mick Jagger points out: you get what you need.) I suppose, Matt, one just does it. But in a much more crowded — and beautiful — world.

Posted in /Publications
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George Hunka home page

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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