Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Home > Drama
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Garrett Eisler mulled over the economic presumptions of the Lincoln
Center Festival's Samuel Beckett series at The Playgoer yesterday; it seems that, where
Samuel Beckett is concerned, the stars come out in New York. Lincoln
Center boasts Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. Last season, of course, there was
Mikhail Baryshnikov in a Beckett evening at the New York Theatre Workshop,
and next season, according to this Theatermania story, Bill Irwin will appear
in a Gerry Hynes-
In all this, the real news might be the addition of a new play to the Beckett stage canon – Eh Joe, originally written for television in 1965. In the past few years there have been no fewer than three productions of the work onstage: Joanne Akalaitis's production at the NYTW last season, the current New York staging, and Atom Egoyan's staging with Michael Gambon in the role of Joe at the Gate Theatre in 2006 (this production the basis for the Lincoln Center presentation, which Obscene Jester reviewed yesterday here).
This points to a development in stage technology that permits a
crossover from video to theatre. The original Eh Joe was an
intimate chamber drama, the camera focusing on Joe's face, the
communication one-
I wonder, though, whether the progress of technology may have the
effect of rendering some of Beckett's other plays anachronistic. When
Beckett wrote Krapp's Last Tape in 1958, the personal, portable
reel-
Even now, it's unlikely that audiences will come across a portable
reel-
The status of Beckett's work in a technology-
That Beckett himself was not averse to moving his work from one medium into another is demonstrated by his own oversight of the film of his 1972 play Not I as well as his permission to Mabou Mines to produce a stage adaptation of the short novel Company during his lifetime. As Eh Joe demonstrates, the canon of Beckett's work continues to challenge theatrical innovators and audiences – a mark of the unique nature of his work, and an indication that Beckett's modernist stage practice will continue to infest the postmodern era. As Garrett notes, his work also challenges the imaginations of the Lincoln Center marketing and development office; but this is the lesser part of the story.
More on Samuel Beckett here.
Posted at 8.52 am in /Drama
Permanent link to this story
Home > Drama
Friday, 11 April 2008
UPDATE (perhaps): If anyone continues to believe in the
purity-
Did you hear the one about the contemporary American theatre?
Critic walks into a bar and says to the bartender, "Unlike earlier plays about groups ... new [American] plays' character assemblages suggest the sitcom producer's instructions in The Heidi Chronicles: 'Just tell us who these women are and why they're funny.' That's not enough for Heidi ... and it's not enough for the theater, either. Yet it is enough, apparently, for a wide and affluent stratum of people, served by theaters nationwide – or maybe just for the managerial types who choose those theaters' plays. [Or for the people who write them. – GH] For them, it seems, the quest to make the figures onstage vaguely recognizable, like people you might see at the mall or on reality TV, has replaced the shock of recognition that comes with great drama. We may be living in a world so dramatic that those who provide entertainment for a living instinctively want to soften their work, providing a harmless, faintly insipid virtual reality that never encroaches too much on the actual one looming outside."
There's a lot of this going about, as the lady said to the vicar.
Another critic down the other end of the bar says, "[Sarah] Ruhl's easy-
To be fair, a collection of those earlier plays that Michael Feingold
mentions above, 1972's monumental The Off-Off-Broadway Book, contains enough
"harmless, faintly insipid virtual realities" and "easy-
The current scene may be the fault of "managerial types" who run institutional non-profits. It's possible that the serious drama that aims for more ambitious heights is still being written but not produced, cowardice being the reason. Critic David Cote suggested as much in a Swiftian modest proposal last week.
I don't think so. Unlike fifty years ago, today most playwrights and experimental theatre artists emerge from MFA programs in theatre. The writers that these critics mention are all products of these MFA programs. Their plays indeed "rank high in terms of quality workmanship," as Feingold notes. They not only sharpened their dramaturgical pencils under teachers and a charismatic guru or two; upon graduation they entered into a network of funders and producers who supported the work of both the mentors and their protégés. You don't need to look far to see the reasons why this work sometimes sounds and looks the same. Great drama might yet still be produced by these MFA graduates. But insofar as these programs cater to an aesthetic paradigm of "a harmless, vaguely insipid virtual reality" with the reward of production by an American theatre sympathetic to that paradigm, the likelihood is less.
As Cote points out, theatres like the Public Theater and the New York Theatre Workshop are opening their doors to these theatre artists – so, really, the system is working; slowly, but that's the way systems work. Maybe that's the joke. What is still lacking is that "unexpected shock of recognition" that Feingold tells us is the mark of great drama. That's where the system fails.
For some people, that "great drama" that Feingold mentions is going to
stick in the craw, for it assumes that there's such a thing as
"not-
There is a touch of revolutionary messianism in every great artist; it's a part of their madness. The great dramatists of the modern period, from Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw and Brecht on to Müller and Barker, believed that they were responsible, as part of their mission, for changing the theatre at its roots: the whole theatre: form, content, education, criticism, technique, economics, audience, cultural position and approach. (Beckett may have seemed less ambitious, but even so, he was creating a theatre that he wanted to see in opposition to the theatre that he saw around him.)
MFA programs, by their nature, are designed to crush out the revolutionary and messianic strain. They are evolutionary: they take a raw talent, set it a series of hoops to jump through and requirements to complete, and at the end that talent receives a document guaranteeing that the talent has met the bureaucratic requirements of the institution and satisfied its representatives in the classroom and bursar's office. The talent also receives entrée into a working guild, a means to a livelihood, not unlike the apprenticeship process of the feudal era. The MFA process adapts the talent to the environment, as evolution adapts the biological specimen to its environment. But true revolution comes from without. True revolution seeks to change the environment to provide the full exercise of the self's – and the talent's – possibilities. A process which encourages adaptation to an existing paradigm of aesthetics (including the unexamined underlying ideologies of contemporary theatre and academia, which are businesses as well, as we're always reminded – but there's a limit to what numbers can tell us about art, or the human spirit) cripples the individual talent, even as it claims to refine the raw material of that talent. The most valuable education is self-education; let's not mistake academia for anything other than a symbol of learning, and not learning itself.
How many critics, playwrights or artistic directors does it take to change a light bulb – I mean, the American theatre? Well, perhaps only one – but, like the psychiatrist's light bulb, the American theatre has to want to change.
Posted at 8.54 am in /Drama
Permanent link to this story
Home > Drama
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
David Mamet today in the Village Voice explains why he is "no longer a 'brain-dead liberal'" (not that he ever was a liberal in the first place, brain-dead or otherwise, whether he considered himself one or not; he's always seemed to me a testosterone-fuelled laissez-faire type; the admiration and affection he displayed for the characters he created in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross always outweighed any putative critical stance towards those characters or the ideologies that drove them). No surprise there. And Sarah Ruhl this week in the New Yorker gets the full-on attention of John Lahr, speaking of admiration and affection; knowing the demographics and editorial slant of The New Yorker, no surprise there either.
Posted at 2.47 pm in /Drama
Permanent link to this story
Home > Drama
Thursday, 24 January 2008
Suggested Reading: Samuel Beckett
The Deborah Warner/Fiona Shaw
production of Happy Days, running at BAM through 2 February,
has given rise to many positive reviews -- but is it Beckett? Rainer
Hanshe, in his essay "Stoic Nihilism and the Beauty of Oblivion" for the
online journal Hyperion, uses the occasion to offer extended
thoughts on Beckett's contemporary reputation in American culture. After
considering this production and the American canonisation of Beckett as
some kind of aesthetic saint (and highbrow Dr. Phil) since Beckett's death
in 1989, Hanshe turns to the urge of performers and directors to
"reinterpret," counter to Beckett's wishes, his theatrical work:
To all of these middling directors and actors, however, Beckett is constricting. If they were to perform Beethoven's 5th, they would want to change the key of the symphony "just to hear what it would sound like." It would be "an interesting experiment." At this point, experimentation is resorted to or relied on out of lack of aesthetic muscle. Of the numerous recordings that exist of Beethoven's late string quartets, Edward Beckett, who performs frequently as a flautist, noted that "every interpretation is different, one from the next, but they are all based on the same notes, tonalities, dynamic and tempo markings. We feel justified in asking the same measure of respect for Samuel Beckett's plays." For those who refuse such respect, in their desire to infect Beckett's work with novelties or alter it according to whims not in harmony with the play, what they reveal is not the limits of his work, but the limits of their own vision and of what they become when they are confronted with boundaries. It is easy to be "creative" when given every license but rarely does this result in something so singular. The true test of a creator’s abilities is in the measure against a boundary.
But this is only part of a much longer meditation on Beckett, Nietzsche's vision of art and the role that literature itself plays in the character of Happy Days' Winnie. As an antidote to a current common conception of Beckett as some kind of hope-dealer, it's worthwhile to examine once more one of the most oft-quoted passages of Beckett's work, from the last page of his 1950 novel The Unnamable:
I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Hanshe's essay reminds us that those final seven words can be read in a variety of ways, only one of them an assertion of courage. They are also, in the musical decrescendo cadence of this passage, a dying of the light, a tortured expression of inevitable painful existence towards an inevitable death. And, too, a third perspective: that the narrator does, indeed, "go on," but as a being-in-words, as a linguistic memoir of suffering and pain -- as the "stain upon the silence" that Beckett wished to leave as his legacy. It is in this last sense that the imposition of directorial arrogance upon Beckett's work most desecrates the work itself. As the writer's nephew points out, Beckett's dramatic texts (and texts like it) are unique in that each word, even the words of the stage directions, counts. Unlike most plays, you can't just go through the texts with a black marker, eradicating the stage directions (to provide room for directorial and interpretive "creativity"); in many cases you'd have little play left. If one respects Beckett (at least, if one asserts that one respects Beckett), one must also respect that being-in-words that his dramatic texts represent as well. If this is too much of a constraint for those "middling directors and actors" whom Hanshe castigates, well, there's nothing stopping them from writing and devising their own new texts and productions -- writing and staging their own poetic visions. And more power to them. But they don't need Beckett for that; paper and pens are available at most local corner stores. And Beckett doesn't need them.
Hanshe's rich and thoughtful essay is available in full here.
Posted at 8.33 am in /Drama
Permanent link to this story
Home > Drama
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Suggested Reading: His Lavender Quill at Rest
Playwright Mark Ravenhill wrote at the Guardian yesterday that "writing gay" no longer interests him:
It's worth remembering, particularly in an age of "inclusion," that most good drama is not multicultural. It's created by exploring singular worlds, where there is no allowing for the interplay of gender, race, sexuality and class. ...
Now, I'm surprised to say, I'm happy never to write another gay character again. It feels as though every aspect of the gay experience has been narrated, performed and picked over in the past 30 years. It has left us with some brilliant work. Alongside all the bad generic gay work, artists such as Derek Jarman, Alan Hollinghurst, Tony Kushner and others have left a body of work that is both gay and great. But that work seems over now.
Right now, I'm eager to explore the strange, twilight world of the heterosexual -- to expose its anguishes and mysteries and unconscious comedies. Maybe one day there will be something to pull me back to the gay experience, the sense of something new to be said about the gay world. But, for the moment at least, my lavender quill is at rest.
Mark's full meditation on theatre, inclusion politics and multiculturalism on stage (at least, in conventional drama) is here.
Posted at 9.07 am in /Drama
Permanent link to this story
