Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Home > Organum Tuesday, 01 December 2009 OrganumUnited Colors of Benetton. A cry for more
customers, this, the talk of diversity in the consumerist age. The
theatre's leadership, artistic practitioners and audience should reflect
the demographic of the modern multicultural democratic state, goes the
valorous idea (and raising the question, "When is a quota not a quota?");
but after decades of labels — Black Theatre, Queer Theatre, Women's
Theatre — and the slow but undoubted inclusion of these tropes in
the mainstream theatre, do we have a theatre that has somehow eradicated
or even alleviated injustice, any more than we have a culture that has
done so? Or has injustice simply driven itself deeper underground, to
emerge in the gross perversions of the smiling progressive state, which
continues to send agents of violence to far- Such a theatre cannot survive — its mere economic inefficiency
will see to that. Nor should it, for then it becomes merely another
instrument of discouragement, a monolith of self-
And, along with the comic or musical, there is now the panel discussion, where they wear badges of compassion which are not large enough to conceal the snakes beneath — which also resist the tragic theatrical experience, and so are ever so popular at home and abroad. Posted in /Organum Home > Organum Tuesday, 17 November 2009 OrganumO'Neill's radicalism. With his late plays O'Neill burrows
through realism and the Expressionist stage to come out upon a darker
landscape: significance and meaning are shattered. The drunks in the back
room of Harry Hope's bar in The Iceman Cometh are exaggerations
of the audience as collective: sharers not in individual pipedreams but
within the cultural construct of ameliorist and personal illusion
(literally so in the character of anarchist Hugo Kalmar). Hickey the
dramatist/ Retreat is denied to the Tyrones in Long Day's Journey into Night, the great dream play that anatomizes the cancer at the center of the Tyrone family and at the center of the theatre. Tyrone, an actor, offers Mary a theatre of family and affection as much an anaesthetic of experience as her morphine dreams. Her own sexuality has produced three children; the two who survive shore up the house as the decay continues within. At the final curtain, in her wedding dress, she denies the experience that began with Tyrone's love, seeking virginity again. It is unrecoverable, of course, but her illusion holds her husband and children wrapped, and rapt, in her dream, even as they remain torn, bleeding and dying. Duration is the avenue of revelation: these are high masses that
require
more than three hours (more than four hours, in the case of The Iceman
Cometh) for their uncut production; three times the length of most
contemporary American plays. But these are surgeries that can't be
performed sloppily: language and performance as scalpel, not machete. As
if O'Neill wanted to send the audience not into the late evening for a
drink or dinner or the post- Below, Jason Robards delivers the opening of the long monologue in Act IV of The Iceman Cometh, from Sidney Lumet's 1960 television production:
Posted in /Organum Home > Organum Thursday, 22 October 2009 OrganumInternal memorandum. An official government organ of either
propaganda or
censorship is unnecessary when individuals have so thoroughly internalized
the assumptions of an ideology, moral dogma, government or culture
industry that they will give up individual autonomy for the unquestioning
furtherance of an abstract goal defined by those organs. What need for
propaganda when the artist will without external compulsion do the same
work in support of an ideology, or will censor himself and repress his
doubts as irrelevant? Especially if his aesthetic goals are those lauded
by the culture industry — entertainment, self- It is a truism of the progressive collectivist that the "individual" himself is a mere historical and social construct; so he will be expected to say, and it is valid insofar as the individual will bear within him certain traits or beliefs, certain common knowledge, lent by collective experience. But this is only a partial answer that does not account for the complexity of human experience within and without the community, nor does it validate the sufficiency of those collective beliefs. The tragedies of Oedipus and King Lear lie in the fracture between collective cultural abstractions (fatherhood, justice, matrimony, kingship) and the individual autonomous self. There are two avenues to freedom: resignation and repudiation, rejection. Neither are necessarily "happy" in the sense that American culture is a pursuit of happiness. But they deny the stupor of the collective and embrace the possibility of imagination and ecstasy in the process of that contemplative resignation or repudiation. (Imagine Oedipus unpunished by himself or Creon ...) In the culture industry, freedom of choice is the cereal aisle of the supermarket, the 800 channels of cable television or the hundreds of offerings of performances in New York theatrical circles. For the autonomous individual, freedom of choice is in choosing to refuse what the culture industry offers, and to imagine something other, to put the individual secret on stage ... Their collective ideologies are embodied too, and they set that decaying fluorescent flesh to laughing and dancing, crying and moping, and dig their hands deep into those bodies ... Posted in /Organum
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