Superfluities Redux

On culture and theatre, by George Hunka

The Theatre Writer
January 2007

The Theatre Writer chooses for herself the feminine personal pronoun; when she thinks of the creative act, she thinks of fecundity, reproduction, a new being out of old. She also chooses for herself British spelling, British the European variety of English, and she has more in common with that continent's glowing, tragic decay, she thinks, than the bright lights and roaring technological noise of the immensely comic continent onto which, in one of history's inevitable incongruities, she was born.

The Theatre Writer wakes one morning and reads over what she'd written the evening before: this writing a short essay, a few notes, on the show she had seen that day; she publishes these essays, has been in the gnawing useless habit of publishing these essays, in a small corner of the public sphere in which a few people had found her. The essay looks foul: mere description; she's done better, she thinks. In the past she's carefully garnered her intellect and her small knack for concise writing to surround her visceral reaction to a theatrical production with something approaching a clarity that could be communicated to her readers; at the same time she's retained some evidence of that indescribable aesthetic and physical reaction beyond precise, explicit linguistic expression.

But not in this case. That description is there, but no evidence of the visceral reaction. She knows why; the visceral reaction is contained in the words she uses to explore the work not only for her own psyche, but also in her exploration of history and craft of the art in which she's chosen to spend her life (though she knew that it was not entirely her doing the choosing). Here, where are the obvious references to the history of medieval stagecraft and Grotowski's attempt to recreate the psychic field for its retrieval? The connection between this work and that of the Flemish Old Masters, certainly appropriate, and about which she possesses the small knowledge to say a little something relevant? Where is that? No, it's a shameful piece, it reflects little of the experience she had and she expresses it poorly. The show deserved better, and she's capable of better.

Sans enthusiasm, sans concentration, sans insight. So this morning the Theatre Writer leans back and sips dourly at her morning coffee. More angry at herself than anything else, for they've gotten to her. She's been accused of pedantry and preciousness, and though she doesn't think it true the accusation stings. Now more afraid of appearance than what she knows to be true of herself.

And she wonders if this is the first indication that the knack is gone.

And it has always been knacks, a series of them: when a child she'd found herself with a knack for stringing words together, an attraction to the human murmur of voices from bodies, mouths spinning linguistic symbols, and she found she had a knack for the imitation of it. Later on this knack would be joined by a knack for reproducing this sound on a page, and then, a little later, a knack for manipulating it so that this sound pleased herself more. She knew this knack was a dangerous thing, somehow, and so she trained herself in the use of it: she'd studied the work of others who had done the same thing, discovering there was a history of 2500 years of it, and she felt very small and modest. But she also knew that if people had been in pursuit of the urge for 2500 years, it must be important, and the urge must be seated not in herself as an individual but as a member of this peculiar race of beings. And so she looked for this urge, and finding it in her body, she determined that the theatre was the place for her.

A similar knack emerged that was more economically useful to her: she could mimic structure. She could easily mimic the structure and voice of plays and playwrights of the past, given enough familiarity with them (though the plays that emerged from this period were sheer juvenilia and creeping with the ill-taken voices of others, not herself). But she could mimic, especially, the structure and patois of the daily newspaper theatre review (certainly she'd read enough of them to be able to craft a review of even a non-existent play in her sleep). It was easy, but paid better than what seemed to be far more important to her, which was to explore this urge and communicate this urge to others. This latter was certainly a far, far more difficult thing to do, and as she aged she found each exploration, each discovery of a new timbre in her voice, more time-consuming, the deeper one goes the dimmer the light shines and it's much harder to see, let alone describe and then manipulate.

For ten years she resisted the urge and beat it down inside herself, until in adulthood she had a small hint, an instinct -- one could scarcely call it an epiphany -- that the pursuit of this urge was in fact the most important thing she could do with her remaining days. She was sorry it hadn't come earlier, but she felt herself fortunate that it had come at all. So she would die poor and live in insecurity. This made her no different than millions of others.

But because of this ten years' absence it was a difficult thing to do: she was older, she was tired. Custom and habit had wrapped its constricting tentacles around her as tightly as they could for a woman of her age. And here she'd decided to criminalise herself. Ma Barker, she was. Of course, as lonely as this exploration was, she was glad that the urge had led her to a form which was collaborative in the end; when through the tunnel, there were others to meet her to take her the rest of the way.

But first, but first, those others. And even prior to this, to eat. The knack for the daily review came in handy; a few paychecks arrived, and she ate. She even came to be recognized and welcomed as a gentlewoman of the press. And during all this she pursued that deeper urge. Her profession as a reviewer allowed her free access to the talent and even the acquaintance of others, actresses and actors, whom she loved, in whom she saw the urge to express through their bodies and voices what she wanted to express through her knack for stringing words together. (Good thing, too; without those free theatre tickets, she couldn't afford any of it.) At nights, after seeing a show, she'd literally grind out a review; the following morning she staged her own plays in her mind, seeing some of these actors and actresses who so inspired her, and, if solitude and quiet allowed, tried to translate what her unconscious suggested to her into ink-and-paper. It grew ever harder, but she'd grown accustomed to that.

Queer things started to happen, her relationships became more tenuous, difficult to suss. Traditionally there were few like her, who tried to tread both sides of the line that divided critic (or reviewer, or essayist, or what have you) from artist, and she became sharply and painfully aware of growing, formal distance from herself and her subject. Her editors, as might be expected, valued her personal and professional distance from the artists she wrote about (even as she admired them). This she accepted. What she'd been stupid to overlook was that artists would value this personal and professional distance from her as well. There were a few who approached her and recognized her own Real Work as similar, or at least tangentially related, to their own. Or they found it enjoyable, even if it had nothing to do with their own, perhaps. Some of them, perhaps, were just being kind (not all, she knew). But the wall remained.

Her own plays had always been a form of talking to herself, in public (soon events beyond her control conspired to have her own work staged, and the very reception of this work, her own position as she'd cultivated it over the past years, crippled both her relationships with her editors and consequently [because no longer an official gentlewoman of the press, though that was how they knew her] her relations with artists; the free tickets stopped coming, by and large, though the few she did receive were warmly accepted). Because she knew that her impulse arose not from her ego but an unconsciousness that, she suspected, she might have in common with others, and that she was not expressing her "self" (whatever this was), she hoped that her knack for manipulation would make this expression translatable to others. In some desperation, then, feeling this distance more acutely, she began to write in her own little corner of the public sphere, herself her own subeditor, her own continuing dialogue with herself about this urge, she tried to define it, investigate it, explore it. She found models for the dialogue that helped her to shape her conversation with herself, models that, too, had been released into the public sphere. She felt the need to be in the theatre, each day, in her mind, even if she found her own dramatic expression increasingly difficult.

As she talked to herself (again in public, always this urge to share her investigations with others, as she did with her plays), she found, as she became more convinced that this urge was central to her existence, that she was growing more strident. She found that some others (by and large dead, but there were still a few around) seemed to feel the same as she did, and she began to write more to them (by and large dead, at least as silent as the dead, and even fewer). Well, I've always been in more of a dialogue with the dead than the living, she thought. She sought affinities with others: she found them in music, in art, in poetry, more often than she found them in theatre. (She began to feel that either theatre was fifty years behind the other arts, or the other arts were fifty years behind theatre. She wondered if others felt the same way. There was certainly that desire for contemporeity in the playwrights she knew. She didn't feel close to them.) This she wrote about, this, she became to see, was integral to her own urge. And consequently more difficult to manipulate, for she had to translate it from these forms into her own.

An acquaintance interested in her work invited her to lunch one day, and they talked of this and that, the interests they had in common, the interests they didn't. He had far more experience in exploring this urge than she did, and she recognised that. He asked a question: "How do you feel in relation to other people in the theatre now?" Perhaps he asked this more out of recognition than simpatico, for she found herself answering, without hesitation and a little surprised, after three years of shows, and plays, and writing about, under, over theatre, and writing her own: "Very alone." Recognition, at least: he nodded.

The theatre writer found that she was now writing more about a theatre that she wanted to see, a theatre that she wanted to write plays for, than the theatre that she found around her. There were already a lot of people writing plays for that theatre, they had it well-covered. She attended much less theatre now, often by necessity (she had little time, now that she had to find another means by which she could put food on her table) than by choice, but that which she did see and enjoy she wrote about under the heading "Notices" -- a coy disingenuous word that avoided the criticism/review dichotomy, but disingenuous nonetheless. (She didn't write about plays she disliked, or plays by her friends, which also were already being written about at length by others who had more of an inclination to those plays than she did herself.) But then, she didn't think she was writing criticism or reviews. She didn't know what the hell it was. But it was something. She kept her hand in.

But this morning, this foul notice she'd written in her hand, she wondered. She felt so far from the show she'd seen, its participants, than any she had before, even in her enthusiasm for it. In the failings of the notice she saw a slacking. And she wanted to apologise for it, for its shallowness, for its lack of contour or texture, especially to those she was writing about. As she began to fear that it was a first indication that finally something had gotten to her, and that her own urge had become just as shallow, contourless and smooth.

But then, she also knew, that this fear indicated that what she had was no longer a knack, but a voice and a calling. And careers are economically rewarding; callings, often enough, aren't. There were no millionairess nuns, after all.

She stared at what she'd written, with empty eyes.

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