Superfluities

Fourth Year's the Charm

2007-08-29T11:22:00.000-04:00

So, on this bitter note, the third year of Superfluities comes to a close. Hard to believe it's been so long. Ironically, I begin a month-long hiatus just at the beginning of the new theatre season, but I'm sure it'll get along without me very well, at least for the month of September.

I will return to the blogosphere on Monday, October 1, 2007: in a new location, within a new Web site. It will also be farewell to Blogger, which has been a fair host, but I do miss the added control I have with (and the simplicity of) the software that started it all. Until October, then, a fond au revoir.

100 Saints You Should Know

2007-08-29T08:25:00.000-04:00

100 Saints You Should Know. The world premiere of a new play by Kate Fodor. Directed by Ethan McSweeny. Scenic design: Rachel Hauck; costume design: Mimi O'Donnell; lighting design: Jane Cox; sound design: Matt Hubbs; and something called "Director of Development": Jill Garland. With Janel Moloney (Theresa), Jeremy Shamos (Matthew), Zoe Kazan (Abby), Lois Smith (Colleen) and Will Rogers (Garrett). One intermission. Runs August 24-September 30, 2007; reviewed at the August 28, 2007 performance. Production: Playwrights Horizons (Tim Sanford, artistic director). Tickets and schedule information here.

Poor Theresa; we first find her scrubbing a toilet in a rectory; little do we know that watching faithhealers on television has led her to a spiritual crisis. Poor Father Matthew; he wanders into the rectory bathroom to find Theresa there; little do we know that an unfortunate combination of The Dark Night of the Soul and the erotic photographs of George Platt Lynes have led him to his own sexual and spiritual crisis. Poor Abby, Theresa's daughter; she's only one step away from delinquency. Poor Colleen, Matthew's mother; saddled with an Irish back-country lingo and faith-and-begorrah brogue so thick it led me to my own spiritual crisis (the only thing missing from her dialogue was a teary reference to the "Auld Sod") -- if there is a God and He cares for this earth, would He allow one of His creation to speak and act so stereotypically?

Well, ultimately, poor us. 100 Saints You Should Know, a play which can only be described as earth-shatteringly mediocre, opens the Playwrights Horizons 2007-2008 season; one can only call it "a meditation on spiritual life in 21st century America" because, like ill-disciplined meditation, it meanders and hews left-to-right, its dialogue as naturalistically drab as any that has come out of an MFA playwriting program and new play development workshop. There's some kind of a story here about those in doubt gathering rather unbelievably together (speaking of belief) in a small American town to sort out their doubts, but the tropes -- the possibly-gay Catholic priest (are there any others in the American theatre?), the tired single mom with a hole at the center of her life (are there any others in the American theatre?), the awkward young gay man (are there any others etc. etc.) stuck in a provincial American town and driven to secret drinking -- are all so hopelessly predictable that spending time with them is like spending time with wet tissue.

One could lay this at the door of the playwright, Kate Fodor, a recipient of lots of prizes and commissions, but in a "Playwright's Perspective" essay included in the program notes (which I wouldn't ordinarily cite as it's outside of the experience of the play itself, but its inclusion in the program -- also a part of the theatregoing experience -- makes it fair game), and to be fair, she denies responsibility for it. "Plays often know things that playwrights don't know they know," she concludes, urging that readers take the 250 interpretive words that come before "with a grain of salt." The essay itself is as tortured as the dialogue (not to mention a tedious pseudo-lyrical monologue delivered by the priest towards the end of the 75 minute first act); the play's self-conscious references to the definition of simile and metaphor, and the old Irishwoman's reference to "allegory," suggest that copies of Warriner's English Grammar and Composition, my old high-school grammar textbook, are as readily available as Gideon Bibles. Even in the Auld Sod, dontcha-know.

The rotating set by Rachel Hauck and effective lighting by Jane Cox only confirm that there's a lot of design talent in New York to dress up minor plays with expensive good looks (would that the play itself moved and illuminated its issues with the same imagination and alacrity); given the two-dimensional characters it's hard to say much of interest about the performers, except that apparently somebody told Will Rogers, who plays the young man, to invest his performance with a series of bizarre vocal and facial tics that seem to render his character semi-retarded.

The annual churlish slog through the "What's Wrong with Play Development in American Theatre" question is going on over at Isaac Butler's blog, as predictably as the turning of the leaves in the fall (enter at your own peril); there, somebody's holding up God's Ear, a much better play than 100 Saints, as indicative of its failures. At least Jenny Schwartz has a distinctive, individual voice, though, an instinct for the patterning of human speech that allows her to manipulate it. (One also wonders why Sheila Callaghan's fine Dead City, which was originally commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, ended up downtown in the off-off-Broadway hinterlands, where New Georges rescued the play and gave it the production and careful treatment it deserved, and not on the off-Broadway mainstage here. What's in the water over there at Playwrights Horizons?) I only note here that 100 Saints has been through the development mill, too -- developed at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and workshopped at the Chautauqua Theater Company before arriving at Playwrights Horizons.

Poor 100 Saints, perhaps -- workshopped within an inch of its well-intentioned but pale, weak life. I left at intermission, I'm afraid, not compelled to return by the tree-injury ex machina that closes the first act, but since Ms. Fodor, the director, the cast and Playwrights Horizons are producing a play that knows more about itself than the playwright or any of the creative team, I hope nobody will take the above words personally. Or with a grain of salt.

More Openings, Albee-Style

2007-08-24T14:15:00.000-04:00

On the heels of Alison's fine, insightful review of a Melbourne production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? comes more news about Edward Albee: The 2007-2008 season will be peppered with Albee plays here in New York, as the playwright approaches his 80th birthday in March 2008. In addition to the afore-mentioned Peter and Jerry, there is this (per a press release), which was also reported in the New York Times yesterday:

Me, Myself and I, directed by Emily Mann, January 11 to February 17, 2008, at McCarter Theatre (91 University Place) in Princeton, NJ. A world-premiere comedy about identical twin brothers and their mother, who can't tell them apart, even in their adulthood.

The American Dream and The Sandbox, March 4 to April 12, 2008, at the Cherry Lane Theatre (38 Commerce St.). F. Murray Abraham will head the cast of these seminal Albee plays, being produced at the same theatre in which they debuted in 1961 and 1962.

Occupant, May 6 to June 29, 2008, at the Signature Theatre Company (555 W. 42 St.) Occupant is a portrait of acclaimed sculptor Louise Nevelson and a quest to capture a charismatic and complex artist and persona. What is the relationship between creator and creation?

Get Out Your Calendars

2007-08-23T13:21:00.000-04:00

UPDATE, August 23, 2007: See Ken Urban's "secret word" below.

Two more upcoming openings, both with special deals just for you, dear Superfluities reader.

The first is for 100 Saints You Should Know, Kate Fodor's new play about faith and common ground which will open the 2007-2008 Playwrights Horizons season. Lois Smith and Janel Moloney are featured in the cast; the play will be directed by Ethan McSweeny and begins performances tomorrow night, August 24. Playwrights Horizons is offering a special blogreaders' admission price for all performances of Fodor's play: $40 (regular $65) for performances August 24-September 2; $50 (regular $65) for performances September 4-September 30. To take advantage of this offer, get your tickets online here or here and use the discount code SABL; mention the same code when you call Ticket Central to make your reservations (212.279.4200); or just tell the box office staff at 416 West 42nd Street the same code, and viola! Discount tickets are yours. Don't forget to mention Superfluities as well.

Secondly, you'll want to put Ken Urban's new play for The Committee Theatre Company in your dayplanner too. The Private Lives of Eskimos (or 16 Words for Snow) will run September 8-October 1. Directed by Dylan McCullough, Urban's latest work is about a man who loses his cellphone and gains ... well, chaos. Tickets and schedule information through Theatermania here; to follow the cast and director through their process, visit the company's blog here. And your secret admirer from The Committee says: "Say the secret code 'ESKIMOS' when you book in advance on Theatermania and that gets you $15 tickets on performances on Saturday, September 8th; Sunday, September 9th; Monday, September 10; and Friday, September 14 (not available at the door)."

Mabou Mines' Song for New York

2007-08-22T12:55:00.000-04:00

Ruth Maleczech and Mabou Mines will be offering free public performances of their latest production, Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting, at the Gantry Plaza State Park in Long Island City, Queens, starting next Friday, August 31. The five-part production, which brings together live music, singing, dance, choral speech, visual art and the performance site itself in the signature Mabou Mines style, will celebrate each of New York's five boroughs from a barge moored at the park's waterfront.

The company commissioned new work from five New York City writers (Migdalia Cruz, Maggie Dubris, Patricia Spears Jones, Karen Kandel and Imelda O'Reilly), their texts then set to music by The Klezmatics' Lisa Gutkin. The extravaganza also involved cooperation from the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; the U.S. Coast Guard; and Miller's Launch. Said director Maleczech in a press release: "I do really celebrate New York. I love what the city has meant to Mabou Mines. I don't think we could have made the works we've made anywhere but here. Song for New York is a way to give something back, to say thanks."

Recent Mabou Mines productions have included the critically-acclaimed Gospel at Colonus, Mabou Mines DollHouse and Mabou Mines Lear from Lee Breuer; over the years they've also proven to be among the most innovative interpreters of Samuel Beckett's work, especially in their adaptations of the prose works Company and Imagination Dead Imagine (with Beckett's approval, I might add); the company's David Warrilow, who died in 1995, was one of Beckett's favorite actors.

Song for New York will be a unique experience. The August 31 performance will celebrate Brooklyn; other performances will take place September 4 (celebrating Staten Island), September 6 (the Bronx), September 7 (Queens) and September 9 (Manhattan). More information soon at the Mabou Mines Web site; in the meantime, further details can be found at American Theater Web.

New York City Opera's "Opera-for-All"

2007-08-21T13:00:00.000-04:00

All 2,755 seats of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center will be going for only $25 each during the New York City Opera's "Opera-for-All" Festival opening weekend, which runs September 6-8. The Festival will run through the season, with 50 front-orchestra seats for each performance set aside at the same price.

The Festival opener kicks off with a concert on Thursday, September 6, followed by a party to be held on the State Theater's promenade, featuring performances by the East Village Opera Company. Those who prefer their operas full and uncut have the option of attending the 8:00pm performance of Puccini's La Bohème on Friday, September 7, or the 8:00pm performance of Mozart's masterpiece Don Giovanni on Saturday, September 8, for the same $25.00.

With the "Opera-for-All" weekend and festival, the NYC Opera hopes to reconnect to the "City Opera's founding mission of innovative opera at accessible prices." The City Opera's 2007-2008 season also includes a new production of Margaret Garner, an opera by Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison based upon events that inspired Morrison's Beloved, and Henry Purcell's King Arthur.

Ticket and schedule information about the NYC Opera and the Opera-for-All Festival is available at the Opera's Web site.

Elitist and inaccessible? Moi?

Upcoming: The Wooster Group

2007-08-20T17:57:00.000-04:00

In yesterday's post about upcoming productions, I neglected to mention The Wooster Group's upcoming Manhattan opening at the Public Theater of their Hamlet, which had a short run at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse earlier this year. It opens at the Public in October.

If you need a Wooster fix before then, it's a short Metroliner trip away: The Group will bring their production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones to this year's Philadelphia Live Arts/Fringe festival, which runs from August 31 through September 15. Philadelphia readers should drop by; ticket and performance schedule information here.

Below is a short piece I wrote for a podcast about The Group's Emperor Jones when it was revived in the spring of 2006 in Brooklyn. (That's Scott Shepherd, Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos, left to right, in the production photograph above by Paula Court.)

***

I don't talk about individual performers much on Superfluities. Most of the time I self-servingly blather on about drama, or form versus content, or aesthetics, or what have you. So sometimes I forget that the soul of theater is in the performers onstage, and I shouldn't do that. In a small way today I hope to make amends by talking about a woman who may be one of the finest actresses working in New York today, and she works almost exclusively in the theater, with one company, the Wooster Group. Her name is Kate Valk, and she's playing the title role in the revival of the Group's production of The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill, now at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Ms. Valk has been with the Wooster Group since 1981, and I first saw her in their controversial L.S.D., a deconstruction and reconstruction of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, in 1984. In that production she played Tituba, a black slave accused of schooling a New England town's women and children into the mysteries of witchcraft: Ms. Valk, a smallish very pale woman in real life, played a black woman, and she brought a bizarre minstrelsy to the role. No type-casting here. Since then, her roles with the group have included Racine's Phaedra, all of the roles in Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, and a narrator and other roles in Chekhov's Three Sisters.

I think I first became truly appreciative and enamored of Ms. Valk with her performance in last year's House/Lights, based on the Gertrude Stein play and a cheap soft-core porn film. In that performance, she spoke the entire text of the Stein play, and never have you heard Stein so musical, so sensible, than when it comes through Kate Valk. Her performance embodied not only the words of the play, but its peculiar and idiosyncratic grammar as well, a physical performance composed mostly of small gestures as Stein's language depends on the recognition of small shifts of vocabulary, of pause, of sentence structure.

Stein's language came through Ms. Valk as echoes of an interior perspective, consciousness of a world construction made visible and audible: all process, little graspable product. Much different from her performance last night, in the very different The Emperor Jones, but then, O'Neill is not Stein by any stretch, regardless of the fact that they're contemporaries.

Stein is silences and atoms of language: O'Neill is all noise and bluster, endless floods of words rather than a mist of language, and in plays like this and All God's Chillun Got Wings, there's also that awful, terrible dialect, black American English filtered through a writer too much enamored of turn-of-the-century moralistic melodrama. Valk's performance of this language is entirely different–Stein's work eases through her. With O'Neill, she grabs the language hungrily, embracing it with all its embarrassing overstatement, pours it through her and spills it out again, flooding the stage with its passion. But in this overstatement of hers she also finds the human heart of O'Neill's drama, a heart that O'Neill could be accused of burying under all that awful, cloddish posturing of his language.

And in a way, she finds it and exhibits it in the smallest but most remarkably effective of physical gestures. For though in blackface, Ms. Valk leaves her arms and legs untouched: quite white. So when they become visible underneath the heavy, overwrought, Kabuki-inspired costumes, Ms. Valk becomes the vulnerable, marginalized, tragic figure that O'Neill envisioned, but more: as a white woman playacting as a black man, she embodies the vulnerability of all humanity somehow. Those late scenes of the play, in which Jones reenacts a sketchy racial memory of torture and a slave auction, therefore echo the grotesque sadism and possessiveness of the entire species. More than O'Neill intended, I'm sure, and even a profound parody and satire of O'Neill's excesses, it's found there, elicited by director Elizabeth LeCompte from Valk's extraordinary personation.

What performers like Kate Valk impersonate when they're on the stage is not a character, but soul: not a two-dimensional creation of a playwright's fervid imagination, but the rhythms of human experience that are expressed through the deliberate spoken word. Which is why actors and actresses are creative artists, blurring the distinction between the creative and the interpretive process. I doubt that Ms. Valk would be able to give the powerful performances that she gives in plays by writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein and Eugene O'Neill if it weren't that their languages pulse through her body, her breath and her gestures as she makes their rhetoric her own. It's a conscious decision to absorb and echo these voices, that enter her as the creation of others, but emerge as her own expression, a part of her own soul, and a part of ours.

It's a rare gift. I've been privileged not only to see this sublime quality of the speaking human body on stage with Ms. Valk, but with a few other actors and actresses of my acquaintance, a few of them in my own plays. Though I can't say that I have written many plays with individual actors or actresses in mind, I'm starting to do so more and more as I recognize, as I grow older, the freedom of body and expression that these artists have devoted their lives to. In the New York Times profile of her published a few weeks ago, it was mentioned, for some reason, that Ms. Valk recently turned fifty, and I'm finding that the actors and actresses I admire most bear in them that memory and shaping of experience that come only with age, that bring beauty and texture. I'm 44. I hope that, in thinking about these performers as I write, I can share in some of this beauty and texture that they bring into my own life and career. So I delight in Ms. Valk, for she does display that soul, so rarely seen on the New York stage, but the true ineluctable delight and meaning of theater.

Upcoming

2007-08-19T15:51:00.000-04:00

I won't be repeating my stint at the New York Times of last September, when I crunched press releases from high and low to produce their Theatre Season Preview; I pass along here, though, a few recommendations for the upcoming season.

October 19-December 9, 2007: Peter and Jerry by Edward Albee, at the Second Stage Theatre. Albee's first play, The Zoo Story, is coupled with a more recent work featuring one of the characters from that play, Homelife. With Bill Pullman, Johanna Day and Douglas Roberts; directed by Pam MacKinnon.

October 25-November 17, 2007: Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, by the 17th-century Japanese dramatist Monzaemon Chikamatsu, a Theatre of the Two-Headed Calf production at HERE, directed by Brooke O'Harra. The New York premiere of the 2HC's latest epic, in which punk rock meets Kabuki in a 1940s milieu.

October 30-December 2, 2007: A Hard Heart by Howard Barker, at the Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row. Kathleen Chalfant leads the cast in the Epic Theatre Ensemble production of Barker's play about a country facing a catastrophic invasion. Will Pomerantz directs.

November 23, 2007-April 13, 2008: The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, at the Cort Theatre. One of Pinter's most accomplished works marks its 40th anniversary with a Broadway revival starring Ian McShane, Michael McKean and Raul Esparza. Directed by Daniel Sullivan.

December 2007-January 2008: Beckett Shorts, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, at the New York Theatre Workshop. Akalaitis directs Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Neumann, among others, in Samuel Beckett's short plays Acts Without Words I and II, Eh Joe and Rough for Theatre.

Winter 2008: Two Thousand Years, by Mike Leigh, at The New Group. Scott Elliott directs Leigh's most recent play, about the repercussions that occur when the son in an assimilated Jewish family suddenly becomes seriously devout.

January 2008: Richard Foreman's new play, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (A Richard Foreman Theater Machine), opens at the Ontological-Hysteric.

March 2008: Tristan und Isolde, Richard Wagner's opera, opens at the Metropolitan Opera in a production by Dieter Dorn and featuring Deborah Voigt (Isolde), Ben Heppner (Tristan) and Matti Salminen (King Marke), conducted by James Levine. A highly-anticipated (by me, at least) production of one of the great achievements of the modern human imagination (for more, see Bryan Magee's fine The Tristan Chord). Tickets on sale today; with that cast -- possibly at the peak of their powers -- and Levine at the podium, you'd better get them now.

Spring 2008: A new production from theatre minima, specifics to be announced.

And in recognition of seasons past, I suggest a visit to Garrett Eisler's Playgoer, where Garrett is featuring digital reproductions of American and international theatre posters from the recent (and less recent) history of the art.

Liturgies of Amorality

2007-08-19T11:14:00.000-04:00

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. -- John 1:1

A theatre based in ritual is accompanied by its playscripts, each dramatist composing a liturgy for a world abandoned by (or divorced from, or finally liberated from) gods (both in the singular and the plural sense of the term): after Nietzsche, amoral; after Adorno and Bataille, in opposition to mass secular culture and its denigration of both body and spirit. The description of theatre that David Ian Rabey provides in his essay on Shakespearean dramaturgy also describes the sacred space:

"... any art, but particularly dramatic art, externalises inner life [what Bataille might call, in the title of one of his most evocative works, "Inner Experience"] in a way which might justly be termed pretentious, in that it bids to manifest an unusual and unconventional (if not always enviable) sensitivity to something, expanding the narrow vocabulary of being which is afforded by literal description of objectified facts."

The same can be said of the words and gestures of worship. Art is artifice, as is the ritual, not real life but a laserlike concentration of darkness (before the death of God, light) upon the artificial event in the attempt for an epiphany. (The fourth wall not a mirror but a lens for the concentration of individual consciousness upon the artificial object, the performance.) Theatre is profoundly calculated as an arena of difference. As incense and music serve as sensual opiates to prepare the worshipper for that epiphany in the church, so do costume and music prepare the spectator for the dramatic epiphany. The theatre does not reflect the street, or life, or the audience; in Rabey's construction, the deliberate aesthetic act is an act not of reflection but of consecration; in the theatre, the consecration of the speaking body. Its transfigurations are, like the transfiguration of bread into flesh, wine into blood, simultaneously literal and metaphorical, acts of metaphysical and alchemical conjuration for the spectator. The externalisation of inner life is a making-manifest of the dynamic between consciousness and the body in which that consciousness is trapped, through which that consciousness explores the world in search of autonomous freedom and awareness.

So the play is ritual, having space (the stage) and time (8:00pm Tuesday-Sunday, twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays) allotted for its repeated celebration. Ritual was the basis of theatre, its content sacred, in the Greek theatre. Its trivialisation into boulevard entertainment strips the theatrical event of its spiritual possibilities, indeed ridicules them, as unnecessary, spurious and ultimately irrelevant. But this is not true; it's a secular cultural prejudice that denies power and significance to the pregnant, transformative possibilities of the theatrical event.

I've been examining the texts (the liturgies) of those rituals known as Richard III and especially Oedipus recently. In his introduction to the Arden second series edition of the play, Antony Hammond makes clear the relationship of Richard III to the morality plays of the early English theatre (in the play, he notes, "the violence and treachery which had been the ruling characteristics of the country since the accession of Henry VI are expiated in ritual acts of retribution and reconciliation" [p.98]); and one sees the ritual acts of violence and expiation similarly in the Oedipus of both Sophocles and Seneca. Ultimately, despite the application of Christian and Greek theology to the original creation of these plays, time has wrested these liturgies from these desiccated dogmas to the more secular 21st-century world. But this does not strip these liturgies from their roots in spirit or ritual. They would not speak to us otherwise.

There comes the question, in relation to Rabey's conception of the Shakespearean dramatist, of space: cathedral or chapel. Ritual is conducted in both; in our small black-box theatres, we have chapels dedicated to the intensification of bodied consciousness. It is not a question of scope or size, but of practice and genre, and especially discipline and choice. "The genius of Shakespeare's drama," Rabey writes, "might aptly be said to reside in the incompleteness of its prescriptions [its disavowal of definitive meaning or interpretation]: hence its challenging power and infinitely renewing fascination. I would add: that the 'necessary choice' of the dramatist, like that of the performer, also excludes, yet somehow simultaneously illuminates, others." This choice is inclusive of the choice of gesture, of tone.

The ritual is reenactment of the dynamics of the spirit, in the Christian church the story of the crucifixion is told and retold, on the Greek stage the stories of the gods' and the fates' manipulation of well-known men and women. So Christ and God are dead, as are the gods and fates, leaving us with what? The body and consciousness, and a terrible freedom -- an obligation -- to explore. We are left to interiorise the dynamics of the crucifixion, of the gods and the fates, and to take responsibility for them. The stage for this interior movement can be as broad and peopled as that of the Globe, or as constrained as that of the profoundly, painfully constricted playing area of the late Beckett plays, populated by the single fragmented body or even body part (head, mouth). The first cathedral, the second chapel.

Narrative is an organisational principle for this exploration; its performance can be various, leading us to new questions, new avenues. In King Richard III: how responsible was he for his evil, if fated to act as he did? This exploration colors the story, the performance of the ritual. And I am thinking of Jocasta, lately, rendering Oedipus still a detective story, but from a different perspective: What did Jocasta know; what was the nature of her physical, sensual desire for her son and husband; and when did she know it? Have we been neglecting the exploration of her role?

LINK: David Ian Rabey is also a playwright and the artistic director of the Lurking Truth company, based in Wales.

Quotes: David Rudkin

2007-08-13T12:00:00.000-04:00

... In Britain, the term political is narrowly understood. And it tends to denote, of theatre, a drama that espouses a particular ideology or polemic, almost always toward the Left. I was never classed as a "political" dramatist, rather as some wild marginal creature, unpolitical. Yet I’ve always felt that life has stationed me at the centre of the essential conflict where our authentic identity confronts all that is ranged against it. In that existential sense, I am political.

... It's not granted to us all, to be heroes or martyrs. But in our culture at least, spared some of the "hierarchy of needs," we have the energy and means – I would say, the obligation – continually to re-author ourselves. The impulse of political institutions will always be reductionist: to limit us to identities that stop growing, that can be mechanically satisfied, predicted and controlled. I believe it to be our moral human duty to subvert that. It's an anarchist stance, in the classical sense of that word. And if I look back over the protagonists in my drama, I see almost each one in a process of unruly becoming, virtually a coming to new birth. At last, each seizes his or her own life, wrests it from those forces that would seek to control it, and makes a naked gesture of starting to live. ... However daunting the play's end-state, to the character on the space, that end is a beginning. I have been howled down by various political activists for not "giving" my characters a creed or value-system to take into their new lives. That's the whole point. It is of such prescripts that we must be free.

David Rudkin
"A politics of body and speech"

Why She Does It

2007-08-13T10:57:00.000-04:00

Our Ms. Croggon has been staring out of her Melbourne window lately, in a contemplative state of mind, leaving us today with a few thoughts on why it is she does what she does; in explanation, she has recourse to American poet Muriel Rukeyser and philosopher Gillian Rose. Alison boils it all down to this:

My qualitative responses - whether I think a piece "works" - rely on something utterly inarticulate. There are shows that I have not understood at all, or which have aesthetically or intellectually challenged every belief I have: but if I leave the theatre feeling light, excited, stimulated, alive, well then: I will have to rethink my ideas. Or, on the other hand, if I leave the theatre feeling depressed, heavy, trapped, then something is not working. The exchange is compromised; the gift is not received.

In truth, I know of nothing else to work with. "Reason," says the philosopher Gillian Rose in her beautiful book Love's Work, "is forever without ground". And the same might be said of my critique. What is most important to its formation is not at all defensible. That is just how it is: experience is incorrigible and unarguable.

Everything else - the intellectual and aesthetic framework which is articulated on this blog - is arguable. And I hope that framework is clear and informed. It's a framework that I have worked hard to create, by reading and writing and thinking, by seeing a lot of theatre over many years. But what it rests on is something any child can know and understand.

Read the whole thing here. As she's said in the past, we tend to disagree more often than we agree, and that's just fine, there is much to think on here. (I'm steering away from criticism and more towards theory myself these days, and that "gift" metaphor isn't quite appropriate for me personally.) But she's a bit unfair to herself; she needs to confess nothing; "apologia" works just as well.

And to wrap up, two of Alison's poems appear online in the first issue of John Kinsella's Salt magazine.

Gallery

2007-08-07T13:39:00.001-04:00

Albrecht Dürer. Portrait of Dürer's Mother. 1514. Charcoal on paper, 41 x 30 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Germany.

Quotes: Howard Barker

2007-08-03T11:29:00.000-04:00

The pieces collected here may be construed as theory, but theory is also rage, temper, nightmare and the suicide note, never really the measured judgement of objective minds, never simply a proposition but always an offensive or defensive act, the parrying of blows, the elaboration of an annihilation. These are scarcely arguments at all, but masquerading as arguments, possibly reveal, as an actor reveals by so many imitations. ... These essays, poems, manifestoes, take as their starting point not only the agony of artistic production but also the agony of artistic experience, the pain not only of the creator but the pain of the witnesses. It is tragedy, therefore, that is being uttered here, as one might speak a secret curse in the confines of an alien religion. Is tragedy not the last secret of the Laughing World? The repudiation of all that entertains? Is it not in effect, a threat to civility? So Plato sensed, and the same sense of horror lingers as a monotonous bass note beating beneath the utilitarian style of most criticism today. Because tragedy remains both secret and an ecstasy, the discovery of its audience and the preparation of this audience -- the shape of new theatre practice -- is necessarily subterranean, nearly a conspiracy. Some of the signposts, a few of the keys, I hope are littered in these fragments, flung up from intuitions, squeezed between contradictions, dug from the humus of a prose. It has been my first principle as a dramatist, and subsequently as a director of my plays, that the author does not instruct. So what may be discovered here will not be advice, or strategy, nor even the thing conventionally known as the useful, for these things serve new oppressions, finally. Rather it is the sound of a style that might be heard, formed of analysis and injury, unharmonious notes which taken as a whole constitute not only a demand but also a longing ...

Howard Barker
"Preface, " Arguments for a Theatre

RIP: Michelangelo Antonioni

2007-07-31T10:31:00.000-04:00

A bad week for cinema; this morning's news brings word that Michelangelo Antonioni died on Monday night in Italy at the age of 94. There are few films as elliptical and evocative of arid, empty existence in the midst of riches, plenty and amusement than his 1960 L'Avventura (which also brought us the picture of frightened but deeply sensual and joyous life in Monica Vitti, Antonioni's collaborator through several films, including L'Eclisse and Red Desert). His 1974 film The Passenger was an affecting meditation on identity, desire and death, centering on an American reporter in North Africa who, seeking thrills, takes on the persona of a stranger in a hotel; ultimately he is unable to escape the consequences of trying to escape his self. It was one of the finest performances of Jack Nicholson's career. In 1995 Nicholson introduced Antonioni when Antonioni was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, saying, "In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places in our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting."

Like Bergman, Antonioni produced some of the most beautiful images ever committed to screen, as meditative and profound as any psychic landscape in painting or theatre. (And, like Bergman, Antonioni was a masterly writer, a poet of concision and grace.) The BBC has an obituary and an appreciation. Derek Malcolm wrote a longer essay about Antonioni's The Passenger for the Guardian in 2000, concluding:

The comparison has to be with painting, but also with a novelist's ability to describe both a scene and a state of mind. If Antonioni is not particularly fashionable now, that's our loss, not his.

RIP: Ingmar Bergman

2007-07-30T10:43:00.000-04:00

One of the most influential postwar directors in world theatre and cinema, Ingmar Bergman, has died in Faro, Sweden, at the age of 89. Although Bergman first came to public attention with his idiosyncratic (and often parodied) black-and-white films of the 1950s, including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and the under-rated The Virgin Spring, he never stopped experimenting with form and content. Persona radically rewrote the rules of cinema in 1967, and one of his most experimental films, From the Life of the Marionettes, a violent and disturbing portrait of a prostitute's murder, dates from 1980. At the same time, Bergman's compassion and sense of the profound possibilities of the artist's imagination were expressed in his film adaptation of The Magic Flute and in his fine autobiographical essay about childhood, the theatre and innocence lost, Fanny and Alexander. Bloody images from his terrifying 1973 film about family, disease and death, Cries and Whispers, continue to haunt me twenty years after I'd first exposed myself to them. He was unafraid to explore, without facile irony, the darkest questions of soul and spirit, religion and mysticism, that have come down to us through the ages.

Bergman also had a long career as a theatre and opera director; his commitment to his vision was uncompromising and exemplary. The BBC has an obituary and several related features.

Quotes: Chris Dench

2007-07-29T13:33:00.000-04:00

As I see it, composing is, in essence, the making manifest of a particular vision, an envisaged musical domain that is, for the composer, unendurably absent from the expanding musical universe. This "vision" is not just of a particular piece, but of a whole territory of musical utterance of which the work in hand is a specific instance. In this context the act of creation takes on meanings which will inevitably color the product: the composer becomes a cartographer, exploring and mapping previously unrealized states of musical being, and a shaman, manifesting these states partly or wholly transformed so as to be assimilable by his/her audience. The attempt to share this vision is, one hopes, an investment of generosity of spirit which will irradiate the resulting artwork.

Chris Dench
"Sulle Scale della Fenice: Postscript"
Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer, 1991)
(emphasis added)

Extension: Bursts, Atmoshere and Stasis

2007-07-26T08:46:00.000-04:00

Bursts, Atmosphere and Stasis, an exhibition of recent paintings by Kylie Heidenheimer, has been extended through August 10, 2007 (though closed for the week of July 30-August 3), at the gallery at Columbia University's Italian Academy, 1161 Amsterdam Avenue between 116th and 118th Streets. Kylie's work is an evocative exploration of texture and tactile awareness; abstraction make vividly physical through the manipulation of mixed media and pigment. Put it on your gallery calendar.

Casting for B'way's Homecoming

2007-07-25T14:43:00.000-04:00

According to a report on Playbill today, Raúl Esparza will play Lenny in Daniel Sullivan's new staging of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, scheduled for a December opening at the Cort Theatre on Broadway. Esparza joins Michael McKean (Sam) and Ian McShane (Max). I've recently written on The Homecoming here.

La Vie: We Are All Going to Die

2007-07-24T11:38:00.001-04:00

La Vie. A Ross Mollison and Vallejo Gantner presentation of a circus in two acts, created and performed by Les 7 Doigts de la Main (The Seven Fingers). With Sebastien Soldevila (host), Patrick Leonard (Patrick), Samuel Tetreault (wheelchair balancer), Faon Shane (chain aerialist), Shana Carroll (host's assistant / singer / stewardess), Isabelle Chasse (insane girl), DJ Pocket (disk jockey), Emilie Bonnavand (vamp). Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes, with one intermission. July 22, 2007, performance reviewed. Through September, at the South Street Seaport Spiegeltent. Tickets and performance schedule information here.

... and if that's the case, we may as well get used to it here -- and that may not be so bad. La Vie, a sister show to the ongoing Absinthe at this summer's New York Spiegeltent, drives the stakes of the tent firmly in a Purgatorial firmament, as Sebastien Soldevila, an imposing Mephistopheles in a grey three-piece suit, leads the various acts of the unique Montreal circus collective Les 7 Doigts de la Main through a variety of highly acrobatic deathgames: physical and mental disabilities are occasion for the writhing body to celebrate itself. And it's all quite delicious, even if the conceit of the show doesn't hold out quite to the end.

Les 7 Doights' Purgatorio is suspended between the Inferno of the stage and the Paradiso of the Spiegeltent rafters above; while Soldevila usually has both feet on the hot ground, the rest of the troupe engages in various suspensions in the air. There are a lot of aerialist acts here: Faon Shane, twisting lightly and erotically among heavy chains hanging down from the sky; Isabelle Chasse, thin and wild, is suspended between freedom and death as she tries to escape from a mental hospital via a series of tied-together sheets that reach three stories down (unfortunately, she's hanging from a tenth-story window, we learn).

La Vie is lightly conceived as an initiation into Purgatory for the unhappy sad-sack Patrick Leonard, who makes a most unexpected entrance into this afterlife. What he finds there are amusements, the often lascivious twistings of souls similarly trapped. (We're trapped there too, the jovially demonic host points out; we are, for the nearly two hours of the show, dead ourselves, we're told.) Leonard makes various moves to escape, like the others tyrannized by Shana Carroll's ever-so-unctious stewardess through the gates of hell, but by the end, in a raucous and violent but often breathtaking balancing and diabolo act, he too finds liberation from his wan body's constraints. As does Tetreault, as he explores what is possible from the limitations of a wheelchair, and Chasse, from the bondage of a straitjacket.

While this is a darker-themed show than Absinthe, it must be said that the joy it takes in its transgressions is a little less breath-taking than those of the first show, which in its broader performative variety has more for every taste. (And an erotic dance between the sultry Emilie Bonnavand and Soldevila in the second act edges precariously close to the self-conscious Cirque du Soleil writhings that the Gazillionaire and Penny so viciously satirize in this year's Absinthe.) But it's hard, at the end of La Vie, to disagree with the host's assertion that, in being shown all this, we can recognize liberation from life's constrictions as well, and live it as fully as we can. I'm not sure who said it first, but it's true that we live life to its fullest when we keep an awareness of death's proximity in our everyday consciousness, and realize what's at stake. La Vie hopes to underscore the warning of skeptical psychic Rossella to poor, confused Guido Anselmi in Fellini's Otto e mezzo (a circus/carnival theme there too, appropriately): "You have to decide what you want [from your life]," she tells him, "and you don't have much time." Not a bad message -- if an unusual one -- to take away from a night at the circus. Viva La Vie. I wish a perversely long life to it.

Photo: Patrick Leonard (top, with diabolo); Sebastien Soldevila (bottom).

Reverend Billy and the First Amendment

2007-07-20T11:46:00.000-04:00

Bill Talen (aka Reverend Billy) invites you to join him next Friday, July 27, in Union Square at 6:30 p.m. for a rally in support of First Amendment rights. (Bill's latest book from PublicAffairs, What Would Jesus Buy?, is available from the Superfluities bookstore.) He offers a sneak preview of the sermon he plans to deliver here. A few of the highlights:

“Reverend Billy” – that would be me – was arrested on June 29th while reciting The 1st Amendment in Union Square in downtown New York City. Images of the arrest were broadcast out into the media-sphere over the week of July 4. The image is that of a televangelist submitting to handcuffs, who looks straight out of a late-night cable apocalyptic church. But his religious fundamentalism is the holy writ of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. I hope that people get the jest – I’m dressed up as our culture’s most famously intolerant type this side of the KKK, but my religion is the constitutional law that gives Americans a defense against intolerance. ...
First of all, all five freedoms have been studied and copied. Products now come in the form of these freedoms, packaged and advertised and delivered.
They are simulated: free speech becomes American Idol votes. Peaceable gatherings are really lobbyists. All the pursuits of happiness become Starbucks flavors. Key to the program of post-First Amendment America is the end of any freedom in public space, which might develop freedoms competitive to the corporate model. The corporate culture is the new monarchy. But since corporate imagery shot like a pixilated elixir into every moment of our day, since our freedoms have been privatized, we have been unable to step out of the traffic jam, stand up from the Internet, or leave the TV room. We walk around in a steam bath of high-end graphics that has a paralyzing impact, in effect – leaves the idea of social change a kind of sentimental after-thought, a holiday, a statue in the park. ...
In 2007 the fight is more confusing, because the media bears down on us with its own imagery of our bodies and words, of our “Reality.” Our bodies, acting in our roles as citizen-activists, must somehow re-work the censoring, right-wing tendencies of the media-sphere, which is designed to sell products. We have the eerie feeling sometimes that our streets are converted into three-dimensional holograms. Are we becoming characters in a live video game? ... Reports we hear that the city is planning to watch the streets in downtown Manhattan from central monitor stations, like a super mall, and then automatically close gates around citizens exhibiting behavior that catches the eye of the desk-cop – clearly we are at a cross-roads for our life in this great city. There is a momentum towards an Orwellian solution to this disease of post-9/11 fear.
In 1973, Susan Sontag devoted the last chapter of her book On Photography to the description of a nightmare called IMAGE-WORLD. It is a culture in which we can no longer dream, but only consume, use up the world around us, burn it up. All creativity is a kind of purchase. In her sci-fi future, corporate-guided images have completely saturated public space. ...
The First Amendment offers us our sweaty bodies and souls back. Our fierce and sassy New York gossip and Yo! and storytelling par excellence ... the real body still has the power to penetrate through all its simulations. Our 44 beautiful words have always invited us to appreciate who were always were, and that is the most powerful thing. I mean, that is my faith.

The Harry Potter Post

2007-07-19T08:29:00.000-04:00

OTHER READING: Isaac Butler has his own thoughts on the same issues discussed below here.

***

A day or two early, perhaps, but if Michiko Kakutani can do it in The New York Times (thereby ruining the book for at least some readers, taking advantage of a bookstore that has violated the embargo on the book), a poor blogger can do it here.

I normally wouldn't write about this at all, but a recent post about the new Harry Potter book at Isaac Butler's blog had me trudging down memory lane. Not the post itself, a call for a serious literary-critical look at the series (not a new idea surely, George Orwell was writing this way about boys' adventure stories 75 years ago), but Alison's note in the comment section about the way the Potter phenomenon might affect the reading habits of the young. Responding to a citation I'd made of a recent NEA study of the Potter series and reading habits, Alison wrote, "George, the Centre for Youth Literature here did a very in-depth survey on children's reading patterns, which was quite fascinating. Given the same gloom-and-doom stories about reading patterns declining in secondary school, they had the novel idea of asking young people what they actually read. And why." The answer in Australia: fantasy fiction, Shakespeare and Jane Austen, at least for starters.

I'd be interested to hear about how these teens got their recommendations -- whether from a teacher, or a list of books for "recommended summer reading," or from their peers -- but it did get me to thinking about my own early reading habits.

Society, family background and culture determine these habits too. I came of age in a small northeastern Pennsylvania coalmining town in the mid-1970s, a city of about 40,000 people called Hazleton. I attended a math-and-science high school there beginning in 1976, when I was 14; although we didn't have video games or one-hundred-channel cable television, we teens did have other means of amusement (among them underage binge drinking and drowning in the pools of water that collected at the bottom of strip mines). Even though the school's speciality was in math and science, we read books in common there too (like the Harry Potter books are read simultaneously by millions), me and my friends, and voraciously. One never can tell how these trends begin, but starting in 1976 we became obsessed by individual authors. One year we worked through Kurt Vonnegut's books, and we were all reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, all at the same time; the following year it was Tolkien (and, for me and a few others, it was Wuthering Heights and the Bronte sisters).

I think the reading habit among these friends of mine declined towards the end of my high school years, when slowly underage binge drinking became of-age binge drinking and more time was spent in summer and after-school jobs (necessary in this depressed community). Those of us who kept reading had to make a conscious decision to make time for it, much as adults have to deliberately make time for the habits that bring them pleasure now. The older one becomes, the more adult responsibility one must take on, the less leisure time, the more the responsibility falls to the self.

I was, in this case, lucky. I kept at it. This was due in large part to my friendship with the owners of a small bookstore in Hazleton, the City Book Store, run by a pair of 1960s-era ex-radicals named Bob and Elaine Curry (with whom I am still occasionally in touch). The store itself was about the size of a men's room in a typical Borders bookstore, and this was long before the book superstore phenomenon; and I think I may have discovered it when seeking copies of The Homecoming and Galileo (productions of which I'd seen as part of the American Film Theatre series, which HBO ran in the first year of its existence, no doubt seeking cheap programming). The store, for me, was a home away from home, something I needed; my brother and I were raised by a divorced working mother, later on disability, and our home life was not ideal. While my friends bought their copies of The Sirens of Titan and The Lord of the Rings from the local Waldenbooks chain outlet, I bought mine there. And Bob and Elaine, learning of my esoteric tastes (Pinter and Brecht? in Hazleton?), soon had me reading Henry Miller, William Gaddis, Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs. By the age of sixteen I was thoroughly corrupted. Bob and Elaine also, in many ways (through this and through their friendship; the life of books takes in our friends, families and lovers too, those reading experiences indissolubly connected with the people who led us to them), saved my life.

Eventually one's explorations take the form of an individual quest for knowing and meaning; I've never been impressed by things like Oprah's Book Club or people engaged in reading clubs, whether mass or minor. Most of the people I've known who participate in these will watch the author interviews, buy the book, go to the lunches put together to discuss the book to drink, eat and talk, follow the coverage in the paper -- they'll do anything, in fact, except open the book, which they read about, not read. I'm sure that most of the 12 million copies (that many now? who can tell) of the new Harry Potter book will be bought, and thoroughly read -- though perhaps not as quickly as Ms. Kakutani apparently read hers -- this weekend; but will it be read more as curiosity, or to be a part of the mass phenomenon and therefore to "belong," in safety, to the mass culture? Most likely both. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a good one, either.

Needless to add (if anything is these days), these books we read when young follow us through our lives, not only in our continuing reading habits through adulthood, but as a part of our imaginative lives as well. After Burroughs, after Harry Potter, one looks and conceives the world differently; they have conscious and unconscious effects on our own perspective. In the career of a writer or theatre artist, the same is true. A person who is first exposed and gains an enthusiasm for theatre through performing in high-school productions of Kiss Me, Kate and Bye, Bye Birdie will in some cases value and work in a different kind of theatre, a different kind of aesthetics, than a person first exposed to theatre through The Threepenny Opera, No Man's Land and Curse of the Starving Class.

So Hogwarts may lead to Middle-Earth and Pellinor; as Pinter leads to Beckett and Shakespeare and Orton and Mamet, Brecht to Wedekind and Goethe and Foreman and Kraus. And of course these lead beyond their own genres as well.

What we are exposed to, and more importantly what we choose to expose ourselves to, in our reading and aesthetic lives either confirm us or challenge us in our worldviews. We can read what we are told to read, by our culture, our teachers, our society; or we can autonomously strike out on our own. In either event, we participate as both collaborators with and challengers to the culture industry in our imaginative lives.

All the above, of course, is as irrelevant as any biographical anecdote, and it's foolish to wish for a return to the days before iPods and the XBox 360, which bring their own unique pleasures. I wouldn't want that, and the days of the City Book Store are far behind me now. But the genealogies of our imaginative and literary experience course through all our existence as we remain readers, audiences, citizens and artists. We conform to a mass-manufactured massmind, or we find strength in our own range of possibilities, and seek to stretch these to their limit, on our own. Ultimately, it's between the author and the reader. But these two are inescapably surrounded by the current ideology, our own deeply interior experience, and the perceived cultural value of reading. Or -- more to the point -- not reading, when we find the time not to read but to expose ourselves to the corporate manufactured image and its ideology instead.

Staging the Tragic Consciousness

2007-07-17T19:01:00.001-04:00

Howard Barker/Eduardo Houth, A Style and Its Origins. 119 pages. London: Oberon Books, 2007. Available via the Superfluities bookstore here (to be published in September; available for preorder now).

The world has a post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima theatre, testifying to the urgency of the creation of contemporary tragedy, in the event a theatregoer wants it: there are the late plays of Samuel Beckett; Richard Foreman's rather more comic extravaganzas; and there is Howard Barker. The three share a most well-deserved status as complete men of the theatre, poets, designers, and directors alike. But it is perhaps Barker who is most in conscious, unforgiving opposition to the theatre of his time. In his plays, his polemics, his poems, his public pronouncements, and now in the slim volume of memoirs A Style and Its Origins Barker creates and theorizes upon a theatre that has room for the brutal realities of Western geopolitics, understanding (like Foreman, perhaps like Beckett) that the true ability of tragedy is to create an anti-history that valorizes the individual consciousness: that in profoundest sexual ecstasy is a form of individual redemption from the guilt and shame every member of the culture industry feels -- and we are all members of that industry now -- for being part of the race that perpetrated, within living memory, such grotesque horrors upon itself.

A Style and Its Origins, as pseudo-autobiography (Houth, the putative narrator of the volume, is one of Barker's many alter-egos) and history of Barker's own company The Wrestling School, provides an exemplary introduction to Barker's enormous body of work: over 40 plays, six volumes of poetry, two books of essays; indeed, in its historical and aesthetic breadth and imagination enough to rival the Bard (as Sarah Kane recognised when she called Barker "the Shakespeare of our age"). But what one brings back from a reading of these memoirs is a deep, profound sense of the poet's necessary isolation, an isolation both voluntary and imposed by the entertainment industry and the contemporary social-realist theatre.

The book is also a history of the experience and ideas that led to the "Theatre of Catastrophe," as Barker describes it, "a tragic form that dismissed morality from the stage, substituting for it a visceral, instinctive emotional energy." Barker traces the beginnings of this theatre to his own battle-scarred, urban childhood in the wake of the Second World War (Barker was born in 1946, immediately after the camps were liberated and the bombs dropped on Japan); as he watched his parents negotiate and fail to come to terms with postwar Europe -- his father as a working-class Communist, his mother a housewife; he loved them both, and was loved -- he began to see through the ameliorative lies of the liberal humanism that was the driving ideology of European reconstruction. "Barker's father lived the demise of the socialist idea and it injured him, just as his mother suffered the decay of public loyalty to the uncomplicated patriotism that had made soldiers and sailors of her family," Barker/Houth writes. The schism that the realities of the war introduced into the lives of individual men and women positioned them face-to-face with the guilt they shared in its barbarity (a barbarity, and a guilt, that both Adorno and Celan recognised as well).

When Barker entered the theatre, it was as a satiric social realist, and indeed his first major play, Claw, rehearsed the story of his parents and his own growing sense of the self-realising individual as a transgressor. But laughter did not liberate, either himself or his audience, from the monstrous solitude of the self: instead, Barker embraced that solitude, sensing that in this lay some form of imaginative redemption. The traditional British theatre practice of the mid-twentieth century, even its more radical and progressive offshoots, participated in the totalising force of the culture industry, an industry designed to eradicate memory, complex historical consciousness and therefore responsibility, at the same time massaging the egos of its artists as it pandered to its audiences; in this not only the National Theatre but also smaller companies like the Royal Court and the Joint Stock Company were complicit:

Barker knew how deeply implicated all men were in their own oppression ... he also sensed the poverty of radical theatre, its preposterous claims to educate and the subsequent grotesque simplifications; he thought the theatre was not brave because it feared what might be expressed if the character was truly autonomous; and he watched this moral sclerosis afflict the entire range of its activity ... as society became less effectively educated, in invested more and more in educational initiatives so that the theatre was drawn deeper into rackets of social amelioration ... funding ... posts ... careers ... Barker often spoke of the Soviet system having found its new home here ...

[Barker] had no desire to educate because he thought the stage a sacred place, too complex in its workings for such mundane projects ... the ambitions of the English Stage Company and its priggish child, the Joint Stock Theatre group, seemed to him patronising, condescending, patrician in effect ... a schoolroom of moralists ... (pages 85-86; ellipses in original)

In contrast to this, Barker disdains a single meaning and insists on a multiplicity of perspective: anxiety as an avenue to new spectra of understandings.

So much for the origins; what of the style? It is a style which begins in the centering, once again, of the spoken word in theatrical experience, that element of this particular performing art which renders it unique from the others; while movement (central to dance) and non-verbal sound (central to music) are ancillary to this style, it is the spoken word as written by a poet for speaking by an actor which is central to Barker's tragedy. In discussing actors, Barker/Houth writes, "They responded to his text because they needed to speak, and to speak to the speech's limits. Because of this profound need in the soul of the actor, Barker loved them ..." In essence, he proclaims Artaud dead, long live Artaud: it's not the tortured body but the tortured word, and more accurately their simultaneous experience, that forms the essence of Barker's concept of tragedy. Barker's project is the same in the theatre as Paul Celan's was on the page (Celan is one of Barker's favorite poets, along with Apollinaire and Rilke): a recognition of a language which participates in the failed enlightenment project of amelioration; language is the locus of tragedy itself. So it must be splintered, turned against itself, stripped and broken down and reassembled, in this reconstruction revealing a multiplicity of meanings, including, perhaps, a meaning which might provide ecstasy.

In his greatest plays to date (Gertrude – The Cry and Dead Hands), this is specifically a sexual ecstasy as well: language as vehicle for sexual joy, a joy only found in passionate transgression against the taboos of the totalising puritanical culture industry. Barker is aware of the transience, of the momentary nature of the joined orgasm, but it is not its permanence which is meaningful, but its possibility. "Even the most passionate sexual encounters were threatened by the inexorable facts of coercion and decay," Barker offers. "In his private existence and in his texts he nevertheless affirmed ecstasy as the only riposte to life's laws, but ecstasy with another, a defiant duality ... a perfection of the 'we' outside the hounding conformity of the collective" -- a collective, a massmind, a hivemind, responsible for the race's own urge to barbaric self-destruction, laughing and denying their responsibility for that destruction all the way.

Content and style are one: the essentials of human experience are mirrored, in Barker's theatre, by essentials of sensual experience: grays, not colors; cold steel in productions like his play for a solo female performer, Und. Barker also saves a more expansive style for his costumes, with a nod to 1940s couture, and the high heels which are so prominently a metaphor for sexual being in these plays.

Theodor Adorno is Barker's favorite philosopher; A Style and Its Origins opens with a quote from Notes to Literature: "Art is a form of knowledge: it expresses through its autonomy what is concealed by the empirical form of reality ... Only those thoughts are true which fail to understand themselves." This is, however, preceded by a poem from Barker's latest play, The Forty, which may (or may not) open in England later this year: "I do these things / Oh how I persist I am at least persistent / And I ask / Does anybody want them? / The answer comes back / Nobody at all / So I go on." One must hear the echo of Beckett's last sentence of The Unnamable in that last line; and, like Beckett's effort, Barker's is essential. A theatre after Auschwitz and Hiroshima not only needs tragedy; tragedy is the only form which can possibly contain them:

Only a tragic sensibility could discover in loss and the thwarting of dreams a melancholy beauty that kept Barker from despair and at the same time enabled him to claim for the most terrible of his tragedies that they were spiritually necessary -- his whole justification for his theatre ... for him theatre could never be ambitious enough in the complexity of its themes, its excesses never too great to satisfy the human longing for some sign that pain was not disorder but necessity ...

Barker's wholesale rejection of social realism includes a rejection, too, of lyrical realism as practiced by Chekhov; indeed, Barker assassinates the Chekhovian theatre in his (Uncle) Vanya, which seeks to reject a puerile resignation exemplified in the loss of dreams to an embrace of pointless "work." Our theatre, as well as its ideological assumptions, remains dedicated to that false humanism which denies possibility. But one can't blame poor Chekhov, perhaps, who did not live to see the Russian Revolution or the two defining experiences of the twentieth century, the camp and the bomb.

As Adorno pointed out, mankind's cruelty to itself did not begin with the 1940s, but as he also pointed out, it is the failure of humanist thought to recognize that the 1940s brought this cruelty to a bright, blunt, technocratic and technological edge. And these continue, of course, finding expression in the kinds of psychological warfare and physiological torture practiced and suffered by Pinter's characters, also so contemporary, also indebted to technocratic psychiatrists. Here in the United States, we are particularly immune to such realisations, Abu Ghraib to the contrary: indeed, who remembers it now? We continue to participate in the mass forgetting to which the culture industry encourages us: this week, CIA black prisons are on the front page; in a few days from now, it will be Harry Potter. As if all were equal; and all equally transient.

Barker's brave insistence -- that one must turn away from this in order to pursue a truly significant tragedy that can have for our communities the same profound recognition of the human spirit that Jacobean tragedy had for the 1600s or Greek tragedy had for the classical age -- is extraordinarily courageous; it moves him and his theatre to the margins, where, perhaps, he is destined to practice his art. But Barker's never cared for large audiences. One of the key elements, one of the key words of A Style and Its Origins, as indeed in his theatre itself, is "faith": a faith that the work is necessary, a faith seated in the bodily sublime product of its experience.

It is hard to keep that faith in the evidence of the poet's exile from his community, from his self: a time in the Nietzschean wilderness. But there are signs that the effort isn't, after all, for naught (though one can be satisfied with that); if critic Charles Lamb finds a performative basis for Barker's theatre in Baudrillard's theory of sexual seduction, a philosophical basis might be found in Bataille's theory of sexual transgression and death, Bataille a thinker whose sympathy to those who also accept Adorno's conclusions is growing. Some recent academic work is reaching back to Kant and Schopenhauer, bypassing Hegel's Absolute, in search of a hidden basis and tradition for Adorno's and Bataille's thought. And this work is finding that basis and tradition there.

In A Style and Its Origins, Barker -- a surprisingly generous man not without the means of self-effacement, at least as he presents himself in this book; the rumors as to his lifestyle (that he lives in a modest house; that he is afraid of flying; that he can be the essence of British cultivated politeness when need be) seem justifiable based on this memoir -- gives credit to many supporters of his work, including well-deserved thanks to critics like Lamb, David Ian Rabey and Karoline Gritzner. Indeed, Barker may be best known here through these critics and the academic books devoted to his work. When his plays are produced in the U.S., they tend to be those of his early period like No End of Blame and Scenes from an Execution (both of these now more than two decades old), rather than his more radical later work. We can hope that the publication stateside of A Style and Its Origins in September will encourage theatre artists to take up his more recent plays. In this way actors may find themselves free to reach the outer limits of their abilities again, and poets encouraged (as I am) by Barker's own fearless exploitation of his own catastrophically ambivalent but potentially liberating language and humanity.

FURTHER READING: In June 2004 Our Miss Croggon found Barker "irrepressible"; find out why here. Issue 3 of her magazine Masthead also featured this scene from Barker's play The Ecstatic Bible.

One (and 49 More) to Watch

2007-07-17T18:35:00.000-04:00

Thank you to The Dramatist, the journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, for including yours truly as one of their "50 to Watch" -- there I am, on the cover of the July issue of the magazine, scaring off newsstand browsers. And thanks, too, to whoever thought I deserved a place there.