Reimagining American Theatre

PART I
PLAYS
INTRODUCTION
Reimagining the Drama
In the second act of Ibsen's The Master Builder, Halvard Solness endeavors to explain to his young admirer, Hilda Wangel, the origin of his peculiarly lucky career as a builder. It had all begun with a fire in his own house, a fire which caused the death of his children and turned his wife into a living corpse, but which gave him his first chance to exercise his building talents. The curious thing about the scene is the manner in which he describes the cause of that fatal blaze.
SOLNESS: You see, the whole business revolves about no more than a crack in a chimney.
HILDA: Nothing else?
SOLNESS: No; at least not at the start ... . I'd noticed that tiny opening in the flue long, long before the fire ... . Every time I wanted to start repairing it, it was exactly as if a hand was there, holding me back ... . So nothing came of it.
HILDA: But why did you keep on postponing?
SOLNESS: Because I went on thinking ... . Through that little black opening in the chimney I could force my way to success--as a builder.
(tr. Rolf Fjelde)
So far, nothing unusual. The passage looks like a perfectly conventional piece of exposition, with the playwright demonstrating how the past influences the present--how Solness began his career and acquired his guilty conscience. A crack in the chimney, leading to a dreadfulfire. An opportunity to subdivide the burnt-out area into building lots. A new reputation as a builder of suburban homes.
But then something extraordinary happens in the scene, as Ibsen proceeds to demolish his own very carefully fashioned causal construction.
HILDA: But wait a minute, Mr. Solness--how can you be so sure the fire started from that little crack in the chimney?
SOLNESS: I can't, not at all. In fact, I'm absolutely certain it had nothing whatever to do with the fire ...
HILDA: What!
SOLNESS: It's been proved without a shadow of a doubt that the fire broke out in a clothes closet, in quite another part of the house.
Hilda's exclamation of astonishment is shared by a chorus of readers and spectators, for the play seems to have taken a very mischievous turn. But Ibsen is not being perverse here. Quite the contrary, what he is suggesting is entirely consistent with his poetic apprehension of reality and with the metaphysical impulse animating all his plays, including his so-called social-realistic drama. The determination of guilt and its expiation may still constitute the moral quest of his characters, but Ibsen obviously believes that the sources of this guilt are not easily accessible to the inquiring mind.
What Ibsen is anticipating in this passage is the significant turn that the theatre was to take sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, in common with similar developments in science, philosophy, and literature--the universal departure responsible, in part, for the movement called modernism, which influenced the work of the major European dramatists, among them Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett, Ionesco, Handke, and Heiner Müller.
For Ibsen has quietly proceeded to undermine a basic assumption of the naturalist universe--namely, that cause A precedes consequence B, which in turn is responsible for catastrophe C. Isn't it possible, he is suggesting, that A has nothing whatever to do with B, much less with C, regardless of the apparent evidence? Isn't it possible that events are so multiple and complex that the human intelligence may never be able to comprehend the full set of causes preceding any situation, consequence, or feeling? Ibsen, in short, is attempting to repeal the simple, fundamental law of cause and effect, which had been an unquestioned statute at least since the Enlightenment--the law that ruled the linear,logical, rationalistic world of literature and, in particular, the Western literature of guilt. In its place, he is reconfirming the unknowable, ineffable secrets underlying the will of Nature.
All of Ibsen's plays contain religious elements, but The Master Builder is clearly his most religious play since Brand. What the playwright is trying to do through the character of his ruthless, guilty hero, Solness, is to challenge the orthodox pieties at the same time that he is preserving the romantic mysteries. The purpose of the universe, the structure of character, the nature of sin--all are beyond the reach of traditional concepts; they can be determined only through the artist's intuition, and then only obscurely. And the task of the modern artist is to help humankind move beyond the sterile cycle of guilt and expiation, which is one of the offshoots of cause-and-effect thinking. Hilda exhorts Solness to challenge God by developing a robust Viking conscience. Ibsen exhorts us to become gods by transcending our sense of guilt, through a gargantuan effort of the will and the inspired intelligence. Whether this is finally possible is open to serious doubt. But one thing is certain: the old rationalistic assumptions will no longer serve the modern understanding. Indeed, they can only compound ignorance and point us toward false paths.
Ibsen's proposals are revolutionary. They challenge not only conventional theatre but established religion, established psychology, established social theory as well. Nevertheless, these proposals are actually a return to the assumptions of an earlier age of mystery, which held sway before the advent of Newtonian physics, Cartesian logic, and behavioral psychology. The drama of the Greeks and Elizabethans, for example, is rarely causal in our modern sense: human motives are sometimes so numerous that latter-day commentators are hard put to find the characters credible. Clytemnestra offers not one but five or six reasons for killing Agamemnon; Iago mentions so many motives for hating Othello that Coleridge was obliged to speak of the senseless motive-hunting of a "motiveless malignity"; and T. S. Eliot criticized Shakespeare for failing to give Hamlet an "objective correlative," meaning that he found Hamlet's feelings to be in excess of his situation.
While contemporary social scientists are busy rooting around in search of causal explanations for poverty, crime, neurosis, depression, and madness, great artists have traditionally understood that the true explanations are beyond concepts of blame. As Shakespeare's Edmund puts it, in King Lear, "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune--often the surfeit of our own behaviour--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars ... . 'Sfoot! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing."
European drama has managed to recapture this biological understanding of motive, dating from a period in the last century. It was then that Ibsen--along with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Freud--threw down a gauntlet, not only before orthodox religion, but before the prevailing liberal ideology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, meanwhile reducing the middle-class living room to a pile of rubble and exposing domestic realism as a cardboard illusion.
A quick look at the history of our own theatre reveals that American drama has been very slow in rising to this challenge, or even in showing any awareness of it. Just as the dominant strain of our religious life has been a tradition of Judaeo-Christian puritanism, and the dominant strain of our politics (at least before the eighties) a form of liberal reform democracy, so the dominant strain of our stage has been social, domestic, psychological, and realistic--which is to say, causal--and its dominant theme, the excavation, exposure, and expiation of guilt. The fires that burn through most American plays have been caused by that crack in the chimney, and the guilty conscience of their central characters can usually be traced to a single recognizable event.
This is particularly striking when one considers how many playwrights in the mainstream of American drama have thought themselves to be writing consciously in an Ibsenite tradition. And I speak now not just of the dramatists of the pre--World War II period--such social-minded writers as Clifford Odets, Sidney Howard, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, Irwin Shaw, and John Steinbeck--but also of the postwar "mood" playwrights--including such psychological writers as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, Lorraine Hansberry, Paddy Chayefsky, William Gibson, Frank Gilroy, and, more recently, Lanford Wilson, Mark Medoff, Richard Greenberg, Michael Cristofer, and August Wilson.
Even the progenitor of our drama, Eugene O'Neill--though he began writing under the strict influence of Nietzsche and Strindberg--became a causal dramatist in his last plays, when he was writing under the influence of Ibsen. In his greatest play, indeed the greatest play ever written by an American, A Long Day's Journey into Night, O'Neill proceeds to weave a close fabric of causality. Every character is suffering pangs of conscience and every character is trying to determine the root cause of his guilt. If the blighted house of Tyrone is misbegotten, thenevery member of the family is implicated in the other's hell. Each separate action ramifies outward into myriad branches of effects, and characters interlock, imprisoned in each other's fate.
My point reflects not on the quality of the play, which is a masterpiece, but rather on the fact that A Long Day's Journey is so remorselessly American in its concentration on the sources of guilt, and on the painful confrontations between parents and their children. These emphases are also evident in the work of an even more conscientious disciple of Ibsen--Arthur Miller--who, along with Tennessee Williams, has been the most celebrated postwar American dramatist, and the strongest influence on the American realist theatre. Miller first broke upon the contemporary consciousness, in fact, with a play that leans heavily on such middle Ibsen works as The Wild Duck, Pillars of Society, and An Enemy of the People--namely, All My Sons. Located in a middle-class living room around the end of World War II, this play has the task of identifying the guilt and establishing the responsibility of its elder protagonist, a wealthy manufacturer named Joe Keller. Keller has served a short term in the penitentiary, having been convicted of increasing his profits by manufacturing faulty cylinder heads for aircraft engines; these have caused the deaths of a number of American fighter pilots. Keller's older son, Larry, is missing in action and, at one point, the characters consider the possibility that the same faulty parts may have caused his death as well. By the play's end, we learn that the causal connection exists, but in indirect form: upon discovering that his father was responsible for the death of his comrades, Larry committed suicide by purposely crashing his plane. After a confrontation with his surviving son, Chris, Keller is forced to recognize that he is responsible for more than the lives of his immediate family--that the victims are "all my sons." He expiates his guilt through his own suicide.
It is easy enough to score points on Miller's dramaturgy, which often seems as faulty as Joe Keller's airplane parts. But my quarrel is not with the farfetched plotting of a young and relatively inexperienced writer; his work is to grow considerably more persuasive as his career progresses. No, my point is, rather, that All My Sons is based on assumptions and conventions which, regardless of how the playwright matures, remain central to his work, not to mention mainstream American drama as a whole--assumptions and conventions which are virtually anathema to Ibsen. For Miller is wedded to simple theatrical causality, whether the sequential links are direct or indirect, and hisplays never escape the kind of connection he establishes in All My Sons, between Joe Keller's crime and Larry Keller's air crash. The action A precedes the consequence B, which leads inevitably to the guilty catastrophe C.
And the catalyst in this mixture is almost invariably the protagonist's son, who manages to bring the plot from a simmer to a boil. In fact, the typical Miller drama has a code which might be deciphered thus: The son exposes the father's guilt and shows him the way to moral action, and sometimes inadvertently to suicide. Take Miller's most famous play--often called the finest tragedy of modern times--Death of a Salesman. The well-known plot concerns the false values of Willy Loman, but the character who confronts Willy with the fraudulence of his own life is Biff, Willy's older son. Once extremely close to his father, Biff has now grown estranged from Willy, for reasons that Miller chooses to keep hidden until the end of the play. Something has happened between them, something which has affected not only their relationship but Biff's entire adult life; he has broken off a promising high-school sports career and become an aimless drifter. This, in turn, has had a powerful influence on Willy's life, since Biff once represented his main hope for the future. Ineluctably, the play brings us toward the revelation buried inside this family mystery: coming to visit his father in Boston one day, Biff discovers that Willy has a woman in his room.
Clearly, Miller is willing to risk a great deal of credibility in order to establish a moral showdown between father and son. Consider how much of the plot, theme, and character development hinges on this one climactic hotel-room encounter. Death of a Salesman purports to be about false American values of success, but beneath the sociological surface lies the real drama--a family drama of guilt and blame. The object of Biff's hero-worship, the model for his own life and behavior, has been discovered in Boston cheating on Mom.
In short, the premises underlying Miller's themes and actions are not Ibsenite in the least. They belong to the eighteenth century, which is to say the age of Newton, rather than to the twentieth, the age of Einstein. And Miller's theatrical Newtonianism remains an essential condition of his style, whether he is writing about Salem witch-hunts, or about the guilt and responsibility of those implicated in the crimes of the Nazis, or about self-destructive glamour queens, or about East European dissidents. In each of Miller's plays--indeed, in most of the plays of his contemporaries and disciples--every dramatic action hasan equal and opposite reaction. It is the crack in the chimney that sends the house up in flames.
So prevalent is this pattern in mainstream American drama that even now, at the beginning of the nineties, our most highly acclaimed dramatists are still shaping their works to sequential diagrams. The style of our drama has admittedly undergone something of an exterior change; its causal pattern is occasionally more elliptical than in Miller's work; and the familiar fourth-wall realism is frequently broken by stylistic or supernatural devices. But these are changes touching the surface rather than the heart of these plays. More often than not, American mainstream drama continues to explore the causes behind the effects; the event to be excavated is still the guilt of the (generally older generation) protagonists; and the drama retains the air of a courtroom, complete with investigations, indictments, arraignments, condemnations, and punishments.
Take August Wilson, perhaps the most typical and highly esteemed of the current crop of playwrights. The winner of numerous prizes, Wilson has often been compared with Eugene O'Neill--but a perfunctory glance at his accomplishments soon reveals that he has a closer relative in Arthur Miller. Like Miller, Wilson is essentially a social dramatist, fashioning attacks on the inequities of the social system; like Miller, he identifies the nexus of corruption through a process of family conflict; and like Miller, he will occasionally make modest departures from domestic realism in order to force an indictment of national crimes as a whole.
In Wilson's case, these crimes are invariably linked with racism, not surprisingly, since he is partly black; and his work thus far has been a decade-by-decade examination of the way white society has managed to oppress the Afro-American minority and ignore the black experience. Take Fences, perhaps the most tightly written play in the cycle thus far. It concerns Troy Maxson, a hard-drinking family man, now reduced to "hauling white folks' garbage," though he was once a gifted baseball player who hit forty-three home runs in the Negro Leagues. Although he has served time in the penitentiary for robbery and murder, Troy prides himself on his capacity to support his family. He loves his wife, Rose, but is continually locked in quarrel with his second son, Corey. Corey, in emulation of his father, shines in sports and has been offered a college football scholarship. Troy would rather he took a job in the A&P. When Troy reveals to Rose that he has fathered a child with another woman, the unity of the family is shattered; and afterTroy manhandles Rose, Corey threatens him with a baseball bat. The last scene, six years later, takes place at Troy's funeral, where Corey, now an enlisted man in the Marines, reflects on the relationship they might have had and the man Troy might have been.
Wilson's larger purpose depends on his conviction that Troy's potential was stunted not through "surfeit of his own behavior" but by centuries of racist oppression. Just as he is reduced to being a lifter rather than a driver because he is black, so the color of his skin has blocked him, like Satchel Paige, from entering the major leagues (the play mostly takes place in the fifties, just when color barriers in sports were falling). To support his racial subject, however, Wilson concocts a straightforward family drama built on overworked baseball images, about the confrontation between an erring father and his indignant son, with a crisis almost identical to the climactic scenes in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. Like Willy Loman, Troy has a long-suffering wife, a son with ambitions to be a football player, a crony with whom to share his confidences, a climactic infidelity, and the obligatory back yard. The play even ends with a funeral--again like Death of a Salesman--giving the characters a chance to discuss the protagonist's futile dreams against the background of the nation's false values.
Despite these similarities, Wilson has claimed for the "black experience" in Fences an exclusive privilege, insisting that only a black director should film the play (he has also assailed George Gershwin for the "tremendous audacity" of "bastardizing our music and our experience" in Porgy and Bess). Yet, for all his sense of black uniqueness, his recurrent theme is the familiar American charge of victimization. What is remarkable is the way in which audiences sit still for their portion of guilt, not only failing to rise to such baited challenges, but conferring fame, fortune, and Pulitzer Prizes on the writers who denounce them the most. At least one member of this audience--himself a gifted black writer named George C. Wolfe--has refused Wilson's indictment. In parodying the theatre of guilt, Wolfe suggests one of the directions our drama might take, were that crack in the chimney ever to be repaired. Wolfe's play, The Colored Museum, is a satire that runs roughshod, not only through the conventions of plays like Fences, but through many of our prevailing social pieties and assumptions.
The Colored Museum is lively and loud and full of fiery jive. The Brandenberg Concerto which opens the show is soon undercut by reggae, New Orleans jazz, gospel, and snatches of Ellington, Satchmo,Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and the Supremes. This suggests that Wolfe has something cogent to say about both the clash of cultures and the awkwardness of black assimilation, voluntary or involuntary, into the white world. Some of this is provocative: an opening sequence aboard a "Celebrity Slave Ship" flying at high altitudes where "shackles must be worn at all times" and earphones can be purchased for "the price of your first-born male"--or a skit involving a prosperous member of the black bourgeoisie carrying a Saks shopping bag who plops everything connected with his past (his first pair of Converse All Stars, his autographed photo of Stokely Carmichael) into a dumpster, finally adding to the pile a contemptuous street kid representing his repressed rage ("Being black is too emotionally taxing; therefore I will be black only on weekends and holidays"). Other sketches are thinner, less coherent, overextended.
But "The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play" displays the felicities of the piece as a whole, and its freedom from orthodox thinking. Subtitled "A searing domestic play which tears at the very fabric of racist America," this is a satire on the whole range of serious black drama and commercial black musicals, though its ostensible target is Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. An omnipresent stage manager hands Mama an award when she slaps her son across the room for doubting the existence of God, and all the actors slip into cultivated Shakespearean cadences ("What's gotten into you?" "Juilliard, good brother"). The malcontented Walter-Lee-Beau-Willy, always bellyaching about "the Man," is convicted of overacting and shot. The stage manager cushions his head with a pillow, saying, "If only he could have been born into an all-black musical." In response, the entire family is resurrected, singing and dancing, no doubt in Raisin.
Although it bravely pinpoints the creaky conventions and tired themes of Broadway-bound black protest, The Colored Museum doesn't always rise above the level of a drama school takeoff. Still, the piece is significant as a genuine advance beyond the cliches of black realism and the imperatives of black pride. It is easy enough to satirize white attitudes toward racial issues (a staple of black drama since the war). What is considerably more difficult--and more courageous--is to satirize black attitudes as well. Richard Pryor has done this, though admittedly with more wit and intensity; so, with more energy, has Eddie Murphy. And the TV program In Living Color has made black satire a witty staple of the home screen. But The Colored Museum remains a tonic for an ideologically choked age which, like most suppressedthings exhumed from underground, helps us breathe the unpolluted air of freedom.
Insofar as Wolfe belongs to a time-honored satiric tradition, he breaks no new formal ground. One dramatist who has turned over the theatrical topsoil is Sam Shepard, a writer who has devoted most of his time to the movies after completing an usually large body of mythic material. In common with a number of playwrights today, Shepard has explored shortcuts through the habitual terrain of plot, character, and theme, primarily through the use of legendary material, borrowed from the myths and magic of the movies, including gangster films, horror films, and science fiction. By bringing recognizable figures onto the stage from popular culture, Shepard and his followers have been able to dispense with illusionary settings and obligatory exposition, fashioning instead a drama which is mystical and mysterious, with the ambiguous reverberations of a poem.
In one of his later plays, Buried Child, Shepard enters the terrain of family drama--but what a family! Set somewhere in the Middle West, the work features Ma and Pa Kettle, or their post-modern equivalents, raging, feuding, mean-spirited. Shepard here develops an entirely new form of domestic drama, enmeshed and entwined with the stuff of American myth. As the title suggests, there is a child interred in the back yard which represents the secret of the household, possibly of America itself. "That corpse you planted last year in your garden," wrote T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, "Has it begun to sprout?" Shepard's buried child is threatening to sprout throughout the play.
One of the mysteries of the play is the paternity of the child. But this mystery (never resolved) is less important than its vegetable significance. It is associated with images of birth and renewal and seasonal change. The older characters, Dodge and Hallie, live in a dust bowl. But Tilden, their idiot son, is continually entering with armfuls of produce which he dumps over Dodge as if anointing him as a vegetable god. It is an entirely weird family, the only "normal" characters being Tilden's son, Vince, and his girlfriend, Shelley, who enters with the convictions that this family are typical Americans: "Dick and Jane and Spot and Mom and Dad and Junior and Sissy." But Tilden doesn't recognize his own son, and neither do his parents. In fact, the only physical contact between these young people and the family occurs when Bradley, a second son, brutally thrusts his hand into Shelley's mouth.
The attempt to bring the family secret into the light is a process ofexhumation, the same process that drives Ibsen's Ghosts, but in this case the process is literal, since the secret is literally buried. Dodge announces his last will and testament and expires. Hallie has a vision of corn sprouting in the fallow garden. And Tilden enters with his last gift of rebirth and fertility--a bundle of rags and bones in his arms, the remains of the dead child.
There is no simple explanation for this powerful final image. It is the family secret--possibly all our family secrets--being exposed to common view. Or it could be a symbol of the failed promise of our native country--a land so full of possibility, where humankind could start afresh, whose hopes have now been buried, existing only as the rotting corpse of a child. Like much of Shepard's work, the play is a hallucination and therefore not readily available to logical explanation. But in the act of disintegrating the causal conventions of realistic family drama, Shepard has managed to reinterpret the conventional drama of guilt. For Buried Child takes the form of a self-accusation, rather than an indictment, in which guilt becomes the price we pay for being alive.
With Sam Shepard, the American theatre takes a step beyond the Newtonian universe into a world of dream, myth, and inner space. With Robert Wilson, it leaps into the universe of Einstein, developing new dimensions of outer space and inner time.
My reference to Einstein's universe is not gratuitous. All of Wilson's bizarre theatre pieces involve a relativity-influenced temporal and spatial sense, and one of his earlier works--the dance-opera-drama piece he created with the composer Philip Glass--was actually entitled Einstein on the Beach.
This five-hour meditation showed the influence of Einstein both in its physics and in its spirit. Every one of the actors was made up to resemble Albert Einstein (dressed in suspenders, gray pants, and tennis shoes), and the principal soloist, like Einstein a violinist, had a flowing white mane and a bushy white mustache.
The opera brought us from the world of the locomotive, which is to say the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, to the world of the spaceship, Einstein's culminating gift (along with the atomic bomb) to the twentieth century. Built around three separate settings--a train, a courtroom, and a field--connected by little dialogues in front of the curtain called "knee plays," the work dramatized (so subtly one absorbed it through the imagination rather than the mind) the change in perception--especially one's perception of time--that accompanied this technological development. The interminable length of the performance,therefore, became a condition of its theme, as did the strange schematic settings, the vertical and horizontal shafts of light, and the apparently meaningless snatches of dialogue.
A later creation called The Forest, one of many pieces Wilson created with German subsidy (in return for draining Germany's lavish arts treasury, it may very well be the most Teutonic of his works), extended his debt to Einstein even further. An epic adventure in fractured time devised with the musical connivance of David Byrne, The Forest was based on the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian epic written in cuneiform on clay tablets around the second millennium before Christ (it was discovered only last century among the ruins of Nineveh). The piece paid homage to these mind-boggling spans of time through a kind of Wagnerian fusing of music, theatre, art, history, sociology, and myth. As one would expect, Wilson and his literary collaborators (Heiner Müller and Darryl Pinckney) deconstructed the story. But despite a radical adaptation which broke the causal narrative of epic and placed the action in the nineteenth century, The Forest contained more coherence than most Wilson works, signifying his growing interest in text.
Wilson and his collaborators interpreted the rivalry between Gilgamesh and the wild man Enkidu as a clash of culture and nature, urban versus nomadic life, the raw as opposed to the cooked, by translating the epic into a visual commentary on the rise of German industrialism, glancing sideways at its effect on the destruction of the Black Forest. The evening--which lasted almost four hours--was structured in seven acts, separated by two knee plays. In typical Wilsonian fashion, the acts paralleled each other (one and seven; two and six; etc.), with Act IV forming a solitary, ambitious centerpiece. Visual parallels abounded as well. The bars on the drawing-room windows, separating the industrialist Gilgamesh from his lobotomized workers, for example, resembled bars that fell over the opening of Enkidu's cave.
Those privileged to see The Forest were rewarded with a wealth of dazzling, exquisitely executed dream images which remained imprinted on the mind's eye long after the curtain fell: the splitting of the sun into planets, revealing a beached monster on the sand while a child played with a model of a small city; factory workers laboring on huge ladders near massive gears as Gilgamesh smoked in his chair, attended by eerie domestics and a weary lion; the golden Enkidu in his cave, accompanied by an armored knight, a figure in doublet and hose, a man cooking himself in a vat, an outsized porcupine; the slow-motionseduction of Enkidu by a lipstick-stained whore as animals and trees paraded across the stage in stately procession; the rock and ice landscapes of the concluding acts, where the two men joined battle with a dragon. It was a piece designed with such beauty that each stage picture constituted a work of art, reinforcing Wilson's position as one of our greatest visionary artists.
These, then, are some of the dramatic artists who have virtually demolished the "tasteless parlor" of illusionistic theatre, and not simply through the let's-pretend devices associated with, say, the theatre of Thornton Wilder. Wolfe, in an excess of satiric glee, knocks down the walls of the family home; Shepard walks his characters through these walls with vegetation in their arms; and Wilson investigates the outer reaches of the expanding universe. By leaping beyond the physical confines of the kitchen, the bedroom, and the living room, these writers are transcending the thematic limitations imposed by those rooms as well. Artists working in other forms have been responsive to the kinds of advances now affecting the modern consciousness--relativity theory, indeterminacy theory, black holes, quasars, bends in time, anti-matter, ESP, and the like. Now the theatre is showing some sign that it has not remained impassive before the liberating new possibilities of the imagination.
And that has been the destiny of all great art--whether theatrical, literary, visual, or musical, whether ancient or modern--to expand rather than constrict the structure of the imagination. The strict laws governing so much modern drama provide an atmosphere of safety and predictability, but only at the cost of severe limitations on the possibilities of creation. To live in uncertainty in such insecure, inchoate times as ours is to live in fear and trembling. But what the poet Keats called the "negative capability"--meaning our capacity to function with doubts and ambiguities--remains an essential condition of the poetic imagination. Like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, we are beginning to discover that we have been speaking prose all our lives--and we have been listening to too much prose as well. But the nonlinear theatre fulfills some of the conditions of poetry by introducing us to the unexpected and by bringing us beyond the prosaic formulas of our social-psychological universe.
For it dredges a channel through which artists find their way to a hidden reality inaccessible to barren explanations and causal links. I hope it is obvious that I am not arguing here for obfuscation or obscurantism. If excessive rationalizing is the bane of modern theatre,then there is an equal danger in formulating mystery for its own sake, as I believe Edward Albee and Harold Pinter are sometimes prone to do. The true dramatic poet understands that symbols are a tool with which to reveal rather than to obscure, the key to turn those locks that remain impervious to conceptual thought.
And finally, this noncausal, nonlinear theatre will help to free us from the facile guilt-mongering of our accusatory playwrights. Rhetoric--as W. B. Yeats said in a famous passage--proceeds from the quarrel with others, poetry from the quarrel with ourselves. The rhetorical indignation so familiar to twentieth-century drama is a result of a failure to understand that the accusing finger may not belong to a blameless hand. Master Builder Solness denounced himself for failing to repair that crack in the chimney, even though he knew full well it had nothing to do with the fire that destroyed his house. Thus, he accepted his own guilt--a condition of being human--and thus, he transcended it--a condition of being an artist. Only through this double responsibility could he preserve the mysteries without losing his humanity, and go on to create a penetrating new art.
(1978; revised 1990)
Copyright © 1991 by Robert Brustein