“All I describe is theatre even where theatre is not the subject.” The blind alleys and cul-de-sacs down which many theatre writers wander result in a quick loss of energy: all that spinning in place dizzies and tires one. Perhaps it is a matter of time — all that theatregoing, writing and socializing leave little room for reading and thought, even if we’re constantly told that we make room in our lives for what is important to us. In the past six months, two books of essays by two very different American dramatists of some stature — David Mamet’s Theatre and Wallace Shawn’s Essays — have been published to little notice among theatre critics and reviewers, and one would have thought their appearance would be some cause for celebration, let alone meditation. (Would the same silence greet similar books from Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill, for example?) Here are two playwrights with substantial bodies of work holding forth, from quite distinct perspectives, on what theatre and drama mean to culture: and not merely the culture of the rehearsal room and the auditorium, but outside those as well. These are not especially books of theory — Mamet describes his own essays as “the otherwise incathectable expression of love for an ever-widening mystery” — but of meditations on their work. I hope to review them both here soon, but for now they demonstrate that some American dramatists, at least, still see the need for contextualizing their work, even if it’s only for themselves, and for doing so in the public forum of the hardcover book.

The possibilities and mysteries of imagination are limitless, the exploration of these possibilities and mysteries perhaps the radical basis of theatrical production itself. There is always more to write about, and for those dramatists for whom the theatre is as much a part of their bodies and wills as their limbs, every moment broadens the canvas, in both their prose and their plays. The human is infinite in the theatre and the drama, but quite finite within the allowable confines of behavior and interest dictated by the limited social culture and the theatre permissible there. Anything can be an “event” as Alain Badiou describes it — a “rupture of being” in which the subject finds a new truth — the birth of a child, a marriage, a death; that this rupture is experienced as a catastrophe makes it the food of drama and theatre for dramatist, performer and spectator alike. But the culture which cannot accept these ruptures limits the autonomy of the individual imagination that circulates within it: so most theatre, and theatre writing, remains small and unambitious. Still, the signifying dance of language gives expression to these events and the imagination. When one writes about the theatre, one writes about the self in full. In passing through the inevitability of time and place, the dramatist always finds more to write about.

There is a sense that being bored with theatre and live performance is being bored with one’s own body; in a culture of screens, the fascination is with the mere two-dimensional image of the self, however false (and however many prefer it) …

UPDATE (17 May 2010): A few days after I posted the below, an a propos story about an upcoming production of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Plays appears in the Sunday 18 May New York Times. Says Zak Berkman, artistic director of the Epic Theater Ensemble, which is producing the plays in Brooklyn’s Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church: “I missed the sense of community religion gives you growing up. Theater should feel like a secular church.”

It is interesting to note that the theology of Jones’ Peoples Temple perhaps owed more to a secular, progressive, even Marxist egalitarianism than traditional Christianity itself. In any event, Celia McGee’s full article is here.

Tragedy in America. Even one who defines himself as something of an internal exile (aesthetically, if in nothing else) turns once in a while to his own country: it is unavoidable, for this is where art first and most intimately impinges on the self. In tracing the stream of tragic consciousness through American drama, I am first faced with the dilemma that this is a country deliberately founded, that it is early in its evolution, unlike the millenia of civilization in Africa, Asia and Europe, which was not ideologically deliberate. The tropes of American self-invention, of new beginnings, of the conquering of a physical frontier: these are unique to American experience, and such tropes suggest a progressive, idealistic foundation: a “city on a hill,” as Puritan John Winthrop noted in 1630, alluding to Matthew 5:14. It is based in work and faith as redemptive activities; and the suppression of sexuality and Eros in the program of improvement remains with us to this day.

Not that there isn’t an American tragic consciousness, which first emerged in the novels of Melville and Hawthorne, and early twentieth-century American theatre too questioned the basis of this foundation. In the 1920s, American tragedy was Expressionist (The Adding Machine, 1923) as well as lyrical (Beyond the Horizon [1918], Desire Under the Elms [1925]). In the following decade, however, the American drama fell under the thrall of the progressive Left and melodrama, not unlike Europe — Brecht visited the U.S. for the first time in the mid-1930s; the establishment of the Group Theatre in 1931 not only pioneered American acting techniques but also a progressive American drama in the work of Clifford Odets; and the Federal Theatre Project established in 1935 was populated by artists with radical leanings such as Orson Welles, John Houseman, Elia Kazan and Marc Blitzstein.

I noted the post-war emergence of a stream of American tragic drama here, but further along in the postwar era the stream thins to a trickle. But it is there if you look for it: in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tiny Alice and A Delicate Balance; in Shepard’s Buried Child and a few other plays; even David Mamet’s Edmond and Glengarry Glen Ross. If not tragedies by Aristotle’s definition (which is not the only one), they are informed by an intent to look darkly into the American abyss between American ideal and American reality, providing neither redemption nor hope. It is interesting that American formal experimentation with the form of drama is more evident in these tragic plays than in the comic, which while influenced by absurdism remained firmly domestic (such as the plays of Christopher Durang).

My thoughts are drawn to Jonestown. Like America, it was founded as a community in exile, dedicated to social justice and in flight from perceived religious persecution; it too aimed for a progressive, politically ameliorist community; it too used sex as a means of control and submission than free experiential exploration (despite a puritan sexual ethos). Although the community itself was largely composed of black and poor men, women and children, it was almost entirely administered by upper-middle-class, well-meaning, college-educated and white men and women (not unlike our current government, and indeed the staffs and practitioners of American institutional theatre today). Both in the U.S. and in its African outpost, citizens of Jim Jones’ church regularly gave theatrical performances for themselves — quite apart from formal worship services, though they partook of theatricality as well — but these were hardly tragedies: they were musicals, joyous, seeking to bind the community in a collective gesture of self-congratulation. The tragic metaphysics of such a community emerged not on its stage, but from around and beneath it: until the end, when from that same stage the king delivered his final soliloquy as the platform filled with the dead.

This is the stuff of an American tragic consciousness as profound as that of Europe’s. Within the American ideal, it is unacceptable: and rather than explored, it is ignored, though its traces linger in our language. The phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” entered the language as a result, but its meaning changed somewhat over the years, indeed diluted: it has come to signify a firm belief, or a faith in what might possibly be a delusion. But the Flavor-Aid that was drunk at Jonestown was not laced with hallucinogens or opiates; it was laced with potassium cyanide, and its product was not collusion, belief or social amelioration, but death. Perhaps this is some thread of a possible American tragedy: and in its identity with the community conformity of the men and women of The Adding Machine, perhaps a clue to a tragic theatre of catastrophe for American shores.