Welcome to the new home of Superfluities Redux.

Since I began writing this blog back in 2003, I have used it almost exclusively as a means of “thinking out loud” about theatre and drama, and as, through the years, my thinking has shifted in more radical directions, the writing here has done so as well. It has led to many opportunities and other avenues for my work (including a period of writing reviews for The New York Times — during which I perpetuated and participated in the continuing commodification of theatre in the Culture Industry, to both my amusement and chagrin). But it has also led to the continuing growth of a body of theoretical work, especially the Organum (nearly 44,000 words of it) and the Critique of Tragedy, which seems to have quite unintentionally been the most important aspect of this blog for the past seven years.

It has also been a space for writing and thinking about other art, drama and theatre especially but music, dance and the plastic arts as well. As I write and produce my own plays, read literature and criticism and experience various artworks, they inform and (for want of a better word) influence the ideas which I continue to develop. These ideas have met with positive, negative and apathetic response (through engagement, vitriol and silence), and this response has only served to confirm my prejudices and suspicions rather than the opposite.

Through its peripatetic existence, this blog (which originated as Superfluities) has been at a few other locations, usually running under an ancient .cgi script called Blosxom, but the time has come to move into the 21st century. WordPress, the software system that now powers this blog, provides a number of enhancements that have been a long time in coming. Here, on the home page, there is easier access to earlier posts by category in the right hand column, and now the ability to place individual posts into multiple categories. In addition, comments are now maintained on the same site as the blog itself, cutting down on the amount of work required to moderate; the “Print This Post” link at the top of each individual post allows easy output to your desktop printer; the “Share This” button at the bottom of each post will allow my friends and interested readers to more readily share some of these posts with their friends and colleagues. I am also glad to include various pages that, though incidental to the blog itself, may be of interest: “About” offers some simple information about this blog, myself, and theatre minima; a “Links” page provides access to a number of interesting and useful sites, to which I will add from time to time.

Superfluities Redux has until now seemed rather ancillary to other Web sites, whether they were Blogger or my own; it is nice to have a new home exclusively for it. Some things will not change: at the same time that I move this site, I will slowly port here most of the old site, which will remain where it is for the time being. I will continue to write here by myself almost exclusively about drama and theatre while other bloggers seem to diversify their spectrum of interests, as well as their stables of writers. (I sometimes wonder if they’ve run out of things to write about; that somehow their earlier love letters to the form now seem like distant nostalgia to them; whereas I find more and more passion and love the more deeply I explore the form.) And advertising will be neither solicited nor accepted.

At the end of the 95 Sentences, I wrote that the work can now be begun; I wrote this in 2007, and even now it has just barely begun. Over the next seven years, and however much longer this blog remains in existence, I will continue to investigate through theatre and drama the dynamic that the photograph of Vienna’s Burgtheater at the top of the blog represents: a theatre both within and outside of the culture with which it exists. Located on the Ringstrasse, the two wings of the Burgtheater seem to embrace the city behind it, though it is an embrace from the distant edge of the Innere Stadt, and tentative. (Indeed, at the center of the Innere Stadt is God and religion in the form of the St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the spire of which can be seen in the distance in the photograph above: it is the cultural dogma around which the theatre circles, and which it opposes.) At night, the theatre permits spectators to enter within it, to experience the tensions and bodied meaning that remain mere ghosts when under the bright sunlight. It is, in this night, a site of glamour and desire: and it continues to bear secrets into the night. Perhaps Superfluities Redux can be conceived as a similar messenger of those secrets: never an explicit textbook, but more a lyric poem that bears its true significance between the words, between writer and reader, performing body and spectator.