If the sole function of the word in the theatre is to dramatize the linguistic inarticulacy of the inarticulate — or to pay popular culture the tribute of validating it as individual autonomous discourse even as popular culture co-opts the autonomous individual — then theatre is best left as a poor ghostly cousin of the reproduced digital image; nobody in the theatre, spectator or practitioner, cares for it otherwise. The best argument that can be made for the reproduction of everyday speech on stage is that it claims to democratically attempt to locate communication and locution within these vocabularies and discourses, vocabularies and discourses that had been absent from the stage until then (for example, the emergence of working-class dialogue in post-1956 British drama in plays such as Edward Bond’s early Saved and The Pope’s Wedding and the plays of Arnold Wesker).

Is this a dead end, and have we hit it yet? Whatever the answer for theatrical culture and playwrights at large, both Bond and Wesker abandoned this naturalism to an extent in search of more imaginative language, and it should be remembered that John Osborne himself in Look Back in Anger did not hold himself prisoner to the naturalistic grumblings of generic Jimmy Porters, but endowed his character with a kind of speech that transcended the quotidian (calling Porter’s long speeches “arias”). Even then, this argues that the stage is a place for identity-politics parity — an entirely justifiable approach to social policy, but to theatrical aesthetics?

The absorption of the linguistic tropes of the entertainment industry, of popular culture, is drama’s attempt to instill community among spectator, performer and playwright through recognition of images possessed in common; here, the rationale offered by some playwrights is that this absorption constitutes subversion. But is this merely lip-service to the self, an attempt to dismiss just how far the idea of the autonomous individual has itself been absorbed into the worldview of the corporate media industry? In many cases it constitutes burial: a deeper burial of the drama and the spectator in the detritus of corporate and commercial discourse, a discourse which, this far along into its evolution, absorbs (through a facile irony) even subversion within its own vocabulary and imagery.

From an American perspective, it is interesting to read Alan Ackerman’s review of Marc Robinson’s The American Play in the most recent issue of Yale Theater:

Although he acknowledges that O’Neill is a pedestrian writer, Robinson suggests that “one can recuperate O’Neill, [by] aligning his work with other strains of American modernism” and discovers “an O’Neill whom his fellow modernists might embrace.” Ultimately this conservative project begs a vew crucial questions. To begin with, why exactly is it so important to recuperate O’Neill? More broadly, what conditions of American culture made specific forms of realism so damn popular?

The latter question is quite excellent; it almost eliminates the irritable dismissal that attaches to the former. As recent productions of plays such as The Emperor Jones (by The Wooster Group) and More Stately Mansions (by Ivo van Hove) have demonstrated, there’s life in the old man yet, and these productions are far from conservative projects.

More to the point, O’Neill is the sole American playwright who attempted to define the tragic genre for the specifically American theatre; in this alone there is reason to recuperate O’Neill in the bath of melodrama and mawkish sentimentality represented by much postwar American drama (not least in Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller). In fact, both of these productions demonstrate that much of O’Neill’s power lies in his so-called “pedestrian language” — a heightened discourse far from prose (even farther from popular culture) and closer to poetry. He also recognized that dramatic form was a language as well — it is hard to gainsay O’Neill’s profound sense of the need for formal experimentation in plays as far back as The Hairy Ape, as late as The Iceman Cometh or Hughie (not to mention The Great God Brown, Marco Millions or Dynamo).

It is true, O’Neill’s language on the page can be challenging, but perhaps Robinson is onto something in suggesting that O’Neill’s dramas be approached as Modernist texts — that in this approach there lies a liberation for O’Neill’s language as one example of a linguistic aesthetic for a genuine American tragedy.