Yesterday I wrote about All in the Family, a show that premiered in 1971, when I was eight years old; I was far too young, of course, to catch the subtleties of the program (such as they were). Though this is a blog about theatre, I frequently enough write about other forms, such as music and film and television (which as a product of the Culture Industry par excellence may be surprising here, though I also know that at the same time Howard Barker was peddling TV series ideas in the corridors of the BBC and writing Hollywood films for Malcolm McDowell), which have also interested or somehow influenced my own dramatic work, and all of this begins with youth. Though I was only in fourth grade in 1971, by the time All in the Family ended in 1979 I was beginning college, and so the show’s presence, and those of other television shows, continued through my adolescence and finally into my young adulthood. It is interesting to turn to these enthusiasms of youth again; during those same years my enthusiasm for drama and theatre emerged as well. In my teens it was Brecht, Pinter and later Beckett who provided aesthetic and intellectual sustenance, and that’s just the theatre — in literature, in which I specialized in college, I also read Henry Miller, Burroughs and William Gaddis, Joyce, Eliot and Pound, for the first time during those years. I might also add that I first read the plays of Arnold Wesker, whom I wrote about on Monday, when I was about 14 or 15 years old. My enthusiasm for Richard Foreman dates from the same time — in the mid 1970s on a visit to New York I saw his stunning Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center, and the very next day went to the Drama Book Shop to buy his first anthology, Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos — they were impossibly obscure to me then, but they were fascinating, and I suppose I knew I had something there. But in Hazleton, PA, where I spent my teenage years, there was little live theatre and drama to be found, so I was left with television, especially Home Box Office, which ran The American Film Theatre series in those early days, introducing me to Pinter’s The Homecoming, Brecht’s Galileo, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Simon Gray’s Butley, Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance and David Storey’s In Celebration, among many other plays. Musical comedy I didn’t like even then; I remember being dourly unimpressed with the original cast LP albums of Sweeney Todd and A Chorus Line, however much I tried to enjoy them.

That was a long time ago, but apparently I am finding some interest in revisiting these early simple enthusiasms, perhaps to shore up my more ambivalent enthusiasm for the dramatic and theatrical arts four decades later. There are of course private and cultural reasons for my early attraction to drama. The private I will keep to myself as being nobody’s business but my own, but my early years were informed by political and social culture as well, from 1969′s moon landing through the Vietnam War, Nixon, Watergate, the energy crisis and the revitalization of the American Right that led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. I can’t imagine what it was like to grow up with other, later cultural references, and what kind of dramatists will emerge after an adolescence of viewing Glee, South Park and American Idol remains to be seen. Perhaps we’re getting some hint of that now, and it is not heartening — at least for me, though I can’t speak for anyone else. Now, I am gratified to look back at All in the Family, Arnold Wesker, Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Schopenhauer — all of these a part of my growing up. Am I missing something new by revisiting these works of old? Perhaps; but they continue to speak to me in new and surprising ways, and they are now life-long companions, not merely childhood friends. It is a useful project, this personal archaeology; we do not know where we are, unless we look back once in a while to see where we’ve been.