I’ve spent some of this weekend thinking about what draws me as an artist, critic, writer, and unabashed enthusiast — not to mention as all of these wrapped up, along with everything else, into what we might call “my person” — to the plays of three very disparate English-language dramatists: Richard Foreman (b. 1937), Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), and Howard Barker (b.1946). Readers of Superfluities Redux will be aware that I’ve written about all three at some length, and at first glance the work of all three writers seems to share little in common. The unique idiosyncrasies of approach, language, and form of each of these writers forestalls extended comparison, either with each other or with the work of other playwrights of the period. I’m not entirely sure that if you put all three of them in a room together, they’d even have much to talk about, and might even regard each other with some suspicion and ambivalence.
But there may be more linking these dramatists than first meets the eye. It is no coincidence, I think, that all three first emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Foreman’s first Ontological-Hysteric play, Angelface, premiered in 1968, and Barker’s professional debut, Cheek, came only two years later. Our Late Night, written in the early 1970s, opened at the Public Theater in 1975. All three writers matured in the political, cultural, and sexual storms of this most chaotic and revolutionary period, and their work reflects a confrontation and negotiation with these storms; they also matured as theatre was turning from traditional dramatic texts to explore more experiential strategies in the forms of performance art developed by a variety of practitioners.
So much can be said for so many playwrights, but Foreman, Shawn, and Barker share more than this. Foreman and Barker, of course, saw the need to form and lead their own companies apart from the institutions of both commercial and non-commercial theatre for a continuing exploration of their very individual projects, and Shawn has similarly devoted a great deal of his professional career working outside the confines of mainstream theatre. But beneath this there is more, I think. I gingerly describe a few strains of similarity below.
The theatres of all three dramatists are text-based; their plays first originate in the generation of a text for the stage created by an individual author. The three dramatists in question accept the primacy of written and spoken language as the driving force of the theatrical experience. Similarly, their approach to language is lyrical, rather than dramatic, epic, or narrative: it is an approach that suggests a vertical rather than horizontal approach to the confrontation with language, an absorption in the individual moment of experience rather than a story. Language creates character; characters do not “speak” their own language, and notions of subtext take a subservient role to the explicit sound and surface of language itself.
The theatres of all three dramatists employ strategies of post-Brechtian estrangement — literally, a “making strange.” Foreman’s description of his plays as a series of “unbalancing acts” and Barker’s notion of a “theatre of catastrophe” indicate an impatience with, and repudiation of, accepted norms of theatrical and dramatic experience: an effort to undermine the preconceptions of both theatre and culture with which audience members enter their theatres. Similarly, Shawn’s plays confront his audiences with a series of shocking, disturbing images and linguistic structures that aim to unsettle the audience’s sense of a predictable and comforting self.
The theatres of all three dramatists suggest all-encompassing landscapes of experience largely divorced from realism and naturalism. While none of these dramatists have written what might be called “site-specific work” — plays written for performance in a particular non-traditional space — they nonetheless situate their plays in scenic environments that challenge norms of narrative drama. Both Foreman and Barker direct and design their own productions, generating unique landscapes and soundscapes for the presentation of their texts; and while Shawn does neither, his work has been staged in a variety of non-theatrical environments, including individual apartments and disused gentlemen’s clubs, for example. They are more interested in providing theatrical and dramatic environments for exploration rather than telling stories or preaching to the converted.
The theatres of all three dramatists center in a contemplation of eroticism and death. If these three dramatists explore the extremes of experience, they do so through presenting the fragility and the ecstatic potential of the human body. All three dramatists press against the confines of cultural taboo and transgression, and they do so through the most intimate physical and spiritual of the body’s potentials, sexuality itself.
The theatres of all three dramatists aim to explode conventional notions of consciousness in an effort to free the individual spectator to think for himself, providing the promise of change and rebirth, rather than as a collective — they are politically, socially, and culturally anti-ideological. Taken together, the above characteristics represent a challenge to culturally conventional ways of thinking about experience, and ways of experiencing thought. They do not seek to teach or explain; they do not seek to provide catharsis; they do not seek to tell a story (though they still seek to amuse and entertain in the most profound definitions of these words; if anything else, they are showmen). Instead, they intend to provide a theatrical experience that undermines convention and provokes new ways of seeing, new forms of consciousness that are more inclusive of the world’s possibilities and impossibilities than traditional theatrical and dramatic forms. They are, in this sense, radically open works that repudiate closure. While they do not exclude or dismiss the necessity of living within a collective, they place emphasis on the individual consciousness and the ways this consciousness impinges on the definition of collectivity itself. Additionally, the plays of these three dramatists undermine and parody Cartesian definitions of existence that would divide consciousness into thinking, feeling, or spiritual experience. The dramatists encourage thinking with the body, feeling with the intellect, recognizing the spiritual in the material, the quotidian in the noumenal, and so on.
Foreman, Shawn, and Barker, then, each in their own idiosyncratic ways, provide examples of the revolutionary potentials for the 21st century drama, theatre, and culture: revolutions of perception and consciousness that, in the wake of the disastrous social and cultural revolutions of the 20th century, may provide new promise for experience and redemption. I do not find it mere coincidence that these writers came of age in the chaotic but uniquely promising 1960s, nor that their work became increasingly complex and confrontational as the 20th century progressed towards its technocratic, postcapitalist, electronic and digital end: their projects of dramatic and theatrical revolution always were conceived in confrontation with and in opposition to these impulses.
It is not necessary to fit them into aesthetic or critical boxes or definitions to recognize certain interesting similarities. But tracing these threads allows us to see the broader implications of their work for the theatrical and dramatic art of the 21st century, and hope for a renaissance of theatrical and dramatic sensibility in a culture which increasingly seems to be hostile to it.
George, I wonder if you might expand on what you mean by “text-based” drama? You’re using the word “text” in a very specific way here, one which I seem to have missed despite reading this blog frequently. Don’t all plays begin with “text”, whether written by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Miller, Neil Simon, or Kane?
I used the phrase “text-based theatre” to differentiate these plays from devised collaborative work that frequently develops from within a collective rather than by an individual author writing explicitly for the stage.
Very good observations. I wonder, however, whether or not the rhetoric of consciousness used to describe this new theater risks using a Cartesian frame to read work that is, as you put it, critical of a Cartesian paradigm. Why a theater of new consciousness; in other words, why continue to use the rhetoric of enligtenment/light, which is itself an Aristotlean gesture, to describe theater that challenges the concept of consciousness and its privileged position over, for example, the unconscious? This question may be more relevant for Barker’s work, as I believe his later plays in particular may be read to be creating a theater that is interested in the unconscious, not as a means to render what is unconscious conscious, but rather as the topos for an imaginative theater that positions itself against, for example, realism and naturalism. In any regard, I hope my question does not offend and it is not written antagonistically. It rather pertains to the language that readers of this work are to use in order to comment on it.
One reason that I don’t use the words “enlightenment” or “instruction” in regards to these plays is that I believe they engage in that criticism of Cartesian thought without claiming that their own explorations are somehow more valid — they are alternative ways of constructing knowledge or experience that are beyond the implied regard that they are somehow “better” (as Schopenhauer used — and then repudiated — the term “better consciousness” in his own work). The plays of these three dramatists, I think, consider the strict barrier between conscious and unconscious to be much more porous than we like to think, and in constructing our world this porousness may lead to broader conceptions of experience. Better, though? I’m not sure how that “better” could be conceived, especially in Barker’s conception of tragedy.
A thoughtful note, Matt — thanks for it.
I don’t remember writing anything about something being better than another…I am not sure to what that refers.
But, I agree with what you say in your response. My point was not to challenge the reading you gave us, but rather to question whether the rhetoric of consciousness (even a new one, and even “drama” for that matter, which as a specific genre does not seem to fit the work of Barker, Shawn, and Foreman) might betray the “alternative ways of constructing knowledge or experience” that you understand these writers foster in their work. In other words, I was attempting to ask whether or not the term “Drama of new consciousness” fits the writers that concern you. So in that regard I should have been clearer, as I was not challenging the reading but suggesting that there might be a conflict between it and the title given to the post. All the best, MR
However, having expressed some concern with the description used to gather these artists, I am rather interested to know whether or not the employment of terms like “drama” and “consciousness” was used by you to suggest a critical engagement between classical/naturalistic theater and Foreman, Shawn, and Barker. In other words, by using rhetoric associated with both (consciousness and drama are about as classical/naturalistic as you can get) you are attempting to emphasize an enounter between these categories and a new theater that has emerged in the last few decades. And I am particularly interested in what you mean by “new consciousness”? Some more on that would be very nice!
At least in their polemic writings, both Foreman and Barker do indeed repudiate the classical/naturalistic theatre that you mention, Matt. But both writers are quite explicit that they’re writing “drama” — that is, a literary text or genre specifically written for theatrical presentation. No need, I think, to consider this generic definition of drama to apply only to classical or naturalistic models.
I’m not particularly married to the phrase “new consciousness” as a school or Procrustian bed. What all three have in common is that they want to restore agency to the individual auditor in his or her creation of what might be called a reality constrained by the Kantian a priori requirements for consciousness itself: that is, time, space, and causality. These to me parallel the Aristotelian conceptions of the well-made play so far as unity of duration, place, and narrative are concerned. Their reaction is against that (and the ways in which these conceptions have come down to us since the Renaissance when they were re-discovered).
“At least in their polemic writings, both Foreman and Barker do indeed repudiate the classical/naturalistic theatre that you mention, Matt. But both writers are quite explicit that they’re writing “drama” — that is, a literary text or genre specifically written for theatrical presentation. No need, I think, to consider this generic definition of drama to apply only to classical or naturalistic models.”
I do not think there is a need to do this either, but I also do not need to be told what they write and that they often refer to drama as an accurate term to describe what they do. This I am well aware of. The point that I was trying to make was not that we simply abandon the terms that you mention, but if the writers that you mention in the piece are to be thought alongside one another under the heading of “drama,” then this would suggest a radical reconsideration of what drama might be. And the reason that I connected the term drama to my interest in the term consciousness is that in the aesthetic models of classicism and naturalism, drama is often used as a way to reflect and represent the development and fulfillment of a historically situated consciousness. Take Miss Julie and Strindberg’s preface to it, for example. So what I was asking is if there is a similar gesture made by your reading, in other words, whether or not the critical engagement that Barker, Foreman, and Shawn have with drama as it is conceived by classical and naturalistic theater produces a different elaboration of drama that would be able to reflect this “new consciousness” that you mention. I would suspect the answer to this question, knowing you and your work, is yes. The implication of this would be, then, at least metaphysically, particularly interesting, for it would testify to history’s ‘progression, rather than its completion (I use that term in scare-quotes because the concept of history as progressing is fraught, but at least I communicate the idea that history is not over and the fulfillment of consciousness complete…given your elaboration, one would see a critical engagement with a particular strange of idealism), and it would suggest that theater is responsible for this future, rather than philosophy.
“What all three have in common is that they want to restore agency to the individual auditor in his or her creation of what might be called a reality constrained by the Kantian a priori requirements for consciousness itself: that is, time, space, and causality.”
This to me puts it nicely: it names a thought of which I am suspicious and it is probably what differentiates between our modes of reading.To put it very bluntly, I am suspicious of the concept of agency as one that describes a mode of subjectivity, and to use the example that you give, to the extent that another (namely a playwright) can give or restore an “auditor’s” agency suggests that the other is always the condition of possibility for that agency. In this case, we are dealing with a concept of agency that looks very different than what I take you to have written. This is where I think we differ, namely, our stance on the implications of these writers work, and I think a lot of that difference has to do with my investment in a deconstructive mode of reading, as distinguished from your effort to show how the work of Barker, Shawn, and Foreman, for example, resonates with the history of metaphysics.
I write this without the least bit of hostility. To me this is not a question of right vs wrong, but about modes of reading and of engaging, as you say, “drama” if by drama we mean a “literary text or genre specifically written for theatrical presentation.” And for me, as a literary critic, the literariness of the drama is quite important. I could spend more time on that, but I don’t want to be too overbearing. I will however say that it is precisely the literariness of drama that makes me hesitate to read drama as an exemplification of a metaphysical concept, or the elaboration of a philosophical idea. This is not to say that theater never does this, because as you always astutely show your readers, theater has been and continues to be something that both explicitly engages philosophy and has philosophical implications. But I understand the literariness of drama as something that distinguishes it from philosophy, and it is to that that I often attend my efforts.
I hope this brings more clarity to what has not been a disagreement, but rather an attempt to explore further with what you wrote in your very eloquent entry. All the best, MR.
Thank you for your most engaging and challenging responses, Matt — much to consider here. And I agree: not a disagreement, but a most illuminating discussion.
All best,
George