EyeCorner Press will publish my book Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros and Contemporary Tragic Drama in January 2011. The work will include and extend several of the issues considered in both the Organum and the on-going Critique of Tragedy.
I am delighted to be among EyeCorner’s imposing list of writers and wish to thank EyeCorner Press’s editor, Camelia Elias, for making the publication possible. More here as it develops.
“Notes on Eros and Performance in Contemporary American Drama,” my contribution to the latest issue of Routledge’s Contemporary Performance Review, is available now. In brief:
Erotic desire, which began to play a significant role in modern drama in the plays of Büchner, Ibsen and Strindberg, has formed one of the central dynamics of European theatre. On the English-language stage alone, desire courses through the dramatic work of Pinter, and through Kane, Barker and Crimp. In their plays, erotic desire, like a river, limns structure, plot and character. …
With the exception of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, American dramatists have foregone this content to an impressive degree. While sexual identity has in more recent years formed a significant concern of dramatists like Tony Kushner, this identity has seemed less fluid, and the issues such self-definition raises remain entangled within more politically ideological projects. The threat posed to identity and self through sexuality is a political and cultural threat, and is often inextricably bound with fear: a fear for one’s safety (The Laramie Project), one’s livelihood or one’s cultural status (Angels in America). It is rarely considered a topic for spiritual concern, whatever ersatz angels may comically crash through ceilings. …
Perhaps it is a question of the role of language itself in the American theatre: instrumental not exploratory, prosaic not poetic, utilitarian not speculative. The challenge, then, to the American dramatist is to write the sexual and erotically exploratory body, to make the first inroads into an American dramaturgy that can finally contain this body and present it to American audiences, to urge the exploration of the possibilities inherent in their own sexualities and bodies. This, too, has profound political and cultural consequences. If there is at least one project for American drama in the early twenty-first century that remains to be energetically explored, it may well be this.
In the full version, I also offer notes on Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Martin Crimp’s The City. It’s not available online, but available for purchase here.
… my recent essay for the Yale School of Drama Theater journal, is now on its way to subscribers; I received my contributor’s copies yesterday, and a handsome volume it is, and there it is on the cover as the lead article: “George Hunka on the Nonliterary Play,” not untimely given recent conversations on the blogosphere. The essay begins:
In his recent study The American Play: 1787 – 2000, Marc Robinson begins with origins: the first play to be produced in America; the first play to be published in America; the first play to be written in America; the first play, written in America, with a distinctly “American” theme. All of these, except perhaps for the third, are discoverable and even endnotable. But all of these identifications point to the peculiar, already suspect status of the play as text — as drama, if we accept Eric Bentley’s distinction between drama as the written form of theater and the play as the performative form. The question of which of these is the “first American play” invites us to consider the role of text in the theater. If the dramatic text is not a play itself (as commentators such as Hans-Thies Lehmann might suggest), what is it? Is it (mere) blueprint? A memento of a given performance? A text as subject to literary investigation as much as a novel or a poem and wholly integral within the terms of that investigation? What is the status of the written word as both originary impulse (for the dramatist as well as the producer) to a potential production and as the ghostly remains, between soft or hard covers, of a necessarily incomplete aesthetic experience in terms of the theater?
Although the culture now finds itself in the interstices of a history precariously balanced between print and digital media, the drama has a peculiar status that has long distinguished it from other literary forms, if we accept the Greek drama (along with the epic poem) as the first flourishing of literature as an aesthetic genre. Since its origin, drama itself has been poised between orality and print (and now between print and computer screen). Though written, the dramatic word is not intended to be read, but spoken aloud (and, in the ear of the auditor, heard). It is this intention that drives its composition, whether meant for a “theater of the mind,” as envisioned by Mallarmé and others, or for a five-thousand-seat amphitheater.
The full text is available for purchase here. I’m delighted to be published among other illustrious and marvellous contributors such as Juliana Francis Kelly (on her friend Reza Abdoh and the recent emergence of “fake poor folk” on world stages), Kathleen Cioffi (on the Year of Grotowski in New York), the Big Art Group and the Nature Theater of Oklahoma.
And, on a further note, Karoline Gritzner’s new book Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance is now available for pre-order from amazon.com. Due for publication in October, contributors include Howard Barker, David Rudkin, David Ian Rabey and myself. A cheery way to start the day, I must admit.
… asks David Jays in today’s Guardian. I’m rather with “zauberberg” in the comments section when she or he says, “I find the very fact that this question is posed baffling.”
But more, they’d pretty damn well be literature or the May 2010 issue of Theater journal from the Yale School of Drama is a waste of so much pulp and ink. This new issue specifically addresses the current status of play-as-text or vice versa, featuring new performance texts from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma (Romeo and Juliet) and Big Art Group (SOS), as well as essays by editor Tom Sellar, Juliana Francis Kelly, Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Karinne Keithley. I suppose I provide my own response to Jays’ question in my own contribution to the issue, “The Booking of the Play” — about six thousand words of it, I think, and only available to paying customers there, or on your local newsstands now.
But in brief: are plays literature? Of course they are, and capable of being interpreted from a variety of valid standpoints as readers: for entertainment, for study, for formal qualities. It’s just that, like novels, poems and other forms, sometimes they’re very bad literature indeed.