Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater

Great Lengths

Great Lengths Seven Works of Marathon Theater

jonathan kalb

the university of michigan press ann arbor

Copyright © Jonathan Kalb 2011 All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2014 2013 2012 2011

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kalb, Jonathan. Great lengths : seven works of marathon theater / Jonathan Kalb. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-472-11795-6 (cloth : acid-free paper) — isbn 978-0-472-02776-7 (e-book) 1. Experimental theater. 2. Drama—History and criticism—Theory, etc.

I. Title.

pn2193.e86k35 2011 792.9'5—dc22

2011011851

for my mother and father Saundra Segan and Gerald Kalb

acknowledgments

The following people offered various forms of advice, assistance, and support to this project, for which I am extremely grateful: Rustom Bharucha, Henning Bochert, Barbara Bosch, Una Chaudhuri, Peter Chelkowski, Sarah Cockburn, Elmar Engels, Mira Felner, Dan Gerould, Rob Gomes, Frank Hentschker, Jeffrey Horowitz, Samuel Leiter, Judith Milhous, Claudia Orenstein, Theresa Rebeck, Nigel Redden, Mark Ringer, Alisa Solomon, Terry Stoller, Louisa Thompson, Vinson Valega, and Edwin Wilson. I am grateful as well to President Jennifer Raab and Provost Vita Rabinowitz of Hunter College for providing me writing time and travel funds, and to all the interviewees for the time and insights they generously offered. LeAnn Fields at University of Michigan Press has my warm appreciation for the unalloyed enthusiasm she expressed for the book from the beginning. Finally, for their many wise, loving, and perceptive comments, I thank my wife, Julie Heffernan, who read everything, including the ugly baby drafts, and Stanley Kauffmann, who, at age ninety-four, read the completed manuscript.

Contents

chapter one: Introduction

1

chapter two: Nicholas Nickleby

23

chapter three: The Mahabharata

45

chapter four: Angels in America

71

chapter five: Einstein on the Beach

97

chapter six: Quizoola! and Speak Bitterness

124

chapter seven: Faust I + II

158

chapter eight: Conclusion

189

Notes Bibliography Index

193 213 223

chapter one Introduction Time is short, art is long. —Goethe, Faust, Part I

the idea for this book dates back to the summer of 2000. Sitting on a concrete bench at a world’s fair in Hanover, Germany, eating Asian-fusion fast food with some remarkably sociable Germans I had just met during one of the ten intermissions for Peter Stein’s twenty-one-hour Faust I + II, I was struck with déjà vu. I had been here before, I felt—an international pilgrim to a theater event of extraordinary length and gargantuan ambition, breaking bread with normally reticent strangers turned gregarious comrades merely because our prolonged exposure to one another and common interest in a play had melded us into an impromptu community. By 2000, I had been attending theater regularly for two decades—in the United States and Germany, to a lesser extent in England and France—but I had never consciously gravitated to lengthy productions (not even in Germany, where they are particularly prevalent). In Hanover, I suddenly realized I had seen more than a dozen, some well before I became a theater critic and professor. During college and graduate school I had seen the eight-and-a-half-hour novel adaptation Nicholas Nickleby by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s ‹ve-hour, theater-of-images “portrait opera” Einstein on the Beach. Later I saw Peter Brook’s eleven-hour adaptation of the Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata and Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides, a ten-hour Kathakali-inspired Oresteia with Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis added as a prequel. Among the others were Robert Lepage’s seven-hour, globe-circling meditation on Hiroshima, The Seven Streams of the River Ota, and new American historical dramas by Tony Kushner and Robert Schenkkan that, shockingly, appeared on Broad-

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way—the seven-hour Angels in America and six-hour The Kentucky Cycle. These works were breathtakingly diverse, and at ‹rst I wondered whether they shared anything more signi‹cant than their great length. Length is, after all, one of those quantitative measures that cultivated people tend to think of as secondary in assessing artworks. We easily accept that size matters in other areas of human endeavor, but with works of the imagination that acceptance is contingent. Surely all questions of content are more urgent and important than the question of how long a play is, or a ‹lm, an orchestral work, or a novel. A fundamental tenet of Western creativity since romanticism has been that art legislates for itself: good works are as long as they need to be, no more, no less. What is more, we children of the era of big-screen “epics” and marketing campaigns wielding “marathon” as an empty gimmick are all too aware that length alone guarantees nothing. As I mulled things over, though, I saw reasons why these productions ‹t meaningfully together. For one basic matter, they had all played havoc with normal playgoing routines. They were endurance feats for their audiences as well as their performers, holding us for whole days and evenings at a time. Sometimes they immersed me in a conjured world so deeply that I felt transported to a different time-space and, despite my muscle aches, I felt truly sorry when the piece ended. For another thing, these long works offered rare and precious experiences of sustained meditation; each had been a tonic against the endemic “hurry sickness” of the media era, with its compulsive multitasking, sixty-second sitcoms, pop-ups within pop-ups, and epidemic attention de‹cit disorder. Most of us suffer this sickness in screenbound isolation, yet these theatrical marathons offered relief from that too. Most had taken place in specially out‹tted theaters or unusual, out-of-theway locations people had to trek to, such as a quarry, an island, a converted factory, a warehouse, or a world’s fair. There they generated an uncommon sense of public communion that transformed throngs of atomized consumers into congregations of skeptical co-religionists, or at least consciously commiserating co-sufferers. Great Lengths is the fruit of my effort to understand why. It is a series of six essays about seven marathon productions that I saw between 1980 and 2009, most of which were sold to the American and European publics with massive and vulgar publicity campaigns as sensational media “events” but all of which were, in my view, artworks of major stature that sustained my sometimes ›agging belief that the theater still occasionally serves great

Introduction

3

masters. The book is not a systematic or historical study of marathon theater—by which I simply mean any production longer than four hours or so (a “full-length” theatrical experience is normally about two or three hours long, and has been for centuries in the Western world). My subject is really a special class of experience that I discuss in historical context in the next section of this introduction. The chapter-essays are case studies, close readings that expand to explore general ideas drawn from the examples, with each example chosen because it taught me something fundamental about the theater, made some powerful impression that formed or transformed my sense of the art’s range of possibility in basic ways. Perhaps in that sense the book is as much about the development of my theatrical sensibility as it is about long plays. In any case, the essays subject my impressions to critical scrutiny with the help of video recordings, interviews, and a broad range of secondary writings both directly related to the productions and not. As mentioned, most of these works were extremely high-pro‹le, reviewed widely, and seen by tens of thousands in the theater and millions on television later. Reviews and television adaptations cannot re-create the experience of seeing the productions in the theater, however. I am concerned, as I hope is obvious, solely with works that earned their length artistically, that clearly needed it to accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims, and that needed the theater. We are all painfully aware of the ubiquity of unbearable long theater—productions merely prolonged due to egomania, ineptitude, indiscipline, or other such failings. I set those commonplaces aside for the sake of some unforgettable exceptions. Lengthy productions place the theater under unique pressure. They are unforgiving crucibles from which artistic ideas and approaches emerge either hopelessly broken and disproved or unforgettably bright and persuasive. The theater is more itself in them, one might say, because it has a chance to realize essential powers and potentialities that shrink from view when the art must serve the strictures of compulsory brevity.

A Historical Brief on Length Lengthy theater is nothing new. Audiences in ancient Athens watched tragedies and comedies from dawn until dusk during the dramatic competitions of the City Dionysia Festival. During the late Middle Ages in western Europe, ordinary townspeople attended and helped stage elaborate out-

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door productions of biblical plays lasting an entire day or more in conjunction with the holiday of Corpus Christi. Numerous Asian theater traditions have always involved all-day or all-night performances, often associated with religious or secular rituals and timed to agricultural cycles. The modern Western dramatic canon includes many hallowed long works such as Goethe’s Faust, Wagner’s Parsifal, and Ibsen’s Brand and Peer Gynt, as well as many less hallowed long twentieth-century plays such as Paul Claudel’s Le soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper), Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, and Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy). Lengthy theater is in no sense a historical aberration; it is a sporadic occurrence with different social and artistic causes at different times. Furthermore, interestingly enough, the impulse to establish a norm of dramatic length also dates back to antiquity. Aristotle spoke of it in his Poetics, the founding document of Western dramatic theory, written in the fourth century B.C., employing a nature metaphor. “Beauty depends on size and order,” he said: Hence neither can a very tiny creature turn out to be beautiful (since our perception of it grows blurred as it approaches the period of imperceptibility) nor an excessively huge one (for then it cannot all be perceived at once and so its unity and wholeness are lost), if for example there were a creature a thousand miles long—so, just as in the case of living creatures they must have some size, but one that can be taken in in a single view, so with plots: they should have length, but such that they are easy to remember.1

The core principle behind this ideal is unity: a good drama is one that can be surveyed completely, as an organic whole. It must not be too short, Aristotle says elsewhere, or it will lack “magnitude,” which evidently means quantity and complexity of incident as well as length. But it must also not be too long—so “excessively huge” that its incidents cannot be held in the memory all at once. The Poetics declares drama a “superior” form to epic in the end precisely because of its greater unity and “concentration.” “Several tragedies come from one epic,” Aristotle writes, whereas the opposite cannot be true because epic action is “diluted with a great deal of time.” “If someone should put Sophocles’ Oedipus in as many verses as the Iliad,” he writes, the result would be ridiculous.2 This principle of unity has been of overwhelming importance in Western theater during the ‹ve centuries since the Poetics was rediscovered by

Introduction

5

Italian humanists and transformed into a rulebook for dramatic art. The pervasive in›uence of the Poetics is the main reason why good plays have long been considered models of creative ef‹ciency. Aristotle’s text was not well known in antiquity, however, and may originally have been nothing more than a contribution to a private academic debate among students in his school. Importantly, the Poetics has nothing to say about the performative context of drama in classical Greece, the festival environment that is surely the most illuminating frame in which to view the Athenians’s custom of spending whole days in the theater. The City Dionysia, the largest and most prestigious occasion for drama in ancient Athens, was an elaborate and expensive weeklong affair so important to the city that it continued even through the most straitened years of the Peloponnesian War (and for some six centuries afterward). It included four days entirely ‹lled with plays and had other purposes as well. Scheduled in the spring when the local harvest was complete and people could afford to leave work, and when sea travel was easy and Athens was teeming with foreign visitors, it included ritual celebrations of the god Dionysus and, in David Wiles’s words, “ceremonies which Athens wanted the rest of Greece to witness”: for example, the garish display of tribute payments by territories that Athens had conquered, and the formal presentation of state-funded armor to young men whose fathers had died ‹ghting for the city.3 Wealthy Athenians, though sometimes reluctant, considered it an honor to underwrite this patriotic event by ‹nancing one of the playwrights, and the conduct of the sponsors was publicly judged afterward, as was the behavior of audiences. The City Dionysia was part of what the scholar Rush Rehm has called a thoroughly pervasive “performance culture” in Athens comparable to an “ongoing feast.”4 Athenians devoted more than one hundred days each year to such festivals, their chief form of religious observance, and considered them integral to the ongoing life of the city. They typically began with a formal procession, a sacri‹ce, and a feast, followed by contests of some kind, such as athletic events or musical competitions, at which the audiences acted as judges. The religious festivals, in other words, were just as suffused with the participatory and argumentative spirit of the agora (public commons) as the democratic institutions were. Those institutions, in turn—the Assembly and the law courts—were inherently theatrical: large public gatherings in which orators proposed civic or military policy, or debated legal adversaries, while amphitheaters full of their compatriots listened and

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great lengths

judged. Wiles says that these gatherings provided the structural model for tragedy: “Almost everything said in Greek drama is said with a view to impressing the chorus.”5 The long hours that the Athenians devoted to drama in the City Dionysia, then, were part of a solemn civic and religious obligation. The plays were an occasion for communal reckoning that happened also to be a form of mass entertainment. Wiles says that the productions, which included extravagant dancing and singing, were “more akin to pop concerts or sporting events than any modern form of theatre,” but this comparison understates their underlying seriousness.6 The crowds were immense, numbering 12,000–15,000 or more, and the stage effects were no doubt crude rather than intimate, but the plays were not crude. The winning works were praised for their subtle arguments and language, and spectators—who brought food and wine to sustain them through the long days— vocally expressed approval and disapproval of speci‹c passages and turns of events. The Athenians lingered in their theater because they cherished this forum for contemplating what they owed to one another and to their gods as citizens, as critics and judges, and as fellow humans. Remarkably, two and a half millennia later, our modern notions of tragedy still strongly re›ect this deliberative performance concept. Aristotle notwithstanding (of which more in a moment), our views of the tragic today generally form around the notion of recognized and shared suffering, of communal bonds forged by transcendent expressions of suffering and its inevitability for human beings. Here is Peter Stein’s view, from a 2005 interview: The essence of human existence consists in a paradox: that the human being is born to die. Death and birth belong together; that is why one can also say that the only human being who can be called happy is the one who was never born. Tragedy draws its life from this contradictory statement. It gets right to the point of the paradoxical essence of life, and it’s obviously only possible to speak the truth about this with the mendacious, peculiar, ‹ctional methods of the theater.7

In a 2007 interview, I asked Stein what experience he hoped people would have generally in his numerous long-duration productions (which have included a nine-hour Oresteia, a ten-hour Wallenstein trilogy, and Faust I + II), and he answered: “To have a theater day. Clearly I took all the inspira-

Introduction

7

tion from Greek tragedy, because Greek tragedy was always organized as a theater day.”8 It is decidedly curious that Aristotle went to the trouble of de‹ning ideal dramatic length without ever mentioning this circumstance of the “theater day.” As a longtime Athenian resident, he was well aware that the tragic playwrights in the City Dionysia were each required to present four plays— three tragedies and a satyr play—on their assigned day of competition, yet the Poetics says nothing about the unity of the daily programs. Perhaps the programs were no longer regarded as integral artworks in Aristotle’s lifetime (384–322 B.C.), when new tragedies equal in stature to the ‹fth-century classics were no longer being written. In Aeschylus’s day (525–456), each tragedian was expected to compose a connected trilogy—as in The Oresteia, our only complete extant example—with the satyr play providing a comic lampoon on the same theme. But that tradition ended with Sophocles (496–406), for unknown reasons, who evidently competed only with three independent tragedies and a satyr play linked loosely by theme. Since Sophocles was Aristotle’s model playwright, we can surmise that his silence on this subject expressed a preference—for Sophocles over Aeschylus, and for the concise and ef‹cient structure of individual, freestanding plays over the expansive structure of trilogies. Whatever the value of that preference, though, we are left with a paradox: the theorist who enshrined the concise, ef‹cient Sophoclean form as the Western world’s ideal dramatic structure watched dramas as part of extravagant, multipart, all-day affairs. In classical Japanese culture there is a theory of unity that was conceived for varied, all-day programs as well as single plays, and it is pertinent to this discussion. This is the principle of jo-ha-kyu, ‹rst described by the founding ‹gure of Noh theater, Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443), in his theater treatises and later adopted as a basic principle in Japanese music, dance, martial arts, and other ‹elds. Noh theater was typically performed in ‹ve-play programs lasting most of a full day in Zeami’s time, and jo-ha-kyu originally referred to an ideal rhythmic structure (jo—“beginning”; ha—“breaking” or “scattering”; kyu—“rapid” closure) for both the individual plays and the whole-day programs. Zeami: Since the term jo means “beginning,” the waki sarugaku that begins a day’s performance should be a play that reveals the authentic nature of our art. Such a play should have a simple source, be constructed without any complex detail, be felicitous in nature, and have a plot that is easy to follow. Song and dance

8

great lengths should be the main elements in such a play. . . . Plays that occupy the third place on the program fall into the ha category. Whereas plays in the jo category concentrate on a simple and straightforward manner of presentation, plays in the ha category place an emphasis on complexity of expression . . . Plays in this category form the central element in the day’s entertainment. . . . Kyu represents the last memento of the day, a play appropriate for such an ending. The term ha requires breaking the mood of jo, and is an art that brings complexity and great artistic skill to the performance. Kyu, on the other hand, extends the art of ha in turn, in order to represent the ‹nal stage of the process. In this fashion kyu brings on powerful movements, rapid dance steps, as well as ‹erce and strong gestures, in order to dazzle the eyes of the spectators. Agitation characterizes this ‹nal stage of the no.9

Jo-ha-kyu brings Aristotle’s discussion of “beginning, middle, and end” to mind, but here the theory is much more re‹ned, ›exible, and broadly applied. Zeami describes its use in small contexts as well as large ones, speaking for instance of the jo-ha-kyu of individual scenes and the delivery of single lines and words. He uses it to describe the proper handling of lastminute program adjustments, such as when one or more plays must be suddenly added to a daily Noh schedule at the whim of a noble patron. The enduring resonance of the concept is in its general view of aesthetic framing, which rests on the Zen Buddhist assumption that jo-ha-kyu is a fundamental rhythm of nature. The lives and careers of people, the histories and destinies of nations and empires, even the songs of birds and the life cycles of plants, may be described in these terms. Artists and critics commonly use jo-ha-kyu to speak of the modulation and organization of any time-based artistic activity with an eye toward satisfaction. “When the day’s program has been completed,” Zeami writes, “the public’s expression of appreciation comes because the jo, ha, and kyu of the day have reached successful Ful‹llment.” “It is that instant of Ful‹llment in an artistic work that gives the audience a sensation of novelty.”10 Cultures far removed from the modern West tend to have very different conceptions of time from ours, so direct comparisons of conventions can be misguided. Time is often referred to in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, for instance, as a wheel or cycle rather than as an arrow or vector, as in the West. The jo-ha-kyu concept, however, has great resonance for Westerners because it treats time as a vector and is not exclusively tied to the slow

Introduction

9

serenity of Noh. We can easily interpret jo-ha-kyu as a general principle of tripartite form (exposition, development, climax) with echoes in the threeact drama, the sonata, the Hegelian dialectic, and much, much more. Peter Brook seems to have been the ‹rst contemporary Westerner to notice the concept’s usefulness for structuring marathon theater. He has often mentioned jo-ha-kyu during his decades-long search for theatrical practices that could transcend national and linguistic boundaries, and in a 2010 interview he told me that he and the playwright Jean-Claude Carrière had found it useful in their struggle to construct a drama from the monstrously unwieldy epic material of The Mahabharata: There was a sense that the ‹rst act prepares, the second act develops, and the third act culminates. . . . Whenever we would come to a certain point, we’d feel, now something must develop. It’s a second part and it’s not taking you farther, so there’s a problem. And if the next part wasn’t kyu, wasn’t culminating, then that was something to be solved. You can also think of it as a pattern from a dark beginning, to light, to apotheosis. And this pattern can also be found within the parts. The graying thing in the third part of The Mahabharata, for example, has to have its own jo-ha-kyu within it, a build to intensity to give the sense of a light saved, a sense of the sun rising only for a moment.11

In a fascinating 2009 book called The In‹nity of Lists, Umberto Eco describes yet another theoretical framework for artistic form that offers a countermodel to both Aristotle’s and Zeami’s models. I will use this framework in chapter 6 to approach the determinedly non-Aristotelian marathon performances by the experimental company Forced Entertainment. Eco’s book explores the list as a structuring principle in visual and literary art throughout history: from Homer’s lengthy catalog of the Greek military leaders in The Iliad, to Baroque and Renaissance paintings depicting multitudes extending to apparent in‹nity beyond their picture frames, to medieval lists of angels and attributes of God that continue for pages, to obsessively compiled cabinets of curiosities, to James Joyce’s puns on hundreds of river-names in Finnegans Wake. Eco says that such protracted listing gestures stand in opposition to the basic Aristotelian principle of consolidated form and de‹nition of things by essence in most artistic creation. “The opposition between form and list refers to two ways of knowing and de‹ning things,” Eco writes, and the list mode is of use

10

great lengths where we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, where we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not in‹nite, then at least astronomically large. We cannot provide de‹nition by essence and so, to be able to talk about it, to make it comprehensible or in some way perceivable, we list its properties.12

Listing is “de‹nition by properties,” and We use de‹nition by properties when we don’t have or are not satis‹ed by a de‹nition by essence; hence it is proper to both a primitive culture that has still to construct a hierarchy of genera and species, or to a mature culture (maybe even one in crisis) that is bent on casting doubt on all previous de‹nitions.13

Forced Entertainment’s work is suffused with this sort of doubt—above all doubt concerning received de‹nitions of drama. It should be obvious how unsuited the list mode is to drama as traditionally understood as the epitome of ef‹cient, integrated artistic form. In fact, turning our attention to the Corpus Christi cycle plays of the European Middle Ages, we may easily ‹nd that it is the lack of such a principle of unity that most egregiously distances them from us today. These lengthy theater events—also called Mysteries in homage to the craft guilds that produced them (each profession considered its expertise a “mystery”)—began in the late fourteenth century and ›ourished in numerous countries for about two hundred years, most popularly in England. They were annual, all-day (sometimes multiday) affairs that sought to enact the entirety of divine history, from Creation to Doomsday, in a series of biblical episode-dramas. Each episode was produced by a different team and performed on a separate pageant wagon with a mostly separate cast, and the overall cycles were patchwork compositions by multiple authors who added plays to the sequence over many years, rarely bothering to adjust older plays to new ones. As V. A. Kolve has written: the cycles had no “consecutive impulse.” Although they were connected by a theological pattern of pre‹guration (New Testament stories foreshadowed in Old Testament stories), they were “not built upon a theory of direct causation: Noah’s thank-offering does not cause the offering of Isaac by Abraham, nor in any sense lead to it, even though the two actions are played in sequence, with complete disregard of the intervening years.”14 The Corpus Christi events were not uni‹ed, in other words, in either Aristotle’s or Zeami’s sense.

Introduction

11

The aspect of these works that has nevertheless long exerted a powerful grip on the Western imagination is their participatory zeal. They represent the ‹rst major ›owering of vernacular drama in western Europe after its almost complete disappearance for more than a millennium—which is what made them such powerful wellsprings of inventive energy. By allowing them, the church opened emotional ›oodgates that had long restricted theatrical enjoyment and creativity in the lay public. That public, largely illiterate and burdened by drudgery, disease, poverty, and exploitation, had seen theater in churches since at least the twelfth century, in somber liturgical dramas chanted in Latin by priests and monks. But Corpus Christi transferred the production responsibility to the people. The holiday was established in 1311 as an early summer celebration of God’s gift of the Holy Sacrament to mankind, and as it evolved into a weeklong festival, it became the ‹rst large forum for plays in local languages outside churches since Roman times. The texts were written by church of‹cials and organized by municipal authorities, but they were lovingly and skillfully produced by local craft and trade guilds and acted by ordinary men and women from the local populace. Their preparation and performance were thus a prized annual period of playful release from the grim routine of the commoners’ everyday lives. The plays used Bible stories to illustrate the repeated miracle of salvationdespite-sin in case after mytho-historical case, but they were saturated with delightful and sensational hocus-pocus effects, realistic local color and humor, and knockabout excitement. The scenes were all set in the current era, according to convention (no important distinction was made between historical periods), which gave audiences an intense connection to the performances. As William Tydeman writes, the cycles were objects “of intense civic pride” and “frequent inter-communal rivalry.”15 The main reason they stand out so sharply in theater history is that they consumed the attention and energy of whole English towns for days. The Cornwall and Chester cycles each took three days to perform.16 The fortyeight-play York cycle, the longest extant, began with a gathering of pageant wagons at 4:30 a.m., after which (in one of several possible production scenarios) the wagons proceeded through the streets and stopped to present their plays in sequence at twelve prearranged stations, where refreshments and other accommodations were provided by businesses that paid a fee to locate their stations there. This cycle lasted at least ‹fteen hours, ending at dusk or, as one source has it, continued in torchlight until after midnight.17

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great lengths

No matter what view one takes of the motivation for this tradition—“awakening and releasing a pent-up body of religious knowledge and religious feeling” (Hardin Craig), or convincing “the frivolous rich and the covetous tradesman . . . to re-dedicate society to Christ” (Glynne Wickham)—the scale of the communal exertion stuns.18 These medieval Christians were no slavish agents of authority. They were acting on their own passionate need both to play and to reassure themselves about God’s master plan for humankind. That is why they created a theatrical immersion experience in which they could imagine themselves as players in the grand historical drama of Man, whose promised end was the permanent end of their misery in the Final Judgment. It was during the era of resurgent secular drama that followed the Mysteries, the late sixteenth century, that the general expectation arose in the West that a theater performance would normally be two to three hours long. A few lengthier theatrical traditions continued in religious contexts through that era and beyond, notably in Jesuit colleges throughout Europe, but for the most part the lengthier traditions faded, casualties of the Reformation and the increased availability of professional theater. Protestantism was a big factor, introducing a new ethic of ef‹cient use of time as well as a mistrust of idleness. Many Protestants (particularly English Puritans) regarded theater as a frivolous and immoral activity (as did many devout Catholics in France and elsewhere), and this circumstance deeply colored the atmosphere in which professional theater grew. Public companies had to balance a desire to please crowds with a need to step carefully around enemies determined to minimize their in›uence. John Northbrooke’s famous antitheatrical text, “A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes” (1577), begins with an objection to the “prodigality” of theatergoing; plays were primarily a waste of the honest Christian’s time and money.19 One reason why neoclassicism became so quickly and thoroughly dominant in European theater during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that its arguments, based on strict Aristotelian standards of concision (unity), propriety, and decorum, were the chief weapons used to defend secular theater against accusations of immorality. Neoclassical plays were two to three hours long. Yet even in the countries where Aristotle’s in›uence was weakest, Spain and England, the general expectation that a performance would last two to three hours prevailed. Most of Lope de Vega’s 300odd surviving comedias (the three-act Spanish form) are within this range, and in his sole theoretical text on playwriting, “The New Art of Writing

Introduction

13

Plays” (1609), he cites audience “patience” as the main justi‹cation for his length prescription: Four pages for each act should be your aim, For twelve best suit the patience and also The time of those who come to see the show.20 At Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, performances began at 2:00 p.m. and ended around 5:00 p.m., with music beforehand and a jig afterward so that “the two hours’ traf‹c of our stage” mentioned in the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet is generally considered a good approximation of average play length. Obviously, the published texts of some plays are much longer than that on stage—the Folio text of Hamlet, for instance, takes nearly ‹ve hours to perform—but scholarly editors tell us that only trimmed versions could have been performed in the public theaters, where daylight quickly faded in the late London afternoons.21 Since the time of Lope and Shakespeare, the norm of two to three hours has been one of the most durable conventions of the Western theater. Amazingly, it survived the advent of the bourgeois theater in the eighteenth century and the development of “leisure” as a respected sphere of ful‹llment separate from “work.” It survived the insatiable thirst for mass popular entertainment and the march of ever more spectacular stage effects in the nineteenth century. And it generally survived the rise of egotistical directors in the twentieth century, though as a group they are its most consistent challenge today. There were numerous exceptions within this 400-year period—occasional, isolated cases of long productions in high and popular culture—but in my view only two developments have occurred that impinged signi‹cantly on the norm: Romantic closet drama and Wagner’s music drama. Romantic closet drama refers to a small number of early nineteenthcentury verse plays intended solely for reading and not for performance that have had outsize in›uence because they were written by world-class poets such as Goethe, Byron, and Shelley as declarations of imaginative liberation from the limitations of their age’s clumsy stagecraft. Because the urtext of this tradition, Goethe’s Faust, Part II, was notoriously long, as were many of the later nineteenth-century works it inspired, such as Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the genre is generally associated with unwieldy length. It is also typi‹ed by de‹ant impracticality: fantastic settings, impossible stage direc-

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tions, uninhibited shifts of time and space, and blurred boundaries between interior and exterior experience, all of which were baf›ing to early readers. Scattered admirers always existed, however, and a century later in the age of the avant-garde the genre’s impracticality was widely hailed as a virtue and emulated by writers such as Paul Claudel and Karl Kraus in outrageously vast dramatic works such as The Satin Slipper and Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind). Avant-garde directors from Wagner to Lugné-Poe to Meyerhold to Peter Stein also regarded such texts as challenges and prided themselves on their ability to stage what was ostensibly unstageable. Wagner was not a devotee of closet drama per se, as he despised its recourse to the reading chair and fulminated against the decadent state of a theater that forced its best poets to take refuge in “abstract literary impotence.”22 He nevertheless dreamed of founding a theater dedicated to Faust and had this to say in 1872 about its not-yet-staged second part: Before us Germans lies an . . . uncomprehended artwork, a riddle still unsolved, in Goethe’s Faust. It is . . . for the present . . . theatrically-speaking impracticable, for the simple reason that the German Stage itself has shamefully made away the originality of its own development. Only when this shall have been recovered, when we possess a Theatre, a stage and actors who can set this Germanest of all dramas completely properly before us, will our aesthetic Criticism also be able to rightly judge this work: whereas to-day the coryphoei of that Criticism presume to crack bad jokes and parodies upon its second part. We then shall perceive that no stage piece in the world has such a scenic force and directness.23

Peter Stein very clearly set out to establish this theater in 2000, undaunted by the famous line about shortness of time quoted in the epigraph to this introduction. The context of that line is this: Faust issues an impassioned Wagnerian demand to “sound the heights and depths that men can know” and “load my bosom,” godlike, “with their weal and woe.” Mephistopheles, knowing he can never grant such a wish, waggishly cautions: “Time is short, art is long.”24 Wagner’s own music dramas pertain to this discussion both because of their length and because they constitute the most elaborate effort yet made in the modern theater to re-create the experience of communal unity and tribal reckoning of ancient Greek tragedy. Wagner sought to assuage the spiritual hungers of what he saw as a deracinated, commercial-minded, industrial-age public by appealing to them through myth, which he thought

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would tap their higher instincts and bind them more strongly together as a “folk.” He also hoped his epic-scale theatrical productions would heal the split between the separate arts (poetry, painting, dance, and music) that supposedly occurred with the downfall of the Athenian state. The noxious nationalistic and totalitarian overtones of that theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) have been widely observed, and I touch on them later in this book. We do well to remember, however, that the inchoate spiritual hungers that Wagner perceived were real, and endure in our scarcely less deracinated world—which is why mythic and epic-scale appeals in the theater persist in our day, and why the festival that Wagner founded in Bayreuth (which grew into a cult event under his widow Cosima) became the prototype for countless other arts festivals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that similarly aimed to raise the stakes for Culture beyond diversion for the tired businessman. As I considered the reasons why marathon theater events have ›ourished in the late twentieth and early twenty-‹rst centuries, the ‹rst that came to mind was the proliferation of arts festivals. During the post–World War II period in Europe and America, innumerable deindustrialized cities inaugurated summer festivals to rebrand themselves and encourage tourism. Most also had the somewhat loftier goals of reclaiming a civilizing function for the arts (which had been discredited by the war) and intensifying the public’s involvement in theater by separating it from workaday routines and immersing it in experiences it was not aware it craved—such as performances set in offbeat locations, performances bent on recovering some of the communal camaraderie of the Mystery tradition, and performances lasting longer than the usual norm. Lengthy theater by famous directors grabbed headlines and attracted thousands of outsiders to the festival host cities for multiday visits. Einstein on the Beach (1976) began at the Avignon Festival, as did The Mahabharata (1985), and few years have gone by at Avignon, Salzburg, Spoleto, Edinburgh, or the Lincoln Center and BAM Next Wave Festivals since the 1980s without some lengthy work by Wilson, Brook, Mnouchkine, Lepage, Giorgio Strehler, Olivier Py, Frank Castorf, or another marathon specialist topping the bill. The international stardom of such directors also helps to explain why marathon theater has ›ourished in recent decades. In their early years, the postwar theater festivals competed for star actors, but beginning in the 1960s and 1970s directors were the sought-after “stars,” at least in continental Europe. This was due to the new ethos of director’s theater, whose heroes

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commanded great prestige and critical attention, which won them the power and ‹nancial backing to realize enormous projects to which their predecessors could not have aspired. Marathon theater does not necessarily require star directors and lavishly subsidized institutions. Nicholas Nickleby (1980) and The Mysteries (Bill Bryden and Tony Harrison’s 1985 ten-hour cycle-play adaptation in London) were ensemble-creations by frugally subsidized British institutions. John Barton, a talented adaptor and former Cambridge don who never acquired directorial stardom, has mounted three high-pro‹le theatrical marathons, two with the RSC and one at the Denver Theater Center: The Wars of the Roses (a 1964 compilation of Shakespeare’s history plays), The Greeks (a 1980 compilation of ancient texts about the House of Atreus), and Tantalus (a 2000 compilation of Greek plays about the Trojan War). Angels in America (San Francisco 1991, Broadway 1993), and The Kentucky Cycle (Seattle 1991, Broadway 1993) were both playwright-driven projects developed at American regional theaters. What binds all this exceedingly diverse work together is the opportunity it has provided for thinking theatergoers in the media age to resist the maddening, ubiquitous, and nearly irresistible pressure to reduce, abbreviate, and trivialize. Ours is an era of notoriously minuscule attention spans, when time has generally become more valuable than money for the social class that attends high-pro‹le theater, yet that class needs occasional relief from image-swarm, from the split screens, quick cuts, bullet lists, and callwaiting that keep it caffeinated. It is no coincidence that long productions tend to occur in the summer, as their slowed-down experience of time replicates bene‹ts that many people seek in vacations, such as traveling with other people to share common experiences with them, or watching long baseball games, or relishing elongated days to commune with nature, or to read long novels. The latter activity is most comparable to marathon theater.25 As is often observed, the demands of doorstop novels (such as Nicholas Nickleby or Dostoyevsky’s The Demons, which Peter Stein adapted) do not ‹t the rushrush postmodern lifestyle, but their authors still sell thousands of copies, indicating that many people have the impulse to immerse themselves, even if they ultimately fail in the act. So much around us is perforce distilled and fragmented that we long for the fullness of comprehensively conceived worlds, long to lose ourselves in elaborate and epic story arcs, savor panoramic vistas, and ponder quixotic concepts of the monumental. We would do all this as readers if we had time, or if we could concentrate, or

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stay awake, but the truth is it is easier for us to do it watching theater. Or watching ‹lm or television for that matter, since excellent long-format works—usually shown in sections over multiple days—have also proliferated in those media during the same period in response to the same social need (e.g., marathon ‹lms by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, HansJürgen Syberberg, and Jacques Rivette, and serious, ‹lmlike television serials such as Lost, The Sopranos, and Mad Men that extend plot complications over eight hours of viewing time or longer). The key difference between watching very long works on media and watching them in the theater is in the nature of the communal experience. Because theater confronts us with the physical, real-time presence of toiling performers as well as fellow audience members, it provokes a greater awareness of the body—and of the ticking clock of mortality—than recorded performances can. To that extent, marathon theater is more akin to endurance performance art than to lengthy ‹lm, since endurance performers such as Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, and Tehching Hsieh, who spend days, weeks, or years performing selected activities (such as living for a week on a shelf in an art gallery, or walking half the length of the Great Wall of China, or living outdoors in New York City for a year without ever entering a dwelling), are all deeply and riskily concerned with the experience of the body in time and space. The palpable exertions of living performers striving to breathe life into dramatic artworks for our sake, replenishing our energy with theirs as we watch them, is theater’s signature feature, and numerous major theater ‹gures (such as Yeats, Beckett, Grotowski, Kantor, Chaikin, and Peter Stein) have pointed out the connection between that physical presence and an awareness of the omnipresence of death. Yeats on Noh theater, a form pervaded with ghosts: “We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.”26 The inherent gravity within theater’s basic physical circumstance—even in comedy, even in circus—helps explain why theater audiences in general are less mentally passive than their ‹lm and TV counterparts. I have twice attended public screenings of Syberberg’s masterful sevenhour Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland (Our Hitler: A Film from Germany, 1977)—a ‹lm that is as imbued with hovering death as any tragedy and has a distinct jo-ha-kyu rhythm to it. Yet not once during those days did I feel my bodily exhaustion transforming into exhilaration as it often did during my days with Nicholas Nickleby, Einstein on the Beach, Angels in America,

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and Faust I + II. Nor were the cinema spectators particularly sociable during the screening breaks. The essential difference lay in the cinema audience’s inherent passivity (lacking engagement with the energy of living performers) and its inclination to hypnotic immersion (especially strong with Syberberg’s dazzling phantasmagoria). In 2007, when the restored version of Fassbinder’s ‹fteen-and-a-half-hour ‹lm Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) was released in Germany, it played for two months at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, which addressed the problem of unwieldy length by arranging for each of the ‹lm’s fourteen episodes to be shown continuously in a separate private viewing cabinet: marathon ‹lm as the apotheosis of the peep show! This book is not about monumental peep shows, or about unwieldy length regarded in any sense as a practical problem to be solved, a clever PR strategy, or an edifying ordeal (as Peter Weiss envisioned his lengthy documentary drama about the Auschwitz trials, Die Ermittlung [The Investigation]: “part of the play’s essential quality is its enormous length—it is unbearable. It should be unbearable”).27 This book is about theatrical works that boldly imagine how we screen-obsessed secularists might reconceive the monumental, and how we might actually achieve some ›eeting moments of public communion akin to the experiences of our forebears at the Corpus Christi and City Dionysia festivals.

“Marathon,” “Event,” and Scandal I beg indulgence now for a brief digression, to explain my reasons for making peace with the puffy word “marathon.” The more I looked into the background of this word, the more I was inclined to forgive it for constantly trying to sell me things, and I have come to see it as the perfect descriptor for the long contemporary productions under discussion. First, a few facts. It turns out that the ‹gurative use of “marathon” is exclusively modern (the earliest OED reference is from 1909: “a coaching marathon”). It was not employed to describe any of the megadramas of the nineteenth century or earlier, because the long-distance footrace we now know by this name dates only from the revival of the Olympic games at Athens in 1896. Long-distance running was considered an odd activity in the nineteenth century, yet the ‹rst modern Olympic sponsors added a twenty-six-mile run over the road from the coastal town of Marathon to Athens as a publicity stunt. They believed it would add classical luster to the

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revived games by commemorating a legendary Greek athletic feat: in 490 B.C., a zealous messenger ran from Marathon to Athens to report the Athenian military victory over the Persians, and then (according to Robert Browning in an 1878 poem that inspired the Olympic revivalists) dropped dead after delivering his message.28 What is most interesting about this legendary and historical background is that the layers of aggrandizement and sensationalism in it survive as overtones in our modern use of the word. No less for theater than for running, sit-ins and love-ins, telethons, Senate ‹libusters, speeches by Fidel Castro, all-night readings of Ulysses on Bloomsday, or any other prolonged activity, “marathon” suggests a crass spectacle of masochism and hucksterism, possibly a stunt, but also a monument of genuine and respectable achievement and a feat of endurance. Today, it has evolved into a term of praise and enlargement that is useful precisely because it is mildly tonguein-cheek and falls just short of hype. “Marathon” signals something the listener knows is deceptively packaged but nevertheless suspects is impressively excessive, and hence real, underneath. In that way it shares ambiguities with the words “theatrical” and “dramatic,” which can also lean toward either the spurious or the authentic. All this means that from a certain point of view, the phrase “marathon theater” is slightly redundant, suggesting an experience of ultratheatrical theater because it implies essentialized quality as well as greater quantity. Peter Stein’s advertisements for his “Marathon Faust” at the giant world’s fair Expo 2000, for instance, were meant to convey that the production represented the essence of theater at the turn of the millennium. A similar compliment was intended by the New York Times journalist who wrote in 1970 that “a marathon performance of Shakespeare” had “enthralled 3,000 spectators in Central Park.”29 The protagonist of the 1976 movie thriller Marathon Man, played by Dustin Hoffman, was not a professional runner but a Ph.D. student and would-be marathoner who succeeded in foiling a complex conspiracy involving Nazi war criminals; the ‹lm used “marathon” as a trope for depth of thought. “Marathon” developed these connotations over decades but became a staple of theater journalism and publicity only in the 1970s. It appeared very rarely in reviews of earlier lengthy theater, such as the 1928 and 1963 Broadway productions of the ‹ve-hour Strange Interlude (it was ubiquitous in the coverage of that play’s third Broadway run in 1985). The running boom of the 1970s in the United States made the word a vernacular commonplace,

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and when Nicholas Nickleby came to Broadway in 1981, nearly every review employed the word even though one of that show’s Broadway producers (Nelle Nugent) told me that she and her colleagues had avoided it in announcements for fear of sending the wrong “negative” message for an “unabashedly commercial” project they were promoting as “pure entertainment.”30 The Broadway Nickleby was a watershed for another reason as well: it was the ‹rst time a theater production was “event-marketed” in the relatively new mass media tradition of Star Wars, the Super Bowl, and Roots (a TV miniseries). Media “events”—building on the precedent of earlier proto-blockbusters like Gone with the Wind—had been warmly embraced as a boon to American culture because they utilized mass advertising to make millions of atomized consumers feel gathered into a community. Interestingly enough, though, that is not the point Nugent stressed in her interview. She put the matter this way: “You either were there or you were nowhere—that’s basically what we created in the marketing of it. You saw Nicholas Nickleby and you were the cognoscenti or you were not.” This commercial producer, that is to say, thought not just of uniting ordinary people into a community but of cultivating a “cognoscenti” whose self-respect depended on knowing about the show. She and her coproducers were well aware that there was much more to Nickleby than “pure entertainment,” and they seized the opportunity it offered to establish a subcategory of “event” in the arena of theater for people able to appreciate such a project as an interesting hybrid of the high and low. That is the historical door that Nickleby opened: it established theater marathons, in the United States and Europe, as a viable new form of quasi-popular entertainment made by highbrow artists grasping for mass popularity (Brook, Wilson, Stein) that would be devoured by a privileged postmodern elite hungry for new “crossover” masterpieces and ›attered at the thought that it was defying the age-old bourgeois posture of comfortably packaged artistic consumption. Nickleby began another trend as well—one that added a layer of fascination to many of the marathon productions that followed it in both commercial and noncommercial arenas. The productions turned out to be scandal magnets. For several decades in the United States (and to a lesser extent elsewhere), each prominent new one seemed to spark a fresh cultural-political controversy peripheral to its subject matter. Much of this was opportunism; the publicity the shows attracted was like a standing invitation to political party-crashers, allowing many discussions that would otherwise have been marginal to take place on wide public stages. To me,

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though, the discussions were truly important and deserved the attention; I take up many of them in my essays. In the case of Nickleby, the controversy concerned the Shubert Organization’s decision to use a melodramatic story about helping the needy as a vehicle to breach the $100 Broadway ticket-price barrier for the ‹rst time. With The Mahabharata, it was about Brook’s touristic approach to Indian culture, which some regarded as colonialist exploitation, and about the appropriateness of using $4.2 million of New York City money to renovate a publicly owned theater as a chic ruin to suit Brook’s taste. Robert Wilson’s the CIVIL warS created a scandal without ever being performed in its entirety: this twelve-hour production, created piecemeal in six countries, was canceled by the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics Arts Festival at the last minute due to lack of ‹nancial backing, sparking international condemnation of American philistinism. Angels in America provoked multiple homophobic attacks in the mid-1990s for its unapologetic depiction of homosexuals as normal and fully enfranchised American citizens, and Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle provoked multiple regional attacks in 1993 for ostensibly stigmatizing Appalachians as rapacious and violent. Robert Lepage’s marathon intercultural pieces, La trilogie des dragons (The Trilogy of Dragons, 1987) and The Seven Streams of the River Ota (1995), were similarly attacked for perceived insensitivity in their Chinese and Japanese characterizations. None of these scandals would have received as much press coverage as they did if editors had not ‹rst deemed the productions newsworthy due to their unusual length. For two reasons, this trend has almost certainly now run its course. First, public outrage has grown more and more short-lived in the media age, notwithstanding the tireless efforts of activist-artists to foment it. In 2003, for instance, Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil tried to raise consciousnessness and anger with a beautiful and engrossing seven-hour production about war refugees called Le dernier caravansérail (Odyssées) [The Last Caravansary (Odyssey)]. Most journalistic responses to that show, though, expressed polite acknowledgment of the company’s good works and then moved on to effusive praise of the piece’s theatrical artistry. Another key factor is that marathon theater has become so common that it is no longer automatically major news. During 2010, the following productions (some performed over multiple days) all appeared in New York City: Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz (a seven-hour performance of The Great Gatsby); Peter Stein’s twelve-hour adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Demons; Taylor

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Mac’s ‹ve-hour downtown extravaganza The Lily’s Revenge; Horton Foote’s nine-play The Orphan Cycle; Tarell Alvin McGraney’s trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays; Lepage’s nine-hour Lipsynch; Tricycle Theater’s twelveplay chronicle The Great Game: Afghanistan; and the ‹rst New York revival of Angels in America. All this in the same year as a much-discussed performance at the Museum of Modern Art called “The Artist is Present,” in which Marina Abramovic sat meditatively in a chair during all of the museum’s open hours for two and half months (a total of 700 hours), while visitors waited in line each day for a chance to sit opposite her. The true PR coup in such a glutted environment was to be noticed, not singled out as outrageous. The works examined in Great Lengths are among the pinnacles of my theatergoing over almost thirty years. Each of these productions played a major role in maintaining my interest in this much-beleaguered art during that period. The book, as should already be apparent, has a more personal tone than most works of criticism, and I hope this will not be too distracting for readers. In any event, it was unavoidable, because I am not merely reporting here on a collection of plays I happened to see but rather describing experiences of extremely unusual intensity and signi‹cance in the theater. This intensity was obviously unexpected at ‹rst, but after I began to understand it, it became an object of pilgrimage, and I reached my critical perceptions about these productions too much through personal reaction to keep that element out of my analyses. The works in question in no small measure justi‹ed the continued existence of theater to me. More than that, they offered me a glimpse of why the art was invented in the ‹rst place, because their long duration folded time into their form and purpose in ways that shed remarkably clear light on the core connections between theatrical enactment and existence itself. It may be that marathon productions have become common of late. The good ones are still rare, exhilarating, and in every case freshly surprising, because they represent theater that is necessary—by which I mean theater that is not merely clever, edifying, or entertaining but inspiringly ambitious, that gathers people together in ways they scarcely thought possible, con‹rming their common humanity, and reminds them of what the art once looked and felt like when it mattered much, much more to the average person than it does today. The true “cost of a thing,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.”31 And the true value of a thing is the amount of life we are willing to exchange for it.

chapter two Nicholas Nickleby

it is often said that the early novels of Charles Dickens are fairy tales: childish fantasies where good and evil are instantly recognizable and unambiguous; bland, unmemorable cutout ‹gures embodying pure innocence endure heartrending trials devised by only slightly more realistic villains; and happy endings are brought about by improbable good luck and magical coincidence. This is a partial truth, long purveyed as a complete truth by partisans of the harsh and ironic proclivities of modernism. Tactical childishness, however, is undoubtedly central to the perennial popularity of those books (The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Oliver Twist, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop), as well as to the seemingly inexhaustible appetite for stage and ‹lm adaptations of them. The dramatic apotheosis of the fairy tale is melodrama, and Dickens was a master melodramatist who happened to write novels rather than plays. In 1979, the Royal Shakespeare Company, England’s preeminent repertory ensemble, was in grave ‹nancial distress, facing a reduced government subsidy and able to mount only one new production rather than its usual ‹ve or six. Under these circumstances, the artistic director, Trevor Nunn, decided to adapt Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Dickens’s third novel—a picaresque, thoroughly melodramatic tale about a nineteen-year-old country gentleman thrown upon the mercy of the world after the death of his bankrupt father— as an all-or-nothing means of lifting company spirits and box-of‹ce receipts. This adaptation, conceived as a potboiler, eventually grew to eight-and-ahalf hours during eight months of development and became one of the most ambitious Dickens adaptations of all time, as well as one of the most popular. Written by David Edgar and codirected by Nunn and John Caird, it is the 23

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only adaptation of the dozen or so I have seen that convincingly conveyed the sweep and teeming life of a Dickens world, or that fully appreciated the complexity beneath his exuberant innocence. I saw the RSC’s Nickleby at the Aldwych Theatre in London in December 1980 during Christmas break from college, when I was about the same age as the novel’s not-yet-worldly hero. It was part of a feverish month in which I devoured London theater like Oliver Twist soaking up life beyond the workhouse—my ‹rst panto, my ‹rst West End and fringe shows, my ‹rst trip to Stratford. Nickleby was my ‹rst exposure to British accents wielded by native Britons who knew instinctively how to sting, wither, and ennoble with a slight in›ection or an elongated vowel, and the class frictions in the work were certainly more intense for me for that reason. I still remember particular snubs and humiliations in detail. It was also my ‹rst time seeing more than a dozen actors performing in a production that wasn’t a musical—a distinctly American provincialism, no doubt, that added to the thrill and romance of actually seeing a serious repertory ensemble company. But my most vivid memory of Nickleby is its un›agging energy and its air of irresistible joy. It was narrated not by any single ‹gure but rather by the entire forty-eight-member cast, all of whom seemed to “own” the story equally, chatting with spectators about it before the show and during breaks, stepping out of their roles willy-nilly to deliver narrative passages of a word, a phrase or a paragraph and then handing off the job to a partner. They sang along with a fourteen-piece band (songs composed by Stephen Oliver). Almost every actor played multiple roles, of varying age, social class, and sex, and the company seemed to be in constant motion, speaking above, behind, and in front of the audience, tramping about on a marvelous warren of irregular ramps, platforms, rope ladders, and scaffolds that were twisted and distressed to look like antique ironwork and extended through the orchestra and in front of the mezzanine. The actors remained visible on this contraption (designed by John Napier and Dermot Hayes) the entire time, sprinkling arti‹cial snow, operating thunder and wind machines, making sounds with their mouths such as dog barks, bird caws, baby cries, and owl hoots, at times just gawping and lounging meaningfully. They piled onto a simple rolling platform with baskets and trunks, magically transforming it into a departing stagecoach. They linked arms and stood in rows while encroaching on the play’s villain, impersonating looming houses and con‹ning walls. They distributed muf‹ns for the audience to toss at corrupt politicians creating a scandalous

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Fig. 1. Nicholas Nickleby cast members creating sound effects vocally at the Aldwych Theatre, London, 1980. (Photo: Chris Davies.)

muf‹n monopoly in the play. The sum impression was so proudly low-tech (there were no recorded effects), so celebratory of group creation and mastery of theater craft, that even after hours of stiffening legs and swelling hunger one felt invigorated by the sense of purpose. The show had the expected Dickensian aura of cozy domesticity but also a strong streak of moral indignation, made personal and immediate by the cast’s implied function as a collective conscience, tirelessly observing from the sides. The conjured world was sweet and haunting, intoxicating and deeply reasonable all at once, an elaborate confection still moist with improvisation. Perhaps most impressive for a highbrow company grasping for popularity, the show eagerly and unequivocally embraced Dickens’s big, sloppy emotions, never retreating into camp or irony, which ultimately allowed it to reach beyond sentimental cliché, transcending it by fully absorbing it. This is the experience Anatole Broyard once described in the best of Dickens, of “making us feel that the mawkish, even the maudlin, are deep inexpungable human instincts.”1 Curiously enough, the RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby had a cool reception at

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‹rst: generally indifferent reviews and low attendance. A month into its sixweek run, however, through enthusiastic word of mouth and the effects of an extravagantly appreciative London Times article by Bernard Levin, it became a sold-out hit and a media darling of unprecedented proportions.2 After two subsequent runs at the Aldwych, it came to Broadway in late 1981 and attracted a tsunami of American press coverage, including a cover story in Time entitled “Broadway Blockbuster.”3 Nick Nick (as its American producers called it)—a publicly subsidized ensemble creation conceived when both the media age and the Thatcher government were still young—became the ‹rst theater production to be “event-marketed” in the manner of Hollywood movies and American pro sports championships. The Shuberts and Nederlanders set aside a long-running feud to coproduce the show in New York, and their decision to charge $100 per ticket (for the ‹rst time on Broadway—the top London price had been eight pounds, or about sixteen dollars)—generated a scandal-driven second wave of journalism that made the play notorious. That pseudoscandal was a sideshow, not least because of the way objections to the ticket price were lumped together with petulant annoyance at the production’s time-demands.4 To me, the most interesting topic was always what made this show tick—how exactly, having broken with so many entrenched traditions of Dickens adaptation, it held hugely diverse, television-weaned audiences in two countries spellbound for the length of an entire workday and eventually won the respect of critics across the snob spectrum. Nicholas Nickleby was originally the brainchild of Nunn, who encountered a large-scale stage adaptation of Pickwick Papers during a trip to Leningrad in the mid-1970s and came home annoyed and embarrassed that such work had fallen out of fashion in England. British dramatizations of Dickens had once been ubiquitous—one critic cites 250 of Nickleby alone5—primarily because the theatricality of the novels was obvious from the start. During Dickens’s lifetime unauthorized adaptations often reached the London stage before the serially published works were even ‹nished, which frustrated and angered him. He inserted jabs at the weak copyright laws of the era into his books and, being an amateur actor and instinctive entertainer himself, he upstaged his imitators by touring in enormously popular readings from his works (really full-›edged solo performances), which eventually exhausted him and hastened his death. The advent of ‹lm at the end of the nineteenth century changed the aes-

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thetic and economic calculus of Dickens adaptation. Film absorbed the mass audience that once ›ocked to melodrama and thus became the medium of choice for most writers and directors interested in mass entertainment. Throughout the heyday of modernism, Dickens’s sort of premodern, melodramatic, unabashedly sentimental narratives were sneered at by many intellectuals and serious theater artists, though they retained their mass appeal and marketability. Thus for most of the twentieth century (with the single exception of Lionel Bart’s 1960 musical Oliver!), the most prominent Dickens dramatizations were on screen, from George Cukor’s 1935 David Copper‹eld with W. C. Fields, to David Lean’s 1948 Oliver Twist with Alec Guinness, to the seemingly inexhaustible parade of television versions of A Christmas Carol, live and animated, that continue to stream into living rooms across the world to this day. Nunn distinguished his enterprise from this daunting heap of antecedents with several key decisions. First, he resolved to adapt an entire Dickens novel, subplots, minor characters, editorial digressions, and all, believing strongly in the need not to impose a radically trimmed, putatively manageable pattern from the outset. Second, he engaged a strong, politically active playwright capable of ‹tting Dickens’s explorations of social contradictions into a contemporary frame without distorting the novel’s aims or squelching its humor. David Edgar’s major theater credits were then Destiny, a play about resurgent fascism in contemporary England, and the adaptations Mary Barnes (about Laingian challenges to conventional psychiatry) and The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (about loss of political innocence in apartheid South Africa). Third, Nunn insisted on a process of collective creation, bringing two other directors on board (Caird and Leon Rubin, as an assistant) and retreating with the company for a ‹ve-week, unpaid trial workshop (later extended to eight weeks) where different modes of storytelling were explored through improvisation, trial and error, and discussion. This development process, which extended through six months of rehearsals beyond the workshop, is insightfully described in Rubin’s book The Nicholas Nickleby Story. Rubin tells many illuminating anecdotes about competing egos and disputes over style, characterization, casting, authority, and much more. With admirable humility, he concedes that none of the show’s production techniques were really original—all had been seen before in Brecht, children’s theater, Paul Sills’s Story Theater, the Living Theater, and elsewhere—though he suggests that perhaps this scale of use was new. More revealing than any of this self-analysis, however, is the absence of

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stories of doubt among the leaders regarding the scope of the project (though Rubin himself admits to some). After several months, a decision was made to separate the production into two parts, to be performed on consecutive evenings or as a matinee/evening marathon, but its length was then still unknown and Nunn, Caird, and Edgar pressed on in the apparently unshakable conviction that the sprawling novel was indeed a good template. A brief plot summary is the only way to convey the leap of faith this conviction involved. The novel follows Nicholas’s fortunes after he arrives in London, penniless, with his newly widowed mother and sister Kate, to seek help from an uncle, Ralph Nickleby, a wealthy, cold-hearted moneylender. Ralph agrees to stand by the family if Kate and Nicholas will accept the employment he arranges for them: she in a millinery shop and he as an apprentice teacher at a boys school in Yorkshire, more than 200 miles away. The school, Dotheboys Hall, turns out to be a horri‹c fraud, a de facto prison for illegitimate and otherwise castoff boys, and Nicholas is so disgusted by the cruel abuses of the headmaster Wackford Squeers that he ends up beating him and running back to London, accompanied by a “half-witted” former pupil named Smike. Nicholas makes an enemy of Ralph by confronting him and is forced to leave London again. The narrative then alternates between Nicholas and Smike’s comic adventures as members of the Crummles troupe, a touring theater company, and Kate’s increasing distress as she is demeaned, envied for her beauty, and preyed upon by a ruthless libertine named Sir Mulberry Hawk, Ralph’s business associate. Nicholas gets word of Kate’s woes from Newmann Noggs—Ralph’s eccentric clerk, who acts as the family’s surreptitious protector—and rushes back to London, coincidentally meeting Hawk in a café the ‹rst evening. Demanding satisfaction, Nicholas is rebuffed, but Hawk is badly injured in an accident while rushing off. All seems well for a time after Nicholas meets a pair of improbably benevolent twin businessmen named Cheeryble, who employ him and provide a house for his mother and sister. Kate falls in love with the Cheeryble’s noble nephew Frank, and Nicholas is smitten with a woman he meets at the of‹ce, Madeline Bray, heiress to a fortune she is unaware of. But troubles brew again as Ralph schemes. He tries to return Smike to Squeers through a false claim to have found Smike’s father, and he tries to cheat Madeline out of her inheritance by convincing her sick and sel‹sh father to marry her to a loathsome, decrepit moneylender named Gride. After all these schemes are miraculously thwarted and Smike dies of

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consumption, Ralph learns that Smike was his long-lost son, and he commits suicide. The book—which includes many more important twists, subplots and supporting characters—ends with the surviving principals all happily married or otherwise gathered into the bosom of domestic warmth. This work is typical early Dickens, meaning it is as crowded, free-roaming, multitentacled, extravagantly episodic, and coincidence-riddled an organism as he ever conceived—a quintessential instance of what G. K. Chesterton called his “mild and genial megalomania.”6 The approach to the book taken by most adapters is to isolate a few chosen aspects of the protagonist (such as his pluck, honesty, pugnacity, or perseverance), treat that as the main theme, and build the drama entirely around it. The directorscreenwriter Douglas McGrath, for example, in his 132-minute ‹lm Nicholas Nickleby (2002), focused on the goal of Nicholas “putting his family back together” after his father’s death. For McGrath, as he wrote in the New York Times, the thematic thrust was de‹ning family as “something larger, more forgiving, more embracing” than mere blood ties.7 The ‹lm was narrated by Vincent Crummles (played by Nathan Lane), as leader of the theater troupe that temporarily became Nicholas’s surrogate family. The gains of such streamlining are obvious: among them, ef‹ciency, shapeliness, audience comfort. But there is also loss. Consider the subplot of the Kenwigs, for instance, cut by McGrath and nearly every other Nickleby adapter because their story is peripheral to Nicholas. The Kenwigs are Newman Noggs’s neighbors, a lower-middle-class family whom Dickens revels in satirizing, genially skewering them for their mercenary fawning over their Uncle Lillyvick, a tax collector and the one relative possibly positioned to raise their social station. One problem with omitting the Kenwigs is that snobbery is then left looking like a secondary matter to Dickens, a trivial problem of style rather than an essential emotional snare behind his loathing of injustice and exploitation. Seen in this light, all his other gems of snobbish portraiture look dispensable too: for example, the deliciously affected upper-middle-class Mrs. Wititterly, who hires Kate as a companion (“I’m always ill after Shakspeare [sic] . . . I scarcely exist the next day”), and Mr. and Mrs. Curdle, who believe “the drama is gone, perfectly gone” and lecture Nicholas and his theatrical colleagues about the neoclassical unities.8 These characters rarely appear in adaptations. As Edgar observed in his 1983 essay “Adapting Nickleby,” snobbery in Dickens (its comic value aside) is a symptom of a deeper social problem be-

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neath his frivolous plots, involving the disorientations and anxieties caused by the early Industrial Revolution. By the 1830s in England, enormous forces associated with new technologies were in play, including headlong urbanization and the political enfranchisement of a surging middle class, and this dynamic had already dissolved many “old certainties” regarding rural and urban values, the rights of the powerless, and the obligations of the powerful. For Edgar, this new world of “unfathomable economic opportunity” and “bottomless social doubt” was the intrinsic subject of the Kenwigs plot, which “encapsulated, in comic form, the obsessions of the whole” novel.9 Mrs Kenwigs, who has married beneath her, is desperately concerned to keep on the right side of her tax-collector uncle, whose promised covenant to her large and growing family is her only guarantee that her children will be kept in the manner—and manners—to which she is determined they will grow accustomed. The point, of course, is that 50 years earlier Mrs Kenwigs would not have married beneath her, and the rules and regulations of family life would see to it that her inheritance would either be on the way or conversely not; but there would be no doubt in the matter. As there would be no doubt that Ralph Nickleby would look after his brother’s widow and her children, or that Madeline Bray’s predicament would be solved, one way or another, in a manner be‹tting her station.10

It is with this sort of historical consciousness that Edgar and the RSC directors clung not just to the Kenwigs plot but to the novel’s whole extravagantly peopled world, seeing its expansive picture of social dislocation in a time of rapid technological change as the decisive link with 1980: in the end, the forty-eight cast members played 139 roles. Sprawl has its bene‹ts (as Brendan Gill wrote: “It is an aspect of the artistry of [Dickens’s] novels that what is preposterous in them—the shameless coincidences, the grotesque reversals of fortune—is granted a certain plausibility by the sheer length of the narrative”)11—and the company clearly appreciated them. But they seem to have justi‹ed this asset in activist terms. They conducted extensive research into early Victorian mores and social behavior, read George Orwell’s landmark essay analyzing Dickens’s worldview in terms of his social origin (which rehabilitated him in intellectual circles in the 1940s), and discussed the novel’s effect on public attitudes in Dickens’s age. It helped to close down the abominable Yorkshire boys schools during the early 1840s.

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The directors were determined to show “the real Dickens at work” and to avoid “the worst aspects of Dickensian schtick,” steering the actors away from shallow eccentricities and toward a more nuanced comedy rooted in observation and understanding.12 Rubin said the biggest challenge was overcoming the tradition of caricature that began with the illustrations by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne) that originally accompanied the novel—farcical cartoons (still often reprinted with the book) that reduce their subjects to a few grotesquely enlarged, usually un›attering traits. Because the cast knew these illustrations well, they had to work “to ‹nd the reality behind the Phiz masks.” Phiz had interpreted the objects of Dickens’s satire to please a nineteenth-century sensibility, so the company’s task was ‹rst to “agree on the human material that is there before the distorting satiric process begins,” then to seek their own way of satirizing it for a late-twentieth-century audience.13 One of the knottiest problems was Nicholas himself, who, like Oliver Twist and other early Dickens protagonists, is comparatively undeveloped in the novel. Nicholas is neither a conventional melodramatic hero nor a particularly colorful personality; he has little worldly experience as yet, so there is nothing much in him to enlarge or satirize (apart from his violent impulsiveness, which would make him unattractive). He is a good example of what E. M. Forster famously called a “›at character” who lacks dimension in his own right but whose exciting predicaments invite readers to impute depth and complexity onto him. Edgar quipped that he is “a kind of courier, the chap at the front of the bus, who, though of little interest himself, introduces you to the wonderful sights you are passing.”14 It is no small compliment to the actor Roger Rees that he made such comments wholly incomprehensible to anyone new to the book. Rees was nearly twice Nicholas’s age in 1980, and he exuded far more substance, gravity, and individuality than Dickens’s character commands. A wiry, hungrylooking man with sunken cheeks, a ›at, crooked smile, and a panicked stare, he brought sweet, dry wit and nervous intensity to Nicholas, which drove the play forward. The storytelling involved many narrative asides calling for instantaneous changes in tone and expression with just a turn of the head or a shift of the eyes, and Rees made these into a mature running commentary.15 He seemed not just shocked but disgusted at the scrapes his character faced, and thus made it seem plausible that he might actually get out of them on his own without the help of divine providence. David Threlfall had no narrative asides as Smike, yet his portrayal was

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Fig. 2. David Threlfall as Smike (left) and Roger Rees as Nicholas in the RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby. (Photo: Chris Davies.)

also a triumph of invented individuality. The book describes Smike as “timid, broken-spirited” and “addled” but not physically disabled apart from his worsening consumption.16 Threlfall’s Smike was severely and pathetically crippled, dragging his legs about with extremities curled inward as if from muscular dystrophy or some terrible abuse or neglect, his voice slurred and halting so that others had to wait suspensefully for his lines. Smike obviously exists in the story to pull heartstrings—he is a sick puppy devoted to Nicholas and a shameful symbol of avoidable suffering—but by shifting the emphasis from mental to physical deformity Threlfall invested the role with variety, texture, and ›ashes of damaged intelligence. In this way he gave a potentially monotonous ‹gure staying power and suf‹cient depth to rival Kate as secondary protagonist. Among the many other actors who lifted their characters powerfully beyond type and caricature were John Woodvine as Ralph, Edward Petherbridge as Newman Noggs, and Emily Richards as Kate. Woodvine’s combination of snappishness and brooding haughtiness humanized the

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diabolical Ralph suf‹ciently to suggest a family resemblance to Nicholas, Petherbridge’s Noggs was far more digni‹ed and openly caring than the comically taciturn and inscrutable dogsbody Dickens conceived, and Richards’s Kate was far more con‹dent, assertive, and appealing than her polite and self-sabotaging original in the book. According to Rubin, all the lead actresses implored Edgar during the workshop to strengthen their roles, citing Dickens’s notoriously pinched view of the female psyche, and the playwright agreed, making numerous small changes to bountiful effect. In the novel, for instance, Kate and her mother ask Ralph’s permission to apply for the Wititterlys’s domestic companion job, but in the play they merely inform him after Kate is hired. In the book, Madeline faints as her wedding to Gride is thwarted, then spends weeks in a sickbed, but in the play, she stays awake, clear-headed and involved in her rescue. At one point, Edgar even denies Ralph a small business coup to make a woman appear stronger: in the novel, the milliner Mrs. Mantalini arrives at Ralph’s of‹ce too late to prevent her foppish wastrel of a husband from borrowing money against papers stolen from her, but in the play she foils the transaction and recovers the papers. None of these changes seriously compromised any of Dickens’s story lines, but they strengthened the spell of the dramatic world by making the play’s females more believable, more fully human, to 1980 sensibilities. In his essay, Edgar said, somewhat defensively, “I like to think—well, no, actually, I do think—that I wrote a real play.”17 And in fact the work he did in reframing the novel went well beyond the humble technical implications of the word “adaptation.” Consider only his most basic challenges. Dickens conceived his story to be read in sixty-‹ve weekly installments. Edgar had to make it operate powerfully over two sittings on one or two days. Dickens wrote for a popular Victorian audience that enjoyed spending long hours with him and for whom the larger-than-life conventions of melodrama were fresh and vital, on the page as well as the stage. His chief competitor was the proto-pulp novelist G. W. M. Reynolds, who wrote serialized sensationalistic horror ‹ction and whose status as a bestseller few Victorians would have distinguished in kind from Dickens’s. Edgar wrote for a cool, cosmopolitan, somewhat jaded, trend- and media-savvy Thatcher-era audience whose taste, patience, and attention span were more affected by television than they liked to acknowledge and for whom Dickens and melodrama were equally “historical.” This audience generally kept its high and low art in different mental boxes and did not associate the latter with the RSC.

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The trick from Edgar’s point of view was to retool the novel’s melodramatic mechanism in order to catch his sophisticated audience off guard and make it laugh, cry, boo, and hiss. He succeeded beyond all expectations. In New York, where the ticket price fostered a different sort of snobbery by making the production seem chic and exclusive, the critic Walter Kerr observed a curious delayed laugh one night, which he found particularly telling. It came seconds after the audience had cheered when Nicholas punched Squeers. Oddly, the laughter was not at the melodrama in the material. At least I don’t think it was. The cheer had been for the melodrama. The playgoers had been wanting to get at Squeers themselves, and they erupted in delight as Nicholas took care of the matter for them. They then laughed at themselves for having been so innocent as to cheer.18

Edgar and the directors’ instinctive understanding of this dynamic—of the audience laughing at its enjoyment of the play—is what enabled the production to sustain its humor and interest over eight and a half hours. Audiences in 1980 came with low expectations of melodramatic conventions, generally associating them only with the crudest characterization and simplistic morality, and they could thus be surprised and delighted to ‹nd themselves affected by them—seduced into innocence, as it were, by the nuance of the company’s acting and the play’s shrewd mixture of serious content and lighthearted style. The style declared itself as playful and larger-than-life from the ‹rst moments, as the dozens of cast members took turns recounting the novel’s backstory in an astonished rush right after the house lights dimmed, emphasizing the instantaneous changes of fortune and improbable twists of fate. Then the play’s ‹rst scene dwelled, surprisingly enough, on the relatively dry mercantile matter of the sleazy politicking behind a muf‹n-company monopoly, suggesting that the play would concentrate sedately on monetary relations . . . until muf‹ns began ›ying from the audience at the stage, that is. And so it went for the duration of the performance, with silly histrionic gags such as the muf‹ns, the motley sound effects, and madcap chases around the scaffold ramps punctuating Nicholas’s story of discovering his manhood, with its implicit critique of business. All the traditional melodramatic trappings were employed—miraculous rescues, absurd coin-

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cidences, cliffhanger curtains—and yet the story entirely lacked the escapist feel of a fairy tale.19 One major reason for that was the canny way Edgar adjusted the story’s emotional pacing to make it play as drama, which also tempered its aura of fantasy. In the scene when Ralph ‹rst meets Nicholas with his mother and sister, for example, Edgar made him much less immediately hostile and disagreeable than in the novel, knowing that if we loathe Ralph too soon in the theater his loathsomeness will grow monotonous. Similarly, Edgar deprived Nicholas of his heroic entrance at his next confrontation with Ralph (“‘A lie!’ cried a voice, as the door was dashed open, and Nicholas came into the room,” wrote Dickens),20 because it was still too early in the long performance to raise emotions to such a pitch. The script contained dozens of changes like that, leveling interim peaks and valleys for the sake of the overall mountain-climb. Dickens’s serial design allowed him to be pro›igate with climaxes, but a good playwright understands that an evening- or daylong performance cannot bear that, particularly when its power depends so much on plausibility and continuity. Edgar also added new material. He enlarged and integrated the character of Brooker, for instance, the shadowy former convict who is Dickens’s last-minute contrivance to reveal Smike’s relationship to Ralph. He thoroughly reworked the scene of the foiled marriage of Madeline and Gride into a Hollywood-style showdown like the end of The Graduate, with the bride snatched from a wedding ceremony in progress, her dying father given an eleventh-hour conscience, and Hawk barging in with a gun, terrifying everyone. The most elaborate addition was used as the grand ‹nale of Part One: a hilarious travesty of Romeo and Juliet as performed by the Crummles troupe and starring Nicholas. Expanding on a minor, passing incident in the book, Edgar created a marvelously antic occasion for laughter at the expense of lowbrow theater, despite the fact that Nicholas Nickleby itself adopted the conventions of lowbrow theater. In the book, the Crummles troupe is a pinched but perfectly competent provincial touring company. Edgar made them ridiculously inept, declaiming in performance like bad salesmen and repeatedly tripping over their swords. The bowdlerized play within the play ended happily with one after another character rising miraculously from death, after which Mrs. Crummles, dressed as Britannia, led the entire cast in a patriotic song (“England, arise”). A number of critics found this lampoon gratuitous. That was not its

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weakness. Its weakness was its ungenerousness, since the RSC was using a wholly ahistorical spoof to ›aunt its superiority to what it imagined to be its benighted Shakespearean forebears. Also, Edgar’s attempt to draw parallels between the dilemmas of Juliet and Kate in cinematically cross-cut scenes leading up to the lampoon was strained. (The idea was that both women were cynically regarded as capital assets to be spent however the family men wished.) Nevertheless, the lampoon’s emphasis on Nicholas as a performer, a character relishing his own self-presentation, seemed exactly the right climactic note for the ‹nale, because (its drawbacks aside) it underscored the core strength of the adaptation, which was its insight into Dickens’s theatricalism. What most people mean by Dickens’s theatricalism is its facade—the eccentric character traits and exaggerated melodramatic emotions that actors love and that feel so much like theater. As the scholar Robert Garis ‹rst explained in his splendid book The Dickens Theatre, however, the theatricalism runs far deeper than that. For much of the early twentieth century, Dickens was considered unserious by many literary critics because he didn’t probe his characters’ inner lives the way such novelists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James did. Instead of exploring interior con›icts and asserting his psychological omniscience, Dickens approached his characters from the outside as a sort of cosmic theater director, manipulating them to “perform” their personalities and emotional traits and presenting that external view as another sort of depth perception. Dickens created people we enjoy, but fundamentally we enjoy him, the director-narrator, the actor behind the actors. We form warm attachments to that fellow and savor what Garis calls “the insistent and self-delighting rhetoric of his voice.”21 This is the chief distinguishing feature of “the Dickens theater”—a lavishly peopled stage that, in essence, has only one true performer. The novels are essentially long-running monologues, even though they include dialogue, and Garis insists that, childish as it may seem, this “mode of art” is no less serious than any other. Dickens’s ambition is to encompass the world through mimicry; not by dominating the world, owning it, and depriving it of its free life, but by copying and thus experiencing its life in his own actions . . . Dickens knows the world through mimicking it, and to his youthful eyes the life in the world is as in‹nite as he feels his own vitality to be: he can mimic everything and there is everything to be mimicked. He can make contact only with what can be mimicked,

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but it is also true, and this is the most important point about his early career, that mimicry is suf‹cient contact with the world as he saw it. Communication is unnecessary.22

The RSC production was a celebration of this approach to art: mimicry as a wholly legitimate and mature mode of apprehension, theatricalism as a worldview, not an attitude. Nicholas sought to know himself better by mimicking Romeo, as Roger Rees appeared to explore himself by mimicking Nicholas. No actual children were cast by the RSC, so the adult actors sympathetically probed the plights of the abused Dotheboys boys, the Infant Phenomenon (the Crummles’s stunted performing daughter), and many others by inhabiting those child roles without concern for realism. Even Smike was given a theatrical turn at the point of death, in an irresistibly sincere scene that much of the Aldwych audience openly wept at. Smike had played the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet and struggled to learn his lines with Nicholas’s help. smike. Who calls so loud? (Nicholas a step towards Smike.) nicholas. Come hither, man. I see that thou art poor. Hold, there is forty ducats. Let me have— smike. Such mortal drugs I have, but Mantua’s law Is—is— nicholas. Oh, Smike— smike. Is death to any he that utters them. (Prompting.) Art thou so bare—? nicholas. Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness, And fearest to die? Famine is in thy cheeks, Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes. Contempt and— smike. No. No, I don’t fear to die. My will consents. (Nicholas turns to embrace Smike, who throws his arms round Nicholas’ neck to stop himself collapsing.) You know, I think, that if I could rise up again, completely well, I wouldn’t want to, now. (Smike looking over Nicholas’ shoulder at Kate.) For nothing—can be ill, if she be well.23 Forster surmised that the reason Dickens’s “›at” characters did not come off as shallow or mechanical was that “the immense vitality of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own. It is a conjuring trick.”24 The RSC’s decisive

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realization was that the nature of this trick changes in an adaptation. It must be worked differently because the actors themselves must be seen to “borrow” Dickens’s vitality. This trick of “borrowing” was evident at almost every moment of the production, but it was perhaps most impressive at the points where Edgar made use of the novel’s elaborate editorial passages. In these passages, usually dismissed as undramatic by other adapters, the narrator waxes lyrical about the characters’ situations and surroundings, projecting the characters’ feelings onto their environments and, in the process, articulating a critical social vision. In the following segment about Nicholas and Smike’s hasty return to London, for example (trimmed by Edgar), the lines were distributed among a dozen cast members who at ‹rst bounced together in a bunch, impersonating the arriving stagecoach, then enacted the described features of the cityscape, including the stream of jostling people, the greedy eaters, the hungry onlookers and the glass between them. narrators. And there they were in the noisy, bustling, crowded streets of London, Now displaying long double-rows of brightly-burning lamps, and illuminated besides with the brilliant ›ood that streamed from the windows of the shops. Streams of people apparently without end poured on and on, jostling each other in the crowd, and hurrying forward, scarcely seeming to notice the riches that surrounded them on every side; Emporia of splendid dresses, the materials brought from every corner of the world, Vessels of burnished gold and silver, wrought into every exquisite form of vase, and dish, and goblet; Screws and irons for the crooked, clothes for the newly-born, drugs for the sick, cof‹ns for the dead, and churchyards for the buried— Pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food, Hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass— Life and death went hand in hand— Wealth and poverty stood side by side— Repletion and starvation laid them down together— But, still—

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It was— London!25 A good deal of the production’s charm and urgency came from passages like this, from the collective ownership of the story demonstrated in them, which gave everyone in the cast, down to every minor choral performer, a chance to speak as Dickens’s narrator and thus command the same dignity and affection as him. This technique also infused the action with an air of critical engagement because the actors’ narrating voices and demeanors were unmistakably rooted in 1980. Edgar referred to the distance the technique created between performers and performed world as quasi-Brechtian, but that association is too easily misconstrued to signal coolness and accusation.26 Both Dickens and the RSC were careful to keep social blame ambiguous, and the actors were intensely involved emotionally at all times for what seemed like their own reasons, whether playing roles or speaking as bystanders or elements of the environment. The resulting multilayered effect is what made the play feel modern, surprising and complex, in command of the tale’s corniness rather than entrapped by it. Morris Dickstein, in a lucid article about the production, theorized that its tone of complexity came from Edgar and his colleagues “passing Nicholas Nickleby through the darker prism of the later Dickens,” whose “imagination is closer to the modern taste.”27 Dickstein saw a “tragic” dimension in certain details such as the production’s exaggeration of Smike’s debilities and its focused repetition of words such as “home” and “outcast,” which recalled the sharpened social critique of Bleak House (1852–53) and Hard Times (1854) more than the diffuse indignation in early works like Nickleby and Oliver Twist. There is some truth in this point. Nunn did say he considered adapting Hard Times, Little Dorrit (1855–57), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) before choosing Nickleby 28—all much less stagey and fanciful books whose social perspective, in Bernard Shaw’s words, exchanged “villains and heroes” for “oppressors and victims.”29 It is lucky Nunn chose as he did, because those works would have ill served the distinctive tension of innocence and experience that made Nickleby beloved. In any case, an equally strong spur to complexity must have been the RSC’s discussion of Orwell during rehearsals. The company’s ambition to locate and understand the human raw material Dickens satirized plainly owed a great deal to Orwell’s Dickens essay. Orwell stresses (following Shaw, Chesterton, and others) the “limited out-

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look” of the class Dickens belonged to—the relatively new “small urban bourgeoisie,” which saw “the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits [as] either laughable or slightly wicked.”30 The reason Dickens never plumped for any comprehensive theory or advocated any program, revolutionary or otherwise, for eradicating the social ills he described is that he generally saw life in terms of individual agency, not community. His individuals may have realistic roots but his worlds are all fantastic and his satirical impulse primarily intuitive and re›exive. Whenever Dickens “has to deal with trade, ‹nance, industry or politics,” says Orwell, “he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire.” Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but he sees them always in private life, as “characters,” not as functional members of society; that is to say, he sees them statically. . . . When Dickens has once described something you see it for the rest of your life. But in a way the concreteness of his vision is a sign of what he is missing. For, after all, that is what the merely casual onlooker always sees—the outward appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of things. No one who is really involved in the landscape ever sees the landscape.31

Actors have always regarded this limitation as a virtue, for concreteness and vivid speci‹city are their lifeblood. To its considerable credit, however, the RSC company set its sights higher with Nickleby by also including in its purview the production’s “landscape” and the cast’s “functional” position as actors. They mined and relished Dickens’s lush and delightful detail, but they also held the results of their excavations up against something outside literature and theater: the contours of their own lives. Chesterton once said, apropos Dickens’s exaggerations, which were often disparaged as caricatures: “the challenge to imagination is not whether [an author] can exaggerate, but whether he can ‹nd anything worth exaggerating.”32 The company emulated the author in this sense, seeking out anew the human qualities he found worthy of exaggeration, the better to ensure that their stage enlargements could withstand the skeptical scrutiny of contemporary spectators. Orwell famously summed up Dickens’s general “message” in a pithy sentence that he admitted “at ‹rst glance looks like an enormous platitude”: “If men would behave decently the world would be decent.”33 Edgar once said that what saves this perception from shallowness is its conditionality:

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Dickens “is not just positing his horror at and pessimism about what is, he is also expressing . . . a conviction that things could be different.”34 He added, on another occasion: Like all great writers [Dickens] was exploring a contradiction of which he was not necessarily fully aware, and the contradiction which he was exploring was, can you have capitalism with a feudal face? Can you have all the thrust and energy and vibrancy and teemingness which clearly attracted Dickens about the city, can you have that while preserving the loyalties and obligations of rural life, and Dickens’s answer is “Oh, I wish you could.” It’s a wishing. No doubt he was more or less optimistic about that on good or bad days. One of the absolute reasons that we wanted to preserve the distance between the adaptation and the original work is to say, actually we think Dickens is being a bit optimistic here.35

In the playwright’s view, in other words, the actors were simultaneously partaking in Dickens’s optimism and judging it—behaving decently, as it were, by “directing and deepening the audience’s own visceral longing for Ralph’s vision of the world to be disproved.”36 One cannot help feeling that Edgar harbored somewhat more pointed ambitions than that, however, because he wrote a new ending for the play that emphasized obligation, not wishing. As the action wound to a close, the ‹nal events of the novel were described by the actors as Dickens conceived them: the Dotheboys school was demolished by the emancipated boys; the adoring young wives were happily tucked away in comfortable homes and blessed with children, whose loving circle also included Noggs and Mrs. Nickelby; Nicholas invested Madeline’s money in the Cheerybles’ ‹rm, became a partner, and lived a leisurely life after purchasing his father’s farmstead in Devonshire. All of this duly embraced the spirit of “radiant idleness” that Orwell found so hard to swallow in Dickens’s endings.37 As the cast sang the Christmas carol “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” louder and louder behind a photo-ready extended family tableau, however, Nicholas noticed a lonely, bedraggled boy—the drudge who had replaced Smike at Dotheboys—sitting in the snow, and rushed over to pick him up. The play ended with the hero straining under the boy’s weight while looking desperately back at Madeline and Kate. Interestingly enough, this ending provoked even more critical debate than the Romeo and Juliet lampoon. It was obviously an exhortation to help the needy in one’s path, but given the politics of that moment in both

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Britain and the United States, there was little agreement on how it was meant. In Britain, Susan Painter viewed it ironically, as an “anti-Dickensian” critique of Dickens’s failure to think through questions of poverty and philanthropy in any larger sense. She thought Edgar and the RSC were saying that sel›ess capitalists like the Cheerybles were chimeras and warning audiences “against the Thatcherite emphasis on families and individuals” at the expense of “collective values.”38 (Margaret Thatcher had made news with the statement: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”)39 Robert Brustein, by contrast, writing in the American weekly The New Republic nine months after Ronald Reagan’s ‹rst inauguration, saw the ending as wholly sincere. He also found it embarrassing, reminiscent of the political failures and evasions that had brought Reagan to power: “this is precisely the kind of futile, limited, charitable gesture that has made liberalism look so smug and impotent to its enemies; it also suggests why Brecht was so contemptuous of the ‘culinary.’ Is the newly af›uent Nicholas prepared for any personal sacri‹ces other than taking one more social victim into his home?”40 I share Brustein’s sense of the ending’s sincerity (though I would absolve the RSC of blame for Reagan’s election). To me, nothing in the production seriously challenged or dissected Dickens’s fantasy of a humane industrial society, let alone condemned it as a pipe dream. On the contrary, the whole thrust was toward promoting a sincere, celebratory, and af‹rmative form of theater art in the face of a long-dominant modernist tradition that had denigrated or ignored it. The show’s directors and numerous critics stated this explicitly at the time. “Mr. Caird thinks that audiences, weary of the pessimistic and sometimes narrow and dreary new drama they see, ‹nd it exhilarating to come across a play” like Nickleby, wrote Benedict Nightingale in the New York Times.41 Richard Corliss wrote in Time: the play “revives pleasures and poignancies that have all but vanished from modern narrative art.”42 In Women’s Wear Daily, Howard Kissel went further, suggesting that Nickleby was an “attempt at expiation” for the “era of Theater of Intellectual Intimidation” that the RSC had initiated with Marat/Sade—a huzzah for the middlebrow that came off as downright reactionary.43 The question of what sort of balm Dickens holds out to the modern psyche, on his own or in adaptations, has been much chewed over by critics in recent decades. I am fond of this apercu by Broyard: “Frustrated sentimentality may be one of the causes of modern angst. Dickens’s primeval

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snuf›es and thrills are part of the weather of the self, our rainy season. They remind me of Wallace Stevens’ line: ‘each man maundering in his asylum, policed by the hope of Christmas.’”44 It seems clear to me that Nicholas Nickleby was a declaration of sorts by Trevor Nunn that the RSC—then desperate for more Arts Council funding, we should recall—was still dedicated to popular art in the tradition of Nunn’s predecessor Peter Hall and did not wish to be seen as an elitist institution. That this declaration took the form of such a thoughtful and nuanced artwork was not in itself surprising, as the RSC was built on the assumption that demanding theater could be popular.45 The anomaly was that Nickleby touched such sensitive political nerves, not only concerning social policy but also concerning such cultural-political matters as the ascendancy of (pre-MTV) television culture, hurry sickness, and postmodern relativism. Erika Munk praised the production in the Village Voice as “an antidote to and a talisman against the televisation of our drama, the sitcomming of performance.”46 And Nunn offered this analysis: “People found it purgative to be able to yell at Squeers, or applaud some act of heroism, and know their reaction was the right one. It was refreshing to go to something where the moral arguments didn’t cancel each other out, something that wasn’t contradictory and complex but said there were judgments to be made and goodness did exist.”47 This remark was no doubt meant as a swipe at moral relativism, but it is also interesting that it contradicted Edgar and others’ views of the piece’s complexity. Both sensibilities were clearly necessary to make Nickleby what it was. A few years after I saw it at the Aldwych, a television version of Nickleby, redirected by Jim Goddard based on the Nunn/Caird staging, with most of the same actors, was broadcast over four nights in the United States, and I was eager to see it. After one installment, however, I never returned, and for decades afterward I chalked that up to a childish reluctance on my part to dilute what had felt like a pure experience in the theater. When I tracked down the broadcast on DVD and watched it through in 2008, however, I realized there must have been more to my reaction than that, because most of what had made Nickleby more than mere entertainment was missing from the TV version. It wasn’t badly made—the action was cleverly rescaled for the small screen, and the acting was consistently strong48—but it prompted a ›ood of memories in me about the original’s audacious theatricality, and I saw how much of its seriousness had actually stemmed from that quality.

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On TV, the ubiquitous melodramatic conventions looked petty rather than grandiose, fatuous rather than frivolously signi‹cant, arbitrary rather than re›ective of basic human feelings. More important, the very convenience of television—the frequent pauses, the physical comfort, the camera-control over where to look and listen—eliminated the paradoxically invigorating fatigue of the marathon theater experience, which had been crucial to channeling Dickens’s voice in all its dazzling, long-winded megalomania. There are indeed important artistic experiences that cannot be had in haste, or in quick cuts, and one of them is the joyous sense Nickleby provided of an entire day and evening triumphantly and subversively stolen, as it were, from the utilitarian Gradgrinds, Bounderbys, and Ralph Nicklebys of the world—that stolen time invested in an astonishingly comprehensive imaginary world. Another is the exhilaration of a day spent in the company of world-class, adrenalinepumped actors sweeping a thousand people irresistibly along on their emotional tide while telling a dauntingly complicated story as if it were a dire personal mission for each one of them. Still another is the mutual pride felt by a cast and an audience experiencing shared exhaustion, weighing their interconnected feats of endurance, at a curtain call that, for all the hours invested, seems to come too soon. All these are products of a speci‹c marathon alchemy whose precious essences cannot arise unless the crucible is continuously watched.

chapter three The Mahabharata

exoticism is one of the subjects that my generation of graduate students was taught to be leery of. The category of the exotic, we were informed, was a naïve holdover from a benighted era before contemporary Theory made the world safe for responsibly historicized art. Once upon a time, the story went, the theater and other arts traded innocently on crude and insensitive distinctions between the familiar and the strange, the self and the Other: Greeks and Persians, Prospero and Caliban, Brutus Jones and the Congo Witch-Doctor. But then, about forty years ago, a divine visitation of benevolent Theorists saved us from our bigoted selves, branding all such easy distinctions as shameful and holding us all to better, more equitable standards. No artist could be henceforth lionized in the American academy who did not carefully clarify what demons and barbarians represent in his or her work, as well as who determines what is frightening and foreign, and who gets to be the self and who the Other. I am exaggerating, of course, but anyone who attended graduate school as I did in the mid-1980s will recognize the atmosphere I’m describing. The world of cultural scholarship and journalism at that time felt dominated by a happy vision of politically fastidious creativity that assumed that artists shouldered the same obligations to activism, social remediation, and explicitation as progress-minded theorists, and that all supposedly insensitive artistic distinctions between Us and Them could be easily and exhaustively decoded in simple political terms. Needless to say, no important theater ‹gure from that era—including Brook, Stein, Wilson, Mnouchkine, Tadashi Suzuki, Lee Breuer, or Ping Chong, all artists of profound social conscience with a taste for intercultural experimentation—believed any of that. And yet one of them, Brook, 45

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found himself at the center of a passionate and extended dispute about interculturalism sparked by his magnum opus, an eleven-hour dramatization of the massive Hindu epic The Mahabharata. The Mahabharata was the most prominent marathon theater event in the Western world during the decade following Nicholas Nickleby, and it was built on the assumption that the exotic could be wielded utterly unself-consciously, as a basic theatrical resource like melodrama, even in the PC 1980s. I saw The Mahabharata at the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn in the fall of 1987, where it visited as part of an international tour that also included Zurich, Los Angeles, Adelaide, Perth, Copenhagen, Glasgow, and Tokyo. It had been originally produced in French two years earlier in a disused limestone quarry outside of Avignon, and for the tour Brook translated it into English, a language that half the twenty-four-member, multinational cast had never performed in before and which some spoke only with great dif‹culty. I vividly remember the show’s surging ‹rst impression: a polyphonic onrush of variegated styles, objects, musical idioms, body types, and skin colors in which the cacophony of English accents was a fascinating (and sometimes frustrating) component. The Mahabharata was ‹rst and foremost a feast for the senses. On a wide expanse of rolling earth adorned with ›aming lamps and pools of water—against the background of a theater renovated to look like a ruin—it presented a constantly shifting mixture of textures, ›avors, colors, patterns, and sounds that somehow retained freshness and strangeness through the entire performance. Bright ›owers and colored powders ornamented faces and settings; metal weapons were sharpened against stones and expertly waved and whirled; ochre-colored soil was ritualistically scattered in anger, affection, and benediction; ›ames were ubiquitous in proliferating lamps, little boats with candles on the pools, bursts of explosive powder, and sizzling torches. Live music underlay almost everything, with chanting in hypnotic cadences and exotic instruments (at least to me—nagaswarams, bendils, maddharam, kamantche, revanhata, and didgeridoos, for instance) played by effusive musicians who wrenched the mood this way and that with their booms, blares, whines, drones, tinkles, and wails. The emphasis at all times was on tactility and elemental materials: earth, bamboo, rattan, metal, water, ‹re, blood. The actors were barefoot and scantily draped, as if to maintain better contact with the elements, and they moved with a formal, aristocratic grace that gave the performance an air of antique elegance. The Mahabharata is an ancient text, a sacred religious and philosophi-

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cal work as well as a sprawling epic eight times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. It is the principal source of mythic lore for a vast and venerable cultural tradition, though it was largely unknown to most of Brook’s Western spectators at the time. In dramatizing its main story line— the tale of an ancient, high-caste dynastic con›ict embellished and expanded into an all-embracing “history of mankind” (“Maha” means great and “Bharata” means race, Hindus, India, or by extension all humanity— hence Brook and his playwright-partner’s preferred translation, “The Great History of Mankind”)1—the production evoked a formative heroic age when magic was real and when gods and humans interacted face to face without the alienating remoteness of their relations in Greek tragedy. Spells and incantations uttered by the characters produced marvelous effects, such as allowing them to see across vast distances and withstand impossible hardships, and the existence of supernatural beings such as cannibalistic forest spirits and amorous air spirits was accepted casually, a source of powerful allies and enemies who materialized out of nowhere. Everyday life in this world was suffused with spirituality; the actors rarely sat or stood naturalistically but instead posed in yoga positions, martial stances, and postures derived from Indian dance and painting. Music and ritualistic gestures accompanied even small matters like greeting, eating, arrival, and departure. None of this formality felt forced, because the actors treated it as normal behavior, tenderly touching the earth and then themselves, for example, or making wide arm movements as if embracing creation, or raising their palms together in namaste salutations. All of this gave the production a distinct style of exotic indianerie (whose degree of authenticity I was not quali‹ed to judge). Nevertheless, the strongest marvels of the production were, for me, not socially cultural. They had rather to do with theatrical imagination, with the company’s seemingly inexhaustible resourcefulness in manipulating simple and basic materials to immense and subtle effect. For example: a princess was made to arrive on a giant “elephant” by riding atop a bamboo litter with a huge red cloth descending from her shoulders to cover both the litter and the servants carrying it, while musicians swayed and bleated in front with enormous curved horns. Other parade ‹gures manipulated a cluster of parasols to resemble a vaulted archway that this “beast” then walked through. An actor portraying a martial-arts master stood in for an idol built to honor that master, then feigned shock and outrage that the idol existed and demanded the thumb of the boy who built it—a horrifying association of imagination

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and cruelty that lingered in memory hours later when the play became immersed in savage warfare. A smiling woman strolled to the water and proceeded to drown seven babies with grim, methodical resolution, bundling a long shawl to her chest and then releasing it each time so that the tip caught the surface of the pool—another instance of horror welded to grace and beauty by theatrical invention, only in this case the horror betokened mysterious compassion. There were countless imaginative sequences of this kind, and after each one the illusion evaporated, the prop objects discretely laid aside or shifted to other uses and the performers seamlessly blended into other roles. Brook’s Mahabharata was conceived for Westerners, for those hearing its extraordinary mythic tales for the ‹rst time, and that was the controversial crux of its use of exotica: it treated a real Asian culture as surprising and mysterious in ways that some felt improperly dehistoricized it. And yet most of its tales were indeed new and astonishing. A few examples: a thousand-year-old hermit who wrote the means of acquiring an earth-destroying weapon in disappearing letters on a scrap of bark, simultaneously aiding and hindering one side in the dynastic con›ict. A warrior’s young son who heard a critical military secret while in the womb, and remembered it, condemning himself to make use of this knowledge before he was ready in the play’s climactic battle. A royal family in which ‹ve brothers harmoniously shared one wife. A queen pregnant for two years, who begged to be struck in the belly with an iron rod and then gave birth to a metal ball that magically spawned the one hundred sons of her clan. A blind king whose wife chose to join him in blindness, dooming their kingdom so assuredly that the blindness was like a palpable handicap in performance. These tales were utterly gripping and deeply resonant in performance, however detached from Indian history they may have been. One constantly asked questions while watching about the norms, conventions, and laws of the depicted world, and the force of that questioning became a major engine of the show’s action. For me, the questioning lent an extra emotional charge to the day, because I realized after two or three hours that curiosity was actually a major topos in the piece. The audience’s tireless efforts to ‹gure out the rules and reasons for everything paralleled the characters’ tireless efforts to understand dharma, the order of things, and in the end both those searches converged in a wide-ranging and extremely moving inquiry into the reasons for human existence, as well as the various illusions

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surrounding the separate Self that the Hindus call maya. Every spectator enriched these inquiries with his or her own historical baggage. Curiously enough, The Mahabharata shared some basic qualities with Nicholas Nickleby. Nickleby was an actor-driven, essentially comic work conceived primarily for entertainment, while The Mahabharata was a weighty, highbrow, director-driven work that strove to be ceremonial. Nickleby’s source was the fruit of a single, prodigiously productive imagination (Dickens), whereas the text Brook adapted (with Jean-Claude Carrière) was a product of accretion, composed by countless hands over many centuries. Nevertheless, the productions shared a trait common to many audacious marathon plays, which I will call the may›y effect: the illusion of living a lifetime within the span of a single day. This is no sticky sentimentalism. I use the term in all seriousness to describe a magni‹cent illusion (Forster would call it a “conjuring trick”): these plays’ journeys are so extensive, adventurous, varied, and marvelously circuitous that they actually seem to compress the incomprehensibly messy, bewilderingly rami‹ed whole of life between their opening and closing curtains. One cannot help wondering how the may›y effect works, and obviously there is no single answer. For Nickleby, as discussed earlier, a decisive factor was the RSC’s ability to (in Forster’s formulation) “borrow” and absorb Dickens’s vitality, which meant also tapping the wisdom at the root of his capacious humanity. Surprising as it may seem, Brook and his company were able to reach a comparable end in The Mahabharata, I believe, by tapping theatrically into vital streams of Hindu culture as contained in the accumulated wisdom of its foundational epic—despite the fact that their knowledge of Hindu culture was touristic and super‹cial, and only one cast member was Indian. A major epic is an established culture’s comprehensive re›ection of itself and its origins, a mirror and often a genesis myth for a de‹ned group. Only an artist of Brook’s reckless sincerity and stubborn, unfashionable humanism could have presumed that he, an outsider, possessed the skill and appropriate platform to turn such a mirror around and focus it to re›ect the whole of global humanity. The Mahabharata received mostly enthusiastic reviews in all the cities of its international tour, including New York. The New York run, however, was also met with skepticism and hostility. Not all of this hostility, it should be said, was about Brook’s interculturalism. Part of it involved objections to the expenditure of $4.2 million in public money to remodel the dilapidated

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Majestic Theater in Brooklyn as a chic ruin, in imitation of Brook’s Paris theater, Les Bouffes du Nord.2 (The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s executive director at the time, Harvey Lichtenstein, was an old friend and admirer of Brook’s, and The Mahabharata inaugurated the city-owned Majestic—renamed the Harvey in 1999—as a new BAM facility.) The bulk of the criticism was about the ethics of Brook’s cultural borrowing, though, with numerous articles accusing him of Orientalism and cultural piracy—of arrogating to himself the role of disseminator of a great “lost” and “universal” work from the enigmatic East without deeply understanding its context, chie›y to enlarge his heroic reputation. There was unavoidably some truth in these accusations, but I could not reconcile their tone of angry condemnation with my personal experience of the production. The Mahabharata, like Nickleby, was to me a rare and mighty theatrical organism that deserved to be remembered primarily for its extraordinary living attributes. On a number of occasions, Brook stated that he hoped The Mahabharata would have wide appeal among audiences who knew nothing about it, and on the evidence of the warm reviews from seven countries we can assume his hope was realized.3 A portion of his audience, however, had followed him for many years and saw the show (as he did) as the terminus of a long journey. It was the culmination of ‹fteen years of idiosyncratic and sometimes esoteric experimentation that he had conducted with his Paris-based company, the Centre International de Créations Théâtrales (CICT). In 1970, at the peak of his stardom as a director in Britain’s major theater venues, Brook had walked away from his native language and comfortable position atop the high-culture pyramid there and reinvented himself as a globe-trekking, Grotowski-inspired explorer of transcendental experiences. With a subsidy from the Ford Foundation and later the French government, he formed a diverse multicultural ensemble and dedicated himself to searching for a universal theatrical language capable of communicating across all barriers of nationality, race, class, and language. This sincere, utopian ambition to “achieve the human essence” and locate a theater “absolutely necessary to people, as necessary as eating and sex” was puzzling to Brook’s many fans.4 “I saw—as Henry Ford might have said—that geography is bunk,” he said. “Each human being carries within her/him all the continents.”5 And: “the complete human truth is global, and the theater is the place in which the jigsaw can be pieced together.”6

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Depending on one’s point of view, it was either ironic or oblivious that Brook decided geography was bunk at the very moment when French thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes were achieving worldwide fame for insisting it was of cardinal importance. Foucault called for the rise of “the ‘speci‹c’ intellectual as opposed to the ‘universal’ intellectual” in 1972, and during the next several decades scholarship in the humanities would be permanently altered by feminist, postcolonialist, and sundry other efforts to expose universalism as a privileged white, male perspective that marginalized particular social and political struggles and ignored major differences in opportunity among groups.7 The scholarly event that most affected the New York reception of The Mahabharata was the publication of Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1978), which launched the academic ‹eld of postcolonial studies in the United States and was cited in almost all the damning objections to the play. Brook, for his part, never recognized any contradiction in the notion of a British star or a subsidized French institution positioning themselves as heroic agents of intercultural healing and transcendence of human boundaries. His experimentation was unquestionably risky and unique. In a 1970 production called Orghast, performed in the ruins of Persepolis in Iran and built around the Prometheus myth, Brook attempted to locate the roots of language in music and incantatory sound by mixing passages from dead languages such as ancient Greek, Latin, and Avesta (the language of the Persian prophet Zoroaster) with rhythmic syllables from an arti‹cial language constructed by the poet Ted Hughes. In 1972, he took his troupe on an arduous, one-hundred-day, 8,500-mile Land Rover trip through the Sahara desert, giving improvisatory performances on simple carpets in remote villages where no one in the company spoke the local language, as part of a quasi-mystical, Artaudian search for a theater of archetype, gesture, and expressive energy. In Conference of the Birds (used as workshop material through the 1970s and publicly performed in 1979), he investigated transcultural myth with a twelfth-century allegorical poem by the Persian Su‹ poet Attar about mankind’s dreams of ›ight and transcendence of earthly limitations. A Su‹ woke one night and said to himself : “It seems to me that the world is like a chest in which we are put and the lid shut down, and we give ourselves up to foolishness. When death lifts the lid, he who has acquired wings, soars away to

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great lengths eternity, but he who has not, stays in the chest a prey to a thousand tribulations. Make sure then that the bird of ambition acquires wings of aspiration, and give to your heart and reason the ecstasy of the soul. Before the lid of the chest is opened become a bird of the Spirit, ready to spread your wings.”8

Little of this work was deeply satisfying to uninitiated audiences when it was performed on tour. The American playwright Kenneth Bernard wrote about a CICT performance at La Mama in 1980, “The pursuit of total communication is a chimera equivalent to thinking poetry . . . can be perfectly translated.”9 The critic Stanley Kauffmann, after seeing an afternoon of company exercises followed by a performance of Conference of the Birds at BAM, found himself repulsed by the group’s “sacerdotal air” and the play’s “spurious spiritual insight.” He said Brook lacked “the right talent for this untraditional work. He has miscast himself. His best productions have been those [like King Lear, Marat/Sade and A Midsummer Night’s Dream] that made the theater move with adventure; he has no apparent gift for taking the theater outside the theater.”10 Kauffmann spoke for many, then, in admiring Brook’s pre-CICT career and regretting the loss of his brilliant reimaginings of plays from the Western literary canon. And though Brook dismissed such sentiments, his actions during the early 1980s suggest that he was asking himself similar questions. He disbanded his company for several years at that time and directed Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and an exquisitely reworked version of Bizet’s Carmen with other actors. These powerful, stripped-down productions, which stressed energy and physical presence and took place on carpets, cushions, and arenas of earth, were fusions of Brook’s classical expertise with the techniques honed in the African carpet shows and other CICT experiments. The Mahabharata was another such fusion, swelled and magni‹ed to monumental proportions as if to encompass and justify all that the director had gathered and absorbed during both his classical avant-gardist phase and his far-›ung questing. The piece had a very long gestation—about ten years. Brook’s curiosity about India dates from the early 1970s, when a Kathakali dance performance in France stunned him with its startling, elaborate costumes and “the magni‹cent ferocity of the movements,” and the speci‹c idea of adapting The Mahabharata dates from 1975.11 In that year, he and the writer Jean-Claude Carrière, his frequent collaborator, paid a series of visits to a French professor of Sanskrit, Philippe Lavastine, who enchanted them with stories from the work. Brook and Carrière were

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shocked that such compelling material was so little known in the West and resolved then to “‹nd a way of bringing [it] into our world.”12 Years of reading, discussing, writing, and discarding draft material followed, after which they traveled to India together for ‹ve weeks in 1982 to learn about the culture and witness as many Mahabharata performance traditions as they could. Some were marathon practices lasting as long as eighteen days (though they saw only brief samplings). Brook made three more trips to India in the next few years, the last (for two weeks in the middle of the show’s nine-month rehearsal period) with the entire cast—a reconstituted and expanded CICT company now containing performers from sixteen countries. The most informative account of these India trips is a short book called In Search of The Mahabharata: Notes of Travels in India with Peter Brook, 1982–1985 that Carrière published in the form of a travel diary. This book enthusiastically records the array of marvels the group witnessed: the magni‹cent dances, masks, costumes, religious rituals, feasts, and meetings with venerated Hindu saints and scholars. It also describes, however, a curious resistance to assimilating Indian culture too deeply. Must not try to grasp everything, understand everything. Let things ›ow, at ‹rst, without trying to plumb their depths. A quick, super‹cial ‹rst impression is perhaps the best. We defer all analysis, all categoric judgement. Peter often speaks, even while working, of a “naïve look.” One of our strengths: our ignorance.13

Later Carrière quotes St. John of the Cross, an ascetic Christian saint, in self-justi‹cation: “We do not travel to see, but to not see.”14 Brook too, in his foreword to The Mahabharata, speaks of determinedly keeping his distance: “we must not allow ourselves to become crushed into a false reverence. . . . We returned from India knowing that our work was not to imitate but to suggest . . . we have tried to suggest the ›avor of India without pretending to be what we are not.”15 In my interview with him, I asked Brook to expand on this idea of the naïve, expecting him to speak of the need to avoid the creative calci‹cation that can come from too much expertise. I had in mind a wonderful short (and un‹nished) book about artistic uses of the “exotic” called Essay on Exoticism, by a little-known, early twentieth-century Frenchman named Victor Segalen, who wrote of the danger of the “mind-withering” distraction of surface detail and factual knowledge when a creative artist absorbs a foreign

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culture for the ‹rst time. “China, though consuming, will not make of me its specialist,” declared Segalen (a remark I will come back to).16 Brook’s answer pointed in another direction, though: Well, “naïve” covers a lot of things but I think in this case it means letting go of a lot of built-in intellectual and cultural habits of reaction. I prefer to say, being simple. When a professor, like Lévi-Strauss, goes to a completely different culture, he comes with a whole structure of convictions about what that culture is. He has done all that work and so he looks for con‹rmations. The naïve explorer is one who is open, who doesn’t at once catalogue in his mind. He receives impressions and then catalogues afterwards.17

“Naïve,” then, is Brook’s shorthand for openness and distaste for preconceptions, which he also stresses in his other interviews and writings about The Mahabharata as well as his Africa trek. He has eloquently described his particular attractions to the places he has visited, but he has also invariably felt compelled to explain that he does not believe in ‹xed identities and cultural categories. He sees categories as stereotypes more likely to poison relations between people than to preserve their beloved heritages. Here is another section of our conversation, which I quote at length to allow Brook to explain his points. JK: Does a Western artist seeking material in another culture, particularly a non-Western culture, have any obligations toward the feelings of people from that culture? PB: I don’t believe in the word “culture,” like “art.” These words, forgive me, but that’s taking an academic view. I don’t believe these words have any more than a temporary convenience for talk and for categorizing. If somebody from the West goes to another culture just to look for material, yes, that is a very, very suspect attitude. But if you follow what I’ve tried to express about the background and the history of The Mahabharata, you know that’s not where it came from. I didn’t go ‹nd The Mahabharata. I reached a point early on where I felt that there was more than the cultural limits given to me by my English education, and I’ve always traveled and always felt that there was more to the meaning of culture than Western civilization, which now everybody’s beginning to recognize . . .

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JK: Let me press you a bit more if I may. When one follows an impulse in the theater to seek an Other, something different from oneself, and it ends up being the heritage of a real living culture like India, is there a line of legitimacy that one must respect? Obviously there were some people who felt that there was such a line and that you didn’t respect it. PB: . . . [When working interculturally] one must always ‹nd in oneself—either it’s there naturally or it has to be constantly renewed and cultivated—a capacity for respect. . . . If that respect is there, when someone is a stranger and you’re a stranger to them, then behind it all there is something that can bind you. Then you aren’t stealing from them and they aren’t stealing from you. Something can ›ow. Sometimes, for a million political reasons, ingrained political and social reasons, somebody wants to say: “you’re stealing from us.” And if you’re white you can’t help carrying on your back all the background of years of exploitation. One cannot talk to an African, however much you want to be close to him and have him feel your total openness and respect, without knowing that as you look at him, he thinks, “Oh, I can see you reacting to the color of my face.” He looks at you and whatever you do, he sees a white man. That you can’t get away from. So we have to pay the price for all the monstrosities that our forefathers committed. This is a truth.18

Listening to Brook speak about India and reading through his comments about it in his autobiography, Threads of Time, it seems to me that what most inspired him about the country and culture was its profound investment in complexity: the incessant noise and bustle, the riotous dance of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, and tastes, in all of which he saw “a climate of constant creativity.”19 He loved the unique and provocative mixture of timelessness and modernity in the villages and cities, the motor vehicles buzzing crazily around sacred cows and small children, the teeming markets with their whirligigs of varicolored food and insects, monkeys and electrical wires, elephants and feces, temple carvings and shop signs, beggars and Brahmins, and he loved the Mahabharata for its embrace and expression of all that dizzying complexity. More than anything else, Brook admired the “richness and generosity” of thought in this ancient text, its Shakespearean refusal of moral simpli‹cations and its refreshing and liberating acceptance of contradiction.20 That is what pressed him to set all residual modesty aside and cast himself and Carrière as the work’s agents of revelation to the larger

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world.“It was as though the Mahabharata, which had lain asleep for so many centuries, suddenly awoke. It had needed to come out and cross the world. Luckily for us, we were there to help it on its way.”21 Precisely because he was a “naïve” foreigner, Brook could attempt something that most people steeped in The Mahabharata since childhood would ‹nd absurd: to view the work whole and objectively. In the original Sanskrit, the poem is more than 100,000 verses long, and its in›uence today pervades every aspect of life (religion, politics, domestic affairs, economics, entertainment, sports) not only in India but throughout East Asia. Over the centuries, this text long ago became an interpolative sponge and a prodigy of digression, incorporating the entire Bhagavad-Gita (a sacred and beloved Hindu devotional work), for instance, as well as hundreds of folk tales, Vedic teachings, codi‹cations of caste privilege, legal doctrines, moral parables, and genealogical lists justifying royal lineages that go on for pages. Brook and Carrière focused on the eventful tale of fratricidal strife that binds it all together, seeing there “a grandiose attempt to de‹ne the notion of ‘con›ict.’”22 Why do humans continually slaughter one another? And how can mere humans ever know the ultimate value of their actions? These were the main themes chosen for ampli‹cation. Brook and Carrière did not drain the work of spirituality or purge it of Hindu spiritual concepts, but they did use those concepts as complications and surprising disruptions to Western dramatic patterns such as tragedy, epic drama, and the well-made play. They also accentuated parallels with the nuclear arms race. Asked by one interviewer to explain The Mahabharata’s intercultural appeal, Brook said it was “Shakespearean in the true sense of the word.”23 This is the basic story they decided to tell. After complicated preliminaries involving the ancestry of the principal ‹gures and the roots of the main con›ict, two opposing camps of cousins are introduced: the Pandavas, the “sons of light,” and the Kauravas, the “sons of darkness.” The Pandavas—‹ve brothers named Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadeva—are all married to the same woman, Draupadi. The one hundred Kauravas are represented by only the two eldest brothers, the villainous Duryodhana and Dushassana. The titular head of the kingdom is the blind king Dhritarashtra, the Kauravas’ father, who tries to bring up all the cousins together as friends, but when the question of succession foments ugly rivalries, he abdicates moral authority by ceding power to Duryodhana.

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Fig. 3. An archery contest supervised by the ‹ghting master Drona (Yoshi Oida, in black) worsens the enmity between the Pandava and Kaurava cousins in The Mahabharata. (Photo: Gilles Abegg.)

Duryodhana cheats the Pandavas of their inheritance in a crooked dice game, and they are sent into exile for thirteen years, during which they have many adventures and acquire valuable wisdom and experience. They brie›y sample death and acquire expertise in devastating sacred weapons, for example, while being tested by their various fathers (who are gods), and during the ‹nal year they live incognito, assuming disguises contrary to their overt natures at the court of a benevolent king named Virata. When their exile is over they appeal to Duryodhana to deal fairly with them, but he clings to absolute power and both sides prepare for war. The war is a battle between good and evil with important complications, since it involves allies on both sides who are neither villains nor heroes. Fighting with the Kauravas is an exceptional warrior named Karna who is an embittered, long-lost brother of the Pandavas. Also on the Kaurava side are two revered men who cannot be defeated in battle unless they choose to die: the martial master Drona and the saintly ‹gure Bhishma, an ageless family ancestor who in effect caused the crisis of succession by swearing an oath to abjure sex long ago. On the Pandava side is Krishna,

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who advises the brothers on the use of their distinctive heroic strengths. Krishna is an enigmatic ‹gure who takes both human and godly form in the play and who describes the war as an inevitable calamity that the participants must nevertheless try their best to prevent. This war—a grueling eighteen-day struggle that leaves eighteen million people dead—is referred to as an “absolute” con›ict, though it becomes harder and harder for anyone to understand why that must be so. The ‹ghting involves atrocity, supernatural weapons capable of annihilating both humanity and gods (the proto-nukes), the Machiavellian sacri‹ce of virtue, and, climactically, the intervention of the earth. This summary suf‹ces to reveal some very familiar story patterns. Carrière divided the play into three parts entitled “The Game of Dice,”“Exile in the Forest,” and “The War,” which exhibit a jo-ha-kyu rhythm and roughly correspond to the Christian biblical cycle of creation, exodus, and apocalypse. Echoes of Homer are apparent in the heroes’ long absence from home, their recourse to disguise and deceit, and the violence attending their return. The slow-building, battle-capped story that intertwines cosmic order with social order and royal legitimacy strongly recalls Shakespeare. And one critic—David Williams—points out a tragic structure corresponding to Kenneth Burke’s paradigm for classical tragedies: poiema (purpose), pathema (passion or suffering), and mathema (perception).24 Yet while all of these Western patterns are unmistakably present in the text, the production ultimately treated them with a grain of salt. Brook and Carrière apparently needed them as aids in their Herculean effort to impose manageable dramatic form on an untenably digressive, repetitious, and pedantic epic, but when Brook came to shape and balance all the production elements for ‹nal performance most of them ended up as false limbs. It is possible to see Yudhishthira, for instance, the eldest Pandava, as a tragic hero, I suppose: an essentially good but ›awed man who endures extensive trials and painful doubts before acquiring a glimpse of clarity at the point of death. Yet it is hard to see how that notion can be squared with the fact that everyone else in his family suffers similar hardships and meets almost the same end, and the text suggests that all the trials and experiences may have been illusions in any case. The controlling principle in the play is not de‹nitive divine pronouncement, as in tragedy (the unequivocal word of a god), but rather the enigmatic Hindu concept of dharma—roughly, the task or path that humans, collectively and individually, are meant to follow.

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This concept is debated throughout the action and is not easily aligned with either traditional Western religious notions of fate or faith, or traditional tragic conventions like hubris (arrogance), hamartia (error or ›aw), or anagnorisis (recognition). In any case, the emphasis in the production was really on theatricality and the art of storytelling, both of which could be seen as facets of dharma. The story of the Pandavas and Kauravas was given a theatrical frame involving the poet Vyasa, the epic’s putative author, and a nameless boy said to be the descendant of the protagonists. Joining them was the elephantheaded deity Ganesha, wearing a bright robe and an elaborate, bejeweled elephant mask, who acted as a scribe. The conceit was that Vyasa, played by Robert Langdon-Lloyd in a ragged robe, was telling the story to the boy (as the original epic was told to a young prince) for his edi‹cation and improvement: “If you listen carefully, at the end you’ll be someone else.”25 After a while, the actor playing Ganesha (Bruce Meyers) removed his elephant mask and assumed the role of Krishna, the god-man—who later asked Vyasa, “which of us has invented the other?”26 Vyasa sometimes disappeared or stood to the side passively, but he occasionally took part in the story, preventing a murder, fathering children when the “race” was in danger of dying out, weathering reproaches from the characters about the bloodiness of events, and generally ducking responsibility. The result of all this was a sense of existence as a perpetual interplay of acting and spectating, telling and listening, doing and apprehending. All the characters watched each others’ actions and punctuated them with gestures and expressions as the musicians did with sound, not with a noticeably contemporary air as in Nickleby, or with any sort of Pirandellian knowingness, but rather as actors within a drama of and for their world. “Why do you have an elephant’s head?” asked the boy in the ‹rst scene. “If I’ve got to tell my story too, we’ll never ‹nish,” answered Ganesha, before proceeding to tell the whole complicated tale.27 The act of performing, as storyteller or actor, always appeared as a meaningful choice in The Mahabharata, not an automatic or inevitable act. Thus the curiosity of the boy and the imagination of the poet seemed to stand as model qualities for humankind—representing a sort of readiness to accept responsibility, even in the face of uncertainty about the prime mover. It is in this sense that I use the word “theatricality,” a concept whose slipperiness has been much discussed in recent years, since it can be variously

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in›ected to mean sincerity, insincerity, antirealism, metatheater, religious passion, and much more.28 What I mean, and what I believe Brook was celebrating in The Mahabharata, is the quality Ariane Mnouchkine singled out when she once referred to the theater in general as “Oriental.”“The moment one uses the word ‘form’ in connection with theatre, there is already a sense of Asia,” Mnouchkine said. Asked why she had used Asian conventions in a series of Shakespeare productions she directed, she answered: “From Asia comes what is speci‹c to theater, which is the perpetual metaphor which the actors produce—when they are capable of producing it.”29 For some, these remarks may sound simplistically Orientalist, but the idea behind them is not so easily discredited. The point is that, for Mnouchkine, only the formal, the openly histrionic, has a hope of containing and conveying the broad resonance and metaphorical richness of a Shakespeare play. Using the formal is accepting responsibility for breadth of meaning, recognizing that no prosaic approach, no mundane performance language rooted merely in the everyday, will serve in such circumstances. Actually, there is a long tradition (a contrasting Orientalism) that assumes the very opposite. “The West moistens everything with meaning, like an authoritarian religion which imposes baptism on entire peoples,” wrote Roland Barthes in his book on Japan, condemning the entirety of Western theatrical practice with its dreadfully “animate” (i.e., non-puppet-like) actors and its Apollonian artists like Richard Wagner who can do everything.30 Barthes preferred the exquisite “absences” at the heart of transcendentally dry Japanese forms like Bunraku and haiku: “The Form is Empty, says—and repeats—a Buddhist aphorism.”31 Brook, in stark contrast, harbored no such shame about his Western roots in The Mahabharata, which is why he could blithely graft Asian (and African) forms onto the show’s basically realistic trunk (all its acting was rooted in psychology despite wide variations in style) with nary a thought about emptiness or authoritarianism. For him, The Mahabharata was like Mnouchkine’s Shakespeare, a work that obliged him to create a theatrical language that could be both broadly metaphorical and entwined with the moment-to-moment warp of life in its dauntingly complex world. There was a balletic quality to his scenography—a hypnotic blending of music, pictures and words, a ›uid, transformational movement of props, costumes, actors, and scenes—that seemed suffused at all times with purpose, direction, and meaning. (And in this, credit must be shared with the actors, the set and costume designer Chloé Obolensky, and the musical di-

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rector Toshi Tsuchitori.) When Bhima was challenged by a rakshasa or forest spirit, for instance, the ‹ght between them was an astonishingly gymnastic affair that roamed across the whole stage, including the structural climbing rungs up the rear theater wall, accompanied by fusillades of booming percussion. It ended with Bhima ensnaring the demon in his impoverished family’s sole blanket, which was then used to carry the comically stiffened corpse offstage, and a moment later the absence of the blanket made the Pandavas look pitiful when the Kauravas arrived, poised for murder. Scenography had a causal and connective force in its own right. When the Kauravas lit a magic ‹re circle to spy on Arjuna in the mountains, they found that it both empowered and entrapped them. The circle functioned as a kind of long-distance surveillance apparatus but also forced them to sit still while Arjuna stepped back through the ›ames into their space and spoke to them. Then, moments later with the Kauravas gone, the ‹re became the trail of an apsara, or air spirit, who changed the power balance again by tempting Arjuna. Even the language problems of the cast contributed to this ballet—not by providing the cozy polyphonic spectacle of multicultural cooperation that Brook spoke of in interviews but in what I presume was a wholly inadvertent way.32 The harder the actors’ speech was to understand, the more what they did took priority over anything they said. The enunciation of Sotigui Kouyate, for instance, a tall, stately actor from Burkino-Faso who played Bhishma, was comically poor, but the intense charisma that he radiated defused laughter. He presided regally over his scenes in a white robe that remained unsullied even during the war while everyone else grew ‹lthier and ‹lthier, and he rode to battle atop a shoulder-borne platform that became gorgeously festooned with arrows before being transformed into his deathbed. Similarly, the Japanese actor of Drona, Yoshi Oida, could communicate little more than the brusque gruffness of a martinet in English. His physical characterization, however, was as eloquent as a Basho poem, a strikingly disciplined mixture of gestures, poses, expressions, and guttural expostulations derived from Noh, martial arts, and yoga. Standing ‹rmly planted in a black Samurai robe, he seemed to draw energy up from the earthen stage through his feet—which made the coup de théâtre of his death unforgettable: rising from meditation, he reached for a nearby urn and, rooted in place, overturned it on his head, drenching himself in blood. Bruce Meyers, for his part, spoke perfect Oxbridge English, but even he, as Krishna, left far more vivid memories of his actions than of his words.

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Fig. 4. Drona, played by Yoshi Oida, willing his death in The Mahabharata. (Photo: Gilles Agegg.)

The moment when, according to the original epic, Krishna was supposed to enlighten Arjuna (and hence us) about certain core spiritual matters— holding forth about serenity, illusion, and absorption into the “supreme self ” in the famous Bhagavad-Gita, which suspends the war action for about 45,000 words—he did nothing of the kind. Brook and Carrière had reduced the whole thing to a few vague whisperings about understanding “the ancient yoga of wisdom and the mysterious path of action.”33 The essence of Meyers’s performance was his silky voice, his enigmatic smile, and his magical actions that evoked child’s play: he effortlessly decapitated a man with just a ›ick of his wrist followed by a rushing light and a whistle, for instance; he held “›ying” arrows between his ‹ngertips and calmly walked them to their human targets; and he rolled a large wooden wheel about the stage that stood for a chariot he was driving, all the while cracking a whip and imitating horse movements.34 Carrière’s text is no literary masterpiece. It is lumpy, often vague, and written in a blandly aristocratic idiom reminiscent of modernized Shakespeare that makes all the characters sound alike and manages to come off as pretentious despite its efforts to be plainspoken.35 I cannot imagine any

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other director staging it again. Nevertheless, it provided the ideal framework for Brook’s elaborate composition on theatricality, giving it variety, narrative interest and mythic gravity. Carrière framed the various riddles in the play well, for instance, in ways that did not rely on plot suspense for their fascination. How did the Pandavas avoid sexual jealousy? Why did Gandhari (Dhritarashtra’s wife) blindfold herself for life? What conception of dharma could make Yudhishthira (whose father is the god Dharma) gamble away his kingdom and his family’s freedom? It was possible to puzzle over each of these questions separately without necessarily connecting it with anything else because the emphasis on scenography made the action seem like a series of discrete episodes despite the ›uid transitions and the engaging story. Brook’s continually surprising, multicultural trove of staging techniques was like a montage of attractions that whipsawed attention from sensation to sensation. Neither the story alone nor the sensations alone could have held interest over eleven hours (the parts were each three hours, with two meal breaks between them), but in the end the fusion was much more than the sum of its parts.36 The production seemed to be as much about the nature and use of time as about human violence or dharma. The company made no effort to hide the intense physical exertion behind the proli‹c ›ow of demanding techniques, and over many hours their sweating, breathing, and ›exing became a poignant, tactile trope for the perseverance of mortal bodies—fragile ›esh caught but still wriggling in the implacable fact of time. Another smart choice of Carrière’s was to dangle morality-play satisfactions in front of the audience’s nose but then fail to deliver them. The slight childishness of the tales made one expect strict poetic justice—direct rewards and comeuppance for all the characters’ major moral choices. And it arrived in a few cases: the Pandavas ultimately prevailed in the war, and Duryodhana and Dushassana met with low shabby deaths. Practically everything else was morally murky, though, and the more one sought clear, one-to-one connections between actions and their consequences the more one banged up against The Mahabharata’s aforementioned complexity and remarkable ability to incorporate contradiction. Bhishma was revered as a blessed wise man and glori‹ed in death, for instance, but what Karna called his “lunatic promise . . . long ago” to abjure sex caused immense suffering.37 Draupadi was idolized as “the earth’s most perfect creation” and seen as the element that bound the family together, yet she was also the main force of

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Pandava vindictiveness—proud, impatient, and combative.38 In light of the escalation of atrocity in the war (after Krishna convinced Yudhishthira to violate the customary dharmic rules of decency and fair play), Draupadi bore heavy burdens. Krishna himself died an unsung death in the forest, as prophesied. And Yudhishthira, to his horror, found Duryodhana and Dushassana in heaven and Draupadi and his own brothers suffering in hell, after which Vyasa told him to “Stop shouting. You’ve known neither paradise nor hell.” The human conception of reward and punishment, it seems, was “the last illusion.” “Here,” continued Vyasa, “there is no happiness, no punishment, no family, no enemies. Rise in tranquility. Here, words end, like thought.”39 At that point in the ending scene, poetic justice had clearly become irrelevant, as had the whole neat dualistic worldview that supports it (evil overcome by a guaranteed force of good). The comparable notion of karma was touched on in passing on various occasions. So was the disquieting Hindu concept of samsara: the cyclical view of time as a ceaseless ›ow of birth, death, and rebirth that never culminates in a ‹nal judgment like the Christian Bible. What sprang into my mind at the end, however, was something else: a prophetic hermit’s cryptic remark from hours earlier, just before the Pandavas disguised themselves during their exile: “The whole world is putting on masks. You too. Don’t stay naked.”40 The god Dharma had advised the Pandavas to “Choose the disguise of your most secret desires,” and their choices were amusing: strongman Bhima as a cook, warrior Arjuna as a eunuch in drag, Yudhishthira as a Brahmin storyteller and dice-player who never lost.41 But the episode was memorable less for those comic ironies than (like so much else) for its theatricality: everyone at Virata’s court behaved as if the disguises were foolproof even though they were utterly unconvincing. Draupadi’s poise and beauty were immediately conspicuous. Bhima lifted horses with one hand to pass the time. It seemed to me that the hermit was saying, in effect, that while theatrical arti‹ce may have been pleasant before (optional, as it were), it became necessary as the danger of war approached. Necessary as a kind of armor. To regard masking—theatricality in general—in this way as a shield for truth, as a compulsory tool in an alternative approach to dharma, was to understand it (as Pirandello did) as an essential mode of human experience and not merely as a means of amusement. Through all these means, Brook made his production even more “Shakespearean” than its dynastic drama implied. He seized on the old Re-

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naissance convention of theatrum mundi—regarding the world as a stage— and transformed it into a modern principle of human value and survival. Each performance of his Mahabharata production was in this spirit included in a new mapping of the cosmos. As Ganesha repeated Vyasa’s ‹nal line, “This was the last illusion,” the entire company, dressed in white, walked onstage to commune among themselves, sharing wine and food, washing and drinking from the river, ›oating candles on the pool, clapping to the music, and inviting the audience to join them. It was a blissful, idyllic gathering, tantamount to a heavenly curtain call where the distinction between player and spectator disappeared and the applause was by all for all. The last word where “words end” was a picture: of players as people, of the human race as an exhausted yet grati‹ed theatrical company milling about the reclaimed ruin of a venerable old vaudeville house. When I think back on the heated criticism leveled at The Mahabharata after its New York appearance I am unable to separate it from my memories of its production circumstances there—a perfect storm of accidental factors that converged on the show, involving the venue, the mix of artists and critics, the historical moment, and the academic moment. The physical discomforts of the Majestic Theater, the public ›ap over its renovation, the tone of the burgeoning Culture Wars, the scholarly environment generated by Said’s Orientalism and also by the rise of ethnographic Performance Studies, and even a certain chauvinistic prejudice against a high-pro‹le multicultural import from France (a country that had resisted Americanstyle identity politics, despite its plenitude of cultural-political theorists): all of this contributed to the explosion of objections. The Majestic Theater’s role was particularly interesting. Had The Mahabharata played on Broadway like Nicholas Nickleby, the condemnations of it would certainly have been less vehement, because commercial environments lower expectations of ‹ne cultural distinctions. The Majestic, however, was then the new prime pilgrimage site for America’s theaterati, provoking the highest such expectations. The BAM Next Wave Festival, begun in 1983, had quickly positioned itself as the country’s most prominent venue for prestigious foreign theater, and the addition of the renovated Majestic was its ‹rst major expansion. In 1987, the building had been closed and crumbling for twenty years and the area around it was seedy and desolate— a moonscape of potholes, weedy lots, and run-down industrial buildings devoid of the sort of amenities sought by people who can afford $96 theater

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tickets (BAM’s top price for this event). I remember well the evident discomfort of the nicely dressed patrons squirming on the hard bench seats, complaining about the concession food, and (having declined to explore the neighborhood) squeezing together in the lobby during the intermissions. The tone of that moment in American arts scholarship and journalism, signally mistrustful and acrimonious, also played a major role. In the mid1980s, the pages of American academic quarterlies and intellectual weeklies like the Village Voice (where I had just begun writing) were routinely studded with toxic barbs about colonialism, Eurocentrism, patriarchalism, and other historical blindnesses cast as present-tense bad faith. Robert Brustein, in The New Republic, for instance, blasted Brook’s production as “costly ‘poor theater’” that took on “some of the bourgeois grandiosity . . . that made Nietzsche rage so rabidly against Wagnerian opera . . . The Mahabharata demonstrates not so much international harmony and inter-ethnic bonding as the seductions of cultural imperialism. . . . The Majestic has essentially become an expensive colonial outpost for Peter Brook.”42 The most thoughtfully provocative reactions, for me, were three essays by several ‹ne critics of Indian background who saw The Mahabharata in New York. Gautam Dasgupta wrote that “the question to be posed is whether the thematics of ‘Orientalism’ . . . continue to haunt us.” The Mahabharata is nothing, an empty shell, if it is read merely as a compendium of martial legends, of revenge, valor and bravura. And that, precisely, is the reading attributed to [it] by Carrière and Brook. . . . There is no dramatic or epic kernel to [it] outside of its theological value system . . . One should not, under cover of universality of theme or character, undercut the intrinsic core of how [its] characters function within the world of which they are a part.43

Una Chaudhuri agreed, writing that Brook’s production was a “prime example” of the type of interculturalism that “[colludes] in another version of cultural imperialism, in which the West helps itself to the forms and images of others without taking the full measure of the cultural fabric from which these are torn.” This practice . . . claims the interculturalist label for itself and often seeks to elaborate a moral-political model of theatre as a vital (in all senses) cultural exchange. Its critics, however, discern a less-than-equal dimension to its founda-

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tional trope: is the barter truly egalitarian, do both sides gain equally, or is there something of the “glass-beads-for-land” model of exchange at work here? Is this kind of interculturalism a sophisticated disguise for another installment of Orientalism, or worse, of cultural rape?44

The most virulent response was from Rustom Bharucha, whose 11,000word essay “A View from India” analyzed in detail how the production “negate[d] the non-western context of its borrowing.”45 Bharucha was clearly offended that Brook created a “make-believe India, somewhere between imagination and reality, neither here nor there,” replete with “synthetic” Indian music and super‹cial imitations of Indian habits, in order to “ensure ‘human [read Western] identi‹cation.’”46 That approach was irresponsible and unethical, he thought. Before any artist has a right to ask, “What does this epic mean to me?” he has an obligation to see it ‹rst “on as many levels as possible within the Indian context. . . . If Brook truly believes that The Epic is universal, then his representation should not exclude or trivialize Indian culture, as I believe it does.”47 Bharucha, who had just returned permanently to India after many years in the United States, went on to list numerous aspects of Indian life and culture whose absence from the show he saw as detrimental or embarrassing: meaningful caste distinctions, clear understanding of the status of women, sympathy with the epic’s circumlocutionary structure and image of time that “transcends chronology,” for example. Furthermore, he felt the much-touted cultural mixing really came down to egotism: “As much as he dislikes the term, Brook’s Mahabharata is a ‘cultural salad’ of which he is the unacknowledged chef. The materials of this ‘salad’ have come from all parts of the world, but it is Brook’s ‘house dressing’ which gives the ‘salad’ its distinct taste. Occasionally, we do get some faint ‘tastes’ of other cultures,” but most of them are either muted or naïvely enlarged into “a parody of otherness.”48 All these objections are understandable. I do not, however, believe they are tenable. Dasgupta’s claim that Brook undercuts “the intrinsic core of how [The Mahabharata’s] characters function within the world of which they are a part”; Chaudhuri’s charge that Brook does not take “the full measure of the cultural fabric from which [his images] are torn”; and Bharucha’s insistence that Brook was obliged to see the epic ‹rst “on as many levels as possible within the Indian context”: each of these positions attempts to hold theater art to a standard of cultural authenticity that it can

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never live up to without sti›ing its expressive power. Artists are not ethnographers, despite the pressure to view them that way exerted by the fashionable new ‹eld of Performance Studies in the 1980s. In fact, a certain ethnographical sloppiness has always been necessary to theater. Without the ›exibility to alter cultural borrowings at will, how could theater artists ever combine ingredients into integral imagined worlds and coherent statements of their own? It was never clear to me, reading the essays just mentioned, why Brook—even if he was a star and a native of a powerful country that once exploited India—deserved any less freedom to work from unabashed cultural misunderstandings than, say, Shakespeare and Brecht enjoyed when they fancifully depicted cities they had never visited. Julie Stone Peters lucidly summarized the core issue in her 1995 overview of the Mahabharata controversy: To insist that theatre represent things in their “appropriate context” . . . is to insist on the purity of cultural property, and is ‹nally another version of the puritanical insistence that cultural identities have their unyielding boundaries. . . . If orientalism (representation of the foreign as a ‹xed and uniform set of cultural features) means dangerous stereotyping, so does the claim for “authenticity.”49

It would be wrong to simply whitewash Brook in this debate. There seems to me no question that he did create a magical oriental elsewhere as “a theatrical stage af‹xed to Europe,” as Said de‹ned Orientalism.50 Indian novelties and marvels such as Krishna’s moral enigmas, Ganesha’s elephant’s head, Draupadi’s polyandry, and the perplexities of dharma obviously inspired him as irresistible theatrical charms, not features of any geographically and temporally locatable place. Yet we ought to remember that Said’s book concentrates on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the West by and large did not permit the East to de‹ne itself and perpetuated stereotypical ‹ctions of “the Orient.” Brook mounted his production in a postcolonial era when India had long been free to represent itself. In fact, a high-budget Indian TV miniseries of The Mahabharata was being made at precisely the same time as Brook’s production—plainly in›uenced by numerous adapted Western epics in that medium. If Brook’s arti‹cial India seemed ridiculous and unreal to some Indians, that was surely a weakness, not an unfair advantage, and in any case its declared purpose was to explore universal human questions about time, death, violence, and earthly

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existence. The project was driven by feelings of identi‹cation with the exoticized Other, not condescension to it in the spirit Said described of “moral-political admonishment.”51 It seems to me that Brook’s Orientalism was, in the end, nothing more or less pernicious than an impassioned theatrical investment in exoticism per se, seen not just in The Mahabharata but in all his post-1970 work. Brook would not like this description, as he has always stressed his utopian syncretic ambitions and the intimacy of his cultural explorations rather than the aloofness I have described, but I believe exoticism is the right word. The marvels of India, of Persepolis, of Su‹sm, the mystifying neurological maladies described by Oliver Sacks, the bewildering behavior of the Ik (an African people described by Colin Turnbull): since founding CICT, Brook has consistently demonstrated a deep and abiding penchant for material shockingly different from the audience—the faraway, the strange, the bizarre, and the Other. The tremor we feel on encountering such differences is the thrill of the exotic, and for forty years Brook has insisted on his license to evoke this thrill heedlessly, accepting no obligation to ponder any problems of de‹ning “we” and no obligation (as Victor Segalen said) to become a “specialist” in the material presented. His justi‹cation for this view is that, properly handled, such thrills are not super‹cial titillations. They are, or should be, startling confrontations with the incomprehensible that energize people and launch them on a path to exciting and adventurous explorations of both the self and the Other. No Brook production ever demonstrated the viability of this view more effectively than The Mahabharata, which spread its exotic confrontations over so many hours that the audience (those who weren’t offended, that is) experienced the energy within them as a kind of basic life force, an essential creative drive without which existence itself would become dull, monotonous, and torpid. There is a theory (Freudian at root, though Eric Bentley is its most familiar exponent) that traces the core impulses of theatrical enactment to childish desires: to see or be seen, to impersonate, to be omnipotent. Among these desires is the adolescent wish to rebel without having to face the consequence of expulsion from home: “The theater is another country which one can visit without leaving this one,” writes Bentley.52 Segalen wrote similarly of “born Travelers” (he called them “exots”) who could absorb foreign impressions childishly, meaning without relinquishing a se-

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curely familiar mental base, primarily to develop original and “universal” artistic visions.53 Peter Brook is the contemporary theatrical ‹gure who has most forcefully pressed this “naïve” view of creativity on us, again and again testing our tolerance for the manifestations of it that aspire to transcendence. He made his most persuasive case for it in a magni‹cent production that—in no small measure because it occupied an entire day—left basic theatrical inventiveness looking like humanity’s saving grace.

chapter four Angels in America

americans, tony kushner once said, are “allergic to politics in the theater.”1 Many intrepid souls have cultivated political theater in the United States, but historically the genre has been more often thought of as an irritating weed than a crop that might nourish the public as part of a regular diet. Overtly political American dramatists have usually paid for their passion with obscurity. Which is no doubt one reason why the politics in most of our canonized “Great American Plays” (GAPs)—Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Our Town, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Buried Child, and American Buffalo, for example—lie deeply tucked away beneath psychological narratives about family and personal relationships. Interestingly enough, in the mid-1990s, during the brief Clintonian ›irtation with public self-examination, a group of overtly political American playwrights—including Kushner, Robert Schenkkan, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks—rose to national eminence, and even won commercial exposure on Broadway, without making apologies for raising unpleasant questions about power, identity, community, and enfranchisement. No play in that curious commercial-political blip, however, received anything like the public attention of Kushner’s Angels in America—which was exalted by our most prominent critics and prestigious prize committees as the newest legitimate GAP despite being a seven-hour, Brecht-inspired epic that used gay New Yorkers as emblematic Americans and queerness as a trope for the examined life. Angels in America was a real revelation for me. By 1993, when the work arrived in New York, I had more or less given up on Brechtian epic theater, the form that all my revered teachers and critical heroes had said was supposed to solve the problem of fusing explicit politics with the popular bour71

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geois dramatic tradition. During more than a decade of indefatigable theatergoing then, including two years living in Germany, I had never seen a Brecht play truly outshine the preachy demands of its conventional parable, and had certainly never seen staged political discourse by Brecht’s followers or anyone else that generated the kind of mass excitement and energy Kushner’s play did. This drama seemed to me something new in the American theater landscape—a bold announcement by an exciting, fresh voice that not quite everything had yet been tried to counteract the historical amnesia and complacency of our mainstream repertory. Kushner’s modest claim is that much of the rapturous reception of Angels in America at its New York premiere was due to lucky timing, and he is unquestionably right.2 The two halves of the work opened on Broadway, directed by George C. Wolfe, six months apart in 1993 (Part One: Millennium Approaches in May and Part Two: Perestroika in November), and their topicality and politics were perfectly aligned with the surging emotions of that cultural-political moment. The action was set in 1985 and 1986 (except for an epilogue in 1990), telling the stories of ‹ve gay men, two straight women, and some two dozen subsidiary characters struggling with AIDS, couple problems, the policies and politics of the Reagan administration, and an elaborate scheme by angels to lure an absconded God back to heaven. How cheeky, whip-smart, and devastatingly perceptive this play was about all the public and private moral slippages that had allowed the Reagan revolution to occur. Both the play and its eight superb actors crackled with wit and impudence, employing the self-conscious hilarity of gay camp to name and thereby unmask the mechanisms of self-serving power and authority that crossed their paths.“God almighty . . . Very Steven Spielberg,” said Kushner’s un›appable, AIDS-ravaged hero about an angel who crashed through his ceiling—an unforgettable would-be deus ex machina from the ‹nale of Part One.3 And that cheekiness was only part of the effect. The work also trembled with earnest hunger for some ecstatic millenarian experience not de‹led by the cynicism and know-nothing intolerance of the American religious Right. Seven years before the activist preacher Reverend Billy began attracting crowds of hip young nonbelievers with his hilarious anticonsumerist sermons around New York, Angels tapped a leftist longing for spiritual cleansing and communal reinvention—rising above its materialist worldview in the course of insisting on it. Angels in America thundered into New York like a jolting aftershock from the 1992 presidential election, winning the Pulitzer Prize and four

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Tony Awards for Millennium Approaches before Perestroika arrived. Its parts ran in alternating repertory at the Walter Kerr Theatre for more than a year—astonishing for any nonmusical, let alone a politically barbed marathon that wasn’t a London import. Even in December 1993, when I saw the parts together in one day, memories were still fresh of the string of nationally televised speeches at the Republican National Convention the previous August that spewed homophobic and antifeminist hatred and intolerance in the name of righteousness and “family values.” Bill Clinton had promised to stem that tide of smug hypocrisy and redeem the raft of Reaganite depravities that went along with it: indifference to the AIDS crisis, veneration of greed and sel‹shness, voodoo economics, demagogic attacks on the arts. Clinton had also openly accepted the support of the new national queer power movement during his campaign, which coincided with several glowing New York Times articles by Frank Rich about earlier versions of Angels in Los Angeles and London. The play’s arrival on Broadway was thus primed to resound like a glorious antirequiem for twelve years of maddening and infuriating misrule. There was something extravagant, gustatory, and palpably cathartic about the laughter it generated at the Walter Kerr, as if its innumerable jokes were blasts from some phantasmagorical power-hammer pumping nails of wit into the cof‹n of the Reagan/Bush era. The enthusiasm wasn’t all re›ex. Several critics also appreciated Angels as a play about AIDS that did not (like the two most prominent AIDS plays before it, William Hoffman’s As Is and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart) trade primarily on pathos or present itself as a plea for attention from an ignored minority.4 It treated the disease instead as a national crisis. Kushner had chosen the bleakest years of the epidemic in America for his setting, when treatment options were few, more than 20,000 people were infected, and Ronald Reagan had publicly mentioned the disease only once in response to a reporter’s question.5 The risks of sentimentality and preachiness were enormous with such material, yet Kushner never succumbed to easy emotion or special pleading. He was too interested in the huge and thorny questions about American citizenship that his subject matter opened up. The work was vatic and visionary without ever descending into the pompous or stilted. Kushner seemed to be prodding history, placing ordinary gay men on a national stage by artistic ‹at, through breezily trenchant encounters with angels, establishment Mormons, a grizzled old Kremlin of‹cial, and the lawyer Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s notoriously unscrupu-

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lous, bulldog protégé and a conservative icon who was “outed” by AIDS when he died of it in 1986. Cohn was in turn haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, whose execution for atomic espionage he had ensured. The play was a whimsically rigorous, sweetly heady blend of realism and theatricalist fantasy whose wonderfully bizarre surprises were outside the imaginative ken of any living political dramatist I was aware of, except perhaps Caryl Churchill. The work was channeling Churchill and Charles Ludlam more powerfully than Brecht, blending their complementary lunacies into a potent new compound as Kushner turned to gender twists and multiple casting to help turn his domestic con›icts into facets of major historical, political, and religious struggles. Angels was fresh and startling in one other way as well. It was anomalously articulate for an American drama—possibly one reason it evoked intemperate enthusiasm among American intellectuals who had never been quite satis‹ed with Eugene O’Neill and his stammering “fog people” as the nation’s crowning dramatic achievement. Kushner clearly had no empathy with the much-discussed mistrust of language in the American character, or with the demotic degeneracy of public discourse in the media age (eloquently lamented by the historian Tony Judt in one of his end-of-life memoirs written in 2010: “The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today”).6 Like Bernard Shaw in another land and era, Kushner believed unabashedly in words, in words as both tools of serious public discourse and forgers of previously unavailable spaces for that discourse. He gave his play a Shavian subtitle—“A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” echoing Shaw’s subtitle for Heartbreak House, “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes”—as if to underscore his provocative assumption that even Americans could savor sustained, intelligent talk and intense, rational debate in the theater.7 Most provocative of all was the play’s view of the American nation through the eyes of gays rather than the other way round—gays, moreover, who were comfortable in their skin and not fearful, ashamed, or apologetic about their existence. Gays and gay culture were this production’s de-exoticized exotica. Angels was not the ‹rst American play to depict homosexuality as normal and unexceptional but it was by far the most prominent, and when it entered the regional repertory in the years after its New York run its visibility and impact expectably sparked right-wing outrage, as well as sporadic censorship and controversy around the United States.8 More surpris-

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ingly, it also irritated some on the left because of its stance of gay universalism. The hopeful, unifying call for tolerance in Kushner’s rainbow-coalition epilogue struck some partisans of identity politics as milquetoast liberalism, and certain demanding Brecht devotees found its dialectics unrigorous. I, for one, found it hard to credit any arguments that didn’t appreciate the work’s vivacious recklessness. Like Nicholas Nickleby and The Mahabharata, Angels was a world-embracing, heaven-storming conception whose force and inspiration emanated from its scale, its playfulness, its radiant joy, and its garrulous messiness. Angels in America was a commissioned work. Oskar Eustis, who later became head of the Public Theater in New York, was then a resident director and dramaturg at the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco, and having directed Kushner’s ‹rst play, A Bright Room Called Day, in 1987, Eustis invited him to apply for a National Endowment for the Arts special projects grant to create a new play for the Eureka. Kushner considered the chances of getting this grant nil, since the Reagan administration was still in of‹ce, Bright Room (loosely based on Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich) had explicitly compared Reagan to Hitler, and the playwright had no intention of sugarcoating his proposal to write a two-and-a-half-hour drama, with songs and an angel, about ‹ve gay men including Roy Cohn and a closeted Mormon. In 1988, to their shock, they received $57,000—an enormous sum for a small theater at that time and a pointed testimony to what was later lost when the NEA peer-review process became politicized under the elder President Bush. Kushner felt the prospect of working in San Francisco gave him the “permission” he needed to write about gayness for the ‹rst time.9 He was thirty-one, had grown up Jewish and closeted in Louisiana, and was still adjusting to being an “out” New Yorker. It was the composition of the Eureka Theater Company—which he hadn’t considered when writing his longshot NEA application, and which included three women who expected substantial parts—that ‹rst forced him to broaden his conception: “the play became suddenly eight lead characters, which, of course, is going to make for a long play.”10 Accepting federal money also made him feel obligated to open the work up to issues of nationality and history—an expansiveness strongly encouraged by the uncommonly literate Eustis, whose taste and working habits were formed partly in the dramaturg-friendly environment of Swiss and German theaters. “The play was really begun in conversation

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with [Eustis],” Kushner said.11 The Afterword to Perestroika generously credits Eustis, Kushner’s friend Kimberly Flynn, George Wolfe, and at least a dozen others with contributing substantial ideas and material to Angels. Eustis prompted Kushner with discussions of contemporary politics, including the promise of perestroika and the demise of the Soviet Union, which occurred during the development of the play. Flynn steered his attention to Walter Benjamin, whose well-known text describing the “angel of history” in Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus”—who looks backward at “wreckage upon wreckage” while being blown forward by the storm of “progress”—became a thematic lodestar for Angels.12 And Kushner had his own unresolved feelings about Brecht, the “progenitor,” he said, from whom he most needed “to wrest an independent persona.”13 Despite all this, it would be misleading to present Kushner’s impulse as predominantly highbrow, because, as he also said, his nature is that of a “magpie” who habitually absorbs and imitates vast quantities of material from the ultratrivial to the superserious.14 “I’m very in›uenced, as any American ought to be, by garbage,” he told the novelist Michael Cunningham. “I get very cranky if I don’t have my comics every day. And there’re a lot of TV shows that I really love . . . Theater is as much a part of trash culture as it is high art.”15 In a lecture-essay called “On Pretentiousness” that he wrote during Angels’s Broadway run, Kushner described his aesthetic as one of “opulence,” “bombast,” and “habitual ›orid overstep,” adding that he considered this “self-indulgent” approach quintessentially American and indispensable to making effective political theater.16 “Theater that isn’t entertaining isn’t worth doing,” he wrote elsewhere: Theater that’s explicitly political has to be very entertaining and very well done or it will be very easily dismissed. If we do political theater, theater that will be perceived as political, that addresses political issues or addresses issues politically, we are starting out with one big strike against us. We will have to be better than most, not just as good as.17

What was most impressive about the playwriting craft of Angels was the ‹nesse and con‹dence with which Kushner kept so many different dramatic balls in the air for so long, simultaneously evoking and transcending the trivializing and ahistorical “trash culture” paradigms that he plainly loved and loathed all at once. He came off (to switch metaphors) like a devious organic baker sneaking healthy whole-grain ingredients into Broad-

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way’s overprocessed bread and butter. He once told an interviewer that he almost stopped writing Millennium Approaches at one point because “I thought I was writing a soap opera,” but a soap plot turned out to be the perfect scaffolding for his formidable assemblage of “pretentious” surprises—a “childish” core in the material, which the stern parent of “history” unbendingly pushed into maturity.18 Here is a brief plot summary of Millennium Approaches, which I have deliberately purged of interesting ironies, allusions, and resonances to demonstrate this point. New York City: 1985. Prior Walter and Louis Ironson are a hip, young gay couple whose relationship is thrown into crisis when Prior learns he has AIDS. Joe and Harper Pitt are a young Mormon couple, unhappy but toughing it out with the help of prayer, as he clerks for a right-wing appeals court judge and she escapes from grim reality with Valium and elaborate fantasies. Unable to hide his long-repressed homosexuality, Joe begins a ›irtation with Louis, who works as a word-processor at the courthouse. Unable to cope with the pain and mess of Prior’s illness, Louis leaves him as soon as he is hospitalized and begins an affair with Joe, who leaves Harper. Harper ›ees to a fantasy Antarctica with an imaginary travel-agent named Mr. Lies, and when she is arrested one night in her nightgown in Prospect Park, chewing a pine tree, she is brought home by Hannah Pitt, Joe’s mother, who arrives in the nick of time from Utah. Meanwhile, Joe vacillates over a job offer in the Justice Department that his friend Roy Cohn has arranged for him, the catch being that Roy has been caught in a corruption scandal and wants Joe to help thwart the investigation from Washington. Roy is another closeted gay, who learns he has AIDS (lying to the world that he has liver cancer), and in the hospital he is visited by the gloating ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. A campy, delightfully selfpossessed black nurse named Belize, who was once a drag queen and happens to be friends with Louis and Prior, is assigned to Roy, and the friction between them sparks marvelous verbal fencing. Through all of this, Prior is visited by ghostly family ancestors who died of plagues in previous centuries (prior Priors) and hears voices telling him to “prepare the way.”19 He assumes he is delusional until the angel crashes through his ceiling just before the curtain, announcing: “Greetings, Prophet: The Great Work begins: The Messenger has arrived.”20 What I hope is clear from this summary is how easy Kushner made it for his Broadway audience to feel happy and comfortable before they were seriously disturbed or discom‹ted. It was possible to assume through more

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than half of Millennium Approaches that the core of Angels was a conventional domestic drama about two couples in relationship trouble—a quipleavened soap opera, in essence, with nonrealistic embellishments and a tragicomic hue due to the presence of AIDS. The political thrust and grave moral edge of the plot didn’t become fully evident until well past midplay, and by then the wandering-spouses story had strongly harked back not only to TV serials but also to the enormous body of sub-Ibsenian maritalproblem plays that had appeared on Broadway without pause since the turn of the twentieth century, from Clyde Fitch to Philip Barry to William Inge to Lanford Wilson, sprinkling dashes of harmless social critique onto essentially ›attering re›ections of their audiences’ bourgeois lifestyles. Given Kushner’s contempt for this material, it is courageous that he invoked it at all. But it was obviously a lure, and he wasted no time opening up his ‹eld of vision far beyond it (without ever entirely dropping it). My impression, watching George C. Wolfe’s production, was that the entire arc of expectation through Millennium was planned around a carefully paced playing out of theatrical coups that kept expanding the dramatic context and rescuing the domestic tale from its mundane limitations. It was as if Kushner and Wolfe (in the spirit of Nunn and Brook in Nickleby and The Mahabharata) had devised fresh means of lifting the action beyond the literal and probable for use whenever they brought in some new aspect of the literal and probable material. This was no template work by a Brecht epigone, like Bright Room, but a puzzle solved piece by piece, from scratch. Before describing these decisions and effects, let me brie›y acknowledge that many readers of this book will know Angels in America only from the ‹lm version directed by Mike Nichols that was broadcast on PBS over two evenings in 2003 and distributed commercially as a DVD. Far more effective in its way than either Jim Goddard’s TV adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby or the limp and inert ‹lm of The Mahabharata that Brook directed in 1989, Nichols’s Angels nevertheless necessarily sacri‹ced the play’s theatrical core. Because of ‹lm’s irresistible gravitational pull toward realism, even when dealing with fantasy, Nichols’s work could not help being illustrative. It had narrative power as a ‹lm and contained some splendid acting, but it naturalized Kushner’s fantastic effects and thereby undid the deliberate arti‹ciality that gave the stage play such strong political traction. The opening scene of the play, for example, did not introduce any of the principal characters but rather an old rabbi beside a cof‹n, delivering a curiously goading eulogy in front of the curtain for a woman he said he

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didn’t know (Louis’s grandmother, we later learned). Onstage and in the ‹lm, the rabbi was played by a woman, but only in the theater was the actor, Kathleen Chalfant, recognizable as female behind her crepe beard, stagey Yiddish accent, and high nasal voice. Her rabbi drag was drily amusing and also fascinating as a distancing effect (Verfremdungseffekt) that highlighted the notion of performed, or chosen, identity. The dead woman, said the improvising rabbi, was “not a person but a whole kind of person” who bravely left the familiar world of the shtetl, struggled to make ends meet, and fought for the integrity of the Jewish family “in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted.”21 This scene in the ‹lm served primarily as a platform for virtuosic impersonation by Meryl Streep, who was indistinguishable from a man. Onstage, it was a slyly ambiguous prologue that touched obliquely on the deconstruction of several American myths. Addressing the theater audience as if we were the dead woman’s thoughtlessly assimilated relatives, Chalfant’s cross-dressed sectarian praised her as “the last of the Mohicans” and parted with a strange scold, in Yiddish syntax, that seemed to urge a much more global and relational view of the world than s/he possessed: You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.22 The next scene was a showcase for another actor—Ron Liebman. A smart, leather-and-wood law of‹ce unit rolled on to become the “civilized” foil for his over-the-top uncivil, scene-stealing, tour de force portrayal of Roy Cohn. (Robin Wagner’s setting for the production consisted mostly of neat, compact rolling units de‹ning speci‹c locations on discrete parts of the otherwise empty stage.) Liebman-as-Cohn was revealed conducting business on the phone with demonic mania—cajoling, bullying, and barking at the receiver while Joe Pitt, his mild-mannered admirer and would-be protégé (played by David Marshall Grant), sat nearby trying ineffectually to interrupt. Again, this scene was nothing like the realistic, civilized professional encounter in the ‹lm, between Al Pacino as Cohn and Patrick Wilson as Joe Pitt. Grant’s Joe, like the audience, could do little more than marvel at the spitting, fuming, bulge-eyed, red-faced, infantile Barabas played by Liebman, who violently punched his “hold” button while shouting lines like

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“I wish I was an octopus, a fucking octopus” at the unseen listeners on the line.23 His tirade was whiney, belligerent, fey, and virile by turns, veering off without warning from business into Benjaminian introspection: You hold. I pay you to hold fuck you Harry you jerk. (Button) Half-wit dick brain. (Instantly philosophical) I see the universe, Joe, as a kind of sandstorm in outer space with winds of mega-hurricane velocity, but instead of grains of sand it’s shards and splinters of glass. You ever feel that way?24 This performance was as much standup or sketch comedy as ensemble acting, albeit on a plane of existential paranoia miles beyond the borscht belt. All the scene’s plot information—the prospect of the job at the Justice Department, for instance—came off as vastly less important than the gesticulations of this furious octopus. Astonishingly, Liebman maintained the same high amperage through the entire afternoon and evening, summoning new bursts of energy and variety even during his climactic hospital-bed scenes when his character was dying. “Hold” was Roy’s desperate last word. Liebman’s performance thus established Roy as a larger-than-life presence, a monster the audience could enjoy and hate in equal measure. No comparable monster existed in either Nicholas Nickleby or The Mahabharata, and in fact an overwhelmingly demonic character is hard to incorporate into marathon drama because his fearsomeness tends to exhaust itself long before the end. Goethe is the one great dramatist to ‹nd an effective solution to this problem—in his twopart Faust, discussed in chapter 7—yet interestingly enough, Kushner emulated that solution only in part. Like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, Roy was presented as a colorful, iconic ur-villain who could spur meditation on evil and keep the audience interested in moral and political exploration long after the play’s sentimental “hook” tale had run its emotional course. As in Faust, the villain’s ›amboyance lifted him above mere villainy, and made the audience less interested in judging him in the end than in listening to him. Kushner did not, however, emulate Goethe’s decision to blend his villain into his hero gradually over the course of the long work, merging them for the sake of a grandly comprehensive, morally capacious picture of humanity. Kushner’s choice was rather to keep Roy’s villainy anchored in speci‹c historical and personal contexts, and use interpersonal sel‹shness as an in-

Fig. 5. Ron Liebman as Roy Cohn during a maniacal phone conversation in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, directed by George C. Wolfe, Walter Kerr Theatre, New York City, 1993. (Photo: Joan Marcus. Reproduced courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

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dex of moral bankruptcy in government and social policy during Roy’s time. The strategy basically mirrored Churchill’s, Edgar’s, and David Hare’s in their anti-Thatcherite plays of the 1980s. Roy and Joe were used as agents of sel‹shness, linked both as friends and as proponents of a morally blinkered, right-wing ideology. Though Joe eventually declined the Justice Department job as unethical, he enthusiastically parroted Roy’s cold-blooded, individualism-run-amok life philosophy often enough to mark him as another kind of monster—more hateful for being human scale. This was Roy’s paternal advice to Joe early in Millennium: Love; that’s a trap. Responsibility; that’s a trap too. Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself.25 And here are two bits of fond advice Joe offers to Louis in Perestroika: It was your choice [to leave Prior alone in the hospital], what you needed . . . Forget your victimology.26 *

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There’s a genuine violence softness and weakness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.27 At the end of Millennium’s ‹rst act, when Roy’s doctor Henry (played by a woman, Chalfant) informed him he had AIDS, his argumentative response was, tellingly, not about death, bodily breakdown or loss of dignity, but rather about loss of stature: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels . . . Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. . . Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identi‹ed ‹t in the food chain, in the pecking order? . . . Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in ‹fteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout . . . I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every

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man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is de‹ned entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys.28 This sort of inextricable braiding of the personal with the macropolitical, and later the theological as well, became the hallmark of Kushner’s play. Cohn’s personal crisis was a political crisis, a struggle for physical survival that shed daylight on the hypocrisies behind his professional survival, and in his case that daylight was recognizably Brechtian, involving the unmasking of an authority ‹gure like the police chief in Threepenny Opera, the pope in Galileo, or the gods in The Good Person of Setzuan. With ordinary civilians like Louis, Joe, and Harper, the tone was more Tennessee Williams or Thornton Wilder embellished with dialectical grace notes. The violent climactic lovers’ quarrel between Louis and Joe in Perestroika, for instance, grew out of Louis’s refusal to stop quoting from an implicitly homophobic legal decision that Joe had ghost-written for his judge. And all of Harper’s fantasies—ostensibly the consequence of her private unhappiness and isolation—involved jarring poetic swings between the cosmic and the mundane as well as wide-roaming talk about epochal historical shifts and the breakdown of “old ‹xed orders” and “beautiful systems.”29 The play was replete with such nonrealistic encounters that advanced the theme of embattled systems, orders and categories, and this was the sense in which the action could be fairly called a fantasia. Perestroika was loopy and free-form, and much of it dissolved the distinction between realism and fantasy, disregarding the domestic plot completely for long stretches while building toward a culminating episode in heaven (a place “remarkably” reminiscent of San Francisco) where Prior and a convocation of hermaphroditic angels considered freezing all human movement (hence all systems). Like Benjamin’s hapless angel of history with his back turned toward the future “while the pile of debris before him grows skyward,” Kushner’s reactionary angels fetishized the past and dreamed of arresting the frightening onslaught of progress.30 Meanwhile, Prior demurred. Parts of Millennium prepared the ground for this drama of competing revelations, such as an early mutual-dream sequence where Harper and Prior examined and de-exoticized each other twenty-seven scenes before they actually met.

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prior: I’m a homosexual. harper: Oh! In my church we don’t believe in homosexuals. prior: In my church we don’t believe in Mormons.31 Only in Perestroika, however, did this sort of “magic of the theater” counterlogic develop into a frame for teaching and learning: a nineteenth-century Mormon-pioneer manikin came alive to help Harper understand the violent limits of God’s love; and the angels’ attempt to press Prior into service as the prophet of their new gospel of immobility and inaction ultimately opened his eyes to the reasons why the rights and dignity of a citizen matter to a person with AIDS. But the most original political gesture of the play, in my view, was Kushner’s use of gay camp as the dominant mode of humor—another theatrical element that was muted, and sometimes erased, in Nichols’s ‹lm. Angels’s microcosmic America was a peculiar place: all the people in it were citizens, but none was ever wholly con‹dent of being an insider—including the WASP hero Prior. For this reason, it seemed, everyone became a wry, preternaturally articulate observer, particularly concerning the mechanics of power. Prior’s quip when the Angel broke through his ceiling, “God almighty . . . Very Steven Spielberg” (omitted in the ‹lm) was the perfect demonstration of camp’s basic tactic of puncturing, exposing the theatrical effort behind the angel’s arrival while marking Prior as the puncturer, or leveler, par excellence. Earlier, Prior had even used puns to mock the gravity of his virus: “I’m a lesionnaire . . . My troubles are lesion” (referring to his Kaposi’s sarcoma).32 And deadpan Hannah, the Mormon mother from Utah, ensured that his camp never became an incubator of egoism: prior: [quoting A Streetcar Named Desire] I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. hannah: Well that’s a stupid thing to do.33 The fact that Hannah and other straight characters also participated in the camp made it much more than a style or tag of recognition for a group proudly asserting an identity. Spread across the dramatis personae, this humor became a pervasive attitude, a sort of diffuse, acrid abrasiveness that burst all bubbles of unearned aggrandizement before they ever in›ated very large. Even the old rabbi from the opening used it when blasting Louis for shirking responsibility by speaking of himself as a category:

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louis: Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need? . . . rabbi: The Holy Scriptures have nothing to say about such a person. louis: Rabbi, I’m afraid of the crimes I may commit. rabbi: Please, mister. I’m a sick old rabbi facing a long drive home to the Bronx. You want to confess, better you should ‹nd a priest. louis: But I’m not a Catholic, I’m a Jew. rabbi: Worse luck for you, bubbulah. Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in Guilt.34 I am aware of the debate among gay critics about whether camp becomes politically neutralized when applied outside the gay subculture. Richard Dyer has written, for instance: “something happens to camp when it’s taken over by straights—it loses its cutting edge, its identi‹cation with gay experience, its distance from the straight sexual world-view.”35 Obviously, I think Kushner’s writing retained a political edge, though I would concede that he failed to solve all the plausibility problems his generalized camp raised. There were points, for instance, when it jangled with certain facts of plot and character—most glaringly with Harper, who was too freighted with gay male codings to be entirely convincing as a straight woman. Consider her quips about cult ‹lms (“There’s something creepy about this place. Remember Rosemary’s Baby?”);36 her genital ‹xation (“There’s your breasts, and your genitals, and they’re amazingly stupid”; “I miss Joe’s penis”);37 and her choice of San Francisco to begin a new life. Yet the more basic failing with Harper was that her character (like Joe’s) was insuf‹ciently realized. Marcia Gay Harden played her as a grownup child with a shrill voice like the Peanuts character Lucy and, at one point, shoulder braids like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Her drawn-out emotional collapse grew tedious and redundant long before the end. Such blemishes notwithstanding, though, what was remarkable was how much mileage Kushner did get out of the puncturing (or de›ationary) principle behind the camp. De›ation turned out to be a central structural tension in Perestroika, set against powerful forces of in›ation and aggrandizement that were also crucial to keeping the play “very entertaining” (Kushner’s phrase). The characters spent much of Perestroika ‹guring out how to live with the practical problems and complications revealed in Millennium, as they also wrestled with angels amid ›aming alephs, ascended to heaven on a glowing ladder, and conversed mysteriously with diorama

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‹gures. The action simultaneously soared toward lofty matters such as the abdication of God, the disintegration of venerable cultures, and apocalyptic prophesies envisioning an end to history, and dwelled on mundane issues like Joe bloodying Louis’s face, Harper asking Joe for his credit card before leaving their marriage, and Belize stealing the dead Roy’s stash of the experimental drug AZT for Prior. In the most glaring irony, the sexually omnivorous, voluptuous, immortal angels were advocates of stasis, ‹xity, and intellectual stagnation, whereas emaciated, AIDS-stricken, earthbound Prior was the champion of perpetual migration, curiosity, self-reinvention, and progress (the blessings of American individualism and restlessness). Numerous critics (notably David Savran and Matthew Wilson Smith) have pointed out that Angels in America is, at heart, politically ambivalent.38 The play tugs paradoxically toward radical revolutionary upheaval on the one hand and toward gradual progressive reform on the other. As Smith writes, the “mystical,” suprahistorical millennium approaches but is inde‹nitely postponed by the practical historical complications of American perestroika (“peaceable” liberalization from within).39 This is an important point, but I would add that Kushner is aware of it, and that it ought to be considered from a theatrical angle as well, because the play contains an ambivalence toward theatrical spectacle that is a facet of its political ambivalence. In an interesting essay, Martin Harries has said that Kushner used spectacle to update Brecht’s distancing techniques for an age when they have become predictable conventions and thus complicit with what they were meant to criticize. “The theater must cease to be magical in order to become critical,” was Roland Barthes’s pithy summary of Brecht’s dramaturgy in 1955.40 Harries says that Kushner employed the sacred and supernatural to “reverse Barthes’s lesson,” arguing in effect that “to become critical the theater must begin again to be magical”: Political and entertainment apparatuses [today] advertise their constructedness, paradoxically reenacting a classic maneuver of disenchantment: to show the “inner workings” of power should demystify it. But this putative demysti‹cation has the opposite effect: “disenchantment” itself becomes supernatural; the disavowal of magic becomes magical. The look of the hand-held camera now forms part of a “style,” laboriously achieved. . . In Angels in America estranging the real now includes the imperative to estrange a new sort of magic: that is, the theater must represent the new social magic as magic in order to demystify it.41

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Harries’s observation is illuminating, I think, as long as allowances are made for the fact that Kushner is not as politically radical as Brecht. “It’s OK if the wires show,” wrote the playwright in his staging notes to Angels, “and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing.”42 This, essentially, is the pact Kushner made with the devil Entertainment to get a critical hearing for his prophesies in the 1990s spectacle society: Americans would listen to his political discourse as long as his Verfremdung was dumbfounding. In fact, as he learned, under such conditions they would listen for seven hours. The closest Kushner has come to offering a comprehensive theory of his ideal theater is a long essay called “Notes About Political Theater,” published in 1997 in The Kenyon Review. This essay mentions Brecht—the author whose example Kushner says convinced him to be a playwright— only brie›y about halfway through its 8,300 words, after which it skips quickly past him to describe more thoroughly the af‹nity Kushner feels with Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous, “the ‹rst openly gay aesthetic.”43 Early in the essay, Kushner concentrates on describing the theater he loathes, which is very various and turns out to include many of the hallowed traditions of American drama. He catalogues the GAPs, so to speak, that he sees his new art superseding (without explicitly naming them) before going on to describe the art. I will quote several substantial passages from this wonderful screed because it is the most eloquent and penetrating analysis I have read of the allergy mentioned at the opening of this chapter: the historical American resistance to political discourse onstage. Over the years, I had attributed this problem to a phobia to didacticism in the American character. Possibly because Americans tend to see themselves as custodians of democracy and fair play, many of us possess hypersensitive early-warning alarms for stories with stacked decks. That seems to me why drama in the agit-prop tradition—from the Proletbuehne to the San Francisco Mime Troupe to the Irondale Ensemble—has almost always remained a marginalized affair on American stages, and why topical ‹recrackers such as Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty and Mark Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock have invariably faded into objects of activist nostalgia soon after their headline-grabbing indignation has worn off. Agit-prop comes off as too crudely manipulative for a people that cherishes both the illusion and the reality of free choice, and “closed” parables like Brecht’s (i.e., those

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whose ideological questions are already decided) smack too much of the hard sell. This is an explanation of why Brecht, whose post–Jungle of Cities plays always had Marxism up their sleeves (and on them), received such a cold shoulder in the American theater during his American exile and why his work (apart from Threepenny Opera, a patently commercial exception) has never been truly popular in the United States—notwithstanding Kushner’s “very entertaining” translations of The Good Person of Setzuan (1994) and Mother Courage (2006). Kushner understands this issue well but he also sees deeper into it. He says that the reason Americans “reject the pedagogical function of theater” is that we have a damaged relationship to education, which is too often “boring, unsensual, and worthless” in our society. Also, because we “suffer from collective amnesia,” we resent being force-fed information about a past we feel we have a right to forget.44 Faced with these limitations, Americans over time developed a pervasive set of “aesthetic codes” that have allowed us to feel we are probing beneath narrative surfaces while actually doing no such thing. These codes “preclude complex political discourse far more effectively than any government censor could hope to accomplish,” says Kushner.45 An example is our fateful view of the individual and the family, the characteristic agon in American drama from O’Neill to Miller to Albee to Shepard. The principal antagonists and agents of our drama are individuals, usually white men, or families, usually white families. The individual is important to us; he gives us something to “care” about. We are apparently incapable of caring about issues, or ideas, or communities, or at least we believe ourselves to be; if we personally are capable of such empathic leaps, we assume it is our audience that is unable and must be served up a regular menu of individuals and their individual problems. The family is regularly hauled into service as the contemporary stand-in for fate: that which must be struggled against and, inevitably, succumbed to. Both phenomena, the individual and the family, are given validation by being treated as facts and forces of nature.46

Another code of this kind is our insistence on strict distinctions between the personal and the political. Most mainstream American art (and Kushner uses the term “mainstream” to describe himself)47 establishes a ‹rm wall between them, which Kushner attributes to an “unsophisticated” understanding of psychology on the part of most Americans.

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In a lot of theater in this country, the personal is what you make art out of and the political is what you try to avoid discussing at parties; or maybe an occasional current event worms its way into the theater you do, which is ‹ne. Politics in moderation spices up the proceedings, adds a contemporary punch to that tired second act in which Joe Sr. and Joe Jr. have it out in the kitchen following a late-night drinking spree, as long as the real issues are adhered to: Joe Jr.’s rotten childhood, caused by Joe Sr.’s rotten childhood. The personal is personal, the political is personal, and the problems of Joe, father and son, must ultimately be ascribed to that old villain, human nature, the precise character of which is inferred but never too closely examined, understood by all to be ambivalent, competitive, lonely, sinful, incurious, and anti-intellectual. There is a great dread of in›icting the political upon the psychological, true locus of the aesthetic event.48

This familiar insistence on keeping politics in a pigeonhole outside the boundaries of “human interest stories” is widely seen as innocuous but it is actually insidious, not only because it severely circumscribes the content of American drama but also because it perpetuates the downgraded status of theater (along with all other imaginative activity) in the scale of public urgency. It is one reason why culture in America is always treated as soft news. The “class-based division between science and the humanities,” says Kushner, creates a “mildly depressed” atmosphere in which our “Palaces of Art” become temples for dwelling on failure: “Those problems are generally deemed most interesting which are unsolvable, which no political theory or belief in human agency can address, which lie beyond politics, beyond history, in the realm of destiny, tragedy, and myth.”49 In Angels in America, as discussed, the personal and psychological were indistinguishable from the political, and the play attended equally to problems deemed solvable and those obviously unsolvable. This was far from the ‹rst American play to ply such a path, of course, but Angels had unique political traction in a mainstream commercial circumstance because of the careful consideration Kushner gave to all the daunting obstacles just described. For each of them, he came up with a remarkably clever solution that kept the audience actively engaged without letting their attention wander far from those larger issues, ideas, and communities they weren’t supposed to be able to care about. He handled the treacherous American aversion to pedagogy, for instance, by embedding unfamiliar and historical information within fun,

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sensual, and familiar dramatic conventions. Potentially eye-glazing details from legal opinions regarding the Air and Water Protection Act and the U.S. Army’s pension policies were tucked into the screamed recriminations of Joe and Louis’s sensational breakup scene. Ethel Rosenberg harped on the bureaucratic steps of legal disbarment in New York State during her revenge-driven deathbed showdown with Roy Cohn. And a mechanical drone of encyclopedic facts about early Mormon history became both the butt of laughs and a source of critique when Harper, munching potato chips, mocked the recorded words emerging from a hokey Mormon Visitor’s Center diorama. Kushner dealt with the entrenched concept of family as a “force of nature” by rede‹ning family as a group of choice, not necessarily of blood ties (a necessity in many gay lives). He didn’t do this in an exclusively personal context—as did the two other longest running gay-themed dramas on Broadway, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy and Terrence McNally’s Love! Valor! Compassion!—but rather by arranging events so that all the characters (even those who never interacted, like Roy and Prior) felt interconnected. Kushner’s people were like pieces on a great sociopolitical chessboard, players in a single global crisis involving the search for a guiding Idea of the future. They rarely agreed, some didn’t even have coherent positions, and no one dominated, but Harper seemed to voice an overarching ideal of communality near the end when she spoke of a “great net of souls” rising with joined hands like “three-atom oxygen molecules” to repair the earth’s ozone layer.50 The Epilogue in 1990 was a communion of adults rather than children (indeed the adult-child Harper was absent), and it made this vision concrete. A group of unlikely friends gathered at the Bethesda Angel fountain in Central Park—Black, Jew, WASP and Mormon, with Hannah now looking “like a New Yorker . . . reading the New York Times”51—affectionately squabbling about Gorbachev and the rapid changes in the world. Meanwhile, Prior stepped downstage to speak with the audience like the Stage Manager in Our Town: urbane New York City as the new Grover’s Corners, the “miraculous social grouping” (as Una Chaudhuri calls it) as the new, netlike family Webb.52 The American fetishization of the individual was the trickiest problem of all for Kushner, because pretentiousness and “fabulousness” (his word for the Ludlamesque essence of his art), are so easily construed as uninhibited indulgence of the individual ego.53 Camp humor may be rooted in

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de›ation but it is also rooted in vanity, as is the preening of drag queens like Prior and Belize. Kushner handled this problem by distributing roles among the actors in ways that complicated all seemingly easy identi‹cations.54 Stephen Spinella, for instance, played Prior in George C. Wolfe’s production magni‹cently as a wry and sagacious whirligig of fear, rage, wit, and indomitable courage, but he also played a doltish, hypocritical poseur: the menacing leather-and-chains lunk Louis picked up for anonymous sex in the Central Park brambles, who tried to avoid using a rubber and turned out to live with his parents. Similarly, Jeffrey Wright, whose deliciously bitchy savoir faire as Belize made him come off as the play’s trustworthy voice of Truth, also played Mr. Lies, a much more glittery raconteur onstage than in the ‹lm, who persistently regaled Harper with escapist blandishments and bromides. No voice or face on the stage (including those of Liebman, who doubled as one of the angels) was unequivocally tied to a single nature. Multiple casting is a common theatrical practice, but it isn’t necessarily understood politically. In many plays, the audience looks merrily past it as a necessary concession to thrift, or enjoys it as a technique of knockabout comedy. In Nichols’s ‹lm, it struck me as inert, a rootless holdover from the original material. In very long plays, however, the technique tends to take on special resonance because the audience has time to brood on it. This happened in Nicholas Nickleby when some actors appeared memorably throughout the day and evening as servants, aristocrats, and vulgar bourgeois, tacitly emphasizing that the Dickensian foibles of greed, snobbery, and mean-spiritedness were spread equitably across the Victorian social spectrum. In The Mahabharata, the seemingly endless parade of new mythical, musical, and ornamental roles for the entire cast and orchestra pressed home the universal nature of theatricality as a basic life force in that world. In Angels in America, the general effect of multiple casting was to “denature” power relationships (in medical encounters, love affairs, business dealings, political negotiations, and more) in a similar manner to Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (which used cross-race and cross-gender casting to “denature” colonial domination and marriage)—“denature” in this sense meaning to make those relationships seem products of human choice and therefore changeable. Chalfant played six very disparate roles in Wolfe’s production, all with spectacular precision (if not with Meryl Streep’s seamless realism): she played Hannah Pitt, the old rabbi, Roy’s doctor, Ethel Rosenberg, the Angel Asiatica, and an ancient Russian Communist named

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Prelapsarianov who decried the loss of an overarching political theory in “this Sour Little Age.”55 Her chameleonesque yet transparent virtuosity did more than anything else in the show to weaken social, political, and ethnic stereotypes, as well as truisms about sacrosanct Individualism. There is a reason why Kushner’s “Political Theater” essay glows more warmly for Charles Ludlam than for Bertolt Brecht, and the reason may be gleaned from the nature of all these ironic and layered techniques. Ludlam was the champion and theorist of a widely in›uential theater form that, in the years following the Stonewall riots, openly celebrated ›amboyant gay expression and at the same time deconstructed that celebration. The work of his Ridiculous Theatrical Company was both farcically “hedonistic” (his word) and seriously critical—the critical aspect resting on an irreverent view of individual identity as unstable, self-consciously performed, “ridiculous.” This instability is the root idea behind “queering” as contemporary theorists use the term. In his Ridiculous Theater manifesto Ludlam wrote: “You are a living mockery of your own ideals. If not, you have set your ideals too low.”56 Nearly all Kushner’s strategies for seducing Americans into a political listening posture were forms of “queering,” a concept similar to Brechtian Verfremdung but more playful and typically wielded in de‹ance of what Adrienne Rich once called “compulsory heterosexuality” (“heteronormativity” is now the common term).57 In Angels in America, Kushner queered the American citizen, the American family, and the American family drama. He queered the soap opera and the Brechtian epic chronicle play by using historical narratives as threads in a “gay fantasia.” He queered the Mormon and Jewish religions, the legal profession, the Republican Party, and sacred totems such as the inviolable Individual and the benevolent, omniscent God. Ultimately, he queered the evangelical chestnut of the apocalypse by presenting it as a ‹zzled, opportunistic scam by agents of a half-assed heavenly bureaucracy. Queering of this kind may be understood as a form of open-trick yet amazing magic, as described earlier. Its aim is the paradoxical experience Harries described: demystifying mysti‹cation. Or de-exoticized exoticism: I love it, I hate it, I’m attracted to it, I’m repulsed by it . . . but now I see it. Kushner’s play asked spectators to distance themselves in order to assess how its representations worked, as Brecht wanted, but also to open themselves to arousal, intoxication, glamour, raucous laughter, confusion, and the chaotic. He clearly felt his audiences could be analytical while

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being seduced, for the hedonism in his work was employed as both a mirror and a lamp. The argument about whether this position is plausible or tenable will never be settled. A number of reputable critics have been very skeptical about it, coming down hard on Kushner for seeking a center that cannot hold. Janelle Reinelt, for instance, assailed Angels for not being legitimately “epic” in Brecht’s sense. She criticized Wolfe’s production as irredeemably culinary (Brecht’s word for bourgeois complacency in theater), a study in “polish and theatrics,” saying the audience reacted “as if they were at an Alan Ayckbourn comedy.”58 (She preferred Mark Wing-Davey’s more explicitly “epic” 1994 production at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.) As for the play, Reinelt felt Kushner drifted too far a‹eld from the important work of reimagining the nation’s social and communal self-image, distracting himself with petty plot details and the personal intricacies of “private consciousnesses.”59 Describing the moment when Belize steals Roy’s AZT, for example, and dismisses his threat to report him (“There’s a nursing shortage. I’m in a union. I’m real scared. I have friends who need them. Bad”),60 Reinelt wrote: “that scene, those events, aren’t good enough for an American epic play . . . it is precisely the evocation of personal friends who need the medicine that undercuts a social critique by keeping the discourse personal.”61 David Savran, a prominent queer theorist, has written two articles assailing Angels in America. The earlier one begins as a ‹ne, penetrating analysis of the play’s thematic development in relation to the belief system of early Mormonism, which then tacks toward a broad condemnation of liberal pluralism (the implied politics of Prior and the others in the Epilogue). For Savran, liberal pluralism is akin to Mormonism, an ostensibly communitarian doctrine that actually af‹rms “a fundamentally conservative hegemony,” absorbing dissent only for the sake of happy consensus.62 Thus Kushner’s play presents a “false dialectic,” its consensual politics “masquerading as dissensual,” its concept of revolution “evacuated of . . . political content” and reduced to a mere “‹gure of speech.”63 In the second essay, Savran is still harsher, linking Angels with McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! as a “putatively queer theater” that “has all the trappings—but little of the substance—of a transgressive project.” This theater, he says, “titillates bourgeois audiences, queer and straight alike, and reassures them of their hip, liberal values.”64 Moreover, its sole claim to “rad-

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ical” achievement—universalizing the queer subject (using gay men as representative Americans)—is really “false” because almost all the characters are white and middle class.65 Queer theater, Savran says, comes in two types, “universalizing” or “deconstructive,” and only the latter is truly “edgy” and “transgressive.” Avant-garde theater artists such as Holly Hughes, Split Britches, and Pomo Afro Homos are preferable to him because they “[delight] in deconstructing subjectivity,” dramatizing “both the contingent nature of performance and the performative nature of identity . . . the new queer performance attempts less to prove that perverts are normal than to demonstrate that all desire is perverted.”66 I feel bound to stand up here for both Kushner and the value of universalizing the queer subject—just as I would for the value of universalizing the black and female subjects in plays such as A Raisin in the Sun and The Vagina Monologues. Savran has no apparent sympathy for the dif‹culties of creating serious theater in a commercial context, and he comes close to dismissing the whole category as facile and corrupt. Angels in America clearly does deconstruct subjectivity—not at every moment, and not with single-mindedly subversive intent, but certainly with relish, as shown. More importantly, as Savran points out himself, the most interesting writing on queering in recent years has opened up the concept far beyond same-sex desire to include a host of other matters such as ethnicity, race, nationality, fashion, celebrity, and much more, and this is the larger context in which, for me, Kushner’s play shimmered with bright, unexpected light. Alisa Solomon writes in The Queerest Art, the valuable collection she edited with Framji Minwalla on this subject: Theater, by its nature, reveals and revels in the very angst the [Puritan] antitheatricalists were frantically trying to quell: the notion of identities as contingent and malleable and the suggestion that categories can be playfully transgressed—queered. . . . Irony—the capacity to hold contradictory ideas at the same time, and more speci‹cally in theater, the gap between what audiences know but characters in a play don’t—drives a wedge between representation and reality, throwing their relationship into question. Thus like queer theory, which examines how representations of all kinds shape sexualities, theater—in Bruce Wilshire’s words, “the art of imitation that reveals imitation”—unmasks representation’s effects qua effects.67

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To paraphrase this idea with a different spin: queering, which can never be wholly serious (as Ludlam said), turns out to be fundamental to the politically serious use of the theater. This, at any rate, was my realization while watching Angels in America, particularly as the performance stretched into its ‹fth, sixth, and seventh hours and Kushner more and more exchanged reason and linearity for caprice and fantasia. Queering, I understood then, is what Verfremdung was before Brecht “demagicked” it—back when Shakespeare used ghosts, a living statue, and a dumbshow, for instance, to prick the consciences of his kings, or when Aristophanes disguised Dionysus (his Olympian drama judge) as an effeminized Heracles to get him in and out of Hades. Queering is nothing more or less than a form of complicating in which the chief complicating factor is some form of amazing carnal representation. At least that is what it can be for those able to look beyond identity politics. Angels in America was indeed, as its detractors have repeatedly said, an ideologically ambivalent work. From a theatrical perspective, however, that ambivalence was actually a strength, for it kept the play from didacticism and aligned effectively with the lumpy unwieldiness of its form. American audiences would never have attended closely to it for seven hours if it had advocated one position too strongly or consistently, and that command of prolonged attention is what was so interesting and unique about it. Its brash, ragged, and queer contours re›ected the big-tent democracy that the play ultimately celebrated, in all its noisy, frustrating, and time-consuming glory. Keep the dialogue ›owing, the gentle epilogue seemed to say. The work’s caprice and queerness were the keys to its success in framing an enjoyable political immersion experience. They were the unfailingly diverting factors that enabled Broadway audiences to maintain a socially critical frame of mind for a length of time Brecht would scarcely have thought possible. In the land of the chronically allergic, in a commercial circumstance, that willing immersion was in itself a historic achievement. More than sixty years earlier, another political playwright with very different loyalties but with a similar penchant for fantasy was also accused of ambivalence by ideological authorities in his country. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s last plays, The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, were satires born of outrage at the corruption of Soviet Communism by craven bureaucrats and other hypocrites—plays that also expanded to encompass magni‹cent theatricalist representations of millenarian elsewheres (Mayakovsky’s in the

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future, Kushner’s in heaven) before retreating into re›ectiveness and a closing mood of tragicomic stalemate. We should no doubt be glad that Kushner was never an ecstatic cheerleader for revolution the way Mayakovsky was, if only because Mayakovsky ended up blowing his brains out. Kushner, like his hero Prior, went back to work—respectfully bracketing AIDS—and suggested that we do the same. prior: I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.68

chapter five Einstein on the Beach

it has long been fashionable to refer to the Broadway theater as the fabulous invalid—perpetually sick with a crippling illness that never kills it. Anyone with theatergoing experience not con‹ned to the commercial, however, knows that the truly fabulous invalid for most of the past hundred years has been the avant-garde theater. Decade after decade from the 1890s on, the succession of Euro-American avant-garde movements performed their signature act of rising miraculously from the deathbed of a predecessor, ›ush with rejuvenating rage at outdated practices and principles and hell-bent on implementing better ones. In retrospect, it is astonishing that any utopian ideals survived those waves of ideological parricide, yet a few managed to do so. Two in particular have come down to us fairly intact, enduring through two world wars, the rise and fall of Communism and Fascism, the rise of the media and information age, and innumerable other jarring shifts in style, taste, behavior, mores, and technology. These are the Wagnerian dream of uniting the separate arts (music, poetry, dance, and painting) in a monumental, communally healing “total theater” synthesis or Gesamtkunstwerk, and the kindred symbolist-surrealist-Artaudian dream of liberating theater from the tyrannical dominion of language. Skeptics about these idealisms have never been hard to ‹nd. Igor Stravinsky once sniffed that “sound minds never believed in the paradise of the Synthesis of the Arts.”1 Bertolt Brecht dismissed the ideal as “witchcraft” whose likeliest result was “sordid intoxication.”2 And Jean-Paul Sartre insisted that the symbolist utopia, the “theater of silence,” really amounted to “panverbalism, the total conquest of the theatrical world by the word,” as words ended up de‹ning the nature of everything around them, including the empty spaces.3 These idealisms nevertheless pervaded theatrical inno97

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vation throughout the twentieth century. They were basic animating forces for artists and groups as diverse as Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, Hugo Ball, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Sergei Diaghilev, Walter Gropius, Oskar Schlemmer, Antonin Artaud, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Allan Kaprow, the Living Theater, the Judson Poet’s Theater, and Jerzy Grotowski. By the time I began attending experimental theater in the early 1980s, however, passionate enthusiasm for them had for the most part faded to nostalgic whispers and wishes. The only active theater-maker then who still carried a torch in any pure way for both “total theater” and the theatrical transcendence of language was Robert Wilson, and he was something of a rumor or myth to young Americans because his work appeared almost exclusively in Europe. In December 1984, when I saw my ‹rst Wilson piece—Einstein on the Beach in its ‹rst revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House—he had not premiered a new piece in the United States in eight years. That evening destroyed a number of old shibboleths for me. It has lived vividly in my memory through two and a half decades, not least because it is still the only theater work I have seen that sustained my interest and attention over a marathon length of time without a substantial text. Einstein on the Beach was originally a product of an earlier, teeming New York avant-garde milieu. In the early 1970s, Wilson was a downtown New York ‹xture and something of a doyen of marathon theater, having done several of his signature, slow-moving, image-centered pieces at BAM, with lengths up to twelve hours. Einstein was a ‹ve-hour, uninterrupted “portrait opera” by Wilson and Philip Glass that premiered in Avignon in 1976, toured Europe that summer to ecstatic reviews, and ended with two sold-out performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Met performances were an extremely unlikely coup for these experimental artists. No such aggressively unconventional, staunchly countercultural production had yet scaled the walls of that citadel of mainstream culture, and the resultant media blitz and ‹erce competition for tickets—as well as the force of the show itself—ensured its enshrinement as a legend. In 1984, BAM brought the work back for twelve performances, substantially the same, we were told, except for a change of choreographer: Lucinda Childs replaced Andrew DeGroat. I attended with a gang of skeptical graduate-school cronies, all of us mistrustful of both the play’s legend and the sticky reverence behind the Wilson myth. Many of us were also rueful at having missed the golden era

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of experimentation that the production epitomized. I was not yet savvy enough to understand that the feeling of arriving just after the party ended has characterized every generation of would-be New York hipsters at least since the turn of the twentieth century, and that if the notion of a 1960s golden age ever had any reality, it was certainly over (or rapidly fading) by 1976. Reviewers of the premiere had hailed Einstein as a boundary-bursting masterpiece that exploded received conceptions of opera. Whatever the truth of that, it is evident in retrospect that it was in many ways a summary or valedictory work of the New York avant-garde, its anomalous uptown professional splash signaling the imminent decline of zealous amateurism, collectivism, “poor theater” humility, and other utopian idealisms of the Age of Aquarius. The Met triumph did open new opportunities for Wilson, but they were largely foreign. He was never able to use it as leverage for the major American institutional and ‹nancial support he craved. The production left a $150,000 debt that took more than a decade to pay off.4 And nine months before Einstein’s BAM revival, a twelve-hour production he had spent three years creating in six countries for the Los Angeles Olympics, the CIVIL warS, was abruptly canceled because of insuf‹cient ‹nancial backing.5 Wilson had hoped that production would be his long-awaited national redemption through “event” marketing, as he told an interviewer in 1982: the CIVIL warS . . . [is] on the scale of large popular theater. That’s how I intended it. It’s an event, a large popular event. It’s meant to be the way rock concerts are. I was in Rome a few weeks ago and [Hans-Jürgen] Syberberg’s ‹lm of Parsifal, which is four and a half hours long, was shown before three thousand people in a large open air space. It was fantastic. It was big event.6

Whether the completed piece would have been all he hoped is an open question, but these comments reveal how far Wilson had moved since Einstein to adopt the stance of an impresario. The years between 1976 and 1984 were a period of retrenchment in the American avant-garde: countless New Yorkers ceased experimental work, retreated to academia or legit theater, or were displaced by skyrocketing rents. Meanwhile, the national political mood turned reactionary, and glib and ironic postmodernism began swallowing what was left of the counterculture and regurgitating it as quotation. Among the many pleasures of Einstein was the way it effortlessly cut through that demoralizing atmosphere of cynicism and skepticism. It was a

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sophisticated work of childlike simplicity—note the element of the childish and naïve again, as with Peter Brook—and a magisterial assertion of easy faith in those old Wagnerian and Artaudian ideals. It had no coherent narrative and was constructed as a prolonged waking dream in which anything could happen at any time, and one soon stopped expecting or even wanting logical continuity from it. Plenty of nonnarrative theater had already been done by Mabou Mines, Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, and many others, but this was by far the most sincere, extravagant, and inspired piece I had seen. All Einstein’s scenes were lucid, simple, and accessible on the surface: a train moved slowly on and off as people danced beside it and a little boy tossed paper airplanes from above; a trial with two bewigged judges (an old man and a boy) took place beside a giant geometrical bed, where a witness played by Childs lounged and chattered as a clock was obscured as if by an eclipse behind her. The more one pondered these pictorial riddles, though, the more they resisted interpretation. The work was a rhapsody to right-brain apprehension, an anomalously systematic celebration of association, connotation, metaphor, and tone. Einstein didn’t entirely exclude language. It treated it as trivial, whimsical, and irrational: disconnected, nonsensical stories and advertising twaddle were repeated ad nauseam; lyrics consisted only of counted numbers and solfège syllables (do, re, mi . . .). From published descriptions of the premiere and from my other avant-garde experiences, I expected this devaluation of language and logic to be irritating, an alibi for shallowness, but it wasn’t because it never seemed evasive or facile. The whole show was painstakingly constructed, and nothing essential in it originated in language. The moving images were not a species of mime, or a form of graphic art hungry or nostalgic for narrative. Knowledge in this world stemmed from line, shape, gesture, movement and musical expression, not from words. The impetus of the train scene just mentioned, for instance, was clearly a fascination with relative speed. Lucinda Childs jauntily “wrote” in the air with chalk while walking back and forth obsessively along a diagonal line, as the giant, two-dimensional steam locomotive behind her took ‹fteen minutes to move twenty feet, numerous other dancers moved methodically in somewhat faster slow motion, and the boy’s paper airplanes dropped from a high derrick in slavish obedience to Newton’s gravitational law. The work’s ostensible subject was Albert Einstein, represented not biographically or historically but poetically through dance, image, and music.

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Occasional use was made of biographical tidbits, but their informational value was slight. All twenty-four cast and chorus members, for instance, wore the tennis shoes, white shirt, and neutral-colored pants with suspenders familiar from famous Einstein photos, some of which were projected upstage. A solo violinist in an Einstein wig and mustache played on a chair downstage center for much of the show, a position that seemed to mediate between the stage and the audience. I later read that Einstein had been an amateur violinist, but I didn’t know that at the time and viewed this fellow as a sort of cicerone, and also as a stakeholder for the place of music in the dramatic universe. Music took the reins in this work more authoritatively than in any other music-theater piece I had seen or have seen since—including Wagner’s music dramas. The whole ‹ve hours was through-scored, as in most grand opera, but because the verbal text was shorn of its usual governing function, the music (along with Wilson’s pictures) took over as a prime organizing principle. Cyclically hypnotic and relentlessly repetitive, the sound produced by the Glass Ensemble—six musicians playing ›ute, piccolo, saxophones, clarinet, synthesizer, and organ, plus the solo violinist—permeated the hall like “sonic weather” (Tim Page’s phrase), warming, cooling, and sweeping everything along in its shifting breezes, lulls, gales, and light.7 The music had already begun when the audience entered: a slow, droning sequence of three organ notes (A–G–C), each sustained up to a minute at ‹rst, then gradually shortening and quickening over a half hour as two young women in a small square of light off to one side (Childs and Sheryl Sutton) slowly tapped their ‹ngers as if on invisible keyboards and spoke numbers into their head mics (“2 . . . 3 . . . 4”—everyone had head mics). By the scheduled curtain time, a polished vocal chorus had joined them, rising with the ampli‹ed organ to a majestic crescendo of sung numbers and solfège syllables, sung with all the soaring exuberance of a “Hallelujah” chorus. The rest of the evening proceeded in the same vein: Childs and Sutton were treated as protagonists in mysteriously enigmatic dramas whose emotional peaks and valleys were de‹ned not by the texts but by the music. Though rigorously systematic, the score (and the dance too, to a certain extent) provided a warmth that thawed Wilson’s chilly geometric visuals. The music was lushly orchestral, with the vocals resembling anthems, elegies, and odes to unnameable objects. Everything was composed in Glass’s signature idiom of doggedly regular pulses, wide-roaming arpeggios, scales, and moody, simple melodies repeated over and over with contracting and

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expanding variations. The focus and endurance of both the cast and the musicians were astonishing. For long stretches, the physical action was so slow-moving and the music so repetitive, chantlike, and anesthetic that some spectators could be seen dozing. Others ›ed to the lobby, which a note in the program sanctioned: “As Einstein on the Beach is performed without an intermission, the audience is invited to leave and reenter the auditorium quietly, as necessary. The food service in the lobby will remain open during performances.” During previous Wilson marathons at BAM, the LePerq Space (another performance venue there) had been out‹tted as a café, and the social scene there was said to be as interesting and inviting as the play.8 No such café or social scene existed at the 1984 Einstein, where only the rather cold and impersonal Opera House lobby was made available. And if one stayed in the theater, there was no way to avoid falling into reverie, boredom, trance, or meditation, at least occasionally. But meditation on what? The question of meaning inevitably loomed, as the mind was drawn to try to understand the sense in which Einstein was being used as a trope, and sought connections between Wilson’s intricately detailed and formally precise scenography, Childs’s buoyant, formalistic choreography, and Glass’s music. These elements strongly resisted easy connection, and though Glass later insisted they were not arbitrarily overlaid like the music and dance in Cage and Cunningham’s chance-based collaborations, that sometimes seemed the case. There was indisputable synergy in Einstein, but pinpointing and naming it were tricky. Time was certainly one underlying theme. Einstein had famously drawn new associations between time and speed, and the performance consistently made time feel plastic and malleable—like a material that a clever artist could manipulate at will like paint, sound, or light. (“Here time becomes space” was Wagner’s description of the mythical Grail domain in Parsifal.)9 Another obvious theme was the human costs of science and the scienti‹c age. The trial scenes seemed to place all of “Einsteinian” humanity in the dock, for mysterious unnamed crimes. The music’s mathematical rigor posed tacit questions about the baleful effects of mechanistic process. And an image of a mushroom cloud appeared near the end. Space travel too became a locus of mystery and anxiety: a diminutive model spaceship traveled across stage on a wire during the piece’s two long dance sequences, a harmless toy; but in a tumultuous ‹nal scene it grew ominous, as the performers became cogs and drones, standing like manic automatons

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from the Fritz Lang ‹lm Metropolis, working brightly lit, geometrically patterned controls in what one assumed was the spaceship’s interior. Much in the production didn’t ‹t any of these themes. The evening was sprinkled with silly non sequiturs, such as when dancers entered clutching odd objects like a newspaper or a seashell, moments when the chorus paused to brush their teeth or check their watches, and an anomalous coffee break plunked into the middle of one of the ritualistic trial scenes. In this last sequence, about ninety minutes into the piece, the cast became surrogates for the audience, needing a coffee break. Incongruous topical references also cropped up, such as pop lyrics from Carole King and a scene evoking the heiress-turned-bank-robber Patty Hearst (a hot news story in 1976). Immense journalistic energy was expended trying to interpret these crumbs. Still more was expended pondering whether Einstein, which lacked a coherent hero, a plot, and easily graspable links between its components, was really an “opera.”10 Or just an avant-gardist hoax. For me, the show was an avant-gardist redemption, because it revived my then ›agging belief that the legacy of Wilson’s generation of innovators could still be excitingly provocative. Einstein melted my resistance, which was considerable, in the course of the evening. It taught me how to appreciate it, how to accept and read its nonverbal strategies as a form of “writing,” and it consequently upset my already rather hardened sense of the hierarchy of perception in the theater. I was, and for the most part still am, an unregenerate Sartrean on the question of theatrical language. Years of reading the heady visions of Wagner, Artaud, the symbolists, the surrealists, and all their postmodern apologists had never shaken my conviction that language, when it is present at all, holds inescapable supremacy on the stage, regardless of the signifying powers of gesture, color, form, and sound. The whole weight of my theatergoing had con‹rmed this: language always managed to seize control, to establish the ground against which everything else was seen, even if that power sometimes worked by default, as in Beckett. (Sartre: “the ‘theater of silence’ really meant that language had appropriated silence.”)11 Words simply wouldn’t tolerate being merely one equipotent element among many in a composite stage language, I had thought. Yet here was an unimpeachable counterclaim—a patently eloquent and profound work in which they tolerated just that. Einstein on the Beach was the ‹rst project in which Wilson collaborated “on an equal footing with an artist of his own stature,” in Laurence Shyer’s

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words.12 The piece was from its earliest stages the product of both Wilson’s and Glass’s sensibilities, not a framework that one conceived and the other embellished (like most of Wilson’s other collaborations with musicians, including his others with Glass). The two men had never met, though they knew of one another, when Glass went to see Wilson’s twelve-hour The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin at BAM in 1973. Struck by its apparent harmony with his sensibility, Glass approached Wilson afterward to suggest that they work together. It was a fortuitous moment for the suggestion because both had just completed mammoth projects—Glass’s was the six-hour Music in Twelve Parts, which took him three years to write, Wilson’s was Joseph Stalin—and felt ready for new horizons. Also, as I will explain, both were at the time working through a major shift in their aesthetics, which they would use this project to complete. They began by meeting for lunch every Thursday whenever both were in New York, to get acquainted and explore ideas—meetings that went on for a year before Glass composed any music. Wilson sketched while they talked, and his sketches became a pictorial “libretto” describing the piece’s visual themes. One of their earliest agreements was on a sectional form for the piece organized by time rather than content: nine scenes of approximately twenty-‹ve minutes each distributed over four acts, with shorter entre-act scenes in between called “knee plays” because they formed joints. Glass says that their partnership ›ourished early on largely because of this common acceptance of time as the central organizing principle: [Einstein] began as a structure in time that was empty of any story or any image. It never occurred to us to begin with a story. The common ground would be how to use time. Music uses time and theater uses time. We discovered that it was in this area that we could begin to form ideas together. We took ‹ve or six hours and we divided it into acts and scenes and time periods. Then we began to ‹ll it in.13

For Glass, this view had multiple roots. It came in part from his attraction to Indian music, which dated from the mid-1960s when he worked as an assistant to the sitar-player Ravi Shankar. Indian music is organized in recurring time cycles (called Tal) and includes lengthy passages of melodic invention that ›ow freely without the restrictions of traditional Western measures. Equally important, however, was the legacy of John Cage. As already

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mentioned, Einstein’s audiences were not expected to sit through the whole performance, uninterrupted. Like Wilson’s previous marathon works— Joseph Stalin, the seven-hour Deafman Glance (1970), and the seven-day KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE (1972) done in Iran, for instance—Einstein was a chapter in an ongoing effort to develop a Cagean theater of ambient experience. Cage’s book Silence, in which he laid out his magisterial theory of perceiving and accepting everyday life as art (calling for a “total sound-space” that could “transform our contemporary awareness of nature’s manner of operation into art”), was an important early in›uence on Glass.14 And Wilson spoke throughout the 1970s of his desire to create a continuously running performance that people could drop in on at will, a theatrical action that was “always there” (like television, or life in a city park—his comparisons), the main purpose of which was to blur the boundaries between art and life and expand their de‹nitions so that people would look more carefully at both.15 At ‹rst glance, these ambitions seem aligned with the avant-garde imperative, pervasive in the 1960s and 1970s, to idealize amateurism and banality in the name of resisting phoniness and inauthenticity. The ambition of the British company Forced Entertainment, discussed in the following chapter, to create a theatrical experience with “no beginning and no end,” which “placed you in a world rather than describing one to you,” is a later variant on that impulse.16 The fact is, though, the theatrical sparkle and ‹nesse of Einstein didn’t ‹t that paradigm at all. Its obsession with precise time measurement pointed more toward another, earlier concern of modernism: formal self-critique. Clement Greenberg pithily de‹ned this concern, saying that the core modernist impulse was the use of the “characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself.”17 For Greenberg, modernist painting, for instance,“harp[ed] on” ›atness because the ›at surface was the picture’s “limiting condition.”18 Wilson’s marathon works, one could say, harped on time because a measured, and preferably lengthy, expanse of time was live performance’s limiting condition, its ›at canvas, as it were, and its occasion for self-critique. I will come back to this point, because it seems to me that Wilson’s obdurate modernism has always been his strongest defense against those who claim that his work lacks a critical edge. Einstein’s measured precision and professionalism made it a novelty in Wilson’s work. Reports and videos of his earlier pieces make clear that they were much shaggier than Einstein: visually baroque, musically eclectic, and

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often extremely populous, involving hundreds of the amateur acolytes who had nested in his Soho loft and dubbed themselves the School of Byrds. Beginning in 1973–74, Wilson withdrew from this army of dependent followers and repudiated the loose aesthetic they had helped foster. A Letter for Queen Victoria, the production immediately before Einstein, introduced his new, minimalistically sleek and spare visual style, which emphasized geometric forms and black, white and gray in lieu of bright colors. Queen Victoria also introduced text for the ‹rst time and employed only fourteen performers, infuriating the many Byrds not selected for the cast. Einstein brought ‹nality and closure to this aesthetic transformation. The work used an entirely professional company of singer-dancers, which Wilson and Glass assembled from scratch through rigorous auditions. The only holdover from the School of Byrds was Sheryl Sutton. The choice of Einstein as the subject did hark back to Wilson’s earlier work, since he had named several pieces after famous people (Stalin, Queen Victoria, Sigmund Freud) who were not really their objects of investigation but rather nodal points for re›ection and association in sprawling, abstract theatrical actions. Glass admired this loose focus, but he was much more intellectually oriented and analytical than Wilson and thus more inclined to limit the sprawl, hold it closer to the chosen nodal point. It would have made no sense to call any of Wilson’s earlier works “portrait operas” in the illustrative tradition of Virgil Thomson, yet Glass applied this term to Einstein.19 He then went on to apply it to two more operas—Satyagraha (about Gandhi) and Akhnaten (about an ancient Egyptian pharaoh)—which he considered a trilogy along with Einstein. The subject Wilson and Glass sought was a historical ‹gure who had de‹ned an era or represented some pivotal change for humanity, and who was suf‹ciently familiar to the public that no introductory or explanatory material would be necessary. Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin were proposed and rejected, and Einstein was ultimately chosen because he ‹t those criteria and because both artists felt personal connections to him. Glass said he had been “swept up in the Einstein craze” as a child, the period of the scientist’s greatest postwar fame, and Wilson felt a kinship with his humanistic public image (“He seemed a sort of Everyman”) and also with his early learning dif‹culties (both were day-dreaming, late-speaking children regarded as dyslexic).20 Wilson also said he was fascinated by the scientist’s historical contradictions: “Einstein was a paci‹st, a dreamer and a time

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traveler, yet at the same time he was the father of the nuclear bomb.”21 Hence the opera’s central oppositions of dreaming and analysis, music and science, mythopoesis and mathematics. Fascinatingly, after agreeing on this subject, Wilson and Glass proceeded in entirely different ways. Glass set about doing historical research, reading Ronald Clark’s biography Einstein: The Life and Times, for instance, and offering it to Wilson . . . . . . but he would never take it. We had a lot of discussion about that and it became a kind of joke between us. I said, “Bob, this book’s real interesting” and I would show him pictures in it. Bob has his own way of doing research which is quite different from mine. His way was to collect photographs of Einstein and to talk to people about him. He said to me once, “I don’t want to know any more than what everyone knows about Einstein. I just want to know what the man in the street knows because that’s what they’ll be bringing to the work.” If he snuck off and read a book about Einstein he never told me, but I don’t believe he did . . . . Reading about him and thinking about him was the only way I knew how to begin. It often meant that the two of us were not working from the same source. I was working from a literary-historical base and Bob from a populist idea of Einstein.22

If occasional tension arose due to this disparity, there was no evidence of it in the ‹nal piece that I could discern—no clash of intellectualism and know-nothingism and no sense in which the music seemed somehow better informed than the pictures (or the dance for that matter). In fact, one of the joys of the opera was the unmistakable harmony between its visuals and sound, which took on immense suggestive power in concert that neither element would have had separately. Glass once said: “What makes Einstein a uniquely collaborative work is that we’re both looking at each other’s work through our own.”23 For an opera that relied so much on nonsense, utilitarian, and word-litter texts, its emotional speci‹city was extraordinary, including distinct evocations of scienti‹c rigor, imaginative whimsy, tedium vitae, as well as regret, betrayal, isolation, community, elation, love, and much more. There was, moreover, dramatic development of a sort, notwithstanding the action’s lack of narrative. As Glass said on another occasion: “The only way music can be profoundly successful is if the musical language is part of the argument of the piece”—a remark that can pertain to Einstein, obviously, only if it has an argument.24

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Einstein’s scenic breakdown was as follows: Knee Play 1 Act I Scene 1* (or 1A)** Train Scene 2 (or 2A) Trial (Bed) Knee Play 2 Act II Scene 1 (or 3A) Field (with distant Space Machine) Scene 2 (or 1B) Train (at night) Knee Play 3 Act III Scene 1 (or 2B) Trial (Bed)/Prison Scene 2 (or 3B) Field (with Space Machine slightly closer) Knee Play 4 Act IV Scene 1 (or 1C) Building (resembling night train) Scene 2 (or 2C) Bed Scene 3 (or 3C) Space Machine (interior) Knee Play 5 *Philip Glass’s scene designations in his 1979 record notes **Robert Wilson’s scene designations in his 1984 program notes25

As this outline shows, the plan called for three transforming visual themes (train, trial, ‹eld), with three cycles of transformation, and with the scenes distributed over the four acts so that each possible thematic pairing was used in an act between knee plays before all three themes returned in the fourth act. Three similarly transforming musical themes were linked to these visual themes. The train, for example, was more and more obscured and abstracted each time it reappeared: in act 1, a locomotive engine was seen as a side-view cutout, in act 2 an antique passenger car appeared in dim night-light as a three-dimensional object, and in act 4 that passenger car was replaced by a building shaped and angled exactly like it. The musical theme for the act 1 train engine was a pair of overlapping rhythmic patterns (the introductory jo phase, in Zeami’s terms), which were heard again with the act 2 passenger car, ‹lled out with more singing voices (the ha phase of development and complication), and in the act 4 building scene these were further expanded with a new cadential rhythm and embellished with a jazzy, improvised saxophone solo (the kyu phase, which uses increased rapidity to signal closure). The work’s tripartite pattern also applied to the scenes’ pictorial per-

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spectives, which Wilson compared to painting genres. The knee plays were like portraits, he said.26 Crowded into a small square of light downstage left, they presented closeup views of Childs and Sutton engaged in formalistic squirming, tapping, kneeling, crawling, and sometimes speaking, framed as much like bugs under a microscope as like portrait subjects. The train and trial scenes were like still-lifes: middle-distance views showing human ‹gures in various suggestive relationships to carefully selected objects (the trains, derrick, judge’s bench, bed, a handless clock, a jail cell). And the two ‹eld scenes were like landscapes, comprised entirely of dance: waves of spinning and leaping dancers broke against one another in pulses on an empty stage with a color-shifting backdrop. These scenes were the most panoramic of all, evoking a bustling population seen from a distance, perhaps from the spaceship hovering overhead. I can’t claim to have recognized all of these formal patterns and relationships the ‹rst time I saw Einstein. They had their effect subliminally, the way the pace, sounds, and forms of a new city do the ‹rst time you visit it. In any case, the really interesting question had to do with the structure’s effect, how such a formalistically conceived object took on so much palpable life in performance. The sole line of dramatic development I did discern immediately was a certain lurching progression (seen in the major set pieces and various projected photographs) from the age of steam locomotives, into which Einstein was born in 1879, to the age of space travel just burgeoning (partly thanks to his discoveries) when he died in 1955. The opera seemed to use the two vehicles from these different eras, the train and spaceship, as frames for a very general inquiry into the human response to technological advance. The music conveyed this idea through its cycle patterns, which suggested an obsession with form, a passionate search for patterns, particularly scienti‹c and mathematical patterns. The cyclical repetitions and the numbers and solfège syllables (which actually named the rhythms and pitches sung) bespoke actuarial dullness and routine, but there were also effusions of ardent feeling throughout that strongly pulled the other way. Accompanying the monklike chanting of the baritone jury-chorus in the trial scenes (do, la, do, la), for instance, was plaintive chirping from a female chorus (mi, mi) across the stage and an enchanting romantic melody played with demonstrative ardor by the Einstein solo violinist. The same tension could be observed in the show’s gestures and movement: the performers in every

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act ceaselessly jotted in the air, as if making notes or calculations as Childs did during her opening dance, for instance—a mechanistically repetitive activity that also conveyed heroic vigor and persistence. All of which is to say that though there may not have been an argument in Einstein, there was a rather crude central agon. Stated plainly, it sounds like a pre-Bauhaus chestnut: the struggle of the human individual for expression and self-actualization in a world of increasingly dehumanizing technology. The free-›owing movement in the two dance sections was the best evidence for this. The dances came off as intervals of deliberate relief and release from the rigid control Wilson imposed on every other scene.27 The costumes for them were brightly colored, and Childs’s choreography emphasized interweaving clusters of springy and elegant ‹gures who never touched one another, and who grew more anxious and tentative in act 3 as the spaceship drew nearer. DeGroat’s choreography in 1976 was less polished and formal, as I learned from a video, more like a folk dance in a meadow, stressing ordinary jogging, bending, and bouncing movements and featuring a young woman who whirled dervishly in place for about ten minutes while everyone else formed patterns around her like electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus. These differences notwithstanding, the general tonal relationship of the dances to the other scenes was the same with both choreographers. There is a famously exhaustive analysis of Einstein by Stefan Brecht, Bertolt Brecht’s son and one of Wilson’s former Byrds, which is strongly colored by his resentment of the production’s polish and professionalism. Brecht is grimly serious about the work’s thematic development, stressing the apocalyptic nature of the Einstein-inspired technology looming over the action. His reading sees the opera as a sort of doomsday proclamation comparable to the prophecy of Kaliyugi (the age of destruction) in The Mahabharata. The visual themes move steadily toward “disintegration” and “failure,” Brecht says, ful‹lling an immanent “catastrophic potential” in their conception: “Train landscape and court room appear subject to ‹ssion [because they split apart or otherwise decompose], the ‹eld-scenes are not only relaxing dance interludes but distribute the approach of the end (as signi‹ed by the space-ship’s arrival).”28 This Cold War reading ‹ts the scenes’ visual development, I suppose, but it does not ‹t my overall experience of the work, either live in 1984 or during multiple video viewings in 2008. The subject of nuclear arms was, if anything, more omnipresent in 1984 than in 1976 (when Brecht saw the

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piece) because of the ubiquity and stature of Jonathan Schell’s 1982 book The Fate of the Earth, which signi‹cantly raised the national consciousness about the issue. I had recently read that frightening book myself before seeing Einstein at BAM, but I don’t remember thinking much about the subject before the mushroom cloud projection in the ‹nal act. Glass’s music did vividly capture the ›avor of life lived under the pressure of rapidly advancing technology, but the same could be said of countless other artworks dating back to the nineteenth century, including Wagner’s music dramas and ‹lm classics such as Lang’s Metropolis and Chaplin’s Modern Times. Interestingly enough, like those quaint ‹lms, Einstein’s abiding atmosphere was playfulness, and its sense of humor was its atmospheric glue. The fact that the production never took itself entirely seriously was what ultimately kept its creaky central agon from ever seeming like a chestnut. At the end of the trial scene’s coffee break, for instance, ten or ‹fteen seconds were ‹lled with nothing but the cast crinkling paper bags. The spaceship in the dance scenes was a plastic toy drawn on a wire: an adorably cheesy, low-tech effect that elicited giggles from the audience and let considerable air out of the ponderous high-tech marvels used elsewhere. The sequence of trial scenes offered a more sustained illustration. The ‹rst trial scene was a droll distillation of the maddeningly slow grind of justice. The judges declared the court “in session” six times (once in French), never mentioning the name or nature of the case, as the various players entered in slow, ritualistic procession and took up their ceremonial positions as jurors, witnesses, attorneys, and stenographers. The organ doodled, the jury-chorus chanted, the handless clock hovered like a mysterious hieroglyphic tablet until a black disk slowly effaced it, and time seemed to drip heedlessly onto the huge illuminated bed on the ›oor below. Meanwhile, Childs—strong, lithe, sharp-boned—sat sculpturally in an eight-foot-tall witness chair while someone else recited a baf›ing text by Christopher Knowles (the brain-damaged teenager Wilson began collaborating with in the 1970s): So it you see one of those baggy pants it was huge Mr Bojangles So if you see any of those baggy pants it was huge chuck the hills and if you know it was a violin to be answer the telephone and if any one asks you please it was trees it it it is like that . . .29

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Fig. 6. The slow grind of justice in the ‹rst trial scene (act 1, scene 2) in Einstein on the Beach. (Photo: Fulvio Roiter.)

The next trial scene (act 3) asserted more of a sense of purposefulness and individual human agency but maintained the general air of puzzlement. The stage was split in half, with the courtroom on the left and a barred prison on the right where two inmates in striped uniforms performed a jumpy, vaguely antagonistic dance on benches. Childs, now wearing a white debutante dress rather than her generic Einstein costume, lay on the truncated bed repeating the following speech over and over in an eerie, mentally disconnected, pedantic drone: I was in this prematurely air-conditioned super market And there were all these aisles And there were all these bathing caps that you could buy Which had these kind of fourth of July plumes on them They were red and yellow and blue I wasn’t tempted to buy one But I was reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding the beach.30

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The last line was the opera’s only explicit reference to a beach. After a while, without pausing in her drone, Childs rose, walked to the jail bars, and dressed herself as “Tanya,” the criminal Patty Hearst’s alter ego in black jacket and tommy gun, as did Sutton a few minutes later—thus explicitly invoking one of the most controversial public ‹gures of the era, a lightning rod for pitched establishment anxieties concerning the protean self and the erosion of personal responsibility in very speci‹c social circumstances. The mind quickly ‹lled then with speculation about connections between Hearst and Einstein, between Hearst’s rejection of her conventional upbringing and the opera’s rejection of received theatrical conventions, between social criminality and larger-scale betrayals of nature, betrayals of God, and much, much more. That invitation to probe rationally and inquire politically, however, was extremely short-lived. In fact, nothing else in the production encouraged it. No reference to Hearst or any other topical subject appeared again, and the ‹eld dance-scene that followed suggested a committed return to meditative reverie and determined political vagueness. Then came the resumption of the trial theme in the middle of act 4. When this scene began, all one saw, for more than three minutes, was an illuminated white rectangle lying horizontally in the dark—a light bar seen earlier as the downstage edge of the bed. This shape shimmered expectantly while a single sustained organ note purred and then swelled into quick, closely grouped musical phrases and then excited, overlapping, cyclical keyboard patterns. Without warning, the bar then began to rise on one edge, lifting with excruciating slowness into a diagonal and then a vertical position. In the opening train scene a similar bar had split the sky vertically like modernist lightning; now the standing bar seemed to linger as a ‹gure of life. At the moment it achieved verticality, it became stunningly and unmistakably anthropomorphic. It was extremely strange to ‹nd emotions so powerfully pulled by a simple strip of light substituted for a character, yet that is what happened. With that gesture, all the complexities and perplexities of human justice seemed suddenly absorbed into the pure monolithic form: absolute presence and absolute absence merged into one, a pretentious suprematist ‹gure of mystical rebirth recontextualized as a minimalist gesture of lighthearted selfdeprecation. Finally the bar began levitating directly upward, accompanied by a fervent soprano voice that joined the organ (“ahhhhh”), roaming romantically through numerous pitches and rising in volume until the bar disappeared in the ›ies: a geometric Hamlet sung to its rest by a wordless angel.

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Fig. 7. The majestically rising light bar in act 4, scene 2 of Einstein on the Beach. (Photo: Babette Mangolte.)

I remember the palpable catch in the breath of the spectators around me as this scene ended. To me it had clearly been the climax of the opera, and I assumed they all felt the same way: the bar-cum-bed stood for Einstein the dreamer, I thought, and the ascension was his reverential yet tongue-in-cheek apotheosis. I was humbled to learn, afterward, that almost no one I attended the show with saw things the same way. Everyone enjoyed the rising bar for his or her own reasons—no one I knew had missed it due to lobby breaks or anything like that—but I was the only one who identi‹ed it with Einstein. Moreover, one friend insisted that the show’s climax had been the cascading, prayer-like, Coltrane-esque saxophone solo in the building scene. Others said that the climax was obviously the tumultuous conjunction of sound, light, and technical effects in the ‹nal space machine scene, which included a marvelously frantic, elbow-›ailing ›ashlight dance performed by Wilson himself—a standout moment of exuberant individual creativity comparable to the bed aria and the saxophone solo. Only when I studied Einstein years later on video did I fully understand this disagreement. The opera’s acts and scenes were constructed on a principle of such strict parallelism that their affect was leveled. The visual

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themes appeared to have an ineluctably rising dramatic action leading to a singular climax because each of us had, in different ways, projected that expectation onto them. In actuality, though, they possessed no such Aristotelian pattern, either in imagery, text, or physical activity. The closest the piece came to such a pattern was the very general jo-ha-kyu progression in the music. Wilson’s sensibility in Einstein in some ways recalled that of the alien Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, who read all the pages of their books at once rather than in sequence, because they know how the universe will end and thus are indifferent to change over time. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.31

Unlike Vonnegut’s satirical vision of sterility, of a moribund race that sees itself as “bugs in amber,” however, Einstein’s world was earnest, passionate, and dynamic—a dwelling for living bugs, one might say, rather than fossilized ones.32 The structural image that sprang to my mind was a beehive, a collection of compartments conceived as more or less discrete vessels for self-generated energy and growth (growth of anything, it seemed—the celebration of human ingenuity, the warning against hubris, or the ›eeting intellectual speculation on restrictive social roles). The compartmentalization of the cells of energy is the chief reason why the piece could tolerate spectators leaving for long intervals without loss of impact. And the dynamo generating that energy was the music—a source of perpetual regeneration that made the action feel optimistic and ful‹lling despite the maddening repetitions. The score was like this dramatic world’s core life force, with its endless loops of radiant energy ›owing through characters and pictures that would plainly have been quite inert without them. The lack of sequential dramatic progress in narrative terms consequently never felt disappointing, or even particularly frustrating. One always had a distinct sense of the piece probing nuances of the endlessly renewable human drives to understand, create, and destroy. (In that sense, it was more authentically Hindu than The Mahabharata.) The model of “de-

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velopment” in this world came only from the musical cycle patterns, which moved forward by continually starting over and continuing with increased complication. In his 1987 book Music by Philip Glass, Glass described his view of Einstein’s structure, both as music and as drama. “It is surely no coincidence,” he wrote, “that it was at the moment that I was embarking upon a major shift in my music to large-scale theater works that I began to develop a new, more expressive language for myself.”33 Glass recounts a soul-searching process during the period before Einstein when he began to question his exclusive focus on “additive process” and “cyclic structure” and opened up his music to the pleasures of “harmonic progression.” (The former were the techniques that had made him simultaneously revered and reviled among the serious music public in the 1970s. Additive process is the systematic expansion and contraction by one note of a repeated musical grouping, and cyclic structure is the superimposition of different rhythmic patterns to create the impression, as he puts it, of “wheels inside wheels.”)34 Einstein and Another Look at Harmony—the work composed just before Einstein, which it partly incorporated—were Glass’s ‹rst attempts to reach a larger audience. And Einstein is replete with magni‹cent harmonies whose echoes extend from Bach to Berlioz. It was the cumulative force of those harmonies, the impression of maturity and ripening they brought to the score’s numbing rhythmical patterns (and climaxing in the clamorous space machine ‹nale), that generated the impression of exciting development and rising action. Glass’s discussion of Einstein’s dramatic structure rests on a curious misunderstanding. He describes Samuel Beckett (for whose plays he composed several background scores from the 1960s to the 1980s) as the model for a liberating paradigm of drama whose actual model is Gertrude Stein. Glass speaks of a type of structurally ›attened play in which “the emotional quickening (or epiphany)” occurs “in a different place in each performance” because the play contains no “interior mechanism” designed to trigger speci‹c emotional responses at particular times.35 In fact, all of Beckett’s plays contain such mechanisms, but Stein’s do not. (Interestingly, she moved in the circle of the original “›at” modernist painters, Manet and Cezanne, whom Clement Greenberg venerated.) This quality in her “landscape plays,” with their monotonous repetitions, fractured syntax, and inconsequential, nonhierarchical plots, is what makes them the most illuminating precedents for Wilson’s similarly leveled structures.

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The interesting af‹nity between Wilson and Stein, however, which has been well documented by other critics, is that it also provides a powerful historical model for the benign betrayal of the implacable ›attening they both stood for.36 Tellingly, both Wilson and Stein collaborated with composers who upset their absolute plans and, in the process, helped create extraordinary theatrical events. Stein’s partner was Virgil Thomson, whose remarkable 1928 score for the avant-garde opera Four Saints in Three Acts imposed enchanting melodies and passionate feelings on the obdurate stasis and emotional neutrality of Stein’s libretto. Glass’s score for Einstein (along with Childs’s choreography) similarly added depth, variety, and optimism to Wilson’s cool, arid, and formalistic pictures. In an interview during the BAM revival, Glass generously shared credit for this achievement with Wilson: I wrote a piece I hoped would get people up on their feet, and by God it worked! I said, “Bob, I’m almost embarrassed at how well it works, because it seems somehow so calculated.” But in a way, that’s what theatre is all about, and it would be false to pretend we aren’t conscious of the dramatic ›ow of an evening. We’re both theatre people and we had to embrace the strategies of the theatre. Verdi did it, so did Mozart, so did Wagner.37

And so did Nunn and the RSC with Nicholas Nickleby, Glass might have added, and so would Brook and the CICT with The Mahabharata the following year. Because Robert Wilson dislikes and mistrusts intellectual frameworks, he has always been cautious about articulating theoretical goals. He tends to respond to theoretical questions by speaking of the minutiae of speci‹c decisions rather than global ideas. For this reason, primary evidence is in short supply for those interested in his larger artistic ambitions. “The fact is,” he once said, “I don’t really understand my own stuff. Artists very seldom understand what they are doing. My work is a mystery to me, and I feel that words only confuse people about my work. I don’t wish to mystify people. It’s best not to say anything at all.”38Another dif‹culty in generalizing about him is that since the 1980s his work has been extremely various, including visual art and design exhibitions, classic plays and musicals in addition to original theater projects, and only occasionally have his theater works hewed to the principles of ›attening and leveling seen in Einstein.

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Many pieces have had thoroughly conventional Aristotelian structures. The one generalization that seemed to make sense with his works through the mid-1980s was the Wagner comparison.39 As Erika Munk wrote in a review of Einstein’s 1984 revival: “Gesamtkünstlichkeit [integrated effect in theater of mixed artistic means] was part of almost every project” in the 1960s avant-garde, but “Wagnerian scale wasn’t reached until Wilson’s early big pieces, and a Wagnerian union of music and staging didn’t happen until Einstein.”40 Wilson aspired in this period to Bayreuth-like audience pilgrimages (to the Met, to BAM, to the 6,000-seat Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, his preferred venue for the CIVIL WarS: “It had a sense of an event about it”).41 And the trancelike viewing experience he said he strove for was also similar to Wagner’s: When watching a play that is seven hours or twelve hours long, the viewer falls into a half-sleeping, half-waking state in which his internal images are mixed with the external images on stage, and he ceases to make a distinction between the stage and reality. Some viewers see or feel things that never really appeared on stage. In this way the viewer himself participates in the creation of the drama.42

Over the years, this embrace of hypnotic or hallucinatory states of mind on Wilson’s part has attracted some harsh criticism, as has his Wagnerian use of emotionally powerful yet historically deracinated imagery, chosen in the name of “myth” (e.g., Lincoln, Queen Victoria, Einstein, and Frederick the Great cut loose from their historical moorings).43 These preferences of Wilson’s have been seen as unforgivably naïve in the wake of the Nazi‹cation of Bayreuth and the many other exploitations of mass unreason by ideological theater-makers in the twentieth century. Here is Erika Munk: An opera about Einstein is, on the face of it, a totalizing effort to overcome the split between reason and aesthetic emotion. When, despite odd conjunctions and startling images, its overall effect is to draw you in and sweep you away, to engage the marrow of your bones (if you love the music as I do), enrapture the eye, and detach the brain, the split is overcome by reason’s sheer defeat. Quite total (-itarian? Perhaps).44

And here is Tony Kushner:

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I saw Einstein on the Beach at the Met in ’76 and was maddened and deeply impressed by it . . . I was horri‹ed by what I saw of Civil Wars. It really seemed like Nuremberg time—done for Reagan’s Hitler Olympics. . . . What are we saying about history? Because these ‹gures are not neutral, they’re not decorative. You do see ghosts of ideas ›oating through but it just feels profoundly aestheticist in the worst, creepiest way, something with fascist potential. Also, the loudest voice is the voice of capital. . . . There’s a really unholy synthesis going on of what is supposed to be resistant, critical and marginal, marrying big money and big corporate support.45

Reactions like these are inevitable in a post-Brechtian era whose educated observers are acutely aware of historical critiques of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the culture industry by the likes of Brecht, Adorno, and Horkheimer. In a 1984 book, Leo Bersani, appropriating a phrase from another critic without acknowledgment (Gerald Rabkin), disparaged Wilson as “the Cecil B. DeMille of the avant-garde” and accused him of sympathizing with “Lautréamont’s intention of ‘cretinizing’ the artist’s public.”46 Political critiques that rise to such heights of rhetorical contumely strike me as mildly hysterical. Surely labeling Wilson a crypto-fascist or a cretinizing panderer overstates the case (just as labeling Brook a know-nothing Orientalist overstates the case against him). Wilson belongs to a faux naïf tradition in modernism with a long history that dates back well before Gertrude Stein to still earlier ‹gures like Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin. All of these artists refused responsibility for the broad panoply of worldly (grownup) implications in their childlike techniques. Wilson’s “innocent” apoliticism and careless invocation of myth just seemed especially sinister in the 1970s and 1980s because they were played out on a Wagnerian scale and because of the critical mood described in the Mahabharata chapter. In any case, I believe there was more to the political subtext of Einstein than these critics perceived.47 Einstein cultivated not the disturbing “fascist potential” but the redemptive humanistic goals that gave birth to the Gesamtkunstwerk. Wagner originally conceived this form as an instrument to heal communal wounds arising from modernity and the Industrial Revolution. In all its later historical iterations—from Hugo Ball’s promiscuously interart Dada cabaret, to Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus plan for a Totaltheater, to Antonin Artaud’s sensorily and emotionally overwhelming Theater of Cruelty, among many more—the form’s deepest purpose has been (in Matthew

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Wilson Smith’s words) the recovery of “supposedly original, lost, organic unities.”48 This quixotic spirit has been the total artwork’s crucial de‹ning feature, as it pits a broadly conceived enthusiasm for integration and unity against modernity’s most irredeemable rifts. Chief among them, writes Smith in his excellent book on the tradition, have been the rifts between “mechanical and organic form, technology and technophobia, mass reproduction and the aura of originality, individual genius and the Volk, commerce and communism.”49 The Gesamtkunstwerk is modernity’s polestar. It is an uncompromising wish for a joyful community to be realized in this life, in this world. It is a longing for unity amidst fragmentation, for collectivity amidst alienation. It is inherently restless and potentially revolutionary . . . It is the shape of radical hope.50

Einstein was a work by two “individual geniuses,” designed as a vessel for collective and communal creativity (“the viewer himself participates”). Its subject matter was a scientist (an “individual genius,” pluralized onstage) obsessed with theoretical unity: a man who invested years in an intense and ultimately unsuccessful effort to develop a Grand Unifying Theory of physics that could link all observable phenomena large and small. The opera thus incorporated both a dream of universal unity and its immanent failure in the person of its central ‹gure. The show’s action consisted of various interactive clashes between mechanical and organic form, and between technology and technophobia: seen in the play of mechanistic repetition and ardor in the music, in the alternation of free-›ow and rigid control in the dance and blocking, and in the anthropomorphic transformation of the formalistic stage pictures. In addition, Einstein aimed to some extent at real-world social unity by inviting reconciliation between its variously alienated audience constituencies. Think of the uptown and downtown crowds bumping elbows for the ‹rst time at the Met in 1976, for instance. Also the diehard admirers of Glass’s strict serial techniques and those newly attracted by his incorporation of harmony. Also the Anglophone spectators able to understand the show’s texts and the international audiences grateful for the “universal” picture-language. Also the veteran Wilson-watchers at BAM in 1984 and the skeptical newcomers seeing his ‹rst New York premiere in eight years. There’s no need to stretch this point. Overemphasizing it would contradict the spirit of the work, which seemed to dream of formal unity while

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working to maintain strict parallelism among its means and components. In fact, in the uncertainty of its social unity, Einstein set a pattern for Wilson’s subsequent work. For decades afterward, the signature tension in his career would be his desire to be popular without compromising the high modernist visual aesthetic that de‹ned his style. On the one hand he has continued to insist on his fundamentally innocent eye and the spectator’s right to watch naïvely in the same spirit. On the other, he has remained wedded to a spare, geometrical, symbolist-inspired idiom that invariably comes off as “knowing” and sophisticated because it is inherently invested with self-consciousness (what Greenberg called a critique of “the discipline itself ”). Wilson’s collaborations with pop stars like Tom Waits, David Byrne, and Lou Reed have loudly advertised his longing for mass popularity on a Dickensian scale. The hitch is that the severe modernism of his visual language is intrinsically critical and thus speaks most comfortably and effectively to an educated elite—to the group Hamlet snobbishly called “the judicious,” whose “censure” must “o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.” Elitism and avant-gardism aside, however, as I mentioned earlier, the great mystery of Einstein for me had principally to do with verbal language, with the question of how a production so aloof from rational words sustained impressions of such strength, density, and speci‹city for so many hours. One 1976 reviewer (Jamake Highwater) suggested that the answer lay in ritual, in a dynamic akin to hypnotic “primal drumming”: The fundamental structure of ritual used up all of the complex ideals of Wilson and Glass—reshaping everything into nine long rites of initiation in each of which a single microcosmic act is so eloquently slowed down that we are given the unique opportunity of witnessing the primal power which lies behind the reality which most people accept as absolute.51

Another suggestion drew on Wilson’s history of fascination with the mentally handicapped and his lofty view of Knowles’s literary abilities. Wilson: Christopher Knowles is the continuation of my fascination with Gertrude Stein. In many ways, he is much more brilliant than Stein, because he does it extemporaneously. You can’t believe the organization of his mind in terms of mathematics, geometry, architecture and how he can see patterns. It’s visual music. I mean, he’s a genius. His words were mostly sound poems that could be understood internationally as well.52

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Although Knowles wrote only a fraction of Einstein’s texts, some commentators thought the production seductively re›ected (in Susan Sontag’s words) his “symptomology of mental de‹ciency,” just as Wilson’s Deafman Glance (1971) had re›ected the experiential world of the deaf-mute Raymond Andrews (another boy whom Wilson befriended and collaborated with somewhat earlier).53 It doesn’t really matter whether this was Wilson’s true intention in Einstein or not. I have serious doubts about the capacity of any such viewpoint to sustain interest on its own for ‹ve hours. As Sontag observed, any art bent solely on re›ecting a state of consciousness (pathological or otherwise) invariably ends up feeling isolating (“asocial”) rather than expansive or inclusive, and that was not the case with Einstein.54 Still another explanation was offered by Craig Owens in a 1977 essay that considered Einstein’s nonverbal strategies in connection with Artaud. According to Owens, Wilson conceived Einstein as an Artaudian “pictographic text” that strove to undermine “the authority of the spoken word” by attempting to “stage a semblance of the unanalyzed, amorphous continuum of sensory data” that our brains receive before forming it into language.55 What happened in performance, though, was that viewers processed Einstein’s associational patterns, metaphors, and texts (even the nonsense texts) in a manner indistinguishable from processing poetry. The brain transformed the prelinguistic experiences into linguistic ones. Owens: “To the extent that Wilson generates a uni‹ed ‹eld through visual means, his theater is nonverbal. Nevertheless, the techniques according to which his imagery is manipulated can only be described as poetic.”56 This argument is illuminating. It helpfully historicizes Sartre’s point about the inevitable co-optation of the nonverbal by the verbal onstage. But it does not explain how Einstein sustained its power any more than the putative presence of ritual or pathology does. In my view, something unique and extraordinarily fruitful happened in the making of Einstein regarding not just “the authority of the word” (Owens) but regarding authority in general. Paradoxically, Wilson acted in this piece as both a dictatorial auteur in the tradition of Wagner and Artaud and a diffuser and ›attener in the mold of Stein whose values were antiauthoritarian. His exceptionally tentative and laissez-faire attitude toward meaning lent an air of humility to his absolute control over the pictures and movement. By the same token, the general polish and discipline of the whole show suggested that all the various collaborators, who were clearly given real authority and independence, were answerable to the same high technical standards. This peculiar circumstance—of separateness and par-

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allelism combined with the sort of sparkle and polish one expects only where authority is truly singular—became a marvelous, standing enigma hovering over the production. The oddity of it prompted viewers to watch for hours and hours with improbably high expectations, unsure about particular signi‹cances but nevertheless secure in the knowledge that something signi‹cant and pertinent would always rise to ‹ll the apparent voids. One felt drawn into a reverie that might last inde‹nitely, and remain inde‹nitely rewarding, since time itself seemed as expertly manipulated as the pictures, music, and dance. In the end, the length of the production, divided into such precisely crafted and timed sections, was yet another warrant of its rigor and tenacity. Bertolt Brecht once said that in Epic Theater, the politically savvy form he advocated, “the great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production” could “simply be by-passed by radically separating the elements.”57 He presumed that rational thought and social critique would supply the connections between those elements. Wilson obviously made no such assumption, offering instead a de‹antly vague promise of meaningfulness without speci‹c meaning. And in that vague promise lay the basis for still another rather rare experience in the theater: direct phenomenological perception. This is the experience that Sontag championed in Against Interpretation, a sensual mode of artistic response that, while not denying the intellectual, crucially fosters “direct appreciation of a work’s ‘thingness.’”58 The same idea could be approached via Robert Smithson’s vision of minimalist sculpture in the 1960s, of timeless “new monuments” that “bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age” and place “past and future . . . into an objective present.”59 Or via William Carlos Williams’s famous credo, “no ideas but in things”—an apologia for a form of quintessentially American artistic naïveté in the twentieth century that was rooted in intense, local experience rather than modernist complexities. The objective strangeness of a train, a derrick, a courtroom, a rectangle of light . . . seen as if for the ‹rst time, yet not childishly, or not only so. Inexplicable surprise felt in a seashell, in the ›oating descent of a paper airplane, in the blinking of patterned lights, even in familiar images of Einstein or a mushroom cloud. The possibility of such direct, empirical apprehension, such bright, sensual contact with the “thingness” of a mise-en-scène, with literally unspeakable essential truths inside it, seemed almost absurdly unlikely to me on that winter evening in 1984. Yet I witnessed it, for one ›eeting, ‹ve-hour moment.

chapter six Quizoola! and Speak Bitterness

the avant-garde, if it can still be said to exist, has become a very large and diverse theatrical category. The term is slung about like a smiley-face emoticon in the information age (☺), a generic token of mild excitement that serves equally well to ›atter narrative and nonnarrative performance, extravagant multimedia work and bare-stage purism, respectful adaptation and high-handed deconstruction, as well as every conceivable attitude toward acting from the virtuosically professional to the de‹antly amateurish. Internationally prominent ‹gures like Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, and Peter Sellars, who command multi-million-dollar budgets and work at rich and prestigious institutions, are avant-garde. So are obscure club performers and purposefully humble, small-scale operations like the Chicago company Goat Island, the New York groups National Theater of the United States and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the British company Forced Entertainment, which rarely perform for more than a few hundred people at a time. For me, the sole meaningful distinction left is between theater that complacently accepts the basic terms of what Brecht called the “apparati”—the institutions that deliver art to the public—and theater that meaningfully criticizes and challenges them, or at least wriggles uncomfortably in their grasp.1 Artists in the humbler mold just mentioned are obviously better positioned to wriggle meaningfully than the big-budget stars, and one of those groups, Forced Entertainment, is the subject of this chapter. All the huge marathon productions so far described have posed major practical obstacles to theatrical institutions, forcing them to jump through hoops ranging from wholesale construction or refurbishment of theaters, to arranging special meals and sanitary facilities for prodigious crowds, to negotiating special work hours for contractual employees. The “durational” 124

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productions of Forced Entertainment, as the company calls them, also sometimes provoke institutional confusion, but they take place on a different scale, playing to small crowds in modest and simple spaces. Most of them last six hours (though they have occasionally lasted twelve or twentyfour hours). Like Einstein, they are not made with the expectation that audiences will watch them from beginning to end, are not built around narrative, and do not develop ‹ctionally in an Aristotelian sense. Unlike Einstein, however, these pieces are like subtly subversive games that cannot be conclusively won or lost, rule-based activities occupying a gray area between theater and performance art that invite sustained contemplation of their peculiar rules, and many spectators who arrive intending to stay only a short time end up watching them for hours, sometimes to the end. These works are nonrepresentational to the extent that all game-playing is, yet they are also exquisitely metaphorical, turning the exposure, vulnerability, exhibitionism, and inherent duplicity of live theatrical performance into powerful tropes for the trials of a consciously lived life. Again like Einstein and the class of early Wilson work it represents, Forced Entertainment’s durational pieces twist, distort, and critique the received Western model of drama in the spirit of John Cage and his vision of an environmental theater that would blend seamlessly into everyday life, incorporating the accidental along with the aesthetically planned. The company’s artistic director, Tim Etchells, says Forced Entertainment seeks a “theatre that place[s] you in a world rather than describing one to you,” a theater that “disrupt[s] the borders between the so-called real and the socalled ‹ctional.”2 Where they most signi‹cantly part company with Wilson is on the fundamental matter of avant-garde heroism. Einstein on the Beach (like almost all Wilson’s works) was a heroic creation in the venerable mold of Wagner, Meyerhold, Brecht, Cocteau, and all the other innovative theatrical modernists who earned immortality with signature productions that were hailed as monumental and enshrined in the avant-garde canon. Seeking to reach as large a public as possible, Wilson and Glass created a rigorous, professionally polished epic and supplied it with mythic resonance and multiple exciting climaxes, notwithstanding their announced philosophical preference for ›atness. Forced Entertainment, in contrast, has never craved monumentality or mass appeal and has never striven for polished appearances. It has no Apollonian yearning for the totalizing experience of the Gesamtkunstwerk or the heroic, authoritative aura of the Wagnerian masterpiece.

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As its name implies, the company’s orientation is antiheroic and strategically humble. It operates on what might be called a Beckettian paradigm of punctured pretention and precise critique of its apparatus. Its durationals are like whole works built on the principle of the act 2 coffee break in Einstein. Thus their brilliance depends on their unprecious and bedraggled affect, their clever incorporation of the hapless and chaotic, and their smart and hilarious investigations of failure and fallibility. The wonder of these pieces is that they do ultimately acquire magisterial gravity despite themselves, by dint of sheer dogged persistence. The ‹rst durational I saw was the six-hour, three-actor Quizoola! in Portland, Oregon, in September 2008—a tour performance of a show originally produced in Glasgow in 1996. It was included in the 2008 TBA (TimeBased Art) Festival, sponsored by PICA (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art), which specializes in productions that elude traditional categorization as theater, performance art, dance, new media, or installation. TBA scheduled Quizoola! in Leftbank, a former creamery and plastics factory located at a desolate junction of several main street arteries across the river from downtown. The gritty old Leftbank building was at that time under construction—or reconstruction—as a new postindustrial hub for Portland’s adventurous and thriving cultural scene, but the work was far from ‹nished. The show took place in a demolished, L-shaped second-›oor room about the size of a squash court, crammed with about two dozen folding chairs as well as construction tools, sheetrock scraps, discarded lumber, and walls open to loose wires and pipes. I mention this circumstance not only because it was the perfect dubious environment for Quizoola! but also because the seemingly dodgy arrangements were the accidental cause of my seeing the entire show, which I had not intended to do. TBA had announced that admission to this event was free and on a ‹rst-come, ‹rst-served basis, and by curtain time about seventy-‹ve people had assembled for it at Leftbank. When the doors opened, however, the crowd was told that, by order of the ‹re marshal, only twenty‹ve could be admitted at a time. I entered with the ‹rst group and then felt I had to stay, because leaving and returning would have meant waiting hours in line (most people stayed at least an hour or two, particularly early on). After settling in for what I feared might be an ordeal, I found myself gripped, drawn in with a steady intensity that I would not have thought possible with a work so dead set against being a play. The basic circumstance was simple (or so it seemed). Two actors in

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smeared clown makeup sat in plain wooden chairs surrounded by a circle of bare lightbulbs and took turns asking each other questions that they read from dog-eared paper sheets, occasionally dropped on the ›oor. One held the sheets and asked the questions, the other offered spontaneous, unscripted answers, and periodically they switched roles (when the questioner asked, “Would you like to stop?” and his partner answered “Yes”). At two-hour intervals one actor was spelled by a third entering from offstage. Their manner of speech ranged from rote and dull to excited and violent, and the questions ranged from quiz-show trivia (“David Soul of Starsky and Hutch fame supports which English soccer team?”) to personal opinion (“Who do you really hate?”) to encyclopedic fact (“Who were the Vikings?”) to temporal fact (“What time is it in West Africa now?”) to barroom chat (“Do you work the night shift?” “Can you tell what people are thinking?”), and much, much more. There were evidently thousands of questions on the sheets, of which many hundreds were chosen. I had read several descriptions of Quizoola! from Forced Entertainment’s critical admirers before that evening, and also perused a published version of the question list.3 Until I saw the piece in performance, however, the very idea that such a plodding, methodical, physically static event could possibly generate a sustained experience of revelatory theatrical discovery comparable to the others described in this book—that it could actually stand comparison with the cataloging gestures of such epoch-de‹ning artists as Homer, Bacon, Rabelais, and Joyce, as described in Umberto Eco’s The In‹nity of Lists—would have seemed patently ridiculous to me. The fact is, I went to Leftbank somewhat skeptical of this event. I have been let down so often by lazy and uninsightful, “system”-driven avant-gardism posing as edgy postmodern fragmentariness that I go warily to work that announces itself in that vein. What most surprised me about Quizoola! was its utterly improbable trick of conjuring enormity out of shallowness. Unlikely as it may seem, its unassuming methodical system proved to be a sly vessel for unwitting monumentality in the end, because the astonishingly capacious list of questions, along with the vast tracts of human experience touched on in the improvised answers, provided a luminous instance of what Eco calls “chaotic enumeration,” a representation by obsessive, systematic listing that “seizes [us with] vertigo” by means of its “dizzying voraciousness.”4 This text amounted to a bizarrely quixotic and extremely moving effort to comprehend an entire world.

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Why do people keep pets? If you did have any pets, what kind of pets would they be? Can you ›y? Are you scared of your emotions? Are you in control? Do you believe that the civil service is a depressing and corrupting institution? Are you hungry? Name six lies that children are commonly told. How many planets orbit around the sun? Are you satis‹ed with the work Bin Laden has done so far? What is the biggest city in North America? Name four things that you have lost. Name four ‹lms starring Marilyn Monroe. How many people died at The Somme? Do you believe that places contain a memory or trace of events that have taken place in them? What are the rules of the parlour game sardines? What are the rules of warfare? What are pedestrians? Who were the Sex Pistols and why were they called that? Do you think that sleep is close to death?5 Forced Entertainment was founded in 1984 by a group of friends from the University of Exeter who moved together after graduation to the northern English industrial city of Shef‹eld. They saw that rugged and economically forlorn place as an ideal laboratory in which to cultivate an original experimental aesthetic far from the earning and mainstreaming pressures of the United Kingdom’s capitals. “It was that time during Thatcherism when you could hide amongst 3–4 million unemployed and quietly get on with your work and being poor,” wrote Etchells.6 The core group, which has remained remarkably stable over time—Etchells (principal director, writer, and spokesman), Robin Arthur, Cathy Naden, Claire Marshall, Richard Lowdon, and Terry O’Connor—began making productions in collaborative workshops, performing them in art galleries, found spaces, and their own formerfactory rehearsal space, and eventually touring them throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, and elsewhere. Since their founding, they have averaged

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about one new performance work per year, along with a body of related installation, photography, video, and interactive CD-ROM works. Etchells says the group knew from the beginning that their work would be “deeply and always political,” but they felt no connection to the prevailing tradition of British political drama in the 1980s (e.g., Edgar, Hare, Churchill). “The theatre we dreamed of was concerned with ethics and identity,” he said, “but, in embracing the fractured ambiguous landscape (social, cultural, psychic) of the 80s and 90s in Britain we knew it had to forgo the suspect certainties of what other people called political theatre.”7 Although they did not know it then, the group’s attitude was close to that of Peter Handke, who had complained more than a decade earlier that explicitly moralistic theater “gets on my nerves” and insisted that theater could work politically only in an implicit manner by examining the duplicities of language and problematizing the theater’s own conventions and practices as a means of forcing people to notice how “domination is effected.”8 They did not know Handke’s work early on, though, and felt their closest allies were image- and movement-centered artists like Pina Bausch, Jan Fabre, and the British group Impact Theater, as well as performance artists like Chris Burden, Bruce Naumann, Brian Catling, and Bobby Baker, who had riskily explored physical danger, physical presence, time and duration, intuition, chance, and dreams. Burden famously had a friend shoot a bullet through his arm in the 1971 performance Shoot, and Etchells quotes with admiration Burden’s description of the people who attended that piece as “witnesses” rather than “spectators”: It’s this distinction I come back to again and again and one which contemporary performance dwells on endlessly because to witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s own place in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as an onlooker.9

Forced Entertainment’s durationals are the best examples of this “ethical” presence, in which performers and spectators alike “feel the weight of things and [their] own place in them.” But the company did not begin making them until the mid-1990s, when its distinctive aesthetic had already been well developed in shorter works, generally about ninety minutes long. The earliest of these (unseen by me) were directed by various members on

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a rotating basis and were deconstructions of genre clichés (romance, gangster, science ‹ction) that depended heavily on ‹lm quotation, simple choreography, and prerecorded speech mixed with disjunctive and fragmentary live speech. Around 1987–88, prodded in part by their ‹rst encounter with the Wooster Group, the group sought a more consistent direction, making Etchells sole director and focusing their work more on direct interplay between performers and audiences and on the company’s experiences of their urban environment. They had always worked from fragmentary and incomplete material— scraps of text, music, costume, story ideas, often about theater and theatermaking, life in cities, identity and sexual politics—explored in what Etchells calls “chaotic” and “blundering” improvisatory workshops. Their mature pieces became, in his words, “›uid dramas of attempt and struggle” that “rais[ed] performance itself to the level of a subject.” These works “abandoned the rhetorical power of the stage, refusing the shelter afforded by theatre, preferring simply to be there.”10 They were vessels for accidental poetry and surprising coincidental meaning, which replaced the “traditional ‘engines’ of character and plot” with live onstage “dynamics such as play, competition, upstaging, duress, exhaustion, pattern-making and alliance-forming.”11 The pieces often acknowledged the history and associations of their performance sites—for example, a gallery, library, garage, or tour bus—and though they sometimes had ›imsy story frames, their true subject was always the “story” of their discovery process. Mishaps and mistakes—along with sundry other material usually considered theatrical dross, such as story drift, hesitation, forgetting, ineptitude, redundancy— were proudly displayed alongside skill, competence, and bright theatricality. Fiction blurred with reality and acting with not-acting, as the actors “pretended to be themselves.”12 Etchells: Real people in real time, really pretending. The pretence acknowledged at all points. Or the pretence ›ickering in and out of acknowledgement . . . Costumes. Props. Sets. Not because one “believes” in these things. But because their processes of transformation and pretence are what the culture is made of. And because you want to foreground the economy by which meaning gets made and unmade.13

This self-conscious embrace of the hapless—implicitly political, overtly melancholy, born of a trust in process so complete that it ›irted with formlessness—became Forced Entertainment’s signature.

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I did not see the group’s shorter pieces from the 1990s but have sampled a few in video clips. In Club of No Regrets (1993), two performers in a crude plywood room were treated as hostages and forced by a woman named Helen X (Terry O’Connor) to perform fragmentary formulaic scenes over and over (TV and movie clichés such as “A Look How I’m Crying Scene” and “A Shootout Scene”). Helen wielded despotic power over the hostages, whose enactments never satis‹ed her, while two brutal and incompetent stagehands assisted by binding, gagging, and threatening them, eventually littering the stage with fake blood, talcum powder, leaves, and other detritus. The theatrical action of Dirty Work (1999), in contrast, was predominantly internal: two actors seated on chairs described “scenes” that did not happen onstage. These “scenes” were astonishingly various, including massive movements of armies and geological plates, miniscule matters of a gesture or a kiss, and anecdotal tidbits such as a man whose saliva could dissolve metal objects and another who could make himself die with a thought. The audience’s imagination was thus enlisted as an impossibly huge stage. Two more recent pieces I saw in their entirety: First Night (2001) and Bloody Mess (2003), both of which adopted startlingly aggressive attitudes toward the audience, as if it were to blame for the company’s disgraceful reversion to certain theatrical conventions. First Night was organized as a demented vaudeville in which the performers all wore rigid, exaggerated smiles that they held so long it was painful to watch. The action was a series of “acts”: for example, a tortuously drawn-out welcome greeting, and a mind-reading routine in which Cathy Naden (a tall, very self-possessed actress with an authoritative voice) pointed to individual spectators and told each how he or she would die. Each of the acts degenerated into some sort of bitterness, resentment, or inexplicable anger. This dynamic was interestingly provocative, for me, for about thirty or forty minutes. After that it grew redundant and predictable—like a one-note Pirandellian protest against the indignity of ‹xed character identities. The marvelous chaos of Bloody Mess, on the other hand, gripped me from beginning to end. This show began with a clowning tour de force in which two men in silly suits played out a vicious war of wills over where a row of chairs should be placed, and it also included a woman in a gorilla costume inexplicably convinced that the audience lusted after her, as well as a satirically brilliant running gag in which two rock-gig roadies repeatedly blew fog and offered microphones to other performers for no reason. Bloody Mess was basically a mad thespian survival struggle with ten per-

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formers from half a dozen different theatrical idioms constantly trying to upstage one another. That it achieved any kind of unity in the end felt nothing short of miraculous. In this case, the piece’s Pirandellian protest against ‹xed identities (if that’s what it was) seemed directed at the company members themselves as well as at the audience, and that gave the undeviating anger a feeling of refreshing variety. The durational shows grew out of the company’s yearning for a change of pace, “a different approach” after a decade of making this type of ninetyminute piece.14 Etchells—who idiosyncratically calls the shorter shows “theatre” to distinguish them from the durationals—says that “theatre forces one to deal with the ergonomic shape of an hour and a half—the pattern of ‘start,’ ‘middle’ and ‘end’ that procures a satisfactory feeling of closure” (in either Aristotle or Zeami’s sense, one might add).15 While the group has never abandoned that compact form, with its expected catharsis or jo-ha-kyu, in 1993 it turned a festival invitation (from the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow) into an opportunity to develop a different form that it could use to push its ideas further and deeper. A few of the “theater” pieces already contained rule-based improvisational games, and the ‹rst durational, 12 a.m. Awake and Looking Down, evolved as an expansion of one of them. The shorter work Emanuelle Enchanted (1992) had included a ‹fteen-minute section in which the performers competed for attention by silently portraying characters named on crude cardboards signs, selecting the signs from bins and pulling clothing from bulging costume racks at the sides in order to strike telling poses and attitudes for short or long intervals as the audience imagined full identities for and possible connections between the ‹gures. 12 a.m. Awake and Looking Down (unseen by me) extended this game for six hours, foregoing any closure or telos, and combining the unpredictable imaginative adventure (Etchells called it a kaleidoscopic “coincidence machine”)16 with an exhausting, non‹ctional endurance spectacle. The intention of the durationals, says Etchells, is to free both the company and the public “from the tyranny of [the theater] economy” by providing an occasion for pure confrontational play within clear, tightly controlled boundaries.17 Under these circumstances, he adds, the public can make its own decisions “about what and how to watch, about where to draw connecting lines, about what might be a start, middle or end.” They thereby become partners not merely “in completing, but more fundamentally, in making the work.”18 It was this last comment, I confess, that most

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piqued my skepticism about Quizoola! Unfortunately, over three decades of New York theatergoing, I have seen so much vapid and obscurantist avant-garde work that no one but a trend-drunk, theory-addled sophomore would consider mentally “completing” that I have come to regard the all-too-common claim of audience cocreation as little more than a fashionable crutch. Einstein on the Beach was a remarkable exception, as already discussed, and to my delight and amazement, the two Forced Entertainment durationals I saw were as well. Both actually made me want to seek out my own shapes and cumulative meanings in the material and superimpose them on the seemingly aimless and endless games. Still more unusual, the most gripping aspect of these works turned out to be their air of futility, not their eloquence or excitement, which were in any case ›eeting and unreliable. The pieces were struggles with absurd and impossible tasks, spectacles of predestined failure and Sisyphean frustration, and their main emotional hook therefore lay not in statement or achievement but rather in re›ection of life’s losing scrambles for control and its fundamental predicament of competition. When I entered the room for Quizoola! a pair of actors (Etchells and Kent Beeson) dressed in ordinary street clothes and smeared clown makeup were already conversing in quietly intent tones, apparently indifferent to the gathering audience. The place smelled of sweat and sawdust, their smeared makeup looked contrivedly pathetic, and they walked about and sat in the nondescript chairs with no particular purpose, a few bananas and plastic water bottles at their feet. I felt as if I had accidentally intruded on a private theatrical exercise that outsiders were bound to ‹nd tawdry and tedious. It was 6:30 p.m. and the late-summer sun was streaming through a row of undraped windows facing the street, diffusing the light from the circle of bare bulbs that de‹ned the playing area. As the sun gradually set over the next few hours, the light from these bulbs grew more and more prominent, eventually harsh and painful, recalling now a dressing room, now an underground shelter, now an impromptu interrogation chamber or ›imsy game-show set. Outside the window, billboards and shop signs were visible whose names and phrases (“Go Full Throttle or Go Home,” “Grandma’s Place”) occasionally turned up in the actors’ questions and answers. The exchange between Etchells and Beeson began somewhat stif›y, with the former questioning in a subdued drone and the latter giving only reluctant and clipped answers.

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Fig. 8. Jim Fletcher and Kent Beeson in Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola! Leftbank, Portland, Oregon, 2008. (Photo: Tim Etchells.)

e: Is the light shining in your eyes? b: Yes. e: Do you like the light shining in your eyes? b: No, I don’t. e: Do you like sunshine? b: No. e: Do you like the feel of sunshine on your skin? b: Not always, no.19 Soon Etchells began needling and badgering, though, which added an enigmatic emotional edge to the encounter, and Beeson resorted to humor and sarcasm. e: Do you plan to have plastic surgery? b: No, because I’m perfect just the way I am. e: Do you plan to have plastic surgery?

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b: No, because I’m perfect just the way I am. e: If you won a contest where the prize was free plastic surgery, what would you do? b: [Long pause.] I’d give the money away to charity. e: Why are women more employable than men? b: Um, because there’s more of them. e: You’re sure? b: No, that didn’t make any sense. e: How many more women than men are there? [Audience laughter.] b: Seven. [Audience laughter.] e: Have you been counting how many women and how many men there are in the whole fucking world? You keeping track of that? b: No, no. e: What do you think about me? b: I think you’re kinda rude, and I think you’re kinda white, and I think there’s a smell coming off of you. After twenty minutes or so, Etchells asked “Would you like to stop?” and they switched roles. Beeson clenched the paper pile eagerly and began questioning Etchells, ‹rst with an air of relief, and then smugness, and the exchange entered wholly new emotional territory. One had to wonder: what was the point of this encounter? Its content obviously had no sustained direction, so one spent no time seeking a dramatic plot in the classical sense. It occasionally bore a resemblance to a comedy sketch (error buzzers would not have been out of place), but even that ultra›exible form usually relies on a zany plot. The only plot here, if one could call it that, was the non‹ctional confrontation between the actors, which had enormous tonal and emotional variety and which did develop over time despite its lack of preplanned organization. Also, the show had a changing cast since a second pair performed after two hours and a third pair after four: Jim Fletcher replaced Beeson and then Beeson replaced Etchells; thus each possible pairing of the three was used during the six hours. In addition to a comedy sketch, the circumstance brought to mind a quiz show, an interrogation, and a psychotherapy session from hell—that is, when it didn’t sink entirely into inanity or somnolence. One couldn’t help asking what the imperative was behind it, at least at ‹rst. And whether it even merited any metaphorical or allegorical reading. Did the content of the questions matter at all? Was there any criterion for good or bad an-

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swers? After a while, I gave up looking for de‹nitive solutions to these puzzles, since the show was plainly premised only on strictly following its rules. These seemed clear enough: some sort of answer to each question was required, if only a dismissive one. And the questioner could follow up only with questions, never statements, even if answers were phrased as questions to invite ongoing conversation. The result was that there was always a dominant and subordinate player, never a meeting of equals in which sympathetic exchange was possible. Even the decision as to when the roles would switch was left wholly to the questioner. My impression was that this arrangement was necessary to maintain the work’s purgatorial subtext, since any greater opportunity to converse or commiserate might have invited rebellion against the rules—which the actors indeed respected as sacrosanct the entire time. The darker the room grew, the more the game felt like a ceremony, a sacred rite in a magic circle—except, once again, when it degenerated into pointless talk evidently driven by some mysterious Beckettian prescript to keep the dialogue ›owing. In an interview with me, Etchells explained the restrictions on actor interaction in the durationals as a necessary device to keep the audience creatively involved. The following comment referred to 12 a.m. Awake and Looking Down (the piece where the actors portray cardboard-sign characters): [One] rule in it is that you don’t much interact with the other performers. So you get into these situations where someone with the sign “Elvis Presley, the dead singer” is standing at the front and someone with the sign “A Nine-YearOld Shepherd Boy” comes to stand beside him; there might be a moment of eye contact or a little look between these two ‹gures, but that will be it. They don’t get into complicated improv where they join up together to interact or make a story. . . . The whole performance can be thought of as a machine for making stories, or for throwing up the possibilities for stories. And we didn’t like the ‹gures to interact too much because at the point where they do so the machinery somehow stops. The sense of endless possibility is stopped. You think, “well now we’re deep in some silly nonsense between Elvis and ‘A Bloke Who’s Just Been Shot,’” and that’s somehow not so interesting. It’s much more interesting to let the machine continue to operate, and to let all the story-making stuff go on in the minds of the viewer. That’s where all of the work is happening.20

In fact, the Quizoola! actors found myriad ways to express their personalities and feelings about each other despite the show’s strict rules. And no ac-

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tor ever bene‹ted for long from being dominant, because any rudeness, aggression, manipulation, or vindictiveness was soon repaid in kind when the roles switched and questioner became questioned. The Portland cast was a motley crew, with very different physiques and personalities (Fletcher and Beeson were frequent Forced Entertainment collaborators but not central company members). Fletcher, a veteran of Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players who looked to be in his midforties, was tall, slow, deliberate, and brooding. Beeson, a Seattle actor who looked about a decade younger, was short, stocky, candid, and articulate. Etchells, late forties and the only one of the three with a British accent, was of medium build, balding, wry, and con‹dent. Everyone knew Etchells had coconceived the piece and written the questions, so he had the upper hand in many ways. He asked many more questions off the top of his head rather than from the list than the others did, and he more readily strung together questions that amounted to judgmental harangues (Fletcher: “I love Mariah Carey.” Etchells: “Oh yeah, what do you mean you love Mariah Carey? Are you part of Mariah Carey’s street team? Do you log onto forums on-line and make casual comments about Mariah Carey?”). He also freely veered from earnestness to sarcasm and back again. beeson: How many scars do you have? etchells: A lot. beeson: Which one do you like the best? etchells: I’m kind of past liking any of them much. I have a sternotomy scar where they cut down through my rib cage in order to do heart surgery. So that was fairly dramatic. I have another one in my neck from where they did a biopsy. And I have two or three on this side from pacemaker operations . . . beeson: Which is faster, a cheetah or a gazelle? etchells: A gazelle. beeson: Which is faster, a cheetah or a gazelle? etchells: A gazelle. beeson: What do cheetahs eat? [Pause. Laughter from audience.] beeson: What do cheetahs eat? etchells: Um, antelope. [Pause, more laughter.] Or monkeys, many monkeys. [More laughter.] beeson: You really believe that?

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etchells: Yeah. They eat children. beeson: Whose children? etchells: The ones that people leave in their car with the windows open. Beeson came off as contentedly subordinate to both Etchells and Fletcher, resigned to play straight man or assert himself occasionally through ›ashes of cleverness and contradiction. Fletcher, in contrast, posed persistent, determined challenges to both the others with passive-aggressive self-absorption, controlling the pace of the conversation with long pauses. etchells: Do you think Leonardo DiCaprio would make a good King Lear? fletcher: I think he’s [long pause] he’s very pretty. And he tends to be solemn. And [long pause] maybe he would make a good King Lear but I don’t think so. etchells: Do you think people have sexual fantasies about John McCain and Sarah Palin? fletcher: Yes. etchells: What kind of fantasies? fletcher: I think [very long pause] I think people have a lot of fantasies about Sarah Palin. And I think John McCain gets dragged in there by proximity. [Audience laughter.] etchells: Do you think that some of the FBI guys around also get dragged in? fletcher: [Long pause.] I never thought about it but now that you mention it, maybe. FBI guys. etchells: How much would I have to pay you to eat a plate full of my shit? fletcher: [Very long pause.] I would . . . I would do it for $2,000. [Laughter.] One fascinating aspect of Quizoola!—noted by numerous critics—is the ambiguity concerning whether the answers are ‹ctional or drawn from the actors’ lives. Many answers in the Portland performance certainly sounded autobiographical (such as Etchells’s description of his scars, or Beeson’s remark that his daughter was the person he loved most in the world), but there was no way to tell for sure. This was the sort of ambiguity Etchells had

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in mind when he spoke of Forced Entertainment “disrupting the borders between the so-called real and the so-called ‹ctional,” and one had to see it in action to understand its theatrical power. The Quizoola! actors were put on the spot improvisationally in an extraordinarily intense and prolonged way, forced to invent spontaneously for hours on end with no agreed-on superobjective and no limitations on subject matter. They inevitably fell back on their own experiences in order to cope with the daunting array of subjects, but one could never tell exactly when or how. Beeson gave different answers, four hours apart, to the question “What is your name?” The actors had to address dozens of topics that they obviously knew nothing about, and their main defense, apart from silence and curtness, was to try to be entertaining. (“Are you acting?” asked Fletcher at one point. “A little bit,” answered Etchells. “What are your quali‹cations?” barked Etchells later. “I’m alive, I’m available,” deadpanned Fletcher.) During the many intervals when the actors’ energy and inspiration ›agged, I assumed that autobiographical truth was ‹lling the creative vacuum (which company members have con‹rmed in interviews).21 After considering that point for a while, though, I wondered whether it even mattered. What was the difference, in this ›agrantly ambiguous context, between literal truth (what Bernard Shaw once called “mere actuality”) and poetic truth (‹ction that casts revelatory light on some aspect of life)?22 These actors had even ›imsier ‹ctional alibis than players of Didi and Gogo. And after three or four hours, the massive question list, ranging willy-nilly across the vast expanse of human affairs, came to seem like a test of their human depth—despite the fact that the only veri‹able event taking place was a competition between three actors as actors (i.e., for who could be most interesting and engaging under these absurd circumstances). This is the competitive engagement I referred to before as the true “plot” of Quizoola!: the actors’ arc of invention, and arc of exhaustion, as they moved through what eventually became a rather brutal endurance trial. Their exploration and depletion of their inventive resources formed the impromptu story that asserted itself and stood in for the organization and development that never arose in the questions and answers. Each actor had a different journey through the strain of the evening, different strategies for trying to look good and for coping with the inevitable “naked” intervals when he was exhausted and resourceless. Etchells, for example, was particularly adept at drawing energy from newly arriving spectators, whose laughter was always quicker and perkier than that of the longer-haul view-

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ers.23 But at numerous points, the piece fell into utterly vacuous doldrums, intervals when the actors could muster only terse or distracted answers (“I don’t know,” “I don’t know”), took long draws on their water bottles, and some spectators nodded off in the hot, stuffy room. Even during those intervals, though, when the ‹ctional screen was thinnest, the piece seemed to invite interpretation of its boredom as a Beckettian topos—“a little game [played] around boredom,” as Etchells said about another work.24 I once described Quizoola! to a friend who is a jazz drummer, who remarked that the creative pressure on its performers sounded like the dilemma of musicians (particularly drummers) who play with the sax maestro Sonny Rollins. The jazz convention of “trading fours” refers to a cycle of solo improvisations by the members of a band that typically lasts about ‹ve or six minutes. When Rollins trades fours, however, the sequence can last ‹fteen or twenty minutes because he likes the routine and his wellspring of inventiveness is unusually deep. This situation is marvelous for audiences but can be maddening for Rollins’s band colleagues, who reach their limits of spontaneous invention and are left repeating themselves while he shines. The analogy with Quizoola! is interesting, if imperfect. Quizoola! (like another durational from 2000, And on the Thousandth Night . . .)25 involves real improv; indeed, it tests the limits of its performers’ improv chops in a competitive manner similar to an extended session of trading fours. The cast is wholly free to be sarcastic, sober, stern, goofy, sophisticated, idiotic, what have you, whenever they like. But none of them can possibly shine like Rollins in the end, no matter how clever they are, because the marathon structure of the piece won’t permit it. The action completely lacks closure and exerts no control over its distribution of high and low points, so it cannot frame any solo triumphs ›atteringly; they are all ›eeting and evanescent, and ultimately blended into the larger melancholy picture of cosmic futility. Eco refers to artworks of this kind as “representation[s] by accumulation or series of properties,” likening them to an “on-going encyclopedia” that is “never ‹nished” and never supplied with a hierarchical structure.26 As the clock passed 12:30 a.m. in Portland, Quizoola! simply wound down and timed out without the slightest hint of climax, resolution, or denouement—like Gargantua’s ridiculously protracted list of ways to wipe his bum in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, or like Joyce’s collection of riverpuns, catalog of abusive names for Earwicker, and list of variant titles for

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Annah the Allmaziful’s “mamafesta” in Finnegans Wake.27 There was no kyu-like quickening whatsoever as Quizoola! ended, and no last-minute assertion of emphasis or hierarchy. Fletcher ‹nished some unmemorable answer, Beeson asked “You wanna stop?,” Fletcher answered “Yeah,” and that was it. The actors bowed brie›y and walked unceremoniously out of the circle, and the audience went home. What I felt, though, after relieving my muscle cramps, dehydration, and bladder pressure, was an anomalous sense of elation. It was as if I had experienced an exceedingly strange twist on the may›y effect described in the Mahabharata chapter—the impression of living through an entire life in a single day. Quizoola!’s modesty is deceptive; it purports to offer little more than super‹ciality, banality, and ineptitude, and one critic has suggested that that shallowness is really a critique of info-age mendacity: How to cook lasagna and what a tree is; what’s the history of the world; why milkbottle tops are made of metal; what caused the Balkan wars; and whether you cheated on your lover—all appear together like a mad live newspaper. Slowly, through these questions, the ghost-outline of everyday knowledge rises to the surface of daily life like some fabulous Elizabethan shipwreck. And, watching the actors struggle to survive this shipwreck (that is, the inconsistent knowledges that make up daily life) I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s line: “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.”28

There is no question that information-swarm is one underlying subject of the work. To me, however, that was not its theatrical thrust. Its thrust was rather the increasingly glaring incongruity between its modest affect and the enormous scale of its encyclopedic ambition. In its fumbling, bumbling way, Quizoola! revealed itself in time as a fanatical effort to achieve comprehensiveness, an absurdly omnibus attempt to limn a complete world, in all its bewildering variety and ungraspable detail, through a preposterously protracted and obsessive act of listing. A complete world—which necessarily includes super‹ciality, banality, and ineptitude along with the many forms of splendid achievement that theater usually embraces as its material. Jonathan Romney wrote in his Guardian review: “It was as if the entire repertoire of questions in the world were being exhausted in that room.”29 One need only add that of course such an effort is doomed to fail. Its futility is its charm, and its proof of sincerity beneath all the games and dodges.

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great lengths To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. —Samuel Beckett To put it simply, more simply. To put it very simply: You get up there (you come up here) and you fail. And in that failing is your heartbeat and in that failing is you connected to everything and to everyone. —Tim Etchells30

In recent years, numerous critics have discussed Forced Entertainment’s work as an example of “postdramatic theater.” This term was proposed by the German scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann in a 1999 book to describe what he saw as the dominant paradigm of Western theatrical innovation since the 1970s. Actually, Lehmann mentioned Forced Entertainment only brie›y in that book, but he published a deeply admiring essay about them in 2004 (“Shakespeare’s Grin”) that made clear he considered them a prime illustration of his theory, and Karen Jürs-Munby used them as her main example in the introduction to her 2006 English translation of Postdramatic Theatre. Lehmann’s term has unfortunately been a bit cheapened by journalistic overuse during the past decade, but when it appeared his study ‹lled a long-standing need, performing an extremely dif‹cult feat of broad historical and conceptual description of the dizzyingly diverse landscape of post-1960s theatrical avant-gardism.31 Its central ideas have been very helpful in thinking about how and why such a patently undramatic work as Quizoola! could acquire so much theatrical power. For the majority of its habitual users, “postdramatic” is a rough synonym for the postmodern, and that is indeed one of its aspects. It refers in part to the artistic strategies that forward-looking contemporary theatermakers have developed in response to an increasingly mediatized culture that is mistrustful of all “master narratives” and ideologies and awash in simulation, quotation, celebrity worship, image-swarm, and overfamiliar story patterns. Many artists immersed in this environment have come to regard the basic convention of ‹ctional dramatic situation as an arti‹cial sham; they treat mimesis as a subject for self-conscious examination rather than as a mere tool of expression. “Postmodern” generally refers to artists who avoid or downplay enacted stories in favor of gestures that can be seen as primary events (happenings) rather than representations or illusions.

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These artists also tend to privilege visual dramaturgy over verbal, employ disintegrated dialogue suggesting the untenability of the integrated human subject, and utilize fragmented, pluralized, and otherwise unstable “speakers” in lieu of consistent and coherent characters. This is the largest subset of Lehmann’s postdramatic ‹eld, including dozens of internationally prominent ‹gures from Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group to Pina Bausch, Tadeusz Kantor, Jan Fabre, Theater Angelus Novus, La Fura dels Baus, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, and also Forced Entertainment in their ninety-minute “theater” works. Many other artists Lehmann includes do not ‹t this pattern, however, such as Beckett, Handke, documentary dramatists like Peter Weiss and Rolf Hochhuth, and “hypernaturalists” like Franz Xaver Kroetz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His theory of the postdramatic concentrates on a breakdown of faith in a particular model in art, not on speci‹c reactions to media-age culture or society (like postmodernism), and he traces the phenomenon back to the early years of modernism. Symbolists, futurists, Dadaists and others were already objecting to drama as a “model” before World War I, Lehmann says. Drama—de‹ned as stories told through enactment and impersonation that create ‹ctional worlds with their own internal logic—necessarily imposes a model of closure, wholeness, and surveyability on reality that artists like Alfred Jarry, Tristan Tzara, and Andre Breton already saw as specious, and today that attitude of disbelief has become an article of faith for radical theatrical innovators everywhere. Drama packages selected human events in order to expose a “hidden logic” in them, inviting us to regard life as purposeful and overseen. It projects a teleology onto those events and “prevent[s] the appearance of time as time,” writes Lehmann. “Time as such is meant to disappear, to be reduced to an unnoticeable condition of being of the action.”32 Tellingly, the artist who worked most memorably to demolish this view in the post–World War II era was Beckett, and it is no coincidence that Lehmann examines Beckett in special detail or that his spirit pervades Forced Entertainment’s durationals. In her introduction to Postdramatic Theater, Jürs-Munby imagines Lehmann’s readers asking why it is “necessary or even appropriate to relate new theater and performance work to drama at all.” Her answer is that drama is one of the “deep structures that still inform the expectations of the majority of the audience.”33 True enough. I would go a step further, however, and add that this deep structure also informs the artistic choices of

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nearly every postdramatic theater artist. Drama is the dominant theatrical form in our world, a century of avant-gardism notwithstanding, so it is an inevitable reference point for anyone making or seeing theater, even if that reference takes the form of rebellion. The iconoclasm of the postmodern artists just described has meaning only in relation to the icon of drama, just as the lack of hierarchy, closure, and unity in a listing gesture has meaning only in relation to the order and hierarchy of integral form. All postdramatic theater acknowledges drama in some way. What is remarkable is that Forced Entertainment acknowledges it differently at different times. The group’s “theater” works like Club of No Regrets, First Night, and Bloody Mess tend to operate in a typically postmodern manner, employing aggressive and challenging techniques (such as disintegrated dialogue and fragmented speakers) designed to provide the audience with alternatives to the dramatic “model.” This is the chief reason, I believe, why their natural limit is about ninety minutes—also the average length of most works by the postmodernists mentioned above. One cannot reasonably expect even very sympathetic audiences to remain alert and receptive to such intense and unusual demands for much longer than that. And yet the truth is, works immersed in such techniques are not usually kept short merely as a courtesy to viewers. They are fundamentally hostile to marathon-length engagement, because sustaining audience involvement depends on their seeking the sort of comprehensive overview and blanket signi‹cance that postmodern artists abhor. Postmodern theater fetishizes obscurity, makes disconnection and fragmentation into structural principles, and treats the very idea of panoramic vistas as ridiculous, if not pernicious. Forced Entertainment’s durational works, by contrast, harbor no such hostility. They are free to approach the panoramic and the microscopic with equal con‹dence. Moreover, strangely enough, they are less demanding than the “theater” works despite their inordinate length, because they operate according to easily apprehensible rules, and because they unmistakably evoke drama as a longing, a locus of pathos and regret, superimposing their endurance spectacles onto that pathos. Drama is plainly present in the durationals in a way it is not in the “theater” works. In the durationals, it stands for what theater must regrettably sacri‹ce if it is to believably capture the amorphousness and mutability of life: “the constant invention, constant failure, constant effort, and constant ›ux,” as Etchells puts it.34 These works leave the audience on their own to meditate on the dra-

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matic “model” as they wish, and to spin their own teleological webs around the action’s fugitive, accidental meanings. And that intimate climate of re›ection is what makes them feel so friendly and welcoming despite their circumstantial discomforts. This same point could be approached another way by recalling Forced Entertainment’s split self-identi‹cation. The group has always made an effort to keep one foot in the theater and the other in the gallery/museum world, having suffered at times from the dim incomprehension of various cultural border guards: “Not enough ‹ction for theatre people to feel comfortable. And not enough ‘just in real time’ for the performance purists either. We were in a border zone,” says Etchells.35 One source of this border anxiety, however, is surely the incompatibility of two views of performance. The theater world typically assumes that its artists must pay at least some attention to audiences, to what they ‹nd satisfying and rewarding, if only to deny or criticize that (as in avant-garde or postdramatic theater). The visual art world, by contrast, generally sees “performance” (or “performance art”) as an animate version of the inanimate work it displays on walls and ›oors, in courtyards, and so on, regarding performances as self-suf‹cient objects like paintings or sculptures—primarily of interest for the artists’ intentions, ideas, and gestures, with little obligation to adjust to audiences, or even acknowledge them. The extreme of this view was expressed by Michael Fried in his wellknown 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” which declared that theater had “perverted” a growing sector of modern art by making it alarmingly ingratiating: “It is the overcoming of theater which modernist sensibility ‹nds most exalting, and which it experiences as the hallmark of high art in our time.”36 There are indeed moments in Forced Entertainment’s durationals when almost no acting energy radiates from the stage and the action seems so distant and aloof that one can imagine it pleasing the likes of Fried. Mostly, however, the works are assiduously attentive to matters of reception and apprehension. They make myriad adjustments to audiences. Even the expectation that durational spectators will come and go as they please is essentially a form of accommodation. Gatekeeping categorization aside, then, it seems obvious to me that this company’s heart is not with pure and “exalted” Friedian modernism (as, for example, Robert Wilson’s is). Its heart is with theater, in all its reality-drenched impurity, and it achieves its most intimate theatrical connections in the durationals.

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For Etchells, as already mentioned, the ultimate purpose of theatrical communication is ethical. Ideally, he thinks, spectators should be persuaded to regard themselves as “witnesses” and adopt a responsible, critical relationship to what they see—a quasi-Brechtian stance that Florian Malzacher has described as “the counter model to the idea of a passive being in Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, who is taken to ‘have no idea and no claim to anything’ and who ‘watches always only so as not to miss the sequel.’”37 Etchells says that the company was particularly moved by the Vietnam War journalist Michael Herr’s realization (in his book Dispatches) that he was somehow as responsible for everything he saw as he was for everything he did. We always loved the idea in this—of one’s responsibility for events only seen. The strange responsibility of the city and its endless crowds and half-glimpsed lives, or of the media space with its images everywhere, always, already. That (lucky) experience of having seen only two real dead bodies [in my life] and yet thousands upon thousands of TV corpses—real deaths and ‹ctional deaths, mediated deaths. We wanted to speak of what it felt like to live in this space—of second-, third- and fourth-hand experience.38

This notion of performers and spectators accepting responsibility for all they have “half-glimpsed” may smack of utopianism, but it is indeed the company’s stated goal, and the production they have done that pursued the goal most directly is Speak Bitterness. Speak Bitterness was originally made as a six-hour durational in 1994 and subsequently adapted into a ninety-minute “theater” work. The “theater” version was easier to perform and quickly became extremely popular with audiences and critics; it is the work that did most to spread their fame through Europe. Etchells has always preferred the durational version, however, and on February 28, 2009, he and the company performed it (for the ‹rst time in more than four years) at the PACT Zollverein in Essen, Germany. The company arranged a live webcast (announced in an e-mail blast), and I watched it from my desk chair at home in New York. This circumstance was obviously not ideal, but in the end I found it fascinating, both for the nature of the show itself and because of the webcast’s inherent limitations. The irony of watching a work so deeply and explicitly concerned with collective witnessing and responsibility in mediated privacy,

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6,000 miles from its live venue, was so glaring that it added an illuminating new layer to the experience. Speak Bitterness might be described as a companion piece to Quizoola! that presents endless answers instead of endless questions. As in Quizoola!, the actors spend six hours reading from a gargantuan list printed on sheets of paper that loom large as portentous objects and end up scattered about the stage set. In this case, however, there are six actors rather than three and the list contains confessions rather than questions: thousands of putatively scandalous and embarrassing admissions from every walk and crevice of life, from the gravely serious to the banal and forgettable to the ridiculously trivial. The text is a living document, continually expanded over the years by various company members, and read in a different order at each durational performance (the “theater” version uses a set text). The Essen performance began this way: We confess to fraud and to forgery. We’re guilty of coldness and spite. We de‹ed gravity and we walked on water. We sacri‹ced our career for the sake of our marriage. We got airlifted to safety while others clung to the wreckage below. We got turned back at the border. We counted calories. We made mountains out of molehills. We asked, “What’s in it for us?” We confess to road rage. We made a mockery of justice. We’re guilty of in‹delity, betrayal and deceit. We wished that we were invisible. We left our gym shoes in the taxi. We entered our kids into beauty contests. We signed the Of‹cial Secrets Act in 2001 and never spoke again for fear of saying something that we shouldn’t. All our friends got married and had kids. We smiled at our re›ections in shop windows. When we were housesitting for our neighbors we tried on all their clothes and ate all their food. We listened to “Stairway to Heaven” thirteen times in a row. We thought that “When Will I Be Famous” by the band Bros contained a secret message just for us. We played hide and seek in an old deep freeze. We threw a birthday party but no one turned up. We’re guilty of prejudice, chauvinism and narrow-mindedness. We confess to despair and hopelessness.39

As this sample shows, the confessions are all attributed to an ambiguous “we” whose slippery identity becomes a central question in the piece. Etchells says he took the phrase “Speak Bitterness” from reports about China’s Cultural Revolution; it was a name for compulsory public meetings when citizens were pressured into exposing their own political shortcom-

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ings, for which they were then punished. With typical solemn jocularity, the company grafted that grim reference onto a travesty of the public-confession vogue in 1990s Western pop culture (in reality shows, talk shows, political apologies, and more), just as Quizoola! grafted its purgatory and abusive interrogation references onto a sendup of TV quiz shows. In both cases, shades of serious oppression and restriction were mingled with the freewheeling ethos of media-age consumerism. Speak Bitterness felt in toto more sober and earnest than Quizoola! to my mind, because it contained much less improvisation (only the confessions were spoken, without responses, and very few were invented on the spot) and because its setting resembled a courtroom. The cast was cleanly groomed and dressed in neat, dark-colored business attire, as if summoned to testify at an of‹cial hearing, and their papers were spread across a long, metal table spanning the width of the stage, with only a telegenic blue backcloth behind them displaying the show’s title. The webcast began slowly, with the actors (Forced Entertainment’s core members: Etchells, O’Connor, Naden, Marshall, Arthur, and Lowden) loitering upstage and then, one after another, approaching the table and reading in deliberate, clear, and sincere voices. Cathy Naden spoke ‹rst, looking rather buttoned up in a sedate gray jacket with her hair tied tightly back, standing bolt upright and talking for about three minutes (the words just quoted, and more). Richard Lowden then spoke for about one minute, a lanky, wry-faced man standing more casually than Naden, slightly bent over the table with his top button open. Then Robin Arthur, sloppier, heavier, and gruffer than Lowden. Then Claire Marshall, loose-haired and sultrier than Naden. And so it went, with each actor introducing a new “›avor” of confessing, speaking at all times directly to the audience and never to each other. Some got more laughs than others, depending on their demeanor and choice of text, and that variety created a whiff of vaudeville since the actors were all clearly in competition for whose deadpan was funniest and who could seem most sincerely penitent. As it happens, I had seen this sort of actor interaction before, some thirty years earlier in a Yale student production of Selbstbezichtigung (SelfAccusation), one of Peter Handke’s short Sprechstücke (speaking plays), which is almost never performed in the United States and which has substantial similarities to Speak Bitterness. Etchells says the Forced Entertainment company was unaware of this work when it made its piece, but the comparison is interesting.40 The text of Self-Accusation also consists solely

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Fig. 9. Forced Entertainment members in Speak Bitterness: (left to right) Terry O’Connor, Tim Etchells, Robin Arthur, Richard Lowden, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden. (Photo: Hugo Glendinning.)

of hundreds of short confessional statements in block form, all with the pronoun “I” rather than “we.” Handke’s statements are meant to be spoken in scripted order (as in the “theater” version of Speak Bitterness), but unlike Speak Bitterness they form a de facto narrative describing (or implying) the development of a human life from birth (into original sin) through innocence, maturity, corruption, and inevitable decline. The production I saw used a diverse cast of ‹ve men and women (rather than the one male and one female speaker Handke called for), who walked among café tables in a nightclub setting and—as in both Speak Bitterness and Quizoola!—overtly competed with one another for laughs and attention. What distinguished Speak Bitterness from Handke was its use of “we” instead of “I,” its lack of any implied narrative, and its wholly impromptu rhythm and pacing. The actors all decided on the spot which words, how long, and in what manner they would speak. They sometimes delivered only one line at a time, sometimes two or three, and occasionally strung multiple confessions together into composite scenarios:

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naden: We got a job doing security for the Beckhams. We got a job as ‹nancial advisors to the Beckhams. We got a job as magicians for the Beckhams’ kids’ Christmas party. We just wanted to work for the Beckhams. We didn’t mind in what capacity. Fascinatingly, it seemed as though reading the confessions from papers actually enhanced the actors’ spontaneity rather than lessening it, because they were never tempted to speak by rote memory. As readers, they could concentrate all their efforts on sounding convincing, like engaged creative agents confessing on their own behalf. Despite this (or maybe because of it), I found myself annoyed after about ‹fteen minutes at the moral equivalency implied in such “good acting”—at the whole cast sweeping too sincerely through so many instances of wrongdoing without considering any rami‹cations—but I let that scruple go for the time being because there was so much else to chew on. For example: the actors occasionally seemed to divide into factions, without ever overtly addressing one another. This happened when groups of two or three lingered near one another at the table, standing or sitting, and referred to each other obliquely, indicating with subtle physical and vocal signals that they considered one another allies or adversaries. Then, when that was done, they moved apart perfunctorily as if nothing important had happened. This understated dynamic of mysterious, ›uid alliances and antagonisms, constantly forming and evaporating, called speci‹c attention to the question of who “we” was supposed to be, as did the occasional suspicion that some confessions were autobiographical. The actors managed to suggest an enormous range of motivations for confessing, including propitiation, self-humiliation, evasion of punishment, exhibitionism, seduction, as well as sincere regret. When the confessions didn’t sound personal, they often sounded ritualistic, like a litany, or like liturgical call-and-response between speakers at opposite ends of the table. arthur: We invented diseases for our useless medicines to cure. naden: Our music only made sense if you were taking the right kind of drugs. arthur: We mistook anger for justi‹cation. naden: We didn’t think for ourselves. arthur: We mistook addiction for grati‹cation.

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naden: We gave Dr. Taylor a good taste of his own medicine. arthur: We were the worst kind of celebrity worshipers and asslickers. naden: We read the same books again and again. Loaded with personality, these rhythmic, single-line exchanges were nevertheless oddly devoid of individual agency, as in a worship service. With the subject matter swinging willy-nilly between the abominable and the ridiculous, the compatible and the contradictory, the voices also resembled antiphonal parts of a classical chorus—a daft and delusional mutation of one, that is, evidently bent on trying to effect social healing through a mad gesture of confessing to every conceivable sin. marshall: We told our fans to fuck off. etchells: We told lies to the people that we were supposed to represent. narshall: We held our noses and voted for Chirac. etchells: We robbed Peter to pay Paul. marshall: We thought that money grew on trees. etchells: We staged a dancing dogs competition. marshall: We threw acid in our sister’s face because she married a man of whom we disapproved. etchells: We had wheels of steel. marshall: We invented a way of preserving dead bodies which we called plasticization. etchells: We thought Stalin was misunderstood. marshall: We did not like Abba, not even in an ironic kind of way. etchells: We thought Benjamin was a misogynist. marshall: We grew magic mushrooms in the cellar. etchells: We dated lap dancers but we would not put money in their g-strings. We wanted everything for free. In The History of Sexuality, written in the mid-1970s, Michel Foucault famously described confession as the most authoritative “ritual of discourse” in the modern era. He spoke of confession as the Western world’s distinctive mode of “truth-production” from (roughly) the Enlightenment on—in sex, law, politics, culture, business, and more—and tried to tease apart the essential questions of power it raised:

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great lengths The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also a subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and ‹nally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modi‹cations in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and puri‹es him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.41

Speak Bitterness, interestingly, was conceived for a speci‹cally postmodern circumstance in which the ritual that Foucault describes has been cheapened by theatricalization in mass media, making it as much a mode of doubtproduction as truth-production. Thinking people in our time generally presume that published or broadcast confessions are self-serving distortions, if not outright ‹ctions, unless proven otherwise. The possible examples are legion, from Bill Clinton’s admission that he smoked marijuana without inhaling, to fraudulent memoirs by the likes of James Frey and Margaret Seltzer, to Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he used performance-enhancing drugs but couldn’t remember which. The corruptions of mass-mediated public discourse have made confession a dubious form of transformative expression and an inherently problematic form of witnessing, which is clearly what made it an appealing subject for Forced Entertainment. The response to this cynical state of affairs in edgy art is usually the same as in pop culture: cynical satire. Forced Entertainment took a different approach, however. Instead of mocking the behavior, it plunged into sincere enactment of it, exaggerating its theatricality and rendering it metastatic, like a collective urge gone haywire. In this way it struck a disconcerting balance between cynicism and earnestness that one could never quite pin down, all presumably in the interests of making the ritual more critically visible. In Brechtian terms, Speak Bitterness “queered” or “alienated” the confessional ritual (i.e., revealed the social choices behind it) by turning both its key players, confessee and implied judge, into ›oating signi‹ers, so that we had to decide who was guilty and who absolved in every case. We were the sole arbiters of meaning, sincerity, and salvation for the bewilderingly wide range of hypothetical transgression and penitence,

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whose details ›ew by like a newsreel on fast-forward (each one an abbreviated minidrama, interestingly, since every confession was the climactic resolution to an implied con›ict within the ‹ctional speaker). That power of decision was intoxicating and invigorating for a while. I laughed, scoffed, rolled my eyes, shook my head, and also, quite often, made decisions, took positions on issues that my mind arbitrarily plucked from the onrushing stream. We worked at Treblinka. [So what do you want from me? I hope a bus hits you.] We hated Jews. [Glad you regret it now, or seem to. And which actor added that line to the text, anyway?] We loved a piece of time too small to give a name. [Beautiful—but who in the world would make you feel bad about that?]

This imaginative back-and-forth was mesmerizing for about eighty or ninety minutes—a long while when you consider how droningly methodical the action was. After that, however, I hit a wall. What happened was that I reached the limit of my ability to listen closely and attend to speci‹cs. Handke’s Self-Accusation conveniently ended just as the audience’s attention was wearing thin, and I suspect the same is true with the “theater” version of Speak Bitterness. In the durational Speak Bitterness, though, the ›ow of misdeeds was relentless, directionless, and eventually numbing. I knew that the piece wasn’t made to be seen straight through, of course, but sitting at my desk, I nevertheless felt empty and frustrated when I could no longer listen, and I began considering the show with a colder eye as it ›ickered away on the computer screen. Forced Entertainment was obviously an earnest, high-minded, and sophisticated group, but at that mentally exhausted moment I felt suddenly unsure about several basic matters I had been taking for granted. Most important: did this company really have a coherent critique of postmodern culture? My earlier qualms about moral equivalency began ›ooding back in with redoubled force. Was it indeed defensible that Speak Bitterness contained no follow-through on any issue, made no effort to understand any of its confessions deeply, and placed tri›es like eating the last cookie side by side with genocide, torture, and mass rape? Perhaps these six characters ought to have searched for an author after all. Could a work of such seeming ›ippancy be effectively critical of the mass ethical and aesthetic leveling, the collective attention de‹cit disorder and chronic trivialization associated

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with our age’s ubiquitous ›ickering screens? In the absence of the Brechtian criticality just described, which required concentration, what ultimately distinguished this show’s game from acquiescence to Twitter culture, from replication of shameless attention-mongering, and from glib mockery of all real moral standards, penitence, consolation, and forgiveness? Uneasy and uncertain, I switched screen-windows to check e-mail and then walked off, leaving a tape recorder behind to capture the show’s audio in my absence.42 It was a Saturday, as it happens, and the distractions of a busy household were multiplying around me. The very idea of concentrating on anything to the extent one could in a theater was an absurdity. I had been reading about the performance artist Marina Abramovic and recalled a remark she made about the relationship between her life and her durational art, which sometimes lasted days, weeks or longer: You know what’s interesting about stillness and duration and meditation? In “real life” it’s impossible for me to have any of this. The older I get the more activity and the more obligations I have. The pace is so fast. I’m literally running after myself. So I need to create these islands of time. Then I go through this transformation in the work; work transforms me, and then I use this experience in “real life.”43

Coincidentally, the New York Times that weekend had published a pro‹le about another endurance artist, Tehching Hsieh, whom Etchells had mentioned when I interviewed him. Hsieh became legendary in the 1970s for a series of grueling yearlong performances in New York, one of which involved shutting himself inside a wooden cage in his Tribeca loft and never reading, writing, conversing, or watching/listening to media. Etchells had said to me: “when I consider our durational work next to projects like Tehching Hsieh’s . . . I’m tempted to put the word ‘durational’ in quotation marks—it can seem slightly trivial to make a big deal out of performing for six hours when he was doing incredibly arduous projects and tasks for periods of an entire year.”44 Hsieh—who said he tried to make “art stronger than life so people [could] feel it”45—evidently represented a humbling ideal for Forced Entertainment, an impossible model of a durational art that so exceeded the bounds of publicity stunt that it became truly transformative for both artist and public. “Go too far, go too far,” was one of Etchells’s bywords in his 1990s rehearsals.46 It was obviously unfair to judge Speak Bitterness solely by its ‹rst ninety

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minutes, so I stayed away until I felt able to concentrate again and then went back to see what had changed. More than two hours later, a lot had. The actors’ appearance, for one thing, was extremely different—they were wilted and droopy. Most had removed their jackets and rolled up their shirtsleeves, and when not speaking they draped themselves over the upstage chairs, taking breathers and catnaps, occasionally dropping confession pages at their feet. The table was now littered with a chaotic jumble of papers. Earlier, the scene had vaguely recalled a televised truth-and-reconciliation commission hearing, very poised and organized, but it now resembled a late-night editorial meeting, or a deadlocked jury deliberation two weeks old, with tempers frayed, grooming forgotten, and proper procedure abandoned. The actors had to expend a great deal more effort now to maintain a semblance of sincerity, and that straining, along with their visible fatigue, altered the show’s tone. No one entering at this point could have suspected these people of glibness, because it was costing them so much to perform. Something important was obviously at stake for them. Also, the confessions themselves suggested greater understanding. No longer merely snapshots of the “half-glimpsed,” they now included statements so long and connected they amounted to little stories: We discovered a dead body whilst out walking the dog. We put off going to the police because we got a thrill from the sense of possession. We visited the body every two or three days and noted its gradual decay. After a while we decided it would be impossible to inform the authorities as we would be suspected, so we used a hacksaw to dismember it, wrapped up the rotting pieces in plastic, and disposed of them slowly over a period of weeks in a public incinerator. When the last piece was gone we felt a strange sense of disappointment, as we realized that nothing else in our lives would replicate the intensity of feeling that the previous few months had given us.

*

*

*

In interviews about our new movie, we gave the same answers again and again and again. We had two amusing anecdotes about something that had happened on the set. One poignant tale about meeting the real person whose life story the ‹lm is supposed to be based on, and a long, lame joke about how hard it was learning to water-ski with some super-models in Barbados so we could do our own stunts.

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The upshot of all this was that the show became gripping again in a wholly new way. It was indeed bizarre to be intensely drawn in a second time by a performance that had already exhausted my patience, but that is what happened. Speak Bitterness, like Quizoola!, commanded a kind of awe after about the four-hour mark, despite its patently ridiculous and fundamentally antidramatic action and despite the dulling and distancing effect of the computer screen. A major reason for this was that the universally human (that dreadfully unfashionable bugaboo) ‹nally trumped all theoretical schemas as the limitations of the body came to the foreground. There was a self-sacri‹cial aura to the plucky but ›agging actors, whose deterioration had a paradoxically lifting effect, as in Beckett. Their desperate and perpetually futile efforts to connect (with us, with each other) offered a poignant image of perseverance in the face of crushing indifference, and also an impression of authentic humility—once helpfully de‹ned by Terry Eagleton as the “necessary acknowledgement that, despite all one’s fancy attainments, one remains something of a worm.”47 Another factor in my awe, though, was a mounting awareness of the immense creative effort behind the list. Such an astonishing ocean of confessions, at an impressively consistent level of novelty, speci‹city, and perceptiveness, and they ranged over so many different arenas of life as to suggest godlike objectivity (family, romance, pets, politics, economics, science, history, prehistory, aesthetics, geography, literary criticism, warfare, writing, language, acting, directing, fashion, childhood, sports, pop culture, gambling, religion, crime, business, futurism, fantasy, and much, much more). I couldn’t imagine any human, living, dead or not yet born, who was not re›ected somewhere in this catalog, and for that reason it created a feeling of community despite the endless ambiguity of “we” and despite every spectator’s natural resistance to sharing anyone else’s guilt. The sheer scope of the catalog was dumbfounding, truly a work of “lunatic eclecticism,” to use a phrase Eco applied to Francis Bacon’s list of departments and disciplines in Salomon’s House, the ideal institution of higher learning in the utopian novel The New Atlantis (1627). Yet the confessions in Speak Bitterness also de‹ed singular purpose, reveling in “a love of excess, hubris, and a greed for words, for the joyous . . . science of the plural and the unlimited,” as Eco says of the whimsical catalogs of Rabelais and Joyce.48 In the hands of this sort of artist, “the list becomes a way of reshuf›ing the world.”49 Our world—as postmodern theorists never cease to remind us—is frustratingly vast, splintered, multifarious, and unsurveyable, yet Forced Enter-

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tainment’s durationals attempt to survey it anyway with massive and obsessive acts of cataloging. The length of the pieces re›ects a hubristic grasp at omniscience, whose destined failure is uncommonly moving because of the literal spectacle of mortal exhaustion in them. Yet Forced Entertainment are no apostles of failure or disconnection, much as they may ›irt with that role.“In a world composed of fragments, the List becomes a unifying form,” wrote Matthew Goulish acutely in a text called “Compendium: A Forced Entertainment Glossary,” itself (like The In‹nity of Lists) a well-turned essay written in list format.50 That feeling of unity and comprehensiveness—a response to inadvertent monumentality—is the enduring mystery of these works: extraordinary marathon theater born improbably of an urge to forsake dramatic unity and shape.

chapter seven Faust I + II

with the exception of Angels in America, all of the marathon works this book has discussed up to now have been projects either initiated by directors or created by ensemble companies guided by strong directorial hands. This fact has not seemed worth remarking on because, in our time, we take the leadership of directors for granted. Directors run most of our theatrical institutions and control the basic terms of almost all theatrical productions, from casting to arrangement of people, objects and effects onstage, to pacing and tone, to selection of designers and plays. As it happens, however, their position atop the theatrical pyramid is historically quite new. Before the nineteenth century, there was no such ‹gure as a director because plays in the Western world were staged by actors or playwrights. The need for directing was ‹rst felt in the late eighteenth century, when audiences and practitioners became unsatis‹ed with the standard, conventionalized modes of staging that had long been in use, quickly arranged in a few rehearsals, and turned to clever and ambitious actor-managers like David Garrick to ‹gure out what else was possible. Major shifts in sensibility and values were afoot, as all the arts became commodi‹ed, and newly empowered and self-con‹dent middle-class audiences demanded more polished consistency in productions in return for their ticket expenditures. On the heels of these changes, the Romantic revolution ushered in a new demand (not widely answered until the twentieth century) for wholeness in production and singleness of vision, even in collaborative art forms (orchestra conductors date from this period as well).1 Inspired by that ideal of wholeness and integration, a succession of great rebels during the next several generations—Wagner, Appia, Craig, and Meyerhold, among many others—disparaged the theater rooted in nineteenth-century practices as rud158

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derless and super‹cial, and proclaimed the need for a strong, central ‹gure who could instill theater works with purpose and unity. Their arguments and examples were the birth pangs of a new profession that, during the twentieth century, occasionally lived up to its promise of revivifying a beleaguered art but also sometimes threatened to devour that art in binges of egomania. The ascendancy of the director is now an established fact, but the nature of the activity, its proper province and function, is far from universally settled, particularly regarding canonical plays. Many theater people still regard directing in essentially the same spirit that Stanislavsky and Andre Antoine did a hundred years ago, as an interpretive function rather than an independent art asserting its own aesthetic claims: the director is expected to be imaginative but should ultimately serve a text and ideally disappear from the ‹nished product. Many others, however, favoring the legacy of Craig and Meyerhold, insist that directing should be its own art: since theatrical enactment is always a form of mediation, this argument goes, it is disingenuous to pretend that the mediation can be neutral. Each production is a unique, fresh encounter between artists—chie›y the director and playwright—and that encounter, not the written text per se, is the most reliable source of urgency for productions. The extreme of this latter position is the auteur concept—much more prevalent in continental Europe, particularly Germany, than in the British or American theaters—which rests on more or less blind acceptance of the “death of the author” myth and confers unlimited authority on directors to manipulate text, acting, decor, music, and everything else willy-nilly as raw material. I have been following the waxing and waning of this debate with fascination, amusement, and occasional disgust my entire theatergoing life. It has often seemed to me that the endless, attention-grabbing struggles over authority in the theater are actually a distraction from the elephant in the room, which is the life-and-death battle to retain audiences increasingly drawn to other media. It is no coincidence that all the marathon works I have so far explored—each of them personal landmarks—were productions created from scratch, not revivals of classic plays. Such original projects are less prone to authority struggles; collaboration tends to be harmonious, public expectations stem only from the new material, and the ‹nal result has a greater chance of creating unique impressions. In this chapter, I deal with the much more inherently troubled circumstance of a highpro‹le classic, with all the baggage of propriety, expectation, and rivalry that this entails.

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Like most Americans, I saw only a handful of classic plays in my youth, none more than once, so I naturally acquired an early sympathy with the prevailing Anglo-American ethic that holds directors responsible for delivering the play advertised on the program, not some ingenious improvement on it. My perspective changed, though, when I lived in Germany for two years during and after graduate school in the 1980s, because I spent three or four nights a week there exploring the enormous range of offerings in the subsidized repertory theaters. The Germans incubated the art of directing earlier and more eagerly than other cultures because it could ›ourish in their subsidized theater system, and they continue to spend vast sums of public money on theater because their middle class still attends the serious theater out of habit, keeping the canon of Western drama constantly before it. I learned the German language to some degree by attending productions of plays I had studied, of which there were many, and in that way came to appreciate the German tradition of Auseinandersetzung—the critical “grappling” or “arguing” with canonical texts that directors and critics alike treat as obligatory. Much of the directing I saw was less than brilliant or inspired, to be sure, and the excesses were easily mocked—Shakespeare amid tons of green slime, Sophocles on a department-store escalator. But the ego-display and sensationalism aside, the intentions behind the best work struck me as earnest and admirable. The directors were having expensive fun, but they were also ›exing the theater’s muscles more vigorously than any other culture cared to, and they had dedicated themselves to a quixotic, implicitly Brechtian mission to undo the complacency behind their bourgeois audience’s familiarity with the dramatic canon. They were trying to trick smart, rich, and contented spectators into risky inquiries about life. I had been traveling frequently to Germany and carrying around this neat, professorially tolerant view of directing for more than a decade when, in the summer of 2000, my view was abruptly unsettled and altered by a marathon production in the city of Hanover. The production was a twentyone-hour version of Goethe’s Faust directed by Peter Stein, whom German critics had once lionized as the foremost director of his generation. Stein was one of the original enfants terribles of director’s theater in the 1960s and 1970s, when he led the Berlin Schaubühne. He made his name with incisive, radical stagings of classics such as Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and Shakespeare’s As You Like It that included major textual emendations based on deep dramaturgical research and acute analysis. In

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the 1980s, however, he underwent a conversion. Two Chekhov productions that he staged in a painstakingly realistic manner, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, were panned by German critics who regarded them as capitulations to an ingratiating bourgeois aesthetic that 1960s radicalism was supposed to have eradicated. Stein reacted belligerently, repudiating his earlier career, moving away from Germany, and declaring himself a bornagain guardian of Great Dramatic Texts. The Franco-Romanian critic Georges Banu dubbed him the “Coriolanus of the German theater,” and he fulminated more and more angrily in interviews about the degraded state of his métier.2 You take this text [Faust] especially seriously? What else? Should I take myself seriously? No! These illustrious people who pursue director’s theater regard themselves as excessively important and aren’t exactly bursting with inspirations because of it.3

*

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The directors think they’re really authors. They use the material from the real authors as nothing but a quarry. You can do that. I consider it imbecilic and I’m not interested in the thought-farts of these relatively dumb people who at the moment are called directors.4

Stein baf›ed his professional colleagues by speaking as if practices readily accepted in recent decades were beneath contempt. There may have been a grain of truth in his tirades, but they were unlikely to open or move minds. He shopped around his Faust proposal to various institutions for ‹fteen years (his plan to do it at the Schaubühne dated from ‹fteen years before that), and no established theater would support it. The scale and nature of his scheme—to present the entirety of Goethe’s massive, two-part lifework, the cornerstone of the German literary tradition, without a single cut or change in its 12,111 lines and without imposing any stage action not speci‹cally mentioned by Goethe—frightened all potential collaborators.5 Only when an organization outside the theater world, Germany’s ‹rst world’s fair, Expo 2000, offered sponsorship and cash did the ‹nancing for the DM 30 million ($20 million) production materialize. Stein assembled a thirty-three-member ensemble for the project, incorporating it as a forpro‹t company and insisting that its eighty full-time employees commit

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themselves for two and a half years. The show opened at Expo in July 2000 and was greeted with a unanimous chorus of scornful condemnation by Germany’s leading critics. Rüdiger Schaper called it “brain-washing and brain-softening declamation theater.”6 Roland Koberg called it a “pitiless anachronism” that felt “hostile to intelligence.”7 Gerhard Stadelmaier mocked Stein as ridiculously impotent, comparing him to a man who had pursued a beautiful woman for years and then, when he ‹nally got her into bed, couldn’t do anything with her: “Peter Stein couldn’t do it. Divorce after two attempts at a wedding night” (the production was performed over two days).8 Götz Aly said Stein had constructed “nothing more than a marble sarcophagus for the German national epic, yet again.”9 And the subtitle of a review in Der Tagesspiegel belittled the show with sports jargon: “Peter Stein Beats the German Giant-Poem at Expo. All for Nothing.”10 The critics were obviously responding to Stein’s provocations as well as his production (his ‹rst in Germany since 1991), but interestingly enough, the public didn’t share their disdain. Faust completed its planned year-and-a-half run in Hanover, Berlin, and Vienna, consistently selling out its DM 398 ($265) tickets a month ahead of each performance. It ultimately earned a pro‹t.11 I ›ew from New York to see it in September 2000, spurred by the critical brouhaha and in any case eager to see Stein achieve his Faust at long last. (I had seen several of his other productions, including both Chekhovs in the 1980s, and found them breathtaking.) Mostly, though, I was drawn by the chance to see a complete Faust. All students of drama are taught to appreciate this essential play, but the difference between German and nonGerman experiences of it is vast. The text is astonishingly beautiful in German—an unpretentious, melli›uous cavalcade of different verse forms (folksy doggerel, Alexandrines, iambic trimeter imitating Greek tragedy, and much more), profuse with playful puns, impudent ironies, and rich philosophical ambiguities. It is an aphoristic treasure-chest that “for German ears, seems to consist of quotations,” as Thomas Mann once observed, and Germans quote it without thinking, as Anglophones do with Shakespeare.12 But its range of emotion, tone, and level of discourse are unparalleled, more comparable to the collected works of Shakespeare than to any single play. No English translation has ever come close to capturing all of these qualities and beauties. Some are clearer or more speakable than others, but they all ultimately make the play seem wordy, rhetorical, monotonous, or archaic. That is why Faust is so seldom read or produced in Britain

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and America, whereas in Germany it is revered, enshrined as a repertory staple and assigned as compulsory grade-school reading. Even before the text was ‹nished, the philosopher Friedrich Schelling called Faust the Germans’ “great mythological ‹gure . . . hewn from the very center of the German character and its basic physiognomy.”13 Richard Wagner said in 1872 that “Faust should really be the new Bible” of the Germans; “they should all learn every verse from it by heart.”14 And toward the end of the nineteenth century the work was pressed into service in support of every broad national aspiration. Some said it justi‹ed liberalism, others imperialism and colonial expansionism. In the twentieth century, this tradition of ideological appropriation intensi‹ed, because the Nazis and the East German Communists both read the work as a prophecy of their violently opposed worldviews. Books associating the character Faust with the ideal Nordic or German man of action, an Übermensch beyond ordinary good and evil who subordinates his intellect to his superior feeling, began appearing shortly after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, starting with Kurt Engelbrecht’s Faust im Braunhemd (Faust the Brownshirt). Scarcely less far-fetched, Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, claimed in 1962 that his country was itself the utopian continuation of Goethe’s masterpiece: with the GDR’s founding in 1949, he said, “the whole work force of the German Democratic Republic began to write that third Part of ‘Faust’ with their toil, with their struggle for peace and socialism.”15 Faust also functioned as a national mirror throughout the Weimar, Nazi, and Cold War eras. German theaters produced it every decade of the century in lavish, widely attended productions, with audiences converging on it as a sort of communal confessional inviting them to brood on the shifting state of their souls. Gustaf Gründgens dominated this history—as Bernd Mahl explains in his richly documented 1999 book Goethes “Faust” auf der Bühne (1806–1998)—with his three productions, over twenty-‹ve years, presenting Mephistopheles as the most interesting character. By 2000, however, the crude reference to issues and ideologies so common in pre-1989 Faust productions was relatively rare. Two generations had passed since World War II and a decade since reuni‹cation, and theater artists generally harbored a healthy skepticism toward national myths. Very few felt particular obligations to nationalism or historical penance, and the reins of many German theaters had passed to younger leaders (such as Sasha Waltz and Thomas Ostermaier, the codirectors of the Berlin

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Schaubühne—Stein’s former employer—who ruf›ed many feathers by emphasizing new work over classics after taking over in 1999). The German national mood at this time was self-consciously con‹dent, marked above all by an earnest desire for normality. In 1998, the conservative Helmut Kohl was replaced as chancellor by the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, the ‹rst postwar German leader with no memory of the war (he was born in 1944), who spoke at his inauguration about the “self-con‹dence of a grownup nation that doesn’t have to feel superior or inferior to anyone, that accepts its history and responsibility—but is forward-looking.”16 Expo 2000—something of a planning boondoggle, as I’ll explain—epitomized the genial social benevolence of this early Schröder era. One easily felt, then, that intractable problems such as chronic poverty in the former GDR and elusive normality in the land permanently linked with atrocity might actually succumb to the fresh intelligence, cultural sensitivity, and environmental conscience of the new leaders. Stein’s production ‹t this mood to a T. He plainly had no wish to engage any messy questions of national identity or historical guilt, not directly at any rate, and no interest in situating his production within any ongoing Auseinandersetzung about Faust among directors or scholars. He just wanted the public to trust him as a tested senior statesman of Kultur. The powerful ‹nal image in his production did very clearly refer to the muchdebated return of Germany’s capital to Berlin from Bonn in the late 1990s— the set for the last scene was a spiral ramp that strongly recalled the glass dome Norman Foster had designed for the rebuilt Reichstag building (opened in 1999)—but that reference occurred as something of an afterthought. Stein stressed that he was primarily concerned with staging what he called a “world premiere,” and with his socially benevolent mission to grant the public belated full access to their greatest drama.17 His point of pride was democratic: providing the ‹rst chance ever for ordinary audiences to appreciate the structure, shape, momentum, and ›ow of Faust’s overall conception in a single, integral experience. Most productions of Faust are really heavily edited versions of Faust I, the relatively conventional tragic drama Goethe began in the 1770s and published in 1808 (itself seven hours if performed uncut) whose centerpiece is a familiar tale of seduction and heartbreak: Mephistopheles (Mephisto) helps rejuvenate the jaded old Professor Faust and, through negligence and distraction, they end up destroying the innocent country girl Margarete (Gretchen) after Faust gets her pregnant. German theaters occasionally

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tackle Faust II, the extraordinarily free-form and prolix work Goethe completed shortly before his death in 1832, which is twice as long as Faust I and steeped in arcane symbolism and dense allegory, but it too is usually severely cut. Faust II recapitulates and deepens the moral and philosophical explorations of Faust I, and parts of it anticipate certain rebellions and innovations of the modern and postmodern theaters. Mahl describes a number of productions dating back to the nineteenth century that produced the two parts separately and then played them in repertory, or that combined them in multiple-evening presentations, some totaling more than thirteen hours. With one problematic exception, though, none of these productions used a wholly uncut text.18 Goethe was himself skeptical about the idea of performing the whole work, knowing that he had composed it in widely separate bursts of creativity spread over six decades and that the ‹nished whole was lumpy and unwieldy. He said to his acolyte and assistant Johann Peter Eckermann: “In such a composition what matters is that the separate pieces are meaningful and clear while as a whole it always remains incommensurable; in other words, it resembles an unsolved problem that lures people again and again to repeated contemplation.”19 Stein dismissed this famous warning. He insisted that in the late twentieth century, theatrical tools existed to make the project feasible. Thus he rolled out a fabulously diverse array of theatrical strategies—gymnastics, ›ying effects, video, complicated makeup, toy and puppet theater, skating, mechanical costumes, high-tech machine units, perpetually shifting playing spaces, and much more—to give embodied life to all the play’s 450-odd characters and every bizarre, abstruse, and fantastical vision Goethe described. And strange as it may seem, that festive celebration of variety, together with that quasi-childish drive to illustrate in literal terms, packed a terri‹cally strong emotional punch. To me, it was as if a bright lamp had been suddenly switched on in a vast, splendidly elaborate room that I had previously enjoyed only in shadowy, candlelit sections. My enjoyment certainly came in part from the sensual power of the play’s language, which is exquisitely vocal and delightfully puckish in ways one has to hear to understand. Unlike most of the audience, I was hearing it spoken for the ‹rst time, and the silver-tongued actors made Goethe’s profusion of droll double-entendres, grave philosophical meditations, romantic endearments, and raunchy profanities unforgettably palpable, lucid, and immediate. Most of my amazement, however, came from the production’s clarifying power. Hearing the whole text, and seeing it enacted in such an il-

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lustrative manner, helped me to understand countless relationships between the play’s characters, lines, scenes, and themes for the ‹rst time, and to feel as if the tantalizing multidimensionality of the work were within my grasp—and I was far from alone in that feeling, as I learned. During the show’s ten intermissions over the two days, I struck up numerous conversations with nonspecialist Germans, all of whom confessed that they’d also never fully grasped the basic action and relationships of Faust before, particularly in Faust II. The high-concept productions they’d seen at their local Stadttheaters had been of little help because they all placed interpretation or ideology over clarity. What Stein offered, these people felt, was an un‹ltered experience, which they gratefully gulped down like water after a glut of arti‹cially ›avored beverages. I would not defend every minute of Stein’s Faust. I was taken aback by its corny literalism at times, to say nothing of the prospect of a major director so thoroughly abandoning the sort of critically active and challenging mise-en-scène that he had once wielded so brilliantly. I do think it was clear, however, that the gains far outweighed the losses, and that the German critics were curiously unable to see it. The production exposed a fascinating blind spot in their professional community. Three and half decades of director’s theater, it seems, had led them to regard classic dramatic texts as essentially inert unless they had drastic manipulation by directors. The critics simply did not believe that any great play could possess critical force in performance without some explicit act of Auseinandersetzung. Yet here was a text from the early nineteenth century—the classic play of their national tradition—plainly exhibiting tremendous potency outside that paradigm. Stein’s staging, for all its occasional corniness (e.g., folk dances and costumes drawn from commonplace reference books), released the work’s implicit criticality in fascinating ways—most ›agrantly, perhaps, in relation to its fairground venue. As many scholars have observed, Faust contains an extraordinarily prescient meditation on the acceleration effect of modernity. The work’s plot spring is Faust’s wager with Mephisto: that no temptation he can offer will ever make Faust so content that he pleads for the moment to “Stay a while, you are so beautiful” (1700).20 This wager proves to be his salvation and his tragedy. The parade of subsequent novelties frees Faust (and us) from the claustrophobia, superstition, and prejudice of his medieval world but also condemns him to a life of perpetual dissatisfaction. He can never be content, and at the end of the play heaven rewards him for that, redeeming his many crimes—including “the sacri‹ce

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of humans” (11, 127) for a megalomaniacal development project—thanks to his indefatigable “striving” (11,936). As Martin Swales writes: “Faust is justi‹ed . . . for the sake of his sheer energy, his drive, his avidity for experience, endlessly catalyzed by his self-consciousness. . . . Yet the justi‹cation is precarious rather than triumphant. Goethe’s great drama is a reckoning with modernity and not simply its apotheosis.”21 How poignant and reverberant it was to see this tale of dubious and reckless human achievement hyped as popular entertainment at a nearly deserted world’s fair. Expo 2000 was the largest event of its kind ever planned in Germany, a megalomaniacal extravaganza with hundreds of national pavilions, galleries, performance halls, and eateries spread over more than a million square meters, whose planners had badly overestimated the tourist appeal of Hanover, had overpriced the tickets, and had done a very poor job explaining the event’s purpose to the public. The result was a shiny, futuristic minicity of wide, welcoming pathways, expensive, whimsically designed pavilions, and ubiquitous national ›ags and corporate logos eerily suffused with an air of end-of-the-world futility and desolation. The limits of human striving and modern acceleration were everywhere—stark and appalling. At the frustratingly brief dinner break during Faust I, on a Saturday when the place should have been teeming, I found myself with some other Faust spectators at the fair’s main food court called One World Café, and noticed that we were the only patrons in the hall. The only people savoring the ironies of Expo’s huge rush to nowhere that evening had come for Goethe. The publicists for Stein’s Faust strove to present it as an unintimidating popular amusement—a show that happened to have literary respectability but could be as much fun to attend as a circus or carnival. A German Nicholas Nickleby, more or less. Its television commercials featured sensational montages with lots of ‹re and acrobatic exertion, and with touching disingenuousness its posters shamelessly exploited the director’s stardom by adjoining the names STEIN and FAUST in mirror-image block letters (no mention of Goethe). Performances took place in a huge, characterless, hangarlike hall that could not have contrasted more starkly with Expo’s extravagant national pavilions. This mysteriously nondescript, black metal shed seemed to promise a theme ride within the theme park—Star Wars: The Faust Voyage!—and in a way that is what it provided. Inside, the hall was divided with black curtains into two performance

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areas with a corridor in between. The audience (about 430 people) continually moved back and forth between these spaces every twenty to sixty minutes, watching action on one side while the other side was rearranged for the following scene. This system was more democratic than most people able to pay DM 398 for a theater ticket were probably comfortable with, as no seats were reserved and some sections required everyone to stand. But the crowd was amiable. Each new destination was an adventure, and the constant to-ing and fro-ing kept us awake—no minor consideration in a performance that ran seven hours the ‹rst day (Faust I) and fourteen hours the second (Faust II). I once heard Ariane Mnouchkine at a public discussion justify the rather ascetic seating at her marathon plays (cushionless pews, backless bleacher seats) as a means of discouraging drowsiness; the price of alertness over the long haul was muscle cramps, she implied. Stein achieved the same result much less punitively. Because no scene lasted more than an hour or so, there was ample opportunity to stretch, move about, and even (at one point) eat and drink. In the “Knight’s Hall” scene, individual plates of real wine and cheese were set out for us on long banquet tables. The enormous variety of theatrical con‹gurations over the two days— a historical potpourri that included a Greek-style choral arena, a neoclassical court theater, a masquing hall, a medieval pageant stage, a pictureframe stage, a thrust stage, and action set variously on scaffolds and grids—was Stein’s most overt concession to a directorial concept. It did not merely celebrate the theatrical, as the TV ads implied, but rather cut two ways, like the major themes in Goethe’s play. Theater happens to be one of Faust’s profound concerns. The action contains multiple plays within plays and many explicit ruminations on theatrum mundi. Its dramatic world is essentially a vast stage shaped by Mephisto’s magical powers and Faust’s imagination. All the theatrics, however, are sources of both pleasure and frustrating deception. The Faust tale that most Anglophones know is Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (ca. 1592), which unambiguously aligns theatrical trickery with pleasure and sin: Faustus aspires to heroic stature, and vacillates in his blasphemy, but he is ultimately led off to hell as a frightening lesson to all would-be overreachers, presumably including the spectators who enjoy his sin while watching it. Unlike Marlowe’s play, Goethe’s is an elaborate study of ambivalence. Its hero, like Hamlet, is ambivalent from the start and suicidally disenchanted with all the stale uses of this world. His esoteric studies are efforts to lift himself out

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of despair and identify pursuits—actions, as the Dane might put it—that do not shrink under scrutiny and “lose the name of action.” Faust is drawn to magic and theatrics as Adam and Eve were drawn to the Tree of Knowledge: he wants superhuman insight, wants to know “what holds the world together at its core” (383). He is always trying to move beyond empty appearances but is perpetually frustrated because (1) being tied to Mephisto, he always suspects that the marvels and pleasures held out to him are specious, and (2) being human (and a product of Enlightenment rationalism as well), he never knows certainly whether any of his actions can be truly Promethean, or can ‹gure in a purposeful plan. As the allegorical character Care says near the end (before breathing away Faust’s eyesight), “Humans are blind their entire lives” (11,497). Goethe leads his audience into this forest of mirrors by suggesting that they can see more about its plan than Faust can. He does this in three short framing scenes at the beginning entitled “Dedication,” “Prelude on the Stage,” and “Prologue in Heaven.” These scenes are like Russian dolls, multiple wrappers around the Faust tale proper that drop away after posing general questions. “Dedication” is a personal re›ection by the aged poet on a long life devoted to “wavering forms” (the absent, re›ected, and remembered fruit of artistic creativity) that return to him as beloved ghostly presences; he is curious, even anxious, about what those forms will mean to others after he and his friends have left the earth (1). “Prelude on the Stage” is a debate among a theater manager, a writer, and an actor as to whether the theater is too vulgar and popular a forum to do justice to art that seeks to fathom “the whole circle of creation” (240). And “Prologue in Heaven” is a Job-like episode in which Faust is mentioned for the ‹rst time as the subject of a wager between Mephisto and God. Goethe’s play is driven by a wager within a wager—not by a simple pact, as in most other Faust tales—that frames its action as an experiment: God gives Mephisto license to tempt Faust and try to win his soul, as the biblical God does with Job, though one has the feeling that Goethe’s game is stacked (God evidently knows that Faust “strives,” so Mephisto seems bound to lose [317]). Mephisto, as the coming action will make clear, has his own brand of blindness: of God, he says, “it’s really nice of such a great Lord to chat man to man [menschlich] with the devil himself ” (352–53). This is no simplistic devil in the medieval mold, a mere callous brute, or a flattering Marlovian trickster, but an un‹xed, metamorphosing “wavering form” like Faust. These prefatory scenes are very rarely performed, especially all together.

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They are among the ‹rst material cut in productions that trim the play down, typically on the model of Marlowe, to a streamlined morality tale about an individual sinner. No such shortcuts for Stein. He appreciated the scenes’ circumspect vistas, the way they contextualized the play’s myriad references to writing, time, mortality, and theatricality, and he used them as a stepwise induction into the sort of theatricality that would characterize the two-day performance. “Dedication” was recited in the corridor between the playing spaces by an elderly actor in plain street clothes (unidenti‹ed in the program), with the audience standing informally around him. “Prelude on the Stage” was performed on a humble wooden platform with the audience in riser seating around four sides, as at a fairground play, with the thespian characters dressed in trite costumes (frock coats, jester’s motley). “Prologue in Heaven” then plunged into exciting modern spectacle, dropping a giant metal ladder through the platform from the futuristic spiral grid overhead and piping in ethereal music, dazzling light, and electronically enhanced voices. The three scenes, in other words, grew increasingly stagy, providing a slow immersion into theatrical “sin,” a gradual bridge between unspectacular everyday life and Faust’s histrionic world of “wavering forms.” The Faust story itself arrived with special anticipation in Hanover because of a preopening calamity: the actor billed as the show’s star, Bruno Ganz (age ‹fty-nine), had seriously injured himself in a fall nearly eight months into the nine-month rehearsal period and had to be replaced by a relatively unknown thirty-one-year-old named Christian Nickel.22 The original plan was for Nickel to share the title role with Ganz (playing the rejuvenated lover of Gretchen, for instance), but due to the accident he performed the entire show. (Ganz returned later, in Berlin, but missed the whole four-month run in Hanover.) This acting task was a daunting challenge, which Nickel faced with marvelous aplomb. He was more than adequate and sometimes genuinely moving, despite the fact that he obviously lacked the gravity and depth to play the entire range of such an enormous role. The surprise was the emotional intensity he was able to generate simply by being a clear and ef‹cient conduit to Goethe, employing his crisp speech, resonant voice, and excellent sense of the text’s rhythms. Goethe introduces Faust as a grumpy old scholar moping around his study and grousing about the futility of book learning, and those early minutes were very worrying with Nickel. He seemed forced and affected, straining to sound jaded and looking like an interloper in his own room— a wonderfully gloomy and claustrophobic medieval space designed by Fer-

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dinand Wögerbauer, with tall, dusty shelves crammed full of old tomes, scrolls, and bric-a-brac. Within a short time, however, as it became clear how important pretence, fakery, and trickery were to the action, Nickel seemed less and less out of place. No emotional realism or gravity of age were needed, for instance, when he struck a severe melodramatic pose while shrinking fearfully away from the Earth Spirit (a large ‹lmed face projected upstage), or when he gaped amazedly at the entertaining “spirits” that appeared as nude actors reaching out from his bookshelves. Such moments may even have been more effective indicated than acted, because the distance between actor and role added vibrant colors to the play’s obsession with purposeful arti‹ciality, and to the character’s egregious selfsuf‹ciency and egotism. On two occasions, Goethe described Faust as “serious jokes.”23 The serious joke here was that Faust, Goethe’s representative Man, was an imperfect actor whose ›aws lent him paradoxical credibility, inducing the audience to listen to the text with particularly sharp attention. “What a show!” said the handsome and smug young man in old-age makeup, about a map of the cosmos. “But it’s just a show! Where can I grab in‹nite Nature by the breasts?” (454–56). Much later, during the digressive episodes toward the end of Faust I and throughout Faust II that wreak havoc with the work’s momentum (the Walpurgis Night scenes, the Emperor’s carnival and “Classical Walpurgis Night,” for instance), Nickel facilitated the audience’s listening in another way, holding his face in an impassive, un›appable expression that became a neutral mask onto which the audience could project any emotion. When I ‹rst saw Nickel do this, I assumed the expression was an accommodation to the dif‹cult circumstances—a happy one, since it kept him from exhausting his expressive repertory too soon. But when I saw the production with Bruno Ganz on German television a year or so later—a splendid performance that added depth, heft, variety, and maturity to the show—I discovered that the mask-face was part of Stein’s direction. Ganz wore the same nearly frozen expression in the same dif‹cult, potentially torpid scenes, with the same effect of encouraging close listening. Stein had evidently hit upon this device as a means of regulating the production’s pace and foregrounding Goethe’s words when they were most in need of it. A peculiar feature of Faust, German culture’s putative “greatest play,” is that it is not entirely theatrical. It stems from a mixture of theatrical and antitheatrical impulses: from “two souls” contending in Goethe’s breast, as Faust might say.

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Fig. 10. Christian Nickel as the aged Faust contemplating suicide in Faust I, directed by Peter Stein, Hanover, Germany, 2000. (Photo: Ruth Walz.)

faust: Two souls dwell, alas!, in my breast, Each craving separation from the other; One clings in lustful passion to the Earth, Grasping with every physical sense; The other lifts itself arduously from the dust To explore regions of higher understanding. (1112–17) Faust I is predominantly theatrical, because of the direct, sensuous power of the Gretchen tragedy, and Faust II (dismissed by many as a “closet drama”) is predominantly antitheatrical, because of its length, the frequency and obscurity of its digressions, and its general headiness. There is nothing exclusive about these identi‹cations, since the theatricality of Faust I, as already mentioned, is ambivalent, and Faust II contains a number of actor-friendly sections, including a sensuous, 1,551-line Euripidean minitragedy in which Faust marries Helen of Troy. The contrasting emphases of the two parts are clear, however, and the major challenge for any director in staging them together (apart from sheer length) is reconciling their con›icting attitudes.

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Stein once told an interviewer, with characteristic hauteur, that “any fool could direct Faust I,” implying that no unusual insight was needed to exploit its theatrical assets.24 But directing the two parts together so that they form an aesthetically coherent unit—so that the positions of the impresario theater manager and the idealistic writer from the “Prelude on the Stage” are reconciled—is another matter entirely because Faust I raises theatrical expectations that Faust II disregards. Stein’s solution to this dilemma, fascinatingly, was to tamp down those expectations on the ‹rst day by amplifying Goethe’s ambivalence. He did this, for example, with tactical use of kitsch, tastelessness, and tedium. After the delightful and visually engaging early scenes in Faust’s study, the action descended into bathos and predictability in the “Auerbach’s Celler” and “Witch’s Kitchen” scenes, both strangely squeezed into cavelike niches high above the audience and thus dif‹cult to see. The latter scene, where Faust drinks the rejuvenating potion, was unabashedly kitschy, presenting a knobby-nosed witch, actors jumping around in ape costumes, and a steaming cauldron straight out of a hackneyed spook-house. I could not tell at ‹rst whether these choices had been inadvertent, but when the kitsch and the visual obstruction later returned with a vengeance in the Walpurgis Night sequence, I knew they had been deliberate earlier. “Walpurgis Night,” the witch’s sabbath orgy that diverts Faust after he abandons the pregnant Gretchen, began languidly as a contrived and inexplicably dim and distant display of unalluring nudity, horror costumes, and dreary pyrotechnical effects, all of which were soon supplanted by cacophonous tastelessness in “Walpurgis Night’s Dream.” Goethe evidently intended this irreverent Shakespearean lampoon, introduced by Mephisto as a distraction within the distraction when Faust starts to think about Gretchen, as a travesty of theatrical spectacle and pleasure. Stein staged it as a pornographic noise-concert in which the numerous allegorical and literary characters wore gigantic cartoonish genitals and signs with their names, and stepped glumly up to microphones to blurt out their doggerel verse while banging aimlessly on various musical instruments. The scene would not have been out of place in First Night, Forced Entertainment’s discom‹ting attack on theatrical pleasure made the following year. Another example was the setting for Gretchen’s village. This village, where the whole middle portion of Faust I is set, is described by Goethe as a charming place with a cozy cottage that prompts Faust to ›ights of lyrical envy for its air of domestic contentment. Wögerbauer designed it as a

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sparse and impersonal expanse of empty stage with decidedly unmedieval metal scaffolds at the corners and cutout house shapes to one side suggesting only the idea of small-town gemütlichkeit. Gretchen’s cottage was a small curtained bed, chair, and cabinet rolled onto the empty ›oor, neither cozy nor enviable. (The costumes throughout Faust I were mostly simpli‹ed clothes from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.) The upshot of the cold spareness was that the medieval “small world” of Gretchen (3355)—which is captivating for Faust, as he tastes a social connectedness there that he has never known—held no veri‹able appeal in Stein’s production apart from Gretchen herself (played with a moving blend of innocence and subtle pride by Dorothee Hartinger). Faust’s attraction to this world was a fantasy, a pang of nostalgia for an image of simplicity and innocence belied by the reality in front of him. Faust I contained plenty of intense and seductive emotion, notwithstanding its implicit critique of spectacle. In the cliffhanger scene “Cathedral,” for instance, Gretchen was left collapsed on the ›oor in a “cathedral” that consisted only of ominous rows of still and silent, black-hooded actors—“pillars” of the pious, one understood, who shunned her as the majestic organ chords and warning words of Mozart’s Dies Irae requiem swelled around her. When next seen in the “Prison” scene that concludes Faust I, she appeared pale and bedraggled in a cruelly diminutive medieval cage too small for her to stand or fully stretch out in. Faust, dressed in an immaculate white Goethe-era suit (his costume since his rejuvenation), rushed in and pulled her out, but she didn’t recognize him. Suffering from an Ophelia-like distraction and facing imminent execution for the murder of her mother and baby, she regained her grip on reality only very slowly with his coaxing. Mephisto sabotaged the incipient reunion of souls, appearing abruptly in stark backlight like a noir villain, whereupon Gretchen rushed back into the cage and slammed the door behind her, directing her horror at Faust: “Heinrich! I shudder at the thought of you” (4610). Thunderous applause followed this heartbreaking and exquisitely acted ‹nale, which, for all its exciting “theater,” had antitheatrical overtones: if the lovers stood for authentic and spontaneous nature, then the melodramatic entrance of Mephisto stood for the inevitable destruction of that by calculating theatrical cynicism. Before describing Faust II I must clarify my use of the term “antitheatrical.” Many readers may associate it with the long and infuriating tradition, pre-

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eminently described by Jonas Barish, of the puritanical prejudice against public display, sexual arousal, and the spuriousness of actors and acting that dates back to Augustine, Tertullian, and Plato. That moralistic history is relevant here but only indirectly. Since the advent of the avant-garde, a venerable tradition has existed of theater writers appropriating aspects of the puritanical attitude and transmuting them into grist for rich and complex self-re›ections. This is the phenomenon Martin Puchner describes in his ‹ne book Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama, which traces a strain of modern dramatic writing (including the works of Joyce, Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, and Beckett) back to the nineteenth-century genre of closet drama to which Faust II belongs. The authors whom Puchner discusses wrote drama partly out of a fundamental “suspicion of theater,” resenting the theater’s age-old connection to popularity and mass appeal as well as its tendency to employ mimesis uncritically as a mere seduction.25 More than anything else, though, these modern writers shared the closet dramatists’ refusal to accept the practical limitations theater imposed on the imagination. They attempted to stretch theater to encompass nonmimetic presence (being as opposed to representing, as in Forced Entertainment’s work), intricate language play, complex explorations of inner experiences, and visionary mental adventures usually attempted only in texts meant for reading. Many of their distinctive techniques and strategies—such as treating language as pure gesture, radically depersonalizing characters, replacing dialogue with third-person narration and direct addresses to the audience, and piling up multiple forms of theatricality into preposterous conglomerations—were anticipated in Faust II. Puchner rightly locates the distant roots of this fascinating, self-critical tradition in the basic paradox of Plato’s dialogues—texts in dramatic form by the author who most in›uentially questioned the value of mimesis in general and theatrical enactment in particular: “That Plato, the founder of antitheatricalism, would turn to the dramatic form . . . bespeaks a tension that marks the closet drama throughout its history, for it remains attached to the theater it struggles to resist.”26 This essential contradiction is in Goethe’s work. Goethe refused to publish Faust II during his life, and for decades after it appeared in 1833 it elicited mostly perplexity and embarrassment. For all its in›uence on ambitious artists later, it has always puzzled and intimidated ordinary readers, so for Stein to package it as a popular entertainment was decidedly daring. Some sections of Faust II had formed in

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Goethe’s mind as early as 1800, but after the publication of Faust I in 1808, he did not resume steady work on the project for seventeen years. During that time, he grew markedly more mystical and circumspect—a wealthy, internationally venerated sage surrounded by helpful assistants, a large personal library, and a carefully arranged collection of nature specimens that made his home resemble a museum. Schiller, his great theatrical collaborator in Weimar, was dead, and Goethe gradually lost interest in practical theater work. He devoted himself instead to an extraordinarily broad range of other interests, including learning Arabic, studying Islam, and completing two novels, a major scienti‹c work on color, an autobiography, and a poetry collection called the West-Easterly Divan, now recognized as the prototypical work of European interculturalism. He also envisioned a vastly expanded arena for the Faust myth where it could operate on multiple macrocosmic planes of history, philosophy, politics, art, science and economics. The Faust of Faust II would be allegorically conceived as a government of‹cial, a playwright-director, a military of‹cer, a capitalist magnate, the husband of Helen of Troy, and more. Goethe (with some cause) has sometimes been characterized as aloof, classically distant, and loathe to meddle in big-game politics (both as a writer and a government of‹cial), but he was always very aware of the tumultuous events swirling round him during his long life. He recognized that he was living through a historically momentous and unprecedentedly complex age, including the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, and the onset of the Industrial Revolution—witnessing the painful ‹nal transition from medievalism to modernity. The Faust project was his means of illuminating this transition while also looking inward at his own ›uid and ambivalent responses to it. He sometimes found it hard to choose sides as he watched an antiquated, narrow-minded worldview offering the comforts and exploitations of very clearly de‹ned social obligations and values being forever displaced by a much worldlier ethos of enlightened rationalism and universal rights, which promised new knowledge, freedoms, and technological marvels but also horrifying new uncertainties and barbarities. This ambivalence is the main reason why Faust and Mephistopheles come increasingly to seem like two sides of a single human consciousness as the drama progresses. The completed Faust II is extraordinarily dense and digressive, its overall plan dif‹cult to follow even for readers with editorial footnotes at hand. It contains few helpful cues or references from Faust I and often feels like an

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entirely separate work, though the fact that the plot spring of the wager is followed clearly indicates that the two parts form a single megawork. Mephisto’s mission to ply Faust with ever-new experiences until he feels satis‹ed, originally a strategy to provide excitements and diversions for the audience as well (“Stick with novelties! / Only novelties appeal to us,” says Mephisto in “Walpurgis Night” [4112–13]), still drives the action in a global sense and sets up the terms of the heavenly resolution at the end. The problem in the theater is that the plot’s many tangents, which are by turns allconsuming, obscurely allusive, absurdly protracted, and tedious, continually divert attention from any global patterns. Aristotle (as mentioned earlier) once de‹ned excessive size in drama with the metaphor of a “creature a thousand miles long” that cannot “be taken in in a single view.”27 Faust II is the very portrait of such a creature. It may be formally divided into ‹ve acts like a classical tragedy, but from an Aristotelian viewpoint it is a monstrosity of disruption and disunity. Among the myriad quandaries it presents to a director is how to keep the audience interested in a complex and extremely prolonged series of enticements that were deliberately conceived not to hold Faust’s interest (except for the Helen section) and not to seduce the audience with traditionally alluring mimesis. Faust is effectively reborn after the trauma of the Gretchen episode (Gretchen and Helen, his two loves, are the only characters in the play who interest him as individuals, as opposed to aspects of himself). In Faust II’s opening scene, which is replete with echoes of Plato, he is discovered asleep in a “pleasant landscape” as Shakespeare’s Ariel and elfin spirits bathe him in the waters of Lethe to make him forget the past and ‹nd the courage to face a new day. He awakens at dawn without Mephisto and delivers an exquisite soliloquy describing a magni‹cent mountain scene around him, focusing particularly on a rainbow formed in the spray of a waterfall that strikes him as a symbol of human striving. “Now neatly delineated, now dissolved in the air,” it resembles Man’s evanescent achievements, he thinks (4723). This rainbow could represent the divine mercy that grants Faust a second chance. But he has forgotten the Gretchen episode, and he interprets it as the image of his new plane of aspiration. For Faust, the rainbow symbolizes his quintessentially Platonic realization that humans may grasp life only “in colorful re›ections,” employing their uniquely creative spirits to conjure something out of nothing (4727). This is the idea that launches him on his new journey. Stein used the rainbow image as the climax of the scene: at the end, a

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multicolored wash of light grew brighter and brighter until it was blinding, obliterating everything—a clever evocation of something-in-nothing ambiguity. Until that point, the scene was rather modest. Stefan Mayer, the set designer for Faust II, made no attempt whatever to evoke a “pleasant landscape,” even as an idea (as Wögerbauer had, say, in the scenes set in Gretchen’s village). The sleeping Faust was revealed atop what looked like a forbiddingly high, solid black wall—more mausoleum than mountainside—later revealed to be a severely geometrical, Robert Wilsonesque pyramid when a large golden sun rose behind it. Six pretty girls in ›owing white (the “hovering spirits”) stroked the sleeping Faust’s body before disappearing into holes in the pyramid, and it was their unalloyed sincerity—so different in ›avor from the ironic and shameful carnality seen throughout Faust I—that set the tone for the production’s second day: earnestness and humility, stylishly modern at times, always grounded in careful, respectful illustration. The next scene, “Throne Room,” had to accommodate a rather dry argument. Here, Mephisto appears without Faust and, in effect, puts a diabolical spin on the rainbow theme. The action takes place in the Holy Roman Emperor’s palace where four of his senior councilors describe at length the impoverished and morally degenerate state of his realm, after which Mephisto offers the advice that the Emperor should just shift his point of view and regard the buried gold in his kingdom as cash on hand. Budget relief in the “magic” of paper money: but is that solution a triumph of imagination or a disgraceful swindle? Goethe leaves the choice up to the audience. Mayer’s throne room consisted of a very plain high platform along one wall for the emperor and four unadorned, witness-stand-like booths atop high towers at the corners of the hall for the councilors, with the audience standing in the middle, occasionally jostled by mingling actors shouting “crowd” lines. This environment was dull and inert, and the only justi‹cation for it was that the visual dullness left the public with nothing to focus on but the abstruse policy discussion. The byword of Stein’s Faust II—indeed of the whole production—was “clarity”: keen actorly understanding demonstrated in every line as a constant encouragement to attentive listening. The surprise of the second day was the extent to which this priority was maintained even when the theatrical apparatus became extravagant. No scene, for instance, demonstrated more theatrical exertion than the Emperor’s carnival—a nearly hourlong costume parade in which an interminable stream of familiar and obscure

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allegorical and symbolic ‹gures entered one after another, spoke a few lines each, and then exited—and yet no scene was more dedicated to the cause of literal illustration. Stein took his hardest critical hits for this unrelentingly corny parade. Deservedly so, as the costume designer Moidele Bickel seemed to have foresworn imaginative originality in it and worked entirely from encyclopedias and trite cultural memory: she dressed the three Graces in plain, loose Greek robes, for instance, the Furies in black evening gowns and cat masks, satyrs in exactly the expected goat’s horns and fur, and other characters precisely as Goethe described them (e.g., Plutus in a jeweled turban and pleated gown). All this was numbingly redundant and boring. Yet having conceded that, I must also report that the scene made me understand for the ‹rst time what Goethe was trying to accomplish in it. What exactly was the purpose of this languid and tri›ing pageant, seemingly patched together from the author’s stray thoughts while reading over the years? What was its importance to the Emperor, to Mephisto and Faust, and to the debate over paper money and the stability of the empire? The way Stein con‹gured the space, as a simple, wide runway with a herald ushering in characters through a curtain at one end, jogged my memory and made me suddenly recognize the action as a processional court masque: an allegorical entertainment that ›atters a monarch with a contrived minidrama about overcoming some hypothetical threat to his or her rule. Moreover, thanks to the literalism, I also grasped the gist of the allegory, perceiving it as a con›ict between creativity and power, invention and authenticity: arti‹cial appearances (from paper ›owers, to Furies posing as young ›irts, to pearls turning into wriggling beetles) threaten the cosmic order, just as the “pretend” paper money threatens the “real” empire. Judged theatrically, all this unoriginal illustration was unforgivably feeble. But judged antitheatrically, as a deliberate brake on the power of the mise-enscène, as a device to ensure that the poet maintained ascendancy, the scene could be construed as a triumph. It recalled the writer’s protest to the crowd-pandering theater manager in the “Prelude on the Stage”: “Go and ‹nd yourself another servant! / The poet won’t wantonly forfeit just for your sake / The highest right, the human right, that Nature has granted him!” (134–36). It would be unfair to characterize the whole of Stein’s Faust II as an antitheatrical or anti-interpretive reading aid in this vein. Passages like the carnival that eschewed interpretation (the bulk of act 4 is another example)

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alternated with lengthy intervals of committed and imaginative theatricality. All the scenes with Homunculus, for instance, the synthetic being in a glass vial created by Faust’s former laboratory assistant Wagner, shimmered with ingenuity and originality. This extended speculation on the creation of arti‹cial life is among the most prescient passages in Faust, and Stein brought his most interesting ideas to it. Homunculus was played by a hairless, nearly nude child sitting inside a transparent globe, who lip-synched his lines (delivered by a female actress offstage) while the globe traveled about via discrete mobile hoists as if moving on its own. Homunculus journeys with Faust and Mephisto to “Classical Walpurgis Night,” a lengthy mythical fantasia, ostensibly to revivify Faust but also so that Homunculus can “wander the world a bit,” and this scene was a wonderland of delightful, self-conscious, show-the-strings stage magic (6993). The personi‹ed river Peneus, for instance, choreographically “swam” along the ›oor while elegantly trailing a long blue cloth that dragged Faust along—a low-tech, high-impact gem worthy of Peter Brook. An allegory about prehistorical exploitation of natural resources, involving Pygmies, Dactyls, and anthropomorphized ants and cranes, was done as a childish game: magnetic appliqués were slapped onto a cartoonish hillside and moved around by Asian-style stage assistants in black hoods. The most resonant effect of all was Homunculus’s climactic “passion”—his desperate effort to achieve fully human form by shattering his glass on the shoreline rocks and “spilling” himself into the ocean (symbolized by Galatea) so he could begin to “evolve” (7858). Galatea—a nude woman on a seashell posed like Botticelli’s Venus—glided together with other sea creatures along a long, curved conveyor belt masked by a low wall. Homunculus drifted there, crashed into her, and then the wall burst into visual life as thirty previously concealed video monitors displayed bright blue crashing waves, and then bright orange licking ›ames. The sensual ful‹llment of the technologically begotten man who longed to be human, Stein implied, was possible only as a technical marvel, an onscreen climax, which inevitably made one wonder how different Homunculus was, in the end, from all the info-age humans in the audience who sought sensual ful‹llment from screens. The “Classical Walpurgis Night” scene lingered in my mind for another reason as well: it was the ‹rst time in the production when I felt I understood why Stein had double cast the role of Mephistopheles (as he had planned to do with Faust). Two middle-aged actors shared the role of Mephisto who had roughly similar looks (receding hairlines and pasty

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complexions) but markedly different demeanors: Robert Hunger-Bühler was sober, judicious, droopy-eyed, and languorous, whereas Johann Adam Oest was earthy and rubber-faced, a worried and weatherbeaten clown. In Faust I, these actors alternated so frequently that I often lost track of their shifts. I couldn’t work out what their differences added to the production. In Faust II, however, they each appeared in longer continuous sequences. Hunger-Bühler played in the protracted sections with the Emperor (acts 1 and 4), for instance, presumably because the business-like tinge to his cynicism was better suited to practical matters of governing. Oest, in contrast, played whenever the action called for open mockery and sleaze, as when Mephisto pompously impersonated Faust in his scholar’s study, or when he ran about like a sex tourist seeking ›esh to grope in the “Classical Walpurgis Night.” Oest was superb at conveying Mephisto’s deep discomfort with the pagan classical world, which his character impugns as “too lively” because its denizens harbor no sense of shame or sin regarding the body (7087). Mephisto’s temptations hold no traction in this pre-Christian realm, where his prudish, northern European attitudes toward sensual experience appear ridiculous. Oest’s shocked and befuddled expression upon encountering the Sphinxes—two young women frozen in crouching poses, wearing large white fright wigs and black gowns that left their right breast exposed—was unforgettable. This reaction was also so unlike anything in Hunger-Bühler’s trick-bag that it made me appreciate how the double casting had actually enlarged the production’s temperamental range, giving vivid and speci‹c life to many more facets of Mephisto’s “spirit of constant negation” than any single actor could have (1338). The ending of Faust II was appropriately the theatrical zenith of both days. Stein saved his boldest effect for this anomalously religious scene— which seems to contradict the secular spirit of the rest of the work—in which the soul of the dead Faust is praised as a “noble member of the spirit world” and transported to heaven by a celestial rescue team that includes angels, redeemed women sinners, and de-eroticized representations of Gretchen and the Virgin Mary (11,934–35). A spiral-shaped metal catwalk in the ceiling dropped down to form a coiled ramp that ‹lled nearly the entire performance space, with half a dozen handsome young men dressed entirely in white stationed on it. These were the angels who snatch away Faust’s immortal soul when Mephisto is distracted by their irresistible pulchritude. They drew the soul out of the dead body, miming it as an invisible

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Fig. 11. The heavenly ramp, with angels standing sentry, descends from the ›ies over Mephistopheles (Johann Adam Oest) near the end of Faust II, directed by Peter Stein, 2000. (Photo: Ruth Walz.)

orb passed from hand to hand, and then released it upward like a freed bird. Then a succession of male actors dressed only in white loin cloths—‹rst a babe in arms, then a young boy, then an adolescent, then Christian Nickel—ascended the ramp expressionlessly while actors in the ›y space above recited the play’s elegiac and mystical ‹nal verses. In Hanover, this scene included a key transitional moment that was not in the television production, so I assume it was an adjustment to Bruno Ganz’s absence. One of the angels approached Nickel, who lay half buried in an earthen grave under the ramp, lifted him up, removed the old-man’s makeup and clothes that he wore in his death scene, and then ushered him up the ramp. (On TV, the youthful Nickel entered from offstage with the other male actors in a procession while Ganz remained lying in the grave.) To me, this moment was brilliant, a critical counterbalance to the technological triumphalism of the ramp, with its clean-cut, glazed-eyed angels gadding about of‹ciously like aliens. When the ramp ‹rst descended, it had scared away devils in hideous animal masks who arrived to drag Faust into a rolling hell-mouth shaped like a gaping sea monster out of Hieronymus

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Bosch. But that quaint, medieval ›oatlike monster-contraption, rooted in realistic mimicry and human-scale handicraft, was instantly outdazzled by the ramp, a giant modern machine with sleek abstract lines and a wondrously powerful, unseen motor. (Goethe’s text speci‹es the hell-mouth but the stage device he mentions for the heavenly messengers is a “Glory” [11,675], an early Renaissance ›ying apparatus that was never as incongruous with the hell-mouth, even in the 1830s, as the metal ramp was in 2000.) The point here is that the removal of Nickel’s makeup in full view of the audience detheatricalized him and injected a note of humility and mundane realism into the slick, high-tech scene. It freshened the air, complicating the dubious promise of a technologized heaven with a more credible “poor theater” idea of an unaccommodated actor as surrogate for the naked human soul. The moment recalled the end of The Mahabharata, with the actors milling about by the pool. Beneath the facade of such stage effects as makeup and costuming, the gesture seemed to say, lay a deeper theatricality we might all accept as an enduring paradigm for humanness—one that af‹rmed the value of continual striving in the face of our certain ephemerality and our ubiquitous cynicism about it (“It’s just as good as if it never were,” hisses Mephisto [11,601]). The metal ramp itself dovetailed with this detheatricalizing gesture by recalling Norman Foster’s new glass cupola on the Reichstag building—no mere personal association of mine but rather a reference few audience members could have missed in 2000, as the cupola was already a swarmed tourist attraction, on its way to becoming as iconic and familiar as the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. Foster designed his dome to symbolize the openness and transparency of post-Wall German democracy, conceiving a soaring structure with a panoramic view of Berlin, glass apertures looking down into the Bundestag’s plenary chamber, and a spiraling metal ramp rising metaphorically to a pinnacle of transcendent candidness beyond political stagecraft.28 Stein did not emphasize these democratic echoes beyond simply presenting the ramp, and they did clash a bit with Goethe’s well-known predilection for enlightened despotism. Nevertheless, Stein’s guiding principle as a director was also transparency: concept-free marathon theater as the ideal glass enclosure for the ‹rst live, complete, and undistorted viewing of Goethe’s “incommensurate” dramatic organism. How to explain the utter disconnection between the popular and critical receptions of this Faust? At ‹rst, the episode of the nasty reviews seemed lit-

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tle more than a snobbish overreaction to a sophisticated artist supposedly gone pop. As time went on, however, I began to see the critical response differently, as a species of categorical blindness akin to the pervasive intellectual disdain for Dickens in the early twentieth century, described in chapter 2. Non-German critics from Warsaw to London praised Stein’s production effusively and expressed gratitude to him for mounting it.29 The major German critics, as stated earlier, disliked it with startling vehemence, traducing Stein as a primitive throwback to a benighted era of text-based directing. Here are a few more indicative remarks: So it’s really accomplished. Peter Stein has forced the issue of his life dream. The journey to hell for a director who, since his departure from the Berlin Schaubühne, has been a wanderer, a man fallen out of time. (Rüdiger Schaper) “This Faust belongs to the millennium,” said the president of the Lower Saxon Parliament after the premiere, and he’s no doubt right: Stein accomplished the last great deed in the theater of the past millennium. (Peter Kümmel) It could have been the child of the marriage of Peter Stein and Goethe, the Euphorion [the child of Faust and Helen of Troy] of a theater that—for the last or the ‹rst time—stood against the annihilation and destruction of drama, but in fact annihilated a great text through sterile reverence. (Gerhard Stadelmaier) 30

The theatergoing public made its quite different feelings known with steady attendance, warm applause, and letters to editors. A political scientist named Ekkehart Krippendorff wrote to the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the critics, confronted with a ful‹lled dream that they had belittled, sounded like “sore losers.”31 An attorney and “passionate theatergoer” named Peter Raue wrote in the Tagesspiegel that “a deeply dogged, impatient rage speaks out of many of the voices that reported on the Hanover marathon.”32 The most interesting and probing retort was written by the scholar Roswitha Schieb, editor of the handsome 320-page program book published for the production. In a 2,000-word article published in the Tagesspiegel, Schieb accused younger critics of a juvenile “inclination toward desecration of monuments and patricide,” and other critics of compensating with anger for not knowing the text of Faust well enough to engage it as speci‹cally as Stein did. Such daily critics, she said, who see and write about theater on a rushed schedule, were in any case the wrong audi-

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ence for a meditative experience requiring absorption, for they merely felt annoyed and “overtaxed” by its demands. Schieb’s most provocative assertion was that German critics in general had a “pathological relationship” to their cultural heritage, due to the nation’s totalitarian past, which made them mistrustful and defensive in the face of anything dubbed “classic.” They were stuck in habitual “antipostures that had themselves long since hardened into clichés.”33 This last point was particularly illuminating, as it spoke to an aspect of German theater culture that has always been puzzling: the institutionalization of avant-garde rebellion. Only in Germany do scores of avowedly subversive theater artists receive long-term patronage from lavishly state-subsidized institutions, in odd collusion with eternally counterculture-minded critics who are prepared to praise all perceived challenges to bourgeois conventions as liberating. Schieb was curiously silent about Regietheater, or director’s theater—perhaps she thought Stein had said enough about it in his truculent interviews—but the subject nevertheless hovered over all her remarks because it is the modern tradition preferred by the critics who belittled Stein’s Faust for its bourgeois “respectability.”34 For decades, the basic working assumptions of Germany’s auteur directors (‹gures such as Peter Zadek, Frank Castorf, and their epigones) were accepted as normal by sophisticated German critics. Among those assumptions were (1) the subsidized theaters should be protective havens for avantgardism; (2) their directors should supply radical original content and not merely interpret other people’s plays; and (3) theater art was only nominally collaborative, because the claims of texts and playwrights (along with those of actors, designers, composers, and everyone else) must in every circumstance bow to the demands of Unmittelbarkeit—immediacy—as the director alone (the Übermensch-in-residence) saw it. The result of this last assumption, defended everywhere as an inviolate principle of artistic freedom, was that any and all dramatic material was indiscriminately squeezed into the patterns of the auteurs’ personal social rebellions. Interestingly, Faust is among the many great plays that simply will not ‹t those patterns, because it is devoted to viewing rebellious and subversive behavior in large philosophical, theological, and historical contexts. (Goethe, it’s worth recalling, dismissed the Romantic movement as “sick” and considered revolutionary transformation of governments appalling.)35 What happened in the wake of the Faust miniscandal was that the nature of the public debate about directors changed in Germany. Theater

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practitioners, critics, and others felt freer to express opinions that they would have kept to themselves in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2004, for instance, the playwright Theresia Walser complained in a public address and an article after feeling that two of her premieres were botched by high-handed directors: [This] kind of radical treatment or deconstruction of a play devised years ago by directors . . . in response to a static and self-referential theater aesthetic, today . . . seems merely to be the application of a fashionable principle. All that is left of the rebellion is its attitude, an attitude that no longer presupposes a director’s engagement with the text. The self-satis‹ed audience whom theater artists have long been eager to shock hardly exists anymore.36

In a 2005 speech at the Berliner Ensemble, the president of Germany, Horst Köhler, called the habit of deconstructing dramatic classics a symptom of “a new arrogant philistinism (Spießigkeit).”37 And in 2007, the theater critic for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Christopher Schmidt, wrote that the original justi‹cation for Regietheater had been turned on its head, because Auseinandersetzung was now an alibi for careerism: Originally rooted in concentration on the material, in a closer reading, in a defense of the play against the public’s expectations, directing allied itself with the work against the public. That was the provocation. Today, directing colludes with the public against the work, with the motto: you want it that way too! That is a capitulation.38

The most pointed con‹rmation of the change in tone came when Stein returned to Germany in 2007 to mount another megasize classic in the same spirit as Faust—his ten-hour, nearly uncut staging of Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy in Berlin. He was treated then with deferential respect by the very critics who slammed him in 2000. Some even praised the production.39 Yet the truth is, there was more to Stein’s artistic provocation in Faust than his challenge concerning the status of texts. He did not merely revert to a pre-1960s paradigm of the director as conduit for an author; he also focused his devotion in part on a closet drama, and incorporated that drama’s antitheatrical tendencies in his production. Major sections of his Faust were conceived, as described above, principally as reading and listening aids, minimally demanding goads to spectators’ imaginations as they conjured

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their own versions of Goethe’s theater-of-the-mind in Faust II. It was indeed strange to see such an internationally celebrated director commit himself so completely to an ambition usually associated with amateurishness: insisting that the theater serve as handmaid to interior experiences that no theater can possibly represent, attempting to reconcile the supremely adventurous experience of reading with the necessarily limited and compromising circumstances of theatrical production. In the end, though, the proof was in the experience—as always in theater, even antitheatrical theater. I did not come away annoyed or resentful of all the static, dull, and tediously illustrative passages, because they served a distinct purpose in the overall experience. Those passages promoted listening, which fostered unusually clear understanding of the work’s hard-todiscern global shape and connective patterns, and they created space for the text to breathe, to settle into its natural rhythms of expansion and contraction, bustle and quiet, action and re›ection, as its extroverted and sensuous passages alternated with sedate and disquisitory ones. There were, as mentioned, many scenes of inspired interpretive directing in the show, but Stein’s crucial insight was that the key to maintaining the audience’s concentration was to place strategic brakes on his theatricalism. These brakes paced the spectacle. They provided much needed intervals of calm and rest to help spectators keep alert and prepare their minds for the next excitement. All successful marathon dramas do this, and several others discussed in this book offered examples of arranging such intervals around listening (the actor-narrated sections of Nicholas Nickleby, for instance, and the scenes with Ganesha and the boy in The Mahabharata). The listening sequences in Faust were more provocative than those others only because they were longer, and also, perhaps, because they betrayed no misgivings about foregrounding and celebrating the voice of an author in the land of autocratic directing. One ‹nal emphasis: the occasion of Stein’s Faust was as memorable and impressive as any aspect of its staging. Watching the German audience engage so actively with this play over two demanding days reminded me poignantly that the greatest theater-makers of the early modern era— ‹gures such as Wagner and Max Reinhardt—strove to create not just works of individual genius but unifying public occasions that harked back to Greece and the Middle Ages, large-scale events that gathered thousands of busy and distracted modern people together into communities. Stein’s event was a similar achievement. He gathered 430-odd media-age people,

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held them rapt for an entire weekend, and ‹lled them with zeal to form some meaningful connection with the inconveniently huge, perennially disputed cornerstone of their national Kultur, which many of them felt had been hiding in plain sight their entire lives. At least to this foreigner, that spectacle was in itself extremely moving. Idolators of Goethe (from Eckermann to Albert Schweitzer to Rudolf Steiner) have boasted that Faust is potentially about everything. They regard the work as a vast, universally re›ective ocean like The Mahabharata or the Bible that can meaningfully address any personal concern, especially spiritual ones. Goethe himself encouraged this reading to some extent. He began work on Faust in his twenties and ‹nished it in his eighties, used the action to trace the arc of an extremely eventful human life from multiple points of view, and he eventually came to regard the text as a gargantuan sponge that might absorb all of modernity’s burgeoning ills along with humanity’s age-old existential ills, addressed in its theological frame. Thomas Mann referred to this spongelike quality when he wrote that “of its own nature [Faust] might have gone on forever” had Goethe not ‹nished it “perforce” when he felt death approaching.40 Stein was careful to distance himself from the Goethe idolators, but his production nevertheless rested on a similar, intellectually unfashionable conviction that the work was universal, in‹nitely re›ective, and timelessly pertinent—or more accurately, that it could be, as long as he refrained from obstructing free access to it with a dominant, politically or religiously charged interpretation. The public reaction to the result suggests that he was right. His decisive perception in Faust was that ordinary people would invest their best attention and enormous emotional capital in his production if he succeeded in preserving an atmosphere of the greatest possible openness to wide-roaming reverie, even at the risk of seeming to abdicate his directorial duties. This was marathon theater as democratic adventure. No one can accuse this director of excessive humility, but he does seem to have understood that, with this play, at this time, he couldn’t present himself as an omniscient hero with de‹nitive answers. For all his previous bravado and self-promotion, he grasped that monumentalism itself was suspect in the year 2000, even though millions were still drawn to it, and that the public preferred its idols to have clay feet. Hence the anomalous triumph of a director, and a Faust, in whom megalomania danced with caution and humility: neither Übermensch, nor even Übermensch-candidate, but rather a striving, bungling, overcommitted man of the earth.

chapter eight Conclusion

like most sane people, I live in a world of diminished horizons, and have lived there since the end of childhood. I learned then (and appropriately mourned) that Eden, Narnia, and Valhalla were not real, and that impulsive, feel-good historical doctrines like Manifest Destiny and Pax Britannica needed scrutiny. This awareness is for the most part salutary. Yet it can be dry and dispiriting at times, like adulthood in general, like modernity in general. Acceptance of rationality and earthly restriction leaves certain primitive hungers unassuaged. And when I ask myself what I went looking for in these works of marathon theater, I see, with the help of the foregoing essays, that it had much to do with such hungers: I craved a sense of awe in something larger than myself, a feeling of transcendent transport beyond mundane reality. The most enduring art has usually been intimate, not self-importantly overblown. That point de‹ned my taste in theater when I was young. The ‹rst deep intellectual attachment I formed was to Samuel Beckett, master of sparseness and understatement, and I spent enormous energy at one time painting verbal portraits of heroes of antimonumentality among the avantgarde, certain I was contributing to the great good ‹ght against what Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies” of the twentieth century. (How right it felt, and still feels, to impugn the nationalism and racism behind Wagner’s grandiose operas, or the inhumanity in Albert Speer’s bombastic architecture.) With time, though, my sense of this good ‹ght has changed. For many years, I have felt assaulted by our massive engines of mediated distraction, and the greatest creative emergency in performing arts today seems to me the media’s universal leveling and trivializing effects. How many ‹ne theater artists I have seen internalize these forces, ‹tting their 189

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once de‹ant imaginations to pseudosubversive institutions of consumerism, adopting the contours and limitations of media even in their nonmediated work, and settling into a habit of “thinking small” to keep on the good side of information purveyors. The most malignant syndrome I see around me now is not self-importance but rather puniness of ambition, clipped talons, and shrunken horizons. Hence my urgency to ‹nd and chronicle meaningful exceptions. The productions discussed in this book all took an extremely risky leap in envisioning some breathtakingly huge and capacious theatrical world. Each dared to evoke the monumental in a postmonumental era, and were thus duly and severely censured in several cases. To me, however, they all found astonishingly intelligent and ingenious ways to accommodate monumentality without sacri‹cing skepticism. Indeed theater generally has a built-in protection against excessive self-importance in its ephemerality—its bombast is written on the wind—and most of these productions turned that to deliberate advantage too. The works I have examined all thrived in performance by establishing a fascinating tension between some awe-inspiring central vision and underlying awareness of its provisional, hypothetical, or interrogative nature. Nicholas Nickleby’s director, for example, was convinced of its moral straightforwardness (“It was refreshing to go to something where the moral arguments didn’t cancel each other out,” said Trevor Nunn of the magni‹cently innocent Dickensian dreamworld) whereas its socialist playwright was equally convinced of the work’s moral complexity. The Mahabharata conjured a fantastic and magical realm of “universal” human origins and mythic wonders that was tempered by its consistently marvelous show-thestrings theatricality and a multinational cast whose pronounced physical and vocal diversity rooted them ‹rmly in the real world. Einstein on the Beach sought a similar quality of timelessness, constructed not from myth but from exquisitely crafted, hauntingly ambiguous pictures and soaring, hypnotically cyclical music, yet the speci‹city of its Einstein, Patty Hearst, and nuclear war references pulled it also toward time-bound reality. In Faust I + II, the cornerstone of German classical drama, a colossal conception tracing the entire life arc of a representative human from youth to old age and beyond, was sensationalized as a theatrical extravaganza and then also, out of respect for its antitheatrical aspect, allowed to sink into physical inertia, with language alone serving as spectacle and imagination carrying the weight of Goethe’s pervasive theatrum mundi trope.

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There is an article by Hans-Thies Lehmann about Forced Entertainment, from 2004, that I found risibly overstated at ‹rst, because it earnestly and unreservedly compared that company’s work with Shakespeare. This article has grown on me as I worked on this book, however, because one concept in it broadly captures the quality I am driving at in these marathon performances. The concept is Welt-Fülle—fullness of world—Lehmann’s term for the uncanny imaginative comprehensiveness of Shakespeare’s dramatic conceptions, the feeling that his plays contain complete and selfsuf‹cient worlds as open to in‹nite possibility and variation as waking dreams. The impression of an open world without borders, even if sometimes cloaked in fog or surrounded by prison walls—this impression is nearly always present in Shakespeare’s theatre. Empires of thought and matter—wide and inexhaustible, endless in their various aspects, from those encompassing the world to the most banal—are travelled by this theatre with the breath of Welt-Zeit (world-time), back and forth, between fairy tales and reality, dream and triviality, the cosmos and the inn, between Lear and Falstaff, the sublime and the inebriated, tragic and comic.1

Every chapter in this book has attempted to grasp the texture, atmosphere, and logic of one such wide and inexhaustible “empire of thought and matter.” These marathon productions all aspired to just this sense of borderless comprehensiveness, fullness, and openness, and though they also necessarily criticized their worlds, they never did so with self-abnegating irony. They did so with joy and—perhaps most inimical to our de›ating postmodern moment—a sense of unequivocal pride in being human. The broad variety of forms in these works is self-evident and signi‹cant, and I hope readers will also take note of their social breadth. The Broadway crowds who coughed up $100 for Nicholas Nickleby in 1981, the uptown/ downtown coalition that rushed to see Einstein on the Beach at the Met in 1976, the tens of thousands of ordinary gebildete Germans and Austrians who invested two whole days in Faust I + II in 2000 and 2001, the experimental theater loyalists who still ›ock regularly to Forced Entertainment’s durationals: the diversity of people these pieces have appealed to is in itself remarkable. Such variety indicates that the marathon phenomenon is no specialized concern of one marginal group. Of course, as I have acknowledged, most of what is hyped as “epic,” “monumental,” and “marathon” in

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our time is unexceptional. It is often tedious and bloated. Yet such work is proliferating, and is obviously a broad-based resistance-response to the glib and trivializing tendencies of the media age. It is made by artists with hugely varied abilities and attitudes toward art-making who are nevertheless linked by their determination to draw a line in the sand on the matter of deep investment and sustained immersion. There is always the chance that media will rise to the challenge of ‹lling this need in the future. DVDs, for example, have recently made modest inroads into the desert of our cultural ADHD, providing access to extended, high-quality television programs without the barbarity of commercial interruption. We use them to savor, say, all of an ambitious multipart documentary originally aired over a week, or the entire eight-to-ten-hour plot of an intelligently written serial-drama season. Few DVD marathon sessions are arranged for large groups, however, and the viewers rarely draw connections between their personal need for sustained experiences and the wider social need to question and challenge the mediated forces of compulsory abbreviation all around them. It may be that marathon theater works are no more socially edifying or provocative than DVD experiences on average. But theater at least invites greater social awareness (and potential activism) than media because it is watched less passively, attended in large groups where people are meaningfully present to one another, and requires more effort and expense to attend. Going to theater is an active decision to seek out a communal encounter, and it usually signals a readiness to listen closely and engage alertly with complex and elaborate talk. Mediated performances cannot accommodate challenging or extensive language, or serious meditations on time, as theater can, and that difference is the small window of opportunity that the best marathon theater exploits. Most of the productions Great Lengths discusses were adapted for ‹lm or TV, interestingly enough, and in every case their aspirations seemed to shrink dreadfully onscreen. The adaptations contained no experience of Welt-Fülle, and offered no sense of awe, grandeur, or transcendence comparable to the live performances. What they offered were helpful jogs to the memory, and the mission I set myself was to remember as much as possible of what they were missing and, with luck, strike a few blows against its ephemerality.

notes

Chapter One 1. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 30–31. 2. Ibid., 74. 3. David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 52. 4. Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992), 11. 5. Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance, 57. 6. Ibid., 109. 7. Dirk Pilz, “Zum Tode geboren: Ein gespräch mit dem Regisseur Peter Stein über Theater, Tragödie und das Los des Menschen,” Theater der Zeit, Oct. 2005, 22. This and all other translations from German texts are mine unless otherwise noted. 8. Peter Stein, interview by the author in San Pancrazio, Italy, June 7, 2007. 9. Zeami, On the Art of the No Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans. J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 83–84. 10. Ibid., 138, 137. 11. Peter Brook, “The Mahabharata Twenty-Five Years Later,” interview by Jonathan Kalb, PAJ 32, no. 3 (2010), 69. Other comments about Brook’s use of jo-ha-kyu may be found in John Heilpern, Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa (London: Routledge, 1999), 128–29. 12. Umberto Eco, The In‹nity of Lists, trans. Alastair McEwan (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 217, 15. 13. Ibid., 218. 14. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 119. 15. William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 132.

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16. Kolve, Play Called Corpus Christi, 233. 17. Tydeman, Theatre in Middle Ages, 113–20. 18. Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 4; Glynne Wickham, The Medieval Theatre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 65. 19. John Northbrooke, “A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays and Interludes,” in Bernard Dukore, ed., Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974), 159. 20. Lope de Vega, “The New Art of Writing Plays,” trans. Marvin Carlson, in Daniel Gerould, ed., Theatre/Theory/Theatre (New York: Applause, 2000), 144. 21. A. R. Braunmuller, “Note on the Text,” in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2001), xlix; Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 33–34. 22. Richard Wagner, “On the ‘Goethe-Institute,’” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 3, The Theatre, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1907), 18. 23. Richard Wagner, “Actors and Singers,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 5, Actors and Singers, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896), 212–13. 24. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, Part One, trans. Philip Wayne (New York: Penguin, 1982), 90. 25. In an announcement to the audience before the performance of his twelve-hour adaptation of The Demons on Governor’s Island in New York City in 2010, Peter Stein held a copy of the 700-page novel aloft and said he had worked hard to “tell the entire story.” In an interview in the program, he was asked why he hadn’t used Albert Camus’s adaptation and answered: “Camus was too worried about the length of the play. I prefer to look at the original novel. If it requires time, I give it time. Eight, ten hours, it does not matter.”Yet the connection between marathon theater and enjoyment of novels does not apply only to the doorstop variety. An impulse to “tell the entire story” also lay behind Elevator Repair Service’s 2006 Gatz, a seven-hour enactment and reading of all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Frank Castorf ’s four-hour Bulgakov adaptation Der Meister und Margarita (2002), and many other productions. 26. William Butler Yeats, “Introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan by Pound and Fenellosa,” in Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenellosa, eds., The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (New York: New Directions, 1959), 162. 27. Paul Gray, “An Interview with Peter Weiss,” TDR 11, no. 1 (1966), 111. 28. There are multiple ancient sources for this legend, and all tell the story differently. Herodotus, Plutarch, Heraclides of Pontus, Lucian, Pausanias: few of them agree on even such basic matters as the messenger’s name, his main task, his running routes, his death, or his supposedly immortal last words, so that reading them one after another feels like a postmodern object lesson in the indeterminacy of truth and the inevitability of authorial embroidery. Browning con›ates many of the sources, assembling the juiciest tidbits into a superhuman fantasy in his poem “Pheidippides.” This poem describes

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the title character’s run from Athens to Sparta and back (a distance of 180 miles), his encounter with the god Pan at a location not on that route, and then his run from Athens to Marathon and back immediately afterward, which understandably killed him. Robert Browning, The Poems, vol. 2, ed. John Pettigrew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 585–88. 29. Alfred E. Clark, “All-Night Shakespeare Enthralls 3,000,” New York Times, June 29, 1970, 1. The performance in question was a one-time, dusk-to-dawn marathon of Barton’s Wars of the Roses, which Joe Papp later admitted was a publicity stunt to try to save the New York Shakespeare Festival from insolvency. Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp, Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 169–72. 30. Nelle Nugent, interview by the author in New York City, July 13, 2004. Interestingly, representatives of the BAM Next Wave and Lincoln Center festivals both told me they considered the word “marathon” unequivocally “positive” in their public relations. Joseph Melillo, artistic director of the BAM Next Wave Festival, and Sandy Sawotka, BAM press director, interview by the author in New York City, June 29, 2004; Eileen McMahon, director of publicity and publications at Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, and Nan Keeton, vice president of marketing and visitor services at Lincoln Center, interview by the author in New York City, June 2, 2005. 31. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 28.

Chapter Two 1. Anatole Broyard, “All the Comforts of Dickens,” New York Times, May 15, 1988, sec. 7, p. 13. 2. Bernard Levin, “The Truth About Dickens in Nine Joyous Hours,” London Times, July 8, 1980, 14. 3. Robert Corliss, “A Dickens of a Show,” Time, Oct. 5, 1981, 76–79. 4. Despite the media circus, the $100 tickets, and unprecedented concessions from the Broadway theater unions, the limited fourteen-week run of Nickleby at the Plymouth Theatre in 1981 barely broke even in the end, so it seems to me that the accusations of gouging were unfounded. The most passionate complaints charged the producers with contradicting the antielitist spirit of Dickens by marketing the show as an extravagance. See, for example, Stephen Koss, “‘Nickleby’ in New York,” Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 6, 1981, 1299. Koss wrote, referring to promotional buttons sold with the slogan “I Was Nicked”: “The double entendre is intentional and itself a pointed commentary. In a town where the byword used to be ‘I can get it for you wholesale,’ it has become a mark of cultural status to have been genteelly ripped off.” In her interview with me, Nelle Nugent, one of the show’s Broadway producers, conceded that Bernard Jacobs, head of the Shubert Organization, had deliberately used Nickleby “to break what was then ‘the $50 barrier’”—i.e., exceed the price of $50 per ticket, which was then seen as a psychological barrier on Broadway. (The producers viewed Nickleby as two plays for $50 each, although the two tickets had to be purchased together.) Nugent insisted that prices

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had not kept up with costs at that time, and that Jacobs’s move was necessary and inevitable. (Nelle Nugent, interview in New York City, July 13, 2004.) The basic facts of the production’s ‹nancing are laid out in John Corry, “The Lessons to Be Learned from ‘Nickleby,’” New York Times, Dec. 20, 1981, sec. 2, pp. 1, 12. 5. Graham Fuller, “Doing Dickens Justice,” Daily News, Jan. 27, 2002, 14. 6. G. K. Chesterton, “Charles Dickens,” The Encyclopedia Britannica—A New Survey of Universal Knowledge, 14th edition, 1929. 7. Douglas McGrath, “For a Movie, Lesser Dickens is Sometimes More,” New York Times, Dec. 22, 2002, sec. 2, p. 13. 8. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 349, 310. 9. David Edgar, The Second Time as Farce: Re›ections on the Drama of Mean Times (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 149–50. 10. Ibid., 150. 11. Brendan Gill, “Taking Chances,” New Yorker, Oct. 19, 1981, 140. 12. Leon Rubin, The Nicholas Nickleby Story (Middlesex: Penguin, 1981), 31–32. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. Edgar, Second Time as Farce, 154. 15. These asides were not merely staging choices; they were part of Edgar’s plan and written into the script, occurring most frequently with Nicholas and Kate. A typical example (from David Edgar, Plays: Two [London: Methuen, 1990], 71): nicholas. Dotheboys Hall. squeers. Oh, sir, you needn’t call it a hall up here. nicholas. Why not? squeers. Cos the fact is, it ain’t a hall. (As Squeers leads the party round to the side of the stage, Nicholas speaks to the audience.) nicholas. A host of unpleasant misgivings, which had been crowding upon Nicholas during the whole journey, thronged into his mind. And as he considered the dreary house and the dark windows, and the wild country round covered with snow, he felt a depression of heart and spirit which he had never experienced before. 16. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 112, 154. 17. Edgar, Second Time as Farce, 159. 18. Walter Kerr, “Surrendering to ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’” New York Times, Oct. 18, 1981, sec. 2, p. 3. 19. Edgar wrote: “For Nicholas, all that is solid has indeed melted into air, all that he thought of as holy has been profaned, and, as Marx and Engels predicted, he is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.” Edgar, Second Time as Farce, 154. As he explains, the story he and the directors decided to tell in the production was a pilgrim’s progress from ignorance to quasi-Marxist class-consciousness—a long way from the fairy tale indeed. An interviewer once asked Edgar why he chose to begin his play with the muf‹n company scene, and he answered:

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“because the plot is about money and the main plot of the book is almost all about money and relations between people and their money and I wanted to start with a scene about money.” Rubin, The Nicholas Nickleby Story, 83–85. 20. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 253. 21. Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 63. 22. Ibid., 93–94. 23. Edgar, Plays: Two, 351. 24. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Harcourt, 1927), 71. 25. Edgar, Plays: Two, 251. 26. Edgar, Second Time as Farce, 158. 27. Morris Dickstein, “Nicholas Nickleby: From Book to Broadway,” Bennington Review, June 1982, 71, 69. 28. Benedict Nightingale, “How 42 Actors and 2 Directors Assembled ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’” New York Times, Oct. 4, 1981, sec. 2, p. 6. 29. Dan H. Laurence and Martin Quinn, eds., Shaw on Dickens (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985), 29. 30. George Orwell, Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 151. 31. Ibid., 166–67. 32. Chesterton, “Charles Dickens.” 33. Orwell, Essays, 139. 34. Edgar, Second Time as Farce, 156. 35. Susan Painter, Edgar the Playwright (London: Methuen, 1996), 72. 36. Edgar, Second Time as Farce, 158. 37. Orwell, Essays, 170. 38. Painter, Edgar the Playwright, 73. 39. Quoted in Painter, Edgar the Playwright, 175. 40. Robert Brustein, “In the Constructive Element, Immerse,” New Republic, Oct. 28, 1981, 26. 41. Nightingale, “42 Actors,” 6. 42. Corliss, “Dickens of a Show,” 76. 43. Howard Kissel, “Nicholas Nickleby,” Women’s Wear Daily, Oct. 5, 1981, 12. 44. Broyard, “All the Comforts,” 13. 45. My sense of the RSC’s priorities and direction during Hall’s and Nunn’s tenures owes much to the thorough discussion in Sally Beauman, The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 46. Erika Munk, “Ralph’s Revenge,” Village Voice, Oct. 7, 1986, 83. 47. Nightingale, “42 Actors,” 6. 48. One of the weaknesses of Goddard’s version was, ironically enough, a lack of harmony between the serial nature of Dickens’s novel and the TV miniseries format. Achieving such harmony would have required reserializing the text, which Edgar had taken great care to deserialize. The TV script was basically the stage script with trims and other minor alterations. The Nielsen ratings for the broadcast indicate that I was far

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from the only viewer to abandon it after the ‹rst evening. See Sally Bedell, “‘Nickleby’ Declined in Ratings,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 1983, 51, and “‘Nickleby’ Starts Off Strong, But Fades in Ratings Stretch,” Variety, Jan. 19, 1983, 86.

Chapter Three 1. Jean-Claude Carrière, The Mahabharata: A Play, trans. Peter Brook (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), viii. 2. See, for example, Robert Brustein, “The Longest Journey,” New Republic, Nov. 30, 1987, 26–28; John Simon, “A Jungle Grows in Brooklyn,” New York, Nov. 2, 1987, 110–11; and Michael Kimmelman,“Putting Old Wrinkles Into a Theater’s New Face,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 1987, sec. 2, p. 20. 3. See, for example, Peter Brook, “Entering the Unknown,” Village Voice, Dec. 1, 1987, 130–31, and Richard Schechner, Mathilde La Bardonnie, Joel Jouanneau, and Georges Banu, “Talking with Peter Brook,” TDR 30, no. 1 (1986), 54–71. 4. Marvin Carlson, “Brook and Mnouchkine: Passages to India?” in Patrice Pavis, ed., The Intercultural Performance Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), 89; Heilpern, Conference of the Birds, 22. 5. Schechner et al., “Talking with Peter Brook,” 54. 6. Peter Brook, The Shifting Point (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987), 129. 7. Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 68. 8. David Williams, ed., Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook (London: Methuen, 1988), 302. 9. Ibid., 308. 10. Stanley Kauffmann, Persons of the Drama (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 60–61. 11. Brook, The Shifting Point, 160. 12. Peter Brook, “Foreword,” in Carrière, The Mahabharata, xiv. 13. Jean-Claude Carrière, In Search of the Mahabharata: Notes of Travels in India with Peter Brook, 1982–1985, trans. Aruna Vasudev (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2001), 27. 14. Ibid., 31. 15. Peter Brook, foreword to Carrière, The Mahabharata, xv–xvi. 16. Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, trans. and ed. Yaël Rachel Schlick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 25. 17. Brook, “Mahabharata Twenty-Five Years Later,” 67. 18. Ibid., 70–71. The most disparaging accusations made against Brook in print, related to The Mahabharata, were in an interview Phillip Zarrilli published with Probir Guha, an Indian theater professional who helped make arrangements for Brook during his visits to India. See Phillip Zarrilli, “The Aftermath: When Peter Brook Came to India,” TDR 30, no. 1 (1986), 92–99. Guha accused Brook of arrogant detachment and callous ingratitude, citing in particular the insult of personal clothing given inappropriately as a gift. In his interview with me, Brook mentioned this incident as another example of paying a “price” for the “monstrosities” of one’s forefathers. He described the

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episode regretfully as a misunderstanding, sparked by a gesture of friendship—the gift of a sweater—that was offered and rebuffed. He later asked that his remarks not be quoted. 19. Brook, The Shifting Point, 161. 20. Peter Brook, Threads of Time: Recollections (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 190. 21. Ibid., 185. 22. Carrière, In Search of the Mahabharata, 21. 23. Shechner et al., “Talking with Peter Brook,” 64. This remark about Shakespeare was particularly objectionable to Sue-Ellen Case, who wrote: “Thus, Brook’s so-called international project brought The Mahabharata securely back to the British sense of classic theater, imported like tea for the Eurocentric stage.” Sue-Ellen Case, “The Eurocolonial Reception of Sanskrit Poetics,” in Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt, eds., The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 123. 24. David Williams, ed., Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1991), 118. 25. Carrière, The Mahabharata, 3. 26. Ibid., 107. 27. Ibid., 4. 28. The best overview of the slippages in meaning surrounding the word “theatricality” is the excellent introduction Tracy Davis wrote for Theatricality, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 29. Ariane Mnouchkine, “The Theatre is Oriental,” in Pavis, The Intercultural Performance Reader, 97. 30. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 70. 31. Ibid., 68. 32. See Shechner et al., “Talking with Peter Brook,” 64, and Margaret Croyden, Conversations with Peter Brook 1970–2000 (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 225. 33. Carrière, The Mahabharata, 160. Gautam Dasgupta called this Bhagavad-Gita sequence “shockingly truncated”: “the epicenter of the poem, the fulcrum on which rests the entire thrust of this monumental drama of humanity, here rendered into whispered words never revealed to the audience? It is as if one were to stage the Bible without the least mention of the Sermon on the Mount.” Gautam Dasgupta, “The Mahabharata: Peter Brook’s ‘Orientalism,’” Performing Arts Journal 10, no. 3 (1987), 11–12. In his interview with me, Brook offered this retort: “I felt very strongly that when you are dealing with what is very rightly seen as the most sacred of sacred texts [the Bhagavad-Gita], you don’t put it into a piece of theater. In a piece of theater you evoke the feeling, try to evoke an interest in it, but it’s not a religious service. It would be a very bad play about the cruci‹xion if you actually stopped the action and for forty minutes read the teaching of Jesus. That would be really not only stupid and boring but also counterproductive, imposing something falsely on an audience. The sermon on the mount is to be read and

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contemplated very quietly in silence, or perhaps read among four or ‹ve people on a special occasion.” Brook, “Mahabharata Twenty-Five Years Later,” 64. 34. Interestingly, Brook told one interviewer that the essence of the character Krishna was that of an actor: “Krishna plays the part of a human being, which is not exactly the same as becoming one. An actor knows what is going to happen in the following scene, and yet knowingly plays to the best of his abilities a person who doesn’t know. There is a strict relationship between the actor and all-seeing God Krishna who ‹ghts with all his eloquence to stop a war he knows will come. This is the mysterious freedom of the actor who, the freer he is to play his part, the more completely he can enter into it.” Schechner et al., “Talking with Peter Brook,” 61. 35. There is no meaningful difference between the French original and Brook’s English translation in this regard. 36. The parts could also be seen on three separate evenings, but Brook told me he agreed to that option only reluctantly, as a concession to “people’s social habits.” 37. Carrière, The Mahabharata, 140. 38. Ibid., 64. 39. Ibid., 238. 40. Ibid., 111. 41. Ibid., 106. 42. Brustein, “The Longest Journey,” 26. 43. Dasgupta, “The Mahabharata,” 78–80. 44. Una Chaudhuri, “The Future of the Hyphen: Interculturalism, Textuality and the Difference Within,” in Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, eds., Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ (New York: PAJ, 1991), 193. 45. Rustom Bharucha, “A View from India,” in Williams, Brook and the Mahabharata, 231. 46. Ibid., 247. 47. Ibid., 231. 48. Ibid., 246. 49. Julie Stone Peters, “Intercultural Performance, Theatre Anthropology, and the Imperialist Critique: Identities, Inheritances, and Neo-Orthodoxies,” in J. Ellen Gainor, ed., Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance 1795–1995 (London: Routledge, 1995), 208. 50. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 63. 51. Ibid., 207. 52. Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 165. 53. Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 25.

Chapter Four 1. Robert Vorlicky, ed., Tony Kushner in Conversation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 15. 2. Ibid., 66.

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3. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: TCG, 1993), 118. Because Kushner completed Millennium Approaches several years before Perestroika, and because it has a very different structure, he commonly refers to them as separate plays. I encountered them as parts of a single marathon work, however—which is also how they were published—so I refer to them that way. 4. I’m thinking primarily of Robert Brustein and Frank Rich. See their comments on the plays throughout their collections Dumbocracy in America: Studies in the Theatre of Guilt, 1987–1994 (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1994) and Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for the New York Times, 1980–1993 (New York: Random House, 1998). Kushner once said that he “really hated” As Is and implied that those feelings were an impetus for writing Angels. Per Brask, ed., Essays on Kushner’s Angels (Winnipeg and Buffalo: Blizzard, 1995), 140. 5. These facts come from Dale Carpenter, “Reagan and AIDS: A Reassessment,” Bay Area Reporter, June 24, 2004, one of the more balanced discussions of this issue that I have found. This article is also available on the Independent Gay Forum website: http://www.indegayforum.org/news/show/26671.html. 6. Tony Judt, “Words,” New York Review of Books, July 15, 2010, 4. 7. The echo in these subtitles is worth further investigation, as Heartbreak House, like Angels in America, was written in a mood of near desperation at the state of the world. Shaw was near the end of his emotional tether after seeing the horrors of World War I, and Kushner had similar feelings after the Reagan revolution and in the midst of the AIDS crisis. The free-form “fantasia” aspect of both plays re›ects their authors’ restive searching for ways to respond. 8. Cases of censorship and controversy concerning Angels in America are discussed in James Fisher, The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope (New York: Routledge, 2002), 88–91, and in John Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 250–52 and 263–66. 9. Vorlicky, Tony Kushner in Conversation, 198. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 159. 12. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 257–58. 13. Vorlicky, Tony Kushner in Conversation, 112. 14. Ibid., 196. 15. Ibid., 63. 16. Tony Kushner, Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (New York: TCG, 1995), 61–62. 17. Tony Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” The Kenyon Review 19, nos. 3–4 (1997), 29. 18. Vorlicky, Tony Kushner in Conversation, 198. 19. Kushner, Millennium Approaches, 35. 20. Ibid., 119. 21. Ibid., 10.

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22. Ibid., 10–11. 23. Ibid., 11. 24. Ibid., 13. 25. Ibid., 58. 26. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part Two: Perestroika (New York: TCG, 1994), 38. 27. Ibid., 75. 28. Kushner, Millennium Approaches, 45–46. 29. Ibid., 16. 30. Benjamin, Illuminations, 258. 31. Kushner, Millennium Approaches, 32. 32. Ibid., 21. 33. Kushner, Perestroika, 141. 34. Kushner, Millennium Approaches, 25. 35. Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992), 145. 36. Kushner, Millennium Approaches, 24. 37. Kushner, Perestroika, 37. 38. See David Savran, “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation,” in Deborah Geis and Steven F. Kruger, eds., Approaching the Millennium: Essays on “Angels in America” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 13–39, and Matthew Wilson Smith, “Angels in America: A Progressive Apocalypse,” Theater 29, no. 3 (1999), 152–65. 39. Smith, “Angels in America,” 156–57. 40. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 38. 41. Martin Harries,“Flying the Angel of History,” in Geis and Kruger, Approaching the Millennium, 186, 187. 42. Kushner, Millennium Approaches, 5. 43. Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” 31. 44. Ibid., 28. 45. Ibid., 24. 46. Ibid. 47. Vorlicky, Tony Kushner in Conversation, 155. 48. Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” 21. 49. Ibid. 50. Kushner, Perestroika, 144. 51. Ibid., 145. 52. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 261. 53. Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” 31. 54. The director George Wolfe cast the show in collaboration with Kushner, but it was Kushner who set the distribution of the multiple roles. He speci‹es them in the published script.

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55. Kushner, Perestroika, 14. 56. Charles Ludlam, The Complete Plays (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), vii. 57. Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1986), 23. 58. Janelle Reinelt, “Notes on Angels in America as American Epic Theater,” in Geis and Kruger, Approaching the Millennium, 237. 59. Ibid., 243. 60. Kushner, Perestroika, 60. 61. Reinelt, “Notes on Angels,” 243. 62. Savran, “Ambivalence,” 28. 63. Ibid., 18, 28, 32. 64. David Savran, “Queer Theater and the Disarticulation of Identity,” in Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla, eds., The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 156. 65. Ibid., 158. 66. Ibid., 159–60. 67. Alisa Solomon, “Great Sparkles of Lust: Homophobia and the Antitheatrical Tradition,” in Solomon and Minwalla, The Queerest Art, 13–14. 68. Kushner, Perestroika, 148.

Chapter Five 1. Quoted in Ronald Taylor, Richard Wagner: His Life, Art, and Thought (London: Elek, 1979), 262–63. 2. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 38. 3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Theater, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 151. 4. The $150,000 ‹gure is from Robert Wilson. Katharina Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson: The Biography (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 159–60. Glass says the debt was $90,000. Philip Glass, Music by Philip Glass, ed. Robert T. Jones (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 54. 5. The director of the Olympic Arts Festival, Robert Fitzpatrick, originally invited Wilson to revive Einstein on the Beach in Los Angeles in 1984, and offered $350,000 to produce it, but Wilson declined, preferring to stage a new work for the festival. Janny Donker, The President of Paradise: A Traveller’s Account of Robert Wilson’s “the CIVIL warS”, trans. Cor Blok and Janny Donker (Amsterdam: International Theatre Bookshop, 1985), 106. 6. Laurence Shyer, “Robert Wilson: Current Projects,” interview, in Robert Wilson: The Theater of Images, 2nd ed., exhibition catalog (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 119. 7. Tim Page, liner notes to Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach, three-CD recording, 1993, Nonesuch 79323. 8. Richard Schechner, “Selective Inattention: A Traditional Way of Spectating Now Part of the Avant-Garde,” Performing Arts Journal 5, no. 1 (1976), 15.

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9. Richard Wagner, Parsifal: Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel in Drei Aufzügen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1950), 24. 10. Wilson began referring to all his productions as “operas” in the early 1970s. “I call them operas because it means ‘opus’ or ‘work,’” was his simple explanation in Mark Obenhaus, Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera, PBS documentary ‹lm, 1985. His biographer says that “opera” was “his designated term for bringing all the arts together.” Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson, 197. Wilson went on to become a prominent director of traditional operas, including several of Wagner’s. 11. Sartre, Sartre on Theater, 150. 12. Laurence Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators (New York: TCG, 1989), 213. 13. Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson, 148. 14. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 9. 15. Wilson’s ideas for a “continuous” theater are described in Shyer, Wilson and His Collaborators, 45; Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson, 94; and Robert Wilson and Umberto Eco, “Robert Wilson and Umberto Eco: A Conversation,” Performing Arts Journal 15, no. 1 (1993), 95. 16. Judith Helmer and Florian Malzacher, eds.,“Not Even a Game Anymore”: The Theatre of Forced Entertainment / Das Theater von Forced Entertainment” (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2004), 287, 288. 17. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., The New Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 101. 18. Ibid., 109. 19. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 32. 20. Ibid., 29; Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 370. 21. Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson, 145. 22. Shyer, Wilson and His Collaborators, 216. 23. Ibid., 221. 24. Kyle Gann, “Midtown Avant-Gardist,” in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 268. 25. Philip Glass, liner notes, Einstein on the Beach. 26. Robert T. Jones, “Robert Wilson’s ‘Einstein’ Returns to the Stage,” New York Times, Dec. 2, 1984, 5. 27. Stefan Brecht wrote of the 1976 dance scenes: “Wilson may have ‹gured that the willful naiveté, one might almost say vapidity, the amorphousness and harmless friendliness of these scenes would mitigate the play’s aura of cold calculation. The spectator is relieved by these scenes of inept playfulness in which for a moment to escape the director’s total power and the humiliation of aesthetic coercion.” Brecht, The Theatre of Visions, 341. Einstein was Wilson’s ‹rst collaboration with Lucinda Childs, whom he originally asked to play the title role alone. In the end, she was one of several principal performers. In 1976, the regular cast performed the dance scenes. In 1984, Childs’s dance

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company was incorporated into the cast and performed the dance sections, which she choreographed. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 42. 28. Brecht, The Theatre of Visions, 374. 29. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 67–68. The texts spoken onstage in 1976 were published in a booklet accompanying Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach, original cast recording, Tomato Music Co., 1979. 30. Ibid., 74–75. 31. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (New York: Dell, 1971), 88. 32. Ibid., 86. 33. Glass, Music by Philip Glass, 62. 34. Ibid., 59. 35. Ibid., 35–36. 36. See, for example, Jane Palatini Bowers, “The Composition That All the World Can See: Gertrude Stein’s Theater Landscapes,” in Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 121–44, and Marc Robinson, “Robert Wilson, Nicolas Poussin, and Lohengrin,” in Fuchs and Chaudhuri, 159–85. 37. Shyer, Wilson and His Collaborators, 222–24. 38. Ibid., xix. 39. The Wagner-Wilson lineage is traced out systematically in John Rockwell, “Robert Wilson’s Stage Works: Originality and In›uence,” in Robert Wilson: The Theater of Images, 10–31.Wilson has on occasion invited the Wagner comparison himself, saying, for instance, that his ideal theater building would be “just like Bayreuth. It’s the best theatre. I don’t know why more people haven’t copied that house.” Shyer, Wilson and His Collaborators, 165. 40. Erika Munk, “Enrapture the Eye, Detach the Brain,” Village Voice, Dec. 25, 1984, 119. 41. Shyer, Wilson and His Collaborators, 346. 42. Ibid., 321–22. 43. A typical example of Wilson’s invocation of myth is this 1991 statement: “Men of the theatre like Euripides, Racine, and Moliere, frequently wrote about the gods of their time. I think that ‹gures like Sigmund Freud, Joseph Stalin, Queen Victoria, and Albert Einstein are the gods of our time. They are mythic ‹gures, and the person on the street has some knowledge of them before he or she enters the theatre or the museum space. We in the theatre do not have to tell a story because the audience comes with a story already in mind. Based on this communally-shared information, we can create a theatrical event.” Wilson and Eco, “Wilson and Eco: A Conversation,” 89. 44. Munk, “Enrapture the Eye,” 119. 45. David Savran, “The Theatre of the Fabulous: An Interview with Tony Kushner,” in Brask, Essays on Kushner’s Angels, 137–38. 46. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York:

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Columbia University Press, 1984), 280. Rabkin wrote: “On one hand, the sheer scale of [Wilson’s] endeavors is admirable: beyond any of his theatrical contemporaries he has forced the world of the traditional to confront the vision of experimental art. Yet, on the other, his instinct for the monumental and his hunger for acclaim mark him as the Cecil B. De Mille of the avant-garde. The courting of the grandiose counters what is for me the most praiseworthy quality of Wilson’s work: the ability to make us see and hear freshly by returning our sense to unfrenzied, contemplative inner rhythms. And this quality is easily lost amid the public clamor and the Wagnerian ambition.” Gerald Rabkin, “Beached,” Soho Weekly News, Dec. 2, 1976, 17. 47. I would readily acknowledge that Wilson’s detractors have valid complaints today. I have seen twenty-odd Wilson productions since Einstein, reviewed half a dozen, and have lost patience myself on numerous occasions with his Mannerism, his factory production, his lazy self-plagiarism, and more. The political charges of totalitarianism and escapism, however, simply don’t gibe with my experience of the work. 48. Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007), 11. 49. Ibid., 3. 50. Ibid., 8. 51. Jamake Highwater, “A Primal Drumming,” Soho Weekly News, Dec. 2, 1976, 15. 52. Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson, 127. 53. Susan Sontag, “On Art and Consciousness,” interview, Performing Arts Journal 2, no. 2 (1977), 29. 54. Ibid. Sontag adds: “If you start from an asocial notion of perception or consciousness, you must inevitably end up with the poetry of mental illness and mental de‹ciency. With autistic silence. With the autistic’s use of language: compulsive repetition and variation. With an obsession with circles. With an abstract or distended notion of time.” 55. Craig Owens, “Einstein on the Beach: The Primacy of Metaphor,” October 4 (1977), 22–25. 56. Ibid., 27. 57. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 37. 58. Sontag, “On Art and Consciousness,” 30. 59. Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 10, 11.

Chapter Six 1. Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 34. 2. Tim Etchells, “A Text on 20 Years with 66 Footnotes,” in Helmer and Malzacher, Not Even a Game, 287; Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1999), 59. 3. Forced Entertainment, “Quizoola!” in Adrian Heath‹eld, ed., Live: Art and Performance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 106–11.

Notes to Pages 127–40

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4. Eco, The In‹nity of Lists, 324, 137. 5. Forced Entertainment, “Quizoola!” 110. 6. Etchells, Certain Fragments, 16. 7. Ibid., 19. 8. Nicholas Hern, Peter Handke: Theatre and Anti-Theatre (London: Oswald Wolff, 1971), 48, 49. 9. Etchells, Certain Fragments, 17. 10. Tim Etchells, “A six-thousand-and-forty-seven-word manifesto on liveness in three parts with three interludes,” in Heath‹eld, Live, 211. 11. Tim Etchells, ed., Forced Entertainment Research Pack (undated publication by Forced Entertainment), 2. 12. Etchells, Certain Fragments, 38. 13. Etchells, “Six-thousand-and-forty-seven-word manifesto,” 212. 14. Forced Entertainment, “Durational Performances,” in Heath‹eld, Live, 101. 15. Adrian Heath‹eld, “As if Things Got More Real: A Conversation with Tim Etchells,” in Helmer and Malzacher, Not Even a Game, 80. In the same interview, Etchells added: “For me, there’s an inherent ugliness in theatre because it is always trying to do something to you. It wants something. So I would use the word theatrical in a derogatory sense: something that is trying too hard to affect you and is distorting itself by doing this.” Ibid., 91. 16. Forced Entertainment, “Durational Performances,” 101. 17. Heath‹eld, “As if Things Got More Real,” 80. 18. Forced Entertainment, “Durational Performances,” 101. 19. All quotations from the TBA production of Quizoola! are from notes I took during the performance. 20. Tim Etchells, interview by the author in New York City, Sept. 8, 2008. A version of this interview was published on HotReview.org as “The Long and the Short of It.” http://www.hotreview.org/articles/timetchellsint.htm. 21. Robin Arthur said, for example, about the ‹nal hours of the 1999 durational performance Who Can Sing a Song to Unfrighten Me?: “at that point you just sit there and say the ‹rst things that come to your mind, which are true usually, because it’s easier to tell the truth than to make up ‹ction.” Judith Helmer,“Always under Investigation: From Speak Bitterness to Bloody Mess,” trans. Gero Grundmann, in Helmer and Malzacher, Not Even a Game, 55. 22. Jonathan Kalb, “Shaw on Shaw’s Neglected Plays: Fanny’s First Play, On the Rocks, Geneva,” in Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 7 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1987), 321. 23. The DVD of Quizoola! sold on the Forced Entertainment website contains excerpts from a 1999 performance at Hoxton Hall in London, performed by Etchells, Tim Hall, and Sue Marshall. Interestingly, the tonal relationships between these actors were very different from those in the performance I have described. Hall was very garrulous, many of his answers longer than necessary, compensatory, vaguely guilty, and he had a familiar, jokey manner with Etchells that made both of them laugh a lot. Marshall was

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Notes to Pages 140–45

laconic and touchy and appeared emotionally fragile, which put Etchells on the defensive and lent the action a serious and uncomfortably intimate tone. The piece changed signi‹cantly with players of different sexes because of the mixture of sexual politics with abusive behavior. Many questions were crudely sexual, for instance, with particularly ugly implications when a domineering male questioner shouted them at a female. 24. Heath‹eld, “As if Things Got More Real,” 97. 25. In And on the Thousandth Night . . . eight performers dressed in cheap red robes and cardboard crowns sat in chairs on a stage and improvised stories, suggesting that they were all Sheherazades as well as kings. The piece played constructive inventiveness off against destructive competitiveness. Every story began with the formulation “Once upon a time . . . ,” and the main rule was that each performer could be interrupted at any point by the word “Stop” uttered by any other performer who wanted to continue in another vein, or begin an entirely new tale. The interruptions could be maddening, but not always, because the cast was not endowed with equal storytelling prowess. Ineptitude and failure of imagination were sometimes summarily punished (as if out of schadenfreude) and eloquence and inventiveness left to ›ourish (as if out of collegial respect), but eloquence was also sometimes nipped in the bud (as if out of envy) and dullness left to ›ourish (as if out of malice). 26. Eco, The In‹nity of Lists, 231. 27. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1984), 71, 104. 28. Christine Evans, “Radical Theatre of Failure,” Realtime, April–May 2007, 2. 29. Jonathan Romney, “The Art of Interrogation: We ask the Questions,” Guardian, Nov. 15, 2000, 13. 30. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (New York: Grove, 1984), 145; Etchells, “Six-thousand-and-forty-seven-word manifesto,” 217. 31. Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theater has been controversial among scholars because it implausibly views the postdramatic as the de‹ning feature of all contemporary theatrical innovation rather than one important tendency within it. It accumulates a mountain of anecdotal evidence to de‹ne the paradigm for the theatrical future, without ever seriously considering mainstream or popular theater forms or offering any original social analysis to support its assertions. Lehmann acknowledges that no single, dominant aesthetic paradigm can prevail in our bewilderingly heterogeneous historical moment, but cannot resist staking a rhetorical claim to a historical imperative for the one he most admires and has spent decades following. This is indeed a fault in a ‹ne book that the author has acknowledged. It does not lessen my admiration for the extraordinary description of a phenomenon that is real and signi‹cant and extremely dif‹cult to describe well. 32. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 161. 33. Ibid., 10. 34. Forced Entertainment, “Durational Performances,” 101. 35. Etchells, “Six-thousand-and-forty-seven-word manifesto,” 212. 36. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (1967), 21, 23.

Notes to Pages 146–61

209

37. Florian Malzacher, “There is a Word for People Like You: Audience: The Spectator as Bad Witness and Bad Voyeur,” in Helmer and Malzacher, Not Even a Game, 124. 38. Etchells, Certain Fragments, 20–21. 39. All quotations from the Essen Speak Bitterness are transcribed from a DVD of the performance kindly sent to me by Forced Entertainment. 40. Tim Etchells, e-mail message to author, Mar. 13, 2009. 41. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 61–62. 42. Etchells responded to a question about these ethical issues as follows: “It’s true that there’s a certain sense of equivalence, or a value-free aspect to the text and the delivery—‘everything’ is there, and that ‘everything’ is presented unheirarchicalised, as if everything is just as important as everything else. . . . I don’t think this is evasive morally, though. It simply creates a moral problem, or a rolling set of moral problems that the viewer has to deal with. There’s a certain equivalence, an equal weighting to the way the text and the performance deal with things, and because of that as an audience member you’re forced to negotiate that; making your own hierarchies and judgments. . . .The text in a certain way also comprises statements of fact (even if some of the facts are ludicrous!). There’s no follow-through because you have all the info that’s needed. What you don’t get is much explanation or justi‹cation or analysis of these facts. Again—that’s to leave space for the viewer. You’re more or less forced to get to work on all of that.” Etchells, e-mail message to author, Mar. 13, 2009. 43. Marina Abramovic, “Elevating the Public,” interview, in Heath‹eld, Live, 148. 44. Etchells, interview in New York City, Sept. 8, 2008. 45. Quoted in Deborah Sontag, “A Caged Man Breaks Out at Last,” New York Times, “Arts & Leisure,” Mar. 1, 2009, 24. 46. Etchells, Certain Fragments, 69. 47. Terry Eagleton, “Qui s’accuse, s’excuse,” London Review of Books, June 1, 2000, 35. 48. Eco, The In‹nity of Lists, 205. 49. Ibid. 50. Matthew Goulish, “Compendium: A Forced Entertainment Glossary,” Performance Research 5, no. 3 (2000), 143.

Chapter Seven 1. The Romantic origins of directing are discussed in Stanley Kauffmann’s essay “The Director Reborn: An Exploration,” which mentions the link with orchestra conductors. In Stanley Kauffman, About the Theater: Selected Essays (Riverdale: Sheep Meadow, 2010), 167–73. 2. Georges Banu, “Peter Stein und der sichere Grund der Texte,” in Harald Müller and Jürgen Schitthelm, eds., 40 Jahre Schaubühne Berlin (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002), 156. 3. Peter Stein, “Ma‹oso mit einer deutschen Seele?,” interview by Hilke Prillmann, Die Welt am Sonntag, May 21, 2000.

210

Notes to Pages 161–65

4. Peter Stein, “Warum Peter Stein Gedankenfürze im Theater ablehnt,” interview by Stefan Kister, Die Welt, Jan. 2, 2007. 5. Stein explains the origins of his Faust project in his essay for the program book, Peter Stein, “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte unserer Faust-Aufführung,” in Roswitha Schieb with Anna Haas, eds., Peter Stein Inszeniert Faust von Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Cologne: Dumont, 2000), 8–9, and in the documentary entitled Probezeit included with the DVD set Peter Stein Inszeniert “Faust” von Johann Wolfgang Goethe (ZDF, 2006; Bel Air Edition & Friedrich Berlin, 2007). 6. Rüdiger Schaper, “Und wenn die Welt voll Goethe wär,’” Der Tagesspiegel, July 25, 2000. 7. Roland Koberg, “Wie Goethe sich verspekulierte,” Berliner Zeitung, July 25, 2000, 11. 8. Gerhard Stadelmaier, “Und auf Verrichtung läuft’s hinaus,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 25, 2000. 9. Götz Aly, “Heinrich küsse mich, sonst küss ich dich,” Berliner Zeitung, Mar. 20, 2001, 9. 10. Schaper, “Wenn die Welt voll Goethe wär.’ ” 11. In Hanover, the public also had the option of seeing the production over six consecutive evenings, but Stein disliked that “sushi-version” (as he called it) and ended it after Expo. Only two-day marathon performances were given in Berlin and Vienna. Roland Koberg, “Das Publikum wird ein anderes,” Berliner Zeitung, Jan. 12, 2001, 10. 12. Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 11. 13. Martin Swales, “Civilization, Un-civilization, Transgression: On Goethe’s Faust,” in Mary Fulbrook, ed., Un-civilizing Processes? Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture: Perspectives Debating with Norbert Elias, German Monitor 66 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 81. 14. Quoted in Bernd Mahl, Goethes Faust auf der Bühne (1806–1998) (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999), 49. 15. Quoted in Swales, “Civilization,” 82. 16. Quoted in Andrew Nagorski, “City on the Edge,” Newsweek, Apr. 19, 1999, 52. 17. Wolfgang Höbel, “Faust als Jedermann,” Der Spiegel, May 29, 2000, 52. 18. Among the noteworthy longer productions that Mahl mentions are those by Hermann Müller, Raphael Loewenfeld, and Karl Weiser. The problematic exception is the Goetheanum production in Dornach, Switzerland. The Goetheanum is an anthroposophical center, dedicated to Rudolf Steiner’s ideas of “spiritual science” and the practice of eurythmics, that has presented an uncut Faust every few years since 1938 with a partly nonprofessional cast. Steiner considered Faust a quasi-religious “mystery,” and Mahl says that he and other Goethe scholars regard the Goetheanum Faust as “problematic” because of its “claims to absolute truth.” Mahl, Goethes Faust, 114, 118. Stein dismissed the Goetheanum production as a “Weihespiel” (a quasi-religious play of solemn dedication) and said his was the ‹rst complete production by a professional theater company intended for general audiences. Stein, “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte unserer Faust-Aufführung,” 9.

Notes to Pages 165–86

211

19. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1925), February 13, 1831, 355. “Incommensurable” was a favorite word of Goethe’s, often used to refer to the ideal quality of ambiguity in poetry. 20. Quotations from Faust are cited by verse number, from these editions: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie Erster Teil (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1986, 2000), and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie Zweiter Teil (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1986, 2001). 21. Martin Swales, “Goethe’s Faust and the Drama of European Modernity,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 74 (2005), 91. 22. Details about the incident may be found in Bruno Ganz, “Diese Rolle gehört mir,” interview by Anke Dürr and Urs Jenny, Der Spiegel, Dec. 11, 2000, 234–36, and Christian Nickel, “Im Weltgebäude allein zu Haus?,” interview by Klaus Irler, Der Tagesspiegel, July 20, 2000. There is a venerable tradition of multiple casting for the roles of Faust and Mephistopheles, as Mahl describes throughout Goethes Faust auf der Bühne. Goethe said he thought the role of Helen should be played by two actresses—a tragic heroine and an opera singer. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 177. 23. The phrase appears in two letters: to Johann Sulpiz Boisserée (Nov. 24, 1831), and to Wilhelm von Humboldt (Mar. 17, 1832). Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethes Briefe, vol. 4, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1976), 461, 481. 24. Schaper, “Wenn die Welt voll Goethe wär.’ ” 25. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality , and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 1. 26. Ibid., 14. 27. Aristotle, Poetics, 30. 28. For a description of the intended symbolism of Foster’s dome, see Horst Willi Schors and Klemens Vogel, Facts: The Bundestag at a Glance (Berlin: German Bundestag, 2006). An interview with Foster appears in Anja Lösel and Rudi Meisel, Die Küppel der Nation: Der Reichstag und seine Verwandlung (Hamburg: Gruner + Jahr AG, 1999), 99. Stein says that he saw the structure of Goethe’s play as “cyclical” and “spiral-shaped.” Stein, “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte unserer Faust-Aufführung,” 8. 29. See, for example, Michael Billington, “One Hell of a Show,” Guardian Weekly, Sept. 21–27, 2000, 16, and Anne Midgette, “Germany’s Classic of Classics, All 21 Hours,” New York Times, Aug. 6, 2000, 1, 32. 30. Schaper, “Wenn die Welt voll Goethe wär”; Peter Kümmel, “Augenblick, beeil dich,” Die Zeit, July 27, 2000, 37–38; Stadelmaier, “Und auf Verrichtung läuft’s hinaus.” 31. Ekkehart Krippendorff, “Skandal-Kritik,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, Oct. 28, 2000. 32. Peter Raue, “Ach! Wie so groß!” Der Tagesspiegel, Jan. 5, 2001. 33. Roswitha Schieb, “Zu Peter Steins ‘Faust’-Inszenierung: Die großen Spitzen der kleinen Spießer,” Der Tagesspiegel, Apr. 20, 2001. 34. See, for example, the comments about Stein’s “old-bourgeois respectability” in Hans-Dieter Schütt, “Fest der Wortlautmaler,” Neues Deutschland, May 21, 2007. 35. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 263. 36. Theresia Walser, “A Playwright’s Worries,” trans. Claudia Wilsch Case, HotRe-

212

Notes to Pages 186–91

view.org: http://www.hotreview.org/articles/playwrightsworries.htm. This text, the transcript of a talk Walser gave at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, is an expansion of her article “Zweimal kein Tisch: Das Theater um den Text,” Frankfurter Rundschau, Oct. 23, 2004, 17. 37. Horst Köhler, “Wider die arrogante Spießigkeit,” Die Zeit, Apr. 18, 2005. 38. Christopher Schmidt, “Mozartmottenkugeln,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, Aug. 3, 2007. 39. See, for example, Gerhard Stadelmaier, “Wahnsinn Wallenstein,” Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 21, 2007, 35, and Rüdiger Schaper, “Götter des Gemetzels,” Der Tagesspiegel, May 21, 2007, 25. In his interview with me, Stein gave a curiously dutiful answer when asked about his motivation for directing Wallenstein: “Well, I did one magnum opus by the very greatest Weimar classic author; then I thought it might be fun to do the other magnum opus by the other great Weimar classic author.” The project and technical director for Wallenstein, Joachim Barthes, told me that another impetus for that production was the need to spend the pro‹t from Faust I + II, nearly four million euros. This money did not belong to Stein personally but rather to a foundation that placed restrictions on its use. It had to be spent on a project similar to Faust, “for the bene‹t of German-speaking theater.” Barthes, interview by the author in Berlin, June 5, 2007. Wallenstein was far less theatrically elaborate than Faust, and Stein’s twelve-hour adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Demons in 2010 was still less so. The Demons was downright minimal. Both these productions were splendidly acted, marvelously clear in their language, and made for wonderful “theater days” that included many pleasures of communal connection. Neither show, however, gave a sense of why Stein was once considered a world-class director, which Faust did, in its theatrical sections and in its overall conception. 40. Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 5.

Chapter Eight 1. Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Shakespeare’s Grin: Remarks on World Theatre with Forced Entertainment,” trans. Marc Svetov, in Helmer and Malzacher, Not Even a Game, 104.

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index

Bacon, Francis, 127, 156 Baker, Bobby, 129 Ball, Hugo, 98, 119 Banu, Georges, 161 Barish, Jonas, 175 Barry, Philip, 78 Bart, Lionel, 27 Barthes, Roland, 51, 60, 86 Barton, John, 16, 195n29 Bathhouse, The, 95–96 Bausch, Pina, 129, 143 Beckett, Samuel, 17, 116, 126, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143, 156, 175, 189 Bedbug, The, 95–96 Beeson, Kent, 133–35, 137–39, 141 Benjamin, Walter, 76, 80, 83 Bentley, Eric, 69 Berlin Alexanderplatz, 18 Berlioz, Hector, 116 Bernard, Kenneth, 52 Bersani, Leo, 119 Bhagavad-Gita, The, 56, 62, 199–200n33 Bharucha, Rustom, 67 Bickel, Moidele, 179 Bizet, Georges, 52 Bleak House, 39 Blitzstein, Mark, 87 Bloody Mess, 131–32, 144 Bosch, Hieronymus, 182–83 Brand, 4

12 a.m. Awake and Looking Down, 132, 136 Abramovic, Marina, 17, 22, 154 Acconci, Vito, 17 Adorno, Theodor W., 119 Aeschylus, 7 Akhnaten, 106 Albee, Edward, 88 Aly, Götz, 162 American Buffalo, 71 And on the Thousandth Night . . . , 140, 208n25 Andrews, Raymond, 122 Angels in America, 2, 16, 17, 21, 22, 71–96, 158, 201n7 Another Look at Harmony, 116 Antoine, André, 159 Appia, Adolphe, 98, 158 Aristophanes, 95 Aristotle, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 115, 118, 125, 132, 177 Artaud, Antonin, 51, 97–98, 100, 103, 119, 122 Arthur, Robin, 128, 148, 149, 150–51, 207n21 As Is, 73, 201n4 As You Like It, 160 Atrides, Les, 1 Austen, Jane, 36 Ayckbourn, Alan, 93 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 116

223

224

Index

Brecht, Bertolt, 27, 39, 68, 71–72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 83, 86–88, 92–93, 95, 97, 110, 119, 123, 124, 125, 146, 152, 154, 160 Brecht, Stefan, 110–11, 204n27 Breton, Andre, 143 Breuer, Lee, 45 Bright Room Called Day, A, 75, 78 Brook, Peter, 9, 15, 20, 21, 45–70, 78, 100, 117, 119, 180, 198–99n18, 199–200n33, 200n34 Brother/Sister Plays, The, 22 Browning, Robert, 19, 194–95n28 Broyard, Anatole, 25, 42–43 Brustein, Robert, 42, 66, 201n4 Bryden, Bill, 16 Burden, Chris, 129 Buried Child, 71 Burke, Kenneth, 58 Byrne, David, 121 Byron, Lord, 13 Cage, John, 98, 102, 104–5, 125 Caird, John, 23, 27, 28, 30–31, 42, 43 Camus, Albert, 194n25 Carmen, 52 Carrière, Jean-Claude, 9, 49, 52–53, 56, 58, 62–64, 66 Case, Sue-Ellen, 199n23 Castorf, Frank, 15, 185, 194n25 Catling, Brian, 129 Cezanne, Paul, 116 Chaikin, Joseph, 17 Chalfant, Kathleen, 79, 82, 91–92 Chaplin, Charlie, 106, 111 Chaudhuri, Una, 66–67, 90 Chekhov, Anton, 52, 161, 162 Cherry Orchard, The, 52, 161 Chesterton, G. K., 29, 39, 40 Childs, Lucinda, 98, 100, 101, 102, 109, 110, 111, 112–13, 204–5n27 Chong, Ping, 45 Christmas Carol, A, 27 Churchill, Caryl, 74, 82, 91, 129 City Dionysia Festival, 3, 5–6, 7, 18 CIVIL warS, the, 21, 118 Clark, Ronald, 107 Claudel, Paul, 4, 14

Clinton, Bill, 71, 73, 152 closet drama, 13–14, 172, 175 Cloud Nine, 91 Club of No Regrets, 131, 144 Cocteau, Jean, 125 Cohn, Roy, 73–74, 75 Coltrane, John, 114 Conference of the Birds, 51 Corliss, Richard, 42 Corpus Christi Festival, 4, 10–12, 15, 18 Cradle Will Rock, The, 87 Craig, Gordon, 98, 158, 159 Craig, Hardin, 12 Cukor, George, 27 Cunningham, Merce, 98, 102 Cunningham, Michael, 76 Dasgupta, Gautam, 66, 67, 199n33 David Copper‹eld, 27 Davis, Tracy, 199n28 Deafman Glance, 105, 122 Debord, Guy, 146 DeGroat, Andrew, 98, 110 DeMille, Cecil B., 119 Demons, The, 16, 21, 194n25, 212n39 Deputy, The, 4 dernier caravansérail, Le (Odyssées) (The Last Caravansary (Odyssey)), 21 Destiny, 27 Diaghilev, Sergei, 98 Dickens, Charles, 23–44, 49, 91, 121, 184, 190, 195n4, 197n48 Dickstein, Morris, 39 Dirty Work, 131 Dyer, Richard, 85 Dylan, Bob, 141 Eagleton, Terry, 156 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 165, 188 Eco, Umberto, 9–10, 127, 140–41, 156 Edgar, David, 23, 27, 28, 29–30, 31, 33–36, 38, 39, 40–42, 82, 129, 190, 196n15, 196–97n19 Einstein, Albert, 100–101, 102, 106–7, 109, 113, 190 Einstein on the Beach, 1, 15, 17, 97–123, 125, 126, 133, 190, 191, 203n5, 204n27

Index Elevator Repair Service, 21, 194n25 Eliot, George, 36 Emanuelle Enchanted, 132 Engelbrecht, Kurt, 163 Etchells, Tim, 125, 128, 129, 130, 132–40, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147–48, 149, 151, 154, 207n15, 209n42 Eustis, Oskar, 75–76 Expo 2000, 19, 161, 162, 164, 167, 210n11 Fabre, Jan, 129, 143 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 17, 18, 143 Faust, 4, 6, 14, 18, 19, 80, 160–88, 190, 191, 212n39 Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, 75 Fields, W. C., 27 Fierstein, Harvey, 90 Finnegans Wake, 9, 140–41 First Night, 131, 144, 173 Fitch, Clyde, 78 Fitzpatrick, Robert, 203n5 Fletcher, Jim, 134, 135, 137, 138–39, 141 Flynn, Kimberly, 76 Foote, Horton, 22 Forced Entertainment, 9, 10, 105, 124–57, 173, 191 Foreman, Richard, 100, 143 Forster, E. M., 31, 37, 49 Foster, Norman, 164, 183 Foucault, Michel, 51, 151–52 Four Saints in Three Acts, 117 Frey, James, 152 Fried, Michael, 145 Galileo, 83 Ganz, Bruno, 170, 171, 182 Gargantua and Pantagruel, 140 Garis, Robert, 36–37 Garrick, David, 158 Gatz, 21, 194n25 Gauguin, Paul, 119 Gesamtkunstwerk, 15, 97–98, 118–21, 125 Gill, Brendan, 30 Glass, Philip, 1, 97–123, 125 Goat Island, 124 Goddard, Jim, 43, 78, 197–98n48

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 1, 4, 13, 80, 160–88, 190 Good Person of Setzuan, The, 83, 88 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 90 Goulish, Matthew, 157 Graduate, The, 35 Grant, David Marshall, 79 Great Game: Afghanistan, The, 22 Greeks, The, 16 Greenberg, Clement, 105, 116, 121 Gropius, Walter, 98, 119 Grotowski, Jerzy, 17, 50, 98 Guha, Probir, 198n18 Guinness, Alec, 27 Hall, Peter, 43 Hamlet, 13, 113, 121, 168–69 Handke, Peter, 129, 143, 148–49, 153 Hard Times, 39 Harden, Marcia Gay, 85 Hare, David, 82, 129 Harries, Martin, 86–87, 92 Harrison, Tony, 16 Hartinger, Dorothee, 174 Hayes, Dermot, 24 Hearst, Patty, 103, 113, 190 Heartbreak House, 74, 201n7 Herr, Michael, 146 Highwater, Jamake, 121 Hitler, Adolf, 75, 106 Hochhuth, Rolf, 4, 143 Hoffman, Dustin, 19 Hoffman, William, 73 Homer, 4, 9, 47, 58, 127 Horkheimer, Max, 119 Hsieh, Tehching, 17, 154 Hughes, Holly, 94 Hughes, Ted, 51 Hunger-Bühler, Robert, 181 Ibsen, Henrik, 4, 78, 160 Iliad, The, 4, 9 Impact Theater, 129 Inge, William, 78 Investigation, The, 18 Irondale Ensemble, 87

225

226

Index

Jacobs, Bernard, 195–96n4 Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, The, 27 James, Henry, 36 Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile, 98 Jarry, Alfred, 143 jo-ha-kyu, 7–9, 17, 58, 108, 115, 132, 141, 193n11 Joyce, James, 9, 19, 127, 140–41, 156, 175 Judson Poet’s Theater, 98 Judt, Tony, 74 Jungle of Cities, 88 Jürs-Munby, Karen, 142, 143 KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, 105 Kantor, Tadeusz, 17, 143 Kaprow, Allan, 98 Kauffmann, Stanley, 52 Kentucky Cycle, The, 2, 16, 21 King Lear, 52 Kissel, Howard, 42 Klee, Paul, 76 Knowles, Christopher, 111, 121–22 Koberg, Roland, 162 Kohl, Helmut, 164 Köhler, Horst, 186 Kolve, V. A., 10 Koss, Stephen, 195n4 Kouyate, Sotigui, 61 Kramer, Larry, 73 Kraus, Karl, 14 Krippendorff, Ekkehart, 184 Kroetz, Franz Xaver, 143 Kümmel, Peter, 184 Kushner, Tony, 1, 71–96, 118–19, 201n4, 201n7, 202n54 La Fura dels Baus, 143 Lane, Nathan, 29 Lang, Fritz, 103, 111 Langdon-Lloyd, Robert, 59 Last Days of Mankind, The, 14 Lautréamont, Comte de, 119 Lavastine, Philippe, 52 Lean, David, 27 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 142–44, 191, 208n31

Lepage, Robert, 1, 15, 21, 22, 124 Letter for Queen Victoria, A, 106 Levin, Bernard, 26 Lichtenstein, Harvey, 50 Liebman, Ron, 79–80, 81, 91 Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, The, 104, 105 Lily’s Revenge, The, 22 Lipsynch, 22 Little Dorritt, 39 Living Theater, The, 27, 98 Long Day’s Journey Into Night, 71 Love! Valor! Compassion!, 90, 93 Lowdon, Richard, 128, 148, 149 Ludlam, Charles, 74, 87, 90, 92, 95 Lugné-Poe, Aurélien, 14 Mabou Mines, 100 Mac, Taylor, 21–22 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 58 Mahabharata, The, 1, 9, 15, 21, 45–70, 75, 78, 80, 91, 110, 115, 117, 119, 141, 183, 187, 188, 190, 199n23 Mahl, Bernd, 163, 165 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 175 Malzacher, Florian, 146 Manet, Édouard, 116 Mann, Thomas, 162, 188 Marat/Sade, 42, 52 Marathon Man, 19 Marlowe, Christopher, 168, 169, 170 Marshall, Claire, 128, 148, 149, 151 Mary Barnes, 27 Maxwell, Richard, 137 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 95–96 Mayer, Stefan, 178 McGraney, Tarell Alvin, 22 McGrath, Douglas, 29 McNally, Terrence, 90, 93 Melillo, Joseph, 195n30 Metropolis, 103, 111 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 14, 125, 158, 159 Meyers, Bruce, 59, 61–62 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 52 Miller, Arthur, 88 Minwalla, Framji, 94 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 1, 15, 21, 45, 60, 168

Index Modern Times, 111 Monk, Meredith, 100 Mother Courage, 88 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 117, 174 Munk, Erika, 43, 118 Music in Twelve Parts, 104 Mysteries, The, 16 Naden, Cathy, 128, 131, 148, 149, 150–51 Napier, John, 24 National Theater of the United States, 124 Nature Theater of Oklahoma, 124 Naumann, Bruce, 129 Nicholas Nickleby, 1, 16, 17, 20–21, 23–44, 46, 49, 50, 59, 65, 75, 78, 80, 91, 117, 167, 187, 190, 191, 195n4 Nichols, Mike, 78–79, 84, 91 Nickel, Christian, 170–71, 172, 182, 183 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 66 Nightingale, Benedict, 42 Normal Heart, The, 73 Northbrooke, John, 12 Nugent, Nelle, 20, 195–96n4 Nunn, Trevor, 23, 27, 28, 30–31, 39, 43, 78, 117, 190 Obolensky, Chloé, 60 O’Connor, Terry, 128, 131, 148 Odets, Clifford, 87 Oest, Johann Adam, 181, 182 Oida, Yoshi, 57, 61, 62 Old Curiosity Shop, The, 23 Oliver!, 27 Oliver, Stephen, 24 Oliver Twist, 23, 24, 27, 31, 39 O’Neill, Eugene, 4, 74, 88 Oresteia, The, 1, 6, 7 Orghast, 51 Orphan Cycle, The, 22 Orwell, George, 30, 39–41, 189 Ostermaier, Thomas, 163 Our Hitler: A Film from Germany, 17–18 Our Mutual Friend, 39 Our Town, 71, 90 Owens, Craig, 122

227

Pacino, Al, 79 Page, Tim, 101 Painter, Susan, 42 Papp, Joseph, 195n29 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 71 Parsifal, 4, 102 Peer Gynt, 4, 13, 160 Peters, Julie Stone, 68 Petherbridge, Edward, 32, 33 Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), 31 Pirandello, Luigi, 59, 64, 131, 132 Plato, 175, 177 Pomo Afro Homos, 94 Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, The, 23, 26 Proletbuehne, 87 Puchner, Martin, 175 Py, Olivier, 15 Quizoola!, 126–28, 133–42, 147, 148, 149, 156, 207–8n23 Rabelais, François, 127, 140, 156 Rabkin, Gerald, 119, 206n46 Raisin in the Sun, A, 94 Raue, Peter, 184 Reagan, Ronald, 42, 72, 73, 75, 83 Reed, Lou, 121 Rees, Roger, 31, 32, 37 Rehm, Rush, 5 Reinelt, Janelle, 93 Reinhardt, Max, 187 Reverend Billy, 72 Reynolds, G. W. M., 33 Rich, Adrienne, 92 Rich, Frank, 73, 201n4 Richards, Emily, 32, 33 Rivette, Jacques, 17 Rodriguez, Alex, 152 Rollins, Sonny, 140 Romeo and Juliet, 13, 35–36, 37, 41 Romney, Jonathan, 141 Rousseau, Henri, 119 Royal Shakespeare Company, 1, 23–44 Rubin, Leon, 27, 28, 31, 33

228

Index

Sacks, Oliver, 69 Said, Edward, 51, 65, 68–69 Saint John of the Cross, 53 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 87 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 97, 103, 122 Satin Slipper, The, 4, 14 Satyagraha, 106 Savran, David, 86, 93–94 Schaper, Rüdiger, 162, 184 Schell, Jonathan, 111 Schelling, Friedrich, 163 Schenkkan, Robert, 1, 21, 71 Schieb, Roswitha, 184–85 Schiller, Friedrich, 176, 186 Schlemmer, Oskar, 98 Schmidt, Christopher, 186 Schröder, Gerhard, 164 Schweitzer, Albert, 188 Segalen, Victor, 53–54, 69–70 Self-Accusation, 148–49, 153 Sellars, Peter, 124 Seltzer, Margaret, 152 Seven Streams of the River Ota, The 1, 21 Shakespeare, William, 13, 19, 35–36, 55, 56, 58, 60, 64, 68, 95, 160, 162, 173, 177, 191, 199n23 Shankar, Ravi, 104 Shaw, George Bernard, 39, 74, 139, 201n7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 13 Shepard, Sam, 88 Shyer, Laurence, 103–4 Sills, Paul, 27 Slaughterhouse-Five, 115 Smith, Anna Deavere, 71 Smith, Matthew Wilson, 86, 119–20 Smithson, Robert, 123 Societas Raffaello Sanzio, 143 Society of the Spectacle, The, 146 Solomon, Alisa, 94 Sontag, Susan, 122, 123, 206n54 Sophocles, 4, 7, 160 Speak Bitterness, 146–56 Speer, Albert, 189 Spielberg, Steven, 72, 84 Spinella, Stephen, 91

Split Britches, 94 St. Augustine, 175 Stadelmaier, Gerhard, 162, 184 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 159 Stein, Gertrude, 116–17, 119, 122, 175 Stein, Peter, 1, 6–7, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 45, 160–88, 194n25, 212n39 Steiner, Rudolf, 188, 210n18 Stevens, Wallace, 43 Strange Interlude, 4, 19 Stravinsky, Igor, 97 Streep, Meryl, 79, 91 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 71, 84 Strehler, Giorgio, 15 Sutton, Sheryl, 101, 106, 109, 113 Suzuki, Tadashi, 45 Swales, Martin, 167 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 17–18 Tantalus, 16 Tertullian, 175 Thatcher, Margaret, 26, 42, 82, 128 Theater Angelus Novus, 143 Thomson, Virgil, 106, 117 Thoreau, Henry David, 22 Three Sisters, 161 Threepenny Opera, The, 83, 88 Threlfall, David, 31–32 Torch Song Trilogy, 90 Torquato Tasso, 160 Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, The, 168 Tricycle Theater, 22 Trilogy of Dragons, The, 21 Tsuchitori, Toshi, 61 Turnbull, Colin, 69 Tydeman, William, 11 Tzara, Tristan, 143 Ulbricht, Walter, 163 Ulysses, 19 Vagina Monologues, The, 94 Vega, Lope de, 12–13 Verdi, Giuseppe, 117 Vonnegut, Kurt, 115

Index Wagner, Richard, 4, 13, 14–15, 60, 66, 97–98, 100, 102, 103, 111, 117, 118–21, 122, 125, 158, 163, 187, 189, 205n39 Wagner, Robin, 79 Waiting for Godot, 139 Waiting for Lefty, 87 Waits, Tom, 121 Wallenstein, 6, 186, 212n39 Walser, Theresia, 186 Walz, Sasha, 163 Wars of the Roses, 16, 195n29 Weiss, Peter, 18, 143 Who Can Sing a Song to Unfrighten Me?, 207n21 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 71 Wickham, Glynne, 12 Wilder, Thornton, 83 Wiles, David, 5, 6

229

Williams, David, 58 Williams, Tennessee, 83 Williams, William Carlos, 123 Wilson, Lanford, 78 Wilson, Patrick, 79 Wilson, Robert, 1, 15, 20, 21, 45, 97–123, 124, 125, 145, 204n27 Wögerbauer, Ferdinand, 170–71, 173–74, 178 Wolfe, George C., 72, 76, 78, 91, 93, 202n54 Woodvine, John, 32–33 Wooster Group, The, 130, 143 Wright, Jeffrey, 91 Yeats, William Butler, 17 Zadek, Peter, 185 Zarrilli, Phillip, 198n18 Zeami Motokiyo, 7–8, 9, 10, 108, 132