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Theater Today: Dialogue With Ourselves
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15200 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1989 |
4,641 Words |
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Don Rubin
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The root of theater, suggested Aristotle some 2,400 years ago, lies in the concept of mimesis, imitation of actions laid out in a reasonably ordered sequence usually consisting of a beginning, middle, and an end. For much of the contemporary theater, however, Aristotelian categories no longer really hold. Indeed, the whole notion of form in the arts as something that can be easily separated from content in this postmodern period--and particularly the notion that both can be neatly codified--is no longer the solid base from which one can develop serious critical inquiry either in theater itself or any of the other arts.
This is not to suggest that the arts are in any particular trouble, at least no more than usual. The fact is that the arts today are probably taken more seriously by more people in more nations than at any previous time in world history. They have been widely recognized over this last generation as serving an essential social benefit and, in many countries, even political and economic benefit. The artist today is more widely respected than ever before and, in many lands, is both called and treated as a living national treasure, an attitude that still boggles many minds.
The period since the end of World War II has been an especially rich one for the arts, a time of both democratization and decentralization, whether one is speaking of theater being used for social development as it has been over the last decade, particularly in Africa and Latin America or whether one is speaking of the spread of professional regional theaters in North America and Europe. Clearly, the arts have become more accessible to more people than even before.
It has also been a period involving the most profound changes in the traditional notions of the nature of art, both how it is presented and how it is understood, how it is signified and how it is received. And there's the rub. Aristotle, like so many educated people today, would probably not have been amused by much of what he encountered.
Does our own fin de siecle art then give us any confidence at all to approach the twenty-first century? Should it? Is it definable? Should it be? Has a suitable critical vocabulary yet been invented to deal with it? Should we allow the aggressive incomprehensibility and masturbatory quality of so much of it in its weakest and most mindless forms to depress us thoroughly about its nature and function?
I heard a story recently about a meeting in Paris between playwright Samuel Beckett--the closest thing we have in the West to a contemporary theatrical and dramaturgical god--and critic Martin Esslin, Beckett's John the Baptist. Walking together down a bright Paris boulevard, Beckett is said to have commented on how beautiful the day was. As they walked on, Esslin, clearly trying to bait Beckett, said, "It kind of makes one glad to be alive doesn't it, Sam?" To which the usually pained Beckett replied, no doubt after a suitable pause, "Oh, I wouldn't go that far."
How far dare we go with all of this? Once we could speak of art as something at least tangentially connected to beauty. We no longer demand the beautiful in our dramatic art, certainly not on a regular basis. One wonders sometimes if we even seek the human anymore. Some of the period's megahits--of course they are profound allegories--have been musicals about alley cats and
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