THE MODERN THEATER OR, THE WORLD AS A METAPHOR OF DREAD

THE theater is the Lazarus of the arts. Two thousand years of "worst seasons ever" between Periclean Athens "and Elizabethan England failed to bury it. Indeed, in the two and a half millenniums since Aeschylus, the number of dramatic geniuses could be counted on one and a half hands. The theater does not live on its masterpieces but between them. Man created the theater in his own image, and it wears two masks and a thousand faces. The mask of tragedy says weep--and bear it. The mask of comedy says grin--and bear it. The theater is witness and partner to man's endurance. Tawdry or frivolous, gallant, polemical or profound, the theater is the place where man speaks to man about man in his living presence.

Today that very serious dialogue is difficult, oblique and garbled. It sometimes seems like a bad phone connection--full of static, elusive, abrupt, frustrating and almost hostile. U.S. playwrights have even cut the wire--for the moment they have nothing to say about either humanity or the human predicament. That poet of the violated heart, Tennessee Williams, may return to his best form at any time; meanwhile, he carries repetition to the edge of self-parody (The Mutilated) or attempts religious allegories (Milk Train) in which symbols masquerade as wonders. Arthur Miller thumbs disconsolately through a three-hour "Dear Diary" (After the Fall), making moralistic marginal notes on his past. Edward Albee has been a ventriloquist rather than a voice ever since he lit that verbal holocaust between the sexes, Virginia Woolf.

Physically the U.S. theater is more robust than its gloomy pulse takers are willing to admit. Broadway is staging a minor revolution, from spruced-up theaters to flexible ticket pricing. Coast to coast, regional theaters are sprouting. But a handsome playhouse or sounder show-business economics does not make a home for a living theater unless there exist playwrights with something to say.

Life Without Sanctions

In the past three decades, the U.S. theater has dashed from the barricade to the bedroom, from a flirtation with Marx to an infatuation with Freud. The social-protest school, including Clifford Odets, Irwin Shaw and Lillian Hellman, recessed when it lost its villain. The Depression took its critics with it.

The case-study cadets took over, blandly following Williams into the sexual badlands. From William Inge to Paddy Chayefsky, they gave their characters a good confessional cry, straightened out their kinky little complexes, and tucked them beddie-bye. These clinical gospelers of love enjoyed a vogue as long as playgoers were "yung and easily freudened," as Joyce once put it. But fashions are the autumns of ideas. Last season Murray Schisgal put all those clotted cliches into the mouths of three wackily soulful devotees of "adjustment" and "personal relationships," derisively labeled his play Luv, and the psychosexual jig was up.

Thus, at the center of the contemporary stage remains the European drama represented by Beckett, lonesco, Genet, Pinter and Osborne. None are alike; yet all raise a hemlock toast to the 20th century. Theirs is a drama of metaphysical anguish, rigorous negation, asocial stance, skin-prickling guilt and anxiety, and abidingly absurd humor. In their plays, the situation of man is horrible and funny at the same time. Ionesco says that man laughs so as not to cry. The problem these playwrights pose is man's oldest and newest--the existence problem.

Why should existence be a problem? These playwrights begin with one major premise--the absence of God. Their despair and their task are to fashion a post-Christian ethos, to find a meaning for life without supernatural sanctions. Man, as they see him, is a creature trapped between two voids, prenatal and posthumous, on a shrinking spit of sand he calls time.

All of these playwrights are obliquely related to the greatest theatrical influence of the 20th century, though perhaps not its greatest playwright--Bertolt Brecht. Despite his seemingly stubborn Marxism, Brecht is intimately concerned with the existence problem. His plays are drenched in fatality, and to call fate "economic necessity" is to change the name without changing the game. While they do not all belong to the theater of the absurd, these playwrights possess that initial recognition of absurdity that, Camus argues, comes to one in the midst of deadening routines. In the opening scene of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Jimmy Porter hurls a newspaper to the floor and says: "Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week's. Different books--same reviews." What begins with the existential why is an awareness of man's incongruous relationship to the universe, of estrangement from his fellows, of aloneness within his family, of the inadequacy of language, the dearth of feeling and the unnerving pressure of physical objects. It is a view of man as a solitude, an island, a kind of Robinson crucified, with the ultimate unmeaning--death--lying ahead.

It might be thought that this heightened consciousness of man's fate would spur some new heroic attitude, and in a minimal way it has. For "Credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd]" these playwrights substitute: I will endure, knowing it is absurd. This is a far cry from the vaulting heroes of past tragedy. The tragic hero must bear full responsibility for his acts, and that is what makes him a thing of the past. Modern intellectual man sees himself as the plaything of powers beyond his reach and shrugs along with Hamlet: "The time is out of joint." The modern mind reduces tragedy to accident and prefers to believe in chance, which is a parody of destiny.

The need to measure chaos with chaos pits the serious modern playmaker against the traditional function of Western art, which T. S. Eliot defined as "imposing a credible order on ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality." By contrast, it is the deliberate intent of modern theater art to bring the playgoer to a condition of inner turmoil, anguish and revolt.

Kyrie Without God

In the world of Samuel Beckett, the entire machinery of existence seems to be grinding to a halt. Words leave his characters' mouths between pauses and in slow motion, as if speech were becoming extinct. The scenery is either fossilized, the bare gnarled tree of Waiting For Godot, or funereal, the ashcans of Endgame, the urns of Play, the mound of earth in Happy Days.'Man is maimed and buried alive in these props. One critic has called a Beckett hero a perverse Cartesian: I stink, therefore I am. Actually, the degradation and mutilation of the body are Beckett's image for the withering away of the soul.

The mood of his plays is traumatic loss, a vestigial memory of the expulsion from Eden. With elegiac melancholy, Beckett intones a Kyrie eleison without God. Godot is hope's requiem. The two tramps are waiting for Godot in vain. In Endgame, the lid is lifted on a character who is dying in an ashcan, and it is disclosed that "he's crying." "Then he's living," says another. The only sort of affirmation lies in Beckett's very act of communicating the darkness of his vision. As Eric Bentley puts it: "If one truly had lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so."

If existence comes to a halt in Beckett, it is absurdly speeded up in the work of Eugene Ionesco. When the clock strikes 17 in the first scene of his first play, The Bald Soprano, it sounds the meaning of all his plays: "The universe is out of control." Better than any other playwright, Ionesco has captured the ludicrous panic that invades modern man in an age of rapidly changing technology. An ardent admirer of the Marx Brothers, Ionesco produces tragic farce by using the proliferation and acceleration of physical objects--much the way that the Marx Brothers in A Night at The Opera piled people and things into a tiny ship's cabin. In The New Tenant, furniture inexorably chokes up every inch of space until the hero is entombed amid his belongings like a petty-bourgeois Pharaoh. But as the props become more animated, the people become more desiccated. The insides of Ionesco's characters are like the outsides of computers. It is only a step from their interchangeable rhinoplastic noses to their look-alike Rhinoceros horns. Ionesco has drawn a devastating portrait of the Unnoticeables.

Death Without Reason

Conformity yields to enormity in Jean Genet. If one can imagine Walter Mitty as a criminal, a pederast and a diabolist, one has taken a quick squint into Genet's imagination. Genet makes the erotically impossible possible. He creates nuns in black lace panties, bare-breasted prostitutes with the flowing tails of ponies. But the whores, pimps, sadists and lesbians who people his plays are also his army of revenge marshaled against the world. The ritual murder of a white woman in The Blacks is a Negro act only insofar as it contains the death wish of the outcast for the society that excludes him.

As a blade is sharpened on a grindstone, Genet has defined himself against society. In a world where many people can scarcely explain what they do, a crime is at least a visible and dramatic act. Genet is the total theatrician in that he revels in making illusion indistinguishable from reality. Are the generals, bishops and judges in the brothel of The Balcony more real when they put on those costumes to gratify their sexual quirks or when they assume the same roles to govern the state? In Genet's drama, costumes not only make the man, they rule the world.

Like Genet, John Osborne is nauseated by society, but he is less ambiguous and symbolic, more direct and realistic. There is more than a trace of Captain Bligh in him, except that he is both martinet and mutineer. He reads the riot act to his times in the accents of self-hatred. Bill Maitland says, "I myself am more packed with spite and twitching with revenge than anyone I know of. I actually often, frequently, daily want to see people die for their errors. I wish to kill them myself, to throw the switch with my own fist." There is little that Osborne does not abominate. With passion, grief, and hysteria, he records the unease of all the 20th century's displaced men.

If Osborne is a frenetic machine gunner with words, Harold Pinter is the coolest of snipers. The rooms in which most of Pinter's plays take place crackle with laconic menace. In The Birthday Party, which has echoes of Hemingway's The Killers, two agents come to a rooming house, rough up one of the lodgers, and then take him for a ride. No explanation. Pinter knows that violence is more terrifying without reasons. No victim knows his hour, no executioner the source of his orders.

Riddled with guilt and anxiety, Pinter's people are Kafkaesque in that they cannot evade, placate, or even contact the unseen powers. He deals in archetypes that subtly evoke family figures, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters. The two brothers who take in and then evict the scrofulous bum in The Caretaker might be doing it to their own father. Pinter's characters are both strange and familiar with one another, as members of a family are. There is a trace of incest in his plays, and his characters take cover behind a smoke screen of language that is outwardly lucid and inwardly impenetrable. Pinter is the master of remaining incommunicado while talking, of suggesting how people keep each other at a distance with words.

Contemporary dramatic art is not only profoundly pessimistic but radically new in form. The well-made play with a beginning, a middle and an end is a thing of the past. It presupposes the leisure time of a leisure class, the idea of steady evolutionary progress and the information speed, as Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, of a railway system. Great Expectations epitomizes a 19th century mood, just as No exit reflects a 20th century mood. The well-made play assumes that everything is a problem capable of solution, as in a detective story.

The catastrophes of the 20th century have restored to favor cyclical philosophies of history with their implications of recurrent patterns of evil. The electronic rapidity of instantaneous information everywhere makes the plot and story line of the well-made play seem slowpoky. The modern play is all middle like a Happening, all now. Unable to conceive of a destination, it coils endlessly around its theme. Genet's The Blacks begins and ends with identical scenes; so does Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. Almost nothing has happened. There is the suggestion of unalterable and eternal repetitions in human behavior. Pinter does this almost subliminally with poetically repetitive speech patterns.

What these modern playwrights aim for is not to convey actions, messages or answers but states of being and feeling. Some playgoers insist that they hate and cannot comprehend these modern plays. The playwrights counter that this hate is what Oscar Wilde described as "the rage of Caliban at seeing his own face." No doubt, they are reporting as honestly as they know how on a moral wasteland. But it is a selected part of the terrain of life, and selection implies exclusion.

These playwrights tend to examine the metaphysical at the expense of the physical, to probe inner psychic space and ignore outer social space. There is little happiness, less love and no hint of the pleasures of existence in these plays. But have all the juices and joys of life dried up? Scarcely. Since these authors' characters are purposely distorted and dematerialized, one cannot identify with them any more than a man can identify with his own X rays. Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage, and he made his stage all the world. With skeletal casts and bare bleak stages, today's thinking playwright invokes the world only as a metaphor of threat and dread.

Questions Without Answers

There is a tendency of the mind to exhaust itself over questions that life either boldly brushes aside or answers with the authority of natural instincts. As G. K. Chesterton put it: "The note of our age is a note of interrogation. And the final point is so plain; no skeptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon. 'Am I a boy?--Why am I a boy--Why aren't I a chair?--What is a chair?' A child will sometimes ask these sort of questions for two hours"--almost the precise duration of a play.

Such inward-gazing drama has inevitably triggered a quest for its opposite, an outward-looking theater. Two possibilities are on the horizon. Some English directors and producers are inaugurating a so-called "theater of fact," with a documentary focus on contemporary world events such as the war in Viet Nam and the Cuban missile crisis, including a hoped-for interview with Khrushchev. Another possibility is the theater of cruelty, a kind of sauna bath of the senses, designed to leave playgoers shocked and tingling at every emotional pore. British Director Peter Brook masterminded Broadway's full-length initiation into the theater of cruelty, this season's surprise smash success, Marat/ Sade.

It is doubtful that the salvation of the theater lies either with flesh-and-blood newsreels or nerve-end sensationalism. But both at least point in the direction of reopening the theater to life, action and meaning. Whatever happens, the theatergoer should have a vantage point offered by no other art. He has a right to demand a place in the fire pit of existence, there to behold the spectacle of man in all his folly, pride and spirit.

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