A Televisual Inferno: Tea Alagic's preparadise, sorry now

In the summer of 2005, Bosnian émigré and avantgarde director Tea Alagic produced Rainer Werner Fassbinder's preparadise, sorry now (1969) at the Ensemble Company for the Performing Arts (ECPA) Summer Cabaret in New Haven, Connecticut. Fassbinder's play was the culmination of his "antitheatre" work of the late 1960s (preceding his turn almost exclusively to filmmaking) in which he addressed a consumerist, media-saturated culture in its own terms, drawing upon mass-print media, film, and television for his dialogue (see Shattuc 1993:35-54; Töteburg 1989:20-34). These media—the "negative" of theatrical immediacy and presence—stood, for Fassbinder, before and against theatremaking, complicating the opposition between "live" and "mediated" forms that Philip Auslander critiques in his book Liveness (1999). Implicit in Fassbinder's gesture and explicit in Auslander's book is the argument that mass media, like language, forms a matrix that preexists and shapes consciousness; it is prior to representation and sets the limits of representation. Mediated representations formed Fassbinder's—his audience's and our—lexicon. Consequently, as Auslander has said in different words, theatre in a mediated environment cannot but be "antitheatre," live performance shaped by the "negative" of liveness—the photographic, video, and print traces of past presence.

A multimedia artist avowedly "obsessed" with technological forms of recording and representation, Alagic recognized her own orientation in Fassbinder's belief that mass media stands as a first principle within our current environment and must inform "live," contemporary theatre. She literalized this by deciding to set those scenes written as journalistic narration in Fassbinder's script as news broadcasts on four large television monitors. These were mounted above the playing area along the horizontal axis dividing the performance space from the viewing space. Since the first and last scenes of the script are such news scenes, the televisual bookended the whole, as the "before" and "after" of the performance.

Alagic went further in her own version of mediatized "antitheatre." The sound of static filled the transitions between each of Fassbinder's scenes, both "televised" and "live," blurring the boundary between the mediated aspects of the performance and the immediate ones. Is everything part of a televisual environment? Or is everything "real," yet so saturated by the televisual, that questioning the difference is moot? With the vertiginous play between the live and the mediated, these questions remained open and undecidable, like the relative meanings of "reality" and "virtuality" in our modern technologically mediated environment.

Alagic's history of successful work, from her performances in Richard Foreman's Panic! (1997) and Robert Lepage's The Geometry of Miracles (1996), to her writing and direction of The Filament Cycle (2001), based on her experiences as a Bosnian refugee, convinced the Board of Directors for ECPA to approve the project. But, despite Alagic's experience and skill, the production almost ruined the theatre. Audience members—accustomed to more traditional performances based on 19th-century well-made-play and melodramatic models that continue to inform serial television shows, not to mention popular plays, such as The Clean House (2004) by Sarah Ruhl—were shocked and attendance dropped significantly—in contrast to the previous summer, in which the theatre was full, if not sold out, nearly every night. After one performance, two female subscribers in the audience turned to me and said, "This sort of work is terrible! Last year, they did Cabaret [the musical] and the Tempest. They had stories. If a season with plays like this comes again next year, I won't come back." A longtime male subscriber piped up, "This presents a horrible vision of human nature; it isn't entertaining. This is a bad representation of art." And this was the "nice" feedback. Silent, rushed walkouts and disgusted facial expressions abounded.

Figure 1.

preparadise, sorry now directed by Tea Alagic, featuring David Matranga as Ian Brady, Emily Dorsch as Myra Hindley (foreground), Gilbert Owour as L, Tommy Russell as M, and Eric Gilde as K. Ensemble Company for the Performing Arts, New Haven, CT, July 2005. (Photo by Zane Pihlstrom)

Granted, there...