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I. Two Quotes

NURSE:

It is right, I think, to consider

Both stupid and lacking in foresight

Those poets of old who wrote songs

For revels and dinners and banquets,

Pleasant sounds for men living at ease;

But none of them all has discovered

How to put to an end with their singing

Or musical instruments: Grief,

Bitter Grief, from which death and disaster

Cheat the hopes of a house. Yet how good

If music could cure men of this! But why raise

To no purpose the voice at a banquet? For there is

Already abundance of pleasure for men

With a joy of its own.

—From Euripides’ Medea (trans. Rex Warner)

FIRST OLD WOMAN:

Less “ay” and more soul.

—From Lorca’s Yerma (trans. W. S. Merwin)

Theater cannot relieve grief, yet it should seek it out, because it is best at pursuing ideals it can’t make real. Also: theater should not make its pleasures redundant. It is no accident that these related critiques come from the mouths of the economically subject.

II. Ideas of Good and Evil

To entertain, to inform, to incite—if theater has lost (abrogated?) its priority (fun) with respect to these infinitives, where has it gone? It does persist. The seductive jubilee slips along covert parade routes. Theater is caused community; community will always want to know itself in a live encounter; the science of hospitality will continue to evolve. Community is an irreducible, immobile instant; the causes change.

Academia is a little-pig house of straw and sometimes wood. Theater retreats there, content to shelter itself in technique and literature. Theater hopes to avoid meatness by allowing itself to seem arcane. Marked useless in the dominant culture, it celebrates its uselessness by closeting so much of its incredible noise and drive in graduate and undergraduate programs. In school, irrelevance is irrelevant. Theater can be studied for its own sake (students as consumers need to be let in on this from the start; many believe they are on a career track).

Beyond school, theater reveals itself to be diminished (in unpoetic ways). Politically inclined works stop at criticism and advocacy, opinions and affect, shy of uncomfortable, soul-deep, reproachful questions. In fact, the work often stops so short it is more about arguments on behalf of its own kind of theater than about conditions beyond—mirrors that reflect themselves. Opinion assumes the status of wisdom. Old information is spoken in a new accent. Our political sensibilities are flattered. Some theater incites. Some theater gets shut down. A lot gets shut out. But the down and dirty of the conflict is played out in Congress or in the boardroom. Theater is a tool in the hands of the privileged, when it wants to be a weapon in the hands of the audience.

I am not arguing for a big brick house; we need to jump out of our pork. Theater persists. Its lithe allure sways in that seductive jubilee. Where is the jubilee, within and without?

III. Out the in Door

Theater takes care of bodies in space (actors, audience). Theater texts are incomplete and want, first, imaginative participation (suspension of disbelief, empathy), and finally unitive identification (belief, abandonment). Theater need not take on the outward appearance of charity to realize its benefits. Theater feeds bodies without food, prays without system, and evangelizes without dogma. Theater is a clumsy servant of the cold and hungry; theater is as impossible as a religion, despite its ease with sacred similes. We are like priests, we are like nurses, but we are not priests, we are not nurses.

Theater does good by doing good theater. Theater is corporal and personal, then promotes collectivism through charity and contemplation. Service and Mysticism may borrow Drama, but may not have it whole. They are schoolmates.

Theater serves through excellence. Its excellence abides in its ability to realize lived metaphors. Multiple truths, each bigger than the moment the art makes for it, reside nevertheless in the moment, vulnerable to time, and are more significant for their vulnerability.