Up Front

Time and a New Collaboration

Academic publishing schedules and the Bush administration's yearning for war being what they are, the satire on the facing page might not seem so funny by the time you read it. Consider its publication a gesture of optimism.

And speaking of our schedule, we're happy to announce a new partnership: Jonathan Kalb, critic and contributing editor, has started an "on-line forum for critical writing about the theater" called HotReview.org. (He accepts no argument about the title.) "Conceived as an antidote to apathy and as a response to the scarcity of print forums today," as "resistance to the blurring of the difference between objective commentary and public relations," it will publish reviews, essays, articles, interviews, and polemics about any aspect of contemporary theater. Indignation encouraged, also theater artists' responses. Pieces will be posted to the site as soon as they are accepted; Theater will publish a selection of them in future issues. This prospect of a double life seems optimistic, too.

—Erika Munk

 

"Time Does Not Stay"

The above caption for Art Spiegelman's haunting cover image—a lone, bereft figure surrounded by decaying monuments of the comic imagination, leaden and still, abandoned by their narratives—serves as an epilogue to Drawn to Death, the new comic book opera he created with composer Phillip Johnston and director Jean Randich. In the song that accompanies this image, Spiegelman meditates on the relentless progression of time and the difference between the so-called time-based arts and comics, which, he argues, "turn time into space." Comics freeze the flow of narrative into frames, and space those frames across the page, allowing the reader to "rewind," and "fast-forward" at will, to pause, even to stop altogether: "chosen moments can be frozen for replay." This type of mastery over the image works as a corrective to the ephemerality of the stage; by combining comics and theater, Spiegelman hopes to find out just how far both genres can be stretched.

Similarly, Framji Minwalla's analysis of the first-act monologue in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul focuses on the Homebody's tangled language, her impassioned attempts to master the syntax and vocabulary of paradox. Her monologue creates a series of evolving images through a torrent of difficult words and stories that fold back upon themselves like a body in pain. The lapidary rhetoric of her speech, her reliance on digression, qualification, confession, dissection, and all manner of linguistic re-play mirrors Spiegelman's own desire for mastery—self-mastery—a desire that Minwalla skillfully unravels for its political underpinnings, its attempt to connect two histories: one "confessional, private, intimate," the other "violent, sociopolitical, public."

"How does one express that real life is actually a deeply political issue?" Spiegelman wonders. That's the question we must ask ourselves—over and over again—in a world where "real life" has become a deeply contested territory.

—Erika Rundle

 

One Sad Sign of Bad Times

Last December Art Spiegelman announced his resignation from the staff of the New Yorker after ten years as their most famous and controversial cover artist. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, he said: "From the time the towers fell, it seems as if I've been living in internal exile, or like a political dissident confined to an island. I no longer feel in tune with American culture, especially now that the media have become conservative and tremendously timid. [The New Yorker editorially supports an American war against Iraq—ed.] All criticism of the administration is automatically branded unpatriotic and un-American. . . . Those like me are condemned to the margins."