Theatricality in the Avant-Garde Drama: A Reconsideration of a Theme in the Light of The Balcony and The Connection

THEATRICALITY IN THE AVANT-GARDE DRAMA: A RECONSIDERATION OF A THEME IN THE LIGHT OF THE BALCONY AND THE CONNECTION AN ASSERTIVE AND SELF-CONSCIOUS THEATRICALITY is an important aspect of Jack Gelber's The Connection, as it is of many plays which we loosely identify as "avant-garde." The average spectator arriving a few minutes early to a performance of The Connection finds, first, that the play has already started and, secondly, that he is himself participating in it. While the audience is still stumbling in, the actors are quietly taking their places on the curtainless stage. This establishes a special relationship between the audience and the play before the play ever begins, which is confirmed as soon as the lights dim and the first character speaks: he introduces himself as the producer of The Connection and immediately points to Jaybird, the author . From the start, we know that the playwright is not endeavoring to evoke a world of fiction whose significance and effectiveness depends on our ability to forget that we are sitting in a theater watching a play, but on the contrary that, far from hiding the theatricality of his medium, he is capitalizing upon it. We sense that we are dealing with the avant-garde theater. Jack Gelber puts the idea of theatricality to very special uses in The ConnectionJ but its importance can best be understood in relation to the theme of theatricality as it appears in other avant-garde plays, and particularly in Jean Genet's The Balcony.1 Theatricality has often been used as theme or image by playwrights whose sense of irony or appropriateness delighted in incorporating in their plays allusions to their art,' but in this century theatricality seems to have acquired particularly urgent meanings. I am concerned here with the motion of "role-playing," especially as it involves a discrepancy between act and reality: "play-acting" as op1 The idea of a special parallel between The Connection and The Balcony was initially sparked by the fact that both plays were simultaneous off-Broadway successes in the 1959-60 season. The most thorough investigation of the theme of theatricality in the French theater is David Grossvogel's The Self-Conscious Stage in Modern French Drama (New York, 1958). 213 214 MODERN DRAMA September posed to a hypothetical "real-life." Many twentieth-century tendencies have given special currency to this notion, among them the complexity , diversity and rapid pace of evolution of our culture, and the tendency toward departmentalization which makes human activities relative to each other rather than to a unifying ,central concept. Furthermore, some of our major currents of thought have contributed to the idea of theatricality: the Freudian vision of life as a kind of play-acting of the ego thinly masking the powerful reality of the id; the Marxist vision of a decadent society gesturing frantically and theatrically before its engulfment by proletarian reality; and the existentialist vision of man paradoxically forced to act purposefully in an absurd universe. Hollow personalities gesticulating according to the dictates of a hollow society in a hollow universe: with such a vision, futile theatricality is likely to seem the only possible mode of action. Pirandello, no doubt, is the locus classicus for the theme of theatricality in modern drama. Fascinated by problems of appearance and reality and saddened by the ephemerality and shadowiness of human activity, he found in the very stage for which he wrote an appropriate symbol for his thoughts. In Six Characters in Search of an Author his purpose in part is to glorify art. Life is an amorphous flux and personality a variable that we can never grasp. What we were yesterday is a mere shadow to us today, and what we are today will be a shadow to us tomorrow, and so on, so that all is shadow. But art snatches an instant of the flux and immobilizes it; an actor's impersonation eternalizes within a fixed context a personality which in life would be only a series of changing facets. Thus the six characters, or at least the garrulous father who leads them, seek an author through whom they can "live" in a deeper sense than...