Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater

Chapter Eight: Conclusion

chapter eight Conclusion like most sane people, I live in a world of diminished horizons, and have lived there since the end of childhood. I learned then (and appropriately mourned) that Eden, Narnia, and Valhalla were not real, and that impulsive , feel-good historical doctrines like Manifest Destiny and Pax Britannica needed scrutiny. This awareness is for the most part salutary. Yet it can be dry and dispiriting at times, like adulthood in general, like modernity in general. Acceptance of rationality and earthly restriction leaves certain primitive hungers unassuaged. And when I ask myself what I went looking for in these works of marathon theater, I see, with the help of the foregoing essays, that it had much to do with such hungers: I craved a sense of awe in something larger than myself, a feeling of transcendent transport beyond mundane reality. The most enduring art has usually been intimate, not self-importantly overblown. That point de‹ned my taste in theater when I was young. The ‹rst deep intellectual attachment I formed was to Samuel Beckett, master of sparseness and understatement, and I spent enormous energy at one time painting verbal portraits of heroes of antimonumentality among the avantgarde , certain I was contributing to the great good ‹ght against what Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies” of the twentieth century. (How right it felt, and still feels, to impugn the nationalism and racism behind Wagner’s grandiose operas, or the inhumanity in Albert Speer’s bombastic architecture .) With time, though, my sense of this good ‹ght has changed. For many years, I have felt assaulted by our massive engines of mediated distraction , and the greatest creative emergency in performing arts today seems to me the media’s universal leveling and trivializing effects. How many ‹ne theater artists I have seen internalize these forces, ‹tting their 189 once de‹ant imaginations to pseudosubversive institutions of consumerism , adopting the contours and limitations of media even in their nonmediated work, and settling into a habit of “thinking small” to keep on the good side of information purveyors. The most malignant syndrome I see around me now is not self-importance but rather puniness of ambition, clipped talons, and shrunken horizons. Hence my urgency to ‹nd and chronicle meaningful exceptions. The productions discussed in this book all took an extremely risky leap in envisioning some breathtakingly huge and capacious theatrical world. Each dared to evoke the monumental in a postmonumental era, and were thus duly and severely censured in several cases. To me, however, they all found astonishingly intelligent and ingenious ways to accommodate monumentality without sacri‹cing skepticism. Indeed theater generally has a built-in protection against excessive self-importance in its ephemerality—its bombast is written on the wind—and most of these productions turned that to deliberate advantage too. The works I have examined all thrived in performance by establishing a fascinating tension between some awe-inspiring central vision and underlying awareness of its provisional, hypothetical, or interrogative nature. Nicholas Nickleby’s director, for example, was convinced of its moral straightforwardness (“It was refreshing to go to something where the moral arguments didn’t cancel each other out,” said Trevor Nunn of the magni‹cently innocent Dickensian dreamworld) whereas its socialist playwright was equally convinced of the work’s moral complexity. The Mahabharata conjured a fantastic and magical realm of “universal” human origins and mythic wonders that was tempered by its consistently marvelous show-thestrings theatricality and a multinational cast whose pronounced physical and vocal diversity rooted them ‹rmly in the real world. Einstein on the Beach sought a similar quality of timelessness, constructed not from myth but from exquisitely crafted, hauntingly ambiguous pictures and soaring, hypnotically cyclical music, yet the speci‹city of its Einstein, Patty Hearst, and nuclear war references pulled it also toward time-bound reality. In Faust I + II, the cornerstone of German classical drama, a colossal conception tracing the entire life arc of a representative human from youth to old age and beyond, was sensationalized as a theatrical extravaganza and then also, out of respect for its antitheatrical aspect, allowed to sink into physical inertia, with language alone serving as spectacle and imagination carrying the weight of Goethe’s pervasive theatrum mundi trope. 190 great lengths There is an article by Hans-Thies Lehmann about Forced Entertainment , from 2004, that I found risibly overstated at ‹rst, because it earnestly and unreservedly compared that...