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22 1. The Seeds of Emotional Form Do you know what this is? It’s a curse. I can feel it. It’s invisible but it’s there. It’s always there. It comes onto us like nighttime. Every day I can feel it. Every day I can see it coming. And it always comes. Repeats itself. It comes even when you do everything to stop it from coming. Even when you try to change it. And it goes back. Deep. —Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class What Dionysus Has to Do with It Perhaps it is because I came of age in the sixties that I don’t consider Dionysus simply a quaint antiquarian construct. I saw it in the streets of Berkeley, I felt it in myself: the pull to run to the mountain to know what wasn’t taught in the classroom, to call the god forth, to become one, to let the body know what the intellect cannot. The streets south of campus were littered with refugees from a middle-class America whose vision of security and success totally rejected the Dionysian. I have been somewhat like Pentheus, drawn to the rites on the mountain but fearful. I’ve been a creature of reason who has tried to know the world beyond reason through art. This awareness is a product of reading, of travel, of event, of failure, and of skepticism. This is the same but different for anyone who is a writer. Everyone has experience, but the writer demands awareness. Defenders of order regard the writer as a threat, as a disruptive, dangerous , and seductive voice. This is not Greek to us. We know it from the twentieth century’s experiments with totalitarianism, our own nation’s experience with battling “un-American activities,” and the demagoguery of the contemporary “culture wars” over values. Dramatic writing has the fortune of having a patron saint. That figure is no saint by contemporary standards, yet the Greeks considered him the god of the theater, the god of transformation, transgression of boundaries, ecstatic joy, profound reverence, blood, and death. The awareness of the undeniable power of Dionysus in human nature was rekindled by one of the great conjurers of modernism, Friedrich Nietzsche. The runaway kids on the sidewalks of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley were not there out of curiosity or some ordinary family dispute; they were joining an exodus to the mountain to experience a dance, a way of seeing the invisible in their early lives. I see the act of dramatic writing as The Seeds of Emotional Form [ 23 ] evoking Dionysus or what the Greeks pointed to by evoking his name. The power of emotional form draws upon our culture’s recognition that human experience grows out of conscious and unconscious forces that we deny at our peril. The writer cannot make Pentheus’s mistake and flee or bully the expression of these forces in our lives, the expression of a profound source of our vitality and our knowledge of death. Consider the physicality and surprise that words inhabit. A writer’s ritual practice might involve a conjuring, a prayer, a curse, a supplication, a rage, a mock, a put-down, a song, a whispered desire, or a secret. In her essay “Elements of Style,” Suzan-Lori Parks reminds us that words are attached to the body. Language is a physical act. It’s something which involves your entire body—not just your head. Words are spells which an actor consumes and digests—and through digesting creates a performance on stage. Each word is configured to give the actor a clue to their physical life. Look at the difference between “the” and “thuh.” The “uh” requires the actor to employ a different physical, emotional, vocal attack. (11, 12) What does a writer need to know about Dionysus, the god of tragedy and comedy? All Athenian plays were performed as part of festivals that celebrated Dionysus. Who is this god of the theater? Well, resurrection was one of Dionysus’s traits when he was reborn from the thigh of his father, Zeus, after a lightning bolt blasted his human mother, Semele. He also has two sides to his nature, as shown by the different names for him in Euripides’ Bacchae: “He is Bacchus, Iacchus, and Evius—all names that evoke the joy of worshiping this god of peace and wine and dancing. He is also Bromius, the Thunderer, born in a blast of lightning, bringing terror against his...

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