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3. The Oedipus Story and the Perfect Play, or the Gospel According to Rita Dove
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61 THREE The Oedipus Story and the Perfect Play, or the Gospel According to Rita Dove The Darker Face of the Earth and Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play Let us leave textual criticism to graduate students, formal criticism to aesthetes, and recognize that what has been said is not still to be said; that an expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; that all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered; that a form, once it has served, cannot be used again and asks only to be replaced by another; and that the theatre is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice. —Antonin Artaud, “No More Masterpieces,” from Theatre and Its Double Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, on August 28, 1952. In addition to her many honors, she earned a B.A. from Miami University of Ohio in 1973, graduating summa cum laude, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1977. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987 with her collection Thomas and Beulah. Dove is known as a poet, not a playwright, and The Darker Face of the Earth is her only drama to date. There are two published versions of the play. Dove wrote the first version in 1989, and it was published in 1994. After its first unveiling at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1996, the Crossroads Theater Company staged The Darker Face of the Earth in October 1997, under the direction of Ricardo Khan. In 1999 the play had its London debut at the National Theatre, and the 2002 publication of the play represents the changes from its 1996 staging. As I argue here, the 62 Aristotle and Black Drama changes in the play are emblematic of Dove’s approach to plot (mythos) and her understanding of drama. For Dove, Aristotelian drama is tied to poetry, and poetry in turn has much to do with her view of history and how experiences —including black experiences—are best represented. Telling the story is first and foremost, but Dove plays with how it might best be told (elegy, drama, history), riffing on dramatic form and versions of her own compositions . Although The Darker Face of the Earth is Dove’s only stage play, it is not the end of her statements on drama, as her 2009 publication Sonata Mulattica, her twelfth collection of poems, makes clear. Sonata Mulattica plays with the dramatic form and the black body on the historical stage in a manner similar to that of The Darker Face of the Earth, and the collection itself riffs on Dove’s stage play. — — One fine soft night in April / when the pear blossoms / cast their pale faces on / the darker face of the earth . . .” (Dove 2002: 65) This chapter opens with an extended quote from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre and Its Double, in which Artaud claims that form is defunct after its use, and a gesture cannot be repeated or replaced. Civil disobedience troubles this idea. Contrary to Artaud’s declaration, forms are not dead, any more than civic structures as a whole fail because of certain unjust laws. Rather than pronouncing them dead, a poet might use forms in the same way that the citizen approaches laws. In performance, the body might be set in the context of dramatic forms in the same way that it occupies buildings and businesses , in uncustomary ways.1 In theater of civil disobedience, there is little violence done to poetic or theatrical form, but rather what exists is a process similar to the political response to an unmoral environment evident in the Civil Rights Movement.2 Aristotelian mythos is a poetic form that a modern writer might abandon altogether, as an institution that might seem emptied of meaning. Alternately , a writer might imbue mythos with particular characters and value formerly lacking. Poet Rita Dove does the latter. Judging from Darker Face, Dove agrees with Aristotle in his assessment of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King 1 On classical reception, black playwrights, and plays with black actors, specifically Oedipus plays, see Wetmore (2002; 2003), and Goff and Simpson (2008). For the perspective of a Du Boisian double consciousness, parody, and signification in black theater, see Krasner (1997). 2 For the use of unmoral as a broader reality beyond individual immoral acts, see Thoreau...