Murderous Enactments: The Media's Presence in the Drama

Murderous Enactments: The Media's Presence in the Drama ROSETTE C. LAMONT The turn ofthe century witnessed technology's coming of stage. Technological inventions became the subjects and the protagonists of modern drama. In Jean Cocteau's The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, the Tower itself, as a bold and controversial structure and a gigantic telegraph antenna, took center stage as the poet's lead actor in his surrealist comedy ballet. Guillaume Apollinaire's The Breasts ofTiresias, begun before and completed at the end of the First World War, foreshadowed our own genetic engineering and feminist movement while protesting France's declining birthrate. It also poked fun at the media coverage of the news, the tyranny of journalism, and the obtrusive presence of advertising billboards. In his Victor or Power to the Children, Roger Vitrac unfurled upon the stage the gigantic front page of a newspaper while dramatizing before this inner curtain some of the gory items of yellow journalism. However, the cartoon style of the performances stressed the comical aspects ofthe new developments and treated them with good-humored lightness and a certain amount of awe. Surrealism's rejoicing in man's scientific achievements, in the rapid spread of data and the lightning speed of communication, gave way in the second half of our century to mistrust and fear of these very systems. The age of the atom and hydrogen bomb, of electronic surveillance and computerized information, no longer seemed friendly to man. Orwell's omnipresent tyrant became a reality on the other side of the iron curtain. Even the joyous adventure of space travel was tinged by the coldness of scientific precision and calculation. The robotized aspect of our explorers deprived them of their well-earned heroic dimensions. Now, as robots and computers become our movie heroes, we realize that Frankenstein need no longer be made in man's image to rule over vulnerable flesh. A teasing realization torments our dreams and waking states: we are the slaves of our own inventions. Two contemporary plays, among many, present the dilemma of man's The Media's Presence in the Drama 149 subservience to the instruments and systems of his fabrication. Both Ronald Ribman's Buck and Janusz Glowacki's Cinders dramatize the way in which the presence of a movie camera, with its concomitants (film crew, director, producer, executive superstructure, potential public), affects the lives of those who handle this tool and those who come under its scrutiny. Moreover, although these two plays come from both sides of the iron curtain, Buck and Cinders expose a similar problem: society's unhealthy curiosity about violence, human degradation and libidinal impulses creates a vitiating activity - in this case the filming of simulated murders (Buck) or simulated confessions (Cinders) - which precipitates greater violence and, in Cinders, the self-inflicted death of the protagonist. Buck and Cinderella are victims of their social structures and, to the extent of their resistance to those constraints, heroes. As Richard Gilman explains in his "Introduction" to New Plays USA 2, the collection in which Buck has been published: "Ronald Ribman's Buck ... appears to have no political dimension, yet it's there.... ,,1 Gilman defines what he means by "political": " ... the organization of life, the communal arena of values.... ,,2 Thus, Buck is not in any sense a didactic piece of theatre; it is a poetic fable in which an innocent hero is caught in the web of society's expectations, the social organization from which there is no escape. The ambiance of the television studio where Buck Halloran produces a series based on "murder reenactments" is devastatingly corrupt. Buck and his assistant, Charlie Corvanni (the cameraman), are situated at the bottom of the pyramid of power. Over them reigns a covey of satanic demiurges, visible and invisible (depending on how high up they are within the pyramid): Fred Milly, the clubfooted henchman of the executive branch, a creature with the "unnerving smile ofa cobra,,3; Mr. Nathan, his direct boss, the caricature of an Old Testament prophet turned wizard of the small screen; and beyond, Mr. Jacobs, Mr. Stein and Mr. S1. George. These three remain strictly out of sight, like the Jansenists' invisible God...