Toward a Neo-Cubist Alamkara Movement in a Reality-Programmed Theatre Near You

When I first started writing electric and hysteric operettas¹ with punk bands down in Austin, Texas, I tried to draw what I thought language could sound like onstage. I came up with the illustration "Back of the Dollar Latin"² because I was worried about how the new dollars were getting simplified and clearer and harder to fake. I liked the strange secrets lurking all over the old dollars and the packing in of symbols and overwrought curlicues. And I thought it was possible to banish that horrible sound of actors projecting their voices into abject space and to have other things coursing through the voice, like emotional vibrato and cry pitches³ and raging vampyre fugues,⁴ and so forth. I thought words could erupt in a kinetic stage combat of dialogue and I proceeded to write madcap barroom brawls⁵ and martial arts operas⁶ and black box recordings of classic disasters.⁷

I picked up this illustration again the other day and wondered if I have changed my mind at all in the voices of what I'm writing now. I realize I have slipped a little away from American black box theatres into music and festivals abroad, where theatre doesn't have quite as much of a stranglehold on its vocal chords duly projecting psychologically correct lines into the painted darkness. The other cadence I've heard a lot lately especially in New York is the sound of a playwright's cynical sneer for anything theatrical; the most celebrated "experimental" work mocks itself with a smug wink as it strips itself down into the effortless nothingness of expensive high-tech multimedia with nothing left in the language at all. No fruits or secrets or ornaments whatsoever.

This yearning for ornamentation has led me to bastardize the opera rather than theatre many times, but still I feel an innate rebellion against what the mainstreams and mainstays of American playwriting dictate for us to write. It has little to do with nonlinear vestigial plot, as I've come to understand multi-linear plot to be political because it privileges more than one point of view. It's the way people talk in plays that is supposed to mirror life—so why is it that every time I transcribe real conversation I find sheer poetry? Or does it have more to do with privilege? Because in the trilogy of world folk operas⁸ I've been writing in the wake of touring war-torn former Yugoslavia and learning Romani "gypsy" music,⁹ I find a deeply human desire to be theatrical, to dress up, to transform out of the daily drudgery of life into something else—to take on some other voice and escape for a minute into elsewhere. I've come to see the wink of nothingness without theatricality as the privileged voice of those who are content with keeping their lives the way they are.

I think, now, looking at this drawing made in my greener days, that it is the poetics of adornment in my characters' voices that still bashes me up against the glass ceiling¹⁰ of American realism. So why are we so afraid of pretension in the art of pretending? What are we pretending not to pretend with the shackles of formulaic realism and crippling reality-programmed seasons pumping the same narrative into us over and over? The one story we dare not get tired of! The one where the hero we choose to like because he represents our own self wins by eliminating everyone else.

I came upon the Sanskrit word alamkara when I was in Kolkata, India, working with theatres¹¹ that are part of the Seagull Foundation. I was struck by a lightning bolt of epiphanies. It means "enoughmaking" or an ideal ornamentation, and comes from a Hindu belief that "unadorned is not enough" and that any doorway or dress or margin of a manuscript has to be embellished to be truly pure because it is incomplete unless it overflows with florid decoration and metaphor. I thought about the Russian...