Tedium: An Essay on Drag, Attunement, Theater, and Translation

In Tedium, a play by Chicago-based playwright Mickle Maher, a single speaker recounts the story of a tedious theater event that turned, over the course of its run, into something else entirely. The play begins with the account of what seems at first to be an ordinary failure: “Greg has written, and made us put up, what many people, myself included, consider to be his worst play ever. Worst in all ways—from the initial bland, unfocused concept, to the writing up of that bland, unfocused concept in play form (the worst form this particular concept could have been expressed in), to the production itself…, the self-conscious over-reaching actors, the green unitards…clinging and bunching on the actors’ bodies…, and the length of the play, which, not counting the one intermission, runs over eight hours.”¹ And yet, the speaker recounts, this play becomes the “biggest hit ever” (2) of the company in the “little theater above the funeral parlor” (3). This unexpected success apparently derives from two moments in the performance, in which the audience experiences something that penetrates the tedium of the play, something that the speaker describes as the “sensation of ‘having been in this place before,’” a sensation that transcends his summary label of “déjà-vu” to approach something that “dissolves one’s present self in another’s…, one more attuned to a certain strength of patience, and one especially aware of the generosity of Time” (4). The speaker attributes this note on the generosity of Time to an unnamed “critic” but uses it to counter the complaint from the insistently avant-gardist director that this sensation was merely a by-product of theatrical gimmickry. Despite the charge of gimmickry, the moments in question—first, a “dialogue” between “two marionette orchids adrift in a pool of jasmine-scented salt water” (3), and second, a “long set-change” in which “stage-hand Todd” used a coffee can to transfer at a very slow pace an “anthill” of dirt from an up-stage corner to down-center (10–11), lead the audience to a moment of unexpected attunement. The speaker asserts that this attunement is created not through “magic—that tired term” (8) but through a “dense boredom” whose “particular pace or ‘pulse’ acts somehow as an incantation against itself,” and that this moment “would be impossible to experience without the boredom that precedes it” (9). In other words, it is only through boredom or tedium that a piece of theater—“even the worst”—can by way of the “chance collision” between stage and audience produce a moment of fundamental attunement (9).

Tedium was first performed in June 2001 by Theater Oobleck, a company of writers and players which has been based in Chicago since 1987, even though some of its original members, who met at the University of Michigan, now live elsewhere, as far afield as Los Angeles and Puerto Rico. This production did not take place in the “little theatre above the funeral parlor” which was then and is still the realm of Greg Allen’s Neo-Futurists, but at another Chicago venue whose name has changed several times since. Playwright-player Maher sat on stage illuminated by the subtle effects of theater lights in the darkened space and backed by a cabinet from whose drawers popped the marionettes and other objects mentioned in the account, but the event has left few traces. The cabinet has long since disappeared and the text remains unpublished but the play’s enactment of the experience of and reflection on tedium struck a responsive chord. In 2010, I invited the playwright to read it again for a seminar on Catharsis, Tedium, and Other Aesthetic Responses. The seminar began with Aristotle’s notoriously brief comments on catharsis and went on to explore, among other phenomena, the aesthetic mediation of pity and terror performed by the tragic audience and the apparent failures instantiated by boredom and its likenesses. Performing as the guest in the session on tedium in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and others, Maher read his own work in...