Tragedy in a Postmodern Vein Ugo Betti Our Contemporary?

Tragedy in a Postmodern Vein Ugo Betti Our Contemporary? LLOYD A. ARNETT "The years: 1941-1953. The form: Tragedy. The setting: undetermined sites on the landscape of the twentieth century. The style: Symbolist-Realism. The principal dramatic technique: postmodern dissociation. Theatre-goers of the last decade have watched the growing phenomenon of the postmodern aesthetic as it has infected the production styles of stages in New York and Minneapolis and at whatever outposts the imitators of Foreman, Schechner and Breuer can be found . As with every theatrical period, when lack of innovative writing leaves directors twiddling their thumbs or attempting avant garde productions of classics, postrnodernism has left the philistines puzzled and aficionados uncomfortable. A review in The Vii/age Voice by Elinor Fuchs a few years ago succinctly summed up the bewilderment of the faithful. On the one hand there is the haunting concern that, " A layer of 'performance,' sometimes composed of dissociated 'bits' from diverse media and styles, alienates us from texts as they have been traditionally conceived"; on the other, is the spectre of being "tantalized by hints of profundity." , Underlying all is the strange conviction that somehow a vision of the contemporary must be produced, but that using a classic script as a mere springboard for mounting an incompatible performance-style does not present text but pretext. AIe there no classic works which are inherently harmonic textually with the music of the postmodern sphere - not just thematically or philosophically harmonic, but dramaturgically so? Enter, for the third time in this century, the surprising Ugo Betti. Acclaimed by the French just prior to his death in the fifties, then embraced by American scholars and critics in the sixties, Betti's place at the end of the twentieth century seemed secure. One could read him lionjzed in theatre journals, one could read him analyzed in the fresh translations of the paperback revolution, one could read him recognized in prominent anthologies of modern drama. But still-born offerings of his plays on Broadway brought 544 LLOYD A. ARNETT the ",arning from Brooks Atkinson that the texts of Ugo Betti were being sabotaged by bad productions. ' Like Cassandra of old, after the fame and the prophecy came the interment. Betti's texts, however, have refused to remain in any theatrical charnel house. Over the years they have stubbornly insisted on resurrections on North American stages, however sporadically. From 1926 to 1953: while serving as an Italian court justice (eventually in the supreme court), writing poetry, film scenarios, and participating actively in the Theatrical Union, Ugo Betti managed to turn out on~ masterpiece a year. Between 1941 and 1953 he created a legacy for the world: thirteen straight tragedies to add to the others he had already created. In the process of developing a tragic form for the twentieth century, Betti, unlike Pirandello with whom he is interminably compared, did not seek to alter dramatic form from a philosophical core. Rather, drawing on his training in the classics, he sifted through the variety of the tragic tradition and created a singular technique. That technique, which hitherto might have been called eclectic, should be recognized for its inchoate postmodernism. Betti found the theatrical tools of historic tragedy more than adequate to create a contemporary tragic form and in so doing rang the changes of the genre so completely that perhaps, in the midst of postmodernism, we can only now fully appreciate his drama. What follows is a fresh look at two of Betti's greatest works, Corruption in the Palace of Justice and Crime on Goat lsland. Drawing on his own experiences as both a court justice and a surviving P.O.W., Betti paints portraits of injustice and sexual degradation that are as dramaturgically timely as they are thematically so. In them, as we shall see, are the potential for a largely absent commodity at the end of the century, tragedy that is stylistically consistent in production. Before turning to the plays, however, it seems necessary to address Ihab Hassan's observation that the critical term "postmodern" has become a "shibboleth."3 It must briefly be defined for this study. In his own work Hassan acknowledges thatthe term requires "historical" as...