Ratifying the Myth of Eden: The Open Theater’s Critique of Humanism

Abstract

The Open Theater’s The Serpent (1968) offers a critique of the humanist belief in world-shaping agency that provided a foundation for the counterculture – and by extension, for avant-garde theatre and performance – of the 1960s. Taking as its subject the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, The Serpent offers a new approach to this classic myth of human origins and human nature, rejecting both a romanticized attachment to the story of an idyllic paradise to which humanity might return and a secular dismissal of that story as a counter-revolutionary narrative of human subjection. The myth of Eden becomes the story of an unfulfillable longing for a knowable, reliable human nature that can ground a revolutionary faith. New archival research into the rehearsal process of The Serpent reveals that the company moved slowly, almost reluctantly, toward its discovery that the category of the “human,” whether alienated in modernity or unalienated in the garden, is a political and philosophical dead end. The play the Open Theater collectively created laid the groundwork for the anti-humanist generation of avant-garde theatre artists that followed, even as the play continues to challenge readers and spectators to develop a non-humanist ethics built on intellectual vulnerability and distributed agency.