This Is Home, This Isn't Home: Reza Abdoh's Tight Right White

Abstract

"It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining". The aesthetics of aporia and failure that Beckett ushered in has been an unlikely legacy to try to build back from, especially for artists with an interest in the sociopolitical. Likewise, Artaud 's lucid madness and his mockery of the world 's mad pseudo-lucidity have seemed no less vital for late twentieth-century theatre artists to struggle with, but as with Beckett's aporia, Artaud's madness has seemed relatively intractable when applied to political theatre. In recent years, the Italian company Societas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS) has been one of the few companies to scramble successfully across this paradoxical terrain of aporia and madness and to retain a sense of perspective on the sociopolitical.ln the late 1980s and early 1990S in the United States, the director and writer Reza Abdoh was also one of the few artists able to acknowledge the potentially solipsistic deconstructions of identity furnished by Beckett and Artaud while still holding onto a sense of social engagement.