With Your Permission: Educating the American Theatre

Abstract

I must confess to some uneasiness about the subject here today, for I'm beginning to feel like the Ancient Mariner with his baleful eye telling the same story. Nor is it any consolation to think that it's not merely my story, nor even quite the same, since when history repeats itself it may, tragic to begin with, repeat itself as farce. That, you may recall, was the way Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire, as he described how revolutions occur in theatrical dress, within the nightmare of history from which we're still trying to awaken. What Marx didn't exactly say is that, if the heightened energy and volatility of farce may-like melodrama at a certain impasse of history-seem liberating, it is in the theatre's hierarchy of illusory forms perhaps the most discouraging. In the recycling process of postmodern forms where, along with the kitsch, parody is prosperity, there's a certain affection for farce. But while I'm attentive to these forms, and have learned much from the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy, there may be in my temperament and pedagogical inclinations an unpurged quotient of modernist pathos, or too much acquaintance with Beckett. It's funny, and then it's not funny. As Didi said, AP-PALLED! But then I can't quite blame it on Beckett, for I'm also one of those who thinks that that most appalling play of all, King Lear, is a metaphysical farce. Bear with me, then, and a certain circuitous reminiscence, and I'll see if I can manage some variations on a theme with which I've been long engaged: the question of theatre education and the professional American theatre.