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[amazon_link id=”0822220768″ target=”_blank” ]Thom Pain (based on nothing)[/amazon_link]as seen at Dobama Theatre on 4 February 2007.

I think the biggest thing of interest to me about seeing Will Eno’s Thom Pain, as opposed to reading it, was the interpretation made in the presentation; or, using the more cliche lingo, the "choices" that were made.

In the post performance discussion, Scott Plate said that he and Joel Hammer had made decisions regarding the character that were different from the New York show. This was based on descriptions provided by Tony Brown, who apparently saw the original show in New York. Brown said that the character/interpretation was somewhat vicious in his incarnation and distant. The performance was menacing and left the audience with a distinct and pervasive feeling of having been ravaged.

The performance I witnessed was that of a more neurotic character, a man who was decidedly in mental chaos: clear and articulate, piercing and insightful; then muddy and worried and uncertain. I found the character, as presented at Dobama, to be worthy of empathy and concern: a human character worthy of compassion.

In seeing the performance, as again opposed to reading the script, I was surprised at how clearly the "spine" of the work became clear: the failure to connect with the family, the loss of the dog, the failure to connect with society, the loss of the lover. These points of the play stood out very well, in my mind–where in the text they were somewhat more difficult to discern. In seeing the piece I found it highly compelling. Additionally, the intentionally theatrical moments of the performance: where the character addresses and interacts with the audience, were very real and had a tantalizing influence on me as a spectator: even though I knew they were coming. In fact, I found this the most peculiar part of the experience: knowing full well something was coming and the nature of that something and yet still being affected by it.

I also noted that one of my favorite lines was botched; but I gained a completely new appreciation for one line that still haunts me, and likely always will. The line that was botched was: "And somewhere in the same night another youth bleeds between her legs, wondering what for, sure she’s done something wrong, unsure whom to tell." I was very disappointed because I thought it so profound. It was either botched or cut. I found it profound and disturbing all at once, along with the line that has become my favorite: "What a surprise to have a body." I am not sure why these two lines resonate so deeply with me, but I will try to put a finger on it. I think it is Eno’s very precise association of bodily events with the mind’s judgment of the self. The mind searches the universe incessantly to make connections between things. That is what makes great artists and inventors and businessmen and–well, any great person–great–is their ability to connect things that are unconnected. It is the true act of creativity in the world. A person can do something or create something or write something never being sure that it hasn’t been thought or written or created by someone else before. But the connection of two disparate things: two things that have not been connected is an original act; unique in that it creates something larger than itself and releases a new energy into the world. The mind is always trying to connect things: connect, connect, connect, connect–what does this mean, how does this relate to this other thing–why me? What have I done? And that is what is haunting about Eno’s lines. The mind judges. Bleeding is bad. Bleeding from your “secret parts” (to use the Medieval phrasing) is very bad. There is no reason for it. The mind is magical. The mind connects unrelated things to create meaning. That is magic. That is why science will always loose to the superstitious mind. We are hard wired to believe, to our souls, things that are refutable: but to the mind as hard as scientific fact will ever be. To the primitive mind, a yellow bird pressed against the skin will take the yellow evil of jaundice away with it out the window. It makes perfect sense. If it doesn’t work, then it is not a reflection on the concept, but on the recipient. The girl lying in the dark will associate this bad thing happening to her with some act that she must have committed. Somewhere a brooding justice falls on her for what she has thought, or may have done, or may have thought, once, of doing. Blood doesn’t just happen. There is a reason. And in the illogical darkness: the murk of the primitive jungle in our unconscious: judgment. Taboo.

I know this feeling. Who doesn’t? And I am moved, wrenched to think of that girl in that darkness fearing that she has done something wrong when the body is just doing what it does to advance the species. Oh, how science takes the magic from us. How clinical and removed it is. Cut off your arm and it becomes a thing. The sensation it has provided you is gone; the utility of movement is lost. Science. Of science, as Yeats says, more poetically than I can ever dare imagine:

[amazon_link id=”B002W2V0TY” target=”_blank” ]from The Song of the Happy Shepherd[/amazon_link]

"… Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass –
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs – the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth."

I find that I am strangely drawn to this play. I enjoy it. The more I think about it the more I find myself discovering. These are excellent qualities in anything. But I also don’t like that I am drawn to it. My mind rebels against these postmodern plays, or these post post modern absurdist plays. The plays that all the "hot" writers write; the "up-and-coming" writers. They seem to me hyperpersonal. It is as if each is vomiting his or her neuroses. I feel at once like quoting a Neil LaBute character and a character of [amazon_link id=”B002ZCXTLI” target=”_blank” ]F. Scott Fitzgerald[/amazon_link]. There’s an odd combination. In The Shape of Things, Adam says, outraged at the end,

I’ve completely missed the point here, and somehow puking up…all your own shitty little neuroses all over people’s laps is actually art–

Nick Carraway, at the beginning of [amazon_link id=”0743273567″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Gatsby[/amazon_link] remarks,

I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accuses of being a politician, because I was so privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon…

I feel often that I am somewhere in between these poles when it comes to "new" theatre. I am pulled constantly between the poles of expressing myself and hoping that my own little, neurotic experience is universal enough that it connects with people; or expressing myself through attempts at displaying universal, epic themes, and flinching away from the postmodern accusation that you cannot generalize anymore–that horse is dead and beaten and buried.

I am clearly moving into a new phase in my own writing. I know this. I can feel it, and feel the urge to explore. This is good. I just wonder if it will lead me to a clearing in the jungle that no one wants to visit. A place that is not only unremarkable, but perhaps, repulsive.

That is to say, to sort of crystallize this, what is theatre today? What is the point of it, what is the goal of it, what should it be? I am torn between my traditional expectations of the [amazon_link id=”0472061666″ target=”_blank” ]Aristotelian model[/amazon_link]: the proud and noble character who experiences a reversal, fails, repents, and is destroyed in front of everyone; to the now post, postmodern offerings of completely destroyed personalities offering up their dreadful experiences as something universal. One could argue that it is a reversal of what is right (or is it just beginning at a different point?). I am reminded of Nietzsche’s [amazon_link id=”0199537089″ target=”_blank” ] On the Genealogy of Morals[/amazon_link]:

The slave revolt in morality begins when the resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the resentment of those beings who are prevented from a genuinely active reaction and who compensate for that with a merely imaginary vengeance. While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant self-affirmation, slave morality from the start says No to what is “outside,” “other,” “a non-self”. And this No is its creative act. This transformation of the glance which confers value–this necessary projection towards what is outer instead of back into itself–that is inherent in resentment. In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself. Psychologically speaking, it needs external stimuli in order to act at all. Its action is basically reaction.

That is, what has been viewed as good, right, and moral is viewed by those who are disaffected as evil, wrong, and immoral. Hence, the inversion begins. I am torn by this and think often that what I am seeing in modern theatre is nothing more than the utter dissolution of anything noble or (hating to use the loaded word) moral. And I don’t know that I mean that in a religious judgmental sort of way, but a more humanistic way: that we elevate what is debased and dismiss what attempts to lift.

Well, there is no easy way to wrap this commentary up. So, it will be left as it is, with that flat and petered-out ending. These are my thoughts, though, on the 19th of February, 2007. Where they shall lead me on the 20th, and 21st, and all days after I must wait, like everyone else, to see!

In [amazon_link id=”0786887400″ target=”_blank” ]Aristotle’s Poetics[/amazon_link], Aristotle begins by discussing basic principles. He specifically notes:

1. Epic composition;
2. the writing of tragedy and comedy;
3. the composing of dithyrambs;
4. and the greater part of making music with flute and lyre,

taken collectively, are imitative processes.

Imitative processes is hard to nail down, as the meaning is not precise for English translation, and I have been left with the impression (from the translator, [amazon_link id=”0472061666″ target=”_blank” ]Gerald F. Else[/amazon_link]) that it means actions that imitate other actions that have occurred elsewhere at another time.The types of imitative art mentioned above are differentiated by different means, different objects, and different methods of imitation.

With regard to different means, Aristotle states that there are a variety of media in which poetic composition can take place, but always through at least two of the following media: rhythm, speech, and melody. He comments on the arts of lyre and flute music or panpipe produce their imitation using melody and rhythm alone; another uses speeches or verses alone (hence, speech and rhythm), bare of music, either mixing the verses with one another or employing on certain kind; likewise, a person could mix all the kinds of verse.

Different objects begins by stating that those who imitate imitate men in action, and that these men must be worthwhile or worthless people. Thus beginning the distinction between tragedy and comedy: tragedy dealing with superior persons; comedy with inferior persons.

Finally, there are different modes of imitation: by narrating part of the time and dramatizing the rest of the time (speaking and acting), as Homer composes, this is a mixed mode; by straight narrative; or by all persons performing the imitation, or acting, in a straight dramatic mode.

Aristotle wraps it all up by stating again that "Poetic imitation–shows these three differentiae: in the media, objects, and modes of imitation." As stated, "So in one way Sophocles would be the same kind of imitator as Homer, since they both imitate worthwhile people, and in another way the same as Aristophanes, for they both imitate people engaged in action, doing things." 19

Aristotle attributes the development of poetry to two sources: "(1) the habit of imitating is congenital to human beings from childhood;" anyone who has children will know that this is decidedly the case; "(2) the pleasure that all men take in works of imitation." That is, men enjoy watching imitations of past actions or supposed actions. Television and movies are the best answer to the truth or falsity of this assertion. 20

Comedy is an imitation of those who are inferior; though not necessarily villainous. It is a form for imitating what is ugly, or ludicrous, or distorted.

Epic poetry is defined by Aristotle as (1) good-sized (2) imitation (3) in verse (4) of people who are to be taken seriously; however, its verse is unmixed and the Epic is of a narrative style.

In difference, Aristotle notes that Tragedy "tries as hard as it can to exist during a single daylight period, or to vary but little, while the epic is not limited in its time and so differs in that respect." The translator of my volume, [amazon_link id=”0472061666″ target=”_blank” ]Gerald F. Else[/amazon_link], notes that this, in his opinion, does NOT refer to the idea of "representing the events of a single day" but rather the "actual length of the respective poems, and therefore of the respective performances." That is, a Tragedy should be performed in one day, but an Epic can take as long as it wants. Our professor notes that this misconception: "representing the events of a single day" led to the Renaissance notion of "Unity of Time." 89

Tragedy consists of Six Elements

Aristotle defines Tragedy as "a process of imitating an action which as serious implications, is complete, and possesses magnitude; by means of language it has been made sensuously attractive–is enacted by the persons themselves and not presented through narrative; through a course of pity and fear completing the purification of tragic acts which have those emotional characteristics." 25

Since the imitation is performed through action (acting), the "adornment of their visual appearance–will constitute some part of the making of tragedy; and song-composition and verbal expression also, for those are the media in which they perform the imitation." 26

I find the last comment very interesting as it suggests that the language, cadence, accent, and other features of the spoken words of the actors are, in fact, as much a part of the appearance and so could be equated with the costumes. I always felt that the language, cadence, accent, rhythm, etc. is a part of the writing, that is integral to the actual process of penning the play ("verbal expression") which it is but to categorize it with the costumes and external features of the action, rather than as an internal feature of the writing, is highly intriguing to me and suggests a strong course of action in looking at playwriting.

Also, "since it is an imitation of an action and is enacted by certain people who are performing the action, and since those people must necessarily have certain traits both of character and thought (for it is by way of these two factors that we speak of people’s actions as having defined character); and since imitation of the action is the plot, for by ‘plot’ I mean here the structuring of events, and by the ‘characters’ that in accordance with which we say that the persons who are acting have a defined moral character, and by ‘thought’ all the passages in which they attempt to prove some thesis or set forth some opinion it follows of necessity, then, that tragedy as a whole has just six constituent elements: plot, characters, verbal expression, thought, visual adornment, and song-composition." 26-7

The "elements by which they imitate are two: verbal expression and song composition; the manner in which they imitate is one: visual adornment; the things they imitate are three: plot, characters, thought–and there is nothing more than these. These then are the constituent forms they use." 27

Hence, means, objects, and methods.

I’ll continue this at a later time.