Cruelty—the desire to poison what is vital in another’s psyche so that one can watch the other bring about their own destruction.

      Primary emotion shatters the ego and awakens the psyche.  The ego is the system of defenses whereby an illusory identity is maintained through vigorous opposition to two things: reality and the inner world.  Psyche is the agon that is joined whenever that system breaks down and the subject is forced to engage the conflicts of its inner world.  Secondary emotion is the system of feelings we construct in order to deliver us from that process.  The purpose of theatre is to activate the latter process.  

4.

      “The director’s first task is to cast the audience.” (Grotowski)  Something I want from you is opposed to something you want from me.  That is the essence of drama.  It is also the relationship between any worthwhile play and the audience.  The theatre event is what happens between an ensemble and the audience as the former work upon the latter to activate a group psychology of a unique kind.  A written play is nothing but a score that is only actualized when in performance an audience begins to move as one to the urgencies of a collective psychology.  We don’t create in front of an audience; we create by working on an audience.  They give us their defenses and we give them back to them as primary emotions.

       That dynamic is the main difference between cinema and theatre.  Cinema is oneiric: the projection of private fantasies by subjects sitting alone in the dark.  Theatre is communal: lived and living because it is built in performance out of the responses that the ensemble seizes upon in order to take an audience in directions it fears to tread.  At the movies audience members try to be unaware of one another; in theatre they desperately depend upon and solicit one another’s responses in the effort to evolve a collective psychology.  Theatre takes on its inherent danger when the ensemble uses this condition to activate an agon that shatters the ideological beliefs that hold the audience together.  When we cast the audience in ways that flatter their self-esteem and reinforce their beliefs we create a theatre in which nothing happens.  When in casting them we seek out the agons that will engage what is buried most deeply within them we create a theatre that shimmers with existential possibility.  To bring that about our task is to overturn the wisdom of Stoppard’s Player-King: “audiences know what to expect and that is all they can believe.”  Most productions, unfortunately, bank on that fact, drawing their mandate from the pleasure associated with repetition of habitual operations whereas for us the purpose of playing must be to make what happens on the stage become for the audience what the Archaic Torso of Apollo was for Rilke: “For here there is no place that does not see you/You must change your life.”  The paradigmatic status of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh for an understanding of the theatre event derives from O’Neill’s effort of that work to dramatize the essence of this process.  Hickey engages the audience on stage in a process that represents the agon that any great play strives to activate in the theatre audience.

5.

      The art of acting is defined by this agon.  That art  can be condensed into an aphorism: “something must break within you with each line.” (Angelina Jolie)  In exploring the inner world actors don’t discover their “true self” and their “true feelings.”  They discover the inner conflicts that must be engaged in order to uncover what one does not want to know about oneself.  When one acts from that place acting becomes, as Jack Nicholson said, “the process of dripping acid on the nerves.”  For when something breaks within you with each line it breaks too within the audience who see their world represented in a way that unmasks it.  Robert DeNiro’s great description of acting is only as good as its hidden major premise.  To quote DeNiro: “Actors are like people.  They don’t express their emotions.  They conceal them.  And it is in the process of concealing them that the emotions are revealed.” An audience experiences the shock of recognition when they are confronted with action and gestures that perfectly mimic their characteristic ways of fleeing themselves.  The question marks that the Brechtian actor places within and at the end of each line are addressed, contra Brecht, not just to the intellect but to the psyche: they plant in the head the time-bomb that explodes in the heart as primary emotions erupt from long concealment engaging the audience in the struggle to confront and reverse their lives.  The purpose of acting is not to entertain, but, borrowing from Albee’s George, to “get the guests.”

6.

      Here is a story revealing where drama begins.  Recently, by chance, I saw on television a dinner party held by Oprah Winfrey for six members of her Book Club and Toni Morrison.  Among the guests where several obviously wealthy socialites (including one named Celeste).  At the end of a bountiful dinner, Toni Morrison reads from the passage toward the end of The Song of Solomon in which Pilate mourns her dead grandchild Hagar.  During the reading Celeste breaks down and weeps uncontrollably.  Comforted by Morrison, that great-souled presence, who holds her, Celeste, still weeping, tells her story.  Her first child was still-born.  She never saw the child nor did she ask to hold it.  “I was always taught that I should be protected from such things.”  But now something different has come into being, thanks to Morrison’s work.  “I never held my baby.  I’m so ashamed.” A drama has begun.  A work of art has put a subject in touch with a depth in her psyche that she did not know existed.  One can only imagine the struggle later that night to resume the mask and cover her embarrassment when Celeste returns to her suburban home and, one imagines, the wealthy friends gathered together to watch her on Oprah and celebrate the occasion.  She can’t go home again—and yet she must.  Such is the power, however momentary, of art to cut through our defenses and “make us ashamed of our existence” (Sartre).  As Celeste learned, art restores us to the past that matters by revealing that past as the forgotten duties that we bear to our own humanity.  Through art they are imposed on us in the violence of the claim they make upon us.  And so our anxiety for Celeste is that she will succeed, helped by her group to say what Heidegger says we always saw once anxiety passes: “it was nothing.”  Theatre is the attempt to bring that nothing into being.  

7.

      “An image is true insofar as it is violent.” (Artaud) The task of the playwright is to find traumatic images and then create a dramatic structure that will unleash their power so that the emotional dynamis implicit in the image becomes an agon that transforms the audience’s relationship to itself.  Theatre must preserve the violence of the image because without that violence nothing happens.  Change only becomes possible when an image stays alive and works within the psyche, when another’s suffering becomes one’s own and one gains no relief from that suffering through fine thoughts and airy platitudes.  Our task is to create a theatre that knows, with the artist R. B. Kitaj that “reducing complexity is a ruse,” that the goal of art is “to create images that will sit in the Unconscious” for it is there, where nothing sits still, that change begins in psyches delivered over to everything they hoped keep repressed.  Such a theatre can be as grand as Weiss’ Marat/Sade or as intimate as Chekhov’s dream of that actor who reveals his fate (and ours) in the way he lifts his coffee-cup or turns the pages of his newspaper.  The choice does not lie between an “epic” and an intimate theatre.  It lies between exploring the truth of primary emotions or indulging the evasions of secondary emotions.  The lesson Artaud taught visits our consciousness daily.  It has become what Hegel called the newspaper: “the morning prayer of modern man.”  On rising one turns on the TV and  is awash in traumatic images,  as in a six year old child mimicking the dance and gestures of an adult woman in a “beauty pageant” soliciting our voyeuristic complicity in the illness that tells parents they have a right to do such things to children.  And so we look again and see what gives the image its true violence.  It’s there—in the deadened eyes, and the broken, frightened gestures that rupture the performance from within, giving it a Brechtian function that is one with the ability of JonBenét Ramsey to “signal through the flames.”  In such images we recover the lesson we most need to recover: that drama is the truth of everyday life; because agon remains the being of the subject.  In the image of a child violating herself in a desperate effort to win her parent’s love we are offered a way back into Aristotle’s recognition that tragedy has the family as its primary subject because cruelty is most terrible when we find it where we had expected to find love.  For we then suffer the recognition that one sign of our disorder is the pleasure the culture took—and continues to take—from such images.  In the traumatic image the suppressed truths of our world assault us in their inherent violence.  To articulate their meaning requires a descent into the heart of our collective disorders.