11.

      Drama has a unique cognitive and ontological status.  Freud said “the tragic poets knew it [the unconscious] first.”  We can now see that they also know it best; know it in a way that goes beyond the limits of other ways of knowing.  Authentic drama is that representation of concrete, lived experience that comprehends what happens when we are delivered over to ourselves.  In destroying those structures of feeling that protect us from ourselves, drama opens the psyche to an order of self-mediation that becomes possible only when traumatic conflicts are sustained in agons equal to them.  As C.S.Peirce said “experience is what happens when our ways of knowing break down.”   Drama is that happening.  It is what breaks within us when all ideological blinders, all rationalistic guarantees, are submitted to an agon in which we exist as at issue and at risk in the struggle to mediate the burden of primary experiences.  The proper relationship between the image and the order of the concept is thereby established.  The world of the image, of concrete experience, is our way of apprehending realities that exceed the limitations of the concept.  The cognitive power of literature subject Plato’s argument banishing the poets to a complete reversal.  “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators” in a world that reason knows little of, a world in which traumatic images are sustained in agons that prove equal to a representation of experience engaged at a level that is visceral, primary, and existentially exacting.  Literature is not the translation of abstract concepts and themes into temporal, narrative terms; it is the world as it is lived existentially in structures that are prior to reason and beyond its range of comprehension.

12.

      Here is a task for a dramaturg of the future.  We don’t need censorship, we have interpretation.  The history of dramatic criticism from Aristotle to the present is a monument to the effort to superimpose the guarantees upon drama by constructing theories and interpretations that take the tragic, explorative energy of great works and bend them to our needs.  Thus Aristotle: offering us the catharsis of emotions that are themselves a defense against the tragic.  Milton: “calm of mind/all passion spent” so that we can leave the theatre assured that nothing will change.  And in our time, the many varieties of ritual theatre (Burke, Girard, Frye, etc.) that turn drama into a group psychology in which social conflicts are transcended through the imposition on experience of  patterns that are held to be universal and a-historical.  By and large the history of dramatic criticism constitutes so many conceptual shields before the Medusa, ways of letting us get close enough so that we can slay what we can’t look upon directly.  What we need is a dramaturg who will reverse that tradition by exposing all the ways that the guarantees are sequestered in interpretations.  We need a method of interpretation that will prepare the way for radically new productions through concrete demonstrations of how great works undermine the interpretations that have been foisted upon them.  Scholarly research would then itself become a drama of a-lethia, of wresting from concealment.  We’d thereby learn, for example, that virtually everything that has been written on Hamlet constitutes an attempt to avoid the play.  Despite different frameworks of meaning, the interpreters of Hamlet share an identical goal: to turn the most radically open-ended and emergent exploration of the tragic in our literature into something cabined, cribbed, confined in the narrow house of our needs and desires.

13.

      And of course we need a theatre of the oppressed, a theatre that will be feminist and gay and multi-cultural, for these are the places where the contradictions of our historical situation are most apparent.  We need a theatre that honors every subject-position.  But in liberating such voices our purpose cannot be the celebration of diversity as an end in itself.  For we live in one world—now more than ever.  And so our task remains dialectical—to apprehend the contradictions that define the social order as a whole and thereby discover the necessary connections that bind us to a common task.  No subject position can be excluded from this search for we can never know when the contradictions of the whole won’t become apparent and assault our psyche in a way that tears our world to tatters: as in the eyes of JonBenét Ramsey and what they reveal about our most cherished institution, the American family.

      And of course we need a theatre that is grandly experimental.  But all experiments must derive from a single rationale: to shrink the space between us and the audience to that the audience is forced to become a participant in the performance.  Thus I envision a theatre in which every device is exploited to make actors and audience inseparable.  As when, for example, the actors, with the play in some way already begun, would form a queue the audience must join and move along in order to get to their seats; or when at points during the performance the lights would go up in the house so that audience members would become painfully aware of one another; or when perhaps they would at intermission find the doors of the theatre locked and a discussion of the work already begun among the cast and actors planted in the audience, a discussion they would be invited to join.  What has become one of the most deleterious conventions of recent theatre—the post-play discussion—would thereby become the itch of an anxiety felt at the time it should be.  We have only begun to explore all the ways we can break the fourth wall through experiments that will be disciplined because they serve a single end: to activate an agon in the audience.  That is the purpose of playing, the concern that informs everything we do from the moment we first begin to write or read a play and search for ways to activate the most radical of encounters.  

14.

      Here, then, in summary is an ideal realization of the action that a great drama performs on the audience.  (1) Social identity is maintained through the public, legitimation rituals through which shared ideologies are celebrated.  Drama reverses that process by exposing those rituals: by blocking their function and turning them back against themselves.  (2) As group psychology the agon thereby engaged has the following structure.  The audience, as group, tries to resolve conflict by coalescing around a shared need (laughter, pity etc) which offers a collective identity.  The ensemble’s task is to destabilize this structure.  Defenses must be activated; the sores of discontent rubbed raw;  projections turned back against themselves.  (3) The collective psyche then regresses to a more primitive state in an attempt to ward off deeper underlying conflicts.  With the fragmentation of group identity each individual is delivered over to the drama of primary emotions.  As in King Lear “close pent up guilts” break loose in an audience confronted with the return of  buried conflicts.  (4) The miracle has happened: an audience has been transformed from a  group seeking pleasure through the discharge of tensions and the affirmation of common values to anxious agents existentialized in a solitude that has arisen, in the midst of others, as the space of a fundamental concern.  Tragic recognitions ensue, destroying the possibility of regaining the psychological identities that existed prior to the play.  (5) The audience now experiences in the characters on the stage the fundamental truth: that what we don’t know about ourselves is what we do—to the other.  They experience it in sufferance as the imperative to deracinate everything that hides one from oneself.

      (6) The purpose of authentic drama is to destroy the ego in order to awaken the psyche.  The ego cringes in the theatre because it witnesses the staging of its informing motive.  Flight from inner conflict is its reason for being.  (7) Our job is to reverse that process; to represent an audience to themselves so that they will, in the shock of recognition, see and suffer what they want to deny.  Thereby the smooth functioning of secondary emotions gives way to an agon of primary emotions in subjects who now find themselves in fundamental conflict with themselves.  (8) Once that has happened, the task of the ensemble is to bring that audience to the recognition that there is only one choice: radical change or the extinction of consciousness; persistence in inner paralysis and the deadening of affect or the effort to reverse oneself totally through the struggle to overcome everything that protects one from confronting one’s deepest conflicts. 

      (9) Theatre has become a place of total exposure, with no “catharsis” available to relieve the audience of the burden that has descended upon it.  Aristotle was right in this—reversal and recognition are the essence of tragedy.  They are what happens to the audience when they prove equal to the agon that a great play activates within them.  When that happens the space of theatre has been totally transformed.  The audience isn’t looking at the play.  The play is looking at them with a look that has the Sartrean power to expose us to our bad faith and reestablish our contact with our existence.  (10) The purpose of theatre is to awaken this possibility and bar all exits that would deliver us from it.  Theatre is not the space in which a content—a body of themes or preexisting ideas—is communicated.  It is the space in which an action is performed.  That action is the attempt to act on the psyche of the audience in order to bring about a reversal in the relationship that they live to themselves.