The productions I've seen of Azande, Ruth Margraff and other brilliant sui generis playwrights, have had full houses, mostly young and not just hip. Their audiences are looking for something, they may not know exactly what, but they know it when they find it. They find these plays and are drawn to the theatre mainly by the 411 on the street. These theatre aficionados want to go beyond the vacuousness and lies of mainstream, mass media American culture, beyond a culture that is in love with the past as long as it is not history and beyond a small minded, self referential market-minded present.
One of the glaring problems facing experimental theatre, labeled with the caveats, "difficult", "marginal" and "ethnic" is that there is not as much variety among critical approaches as there is in the writing the critics are examining. Cultural codes that make normative judgements possible seem beyond the grasp of mainstream critics whose criticism never ceases to be informed by provincialism, whose so called objective analyses always functions as "criticism" raising and resolving narrow, self-referential issues of meaning and value. Such "criticism" usually masks an attempt to block connotations that would destabilize most American critics parochial, insular, dramatic hegemony.
But when I read the work of Jorge Cortinas, Kris Messer, Stacia Owens and Rose Weaver, I know that the drive of Ethnic, Queer, Female and other identities will be heard in their specific idioms for they are the life force of America and its theater. What all these plays offer American theater is a return to stage language and the language of staging. When these plays find critics whose analyses are neither for the academy or market-place, critics who have bothered to learn about various American cultural codes so that they can give the public critiques that assumes every informed, erudite aspect that a critical attitude should embody, only then will the American theater's cramped circle of discourse open up.
In this seventh issue of NuMuse, we pay tribute to Adrienne Kennedy whose plays, beginning in 1964 burst through racial, sexual and formal boundaries since 1964. Today, Kennedy's experiments continue beyond the stage as she conjoins genres: photograph album as autobiography in People Who Led To My Plays, protest, as drama and documentary in Sleep Deprivation Chamber, in Deadly Triplets a mystery diptych that reflects fiction across non-fiction mystery as poetic drama. Happily, Kennedy's work in the 21st century continues to remains a fertile beacon to experimental writers.
Jorge Ignacio Cortinas' Sleepwalkers takes place in Centro Habana. The dialogue, like the city, takes breaths that are soft, febrile yet uriderstated with the tempo that illurninates the title. Artfully crafted, the silences and the spaces between the silences, what is unsaid, is as important as the spoken words of these "sleepwalkers" walking a high wire tightrope in Habana.
Kris Messer's tribute cum parody, Dirty and Naughty are two highly stylized explorations of classic film noir and western, two poetic dramatic plays in her three play The Genre Series.
In Plains, playwright Stacia Saint Owens goes back to 1870 and the Homestead Act. In the plains of Montana Territory she unfolds a shocking, terse and visual drama of homesteaders, and the women who sacrifice life basic comforts in order to feed clothe and populate America's westward expansion.
Rose Weaver blurs dramatic and musical structure into a dramatic, lyrical twelve bar blues and captures the musicality of Southern African Americans during the Great Depression in McDonough, Georgia in Well Water Blues. We hear the echo of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes as Weaver captures the sadness, laughter and strength of the African American Southern peasants in 1930.
With Adrienne Kennedy, setting the pace, and with the kinds of excellent and disparate writers in these pages, American theatre, which presently represent little ethnic diversity combined with no intellectual or artistic variety, has an opportunity chance of breaking out of its solipsism and joining the world.
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