Theatre of wonder and blunder and plunder
by Michael Maiello

I want to delve away from politics for a little bit, and talk about the theatre. I've had some strange relationships with the theatre. My first play was produced in New York. Many of the following ones saw the stage in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One was produced in Midland, Texas. Student plays. Mostly one acts. Fun to write, and the production process is always exhilarating.

So last week I saw a show at Albuquerque's Popejoy Hall in which famous playwrights wrote short plays based on Shakespearean sonnets. Mostly great stuff. A funny piece by Eric Bogosian, a clever one from Tony Kushner, one approaching brilliance by John Guare. I like playwrights. I like theatre. But I wonder about it anymore.

Our best writers are writing poetic creative nonsense. Like Mac Wellman, a man who's not well known outside of New York, and who lives mostly off grants from various foundations because the money he makes producing plays at La Mama Experimental Theatre, P.S. 122, and BACA Downtown, tend not to pay his bills. Mac Wellman, who writes a lot of short manifestos on art talks frequently about a "theatre of wonders."

It's a different kind of theatre, and a different kind of storytelling. One which doesn't depend so much on psychological motivations, back story, and linear time. It accepts Octavio Paz's notion that poetry is a way of questioning linear time, and that plays are quite naturally poetry. It accepts that sometimes people just act, without explicable reason.

Why do we do art? I think we do it to illuminate life. That might sound narrow, but it's why I do art. To call attention to things around us, to help people see things in a new light. This kind of theatre isn't too popular. People don't understand it, it's not easy to grasp. And no, I don't think people are stupid philistines. Well, some people, maybe. But not most. Really.

Through living we create a pretty simple thought paradigm. If I don't wake up on time, I'll be late for work. My boss will want to know why I'm late. If my girlfriend breaks up with me, I want to know why. We always want to know why, and who can blame us?

Of course, we're driving ourselves crazy with these questions which often generate answers which make less and less sense, and don't seem too compelling. She broke up with you because her father withheld love for her and one day when the sun hit your face at the wrong angle, you looked like her father and she wanted revenge.

Why did those kids shoot up their school? Television violence. South Park. The availability of guns and a gun culture. Economic oppression. Barely submerged sexism. Any one answer sounds trite, any combination becomes quickly incoherent.

Sometimes, as in Wellman's Theatre of Wonders, people just act. They simply do things. Random things. Of course, sometimes they are psychologically motivated, but not always, and not as a rule. Though the modern theatre has mostly contained social realism, which means psychological motivation, which usually means pop psych motivations, the theatre has always had it's Edward Albees and Mac Wellmans, who aren't afraid of defying our usually unquestioned assumptions about how humans work. But this isn't new. It goes back to Shakespeare. "There is more to heaven and Earth, Horatio, then is dreamt of in your philosophy." Or your science, or psychology, or sociology, or new age epistemology. Why doesn't Hamlet kill Claudius? because he wants to get revenge and still preserve his chance at the throne. Because he's a student, not a killer. Because the ghost might be a demon. Because, because, because.

He doesn't act for most of the play, and then he acts. Perhaps that's enough.

The worst of the plays about Shakespearean sonnets (in my humble, in your face opinion) was by Wendy Wasserstein. A Pulitzer winner attached to psychology that tends to fall flat. But her stuff sells tickets. It gives stories that fall in line with the way we generally think.

The best selling news magazines tell stories which fall in line with the way we think. The best selling novels, any successful television or Hollywood venture, they all tell stories in the way that we generally think. Most of my own stories, particularly the ones which have brought me financial reward, fall in line with the way that we tend to generally think.

But Mac Wellman's got me thinking about art and life in a new way. My favorite movie of last year? Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen's newest which seems psychological on the surface, but exposes the weaknesses of psychology by the end.

What does all this mean? I don't know. I've just been thinking about art, and thinking about art, and thinking about art, and maybe someone will find these thoughts useful.

Michael Maiello thinks for fun and profit.

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