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katoagogo
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Posted: Sat Jun 7th, 2008 07:58 pm |
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From Mac Wellman’s introduction to Cellophane:
THE HO-HUM classic takes place in the simple time of clocks, not the Wild Time of nonlinear narrative. The Wild Time of poetic theater can bend, slow, break, or fork. Narrative is not destroyed by the nonlinear, it is merely disguised. Disguised is something else, which is where the poetry comes in. The new science of chaos with its use of fractal geometry, for instance, reveals some interesting things about narrative, about the way breaks in the shape and flow of a narrative event, breaks that disrupt flow and energy or information and redistribute it elsewhere, confirm the deep structures we do not normally perceive, because they do not function in linear time. For chaos as architect manifests itself as other (and more) than a merely trivial messiness. Like the time-honored messiness of the typical American ho-hum classic.
In theater we sense the presence of these deep structures any time an actor on stage, within the role of character, does something—anything!—that truly surprises us or takes our breathe away, any time narrative takes a left turn out of the homilies and monorail moralizing of “geezer theater” into the strange world of pure appearance, a land beyond the forest of symbols (where Little Red Hood really went, where Dracula waits for us all, where Baudelaire was headed before he discovered the little boy within). (Cellophane, p. 2-1)
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Basso
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| Joined: | Fri Feb 29th, 2008 |
| Location: | Canada |
| Posts: | 116 |
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Posted: Wed Jun 11th, 2008 12:45 am |
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Perhaps this might fall under..."at what point, size wise, does a cup morph into a bowl?" That is, when does the language of a play become so incomprehensible to the audience that it is no longer a play, but theatre of a different kind?
I've never read anything by Mac Wellman, let alone seen one of his works, but it sounds like he is justifying his iconoclasm by making the "classics" seem tired.
Nevertheless, my interest is peaked and I must look further into the workings of this writer who shuns linear time.
Basso
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