As promised, here (in condensed form) is my preliminary synthesis- summary in Religion & Theater. Not sure how much sense it makes out of context; I can amplify if you ask... but several of these are things I blogged at the time.
What will I remember from this course?
I’ll remember:
• Your wonderful improvs, starting with the first, and especially the sweetness of the sacred space improv
• The hand grenade effect of “Hell House”
• The miracle of Guirgis’ Last Trial of Judas Iscariot bringing us together around being tricked
I’ll remember:
• Being shattered by Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman
• My delighted discovery that Atsumori’s a love story
• Horror at pure-hearted Hester’s killing of her son in Suzan Lori-Parks' In the blood, worse than Agave and Pentheus
I’ll remember:
• Working out how Sor Juana uses theater to make visible invisible transubstantiation in The Divine Narcissus (more on this below), which led to
• Seeing Waiting for Godot's “nothing to be done” as evoking Holy Saturday desolation
I’ll remember:
• A new way of reading plays — not as text but as something more like a recipe for a Golem (just add blood)
• The excitement of engaging the whole body (Fitzmaurice trembling!), non-verbal knowing and sharing, but also
• My surprise that many of you are leery of "efficacy"
I’ll remember:
• The joyful discovery of religion-like aspects of theater, but also
• Understanding Plato’s and Rousseau’s suspicions about the theater as dazzling us with attributes to the point where we become deaf to underlying substance, but also
• Appreciating that the actor’s piety (even monasticism) may present an openness to transcendence which audiences, seeing a play only once, never sense
I could go on and on… Instead, let me try to present some of what I’ve learned, under three headings
A. Religion & Theater
Our starting hypotheses were wrong, at least crude. Theater ain’t religion, and religion ain’t theater, and focusing on what they have in common we may miss what’s essential to them. But for that very reason it’s worth trying to argue out: t=r, r=t, t ain’t r, r ain’t t. One opening issue I still think a valid, and shared one, is the one raised in the essay by Donald Lopez: how do you generate and sustain visible belief? This seems a concern religious practitioners and theater practitioners share, in surprisingly similar and revealingly different ways.
And who said you had to choose between religion and theater? Maybe they can collaborate. Maybe they're on a continuum.
So the experiment’s a success. We learn through falsification! As we've multiplied our knowledge of theatrical and religious traditions, we've seen the fatuity of Bert's bold but bland assertion that "theater is religion!" but also that there's much to learn about religion and theater by exploring them together.
B. Theater & Polytheism
I find myself thinking there is an affinity between theater and the bleak confusing inhuman world of Greek polytheism: a world we do not control, but rather pushes us around for reasons which have nothing to do with us. As Martha Nussbaum argued in her fascinating preface to C. K. Williams' translation of The Bacchae, dramas such as this one show humans creating a fragile human world - a world of justice - in the spaces we are left between the animal and the god. It seems no accident that the Greeks speak to us anew post Galileo and Darwin; the disenchanted modern world is not that different from the world of the Greek tragedies.
(There is also another sense in which I’ve caught myself thinking about theater as polytheism, or even serial monotheism: the enthusiastic, almost fanatical giving of self to the god of the moment and then moving on to another god. Or is it sacrificing every other god to the god of theater?)
3. Religion & Christianity
The above are just hunches. The main thing I've realized is that the history of theater has a shape familiar from the history of philosophy, which you might call the zero-sum story: X flourished until the rise of Christianity, and only with the subsiding of Christianity did X return. It's the implicitly secular humanist story (though it's compatible with the more liberal Protestantisms) which structured the curricula of American colleges at the turn of the 20th century, and it makes "religious theater" as dubious a concept as "religious philosophy." Even those transitional pieces - Everyman and other Moralities - are read in a humanistic way as mainly symbolic or allegorical (which is why a literal-minded modern Morality like "Hell House" so throws us). The world of the sacraments is far behind. Marlowe does the work of secularizing/psychologizing a religious story for us in Doctor Faustus, and makes the religion-renouncing move seem not only liberating but excitingly dangerous.
The influential recent theories of Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, too, are secular humanist theories. Their accounts of "liminality," "efficacy," "communitas" and the like see theater/ritual/religion solving psychological and social human problems, but the relationship of the human (or the human world) and the non-human is off the map.
My favorite texts in this class - the ones I'm happiest we had the chance to introduce you to - are the ones which fit this theater-must-be-secular story least: the Counter-reformation works of Calderon and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Here is theather in full flower, but instead of retreating in embarrassment from the sacramants it makes transubstantiation the focus and key. Sor Juana seems to me to align the very essence of theater with the essence of her religion (which she thinks resonant with non-Christian traditions like Ovid and the Aztec). It's not proto-disenchanted Protestantism, but sees in the theater's remarkable play of attributes and substance a visible representation of the invisible reality of the Eucharist - and a reminder that the world (as conspicuously in Calderon's Life's a dream) is not fixed and inert but alive and marvelous. Theater isn't actual transubstantiation, but it's on a kind of continuum with it. (You might say it's what Thomas Aquinas called a "real analogy" of the workings of God.)
(The success of Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses shows contemporary people still know – or are in some way still prepared to believe – that there can be exchanges and transformations between the human and non-human.)
I hope this course has exposed you to enough different texts and traditions to free you from the ghosts of an obsolete history of theater as essentially secular. Fully human it doubtless is, but this need not mean the denial of a broader theater of the world in which animal, god and human interact. Theater, we found Stanislavsky saying, involves transubstantiation: I challenge you to take this and run with it. Imagine that this isn't just as-it-were transubstantiation, and certainly not the closest thing to real metamorphosis in the world: that makes it mere sleight of hand, and ratifies views of the world as inert and meaningless. Might theater's powers of illusion and reality have the potential to take us beyond the limits of this constraining humanism?
