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By Root 2416 0

production expense, which was to be my nose surgery. Leon argued that it was an unnecessary and irresponsible use of company funds, the relevance of which to the project at hand was questionable at best. Leon, it turned out, would later have to eat a lot of crow concerning his initial objections to my nose surgery, because the surgery in an unexpected way led to the resolution of the first argument. Then we entered the serious planning stages, i.e., preproduction. What we imagined was spectacular, veritably epic in scope and ambition. We had the first of many conversations about what was needed to resuscitate the theatre for the coming twenty-first century—for that was our ultimate aim. I’d been reading Stanislavsky, I’d been reading Artaud. This reading was all part of Leon’s required reading list for my tutelage in modern dramaturgy. As a teacher, Leon equally emphasized both theory and practice, and was particularly interested in the theories of Artaud.

“This shall probably be the greatest production of Shakespeare in history,” said Leon. He gingerly pushed his hair back from his face with his fingertips to prevent it from getting in the martini he was slurping. I had to agree.

“I have realized,” Leon continued, “that Shakespeare wrote at the tail end of the period in human history in which the magic of the narrative art was still truly alive. Later, the wild animal of Shakespeare was captured, killed, taxidermized, and enshrined by the idiotic and anodyne scholarship of the four sad centuries that have followed him, but this obviously is not the Bard’s fault. We must save Shakespeare from his admirers, from his murderers. We must save him by doing away with the tyranny of the text.”

I asked how this might be possible.

“An excellent question. The task that lies before us now is to undo the damage that the Enlightenment and its subsequent centuries have wrought upon the narrative arts. We must revive a sense of danger to the theatre, a sense of vitality. To break down not just the fourth wall, but also the first, the second, and the third. These walls should never have been built. Do you follow?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then I shall explain. After many exhaustive years of careful study and reflection on the matter, I have arrived at the inconvenient conclusion that the Enlightenment caused the beginning of the downfall of Western theatre, just as it ruined nearly everything else. You will notice, for instance, that the centuries following Shakespeare produced astonishingly little literature that may be deemed truly significant. The work of Edgar Rice Burroughs is an exception. And some Dickens. But they were swimming against the current.” Leon paused to insert a generous plug of steak into his cheeks. “Take the Ancients,” he went on, gesturing with his fork, his words pillowed in his cheeks by his chewing. “For them, theatre could not be disentangled from the very fabric of life. The Romans took the theatre so seriously that they were known to occasionally execute people onstage, and would write these executions into their plays, as sort of, you know, plot points.”

“One might argue,” I felt it necessary to point out, “that we should not admire the seriousness with which the Romans took the theatrical arts, but rather be appalled at how seriously they didn’t take the dignity of human life.”

“Bah! What a deeply uninteresting perspective. Please henceforth banish it from your mouth in my presence.”

“Sorry.”

“Right. Where was I? I would speculate that Western theatre began its steady crumbling decline around the fall of the Roman Empire, and was nearly complete by the mid-seventeenth century. After that, it would never be as good again. Why, you may ask? Because after that historical moment, the narrative arts had become severed from the body of society—severed like a limb is severed! After that, all narrative art was placed inside a display case, as something to be viewed safely from outside. It became like a caged animal, pacing back and forth before the bars, to be awed and admired only from behind a protective barrier.