Teatro

The Pleasures of the Plural: Notes on Brecht's Double
John Edward McGrath
Two big, old churches sit across the street from each other. They've been converted to theaters, but you can't tell the difference—not in the smug worshipers nor in the chanted litanies. What kind of theaters are they? Certainly not commercial ventures (there would be at least amplified music and screaming children) noropera (no ostentatious jewelry to be seen on these sober church-goers). No, this is the European and American theater-going intelligentsia, worshiping at the shrines of St Antonin and St. Bertolt
Of course we would all like to tear these churches down, but we are afraid of the historic preservation societies. And what would we build in their place? What tools of demolition or reconstruction do wehave? Literary theories come and go, but the churches of St Antonin and St Bertolt seem made of undeconstructable stone. Theater experiment has been easily assimilated with Robert Wilson elected Pope of the holy Artaudian church and Archbishop Mailer of Bertolt firmly installed. Moreover, increasingly the spirit of theatrical ecumenism reigns with each church's services looking much like theother's, and regular coproductions encouraged by government funding bodies.
I am being facetious, but we are all trapped in these churches. The towering theoretical figures of twentieth-century theater experiment have become institutionalized; and yet when so much of what we value is under attack, battering our own walls can seem a foolhardy project. I am not proposing that we fret (as is the fashionin America at least) over the survival of the theater. Either the particular tradition that goes by that name will survive, or something else will take its place. What concerns me is the present situation: can a space be made in our institutionalized, subsidized, festivalized performance world where experiment can be conducted which neither fetishizes nor ignores the theoretical instigators ofthis century's theater. It seems to me that without this space we are repeating the forms of dead religions.
Barthes wrote of the pleasures of Brecht's cigar—the symbol of capitalism that can be both critiqued and enjoyed. Barthes went on to characterize Brecht's pleasure as primarily oral (food-oriented).' But Brecht's penis was more than a cigar substitute, and in an age and, for me, a city (NewYork) where sexual politics is at the forefront of the struggle over meaning, we cannot allow Brecht's penis to be so easily tucked away nor Artaud's body to lack the specificity of this particular organ. My suggestion is that we return once more to the actor's body (scene of so much of our academic and directorial lust) and discover a Brectian double—a dream of the disruptive pleasures of theplural, of a desire too much in motion to obey the structures of any political or theoretical system. While reading Brecht and Artaud against each other will help us discover this double, we should not be trying to commit the incest of the Artaudian Brecht but rather seeking a disruptive pleasure which both theorists (as we have constructed them) have hidden away. First, however, some thoughts on handgestures.
In February 1991,1 put together in ten days an adaptation of Brecht's Lehrstücke He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No (.Der Jasager and Der Neinsager).a I wanted to make a piece of theater which would directly contribute to the anti-Gulf War effort and I felt such an effort could fulfill this aim in several small ways. It would form one of many "community" level protests supplementingthe large-scale demonstrations in which we were involved; it responded directly as a refusal of George Bush's stated aim to continue cultural life as normal (don't cancel the Superbowl) by interrupting the schedule of a small theater where I was then working with a product relating directly to the war; it allowed everyone involved to protest professionally through our craft, i.e., through our...