[page 78] In America, one of our sentimental complaisances has been to rest assured that love is holy, and the preserving of it preserves everything worth saving, from the Family to the Free Market, from Doublemint to Democracy. Evolutionary biologists remind us, however, that love is just part of the fabric of being. Nothing obligates nature to mirror our ideas about love (or anything else) in any way whatsoever. It may be equal folly to attribute that to the divine presence, creating God in the image of humanity. Fifteen years ago(8) I criticized the fixation of American playwrights with romantic melodrama, at the cost of looking at the larger issues of society, at war, inequality, hunger, the structure of our order. It seemed to me then that our contemporary subtext was being blinkered, carefully reduced down to one interest--the fate of two people in a relationship. I reminded us of the contrast between even the best of the typical American romantic melodrama, like Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God, and the plays of Barrie Stavis, particularly his play about George Washington, The Raw Edge of Victory. Stavis has said that his plays were written in response to Chekhov's exhortation that "Every playwright is responsible not only for what man is, but for what he can be," and to Artistophanes' effort to banish "the little man and woman affair" from the stage.(9) The palette from which American drama has been painted since the 60's has, until the last few years, been a shrinking one. I saw this shrinkage as an escape, a retreat to reliable trivialities and enduring, gossipy voyeurism. But I think now that there was, and is, something larger at stake. Our hunger has been to define what love might be, to see how relationships might hold together against a storm of forces trying to tear them apart. We needed nothing less than a new comic vision. Instead we had trivialized both form and content by repetition and predictability, simply leaving out that storm of forces, treating each precious relationship as a sentimentally cliché, in romantic isolation. Thus we maintained only a sentimental triste, rather than building a new vision of society--the comic vision of union that love (Eros?) really requires.

Now the drama has learned to speak of the love that could not be named, learned to talk of plague and holocaust, learned to visit the horrors of war and the addictions of violence. [page 79] From Streamers to Angels in America, from Bent to Oleana, we are learning to talk of the hidden and the denied. But revelation can sometimes come from unexpected places. In the film of Carousel, surely a typical example of sentimental romance, Billy keeps hitting people he cares about, even near the end when he is only a ghost. Amazingly, the women excuse him by sharing the startling perception that they have both felt a slap that didn't hurt at all. The clear implication of the action at this point is that the slap was the touch of love, and it has infused them with warmth. As repugnant as this conversion of knee-jerk violence (what we now call abuse) into care, love and respect may be, it is very Dionysian, and we should be warned. We never know from where feelings of love, attachment, or fear and hatred may spring. Wisdom tells us the places to look for one or the other, but wisdom is not always the truth, especially when we are stressed and stretched out to our fullest capacities. Now our popular sentimental dramas tell love stories that twenty or thirty years ago would be rejected out of hand as disgusting. So we can have some vision of what we lost back then. But what sacrifice are we making now? The drama seems to me to be a key to that vision, a repository of it, the sharpest mirror in which we can find our limitations, our stumblings, and our capacities, our greatest reaches of understanding.

My Dionysian prejudices by this time are abundantly clear. What is most confrontational, conflicting, out at the edge of our sensibilities, needs, capabilities, imaginings, what is most challenging in this way, is most likely to widen our vision, to enhance our experience, and to be attractive and exciting in the theatre. Others, of course, will disagree vehemently. They would argue that, whether serious or funny, tragic or comic, reverent or mocking, the drama does the most for us when it is closest to what we recognize, when it engages us most intimately in our own realities and enlarges us only by moving us slightly out of that context, pushing us one small step further. Why? The risk of incomprehension and rejection, so this voice says, is huge. If we are deeply shocked, upset, puzzled or hurt, we will fly from the experience rather than embrace it, and rapidly convert what we remember to what stereotype makes it most palatable. The popular theatre, this same voice asserts with the force of practical wisdom, can never afford to forget this. A most enduring value and eternal verity is entertainment. We are entertained by what delights us and makes us look for more of the same. We love entertainment because it is fun, and also because it is so absorbing it distracts us from whatever else we might be doing or thinking about. It does not have to be happy talk-- [page 80] witness the occasional fashion of sad melodrama in theatre and movies--we can also enjoy watching things come out badly. But we need to be entertained.

Kushner's choices become more interesting in this context because he has chosen a set of flashy, campy, highly theatrical idioms in which to encase his social/political/spiritual melodrama. And like all melodrama, it is about a harsh conflict of values, of black evil and white virtue--fidelity and disloyalty, courage and cowardice, about love and the lust for power. These broad conflicts are made more realistic and digestible when they occur in complicated ways within one person. For instance, Joe wants to be loyal to Harper, but also to his emerging sexuality. Louis is endearing in his desire to be close and loving in spite of his (very funny) analytic excesses, but his cowardice steers him to desertion, then to infidelity. Belize, who is tolerance and understanding personified, is able to reject Roy Cohn's vileness and take care of him all at once, while she steals Roy's drugs for those who need them (she becomes a Robin Hood of the hospital). The result of these and other sticky conflations of good and evil, is that the traditional values are transfigured. Love and fidelity are still Good. Justice is still Good. Hatred, violence, malevolence and disease are still Evil. But the historical perspective suggested at the beginning of the play by the oldest living Bolshevik, and by the generations of Prior's ancestors, combines with the constant, tongue-in-cheek domestic mockery to urge us toward a properly comic tolerance for everyday misbehavior--for lying, for sexual confusion, for cowardly self-indulgence, for drug-induced escape and reverie, and even for abandonment of one's love in a crisis. Evil is confined to one devil (Cohn) and the plague that ravages both him and Prior. This is metaphorically extended to the self-aggrandizement, manipulation, power hunger, and inhumane politics Cohn represents. Through Kushner's mockery of the smugness of the Regan-Bush era, we are reminded that the politics of intolerance and greed continues to plague us.

To keep us securely domestic, our spiritual perceptions are mocked too, reducing them to Spielbergian angels descending in a sudden explosion, ten-foot-high Hebrew characters in flashing lights, ladders to heaven with super-bright internal lighting, and notes on conspicuous wires descending from the flies. We know this is an exaggerated stereotype of how we see these things, and know at the same time it cannot be true--a perfect object for wonderfully entertaining mockery. If God were to appear, wouldn't she be staging herself for effect? And in a way, she does, when her angel kisses the Mormon Mother Pitt on the mouth [page 81] and fills her with ecstasy of an entirely unexpected kind. We get to have our cake and eat it too--see our limitations, accept them, wonder at them, be frightened by them, and laugh at them all the same time. Part I, Millennium Approaches, is, because of all this, a wonderful experience, using traditional forms to push out our boundaries of vision and prepare us to see new. Unfortunately, Part II, Perestroika, leaves us without the promised vision, staggering in the dark to find our comforting monuments (Bethesda) in a vain hope of healing, stuck in the ground of ordinary perception and platitude.

Other widely praised contemporary dramas deserve examination from this point of view. Do they use the ordinary means of drama, and some view of our daily realities to propel us to new vision, to transport us to a world somehow enlarged, enhanced, sharpened?

In Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, the structure of the play is a metaphor for the continuation of the generations. The first half shows two adult women, one middle aged and one young, paid to cope with the cantankerousness, bitterness, and the prejudiced, offensive, virulent meanness of an old woman. She gets the best of them. In the second half the two younger women play the older woman at earlier ages, and the three of them interact as if one could talk to oneself, at different ages, at any time in one's life. For the most part, the youngest one is projecting her own hopes, dreams and desires into her future and her two older counterparts are listening indulgently or trying to disillusion her, to wisen her up. Sometimes this is funny, sad, or upsetting, but mostly it is simply hackneyed, trying, boring, and trivial. Partly, this is because the character of the young women is predictable, sentimental, and somewhat selfish, without, for instance, any of the perspective or social awareness that made the peremptory young lawyer faintly interesting in the first half. Her self-absorption and narrowness get dull, and cease standing for anything. It would have been much funnier if the two older women had tried to reject her, to say, "that's not me," to attempt, contrary to all logic and expectation, to disown their own youth(s). That might have been funny and interesting, though it would have had almost as little to do with the first half as the existing second half does. In either case, the metaphor does not hold. The idea of seeing through one's youth and middle age what we come to as an old person, of seeing through the effort to cope with the old and decayed what we are and will continue to be, is deeply trivialized in the second half and emptied of significance. All we see is a feather-light cliché--the bitter, prejudiced old crone was once a pretty, idealistic girl. What do these lives stand for? Has anything at all been [page 82] gained or lost? What was the stake in those women's lives that could live on the stage and move across the footlights from them to me? As you can see, I have the strong feeling that the transfer simply has not taken place at all. There is a vision of the transformation of narrowly selfish and idealistic youth into narrowly selfish and nasty old age, but there is no resonance, no metaphorical juice to transform these facts into a significance beyond the cliché they represent.

In a British play, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, the environment of the play, the grounds of a country estate in Derbyshire, and the process of landscaping it, become a metaphor for the development of the mind, and the progress of our thought through history. It is an echo of the "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" principle in a historical setting. Transforming from rigid order to an order perceived within apparent natural chaos--this is what happens to the estate as it is re-landscaped, and what happens within the estate, to the mind of young Thomasina Coverly as she engages in her education and discovers the elements of fractal geometry and chaos theory. Here is a metaphor so deliberately set that we lick our lips in anticipation. What will we learn? How can chaos make us feel? The two contemporary scholars, Bernard and Hannah, searching this early nineteenth century landscape for the truth of what happened there, find murder, deception, retreat into hermitage--an old whodunit mystery--while they manage to fight with each other comically about what really happened, who did what, and who the hermit was. In the process they engage the interest of Valentine, the contemporary heir to the estate, a mathematician who is studying the patterns of the growth of the grouse population on his own lands. He runs Thomasina's mathematical series on his computer, and notes that these are the same as the contemporary iterated functions used to describe natural phenomena (in fractal geometry and chaos theory). However, he resists the idea that she really knew what she was doing, it spite of a note she left announcing that she has discovered a new "Geometry of Irregular Forms," a "method by which all forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets, and draw themselves through number alone."(10) He helps Bernard and Hannah to a little more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between science and truth, trying to convince them and himself that Thomasina really could not have understood the implications of her discovery. Intriguingly, he keeps a pet turtle, just like his counterpart [page 83] from 1810, Thomasina's young tutor, Septimus Hodge, who trained as a scientist at Cambridge. Hodge and Valentine are played by the same actor.

All of this, in traditional Stoppardian style, is a wonderfully entertaining riddle. But the metaphor stalls, this time on the track of cleverness. Then it withers as we anticipate a drama that never happens. Our fascination with the young girl and her tutor, our questions about their future, our wonder at what these new apperceptions of nature might tell us about the events in the play--all this is never put together. There is a lot of sexual activity off stage, and a lot of witty talk about it on stage, including Thomasina's opening line, a question to her tutor: "Septimus, what is carnal embrace?" Back in 1810 the sexual pairings involve Thomasina's mother, Septimus, another woman on the estate, and possibly Lord Byron, and on the contemporary scene, Bernard and Chloë, the sister of Valentine. While most of this is funny, in the end it seems to connect with nothing, to be mere comic decoration, with one possible exception.

Thomasina is coming of age, and because of a combination of her insouciance and brilliance, Hodge is beginning to be attracted to her. However, instead of seeing the play, the dramatic action that might reveal this, the fates of Thomasina and Septimus are simply dumped into the dust of history's documents. Stoppard prefers the aching silence of the historical record and the cleverness of his detective story to the life he might have made of his metaphor. She dies in a fire, we are told, a day before her seventeenth birthday, just after her tutor, reading the latest essay she has written for him, may have come to understand what she has discovered. On what turns out to be her last night, she has, with her utterly innocent and irrepressible impetuosity, kissed him on the mouth in an effort to get him to teach her how to waltz, a skill she thinks will insure her sexual appeal and seductiveness as an adult. The dance lesson begins with full propriety between tutor and pupil. But then Septimus kisses Thomasina "in earnest." We are left to surmise that he has intuited her genius and fallen in love with her. We are told, in a last minute revelation from Valentine, the mathematician, that Thomasina also discovered, in essence if not in mathematical form, the concept of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. She knew the universe was running downhill. So, we surmise, her death in a fire that night will cause Septimus to retreat into hermitage, lapsing into insanity, writing "cabalistic tracts" about the end of the world. So we have solved the mystery of the identity of the hermit, which is confirmed when we remember a historical [page 84] document that is quoted earlier, noting that the hermit had a pet turtle. We are left with the victory of Hannah, who was sure the hermit was Septimus, and the humorous defeat of Bernard (who gets caught up in a false thesis about Lord Byron and his involvement at the estate.)

Where have we been taken? If Hannah and Bernard are our surrogates, what has happened to them that has any significance? Has all this transported us to an understanding, an apperception of past and present, order and chaos, nature and love, that makes a new vision? Do the contemporaries' search for the truth of the past, and the fates of Thomasina and Septimus, come together into a single action, or even an ironic reflection about a terribly sad set of events where the huge promise of a brilliant mind and a budding romance were cut off by an accident? Is there any relationship in the drama between the transformation of the estate's landscape in 1810 and the remarkable discoveries of Thomasina? I think, as with the second half of Three Tall Women, and the second part of Angels in America, that the promised vision never materializes. Perhaps this can help us appreciate how difficult this is to do, and what it takes to do it.

We come to eternal verities and enduring values in mysterious ways, or at least ways that remind us that our previous visions of what must accompany the eternal and the true are as mutable as our visions of the eternal and true themselves. This makes it all the more interesting to look back at the huge variety of drama generated in the Golden Age of Greece, and note that it was all contrived in celebration of the god, and all performed at ritual celebrations that reminded the audience of the holiness of the occasion.

I doubt there is anything left of that sense of holiness. But there is a pale reflection of it in that feeling of necessity that can creep over those who have found themselves rooted in the bowels of a theatre, preferring the artificial light to the natural, sensing the power of what happens only in that very special place, that particular oomphalos.

In there, we can be transported. We can become living metaforai. But though we work inside, in a special incubator, our work is about what happens in the light, in the course of lives. The theatre disappoints when we let it be about itself, or let it be trapped in reductive triviality, in sentimental predictability, or fascinating games (or, as some have alleged, as [page 85] illustrations of post-modern theory). It delights when it presents us with a vision of the ecstasies, horrors, losses and achievements that make the stuff of lives. When the form flows from the action rather than from an abstract scheme, when it moves from the math to the physics, then there is a chance that that action has been meta-phored, carried beyond our ordinary perceptions into a new vision. It is these visions, I think, working through the ancient, almost genetic, tragi-comic nexus of dramatic form, which evoke the god-of-many-names, shake and move us, and endure.

Bibliography

Albee, Edward. Three Tall Women. New York, 1994.

Kiefer, Daniel, "Angels in America and the Failure of Revelation." American Drama 4:1 (Fall, 1994), 21-38.

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America, Part I: Millenium Approaches. New York, 1993. Part II: Perestroika. New York, 1994.

Larner, Daniel. "Prophet in a Passive Theatre," Religion and Theatre 5:1, (1981). Also, in a slightly altered version, as "What Should Theatre's Concerns be?" in Dramatics 52:5 (May 1981).

McNulty, Charles. "Angels in America: Tony Kushner's Theses on the Philosophy of History." Modern Drama 39 (1996), 84-95.

Medoff, Mark. Children of a Lesser God. New York, 1980.

Stavis, Barrie. Comments on his own work and career [1973] in Contemporary Dramatists, fourth edition, ed. D.L. Kirkpatrick, 1988, 504-5.

Stavis, Barrie. The Raw Edge of Victory. Act I in Dramatics 57:8 (April, 1986), 15-32; act II in Dramatics 57:9 (May, 1986), 13-28.

Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London and Boston, 1993.