Theatrics

The Theatrics exposed in these plays are not those of mimesis or representation - look elsewhere for the banal trappings of scenarios weighed down with incident and context, for characters gobbed up with personalities or motivations, for dialogue chained and bound by comprehensibility. These scenes maintain their Suspension without Disbelief. From start to finish, they relentlessly sabotage the very dramaturgy they invoke. Leaving the "Theatre of the Absurd" choking in the dust, John Crouse does not so much "Break the Fourth Wall" as he knocks out the load-bearing beams of grammar, plus characterization, plot, scene, and our basic expectations of language itself, in order to demolish the theatre's floor, ceiling, and the other three Walls, leaving only the fourth one that's transparent. Though refusing all gestures toward representation, each play is marinated in a unique blend of vocabularic themes and syntactical illogics. And yet, through their baffling and unpredictable and raunchy and often funny verbal play, they release and amplify a more primal, hieratic dimension of the theatrical impulse, arising not from mimesis but from the affect of language itself. The characters are characters only because they are enunciating the lines that shoot or crawl or ring or dribble out through their mouths like chunky streams of physical matter, unbidden and almost unregarded by each other. This speech is destined for the mouths of oracles, not of actors. Characters are catalysts which embody speech, issue it, and then restrain it there on the stage of our reading, where it is suspended in a realm directed at us, yet holding us ever at an eternal distance: theatre as a suspended space between the direct address of speech and the ungraspable suspension of writing. They are not speaking to us, nor for our benefit; they do not need us. They are speaking past us. This theatre lives not in the quotidian, mundane world of relatable people having relatable feelings and doing comprehensible things, but in the fever-dreams of the world inhabited by Kabuki and Noh theatre, by Javanese and Indonesian puppet theatre, by Butoh and Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty: the space that is stretched weirdly between the irrational and the comprehensible, the sacred and the mundane, language and the flesh. Having kicked MEANING off-stage, these theatrics return to the dionysiac origins of Greek theatre - but here we find the inscrutible speech of something even more primal than the gods.