by Rinde Eckert
The following is the record of a conversation with Reinhart Poole, a character of my
creation who has become something of an alter-ego. Poole is the main character in
‘Horizon’ a play of mine. Poole is a Christian minister. This colors his views.
Poole: You’ve been pondering the role of theater in society – the use of it?
Eckert: Purely as a correlate of my search, not as a focus.
Poole: Meaning
Eckert: I lack the scholar’s or the intellectual’s enthusiasms and command of history, so my speculations on the morphology of social norms or the genealogy of idea (the various weddings and assignations and their various heirs and bastards) must be pretentious.
Poole: Let me consider the state of theater then.
Eckert: By all means. The stage is yours.
Poole: My concern, of course, is a loss of faith in the poetic that steered theater into the rich but perilous narrows of psychological realism, presumably in response to the phenomenal success of the novel and its eloquent structuring of the inchoate psyche in hours and hours of sentences and paragraphs. One can build impressive castles in that many pages. Alas, the theater, being the ‘poor player’ ‘struts its hour on the stage and is heard no more.’ Yet, through cunning and genius the theater made itself novel-like in the scope of its psychological depth and realism, its artfully detailed drawing rooms, kitchens, and gardens. Then, of course, movies entered the contest, essentially becoming graphic novels, thus further complicating the identity crisis of theater. The movie combines the detail of the novel, and its ability to change the scenery at a stroke, with pictures, music, and voices. Am I warm?
Eckert: Do you mean to imply that the temptation of playwrights will be to write screenplays masquerading as plays, that the poetic content of theater, its poetic strengths are no longer quite trusted, that mainstream theater is essentially a movie manqué?
Poole: That, or the alternative form of resignation: spectacle
Eckert: Spectacle is a form of resignation?
Poole: Spectacle as spectacle (not, for instance as the necessary extension of a poetic idea but as a fascination with grandeur) is like a little girl dressed up in her mom’s clothing shouting “Look at me!” Mom, of course, is watching TV, so she may need to be shocked to attention.
Eckert: What are you driving at?
Poole: If we fail to understand the poetic pose of theatrical art, its genius for transfiguration of the ‘chemistry’ of the sanctuary, if we lose faith in the intrinsic religious mystery of this gathering, if we fail to be thoroughly present and aware of the poetic power of the questions: “Who are we and why are we here,” we become second class storytellers holding the coat-tails of the contemporary giants of linear story-telling: the novel and its inspired child, the movie (not to mention that cunning little bastard TV and its brilliant cousin the computer)
Eckert: What is all this? What do you propose? You want to throw out unity of time and place? You want to throw out ‘Death of a Salesman’ because it’s too literal, too real, a movie manqué, as you put it?
Poole: No. No pogroms. Just an avowal of faith and a frank acknowledgement of the temptations we face, the giants we have to slay to get to the gold at the heart of the cave.
Eckert: You want to turn theater into religion?
Poole: No. But theater, in my terms, is an offering. It is, or ought to be, attempting to transform the chemistry of the sanctuary, the room.
Eckert: Isn’t that what theaters are doing now, minus the religious rhetoric.
Poole: Perhaps a few. The rest seem a little unclear about the project. Many of them behave as if a play or more precisely a theatrical offering is a theater’s way of making a bigger theater. Look, the value of religious thinking is that it pays attention to the source, it acknowledges a power at the heart of the church that isn’t actually contained or defined by that church. It says “when two or more are gathered in the name of what is Holy (or Whole) the place becomes a place of worship. You see, one needn’t tear down the theater, one has only to reaffirm one’s commitment to the original God. One need only change one’s definition. One has only to say “we are trying to find ourselves in this room, here, now. We are altering the molecular structure of the room. The comedy is deep here. The tragedy is deep here. The chemistry is volatile. We are attempting to illuminate the darkness, we are saving ourselves from darkness.
Eckert: Sounds as pretentious as one could get.
Poole: Yes, it is. It’s tragically, artfully, dangerously, comically pretentious. Exactly what it should be. We are reinvigorating the strangeness of a world that has been drugged by conventional anodynes, little narratives of no metaphoric sweep, no real danger, and no prophetic power.
Eckert: I’m uncomfortable with these terms.
Poole: You prefer cooler terms, safer terms? Theater as extension of politics? Theater as yet another entertainment in a world of entertainments? Theater as political narrative in a crowded field of narratives (movies, novels, sitcoms, miniseries)? Theater as propaganda?
Eckert: Isn’t theater useful in those terms?
Poole: Look, the difficulty with a theater that pretends to resemble the world, that sees itself as having a specific didactic function through the ‘confession” or “the little slice of life” or the “subtle morality play” is its apparent resignation to the status of subordinate to the larger theater it is bound to serve. Confessional, social, and political theater, prides itself on its lack of pretension, saying, in effect, ”this room is just the antechamber to the real theater which is out there in the world expressing itself as politics. The”real theater”, apparently is the unfolding story of justice and power. The best theater can hope for, according to this scenario is to do its job well as little-life-lesson or documentary or propaganda.
Eckert: Isn’t confessional work essentially poetic.
Poole: It can be, of course, but I have a natural suspicion of confessional work. I resent, finally, being seduced by the easy victory of its sentimental powers over my little wilderness of ironies, creating the same exact pathos every time. I’m similarly annoyed by an axiomatic iconoclasm that seeks to subvert the power of sentiment by blunt refusals, offering us a kind of ‘cool’ that supposes itself beyond the reach of temptation, well defended from the sentimental forces, and therefore oblivious to the presence of those same forces tunneling under while their dummy siege engines are drawing fire from the fortress wall. The presumed impregnability of the ‘cool’ leaves them oddly and pathetically vulnerable. No, “cool” never had much of a future. Its victorious pose is not ultimately convincing. The work is still in the field, disguised, hiding in the mud, or sitting around the campfire as one of them, memorizing the plan of attack, fathering rebellious children, subtly introducing doubt about the omniscience of their little golden gods, learning their habits, inexplicably stealing things of little value and replacing them with common utensils or fortune cookies with profound predictions.
Eckert: We seem far away from the church here.
Poole: I’m a scattershot allegorist.
Eckert: You prefer that to, say, historical analysis?
Poole: The parable, to simplify this, has an advantage over historical analysis because it admits that it can’t be true and therefore has some truth to it, whereas inspired analysis, seduced by its command of the facts, begins to think itself true, therefore it has no truth at all.
Eckert: We are back to a kind of mystery then?
Poole: Right back in church.