A few weeks ago I saw‘Exit the King’ with Geoffrey Rush in NYC. (I saw a 1/2 price preview). It was a reasonable interpretation, if you accept Ionesco as shtick. Still, few plays are worth the exorbitant price of these star driven Broadway shows, when there is great stuff off and off off Broadway, and in Boston, and in any city where arts can thrive. To get the public to also patronize non-blockbuster theater and museums , be driven by curiosity into galleries, foriegn films, small dance and theater companies, and then get into fights in bars over art and not just over sports and politics – we obviously need a culture that supports and prioritizes artistic expression. If we’re going stay human in the post-human future taking arts programs from the schools is a really bad start.
Which leads me to this Tribeca Film Festival blurb regarding the film TRANSCENDENT MAN about Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology:

“Kurzweil predicts that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, humanity is fast approaching an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than today. This will be the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations. In Kurzweil’s post-biological world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. Human aging and illness will be reversed, world hunger and poverty will be solved, and we will ultimately cure death.”

Returning to the Ionesco and his take on the folly of power, the anxiety of death, in Exit the King and thinking about all his wonderful ‘absurdist’ comedy/dramas on the state of modern man (Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano, The Chairs) – led me to find this quote:

“In all the cities of the world, it is the same. The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and backbreaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.”

- Notes et Contre Notes, Eugene Ionesco

We have been warned!!

He was one of the great influences for me in appreciating what live theater was capable of, and in the way I could cope with the world going increasingly mad. His work, when well done, was electric on stage. Both small companies and major productions could make his work either amazing, or confusing. When he was well directed and acted these plays made it clear why live theater is the great communal art. Both actors and audience had to work at understanding and recounting what they saw – which led to arguments and spirited conversations, which is what the best theater should do – not just entertain us but alert us to the world, make us attentive, and demand we talk to one another.

And the way we talk to each other has really changed in the last half century. Pinter’s writing is about that seething subtext of information that has always existed in conversation and relationships, and that it is usual about power.

We needed to see the humor in the perversion and power of language especially as the politics became more nakedly duplicitous. The nadir finally came in a total debasing of language and democratic principle with the intrusion (also the term for a cluster of cockroaches) of Bush/Cheney/Atwater-Rove/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft and their good soldiers like Gonzales and John Yoo. Language was not only less exacting (“It’s totally like, you know -whatever”) – but it became a tool of mass manipulation and a medium for domination. What is “freedom” again? What is “peace”? Mollified and trivialized by our entertainments we were at once were driven to fear and division by the crudest language that pushed the easiest buttons.
In his later plays, Pinter’s rhetoric grew angrier, shorter, and more direct. The last Pinter I saw was “One for the Road” a chilling one-act that merely laid out an interrogation. That was from 1984, when that devil of masquerade Reagan, (mis)led the masses with his soothing rhetoric. How much worse things would become. His anger was justified and his commitment to be admired.

I was lucky this year to also see the wickedly clever No Man’s Land revived by the American Repertory Theater, directed by the Pinter master David Wheeler. It featured the late Paul Benedict, Wheeler’s son Lewis, and a stunner of a performance by Max Wright. It stung and disoriented as the best Pinter always would.
Unlike David Mamet who seems to have devolved more and more into loving the sound of his own writing, and who seems uncommitted as a humanist or politically, Pinter’s language lets the audience do the work and in doing so find the conscience of the play. As much as I have loved and do admire Mamet he sometimes feels overly clever. In my craving for anything resembling Pinter I’ll drive to New York to see Jez Butterworth. The writing is edgy, the subtexts dark, but they just don’t resonate like Pinter. Pillowman did, Albee does, Shanley can, Adam Rapp is wonderfully outrageous. There’s still great theater out there.
But Pinter remains the godfather, not the least reason being his great great sense of humor. Read the monologue about the squash game from Betrayal to be reminded of how delicate and vicious and perfect and great Pinter speech can be. These are great plays to read over and over and ought to be sought out wherever you can.
David Wheeler talks about Pinter here:

A great life! Citing John Cage, he has a great quote:
“John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”