Artaud despised and reviled the body. He hated sex and used the social horrors traditionally associated with the most vulgar language to castigate it in all forms. In what we can only call, with generosity, his less lucid periods, the bodily language he used to execrate intercourse, reproduction, even masturbation, makes the flesh crawl and the mind turn aside from an image of disease ridden with disease. The body for Artaud was only a laboratory, ill-equipped and chaotically organized before a dispersed and distracted master, in which to study, as best he could, the machinery of pain. No other dramatic theorist, including Stanislavski, has had such a sense of the actor as a body in space and time, a living gorge through which must plummet the full range of what men and women may whisper about, murmur over, shriek out, snicker at, weep, laugh or howl before. But if there was anything more cruel in Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” than the unstinging rigor that gave it its name, it was the conception of a translation from mind to physicality through a fine grid of physical and mental hurting that was — if his writing is to be trusted — Artaud’s body from adolescence through its premature senescence and death.
Susan Sontag wrote in 1973 (and has been much quoted for writing it)-
The course of all recent serious theater in Europe and America can be divided into two periods — before Artaud and after Artaud.
— where “after Artaud” (post hoc ergo propter hoc) clearly means because of Artaud.
After Artaud?
Theater-in-the-round; a revival of political street theater; theater in unexpected places; multiple theaters in great centers built especially to display all of theater’s myriad forms; light shows; improvisations; puppets, in all sizes and to all levels of abstraction; the interest in various traditions of Eastern theater. Both the abstract unit set and the infinite complexities of stagecraft one sees in a Broadway musical can be envisioned through Artaud; so can the idea of film as a recognized art form — if it will only consent to be film. And of course the work of such innovators as Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Charles Ludlum, María Irene Fornés, Robert Wilson, Richard Forman, and Ethyl Eichelberger in this country; while to say Brook, Grotowski, or Handke is only to make the flimsiest gesture toward European stage art. Basically, what comes after Artaud is almost anything one might call modern in the theater that does not trace directly back to Brecht — with whom, of course, Artaud overlaps anyway. Not only can all the theatrical trends listed above be traced to Artaud, but their seeds can almost all be found in that slim book of theatrical meditations already cited.
And before Artaud?
It is my intention in this inquiry to examine the fiction that before Artaud there was Richard Wagner and Wagner’s theater — and that, as a paradigm for serious art, there was little else. And it is only against this titantic background that the problem Artaud presents can best be appreciated.
To make this an interesting fiction, however, and worthy of our hermeneutical energies, we must limit it in some severe, some rigorous, some cruel ways.
I do not mean that Wagner was the only artist before Artaud to produce interesting or significant art. I do not mean that Wagner was (though many have claimed it) the greatest artist who ever lived. Perhaps this is the place to mention how I came to Wagner’s music. In my case, a late adolescent love of Anton von Webern developed naturally over the years to include his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, and We- bern’s fellow pupil, Alban Berg. To know any of these composers in depth is to know the respect in which they held Wagner…
III
My first exposure to Wagner’s music-drama was in the summer of 1966. I’d just returned to New York from my first trip to Europe and was living alone in a cluttered apartment on East 6th Street in the city’s Lower East Side — Marilyn had recently removed to an apartment on Henry Street and our relationship was such that I had not gone along. Among scant possibilities for making a little money, an older friend named Ed McCabe suggested to me and another friend of mine, Paul, who lived with his truck-driver lover, Joe, around on Avenue B, that we try “supering” at the Metropolitan Opera, which was about to open with its first production at its new home in the recently-completed Lincoln Center.
Far larger than the old one in the just-demolished Metropolitan Opera House, the new stage at Lincoln Center would require far more “supers” than before. And the house’s opening production was to be particularly lavish.
The word “super” comes from supernumerary — often just called a “spear carrier.” Supers are costumed figures in the opera who neither sing, speak, nor dance, but who fill out the stage picture in the lavish, colorful spectacles.
Supers were not paid for rehearsal.
But they were given fifteen dollars a performance. And so, one afternoon, with Ed and Paul, I reported to the stage door in the white marbled wall of the new theater building to attend the first of half a dozen rehearsals for the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Anthony and Cleopatra, starring Leontyne Price and directed by Franco Zeffirelli, with black dancer Alvin Ailey both as choreographer and assistant director.
The music from Barber’s opera was not popular either with the singers nor — once it premiered — with the public. Largely for technical reasons the production itself was something of a fiasco. A giant turntable that was supposed to be on geared metal wheels had been put on rubber rollers instead to save money — and turned out not to be able to move under the weight of the actors and scenery. Machinery that was to roll a scenic construction from the back of the city-block-deep stage up to the footlights failed to function on opening night. But though I played an angry merchant in the first act’s market scene and an Egyptian slave in Act Two (where, with Paul, under the bluest of blue lights, I carried a couch to center stage and left it there), this is not the place to detail the calamities that deviled the production from rehearsals on through its half-dozen performances. What it meant, however, was that I was allowed to super in a subsequent production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which the Met mounted only a little later that same season.
I was only required in Act Three, where I was one of the burghers who gathers with the others to hear Hans Sachs’s “prize song.” My part was quintessentially simple, and so required that I attend only two rehearsals — one of which I believe I missed. At the cue, I entered with a dozen other black-costumed burghers to stand at one side of a small bridge. We waited through the prize song. At a certain point, drummers entered over the same bridge and stood beside us, while the chorus sang the finale.
Very simple.
The production’s opening night, however, was as dramatic and even more fraught than the Barber. I lingered in the wings, looking out on the broad stage all through Act One. Twenty minutes into it, Justino Diaz, who sang Hans Sachs, developed an extraordinary bloody nose. One of the technicians, lounging beside a TV monitor flickering beside me, commented that Diaz was singing with his face staring almost straight into the flies. Minutes later, in an unscheduled exit, he rushed off, leaving Walter and Beckmesser to sing on alone, and practically bumped into me. I looked around as he grabbed a towel from a distraught dresser, dropped his head, and seemed to spew out mouthfuls of blood! Smearing his face with gore, he spat out more blood; blood ran in cascades from his nose, while the whole, huge backstage area went into spreading chaos among the dozens of technicians, stagehands, administrators, friends — and supers — who fill the cavernous wings of such a theater at any moment in a performance. There were whispers of halting the production, of bringing in the understudy — all of which Diaz protested, vehemently, hoarsely, quietly. A few minutes later, he rushed back out on the stage to sing again.