Aristotle and Contemporary Theatre

I just finished reading the play The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman. Before continuing, let me say that I could not recommend it for its moral content, for its content is absolutely amoral from a Christian perspective. Not only does it portray the Christian faith in a false and negative way, it presents as absolutely normal a sinful lifestyle. I read it in order to be informed about the play because it will be performed this fall at an area high school.

That said, the play contains what Kaufman calls a series of "moments," an idea he derived from a Brecht essay in which Brecht describes "an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place." There is no traditional plot in Kaufman's play, no traditional character development. There is a series of actors who come on stage to portray various characters. Occasionally the characters interact, but the play is in long stretches a concatenation of monologues. To be honest, I did find the technique interesting.

Musing then about dramaturgy in general, I took a look at Aristotle's Poetics and found the following.

"The tragedies of most of the moderns are characterless -- a defect common among poets of all kinds.... [O]ne may string together a series of characteristic speeches of the utmost finish as regards Diction and Thought, and yet fail to produce a true tragic effect; but one will have much better success with a tragedy which, however inferior in these respects, has a Plot, a combination of incidents, in it." (Poetics 1450a)

Clearly Aristotle would not approve of Kaufman's work nor, I would imagine, of much else in modern theatre.

He goes on,

"[T]he poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse...; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars." (Poetics, 1451b)

And now we get to the heart of it. When Aristotle talks of poets and poetry, he is talking of drama, for all drama was written in poetic meter. Today, music, theatre, movies, and television, are obsessed with the singulars rather than the universals. Rather than transcend the historical moment in which it is produced, dramatic and musical art seems focused on becoming ever more accurate in what it portrays. In fact, verisimilitude seems to be the prime, if not the sole, criterion for measuring success in drama and lyrical music. The more the rap artist uses language like what is found on the streets, the more the police drama can use real-life scenarios and procedures, the better.

What, then, takes us beyond the suffocatingly immanent? Obsessed with the here-and-now, we find ourselves looking only and ever more inward. What can lift our eyes to where, as Pope once observed, "hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise?" Alas, it is not The Laramie Project, however interesting or novel its dramaturgy. Aeschylus' trilogy Oresteia or Sophocles' Oedipus cycle, perhaps Euripides' Alcestis, to say nothing of Shakespeare or even the more recent A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt...these fulfill Aristotle's vision, for indeed they are pieces of graver import than anything else to be found today.

Why Our School Exists

I ran across the following article and found it to be an insightful and incisive argument for why The Summit Academy exists. It is not long and is well worth your time to read.

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2009/08/what-do-you-want-an-engraved-dismissal.html

In addition, there is this on the recent New Hampshire court ruling, forcing a young girl to attend the local public school because it found she was too much like her mother, who homeschooled her, when it came to the issue of her Christian faith. No, I am not making this up!