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The catastrophes of the 20th century have restored to favor cyclical philosophies of history with their implications of recurrent patterns of evil. The electronic rapidity of instantaneous information everywhere makes the plot and story line of the well-made play seem slowpoky. The modern play is all middle like a Happening, all now. Unable to conceive of a destination, it coils endlessly around its theme. Genet's The Blacks begins and ends with identical scenes; so does Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. Almost nothing has happened. There is the suggestion of unalterable and eternal repetitions in human behavior. Pinter does this almost subliminally with poetically repetitive speech patterns.
What these modern playwrights aim for is not to convey actions, messages or answers but states of being and feeling. Some playgoers insist that they hate and cannot comprehend these modern plays. The playwrights counter that this hate is what Oscar Wilde described as "the rage of Caliban at seeing his own face." No doubt, they are reporting as honestly as they know how on a moral wasteland. But it is a selected part of the terrain of life, and selection implies exclusion.
These playwrights tend to examine the metaphysical at the expense of the physical, to probe inner psychic space and ignore outer social space. There is little happiness, less love and no hint of the pleasures of existence in these plays. But have all the juices and joys of life dried up? Scarcely. Since these authors' characters are purposely distorted and dematerialized, one cannot identify with them any more than a man can identify with his own X rays. Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage, and he made his stage all the world. With skeletal casts and bare bleak stages, today's thinking playwright invokes the world only as a metaphor of threat and dread.
Questions Without Answers
There is a tendency of the mind to exhaust itself over questions that life either boldly brushes aside or answers with the authority of natural instincts. As G. K. Chesterton put it: "The note of our age is a note of interrogation. And the final point is so plain; no skeptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon. 'Am I a boy?—Why am I a boy—Why aren't I a chair?—What is a chair?' A child will sometimes ask these sort of questions for two hours"—almost the precise duration of a play.
Such inward-gazing drama has inevitably triggered a quest for its opposite, an outward-looking theater. Two possibilities are on the horizon. Some English directors and producers are inaugurating a so-called "theater of fact," with a documentary focus on contemporary world events such as the war in Viet Nam and the Cuban missile crisis, including a hoped-for interview with Khrushchev. Another possibility is the theater of cruelty, a kind of sauna bath of the senses, designed to leave playgoers shocked and tingling at every emotional pore. British Director Peter Brook masterminded Broadway's full-length initiation into the theater of cruelty, this season's surprise smash success, Marat/ Sade.