EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Plays on the Mind

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Richard Foreman, an experimental playwright for more than four decades "has presided over heady spectacles that mingle the conventions of theater with ... stroboscopic stage sets designed as embodiments of the working mind [my italics.]" In his most recent play "action assumes head-scratching form in flashing lights and a character who mysteriously marches across the stage with a drum." "Theater of [this] sort", they continue, "ever enterprising and absurd, has earned Mr. Foreman a wealth of awards and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant."¹  

I wonder, though, whether all great plays depict the mind. Hamlet, for instance, can easily be read as a depiction of Shakespeare's. Other scripts by him, too. I have already described Eugène Ionesco's Exit the King in a fairly similar way with the king, of course, as his ego.² In a blog on the Hollywood film Ratatouille (2007) I argued it was true in films as well, lots of them.³ If this is accurate generally, then Foreman's plays are relatively novel not because they depict the mind but because, like Ionesco, he no longer disguises it to the same extent. I'm not sure of the reason for making it more obvious but it seems to be a characteristic feature of modern and contemporary culture. Think of Francis Bacon's paintings or Salvador Dali's or The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Whatever the reason, the change shines a light on the illusion of narrative in past drama. Like the illusion of external reality in past art, it allowed sleeping minds to sleep.

 

1. Andy Battaglia, "Richard Foreman, at Play in the Theater Lab", Wall Street Journal (U.S. edition), May 17, 2013, p. A17

2. Abrahams, "Exit the King", 9th Dec. 2010. See something similar in Abrahams, "Michelangelo's Skull", 7th Oct. 2012.

3. Abrahams, "Ratatouille and the Great Masters (of all genders)", 27th April 2011