Talk of the Town - In praise of theater November 04 2000

One way to revivify the city’s imagination

PushPush Theater’s recent production of Murray Mednick’s new play, Tirade for Three, was one of the most thought-provoking pieces of theater I’ve seen in Atlanta in a long time.
In barely an hour of rather surreal conversation about an act of violence, three actors effectively laid bare the manner in which the imagination brings meaning to events — and the way media can stand in for authentic imagination. The media’s reflexively uttered clichés supply false cohesion and meaning in a world that in reality bears more in common with those moments of senseless violence that annihilate selfhood and, weirdly, plunge us into awe.
Following the brief play, the cast and a member of PushPush’s staff conducted a discussion with the audience. Ironically, after skewering the audience’s dependency on predictable narratives, the PushPush staffer repeatedly apologized for the play’s lack of linearity. She promised that other Mednick works are more “accessible.” I don’t think her intention was to disparage the play, but her promise of more linear works sounded like an ironic moment penned by Mednick himself — and threw some of us out of the awe into which we’d journeyed, back into the media’s safer, more sensible world.
Like any rather radical artist in Atlanta, the PushPush apologist was no doubt a bit shell-shocked by life in a city that really doesn’t know how to imagine itself in very fresh ways. Recently, I wrote here about the way the failure to cultivate respect of the aesthetic life has created an inhospitable landscape in Buckhead that, in my view, attracts violence as a protest against the insult to the inherent need for beauty.
The idea that the imagination can evoke beauty out of life’s inexplicable weirdness — altering the ugly landscape of Buckhead or the interior life of the individual — is certainly not new with me. The Greeks understood this fully and, in fact, it’s one apparent reason they required their entire population, including slaves, to go to the theater.
Free man and slave alike were also inducted into some of the mystery cults where theatrical rituals gave people tools to imagine their lives differently. On stage and in the temples, you met the gods, who were understood to be personifications of the imagination — as real as stones, as petty as humans and as elementally un-real and mysterious as bright-eyed animals hiding in the dark.
Atlanta is lucky to have theaters like PushPush where the woefully few who patronize theater in this city can push their imaginations beyond the predictable. But there is a wealth of other theater — most of it outside the city’s largest stages — where Atlantans can go to examine what it means to live vividly and imaginatively.
For example, Wier Harman, the new director of Actor’s Express, staged The Illusion last month. Tony Kushner’s adaptation of a 17th century French piece demonstrates the way imagination can re-structure the way we recollect our lives and our relationship to authority. (Memory, the Greeks also understood, is just another variety of fantasy.)
I thought Harman’s choice as his debut was a moving announcement to the city of the importance of theater and the imagination in overthrowing conventions of culture and personal drama. It was hard, knowing something of Kushner’s politics and philosophy, not also to see the play as commenting on what happens when we bring our love, our eros, to the community in imaginative ways.
There is still time for you to see Theatre in the Square’s staging of Master Class. This play by Terrence McNally is based on diva Maria Callas’ master class at Julliard. As such, it too examines the imagination. Kathleen McManus brilliantly incarnates the diva, one of the last century’s great muses.
What Callas suffers in service to art challenges the small, grim narratives of current psychological culture. How does an individual, a woman in particular, or an entire community live in service to the weird imagination without being destroyed by it? That, of course, is the terror the imagination presents to us — and to the paternal authority figure in Kushner’s play. The imagination undermines authority, like the inflexible canon of commercial development in Atlanta, and, like PushPush’s play, casts us into a chaotic awe, the pandemonium of images.
Interestingly, the decision by Theatre in the Square to stage a McNally play is itself a comment on the capacity of the imagination to unglue authority. It was an earlier McNally play that caused Cobb County commissioners to adopt their notorious resolution “condemning” homosexuality. That in turn cost the county some events in the ‘96 Olympics.
You can also explore the imagination at the Center for Puppetry Arts. The center is presenting its annual Halloween show as part of its Xperimental series. One of the pieces, the best by far but much too short, explores what happens to a writer in solitude as he awaits the arrival of his muse. Another explores violence and, not unlike the PushPush production, leaves you in awe at how little we control in our lives — how we are, in a way, marionettes run by invisible forces and random occurrence.
Most of us understand the need to have open hearts and minds. We understand that love and tolerance enrich our lives. It is the same with the imagination. Indeed, I don’t think you can have much love and tolerance without the capacity to imagine. But we don’t cultivate the imagination as actively as we do the heart and mind in this culture, in this city in particular. The theater is a place to begin practicing that more actively.
Cliff Bostock, MA, is a doctoral candidate in depth psychology.