The theater is always dying

Stanley Gontarski

doi:10.18778/1505-9057.59.11

Authors

Stanley Gontarski Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University, Departmentof English, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580, USA https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2899-4209

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1505-9057.59.11

Keywords:

Communitas, Victor Turner, David Mamet, Marshall McLuhan, Ariane Mnouchkin, Dionysia, Jerzy Grotowski, Laboratory Theatre, Peter Brook, Charles Marowitz, Richard Schechner, Antonin Artaud, Herbert Blau, Samuel Beckett

Abstract

The Theater Is always Dying traces the resilience of live theatrical performance in the face of competing performative forms like cinema, television and contemporary streaming services on personal, hand-held devices and focuses on theater’s ability to continue as a significant cultural, community and intellectual force in the face of such competition. To echo Beckett, we might suggest, then, that theater may be at its best at its dying since its extended demise seems self-regenerating. Whether or not you “go out of the theatre more human than when you went in”, as Ariane Mnouchkin suggests, or whether you’ve had a sense that you’ve been part of, participated in a community ritual, a Dionysia, or whether or not you’ve felt that you’ve been affected by a performative, an embodied intellectual and emotional human experience may determine how you judge the state of contemporary theater. You may not always know the answer to those questions immediately after the theatrical encounter, or ever deliberately or consciously, but something, nonetheless, may have been taking its course. You may emerge “more human than when you went in”.

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Author Biography

Stanley Gontarski, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University, Departmentof English, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580, USA

Stanley Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, where he edited the “Journal of Beckett Studies” from 1989–2008. His recent books include (with eds. Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison) Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the follow-up Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism appeared in 2014. His critical, bilingual edition of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was published as Un tram che si chiama desiderio / A Streetcar Named Desire in the series Canone teatrale europeo/Canon of European Drama from Editioni ETS in Pisa, 2012. He has also edited The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories, and Translations (2012) and The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014), both from Edinburgh University Press; his monograph, Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze has appeared in 2015 to launch his book series “Other Becketts” with Edinburgh University Press, from which his Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett’s Late Modernism appeared in fall 2016. His Przedstawienie Becketta: Eseje o Becketcie (ed. Tomasz Wiśniewski and Miłosz Wojtyna) appeared from the University of Gdańsk and Maski Press in 2016. His Beckett’s “Happy Day”: A Manuscript Study, appeared from Ohio State University Press in 2017; Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn appeared from Bloomsbury Academic in 2018; and his Burroughs Unbound: William Burroughs and the Performance of Writing is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic and Włodzimierz Staniewski and the Phenomenon of “Gardzienice” (ed. with Tomasz Wiśniewski and Katarzyna Kręglewska) is forthcoming from Routledge.

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