A Play by Any Other Name

...Does it matter...

...Instead, his absorption in theory, still-born and unresonant, leads us to the most private and personal corner in a room without windows or doors, inevitably obscuring our understanding of plays, whatever they are called...

...His perceptions here, free as they are of critical cant, are sharp and illuminating...

...Strangely, while Shakespeare, Racine, Schiller, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Calderon, do not escape the strictures of Abel's little book of verbal rules for playwrights...

...Over and again he will refer to what Shakespeare must have felt, or to such personal fantasies as Racine's Athaliah bleeding a little after each chorus...

...But it would not have moved Abel anywhere until it had been designated muverunk, twittles or, satisfactorily, wheel...

...He is obsessed by daemons, by destiny, by definitions and connotations of tragedy...

...In this criticism of convenience, the rule of the game is that there are no rules...

...Forster describes how Tasso went mad trying to conform to the laws of Aristotle...

...Lacking such heavy philosophical pressure, and depending so inordinately upon the seeming power of names, words and labels, the book finally gives us far too much time to notice the traps, confusions and contradictions into which Abel plunges as he laces the straitjacket more firmly around his mind...

...This is designed to bolster a form covering many plays which we had previously linked under the name of tragedy, but which now we are to accept as metatheatre...

...It was a play...

...but we would let it pass as one means among many for preserving a job designed to find labels for products that few people need and more people must be made to want...

...former managing editor, "Theatre Arts" Metatheatre, it develops, is not a discovery...

...The wheel by any other name would still be the first invention to set man apart from beast...

...What is ironic is that in the name of discussing form, he writes either about words or about the life and career of the playwright...

...Yet he does himself several disservices by relying so heavily upon labels: His own considerable and potentially persuasive powers are persistently straitjacketed by the demands of words...

...Again, Abel does himself a disservice: The founding of a school or of a philosophy requires something written under the pressure of what amounts to a single moment of writing time...

...reason is strangled at birth...

...He is the first to think of metatheatre and he will be the last...

...Metatheatre by any other name would still not stand for the discovery of a new theatrical continent...

...Forster said it well: "In an age which is respectful to theory—as for instance the seventeenth century was respectful to Aristotle's theory of the dramatic unities—a theory may be helpful and stimulating, particularly to the sense of form...

...It is a loss to us that Abel, with all his suggestiveness, is not one of them...

...Thus, Abel likes Brecht, but he does not like the label, "epic theater...

...From the mouth of a serious critic, it cannot be permitted to pass...

...His tendency is to discuss not the work at hand, but the word that properly or conveniently "describes" the work...

...Abel asks if he can be "the first one to think of designating a form which has been in existence for so long a time, about three hundred years...

...Those who are moved by Endgame and Waiting for Godot without benefit of Abel's inside biographical view that the plays are really about Beckett's relationship with Joyce, absolutely astonish him...

...Abel is against overly psychological criticism, yet he cannot see that he himself is an amateur analyst of the playwright and the characters, often mistaking one for the others...

...Jack Gelber does...

...We have only a few critics who can define plays as plays...

...The failure of the playwrights he discusses to call their plays "metatheatre," and the manner in which their work must be bent by Abel to fit his designation offer only too painful an answer...

...This leads him into a number of romantic fallacies, the breed of criticism that was supposed to have died with those 19th century actresses who were so busy justifying their own behavior on stage by making educated guesses about Viola's sighs, Rosalind's feelings before the play began, and Imogen's dreams while the shepherds speak their litany over her prostrate form...

...The form of the play and the form of the audience seem to blend through Abel's eyes: The "fix" the junkies seek directly reflects the "high" experience people seek today from all kinds of odd sources because the old "high" experiences—love, friendship, heroic adventure, martyrdom, and the act of creation—are increasingly impossible for so many people today...

...Suddenly and surprisingly, he replaces one set of critical tools with another: He responds to the play that Gelber wrote, not to the play that Abel wrote for Gelber...

...Shakespeare, in his infinite carelessness, was more fortunate...

...Abel felt this...

...Did Shakespeare call them tragedies...

...He saw it...

...Somewhere past the middle of his book, the name is finally defined: "the world is a stage, life is a dream...

...The pressure in this volume is weightless, suspending argument, propelling us nowhere in time...

...What is shiningly individual to Abel remains darkly elusive to us...

...From the mouth of a babe on Madison Avenue, such a truism might be disputed on the grounds that it represents no significant discovery either about art or life...

...He wrote about it...

...He argues tediously against Martin Esslin's coinage of the "absurd," though Esslin has always been careful to stress the fact that the word is only a handle for a view of life, and not in itself a description of a circumscribed school of theater...

...A line of Shakespeare can be used to translate a line of Racine...

...But the critic's trickery is not clever by half: While he finds sustenance for his arguments by agreeing with himself, both his reader and his playwright prance nimbly into more relevant territory...

...and ingenuity soon becomes a substitute for thought...

...Well yes, but who was he...

...And when it suits Abel, he seems to forgive a playwright whom he admires when that playwright is foolish enough to use a name for his plays other than metatheatre...

...he is concerned with being right, with questions of true tragedy or false daemons...

...Did he leave behind a treatise on daemons in tragedy...

...He simply submits himself to the experience of the play, implicitly commends it for the manner in which it realizes its intentions, and moves on to several illuminating observations about the play in relation to its audience...

...No doubt he regards The Connection as metatheatre, but he relieves us by never bringing the word into discussion...

...Abel's purpose is patently higher...

...or rather, that there are rules for playwrights, but none for critics...

...It is a strange and not undramatic fact of life," says Lionel Abel, "that something shiningly individual will continue to be seen darkly until it has been given a name...

...It is not important to the present or future of any art that phrases be anything more than servants to ideas...

...Abel's intention is clear: to find an alternative to tragedy...

...Criticism, it is true, can often be a form of promotion or a means of self-advertisement...

...Such romanticism domesticates the critic's world...

...Macbeth, in fact, is Abel's—I mean Shakespeare's— "one real tragedy...

...Momentarily he relaxes his critical guard and even asks himself what the author's view might be...

...It is an invention...

...The new word is expected to bring system and order into disparate pieces...

...They need not be definitively "good" in themselves...

...His failure is equally clear: he has not found an alternative, he has only made up a new name...

...Shakespeare," says Abel, "might even have been pointing to the main meaning of the play, in making Macduff stress the word all...

...no matter whatever Brecht may have intended, his work proves the viability of metatheater...

...But the italics are Abel's, not Shakespeare's...

...King Lear fails because the critic maintains that two remarks, spoken by two different characters in separate acts under different circumstances, contradict one another...

...Hamlet and Othello are not tragedies...

...This is said, not because life or art should be pursued apart from theory (our nation of pragmatic realists has surely taken that "theory" too far), but because there is more to theory than the naming of it, particularly today...

...Have we learned anything from this verbal byplay...

...And not even muverunk would help...

...But in discussing other recent developments, he forgets first responses...

...Names, as such, were important only to the Capulets and Montagues, who were rigid moralists, narrow people, and —if they were to practice the art— bad critics...

...A collection of essays and speculations written over a period of years for such magazines as Commentary, Partisan Review and The New Leader, it makes little effort to describe and discuss metatheatre and metaplays in any systematic manner...

...a theory in the modern world has little power over the fine arts, for good or evil...

...The construction of aesthetic theories and their comparison are desirable cultural exercises: the theories themselves are unlikely to spread far or to hinder or to help...

...The book is only partially unified by its title...

...Because Lear does not, by Abel's definition, become daemonic, the play itself is not a tragedy...

...Can we care...

...Well no, he was, after all, a careless man...