Performing Theology: David Adjmi's Satirical Tragedies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2022
Summary
While tragedy has been a central genre in theatre throughout history, in recent years it has become increasingly connected with satire in performance, criticism, and scholarship of Anglo-American drama (cf. Andreach 2014: ix-xii). It has been suggested that “postmodern synthetic realism” aptly describes recent developments in drama that can be observed in the works of authors such as Marcus Gardley, Young Jean Lee, and David Adjmi (Benson 2013: vii). However, these general rubrics, as I will argue in this paper, do not do justice to David Adjmi's work. Adjmi is the most popular yet least researched of these playwrights, whose work displays what I would like to call its theological reinvention of satirical tragedy.
To analyse Adjmi's work from this angle, I will first turn to theories of contemporary drama and investigate the significance of current interpretations of tragedy. A survey of his plays from this perspective will then allow us to flesh out this theological reinvention on the basis of a close reading of a three-act tragedy and a short one-act play.
Apart from these more recent developments in scholarship, discussions on developments in contemporary Anglo-American drama have revolved around the changing roles of the audience. Since one of the functions of the chorus in Greek tragedy is to represent the audience, there is a connection to the more recent concern in redefining the role of the audience. In light of the new position of the audience, it can be said that the religious underpinnings of Brechtian Theatre have become more fully realized on the contemporary stage. This thought is summarized well by David Sauer:
In the older forms of realism, as Barthes, Belsey, and Worthen have shown, audiences were placed in a position of superiority and objectivity. They judged the characters in the plays, created a thematic center as they watched, and within that framework, made their judgments with the illusion of objectivity. The postmodern plays, with their fragmentary sets, non-chronological time-schemes, and invocations of the supernatural, challenge the audience in a different way. These A-effects, as Brecht would have termed them, and as he used them, are designed to disrupt that illusion of objectivity. The position from which to judge characters is not stable, and so no one can make the kinds of judgments that were made in earlier realistic plays. (Sauer 2000: 315)
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- New Perspectives in English and American StudiesVolume One: Literature, pp. 436 - 454Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2022