Innovation in Five Acts by Caridad Svich

Author:Caridad Svich [Svich, Caridad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781559368407
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group

ACT THREE

TASK

INNOVATION IN WRITING

Octavio Solis

When I think of innovation in the theatre, I can’t help but summon up writing examples, which is understandable, since I am first and foremost a playwright myself. I’m always struggling to keep my writing fresh by treading on new ground, and the inspiration I draw from my colleagues is not to be underestimated. I have had many startling moments in the theatre when a particular writer executed something dramatically new and untried in his or her work. An experiment with language. A devising of new structural forms for storytelling. A rethinking of particular characters or tropes. An unconscious exorcism of the rules we follow when we write for the stage. But the one consistent thread that all my brushes with innovation have in common is the writers’ insistent and persuasive way of seeing. It begins inevitably with their singular vision.

My first experience with the kind of contemporary innovation came when I saw The Woman: Scenes of War and Freedom by Edward Bond at London’s National Theatre. Here this celebrated playwright took the familiar war myths of the Greeks and stretched them beyond what seemed dialectically possible in order to shed new light on our contemporary obsession with war. The fiery intellect of Bond shaped even the acting styles. I’d never seen anything like that before. But I quickly understood something about history. I learned that it’s not a rigid palette upon which human events are indelibly etched, but that the past is a living organism subject to the actions of the present. We change the past every time we look at it, and in the theatre, we inhabit it to serve our needs.

Harold Pinter has long been an accomplished and admired writer, and most of us have been familiar with his works. There’s an approach to the world that brands his works with that unique Pinteresque touch. It’s a world where the unknown is just out of view, a world where people act out of a palpable sense of menace and madness. On that score alone, he is an innovator. But what he did with his masterpiece Betrayal completely upended our understanding of narrative structure. He reversed time and arranged his scenes (with some exceptions) from the last moment to the first. We began to perceive human impulses and gestures differently as we turned inevitability and fate on its head. Our concerns were not with how things would end up but rather how they would begin, for there the seed of crime was sown.

Suzan-Lori Parks is a writer I have been lucky to have known in my lifetime. I consider her one of our great geniuses. Each of her plays is a radical gem of striking language and syncopation. The molecules in her world operate in much the same way they do in Samuel Beckett’s darkest works. But as I saw in The America Play, Suzan-Lori’s molecules vibrate to the rhythm of Modern Jazz. In this work, we contemplate a new vision of Lincoln and his assassination and its place in post-modern African-American life.

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