Points of View

If I were granted one and only one wish for the theater, it would be that artistic directors, managing directors, theater boards, funding organizations, critics, all those who have the power to choose, would choose from their heart's dictates and stop trying to outsmart themselves and outsmart audiences. It would be that they stop pretending they are doing something relevant, because they are not. You can't do something relevant unless you do it from your heart. And audiences would do the same: they would stop pretending that they understand what they are seeing, and that what they are seeing is relevant.
       If everyone chose from their heart's dictates, theater would flourish and everyone would love it. There would not be writers writing plays by formula. Nor would audiences think that they know the ropes and look for signposts to help them pretend they understand something that is only a signpost. This pretending gives but a shallow satisfaction and ultimately creates a distaste for the theater.
       If theater is to be successful it must be loved like one loves an animal that one wonders at. Not like one loves a formula. If people would love the theater like they love an animal, they would enjoy the theater and they would want to go to the theater. And if you asked them, "What is utopia?" they would say, "Theater is utopia."

MARIA IRENE FORNES
                                                                                                                                
 
"The future of the theater is cheap seats."
                                                   Peter Brook
 
"The concept of hegemony means political leadership is based on consent of the led, a consent which is secured by the diffusion and popularization of the world view of the ruling class."
 Antonio Gramsci
 
"Properly understood the theatre critic's intent is to mediate between the play and those who produce it, not between the play and the audience.Her/His work is rewarded by more informed productions, not by more enlightened audiences. The audience should learn from the play they see."
Richard Schechner

                                                                                                                               
"For Greenaway: in a society dominated by vulgarity and the God of Money, filmmaking and the making of every art are profoundly political acts."
 Kathy Acker                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for the masses) and as an object of surveillance (for the rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.
Susan Sontag





 
Susan Sontag on Samuel Beckett
Beckett is dealing with emotions, however abstractly, and there is a progress from one emotion to the next that feels inevitable. Not only are his plays narrative but, as Joe Chaikin once observed, Beckett has actually discovered a new dramatic subject. Normally people on stage reflect on the macrostructure of action. What am I going to do this year? Tomorrow? Tonight? They ask: Am I going mad? Will I ever get to Moscow? Should I leave my husband? Do I have to murder my Uncle? My Mother? These are the sorts of large projects that have traditionally concerned a play’s leading characters. Beckett is the first writer to dramatize the microstructure of action. What am I going to do one minute from now? In the next second? Weep? Take out my comb? Stand-up? Sigh? Sit? Be silent? Tell a joke? Understand something? His plays are built on reflections leading to decisions, which imparts to his dramas a real narrative push.


"My work is a matter of fundamental sounds made
  as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else.
  If people want to have headaches among the overtones,
  let them."
Samuel Beckett