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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY) orientation, it’s frightening: the interior spaces, evoking their manifold remodelings with their — to my eyes — utterly illogical connections, sometimes strike me as downright hostile. I’m utterly incapable of finding my way, and indeed, I give up right away, on the first day. In the theater, as also of course in any context, it is dangerous to speak of “a single truth,” but in this case I think of the singular event of reality becoming fact, and not of the diversity of perceptions: the spiritual development that becomes a life fact feels unique in the (practically unknown to the individual) present, which, as a matter of fact, is the it exists and the Jam. Purcärete uses abstract and largely unknown theological concepts as easily as if they were self-evident, yet the company doesn’t start in fright because his next sentence expresses the theatrical language in which he explicates The Tragedy of Man, not solely Madach’s “dramatic poem” but the conditio humana itself: namely, that which interests us, nolens volens, in theater. People who’ve just been resurrected perform the work for us, an amateur company whose hands have just picked up the script of The Tragedy of Man and who sense an unknown prompting, arising from the depths, to realize this salvation-poem. It is the theater of parousia, and right in the midst of Lent, which is an especially significant season in Romanian culture, even, mutatis mutandis, in the age of the consumer apocalypse. During Lent, the city changes its aspect: restaurants and sidewalk crépe stalls and food carts offer Lenten menus, bells toll more frequently than at other times, visibly more people go to church even on weekdays. This is less noticeable in Hungarian communities, but the atmosphere of the whole city still exerts an effect on everyone. Purcarete’s world is the theater of forms, the theatrum theologicum. The form: memory, or rather, the act of remembering. Dust or seaside sand: amnesia. Not only the memory loss of terrestrial beings, but also of astral ones: stardust mingles with the dust, it is not only human bones that become dust — so that we might already think of our appearance and disappearance as form. And to the extent that it is form, it must always be concrete, fundamentally sensory, and experiential: this is what he places in opposition to the abstract quality of Madach’s poem. Faced with the great questions, all of us — if, of course, we’re fortunate — are poor in spirit. And theater, when it reflects, engrossed, on its own historicity, and then sharply questions its own identity, becomes the existence-laboratory of the poor in spirit: theologia pauperum. What are we performing? Bunraku theater, in our humble manner. The performing actor doesn’t speak: he makes an action visible. The actor who speaks is not acting: he makes speech audible and exists as the double of the one who acts in the performance space. This would be the concept of the production being prepared. There is something in this that I find dazzling: the separation of body from soul. The fact that, as it were, we have stepped back into time for the timespan of the performance, into time that we had already left behind us * 227 +
