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ANDRÁS VISKY with finality, since we’ve already died, and indeed, already been resurrected: thus, we have stepped back into the perfect form of the imago dei. This is none other than the re-elevation of the theater’s communal lifestyle, which had remained current for millennia, into our everyday context. Every story is an origin story, presence is a breaking free, and time is the experience of waiting. The actors come among us from the far side of time; they arise from the earth, as depicted in the frescoes in Orvieto’s cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin. Luca Signorelli, the artist, himself conceives the scene as theater, in which he paints himself and Fra Angelico, the other painter of the cathedral, in bourgeois clothing as they observe the promised resurrection in the theater of the Apocalypse: this is how they take part in the events of the Last Judgment. They already knew the piece well from the Book of Revelation, and now they see the performance itself as a cosmic spectacle in fulfillment of the Scriptures. Resurrection: that is, nakedness — the question, in concreto, the question of nakedness is unavoidable. It’s difficult, in fact impossible, to be naked in the theater. The intimate proximity of the audience in The Tragedy of Man in the space proposed here reveals the body’s naturalism, rather than demonstrating the spiritual image of the body, namely, the possible sensuality of an abstract concept: it will not be the body that we sense, but the actor’s concrete, natural (fleshly) body, as a recognizable individual, and this is what would destroy the production’s language. The actors wear skin-colored tights under the trench coats, white color paint covering their skin unevenly: these are rather just patches, stripes, the very distant yet recognizable traces of lime-filled mass graves. Three more important directorial observations regarding the production’s world of form. First: we will handle each of the fifteen scenes forming the tableaux of the Madach work separately, leaving it as an assignment for the viewer to create the connections between them. Second: four actors will create the figure of Lucifer. Who is Lucifer? The personage who does not sing. Third: different pairs of actors will play Adam and Eve from one tableau to the other. (This alone is reason enough for the lack of narrative continuity between Madach’s tableaux.) For those readers unfamiliar with The Tragedy of Man: Adam and Eve, expelled from Paradise, wonder what will become of them and their progeny. Lucifer, with the intent of making Adam give up on humanity and thus spoil God’s plan, offers to show them and guides them through scenes spanning human history from Antiquity to the far future (in a pioneering example of science fiction). + 228 +
