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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY) JANUARY 20, 2020 Return to Timisoara after nearly forty years. A broken down and pillaged city greets me; the prettiest portions of bourgeois Timisoara strike me as a ghost town. Beautiful bourgeois buildings, varied yet unified in architectural style, on the far side of the river Bega, around the Hotel Savoy, or on St. Mary Square: waterlogged facades with peeling plaster peer distractedly into the void. One cannot detect the faintest tremor of life. Fear takes up residence in my chest; I don’t notice as my ribs tighten, then the muscles between the ribs wrench into a cramp, I cannot inhale enough air: breathlessness, confusion. Temesvar, Temeschwar or Temeschburg, Temnısap or TemiSvar, Timisoara — where have they gone?" The production’s flexible masks are made of latex and reproduce the actors’ own recognizable faces. Their proper faces: masks. White paint will cover the latex surface; at present, it’s still skin-colored. In the case of the actors with speaking roles, they’ll cut off the masks’ lower lip and chin to enable speech. The face as quotation. This three-dimensional license makes the audience see even the nearby, familiar face as distant, placing it in a different time that is not our own. These latex faces are death masks prepared from living individuals: the death-evoking attitude that belongs to the eternal, but of course mainly the oriental, theater. These flexible masks, on the other hand, evoke the hallucinatory effect that living people wearing their own death masks are walking amongst us. It is the inscenation of “you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.”’ Purcarete’s absolute pessimism regarding human history is counterpointed by the view of a child who doesn’t fall into despair over what he sees but builds himself a new world out of the elements of a Western civilization that has fallen to pieces. The most important material of the rehearsals, right from the start, is the acoustic environment. As though an opera were being born using the method of “devised theater,” that is, collective creation. “We're finished," says Eve in Scene Two, the Fall in the Garden of Eden: if, in this situation, you speak this sentence on stage, you can attain at most a comic effect with it. “If, however, you sing it as in opera, and the pathos of the singing voice and accompanying ° Temesvar had been a major provincial city of Hungary prior to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that ceded Transylvania to Romania; it was and is a multicultural City. The list here gives the town names as known, respectively, to the Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, and Romanians. The original text uses Hungarian place names for which I have substituted the Romanian place names most likely to be familiar to Anglophone readers. 7 Rv 3:1 (All biblical quotations are from the New International Version). 8 Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man, trans. George Szirtes, Budapest, Corvina, 1988, 4 ed (2000), 41. + 229 +
