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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY) FEBRUARY 25, 2020 More and more stuff ends up on the stage: the three tables, costumes, the final props, body paint, makeup, masks. Now that everything becomes skin-colored, this proximity suddenly becomes beautiful and gripping. Eroticism is not a matter of nudity. The text becomes perfectly incomprehensible — I was waiting for this moment. The technology, the objects, the lighting, and the sounds confuse the actors’ speech. It will clear up: it must clear up. When a scene, or even a short passage, takes place, the text is perfectly audible. I take notes feverishly; Purcarete changes his location in the audience space more and more frequently, paying attention to sightlines, from above, from below, from the locations most distant from the main axis, or from the very front rows. FEBRUARY 26, 2020 Set decoration is in progress on the stage; meanwhile, we reviewed the entire text with the actors in the studio. Could it be that the need for scrupulousness in examining the philosophical-theological aspects of the text, which is the essential uniqueness of theatrical tradition, is in danger of extinction? But, of course, we also seem to be lacking in fundamental dramaturgical knowledge, or perhaps we are continually distancing ourselves from the cultural principles of the Hamburg dramaturgical tradition. What will theater become in the post-literary age? Will the demand — indeed, the need — to point out and analyze socialized aggression remain at the center of the contract the theater has made with itself? It would be good to live to find out; I will not. After the workshop, the actors thanked me for the textual work with a warmth I had not expected. They told me that they had begun to sense their neutral, meaningless sentences, and their relationship to the text had changed. The eternal danger of the theater of Purcarete — given that it’s very frequently ensemble play with protagonists flashing into view, then vanishing, as well as characterful, idiosyncratic (antique) choruses — is that in several productions one can see the above problem; only the director shows his hand because the actors do not achieve true characters, worked out in detail and thus rendering the strongly formal element unnoticeable: that is, they fail to become a personage. The role, as it were, stands before them, at times very distantly; they race after it during the performance, so the viewer is left with the directorial intent, observing the performance at a distance, sometimes without the slightest chance of merging into it and achieving empathy. When, by contrast, the dynamics of the protagonist group work organically and the actors completely fill the form, as in Faust or Victor, in Phédre or Pantagruel’s Sister-in-law, or in
