ART AND HISTORY
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plished artifacts and the coating of reality - its source and nutri–
ment - with its own images and metaphors, the "dramatization" of
actual life through the example of created dramas.
The true history of contemporary drama as an art is the gradual
erosion of the sanctified image of man on the stage, man as character,
destiny as plot, and at the same time the increasingly radical question–
ing by playwrights and other theater artists of drama's own bases and
raison d'etre.
And much of this history has taken place on the sly,
behind a barrage of aggressive gestures, a great many of which have
been feints. From Ibsen's embattled dealings with the well-made play
and his final, partial movement beyond it, through Strindberg's re–
placement of rational character by dream and psychic adventure and
PirandeIlo's ironic dramatization of rationality as itself the source
of delusion, down to Brecht's objectifications of the traditionally sub–
jective and Beckett's motionless plays of language - the common
thread has been an heroic effort to make the drama do something
new, while battling for its sheer existence as a form and a public act.
For the majority of audiences as well as for all but a handful of
critics (compared with modern literary criticism that of drama has
been notoriously thin, wary, lashed to tradition and inherited defini–
tions, the best of it often produced by men who are not ostensibly
drama critics at
all)
the major new dramatic propositions of the past
eighty or ninety years have been either thematic, statements about
the psyche, society or human destiny, or purely technical, tinkerings
with a stalled machine or else, in the eyes of technological optimists,
an intransigent progression on the model of technique's life in science
or mechanics.
The real revolution, a change in conception of what is actually
dramatic, a birth of consciousness about the possibility that all known
forms of the dramatic may be exhausted, remains largely unseen
outside those widely spaced small matrices where original work is
still going on and morale remains besieged but not yet overthrown.
A number of recent phenomena testify to the newest confrontation
with history, its own and that of the world it inhabits, which drama
is engaged in at this moment. Happenings and environments represent
the most extreme form of a repudiation of the artificial procedures
of traditional drama, an attempt to topple the text as sovereign power
and to reconstitute acting as the gestures of nonprofessionals, a set of
