Leslie Epstein
MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR:
RITUAL IN THE MODERN THEATER
The theater is ablaze. Butterflies are incinerated and dollar
bills are burned alive; tiny executions true, but not altogether removed
in spirit from ancestral
autos-da-fe
and close enough in substance to
Artaud's theater of cruelty for us to make out clearly what his "victims
burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames" convey: weariness with
illusion, disgust for art. The actors in
US,
and perhaps those in
Para–
dise Now
as well, had no such idea in mind when they set the insects'
wings, the currency, afire. Whatever their intentions, it is not possible
to accept their behavior as ordinary stage business, that is, as symbolic
action involving the destruction of Vietnamese peasants and the capi–
talist system. Something about the butterfly and the dollar bill- it
must be the sacredness of life that invests the former, the sacredness of
power that inhabits the latter - makes it unthinkable for them
to
stand
for anything other than themselves. They are not props. Hence the
incendiaries are not actors and what they perform is not an illusion or
an imitation; they are rather participants in what Artaud calls "a
wholly magical action," a ritual designed not to evoke an emotion or
effect a state of mind or - in Aristotle's phrase -lighten and delight
the soul, but to transform the very being of all those present by uniting
them one with another, with the dark side of their own natures and
with the even darker powers of the earth. That these two burnings are
ludicrously inadequate to this task is not so important as what they
signify for an artistic tradition which has always sought to substitute
illusion for action. "Psychology," Artaud wrote, "which works relent–
lessly to reduce the unknown to the known,
to
the quotidian and the
ordinary, is the cause of the theater's abasement and its fearful loss of
energy." It is precisely this "psychology" - these emotions and thoughts,
images and ideas, words finally, and unburdened souls - which once
sprang easily between desire and fulfillment, but which now seems arti–
ficially imposed and so unable to mediate between them. Who can
deny the theater's fearful loss of energy? For the artist and his audience
