Richard Gilman
THE NEW GERMAN PLAYWRIGHTS
"I am a theater person who mistrusts nothing as much as
the theater," Franz Xaver Kroetz told an interviewer a few years ago.
The assertion brought the young German playwright into some very
good company. At one time or another during their lives as drama-
tists Buchner, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, and Brecht expressed
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sentiments of the same order; lonesco has revealed his abiding dis–
appointment in the life he witnessed on the stage; and Kroetz's own
brilliant contemporary, Peter Handke, has made disbelief in the
ordinary practices of the theater a ruling element of his dramaturgy.
It
would seem as though the drama, to a much greater degree than
the other arts, requires of its geniuses an at least preliminary attitude
of skepticism, contempt, and even revulsion.
The reason for this isn't hard to find . Along with opera, its
related form, drama is the bourgeois art par excellence, the one most
tempted toward the reinforcement of existing cultural values and so,
by extension, of social and moral values, too. The matter is more
subtle than ideology or any form of direct persuasion; what theater
does, when it is operating to deaden consciousness, to act as a con–
soling and confirming ritual, is to reproduce an
expected
life, to
present models of experience (or wishes, dreams) which the audience
has already had and about which it has already come to conclusions.
Again, it isn't a question of obvious comfort or palliation; "painful"
plays, dramas about suffering of one kind or another, may also be
bourgeois-in the sense of being complacent, essentially optimistic,
unable to imagine life otherwise than as it has been known-as long
as the depicted suffering fits easily into preexisting molds. There
