414
PARTISAN REVIEW
theater and rotten eggs were thrown at its facade, one might
see
no
overriding artistic purpose in the display of such "tasteless" and
malodorous material. Yet there
seems
to
me
no question that Kroetz
is among the most remarkable new writers for the stage of the last
ftfteen or twenty years, and by new I mean in sensibility, vision, and
technical procedure. To begin to know how this may
be
so, despite
the appearance of datedness or crude sensationalism which any sum–
mary of his plots and dramatic incidents would present, we have to
return to the note to
Homeworker
I quoted before.
Kroetz's great quiet originality lies in the fact of his having
broken through, as the note tells us he wished to, a theatrical con–
vention-an iron principle would not
be
too strong a term for it–
that has held dominion over the stage throughout almost all of its
history and in nearly every one of its sectors, transcending questions
of style and theme and coming almoSt to represent dramatic reality
itself. "Garrulity," he calls it, afftxing a pejorative connotation to
I
what we have always thought of simply as speech, dramatic utterance,
oral expression on the stage. So unquestioned has been the existence
l
of speech, dialogue, as the central agency of dramatic values, the
chief means by which consciousness is shaped in the theater, that to
accuse it of being "unrealistic," misleading, a convention and not
the precise heart of the matter, is to
seem
to
be
quarreling with the
very nature of the theater and of drama as a form. Yet we ought to
know from our own lives, even
if
we lacked a theater to bring it for-
mally to our attention, that garrulity-the overabundance of speech,
its runaway mode-is designed to hide truth even more than to reveal
it, and to mask the hiding: "methinks he doth protest too much" is
a response to garrulity having been found out. To speak too much
serves to cover up with words the holes in our existence, the spaces
of unmeaning or of meaning too painful or dangerous to
be
per–
mitted lineaments.
It
is these spaces, these holes, that Kroetz's plays can
be
said to
offer as their dramatic vision or actuality. A paradox? A contradiction
in terms? How does vision arise from emptiness or substance from
absence? Well, so nurtured are we on a belief in language as the most
direct instrument of meaning in any literary work (and drama, while
a peculiar form of literature, an enacted one, we might say, is never–
theless literary) that we find it dizzying to try to imagine how its
