RICHARD GILMAN
415
absence or, more accurately in regard to Kroetz's plays, its maimed
presence might be more
sig~ificant
and evocative than its fulness.
The richer the language, the greater the work, we think; Shakespeare
is the criterion and the apex. And this is all very well and true, except
for the moment, the repeated moments in the history of the theater,
when garrulity takes over, when there is too much being said.
A starting-point for an understanding of what this' 'too much,"
this excess ofutterance might be, as Kroetz conceives it, lies in another
remark to an interviewer that "my figures are incapable of seeing
through their situation because they have been robbed of their capac–
ity to articulate." The word "robbed" alerts us to the political di–
mension of Kroetz's theater, but for the moment the thing to see is
that the statement could function by inversion as the most concise
possible history of traditional "high" drama, for that might be
defined precisely as the
seeing through
of situations, replicas or
analogues of those experienced in life, on the stage.
To do this one needs speech, which is to say the power of naming
the condition one is in (if not directly then by verbal structures that
create it metaphorically; the most "eloquent" plays do it just that
way), of making distinctions both within it and between it and other
states, and therefore of making it, in theory at least, useful : instruc–
tive, purgative in Aristotle's sense, eye-opening in Brecht's, in every
case part of the formal stock of human awareness. And, Kroetz is
saying, until now, throughout the long reign of the theater as a
cultured activity, such a power has been the possession only of the
privileged, in an economic sense, surely, but in a wider one as well.
It has belonged to the more or less articulate, by definition. Drama
in
this view has consequently offered us, in a way that transcends
subject or idea, a world in which characters, deputies for the rest of
us, own from the start the means of making their situations known,
of expressing them, so that whatever else a play may be it is essentially
a process of bringing this knowledge into the light.
What is more, the knowledge is itself privileged, the self-aware–
ness of those human beings in the guise of stage characters whose
social existence, and so whose existential space, is wide enough to
permit thinking about, giving names to, and so truly experiencing–
although not of course necessarily "solving" -their predicaments:
Lear's knowledge that he has lived not wisely but too well; Norah's
