OPENING LECTURE Three Epic Plays What are epic plays?

Best to answer the question by first saying what they are not. There are not examples of what the French would call the pice bien fait, the well-made piece, that artfully satisfied audience expectations without ever stretching or questioning them. They do not rigidly adhere ot the unities established by Aristotle and fortified by generations of neoclassical critics. They do not fit comfortably within the expected two and a half half-hour frame of Broadway shows and their offspring. And they often do not respect boundaries that have often inhibited our view of the theater. Too often, we see the theater as something other than literature and literature as inherently non-performative or non-theatrical. Drama is most present in literature departments at the introductory level, where Shakespeare or a few Greek plays are taught, and then, with the exception of Elizabethan England, it disappears from the curriculum. I have had the experience of having people be surprised that, I a literature professor, am interested in going to plays; they see it as something fundamentally different. These plays challenge that distinctionthey aspire to the literary not only in their breadth and sweep but in their conscious relation to a literary tradition, their interest in historical or political issues, their taking on more than just the domestic and the personal. These plays range so far from the conventional theatre that some might see them as potentially un-stageableand indeed some early attempts at epic plays such as Thomas Hardys The Dynasts or Karl Krauss The Last Days of Mankind, were never staged; their authors chose the dramatic form for the sense of panoply and command but paid little attention ot theatrical considerations, Our three playwrights are different; they are or were all very deeply men of the theatre whose intellectual visions had ot achieve concrete theatrical relaxation for them to be fulfilled. As opposed to Hardy and Kraus, whose major owkr was in other forms Stoppard, Kushner, and ONeill were as dedicated to the theatre as any of their contemporaries. Of course, these are not the only writers of epic plays. Certainly August Wilsons ten-play cycle representing black American life in the twentieth century is a comparable project, although he (much like Shakespeare did in his history plays_ wrote a series of plays of conventional length that made up one overall story. Something like Alan Ayckbourns The Norman Conquests, now currently being revived on Broadway, shows that an epic play does not have to be tragic or weighty, that it can deal with quintessentially comic situations and still stretch the form. In fact had I known that it would be back on Broadway this summer, I might well have assigned it). Robert Schenkkans Kentucky Cycle, though a bit creaky to my taste, ambitiously surveys 200- years of American history. Two of these plays are late work that gives full vent ot longtime obsessions of their playwrightsONeills with alcoholism, class resentment, and the dangerous labyrinths of deception and self-conceit, Stoppard with ideas and their dramatization, and the root sod dangerous twentieth-century ideas in the nineteenth century. The third was virtually the first serious effort of a young palywright who saw the challenge to his community posed by the AIDS pandemic as a predicament calling for an expanded and more resonant theater.

Epic plays imply a certain social critique, a certain questioning of the premises of the society mentioned in conventional plays. We often associate epic with blockbuster movies or empty refashioning of conventional narrative but the term epic theater' as pioneered by Bertolt Brecht in Germany in the 1920s, meant something quite different a disenthralling of theater from normative bourgeois assumptions. We should also remember that even the ancient Homeric epic was not a sprawling, formless genre, but tightly and shrewdly organizedepic dimensions intensify artistry and intelligence, not simply bypass them through a kind of inchoate ambition. If epic plays restore the epic ot theater they also remind us of the artificiality and formal nature of the epic. As the examples above indicate today epic plays are not uncommon. Why this is so perhaps illustrates why this genre has had a surprising visibility in the last hundred years. Angels in America, at the very least shows the Influence of miniseries on television, long moviesother media that like theatre, dramatize speech and action, but that do so without the material limitations of a determinate theatrical time and space. The epic play is the theatres emulator of and rejoinder to these newer media, an assertion that the theater can do something like this as well if it stretches itself a bit. In many ways epic plays are re-theatricalizations of cinematic (and later televisual) modes. Yet while blockbuster movies and TV miniseries try to absorb the viewer, epic plays are often disconcerting, destabilizing, discomfiting, and highly self-conscious in laying bare the device of their own production. As noted before, one of the things the epic play is not is a reclaiming of old-time grandeur, that would elevate the theatre out of its sordid twentieth-century mire. ONeill knew that a certain constituency wanted him ot do something like this, and he would not. Whereas contemporaries of his such as Maxwell Anderson or T. S. Eliotboth born in the same year as ONeill, and both exposed to similar intellectual and experiential influencessought ot bring theater back to the last time it had really flourished in Englsih-speaking lands, the Elizabethan era, by emphasizing the objectivity of the theater its reliance on personae that prevented the author from giving a direct revelation of his own psychology, and its capacity to embody ritualistic subcurrents in its deployed actionONeill unabashedly wrote about low-life people doing ignoble things. ONeill was well-read in contemporary European thought such as that of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche often thought subversive by the cultural establishment, and although his comprehension of these thinkers are crude and often unsubtle, it did indicate an intellectual interest in cutting-edge thinkers. ONeill did not shrink from his own century, but embraced it aid amid all its problems. Politically, ONeill was very much someone with his heart on the Left (as opposed to Eliot and Anderson, who both swung towards conservatism in the latter half of their lives) even though, as we shall see, he certainly distrusted any tendency towards organization in the Movement. Kushners politics, allowing for changes in era and sexual identity, are similar to ONeills; Stoppards tend towards the conservative But we must remember that when Stoppard started writing in the 1960s, liberalism was so much in power as to have beocme almost a sort of counter-establishment, and so Stoppard when he started out was butting heads with the consensus. These palywright inspired, but they do not reaffirm. They how and elucidate all of theaters representational and suggestive capacities, but do not do this just to buttress the theatre as an institution or to make a deliberate attempt to revive theatrical history or past modes of doing drama. I was produced in 1946, it was roundly panned. ONeill, nearing sixty, was thought out

of tough and ponderous, and the message of the play seemed inappropriately depressing for a US that, just after World War II and as the Cold War was beginning, wanted a more pragmatic and timelier message from art. (Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, who would take over the leadership of American drama from ONeill, had their first important plays producer shortly thereafter). Kushner and Stoppard had more acclaim precisely because people were more open to experimentation, theater had expanded by then far beyond conventional boundaries, not only our of the influence of cinema and television but through performance art, intercultural theater and other nonobjective avant-garde practices that had made audiences aware that more was possible beyond the conventional formula. The theatrical audience indeed, has come to terms with these works more than literary culture, with its still-overly rigid dividing line between literature and theater, has. This course is an effort to meet this challenge and make meaningful connections between philosophical ideas and dramatic action, literary style and theatrical meaning.