Meetings with Remarkable Wo/Men

Theatre is a Devil’s Art or the
Idea of a Changed Human Being Who Always Above All Looks Human
(From the conversation with Robert W. Corrigan. August 1987. Dallas, Texas.)

Naum Panovski:
You have pointed out many times that the history and the development of theatre and drama relates to the development of the family. How does the family express the development of theatre, and vice versa, and how do they relate to each other? When you talk about "family" do you think of it as a social community, a collective entity, as a basic fundamental segment of society; that is, as a small unit, a microcosm, or as a small isolated unit set outside of any social conditions and circumstances?

Robert W. Corrigan:
Well, the reason that I've taken such a strong stand about the relationship of the family to the theater, is because when I look back throughout the history of the theater I see that the chief mysteries that the theater seeks to make present and reveal are those that have sources that are in family life. And, indeed, I would say that for each one of us, as human beings, the conflicts, the meanings, the mysteries of our lives have their roots in the family.
Therefore, if you look back, beginning with the Greek theater, in 3rd century plays have their roots in the family. And if you notice, it is the house of Atreus; it is a house of Laius. It is the family of Laius. In Agamemnon for example, when he comes back to the house, he is there celebrating the return to the house and the reestablishment of the house, although he goes through tremendous struggle that he had anticipated, but nonetheless there at the center is the house. I think you can go to Shakespeare’s Elizabethan theater, you can go to the theater of Racine, and finally to the 19th and 20th century theatre, and you can see the same thing, that the family is there at the center of the society.
And to directly answer your question, as the family and the idea of the family changes through the history, I would say obviously, it certainly does, it is reflected in the theater. And the idea of the family therefore will be changing, and the whole definition of family will be changing with it.
So, when you say, when we speak of family do we think of it as a social community, of course we do, but no matter how social and how big the community is, it changes. So, I would think that in terms of classical Greece the family and the idea of the house, was a much bigger idea than it is in the contemporary bourgeois society where the family is a small self-contained unit. But even as I say that, I realize that's no longer really true. Today we live in much more extended families than that, and it's hard to call it home-rooted anymore, because more and more people divorce, there are more and more brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, more and more half-brothers and half-sisters.

As a result, the family is no longer defined really by a mother and a father and the children living at their home. All those changes, it seems to me, are reflected in the theater. And, as our sense of the family changes, as our experience of familiar life changes, therefore as our conflicts in our life change, all these things seems to me are reflected in our theatre as well. I think you can see for example just by comparing all these changes, if you compare the family, the sense of family let’s say in an Ibsen Play and the sense of family in Shepard’s Buried child, there is a big shift in the sense of definition of family and a big shift in how playwrights can give form to the conflicts.

Well, if we accept the idea that the world is disintegrated today, if that happens with the family, if the individual is disintegrated, what happens to the theatre, then? Is the theatre disintegrated as well?

There's no question that there has been a sense of disintegration of the individual as it was once conceived. But I have a feeling that that process of the disintegration of the idea of the individual is something that happens many may times in history in different ways, that the idea of the person that not being able to be divided and then discovering that we can divide the person, is something we see constantly repeated. For example, certainly one of the things we thought about the 19th century and the whole rise of the modern technology is it somehow, that it alienated ourselves from it ourselves, from each other, and that it finally leads to disintegration of the self. There is no question you can talk about that abstractly you can write plays about it and try to show it, but I will argue that for the most part, we as individuals experience our lives and ourselves as not disintegrated. Even though it may be an allusion that we're kidding ourselves I think my life most of us live most the time as if there's a sense of wholeness in our being that we experience it as a whole.