In an act of Theatre blogger suicide I will now be publicly disagreeing with George Hunka and risk the wrath of this masterful mind and quick witted wordsmith. George says today that:
To say that every theatrical production must have an element of “fun” or spass, and then to drag Shakespeare and Brecht and Beckett and Bernhard and others down to our own professional purposes, in support of our own need to be distracted . . . , is to befoul their work, disavow their pain.
Simply because “fun” is a tool used by corporatist structures to gain and maintain power does not mean that there is anything inherently wrong with it. Fun, I would argue, is in fact a fundamentally necessary quality in art. Pretension without relief just gets boring. And I suspect that Mr. Hunka would agree with this as he has quite the sense of humor both at the bar and through his well wrought characters.
Perhaps the problem comes down to what we mean by fun. George, it seems, is struggling against mindless commercial entertainment. The kind of fluff that does nothing more than causes small green rectangular pieces of paper to change hands quickly. But there is another kind of fun, a powerful and transformative type of play that could get lost were one to simply disregard the whole and focus only on the void. That fun is the kind that acts in counterpoint to tragedy and suffering. A kind of divine play. This is the morbid humor of the gatekeeper in MacBeth or the pathetic antics of Vladamir and Estragon. This kind of desperate humor is necessary in the midst of a world filled with so much suffering.
Brecht was a brilliant comedian. The playfulness he brings to his texts serve to play up the tragic point he is making. Kurt Weill truly is the ideal composer for his texts as he too can make tragedy a rollicking good time. Much like the Wilson/Burroughes/Waits collaboration The Black Rider where the sadness come out through the punctuation of play.
The work of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is a perfect example of this important and necessary kind of fun. His films are serious entertainment. They make you think and question. But the also entertain. They are fun. They are filled with humor and play, not as an accident or an aside, but as a fundamental aspect of their dramatic makeup.
Children are filled with play and wonder at the world. The newness of everything excites them to extremes. As we grow older we become accustomed to the world and forget about its wondrous possibility. We forget to laugh, sometimes going days without laughter. We forget to play, taking everything so seriously. And we forget to have fun.
We forget this fundamental and necessary aspect of the soul. In forgetting this, we forget our Selves. We leave parts of our Self behind and forget who we are and where we come from. Fun, play, these things remind us. They remind us that the world is an absurd place filled with humor. They remind us that the world is to be enjoyed. They remind us that even in the worst of circumstance we can laugh.
