The Ghost of the Age: Zeitgeist Fringe 08/05/2011 3:05pm

Editorial
I. A slight confusion of gods
When I was a little kid, the musical “Godspell” was all the rage. This was San Francisco in the 70s, and I was maybe five. Do you know all the words to all the songs in “Godspell”? Can you sing both melody and harmonies on every tune? Well, I do and I can, a pretty neat party trick I am rarely called upon to use. I know these things partly because I listened to the record so many times it finally warped and died, and partly because my parents were theater people and did so many productions of the show that I became confused, got a terrible crush on an actor named Walter, who played one production’s Christ, and began to conflate Walter with God, such that now, to this day, my image of God is not a bearded white guy in the sky but a 17-year-old boy with black curly hair and rainbow suspenders, singing wanly in contralto as he died. Actually, the part of Judas is, musically, much better, but slightly below my range. The productions of “Godspell” were regularly picketed by nuns. Ever seen a picketing nun? They’re a force to be reckoned with. The nuns, too, confused me; I asked some nearby tall person why they were picketing (people were always picketing something in SF in the 70s, but not usually pissed-off nuns), and the nearby tall person shrugged and said, “Well, times have changed.” The zeitgeist, in other words, had shifted. One had ended—the world under Vatican II—and one had begun, the latter being a time in which the two biggest hit musicals in this country and several others were literally heresy, on purpose, for the sake of heresy, as a comment on heresy and what and who defines it, as a means of questioning what it was, as a way of shedding light on how history inflected modernity, by way of seeing an old world through new eyes, dressing Jesus as a clown, inciting nuns, causing five year olds everywhere to confuse actors named Walter with God. The spirit of that age, at least that current in the tide of that time, played out on stage. It was the most public arena in which it could play out; it was the best way to spark thought, emotion, reaction, conversation, decision; and it caused a ripple effect that moved outward a very long way. Now, “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” seem dated, but not yet dated enough to be quaint. In order to be quaint, the audience must see a show as belonging to an era entirely over, historically distant, its questions and concerns so long since resolved that they can be performed with a smug smile for those who get the historically referential inside joke. But the issues raised by those two plays, the pain and anger of that time, have not yet been resolved, and we cannot quite write them off. So we call them dated, and write new work, work about our era, which will one day seem dated, and yet remain unresolved. The zeitgeist of each era lingers in the doorway, and does not leave the room for a very long time.

II. The fractured mask

In trying to identify the cultural riptides and currents that cross, become, and undercut one another in a given time, specifically in the performing arts of that era, it isn’t so much a matter of counting up the number of shows on this topic, or the number that fall under that subgenre heading—it’s trying to get a feel for the thrumming, recurrent questions or ideas that repeat and repeat in an age, spoken or unspoken, informing overtly or subtly the work that appears onstage. The zeitgeist consists of those currents, those questions and ideas, and in many if not most modern eras previous to this contemporary one (we’ll call it the virtual age, for lack of a better term, and without going into the ramifications of that moniker for now), there has been some unifying factor—a war, a social phenomenon, a philosophy, a political and/or artistic movement—and the theater of that age has rarely failed to both completely avoid and directly comment upon that unifying factor, that cultural theme. We have, in the virtual age, no such theme. We have no unifying factor. We are not, as a substantive mass or culture or group, for or against a thing. We are largely without a widely-held belief, and where in previous eras myriad beliefs spawned theater in myriad forms, I have to wonder: right now, what is the source of our theater? What is it reacting to, commenting upon, what lends it weight or lifts it out of the ordinary world? Is it all sheer entertainment, or, contrariwise, is it so earnestly attempting to find meaning in the obscure that it is more or less without power to speak to anyone beyond the very few? So this very situation must be said to be a part of the zeitgeist of now, of today’s theater, and of what is represented at the Fringe. It isn’t that there is no zeitgeist in the virtual age. It’s that the ghost of this age wears a fractured mask. The spirit of this age might, I suppose, be said to be broken. It certainly is very strange. And I’d venture to say that there are many ghosts who have not yet left the room.

III. The harlequin doll

Right around the time I was dizzily spinning around the living room in a hot pink hat, singing along to “Godspell” with all the fervor of five year old on fire, I was given a harlequin doll. It frankly depressed me. The silver tear on its porcelain face did not come off; nothing would cheer it. The laughing face, therefore, was always inflected by its proximity to the crying one, and also, when you wound the key in its back, the doll played “Send in the Clowns.” (Do you know all the words to “A Little Night Music”? No? Well. ) This is a theatrical era divided sharply between the tragic and the comedic, the political and the personal, the aimless and stupid and the possibly prophetic. The Fringe contains all of these things, and all of them are elements of the zeitgeist evident in the Fringe. As I head into a second day of shows, I wonder: how many pieces of the fractured mask will I see? Is there any unity among them? Does there need to be? Last night I saw Mike Fotis, in Batman boxers, standing in a kiddie pool wearing goggles while jugglers flung things around him, a gaggle of actors in Edwardian (or Elizabethan—it wasn’t totally clear) dress wandering around like a flock of motherless goslings as they found their way to one of this year’s several Shakespeare updates for the pop cultural mind, an Irish poetry troupe (Scream Blue Murmur—see tomorrow’s post) performing a Billie Holiday song about lynching while images of dead men flashed onto the Intermedia Arts screen, and I didn’t even make my fourth show. Now is the part where I should probably recite, “This year’s Fringe has something for everyone!” And that is certainly true. But the more nagging question I have is this: is contemporary theater where we are seeing the first signs of a culture truly falling to disparate pieces, where nothing coheres?