Our Mission
We are a deconstructive theater.
We are interested in plays that deliberately place themselves in conversation with other texts and discourses, plays that fracture the (imaginary) line between the “creative” and “analytical”.
We believe that there is too strong a divide between academia and the “real world”, between art and the “real world”. We believe that, given that the difference between the objective and the subjective was effaced decades ago, the fact that people still use the term “real world”—and, moreover, withhold it from a realm in which the very structures that govern our political systems, actions, thoughts and words are created and transformed—denotes the need (in the sense of the need for a blue sky, or the need to see one’s beloved) for theater of this kind.
We will produce new work and we will produce work which has been ignored (whether accidentally or deliberately).
We believe that Derridean Deconstruction should be common knowledge, like Freudian thought or the multiplication table.
We will not parody the conservatives. Rather, we will explore the desire that is embedded in prejudice—our prejudice as well as theirs. We will go to those places where we feel angry or intolerant; we’ll sit on the natives’ porches and ride in their cars.
We will stage plays about the sexiness of conservatives and housewifery and religion and patriotism, as well as plays about the sexiness of liberals and casual sex and expatriation. This is why we are artists and not politicians.
We will publish the work of writers for whom language is “a problem”, who “experience its profundity, not its instrumentality nor its beauty” (Roland Barthes, Critique et vérité).
It would be redundant to say that we are a political theater. Every work of art is political: every work of art has a point of view and adopts a certain discourse. The theatre that labels itself “the political theater” denies the violence of all language. Every gaze rewrites. “Metaphor is never innocent.” (Derrida)
We believe that the only stories that “have to be told” have to be told in the courtroom or in the newspaper or in the mansions of state. We cater only to the urges of form.
Con-Textual Theater
We believe that to have an opinion about a work of art is to change it, to re-create it. All readers, viewers, directors and actors are co-authors of the plays they examine. All criticism is “fiction” and all dramas are in some sense literary criticism.
We will not focus on “understanding” the “classics”; rather we will focus on the emotions and desires those plays trigger in us. We won’t any longer pretend that its possible to learn “who Shakespeare really was” or what Victorian London or 1920’s New York were “really like”; rather, we will explore our need for “Victorian London”, or for “1920’s New York” (fictional periods, born of our fears and desires). Our “revivals” will exultingly proclaim their status as “re-writings”.
There is no “outside” to the text, and so one way to engage with texts is to step inside them, to work at them from within. The word “context” derives from the Latin “con-” (both “against” and “together or in combination with”) plus “texēre” (“to weave”) [OED]. The verb “context” can mean “the weaving together of words and sentences; construction of speech, literary composition” or “the connexion or coherence between the parts of a discourse.” Rather than lament the impossibility of ever locating a play’s “historical context”, one can create a con-text—a text that exists not after or in front of, but beside, “against”, “together with” another text, in the posture of a conversation. We can achieve a fruitful, healthy and relatively honest relationship with both contemporary and historical texts (which is to say with history) by “weaving together” their discourses with our own, “so as to form a connected structure” that goes both “together with” and “against” the “weave” of the “original” text. We will then be able to converse freely with any subject from “The French Revolution” to Sex and the City without being constantly interrupted by our subject’s intractability, or by our own false modesty.