Secular Holiness

Actors should be like martyrs burnt alive, still signaling to us from their stakes.

--Antonin Artaud

The actor makes a total gift of himself.

--Jerzy Grotowski

Artaud and Grotowski are as different as pure and applied science, but the latter would not be possible without the former. Artaud was an unsuccessful French actor who died insane in 1948. He was also a visionary and a prophet with a dream of what theater might be. In poetic though sometimes muzzy language, he coined the idea of "a theater of cruelty." To interpret the phrase solely by conventional usage is to miss a great deal of what Artaud meant by it. For example, he wrote, "Everything that acts is a cruelty," and "Cruelty is rigor."

Artaud's vision encompassed a theater that could sweep through an audience like a plague, be as direct as a bullet, release the torments and ecstasies that may be found in death, martyrdom and love. He felt that the theater was strangling in words and could be reborn only through signs, sounds and the primitive force of myth. Above all, he wanted a burning intensity to be felt in the theater that would sear an audience: "The spectator who comes to us knows that he has agreed to undergo a true operation, where not only his mind but his senses and his flesh are going to come into play. He must really be convinced that we are capable of making him scream out."

Anguish of the Age. Put that way, the Artaudian conception of theater sounds a trifle sadistic, and it can be comprehended only as a refraction of the European experience in the 20th century, with all of its tortures and holocausts.

If Brecht wanted to slap an audience into intellectual awareness so that it would correct the evils of the age, Artaud wanted to gore it into a blood-dripping emotional awareness of the anguish of the age; Among those who have most notably tried to follow Artaud's precepts in the modern theater are Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater, British Director Peter Brook (Marat/ Sade) and Director Jerzy Gro-towski with his Polish Laboratory Theater. The Living Theater is sloppy, Brook is marvelously disciplined but a trifle too cerebral, and Grotowski combines fantastic discipline with lacerating emotional intensity.

Pain Beyond Tears. To grasp what Grotowski does with his actors one must imagine monastic austerity wedded to mystic zeal. One must imagine the body being used to bear witness to the secrets of the soul. One must imagine not a reforging of an ancient myth, but a confrontation with that myth. It is a kind of exploration of the precondition of myth, the psychophysical necessity that brought it into being and confirms its enduring validity. Grotowski begins by stripping away everything that he regards as the excess baggage of drama --makeup, props, lighting effects, music, scenery, a conventional stage. He even strips away a good part of the audience, never allowing it to number over 100 and sometimes as low as 40. He also has a very precise idea about what that audience should be like: "We do not cater to the man who goes to the theater to satisfy a social need for contact with culture: in other words, to have something to talk about to his friends and to be able to say that he has seen this or that play and that it was interesting. Nor do we cater to the man who goes to the theater to relax after a hard day's work. We are concerned with the spectator who has genuine spiritual needs and who really wishes, through confrontation with the performance, to analyze himself. We are concerned with the spectator who does not stop at an elementary stage of psychic integration, content with his own petty, geometrical, spiritual stability, knowing exactly what is good and what is evil, and never in doubt. For it was not to him that El Greco, Thomas Mann and Dostoyevsky spoke, but to him who undergoes an endless process of self-development, whose unrest is not general but directed towards a search for the truth about himself and his mission in life." Between such an audience and his actors, Grotowski attempts to induce what Artaud called "a cosmic trance" and what Grotowski calls "secular holiness."

On the basis of his first offering, The Constant Prince, he succeeds awesomely well. The play is a loose adaptation from the 17th century Spanish playwright Calderon. It is acted out in an area rather like a bull pit with the audience looking down over the walled-in enclosure on all four sides. Four men and a woman representing the madness, arrogance and corruption of the world humiliate, torture and finally cause the death of the Prince, a pure and passive soul clad in a white loin cloth.

It is a Passion play. The Prince (Ryszard Cieslak) does not have to be Christ, but everything about the performance suggests that he is. It is as if one were viewing the crucifixion and being crucified at the same time. The incantatory rendering of dialogue sometimes resembles the Mass. The sounds that the cast utters are as arresting as if they were the cries of the damned in hell. On the rack of torment, Cieslak's body shudders convulsively from head to toe, and few athletes could begin to match the physical suppleness of a cast that seems as fit for dance as drama. At times, the company freezes in still lifes of agony. One is constantly aware of Cieslak's psychic pain, a pain beyond tears, beyond endurance, beyond escape, except by redemption. Religion and drama were once one and in Grotowski's ritual theater they seem, for a few miraculous moments, to be rejoined.

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