Jerusalem

Second blog in and I'm already cheating, writing about drama instead of poetry.  But Jerusalem is based on the Blake lyric, loosely.  The play is little more than a vehicle for Mark Rylant, the finest male performance I've seen on Broadway in years, so amazing, that I am astounded that magnet for fine British stars of stage and screen, the Harry Potter franchise, never coerced him into playing amidst its menagerie of witches, wizards and various fanciful beasties. 

What I'm left thinking though is about the nature of theater, how like confessional poetry, it is overly dependent on the charisma of the deeply flawed character or persona.  As such I'm finding theater difficult to attend.  Whether it is the hubris of Lear, the adolescent melodrama of Romeo and Juliet, the fatal jealousy of Leontes in "The Winter's Tale," the delusions and fall of Blanche in "Street Car," the blindness and inability to act of Madam R. in "The Cherry Orchard," or the cruelty and manipulation of Hedda Gabler, the audience is rapt in the machinations of deeply flawed characters who destroy some combination of themselves, others, and the worlds in which they live.  Often the effect and immersion into that pain is stunning but also tremendously draining and unsettling.

The world in which I live is already filled with a reserve of deeply flawed people of various psychological affliction.  I have found myself spending undue amounts of my life cleansing myself of their influences, shedding my own afflictions, and sidestepping the tragic flaws of a wide range of major and minor players upon the various stages I have inhabited.  I don't require the arts to which I attend to return me to such worlds.  It is not escape or respite I am after but ways to live fully in a life peopled by those who have found ways to be largely removed from a world peopled by borderline personalities, raging narcissists, addictive personalities, and hurlers of projective identification.

I want my art to be filled more with either enlightened beings or those who spend far less time embracing their fatal flaws and far more learning how not to be so intimately wed to their core issues.  I don't think new formalism or flarfs or po-mo smart apathy or safely benign academic verse is the answer, but nor do I think that the drama I mentioned nor the lives of the confessionalists are apt models for art.  Classic drama so often demands human foibles, tragic or comic, as their essence.  And contemporary poetry either avoids matters of achieving a life well lived as unduly earnest or as unseemly affect.