I drifted into writing laterally from a tiny pocket of the dance world. I had moved through the historical progression of dance education, but had no analogous sense of the long arm of playwriting. What follows are notes from the vista that follows my first surveying effort in the history of writing for theater. It's a boomerang throw; I'm concerned here with finding the long view on my own writing.

As I conceive it, the present theater of language is essentially an arena for connective work that takes place in the imaginative faculty of the viewer. I find myself arguing stridently against visual realization of a textual work. I find myself wanting to enquire about the cohabitation of presence and imagination, and in particular feeling sure that language itself is a visual faculty, and so the realistic staging of a play is a form of redundancy that actually dulls language, as touch dulls the ring of a bell.

Early theater is a theater of language. It emerges from the double scenario initiating a transformation of epic, oral poetry: literacy and multivocality. I have been struck in this reading project by the simple fact that old playwriting is poetry. What happens is the pronunciation of words in a reflective arena. Somewhere along the way there is a shift into simulacrum. This is the fault line that runs through my survey. If the mimetic element lay in the (too broadly defined) former theater as a property of hearing, that is, in the image life that arises from poetic language, mimesis is transferred in this second half to the actual properties of the play as it is unfolded: that it be realistic (worldly?), even in a skewed, absurd, way. The criterion shifts to the thing itself having life. Language cedes its primary relationship to visual thinking and takes on a new role.

I identify this shift as the emergence of the interior. Plays pre-interiority have no dilemma surrounding the role of the audience. Everyone is included in the classical theatron; the spectator sits or stands at a vectoral relationship to the site of speaking. The play is conceived as a song, a spectacle, a mirror. Most importantly, it does not have an interior, for to generate an interior onstage would be to estrange the other, larger half of the assembly. The stage space is literally without setting. Actors are directed to enter and to exit. Locations are geographical and left to the imagination of the spectator.

Image arises from language, from metaphor. Everywhere from Aeschylus to Beddoes, metaphor has a modeling function: we are invited to create a picture of the cosmos. [Imagery that draws cosmic metaphor is powered by the imaginative faculty, the innate correspondence of language to image, and the innate correspondence of the imaging that arises from words to a conceptual, momentary sense of knowing, apperception, that transcends the sensual (that which dies) and pulls into a model of the world.] The cosmos, until the modernity and psychology merge, is either an exteriority or a totality. Cosmos transfers realms to the interior around the time that work and production (as in the work that earns the daily bread, not creative work) cease to be scaled to the kinesphere, and becomes measured by time. Here time, space and duration fall out of balance. Here speed increases and theorizes a disjuncture between social reality and subjective experience. Enter the novel.

Interiority becomes urgent with the schism between experience and action. Ah, go ahead, blame it on "modernity." On parts and assembly lines. On capital. On fragmentation. On social classes. Whatever, it is thought to be intensified beyond all reasonable intervals of schism by technology as she is known today, which is basically a defeat of time, space, or both. (Or a radical reassembly of defeated time, space, or both.)

What is plot? Plot is a mechanics of an interior.

What is wonder?

The "theater of wonder" is again built from words. It requires no set. But it does not revert to cosmos either. It sings to the audience.

The difference is between interior as model and a new interior that makes its own strange cosmos. I think new language theater arises and should trounce and denounce interior psycho hoohaw mainly for the reason that movies have far surpassed theater in empathetic simulacrum. Documentaries and non-fiction have surpassed the theater in providing a mirror for magistrates.

All live action is now classed as a miniature. (Theory of the miniature as a longing; gravitational pull, like so many small suns and constellations.)

Interiority followed through to its logical conclusion does not have any need for an audience. For at a certain point it becomes clear that the audience in fact debases the interior, intrudes on it. It coughs, it has stupid opinions, it comes late, it leaves early, it laughs at only the obvious moments, but most of all it breathes and smells and doesn't have anything to do with what's happening inside the play. So it becomes possible to ask the question, "What is the audience even doing there?" This is a step beyond Merce Cunningham, but he makes a grand contribution in the tossing out of the frontal plane. Enter happenings, total inclusion, as an effort to make the interior more democratic.

What I take from my survey is a view beyond the dilemma of "What is the audience doing there?" Inclusion, collaboration, incorporation (of the audience) are not the goal. Besides, they have been shown to be kind of lame. Receptivity is all. The question is on the reformulation of the theatron. (But it is so important to reformulate? it was after all quite beautifully laid out as an outer ear all those years ago.) Talk to me.

This is the most important point: that theatron is a space inclusive of audience and play, is anti-interiority. Because in the interior, the event is complete, whereas in the theatron, the event is complete only in its happening, it being heard, and its being completed in the imaginative mind of the receptacle. Receptacle, my love, I sing for you. Film is undisturbed by the viewer. Let us in the the-a-tah be immune to anxiety by remembering a simple recipe; speak-receive-complete. The old poetic requires a complicity in completing the image. Hearing moves out into Bruno's cosmos. A memory house.

Hearing happens in space (mental space like the pleats of matter communicates with cosmos).

Seeing happens in time; then what you see is gone.

(For years I thought it was the other way around. I did not realize that the image space in my mind was opened up by language.)

Think on it: a theatron with healthy receptacles, a living language, and an active mental life, a two headed beast of text and the image you hear. And no responsibilities vis-à-vis mirrors or messages. (Which have all been effectively resituated in more powerful movies, TV, magazines, news and documentaries.) So this is a time of great freedom.

What does theater do? There is no urgency to this question. For we must receive as we must give. This is really very simple.

RECEPTATRON!
THEATRON!
KOSMOTRON!
POETRY IS THE ANSWER!
BURN MY BRAIN!
GIVE IT!

What's been educational in this reading survey has been the refiguring of the split between theaters that I recognize and theaters I reflexively reject. I've come to understand realism not as a behemoth of its own making but as the logical apogee of the interior. The interior has a teleological relationship with the silence of the audience, and its eventual exclusion. This view posits a fraternity between naturalism and happenings. (And reveals the problematic of the audience in happenings.)

The interior splits apart eventually; anything does. That is simply the natural duration of a style or inquiry. The interior anyway handed off, as in a relay, from chamber plays to films, quite a while ago, allowing movies to conquer the problem of scale and distance, moving ever closer through the evolution of technology and the evolution of technological receptivity of audiences. Movies leave the space of projection (think vocally) and enter technologically into nearness. Evolved receptivity or audience training makes this proximity not strange but deeply familiar. This has brought an impoverishment of thought alongside ever enlarging sympathetic cultural nerves.

The "theater of wonder" as identified has to do with worlding and strangeness. It leaves off the realistic scene code that was so long dominant in the interior, but retains some of the techniques of becoming that are the fruits of interiorization. The theater of wonder creates other worlds. It says, other worlds are possible. But the new worlds are created within a theory of cosmos that knows that the cosmos is not an architectural masterpiece of clarity and proportion, but a pleated multiplicity of interiors.

When I ask myself what the Chos are doing, I realize that we are writing a multiplicity of interiors. The main thing to realize is that the interiors communicate (as in communicating passageways and chambers). This communication doesn't work in three-dimensional space or causal modeling, however. The communication happens in the pleats of language (see Heapism; see The Fold).

Nothing is closed completely.

This is the end of the closed interior.

This is the end of the interior as she was conceived.

This is the proliferation of communicating unclosed interiors.

Language communicates according to Benjamin through our catalogue of non-sensual correspondence, a lost index of mimesis that roots through words. (See Heapism.)

My revelation: THE FRONTAL PLANE IS IN YOUR EAR!

My audience: receptive, like a satellite dish. Beloved ear.

The unclosed interior is a Bruno-esque formulation. If people paid attention they might burn Chos too. If we work hard enough.

The communication of interiors is not an elegant and controlled opening as in a mobius strip, but perhaps to borrow the principle is helpful to conceptualize it. (Note to self: re-read The Fold now that I know what the hell Deleuze is talking about.) The points of communication are points of inflection. "With this revelation, criticism will be rightly given over into the hands of topographical mathematicians and theoretical physicists!"

It is the nature of language that makes this pleating possible (see Heapism). "Listen and you'll see." It's impossible not to, after all. Think about it.

I call for a return to words. To what words can do. As for the event of the performance, presence is what optimizes and makes possible the receptivity. Presence rolls back the tarpaulin from the satellite dish so that the clicks and beeps come through from those damnable Martians. Mauritanians? Martians. Presence sweetens the air and optimizes conditions of receptivity. A half dome, a catchers glove, and ear. "into my seeing ear" and "the seeing ears of other." [Frank...]

Receiving and Reflecting are hermeneutic Life Principles. There is no dilemma here. Newness and continuity are biological principles. Receptivity is a social principle. Culture relies on your seeing ears. On your blessed concavity. (Trade (receptivity and exchange) mistaken for commerce is the debasement of this principle.)

A letter from Joyce Cho
Dear Kathleen,

The movement against causality as a mechanic in fact has nothing to do with anger, attack or even fragmentation, but rather with communicating chambers. It is not a condition of being against. (Being uninterested in the so called well-made play really is not the same as being angry at it.) Rather this stuff is joyful. It is Joyce Cho. Goddammit it is procreative. Where proximity (of words to each other) in the old timey theater of language served pictoral metaphor of cosmos imagery (i.e. blind fortune at the wheel), now proximity, abounding with animal sensitivity and a powerful nose, has gotten into tracking and mapping communicating alleys, rope ladders, hidden doors (i.e. Amber Reed's manor in the Grand Kindness).

Love,
All Chos.