The Third Wheel

Note from the AD

So why is Handcart doing Yeats? It’s because his work recognizes and calls upon the full resources of the theater. Unlike most great playwrights, he constructed his plays not as watertight masterpieces that could be boarded by company after company while retaining their essential appearance, but as loose-fitting apparel needing to be filled by music, dance, and imaginative staging equal to the power of his words. Among twentieth century dramatists, Bertolt Brecht perhaps most fully realized that aspect of Yeats’s vision in Mother Courage, Galileo, and other plays whose bold scenic demands required inventive solutions from their performers. As a Marxist, however, Brecht saw theater as relevant only insofar as it addressed those matters of politics and power that he believed governed the human condition. (He began to modify this view late in his career.)

Yeats had faith in enduring myths as a source of wisdom and narrative power. Like Brecht, Yeats had an agenda, which was in his case the cultural and political renewal of Ireland. The bulk of his plays draw specifically from Irish myth and legend, and it’s perhaps because of this exclusivity that they haven’t yet commanded a vast audience outside their native country. In his finest plays—and I believe Cat & the Moon and Only Jealousy of Emer are among them—the Irish cultural specificity both richly informs them and recedes before their universality in treating matters like childlike faith and noble self-sacrifice.

Yeats’s material is very demanding of its interpreters, and to see a group of committed artists join their talents to make these performances possible has been immensely satisfying. I hope you’ll not only come and enjoy, but share your thoughts with us as well.

Posted by Scott Reynolds at March 27, 2006 03:03 PM

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