The Brooklyn Rail

I want to think about Foreman’s use of the word “hysteria” (Ontological-Hysteric Theater, founded in 1968), which in ancient Greece referred to the diagnosis of a wandering womb in search of an outlet, often getting congested in the throat on its way out of the mouth. As with Charles Ludlum’s simultaneous use of the word “ridiculous” (the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, founded in 1967), the question for Foreman was how to perform a transvaluation of a term that stigmatized bodies as racially, sexually, and mentally inferior. What gets caught in the mouth of the “actor” in Ludlum/Foreman? What chokes up and gags the spectator? Tears, laughter, turds, vomit, words, clichés—sticking to the tip of the tongue or edge of the glottis—never discharged, never re-ingested, always congested.

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Ridiculous-Hysteria marks a bathetic laughter and laughability that is in surplus of pathos. Pathos ends in climactic resolution and inspires legible and actionable pity/sympathy; bathos overfloods any resolution and devolves from noble pity into morose, endless and infectious laughtears. As in melodrama, the division between tragedy and comedy falls apart, not in the balanced synthesis of tragicomedy (“dramedy”) but, rather, in a sappy confusion. Laughing so hard you cry (Ludlum; ridiculousness). Crying so hard you laugh (Foreman; hysteria).

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Foreman’s theater was “ontological-hysterical”—a compound of Being (ontos) as authentic essence and existence + inauthentic diagnostic constructions, masquerades, and wandering organs.

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Foreman echoed Herbert Blau’s formula for the theatrical avant-garde: being = seeming. Unlike Martin Heidegger’s principle of Being as durationally thrown towards death via blood-soil authenticity, Foreman and Ludlum’s Being was a hall of illusory mirrors. Unlike Heidegger’s rejection of framing, Foreman and Ludlum’s Being was a surplus of frames. Rather than breaking the fourth wall, or shattering the linear perspective of the proscenium (centered around the prince’s gaze), the framings were redoubled, the perspectival lines and grids were materialized in strings and borders—what in painting is called repoussoir.

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Foreman and Ludlum constructed a marionette theater with the calculative precision found in Heinrich von Kleist’s “Über das Marionettentheater” [On the Marionette Theater]. Purged of flaws and affects, the theater could be the perfect algorithm; hyper-self-reflexive on the part of the puppet-master and purely innocent on the part of the puppet; the best of prelapsarian (rising) and postlapsarian (fallen) humanity. Falling and rising were literally balanced with grace and buoyancy—the exemplary traits of Romantic aestheticism which Kleist was parodying. However, for Foreman and Ludlum, floating lyricism was counteracted by angst and bathos (sinking/anti-climax).

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Foreman often played the centralized godhead puppet master during his plays—all the perspectival lines led back to him, as he sat in the prince’s seat (center of the audience) but also, the engineer’s seat: controlling the apparatus and speaking in an omniscient voice.

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As the play wore on, Foreman the puppeteer seemed to be yet another puppet: another automated mechanism in an apparatus with no egoic center. The engineer was engineered; the prince was not “outside looking in” but trapped within the stagings. Like Hamlet, Foreman used the play to catch the conscience of the king, only to catch his own conscience. Foreman and Hamlet turned the proscenium’s rigid fixing of royalty as centerpiece of the gaze into a deadly mousetrap, only to find themselves lost in their own game (high on their own supply).

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Ludlum also played the puppeteer (writer director parodist) only to sink into the roles he parodied until he wept real tears; losing himself in an apparatus that suddenly seemed to precede, exceed and condition him. Ludlum/Foreman used the stage to play hide and seek with their own egos (not playing with themselves but rather, playing besides themselves).

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Foreman used surrealist “automated writing” techniques (notably without firmly set character divisions in the writing) but he added (following Antonin Artaud) a set of kinetic spasms. Foreman “staged” automated, reflexive gestures that were beyond the controls of this staging: they manifested from the bellows of the body in real time.

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Foreman did not “recuperate” but rather revamped hysteria. He was never far afield from the hysterias induced and conducted by Jean-Martin Charcot’s famous scenes at the Salpêtrière in the 1880s. Charcot’s hysterics suffered from (among other things) “clownisme”, enacting jestures that both “mimicked” “real” diseases and yet were traced to (unproven) neurological lesions. In other words, these were performances that were deeply fake; iatrogenic “constructions,” “performative” re-citations but also non-negotiably, irreversibly, un-citationally real. Were we dealing with naïve or learned fools (a distinction that dates back to Shakespeare)? The foolish dividing line in Foreman and Ludlum is rendered undecidable.

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By doubling down on the masques of stigmatic cliches, Foreman and Ludlum undid the nativist control of tropes: turning tropes into masques and refusing the totalitarian divvying up of bodily figurations as if they rigidly “illustrated” status, authenticity, and diagnosis. The loosening up of tropes is how Stefan Brecht defined the political importance of the avant-garde in Queer Theatre (1978). For Brecht, totalitarianism is often marked by the rigid control of tropes, while queer theater suggests a pathway to the rotational cross-contamination of tropes and polymorphic dispersal of categories. Queer Theater might serve as an alternative to queer theory. Theatricality not performativity!

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Unlike the “epic theater” of Bertolt Brecht, the postures of queer theater were not simply meant to illustrate status in a 1:1 symbolization but also to devolve into the base material and physiological ground that undergirds symbolic and imaginary “roles” at the level of kinesthetic and non-conscious automation. 

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Theater (like theory) stems from thea (spectacle) and is oriented around the seer and hearer (audience). But theater, unlike theory and theology, turns sight and sound into smoke and mirrors—a play of re-veiling rather than revelation.

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The gendered cliches of Ludlum. The cliche turns of phrase and recycled theatrical jestures of Foreman. Never simply ironic, constructivist, self-reflexive parodies but always also automated reflexes. 

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Theatrical irony degenerates into a funeral parade of roses.