The Marowitz Compendium. Charles Marowitz
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within. Marowitz was the first American to direct at the Czech National Theatre. Following this production Marowitz began to slow in his output and activity. In 2009 he was offered a lecture tour of Denmark under the auspices of the US Embassy in Copenhagen of universities, societies, and theatre schools. Marowitz was invited to direct his Hamlet, collage at the University of Victoria in Canada for nine performances in March 2012. This was the last production he directed. He died on May 2nd, 2014 in Agoura Hills; California due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. He is survived by his wife, Jane Windsor-Marowitz, whom he married in 1982, and by a son, Konstantin, known as Kostya.
Marowitz as Thinker
Charles Marowitz became a key figure in an important new phase in the development of contemporary theatre. The groups and people associated with Marowitz would serve to delineate the antithetical purpose of the alternative theatre and establish an engagement between this sector and the commercial theatre establishment which could be argued had dialectical characteristics. A synthesis of alternative and mainstream characteristics has emerged and influenced contemporary theatre as a whole into a more comprehensive level of engagement with society. In this a somewhat more representative and comprehensive number of communities and voices find representation. One could go to the most commercial theatre in the present day and identify characteristics, such as an increased emphasis on physicality and non-verbal expression, or the irreverent deconstruction and decentring of canonical texts, and trace these characteristics back to the influence of the alternative theatre. In several societies, there is a tendency for mainstream theatre to draw direct influence from the alternative theatre if it exists.
In a conventional proscenium arch actor/audience scenario the audience is a part of an active/passive relationship. In conventional narrative-text-character based theatre the reception of the performance will be optically and auditorily focused and selective with regard to the incidents and their narrative significance. The audience member will sit in a designated position which orientates in a certain direction. The seat is fixed to the floor and the lights are extinguished except for a specific area where the performance activity is located. The audience is expected to acquiesce in a level of subordination and passivity. Marowitz’s theatre sought varieties of alternatives to such a rigid format.
These changes were intertwined with his own personal journey as well as contemporaneous events. Marowitz experienced the advent of Off Broadway firsthand as a youth in Greenwich Village and as a theatre critic for the Village Voice climbing fire escapes and attending unconventional performances in unconventional locales. His move to Britain during the watershed year of 1956 combined with his iconoclasm and his pattern of confronting established practices and institutions were perhaps in some way emblematic of the changes in the theatre itself during the period.
During the earlier period of his career Marowitz was caught up in prevailing theatrical preoccupations of the day. During the 1960s his theatrical temperament transformed from an interest in applying Stanislavski’s methodology to the ideas of Artaud whom he first read in 1958. In his own sensibility Marowitz shifted away from socially committed plays and ideology to an emphasis on aesthetic innovation and metaphysical exploration. In particular, when he was working with the Traverse he found that there was a predominant emphasis on new writing. He decided that no amount of new writing would really change theatre itself or free it from a state of aesthetic obsolescence so he began to search for new forms and techniques which would transcend the mundane and the temporal (Marowitz 1973: 8-9). He became committed to the creation of a collective instrument based around the idea of a permanent company. Working collectively in collaboration with a director but without specific reference to a single playwright per se would, in his view, by virtue of its artistic chemistry, create a new and original kind of artistic specimen that was more efficacious than the written word itself (Marowitz, Interview, 2011). It was in order to realise this vision that Marowitz originally collaborated with Peter Brook on the Theatre of Cruelty season in 1963/64, which effectively popularised the ideas of Artaud within contemporary theatre. He created the Open Space Theatre Company in 1968 which was the only example in Britain of a laboratory company run on a repertory basis. Marowitz’s development in this direction started with his experience of the Group Theatre and the emergence of the ‘American Method’ or rather American derivations of Stanislavski. In particular, Stanislavski-based improvisational techniques were an important formative influence on Marowitz.
Characteristics of his work included a subversion of conventional narrative, the exploration of non-traditional time, experimentation with location and space, an emphasis on a diversity of voices, and new approaches to the physicalisation of performance, experimentation with audience and stage configuration and relationship (Total Space), artistic experimentation with form and content, Post-Brechtian forms of political engagement, non-traditional venues and audiences, non-narrative and language based (physical theatre), use of American ‘Method’ techniques, anti-class based form and content, and the use of obscene language and nudity. In addition included experimentation with language (physicalisation and obscenity), experimentation with form (performance art and one-acts), and a breaking down of traditional hierarchies in terms of the economics and process of production as well as the actor/audience relationship. Further he explored issues of identity as expressed in theatre in ways which problematise and challenge perception of identity in terms of any single overarching or homogenising categorisation.
During the 1950s General Eisenhower, who embodied in many ways older attitudes, was elected to the US presidency twice and former soldiers who were now in their thirties applied the discipline and group ethos that was engrained during the War into civilian activities. Meanwhile the younger generation who had greater educational opportunities as well as fewer financial restrictions and arguably, as a consequence, a greater emphasis on individual fulfilment emerged as a characteristic of the new ‘Baby Boom’ generation which by the late 1950s was entering its teenage years. Teenagers began to assert their identities and it was in part because of these contrasts and contributing factors that a generational clash grew on both sides of the Atlantic, in which many American influences, including what may be described as an emerging youth culture, played an influential role.
In 1956, in Britain, for example more than eighty local councils banned screenings of the hit musical film Rock Around the Clock, amid widespread fears it would foment teenage delinquency. The system of theatre censorship in Britain and taxation combined with a lack of public subsidy led to a situation where theatrical output was restricted. American work, meanwhile, was not created with the intention of satisfying these conditions and over time had a role in changing the prevailing environment in Britain.
In the years after World War II an economic boom in the United States eventually created economic conditions during the 1950s which led to a need for an alternative to Broadway in order to cultivate experimentation, discover new voices, and test untried material which in the pre-war period would have been possible on Broadway (Aronson 2000: 4). By 1951 New York was the richest city in the world and an inflationary boom during the 1950s drove the costs of production on Broadway to unprecedented heights while at the same time Broadway’s audiences were being lost to the cinema and to television (Bottoms 2004: 19). The increasingly severe economic imperatives of commercial Broadway Theatre meant that conventional producers were unwilling or unable to risk money on unfamiliar names and unconventional material so that full scale productions produced on Broadway of plays by unknown playwrights became very difficult.
In this context the Off Broadway sector emerged in Greenwich Village. Greenwich Village was also the place where the ‘counter culture’ started as a rebellion against 1950s conformity. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac was written in 1951 (published 1957) and figures such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, and Jackson Pollock, to name a few were revolutionising literature, music, and the visual arts. There were important distinctions between Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway but there was also a certain continuity. During the late 1950s and early 1960s Off Broadway theatres also became increasingly commercial and as a consequence young theatre artists and writers began to form (and perform) in tiny cafes and non-theatre spaces such as church basements, lofts, and living rooms. Most of these spaces were also located in Greenwich Village or in the East Village and became associated with the label Off Off Broadway.
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