What is my theory that it is*

I was wrong.

I dream of being a surrealist.

I was bemoaning in my last blog post, and to my mentor, that so much of the modern theatre (this is the spelling I am sticking with) is concerned with the "internal logic" of the play.  Nothing wrong with this, but it is very limiting.  And I speculated that Alfred Jarry or August Strindberg never worried about "internal logic."

I don't want to worry about internal logic.

I was doing the dishes and listening to the radio as I do every morning.  On NPR (where so many of the great ideas I have come from), a mention was made of a book called Aluminum Dreams - The Making of Light Modernity.  What a wonderful title, I thought.  The modern world helped along by a manufacturing process.  I wrote a poem years ago called Plutonium Dreams.  I remember the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick, the book the movie Blade Runner is based on.  Anais Nin wrote The Novel of the Future, a wonderful book I read in high school about surrealism in art, with the refrain "proceed from the dream outward," which I have used as a touchstone in my own work and, which I have just learned, is a Carl Jung quote.

Dreams are important to me.  And, no, I am not one of those people who writes down every dream and I spend very little time analyzing my dreams.  I don't think most, or practically any, of my dreams are important.  Most dreams are a response to the previous day and are basically a process of sorting out what the day before held.

But as an excessively rational person, and an artist, I work hard to tap into my irrational mind.  It is a critical element in my creative process.  (Remember what this blog is about... my creative process.)  Dreams, the waking kind, the fantasies that spring into my thoughts unbidden are regularly keys to my art.

And suddenly I understood why surrealism has such a hard time in the modern theatre.

Real life is surreal.  Modern living is surreal.

I can go to a building in my town.  Enter a tiny room crowded with people.  Sleep through the night, and wake up with the Eiffel Tower at my feet.

I've done that.  We call that building an airport and that tiny, overcrowded room an airplane.

This very morning, I was doing the dishes, listening to voice coming out of the ether, telling me about the making of modernity.  Moses would have thought it was the Word of God.

And then there's politics, or international relations, or mega-corporations, or global warming or... on and on.  None of it is rational, logical.  It's surreal.  The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade makes more sense.

No wonder "internal logic" has become so important!  Real life has no internal logic.  Perhaps modern drama must.


*John Cleese & Monty Python, "Ann Elk's Theory on Brontosauruses"