7.18.2006
Future Tragic Events
According to this LA Weekly review, the latest prodction of Craig Wright's play Recent Tragic Events, which deals with the events of 9/12, features a quirky mixture of life, death, comedy, tragedy and surrealism. Among other unique tactics, the play begins when the stage manager "flips a coin to determine whether the production will run according to a 'heads' version or its 'tails' alternate." From the article: "If 9/11 was a wake-up call for Americans, then 9/12, in playwright Craig Wright’s work, Recent Tragic Events, was the day we all began to sleepwalk into an uncertain future." The article goes on to explain that "the story starts as a dating comedy and evolves into an absurdist collision of neuroses, before it becomes a debate on the nature of free will." Sounds like my kind of play.
Reading the review, what strikes me is the question of how to represent controversial historical events. A friend of mine gave a paper awhile back looking at the historical progression of representations of the holocaust. He argued that it wasn't really until the 1950s that people started to take the depth of the atrocity seriously, which seems odd given its current centrality in many peoples' consciousness as the defining moment of the twentieth centruy. Recent Tragic Events was written shortly after the WTC attacks, and debuted only a year later, and "surreal," I think, describes well the feeling I had at that time. I wonder, on the other hand, what that fateful day will look like in sixty years....
