Free Drinks Before Dinner by E. L. Doctorow Page A

central as to be an article of faith. And that is the point. The idea of character as we normally celebrate it on the American stage is what this play seems to question. I must here confess to a disposition for a theatre of language, in which the contemplation of this man’s fate or that woman’s is illuminated by poetry or philosophical paradox or rhetoric or wit. A theatre of ideas is what has always interested me, plays in which the holding of ideas or the arguing of ideas is a matter of life or death, and characters take the ideas they hold as seriously as survival. All of this is, dramatically speaking, un-American. What is clearly American is the theatre of pathos wherein a story is told about this man or that woman to reveal how sad his or her life is, or how triumphant, or how he or she does not realize fulfillment as a human being, or does realize it, or is trapped in his or her own illusions, or is liberated from them, or fails to learn to communicate love, or learns, or is morally defeated by ethnic or economic circumstances, or is not defeated. Comic or melodramatic, this is the theatre of domestic biography, and I contrast it to any other—classical, absurdist, metaphysical, epic—that avoids its bias of sociological realism.
    This theatrical mode has been so exhausted by television and film that I’m astounded it is still thought by playwrights to be useful and interesting. Because presumptionsof form tend to control presumptions of thought, even what is most basic—the solicitation of emotion from an audience—must be questioned if the emotion is no more, finally, than self-congratulatory. Having written this play and seen it through its first production, I understand Brecht’s disavowal of standard theatrical emotion not only as an ideological decision but as a felt abhorrence for what is so cheaply and easily generated. Since the onslaught of television in the late forties, the dramatic mode has swept through all the media; everything is dramatized—news events, the weather, hamburgers. The responsiveness of the media, print or electronic, to every new idea or event or terror is so instantaneous that, as many people have pointed out, experience itself has lost its value, which is to say, life as an experience rather than as a postulate for dramatic statement has begun to disappear from our understanding. Every protest, rage, every critique, is absorbed by our dramatizing machinery and then reissued in appropriate form. The writer confronts not only moral hideousness but the globally efficient self-examination in dramatic terms of that hideousness. Where is wisdom? Everyone has faster hands than the artist. His devices and tricks of the trade have long since been appropriated not only by the media but by the disciplines of social science, whose case studies, personality typing and composite social portraiture are the industrialized forms of storytelling.
    What are the presumptions of thought determined by the formal presumptions of this play? As it happens, the corruption of human identity is exactly the preoccupation of the speaker or character (not to be coy) who sets off the action, and whose point of view annoys, frightens and, if I’m right, finally enlightens the others. This is Edgar, whose complaint is with the weak Self that loses its corporeality to the customs and conventions and institutionsof modern life. His dissatisfaction is so immense that he pulls a gun and looks for someone to blame.
    But not only Edgar but all of the others too who join him in dispute speak in terms of human numbers, in images of replicating humanity, and of themselves not as individuals but as members of larger classes, and for a good deal of the time, but especially at the beginning of the play, their argument is in the first and third person plural. And when Edgar pulls the gun it turns out that he is crucially unattached to the act: it is the situation that determines what he is doing, the others define him as