Anecdotal Evidence: `P Raises His Head, Fixes the Audience'

Anecdotal Evidence: `P Raises His Head, Fixes the Audience'
Excerpt:
“Age and physique unimportant”: Under the Czech communists – or Cuban, or North Korean, or any utopians – everything about the individual is unimportant. Reckoned by totalitarian logic, the collective, an abstraction, is the only reality; the individual, the only reality, is a pernicious abstraction. In Catastrophe, a stringent parody of theater and governance, the Director (D) and his assistant (A) manipulate the Protagonist (P) as he stands mutely on a stage. Until the final stage direction, he remains as malleable as clay in the sculptor’s hands, a motor to be tinkered with at the whim of the mechanic, “the engineer of human souls.”

In the play-within-a-play, A asks if P should wear “a little . . . gag?” D replies: “For God's sake! This craze for explicitation! Every i dotted to death! Little gag! For God's sake!”...................