RENATI THE KING
A Play
by Gian DiDonna
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2007. Copyright © 2007 Gian DiDonna. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
RENATI THE KING: A PHANTASMAGORIC COMEDY
Introduction by Rainer J. Hanshe
The degree to which any of us can fulfill the Delphic Oracle’s command is limited, but the work we create and give to the world is perhaps a testament to our (un)knowability. We live, or so we believe, through other things and on stage, through the lives of others. In his plays, writer Gian DiDonna presents a body of characters that, perhaps, are masks of him, revelations of that which cannot otherwise be revealed. In meditation, as we surrender to silence, what eludes us flickers forth without reserve from the projector of the unconscious. What though is manifested remains enigmatic. Are the multitudinous masks of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche not signs that they are even more unknowable, signs of the high degree their wisdom reached in knowing that the self is ultimately inexplicable? The mask of Dionysus reveals and conceals each of us; as we delude ourselves in thinking that we reveal something as we annul the veils, we are even more obscured. The veils remain, an infinite fold, where layers and layers and layers reveal nothing more and more nothing. Welcome to the spectacle.
For some time, DiDonna has been writing plays and working with various independent theater companies, several of whom produced his work Off-Off Broadway. Of recent, he has been working with LAByrinth Theater Company in New York City. His play A Sinister Man was featured in their 2007 Barn Series, a host of staged readings at New York City’s Public Theater. In 2004, his urban drama The Night Trombone was featured in the same series, which included Jose Rivera’s play about Che Guevara, School of the Americas. DiDonna’s first play, Bento is a complex epic drama that concerns the life of Baruch Spinoza. It was a finalist at the 1999 Last Frontier New Play Lab Competition, which was sponsored by Edward Albee. Of recent, Bento was reconfigured as The New Jerusalem. Renati the King is an exploration of the final hours of Rene Descartes, who, while situated in the bowels of a military frigate in the dead of winter, is awaiting an appointment with the Queen of Sweden. If he is able to produce on behalf of the Queen a cure for melancholy, he will be named the court philosopher of Sweden. In the play, Descartes’ philosophy has been made corporeal, yet that corporeality is abnegated by Descartes despite his grand aspirations. Flesh has been given, not taken away, but Renati the King, as Descartes crowns himself, will refute flesh in honor of mind and construct a temple of reason that the world is to worship.
For Descartes, the mind was the stage of stages, a stage out of which the entire world erupted. As God supposedly created the world, Renati creates a world around him out of his mind, though not necessarily knowing it. The stage to which he aspires in Renati the King though is the grandest of all and it is and is not an illusion. It is the stage of history itself. At one moment in the play, after suffering stark privations for some time, Renati asks the soon to be ambassador to the Queen to sequester clothes for him from the costume house of her theater. The philosopher is thus not only a character in the play, but is to don the raiments of the theater. Theater functions as a place within the play, and Renati, if there is to be a coronation, is, he learns, to be crowned in the theater. What is history but a representation? Enacted on stage, the degree to which it is an invention and a performance is exacerbated, and the reality of the play is as histrionic as history.
The closest antecedent to Renati the King, or a play which it hearkens back to, is perhaps Aristophanes’ The Clouds, wherein Socrates, the first philosopher to be made into a theatrical personage, is transformed into a dangerous buffoon. In The Clouds, it is not the poet who is dangerous, but the philosopher; it is not the poet who is a dreamer, but the philosopher who floats on clouds, mystifying the world with abstract and abstruse theories. DiDonna doesn’t necessarily supplant or undermine philosophy with theater as did Aristophanes, but stages philosophy, mutating Descartes into as much of a buffoon. Renati the King is a comedic spectacle, a theater of ritual and of science where hybris is more dangerous than cyanide. It is a movement into the darkness. The dog heads that crown the stage like muted savage hieroglyphs are symbolic of the horror that consumes Renati. But like Richard Foreman’s Bad Boy Nietzsche, this dramatization of a philosopher’s end is also satiric, a phantasmagoric comedy that veers into the dizzying mania of absurdity yet, while absurd, is still rife with pathos. It is this amalgam of comedy, absurdity, and pathos that is a mark of the play’s merit and a testament of its artistic value. It does not collapse into the bathetic, but expresses with true power and feeling the heightened reality of the philosopher’s exalted moments. In its expression of his baseness, it is honest and unyielding and refuses to idealize its subject. Renati the King is the work of a vaunted imagination. The play is both kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory and in its imaginative transformation of such difficult material, DiDonna reveals sensitivity, depth, and intelligence. This is brave theatrical work that stands against the fashions of its time.
Since Plato, philosophers have been interested in or concerned with theater and its effect on the members of the polis. Socrates, or as we know him as a dramatic personage in Plato, found the poet a dangerous figure who had to be subdued. It was less that theater was to be banished from the polis and more that it was to be co-opted and transfigured by the philosopher. In the nineteenth century, philosophy became, in large part, increasingly ‘theatrical’; that is to say, philosophy employed not only the language of theater in its discourse but the theater’s mode of presentation, as well. The distance between theater and philosophy thus significantly diminished, and it has continued to. Sophocles is now as much an exemplary philosophic figure as Empedocles and it is Mt. Etna more than Athens that, fittingly so, is more the birthplace of philosophy. Increasingly, philosophers became dramatists of sorts and dramatists, from Ibsen to Strindberg, Durrenmatt, Genet and Beckett, became philosophers of a kind or wrote work concerned with philosophical problems. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are undoubtedly the two most prominent ‘dramatic’ or poetic philosophers. The multitudinous styles and the use of monologues or theatrical situations that Nietzsche employs to express his ideas, most famously with the dramatization of the death of God, reveal how deeply theatrical Nietzsche’s philosophy is. Peter Sloterdijk’s Thinker on Stage aptly renders the predominant aspect of Nietzsche’s thought. Kierkegaard’s complex and artful employment of pseudonyms—there are over 10—reveals an even richer and more adroit stylistic conception than Nietzsche’s. His use of theatrical modes is as galvanizing as it is profound. The virtual explosion of ‘theatrical philosophy’ that occurs in the twentieth century, with its appropriation and enactment of drama, event, mask, and performance is born of the wombs of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.
Renati the King is thus part of a long tradition. It is a theater of ritual, science, and philosophy. God is erased, and in his place, the image of the philosopher is erected. The philosopher however dies not on a cross to save man from guilt, but ventures into the abyss, veering towards madness, a crescent breaking an edge, and presents humanity with truths difficult to refute. The philosopher is the antithesis of the savior. He is man’s hardest task master. He refuses man all comforts and instead compels man to strive to overcome delusions, such as the belief in God. The philosopher doesn’t blind with his light like God; his luminosity is not the scintillating luminosity of the saint, which mystifies and transfixes. It is the illuminating light of the seer. Yet, that light is so unbearable, in its clarity, it too can destroy. Descartes though, or Renati the King, does not seek merely to supplant religion with reason but to himself stand as the new truth. It is anthropos refusing and simultaneously reinscribing anthropos. It is the human subject gone mad. In such an instance, Nietzsche’s invocation that man must perish could not be more vital. The human must be overcome; man, as he said, must think cosmically, not anthropomorphically. It is only when such a dawn comes that we may have at last surmounted our madness, if we are mad anymore. In Renati the King, we have a philosopher at the apex of his madness; we have a philosopher obsessed with—reason.
What follows is the first act of a two-act play. Until Renati the King is produced, the writer prefers not to reveal its full contents. Hyperion is publishing this work because of its engagement with philosophy, which is rare in art today, and because its aesthetic objectives concur with Hyperion’s vision of art. Also, as stated earlier, it is an untimely work that is particularly daring for exploring subject matter of little interest to the predominantly consumerist world that is theater today. It brooks no compromises, intellectual, or otherwise, and in that is especially honorable, for it almost courts silence. Integrity however is greater than fame.
For those who wish to contact DiDonna about the play, he can be reached at “gian AT att DOT net”.
On to the coronation of the king. . .
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