Theatre of Cruelty

So it's that... ironic sort of conflation or tension that he's getting off on.

And then there's also the element of Antonin Artaud, who was famous for creating an idea called The Theater of Cruelty, which was putting on productions, you know, plays, one acts, what have you, where the uh intent of the players you know the actors and playwright was to antagonize the audience as opposed to entertain them or or you know right or serve them in any sort of way and i feel like he's combining these elements with his obvious love of john cassavetes and opening night because he puts a poster of the fucking thing in the in criticism you know dressing room or whatever and And this idea of the backstage drama melding and informing, but also being informed by the play scenes and all that, and the blurring of lines between reality and play reality.

But I think there's so many layers to the film that it is... a hard lock-in.

It's a very easy lock-in intellectually because it's fun to put layer on top of layer on top of layer and think, oh, look at all these resonances that are cascading down and all that.

I research projects that have to do with certain parts of theater.

For example, one of my research projects had to do with theater cruelty, which is a style of theater, and I wrote an entire play that was encompassed of theater cruelty aspects and had it produced.

Why is it called theater cruelty?

All right.

Well, there are aspects of it that have to do with the harshness of the human condition, and at the end of it, you're supposed to feel some catharsis once it's completed.

One of my favorite theater cruelty pieces was a piece done in Paris, France.

The woman who was in the piece went through the entire stages of a pregnancy up until having the child.

There was no dialogue, very little dialogue, and it was mostly movement and physicality and, you know, all the embodiment of the pain and the love and all these things that happened.

I don't have it done in years, but I did mostly theater and, and things like that.

So it fascinated me that I never, even though I did things like Theater of Absurd, never came across, which is closely related to Theater of Cruelty.

I was fascinated by it all.

He's fantastic.

If you really want some transgressive art, go and watch a...

Go back to the 19th century and watch some Grand Guignol's Theatre of Cruelty, even Genesis P-Orridge's, uh, confrontation stuff, or even listen to some coil with ritual and altered states.

Get yourself tr- Even a bit of Baudelaire.

Um, get yourself transgressed.