The Drama as a Secular Faith

Robert Brustein, Founding Director and Creative Consultant, American Repertory Theatre, Harvard University
Lowell Lecture, October 5, 2004

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Robert Brustein

Western theatre, whether faith-based or not, has historically formed a close and complicated relationship with religion. Indeed, European drama as we know it began as an expression of the church, then was anathematized and secularized, developing along the way a rebellious attitude toward the very beliefs that gave it birth. After the Enlightenment, playwrights became engaged in an effort to invent new gods and develop new creeds to replace the established religions--an effort that was more significant for its cheekiness and gall than for its persuasiveness or reformative power. These playwrights formed a messianic movement that faltered in the face of world wars and holocausts, and is now disintegrating before the onslaught of religious fundamentalism.

This pattern of belief and rebellion was anticipated in the theatre of Periclean Athens, the development of which describes a trajectory very similar to that of Western theatre. I'm sure I am telling you things you already know, but it never hurts to be reminded that Greek tragedy originated as an extension of the spiritual life of the polis, fulfilling a religious function that was built into the very structure of the physical theatre, including its principal machinery. Significantly, it was the chorus, not the audience, who occupied the space in the theatre called the orchestra. Try to imagine an area occupied not by [American Repertory Theatre] ART subscribers reading their programs in plush seats but rather by a group of celebrants dancing around an altar and singing choral odes. The fact that the audience later invaded this sacred area is compelling evidence of the secularization of the theatre.

But the choral odes sung in the orchestra were essentially pious hymns to the Olympian gods, who often descended onto the stage in a mechanical contraption called the deus ex machina in order to settle a conflict or resolve a plot. The plots were stories from the Homeric myths, the Greek equivalent of our biblical stories, performed by actors wearing masks and huge elevated shoes called cothurni. As for audiences, they came to these events not just to enjoy a good show but to participate in ceremonial worship, expressing their reverence by watching heroes engaged in sacred activities indistinguishable from those of priests, shamans, and holy men.

The religious function of this drama is most expressly demonstrated in the only extant Greek trilogy we have, Aeschylus' Oresteia, which is both a dramatic and a sacred text. In dramatizing the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, and the subsequent murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes, Aeschylus uses his three plays to trace the development of the Greek religious order from the vindictive Chthonic or Titanian deities, represented by the Furies, to the more civilized Olympian gods, headed by Zeus. In the last play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, Athena not only tames and domesticates the raging Furies but defies their ancient eye-for-an-eye justice by setting up the first jury trial in history for the purpose of passing judgments on tribal crimes. Significantly, it is a hung jury, and Athena has to make the final judgment herself--Orestes is innocent of matricide because a woman is not the parent of the child but only harbors the father's seed, a daffy patriarchal notion not designed to endear either Athena or Aeschylus to the female sex.

Aeschylus was an obscure and mystical poet with a deep belief in the Olympian order. Indeed, he was accustomed not only to celebrate the gods in choral odes but to bring them on stage as dramatic characters, as, for example, in that powerful debate in The Eumenides, the first courtroom scene in history, between the Furies and Phoebus Apollo. Sophocles, for his part, never represented the gods on stage, though his choruses are pulsing with reverence and awe for them. In his masterpiece, Oedipus Tyrannos, he did for Greek theology what the book of Job did for the Judeo-Christian tradition, which was to justify the ways of God to man, no matter how cruel or senseless they may seem. Oedipus may have killed his father and married his mother, but his crimes were unknowing ones--if Oedipus were being tried for parricide or incest, no prosecutor could prove intent. However, the fairness of Oedipus' fate is not an issue in this particular world order. He has broken some fundamental law of nature, like sticking your wet finger in an open light socket, and must suffer the consequences willy-nilly, whatever his vices or virtues, whether his crime was intentional or not.

By the time of Euripides, a patina of skepticism had begun to glaze Greek thought, imported from the philosophy of Socrates and the Sophists, and this skepticism had also begun to influence the writing of Greek tragedy. Nietzsche called Euripides "the poet of aesthetic Socratism," a description not intended as praise. Nietzsche believed that Socratic thought and Platonic idealism were adulterating the mystic majesty of the Greek myths and vitiating their religious ecstasy. Certainly, Euripides' attitude toward Greek religion was equivocal. His choruses alternate between ventilating anger at the cruelty of the gods and expressing doubt over whether or not they exist. At the same time, he likes to hedge his bets in a play like The Bacchae, which traces the evolution of an even newer religion founded on the ecstatic rituals of Dionysos, a god whom one ignores at one's peril. In his freethinking attitudes, Euripides is the most modern and radical of the Greek tragedians. No wonder the more conservative Aristophanes made him the butt of so many comic encounters.

The religious origins and development of European drama are strikingly similar to those of the Greeks, the major difference being that the theatre did not long remain a central part of Christian liturgy or an expression of its scripture. Yet, Western theatre grew out of Christian liturgy and scripture. Just as Greek drama began when the actor-playwright Thespis broke from the chorus and initiated dialogue, so medieval drama originated in the church as a brief Latin dialogue called the quem quaeritis (whom seek you?) trope. The three Marys, coming to view the crucified body of Jesus, are informed by an angel that he has risen and been resurrected. The stage directions for this dialogue are provided by a fourteenth-century churchman named Bishop Ethelwold, possibly the first director in European history, who provided performance instructions about how the trope was to be performed (for example, "Let him begin in a dulcet voice of medium pitch to sing: 'Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, O Christocalae?'"). Dulcet voice. Medium pitch. Not very helpful for an actor! It is only a short leap over 700 years to the instructions of such autocratic auteurs as Max Reinhardt, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Serban, and Robert Wilson.

Despite its religious origins, the Christian clergy, unlike the Greeks, soon found the drama to be impious and irreligious regardless of its biblical subject matter and kicked it out of the church. This marked the beginning of a phenomenon that the late scholar Jonas Barish was to call the antitheatrical prejudice, stimulated by the notion that theatre people were rogues and vagabonds (of course we are), and that some material was too sacred to be staled upon the stage. Today a lot of academics I know feel that way about Shakespeare, believing that his plays can be better understood in the study or the classroom than in the imperfect medium of the theatre, munched in the mouths of actors.

But having been ejected from the church, early Western theatre didn't go far--actually only to the church precincts next door. Guilds set up stages in churchyards to reenact "mystery cycles" and "passion plays," namely Old and New Testament stories from the Creation to the Harrowing of Hell. And while the artisans of the guilds were often knowledgeable about the particular biblical story they were staging (the carpenters, for example, produced the story of Noah because they had the tools and skills for building an ark), they were not professional actors. Professionalism would come later. In England it would begin with the formation of theatre structures on the South Bank.

English churchmen, particularly the Puritans among them, would continue to regard actors as some sort of lower species, not fit for burial in hallowed ground, and to condemn the theatre as a gathering place for ruffians, orange girls, and prostitutes. Mainly, however, the Puritans deplored such vile theatre practices as dressing up boys in female costumes to play women's roles like Rosalind and Viola. The Puritan temperament cited Deuteronomy to declare transvestism "an abomination unto the Lord," and it was largely for such reasons, and for what Jeremy Collier would later call "the profaneness and immorality of the English stage," that one of the first acts of the Cromwellians, after they took power in 1642 and sawed off the head of King Charles I, was to board up the doors of the theatres.

Nevertheless, despite its treatment at the hands of hostile clerics, Elizabethan drama usually maintained a loose thematic affinity with religion. The medieval conventions of the morality plays evolved into the more sophisticated moral conflicts of Everyman and eventually even found their way into such plays as Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus with its good and bad angels and its medieval parade of the Seven Deadly Sins. Marlowe reminds us a lot of Euripides in his ambiguous relationship to religion. One of his heroes, Tamberlaine, aspires "to set black streamers in the firmament to signify the slaughter of the gods." And, although his Jew of Malta likes "to go abroad and poison wells," his Christian characters aren't a lot more endearing. On the other hand, Marlowe's masterpiece, Doctor Faustus, is about a sinner who signs a pact with the devil to gain more knowledge and pleasure. He ends up sentenced to eternal damnation, despite a belated and unsuccessful effort "to leap up to my God," after having seen Christ's blood streaming in the firmament. Reputedly an atheist and blasphemer, a homosexual, and possibly a government spy--all heretical practices at the time--Marlowe also seems to have been among the most God-fearing and God-obsessed playwrights of his time.

For all its tragic overtones, the world of Elizabethan drama is relatively comprehensible and ordered. That mood soon dissolved into the Cimmerian gloom of Stuart drama, the result, some commentators believe, of a growing loss of faith characterizing the period following Elizabeth's death and James's ascension to the throne. Moralistic plays like The Atheist's Tragedy--about a villain whose very name, Damville, indicates what happens to people who deny the Christian God--continued to be written. The moral? It is a tragedy to be an atheist; Damville is damned to eternal hellfire. But the sophisticated Stuart drama displays a much more complicated view of the universe than this rather crude tract would suggest. It largely chronicles a world in the process of disintegration, a world where the higher links in the great chain of being have been broken. "'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone," writes the metaphysical poet John Donne, himself a man of the cloth, in a famous passage. That sense of breakdown permeates the greatest plays of the time, those of Middleton, Webster, Tourneur, and Ford, and particularly Shakespeare's major tragedies.

The religious conflicts we find in Shakespeare are usually between characters who appeal to a personal god and those who find god in themselves. The believers, which is to say the figures who fortify themselves with faith, are usually heroic victims--the Duke of Clarence in Richard III, Othello, Lear. The unbelievers, which is to say those whose only higher order is nature, are invariably the villains--Richard Crookback, Iago, the bastard Edmund. Paradoxically, Shakespeare's villains are often the most witty, the most intellectual, and the most advanced characters in the plays. When Edmund, the natural son of Gloucester, proclaims, "Thou Nature art my goddess; to thy law/My services are bound," he is pledging allegiance to a much more sophisticated deity than Lear's "dear goddess Nature," with its pagan and Roman associations. Edmund's nature goddess is not a transcendent being. She is seated in the self, and in a self guided entirely by self-interest. Furthermore, it is Edmund's indifferent force of nature, not Lear's "dear goddess," who pelts down rain on the naked king in the heath scene, who creates vicious offspring like Goneril and Regan, and conscienceless villains like Edmund himself. Similarly, when Richard III cries, "Conscience avaunt, 'tis a word that cowards use," or when Iago snarls, "Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus," they are both arguing for or describing a naturalistic world without the restraints usually imposed by the superego, a world where humanity will eventually begin to prey upon itself like "monsters from the deep."

Certainly, the landscape of Lear remains irredeemably bleak, a world described in negatives ("no, no, no life" and "never, never, never, never, never"), where we seem to be peering into a vast abyss. The play's nihilistic world view is barely redeemed by the death of the villains or the restoration of some kind of feeble order at the end. If one can identify the moment in Western history when the heavens cracked, it is in this play. Something really terrible has entered human consciousness, namely the contemplation of life without transcendence, without the intervention of a personal god.

It is this perception that colors the naturalistic world of Thomas Middleton, especially in The Changeling, which assumes a hell without a heaven, of John Webster in "Tussaud laureate" plays like The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, where all the conventional moral categories have broken down and the heavens are filled only with aimless stars, and especially of John Ford in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, whose hero Giovanni consults a friar to seek religious justification to sleep with his sister, Annabella. The Friar has to concede that "if we were sure there were no Deity,/Nor Heaven nor Hell, then to be led alone/By Nature's light--as were philosophers/Of elder times--might instance some defence." The play thus expresses a pre-Dostoyevskian conviction that if there is no god, only nature, then everything is permitted, including murder, suicide, and incest.

Oddly enough, this belief in the triumph of blind nature, a harrowing thought to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, provides the foundation for the optimistic rationalism of the eighteenth century and the defiant naturalism of the nineteenth century. Thus, the character who worships nature and recognizes no higher power, while a villain to seventeenth-century theologians and playwrights, becomes a hero to the eighteenth-century philosophers of the Enlightenment and not a few of its playwrights. Under the influence of rationalist thinkers, and exhilarated by the new scientific method, some came to believe, in this moment of history, that it was possible to replace the traditional God of the testaments with a god of reason, who rules over a universe made comprehensible not by divine revelation but by human intellect. This confident rationalism, embraced by the deists and publicized by the encyclopedists, was intended to replace forever the centuries-old heritage of mysticism and faith. If it assumed a creator, it was one who formed the world and then remained indifferent to it, rather like nature itself.

"When I see the ancient tragedies," wrote Beaumarchais, one of the inventors of secular democratic drama, "I am seized with a feeling of personal indignation against the cruel gods who allow such terrible calamities to be heaped upon the innocent." Mankind is innocent; the guilty ones are the gods, if indeed they exist. Denis Diderot, both an encyclopedist and a dramatist, agreed, affirming that human nature is good--it is "our miserable conventions that pervert and cramp mankind."

This idea was most passionately expressed by Rousseau, who believed that while human beings were basically decent, human institutions were basically corrupt. By throwing off all external constraints, such as kings, courts, and governments, the human race could exercise its intrinsic virtue uninhibited by outside controls. This idea eventually contributed to at least two successful democratic revolutions, the first in America in 1776, which preserved the power of the clergy, the second in France in 1789, which enfeebled it. And as modified by Karl Marx's concept of the ultimate disappearance of human government, Rousseauvian romanticism probably contributed to the Russian Revolution as well, though instead of withering away the Soviet state became god, appointing Joseph Stalin as its supreme pontiff.

Revolutionary regimes are notoriously short on good drama. But the revolutionary philosophy of the eighteenth century produced at least one great work of theatrical art, namely Mozart's musical drama Don Giovanni. Written in 1787, the opera features a central character who has sometimes been described as a hero of the Enlightenment, if not the personification of its philosophical values. Based in part on Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla and to some extent on Molière's Don Juan, this artful compound of Mozart's galvanic music and Lorenzo Da Ponte's galloping libretto follows the career of "an enemy of God," as he defies all sexual and religious conventions in the satisfaction of his own natural appetites. Don Giovanni is a rebel who bellows his resounding "No"--so evocative of Lucifer's defiant non serviam (I will not serve)--in response to any suggestion of repentance, even as he is being dragged down to the bowels of hell.

Before Mozart, Don Juan had usually been treated as an object for moral and religious condemnation--Molière detested the character and wrote Don Juan against his better judgment. In the Mozart opera, everybody moralizes about Don Giovanni's bad character, but he is indisputably the most dynamic and compelling figure in the play--obviously intended as a strong baritone contrast to the wimpish tenor Ottavio (Mozart, himself a womanizer, had a natural affinity for this amoral skirt-chaser, as well as considerable contempt for moralistic tenors). But the Don Juan of Don Giovanni is not just an aristocratic philanderer like Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro. He is a figure of philosophical, and even religious, magnitude.

It is possible that the proliferation of the Don Juan figure in so many dramas, poems, and novels can be explained by the fact that he fills a huge gap in Christian hagiography. At least, this is how Soren Kierkegaard described the character in his essay on Don Giovanni, "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic." The Judeo-Christian tradition has no figure--no Aphrodite, Eros, or Dionysos as in Greek mythology--to personify sexual love or erotic ecstasy. Don Juan fits the bill perfectly. When I staged the Molière version at Yale some decades ago, under Kierkegaard's influence, we decided to place the action in a church decorated with obscene black- and white-stained windows. Preceding the play proper we introduced a ceremony involving hooded figures celebrating a Black Mass while sacrificing a goat on an altar. By the end of the evening, Don Juan, having turned to stone, had become the object around which the celebrants congregated, a new sacrificial deity. Conflating all the Don Juan stories, we thereby turned the production into a ritual of martyrdom and apotheosis, at the end of which its central figure is transformed into myth as the saint of seduction. In that sense, Don Juan Tenorio is a fictional cousin of that other dubious hero of the Enlightenment, the Marquis de Sade, two hedonists who seduce and abandon, following their desires without regard to moral, canon, or statute law.

Don Juan ends up in hell, the Marquis de Sade in prison. Whatever the more tolerant attitude of the intellectual classes towards the new sexual freedom, in the minds of the conservative majority, then as now, the character of the libertine contaminated the values of human society and had to be punished or restrained. It is ironic that in challenging the church, the French Revolution appropriated one of its principal qualities, namely asceticism. It was the Puritan revolutionary Robespierre who called virtue "the soul of democracy . . . the fundamental principle of popular government." But, ironically, the ideals of the Enlightenment were undermined less by moral revulsion against unconscionable seducers than by a political reaction to the violent turn taken by the French Revolution under Robespierre's leadership.

For the Age of Reason came to an abrupt end when the Reign of Terror rained a shower of severed heads on the ideals of the Enlightenment, blowing a big hole in the trial balloon of a basically rational and compassionate humanity ruled by nature. Edmund Burke's furious renunciation of the French regime helped consolidate the power of the Tory Party in England right up to the time of Margaret Thatcher, who might have been perfect casting for the part of Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, inveighing against "the worst excesses of the French Revolution. . . . And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to."

In the 150 years that elapsed between the Reign of Terror generated by the Enlightenment and the reign of terror now being generated by Islamic fundamentalism, there was a huge vacuum of faith that had to be filled. The earlier eighteenth-century philosophers had suggested that a supernatural being was no longer ruling the universe and that humankind could live perfectly well without an all-powerful supreme power, under the sway of Plato's ideal Republic. Frederick Nietzsche was not among these. As we have seen, he detested Plato and his rationalized universe and had serious doubts about governments run by defective mortals. As for religion, Nietzsche also rejected the old God, but like other German philosophers of the day, he was not so certain humankind could live without a substitute. He at once shocked the world and inspired a lot of modern dramatists--he was perhaps modern drama's greatest philosophical influence--when he resoundingly declared that "God is dead" and proceeded to compose his obituary. A few years later, God declared that Nietzsche was dead and wrote his obituary. But Nietzsche's recognition of the void, and the way he tried to fill it, would have an enormous impact on the artists who followed.

What would take the place of the primal cause? At first, Nietzsche embraced a new religious iconography inspired by Wagnerian opera and later the idea of an Ubermensch, whose superhuman qualities would make him qualified for godhead. "Dead are all the Gods," he thundered, "Now do we desire the Superman to live." This ascent of man to godhead would be accompanied by a transvaluation of values and a total transformation of the spiritual life. Man could create the new value system only by becoming god, and one way to achieve this was through transforming, transcendent works of art. Nietzsche's faith in the supremacy of art was, not surprisingly, very appealing to a number of artists, chief among them European and American playwrights, who also endorsed his recognition of a God-forsaken universe. Some, like Chekhov and Beckett, were content merely to dramatize the void. Others, like Brecht, looked for political solutions with which to fill the void. A number of major dramatists, however, believing that radical change from without was impossible without radical change from within, rose to Nietzsche's challenge for a modern metaphysics by writing works designed to replace the old God and the New Testament with a new god and even newer testaments. I have touched upon this kind of messianic drama in my book, The Theatre of Revolt. With your indulgence, I would like to expand on some of those ideas in the current context, describing a few efforts to evolve a new secular faith, as formulated in the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, O'Neill, and Genet.

A typical Ibsen hero, for example, is the rebel against God, who sometimes seeks a complete alteration in the moral nature of humankind. This describes the religious hero of Ibsen's Brand, as well as Emperor Julian in the rarely produced Emperor and Galilean, and perhaps also Solness in The Master Builder. Of these heroes, Brand is the most complete embodiment of Ibsen's messianism. He is in the direct line of the Old Testament prophets and those religious reformers who arise from time to time to change the course of human belief. But as Brand develops his theology in the course of the play, it is clear that he is not just demanding, like Martin Luther, that each man become his own church. He is asking something more, sounding a lot like Nietzsche, who he may or may not have read, that each man become his own god. Brand's devil is the spirit of compromise. "All or Nothing" is his credo. By the end of the play, his excessive demands on his followers have left him alone and isolated, like Moses on the Pisgah Peak, glimpsing the promised land but unable to enter it. He has become harder and crueler than God and broken the backs of his all-too-human followers. At the end of the play, just before he is destroyed by an avalanche, Brand asks, "If not by Will, how can man be redeemed?" and the answer comes from the heavens, "He is the God of love."

This sounds like Euripidean hedging, but Ibsen never lost his belief in the power of the will, a concept he gleaned from Schopenhaueur's The World as Will and Imagination, the book that in turn influenced Nietzsche's Will to Power. In his world-historical Hegelian drama, Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen follows the progress of Julian the Apostate, a character with whom he closely identifies, in his quest for religious truth. He vacillates between the conflicting empires of Caesar and Christ, the opposing values of self-realization and self-abnegation until, believing himself to be the Messiah, he determines to form a synthesis of past beliefs in a third empire of the will. Human will [is destined to] drive the religion of the future, in which, as Ibsen says, "the present watchword of revolt will be realized" and "men will not have to die in order to live like gods on Earth." Like Brand, Julian has been misled, but like Brand he has moved humankind a little closer to its messianic goal.

In The Master Builder, Ibsen created a hero who has abandoned this quest and must be punished for it. Bygmeister Solness was once dedicated to building churches for the greater glory of God. Now blaming God for the death of his children in a fire, he has become a popular architect, a kind of Scandinavian William J. Levitt, building homes for human beings. This development from the sacred to the secular has left him with a deep sense of guilt and remorse. As a compromise, he builds a home with a tower on it. But when, animated by the admiration of a young girl, he tries to overcome his vertigo by hanging a wreath from the tower, Solness falls to his death. Warring with God, he is finally conquered by overweening pride. But as in Brand and Emperor and Galilean, his defeat is a partial victory. He has also conquered God by doing the deeds he feared most.

August Strindberg looked for a godhead throughout his life and sometimes found it in himself. In his trilogy, The Road to Damascus, whose very title suggests the religious quest he was undertaking, he speaks of merging with the entire universe: "And I feel my spirit growing, spreading, becoming tenuous, infinite. . . . I can survey the whole universe. I am the universe. And I feel the power of the Creator within me, for I am He!" Despite this reverberant bravado, Strindberg never found certainty in his own godhead, never managed to fix on any particular creed or faith. Beginning as a naturalist very much under the influence of Nietzsche, with whom he had a lively correspondence until the philosopher's growing madness scared the life out of him, Strindberg skirted positivism, atheism, socialism, pietism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Swedenborgian mysticism. In an eternal struggle with God, like Jacob with the angel, Strindberg ended up in the arms of the church, leaving instructions that his headstone be inscribed with the motto: Ave crux spes unica (Hail the cross, the only hope). For all his demonic rebelliousness, he actually had more affinity in the end with the religious playwrights of the modern period--say, Paul Claudel or T. S. Eliot--than with the genuine rebels.

Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, remained devoted through most of his life to what he called creative evolution, by which he meant a total change in the nature of humankind. Of course, this change had to come from without, through a revolutionary change in our social and political institutions. It would also come from within through the development of the superman. Man and Superman, as a matter of fact, is the name of one of his most engaging plays, in which the hero, John Tanner, is a modern stand-in for Don Juan Tenorio, the rebel who, defying God, must find his own religion. Typically, Shaw's Don Juan is uninterested in sex. In fact, he spends the bulk of the play running away from the woman who loves him, Dona Ana in the shape of the Victorian charmer Anne Whitfield. Thus, Shaw mischievously adapts the Don Juan legend to the myth of Venus and Adonis, where woman is the pursuer and man the pursued, changing a legend of rape and seduction into a comedy of courtship and marriage.

Still, the pursuit is designed for a higher purpose, namely the evolution of the superman through eugenic breeding. By the end of the Don Juan in Hell sequence, persuaded by Don Juan's arguments about the progressive nature of life as contrasted with the devil's cynicism about its cyclical, destructive quality, Dona Ana chases after Don Juan, seeking "a husband for the Superman." Having rejected Darwin's idea of natural selection--Shaw believed it took "hope out of evolution and substituted a paralyzing fatalism which is utterly discouraging" (Samuel Butler said it "banishes mind from the universe")--Shaw substituted a concept called the life force, based partly on the writings of Bergson, partly on Lamarck.

Shaw's life force, as defined in the play by Don Juan in the dream sequence, is "the working within me of Life's incessant aspirations to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding." This evolution toward pure brainpower is expanded on in Shaw's other messianic play, actually five plays, called Back to Methuselah, written 18 years later in 1921. Shaw regarded this work, windy though it is, as his masterpiece. Calling it a "metabiological Pentateuch," he boasted that it was inspired scripture, a "contribution to the modern Bible."

Assuming that humankind has evolved through the exercise of a universal will, Shaw awaits a man who will become not only superman but god. It is his function as an artist to serve as "iconographer of the religion of my time," creating a series of consoling myths. In the course of this long five-play sequence, he eventually comes up with the solution for these transformations--no longer eugenic breeding but, rather, longevity. By willing himself a longer term of life (say, three centuries), man will become like God, having achieved omnipotence and omniscience. Shaw's assumption that humans grow wiser and more benevolent as they grow older is not entirely supported by geriatric facts or the growing incidence of Alzheimer's disease. But in the last play of the sequence (with a title Stanley Kubrick lifted in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey) called As Far as Thought Can Reach the superman has evolved in the form of ancients--ageless, hairless, and sexless--who devote themselves to pure contemplation. As one character puts it, "The day will come when there will be no more people, only thought." Dying at the age of 94, Shaw almost realized the state of longevity he desired for humankind. It is a blessing that he didn't realize his desire to turn us into pure idea.

Eugene O'Neill was another playwright driven by a quest for new absolutes, but unlike Shaw, who was a confirmed Ibsenite, O'Neill was much more attracted to the experimentation of Strindberg. Like most of his predecessors, however, he was also very much under the influence of Nietzsche. In A Long Day's Journey into Night, the sick and melancholy Edmund Tyrone shouts, "Then Nietzsche must be right. God is dead: of his pity for man hath God died." In a letter to his critical patron, George Jean Nathan, O'Neill wrote, "The playwright today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he feels it--the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning of life in, and to comfort his fears of death with." Like most of his writing, this passage is very prolix, but it catches precisely the sense of loss at the heart of the messianic drama. In Days Without End, O'Neill is calling for a "new savior . . . who will reveal to us how we can be saved by ourselves." And in Lazarus Laughed, he is trying to create a latter-day superman who will serve as that savior. The resurrected Lazarus says, "It is my pride as God to become man. Then let it be my pride as Man to recreate the God in me." And again: "The greatness of Man is that no god can save him--until he becomes a god."

Like Strindberg's, O'Neill's idea of the new god keeps changing from play to play. In Dynamo, God is whirring machinery. In Strange Interlude, he presents himself through an "electrical display." In The Fountain, he is in the biological inheritance passed on through the family. In Marco Millions, he is "an infinite, insane energy which creates and destroys." Writing a letter to Joseph Wood Krutch, O'Neill ascribes a Miltonic purpose to his drama. "Most modern plays," he writes, "are concerned with the relation of man to man, but this does not concern me at all. I am interested only in the relation of man and God." Like Ibsen in Emperor and Galilean, O'Neill eventually sees the religion of the future as a cross between paganism and Christianity, which led some commentators, Lionel Trilling included, to believe that O'Neill, like Strindberg, had returned to the bosom of the church.

In The Iceman Cometh, however, written many years later, O'Neill creates a masterpiece out of his understanding that salvation is impossible in a world without some form of transcendence. Hickey, the messianic salesman, tries to bring a blinding truth to the derelict denizens of Harry Hope's saloon. But all he brings is death. O'Neill speaks of the work as a "denial of any other experience of faith in my plays," and in a sense, The Iceman Cometh presages the world of Waiting for Godot, with its existential sense of purgatorial emptiness, of waiting in the void. It could easily have been titled Waiting for Hickey.

One more stop in my whirlwind tour of the messianic landscape and I'm done: Jean Genet's The Balcony. The Balcony was written in 1956, soon after Hitler's own reign of terror and right in the middle of Stalin's, where death camps, gas chambers, and gulags had replaced the tumbrels and guillotines of the French Revolution. At this point in history, it was obviously growing impossible for playwrights to keep exalting a new man-god when that all-powerful figure was likely to wear the face of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Tse-Tung. It was also getting a little difficult to work up much enthusiasm about a new world religion when Nietzsche's Will to Power had transmogrified into Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi documentary, The Triumph of the Will, with its celebration of the Nuremburg rallies and its sanctification of a mass murderer. Meanwhile, American popular culture had turned Nietzsche's superman, a figure of superior brain and spirit, into a lovesick muscleman with the capacity to fly faster than a speeding bullet, possessed--like his comic-strip brethren Batman, Wolverine, and Spiderman--with superhuman physical endowments rather than visionary and intellectual powers.

Nevertheless, imagining a new man-god and a new world religion is precisely what Genet sets out to do in The Balcony. But instead of the soaring optimism of his Romantic predecessors, he foresees a theology of the future dominated by killers and tyrants. The Grand Balcony is a brothel where the customers wear the costumes of generals, judges, and bishops while having sex with the prostitutes. In this way, the institutions of government--crown, clergy, judiciary, etc.--are being venerated rather than profaned in the brothel, Genet's assumption being that to imitate a function is to preserve and perpetuate it. Meanwhile, a revolution is raging outside, dedicated to putting an end to such imposture by destroying the entire make-believe of government, clergy, magistracy, army, and all the other masquerades by which the system is sustained.

The revolt is obviously modeled on the French Revolution; and Roger, its Puritan leader, with his dedication to reason and virtue, is obviously modeled on Robespierre. But Genet generalizes his theme to include most of the revolutions of modern history, demonstrating how their leaders often turn into despots more tyrannical than the ones they replaced. Thus, Robespierre initiates a terror far worse than the atrocities of the ancient regime. Stalin creates a murderous bureaucracy much crueler than the feudal hierarchy of the Romanovs. Mao initiates the Cultural Revolution that takes more lives and displaces more people than the Chinese emperors did. The simple lifestyles of these dictators become another form of role-playing, their unadorned, undecorated tunics and uniforms another form of costume. Men are doomed to an eternal repetition by their love of masquerade.

By the end of the play, the Police Chief, who has been opposing the revolution, achieves enough glory through his cruelty and sadism to be impersonated in the brothel. His evil fame has made him luminous, a true successor to the biggest political gangsters in history: Hitler, Franco, Stalin. But he longs to be more than "the hundred-thousandth-reflection-within-a-reflection in a mirror," as he calls it. He longs to be "the One and Only, into whom a hundred thousand want to merge." He longs, in short, to be God, who, in Genet's scheme, is also an impersonator, he who has the central role in the nomenclature and the most important part in the masquerade. By the end, the Police Chief, entering his tomb with enough grub for the next 2,000 years--his reign will last as long as that of Jesus Christ--has become a god appropriate to our terrible and tormented age, that rough beast Yeats imagined slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

In this and other plays, like The Blacks and The Screens, Genet dramatized the triumph of that rough beast and the annihilation of cherished figures of authority, and he may well go down as the dramatic artist who presided over the disintegration of the West. After Genet, it is very hard to identify a messianic drama inspired by the exuberant expectations of post-Enlightenment thinkers. Perhaps Tony Kushner's Angels in America is an exception, with its mighty effort to homosexualize the entire universe, where even the angels in God's heaven are gay. But Angels in America is essentially a play about AIDS and homophobia, which is to say a political and a cultural work rather than a religious one. And in a nation where conservative politicians are contemplating a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, where creationism is still being taught in schools as a serious subject, and where, in six states of the Union, the teaching of evolution is still banned, Americans are obviously listening more to the sermons of religious fundamentalists than to the preachments of messianic revolutionaries. What else explains the enormous appeal of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a two-hour-long snuff movie, which somehow confuses sanctity with sadism, piety with torture.

Indeed, the return of a savage orthodoxy seems to be worldwide, or so it would seem after Osama bin Laden launched the twenty-first century with still another reign of terror, characterized by the murder of thousands of innocent civilians. Caught in some grim cycle, we have now become witness to another round of beheadings featuring much cruder instruments than the guillotine, not to mention the slaughter of children in Russian schools and Jewish buses, always to the accompaniment of chanted reassurances that God is good. As Sam Harris notes in his new book, The End of Faith, only religious faith "allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy."

These terror movements, with their indiscriminate acts of butchery in the name of Allah, along with the collateral killing of Iraqi civilians and the torture of Arab prisoners in the name of democracy, have not only eradicated for all time the idea of a benevolent universe. They have virtually killed our hopes for any moral or doctrinal improvement and plunged us into a new religious darkness unprecedented since the Middle Ages. The triumph of orthodoxy in virtually all the major religions of the world has managed to make messianism--or even deism, pantheism, atheism, and agnosticism--almost unthinkable, and in certain quarters unsayable, concepts. It has also put a rude end to the idea of a secular faith. In Bush's America, God is in the White House, and all's white with the world.

In Scienza Nuova, written in 1725, Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan academician, developed a theory that civilization has a cyclical form, proceeding from divine to heroic to human manifestations, after which a clap of thunder signals a repetition of the process. Greek and Western drama seem to have followed the same cycles, which suggests there is yet some hope of renewal and change, always a possibility that some inspired artist or philosopher will once again formulate a powerful new vision. Still, that clap of thunder is especially ominous now that nuclear weaponry is proliferating among so many nations of the world, and we are beginning to feel very helpless indeed. But Shaw said it better, and this talk is about the drama, so let me close with the prophetic words of Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House: "I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and destroy us."