The scene: the spacious square that fronts the Center for Stage Arts. This cultural monument, the Center, would be especially worthy of the heart of a great city, say New York, London, or Madrid. As it happens, it’s in Tel Aviv.1 This city, well versed in the self-glorification of theatrical culturism, traces its ancestry way, way back to the ancient configuration of the Greek Dionysian festivities or, at the very latest, to the Herodian theatres. Nothing remains for the relics in Caesarea to accomplish but to simulate the architectural grandeur. Ages and ages have passed since a Hellenistic kingdom there used this theatre as a show window for its sculptures and adornments, its culture of spirit and body (Segal 1999). By the time they form a crowd at the entrance, Tel Aviv’s theatre-goers funnel from several directions onto this square, which, like its counterparts in Western cities, boasts huge gleaming marble tiles and an envelope of buildings that bespeak “culture.” Its archaic splendor protrudes from the rest of the cityscape with its suggestive pillars and arches and its impressive heavy white stone, avoiding the allures of glass and steel. Its magnificence evokes a restrained modern architecture that seems to aspire to historical semiotics (Helbo et al. 1991). Its aim: to evoke in its viewer an affect of something not just classy but majestic. Etched into these stones is something that leads, as if by self-propulsion, to a stage-poetry that will close in on all sides very soon.
A theatrical event is about to begin. If the cosmological gospel that it carries were to send a message of banality—an idea that might be received easily by most of those involved—the introduction that follows would almost certainly play the conventional role of an overview. I would enter and exit by citing theoretical tractates about this cosmo-logic as if I owned it, or I might march to my foreknown destination safely and confidently. In that case, I might be inspired by the idea of pronouncing a blessing over a theatrical finished product, the symbolic outcome that an Aristotelian playwright would earn by having built in his/her mind’s eye a beginning, a middle, and an end (Aristotle 1996). Such, however, is not the case when one deals with a cosmo-logic, a transcendental consciousness of the life and order of the universe. That’s a rather fraught theme, to which atheistic culturephiles, a religious bunch that holds the secular “sanctuary” at rigid if not disgusted arm’s length, or an intellectual who has attained high stature by studying the theatre, may take raucous exception. To prove it, one need only consult the passel of writings in the theatre literature into which the objections, from clashing directions, are woven covertly or overtly. The self-evident attire that these objections sometimes wear may place the cosmo-logic and those who write about it beyond the pale of the discourse and the time.
The word cosmology abounds with similes of earth and firmament, creation and doom, religion and rituals. It embodies science’s cumulative bewilderment over the worship of the invisible, a confusion that culminates, as in a foreknown conclusion, with the epithet “primitive.” Cosmology evokes the ability to conjecture about the collective unconscious and thus, by mental regression, to cast suspicion on modern drama, which since the early twentieth century has adorned itself in a mantle of Realism and supported the Kantian separation of art from religion (Burns 1972; Kant 1951; Friesen 2004). Furthermore, if accessories are among the signs of consciousness, the truly puzzling question is what theatrical cosmology has to do with the T-shirts and jeans, the cell phones and tablets, that so many of today’s theatre-goers can’t leave behind as they theatre-go. The impression they make is one of children who cling to their technological obsession until the moment someone tells them they have to turn everything off before the curtain goes up. What’s more, cosmology meshes poorly with the subscription plans and sales promotions that by necessity come with the business end of the theatre and with its significant other, the consumerist craving for entertainment. These common-law partners leave little room for the cosmos.
A counterweight to these objections lies, one presumes, in conservatism as an elemental trait of the traditional modern theatre (Lev-Aladgem 2010)—a characteristic that lends this institution a current archaic configuration, like an old brown-and-yellow nostalgic photo that refuses to crumble. Avowed theatre-goers know about this feature of the theatre; the masses who don’t visit the theatre know it best of all. It establishes a great distance between the theatre and popular culture, and, above all, it’s often connected with the theatre as a province of antiquity that has gone through a secularization process (Rozik 2002b). Barthes uses the metaphor “bourgeois myth” to describe the theatre, using it to build a bridge of “mythologism” between the ancient and the familiar. Like a myth, the theatre imposes itself on the audience as an undecipherable essence and defies scientific explanations and intellectual discourses with artistic contempt (Barthes 1957 [1970]). But the theatre defies more than this. If one may add to Barthes’ encouraging distinction, some find that, since the late nineteenth century, the theatre has successfully outlived avant-garde trends and subversive experiments. It innovates a little for its own sake and accommodates minuscule changes in order to fend off institutional metamorphoses that might be visible (Alter 1990). It is almost surely the only cultural institution that has deflected the Postmodern discourses and trends that have influenced cinema, photography, television, architecture, popular music, literary theory, and the human sciences (Birringer 1998; Sevänen 2001). The theatre is seen as being true to its non-participation in the cultural struggle over images and values that shape or mediate between perceptions of reality (Fortier 2002; Blau 1990). Its stature as a vestigial institution also manifests amid the rapid development of electronic and visual technologies and media (Sevänen 2001). Where technologies are concerned, it appears to be the audience that delivers them to the theatre, having so emphatic a “last shout” as to drown out the institution’s own voice. The bourgeois theatre, among other theatres, is seen as one that rests on its laurels. It carries the image—basically the stereotype—of a worthy high culture that takes pride in its self-segregation, deaf to the temptations of the pace, diffusion, and logic of technology and popular culture. In this sense, the theatre displays a piety akin to that of a religion. These features make the theatrical cosmo-logic less strange once you delve into it. In a non-cosmic way, the theatre’s conservatism is weighty in the manner of philosophical thinking, which typically burnishes an imagined linkage between the artistic and the transcendental or the religious (Tillich 1987; Langer 1970). The throngs of urbanites throughout the West who flow to this current archaic institution do so in search of a reality of space and time unmatched anywhere else. So this flow has been explained (Fischer-Lichte 2008).
For this reason, theatre-goers are not totally distinguishable from tourists who visit ancient temples and sites; they justify the perception of theatre-going as an “artistic pilgrimage” (Carlson 2001, p. 156). The Globe Theatre in London, a.k.a. the Theatre of the World, merges the two streams. This reconstructed theatrical monument was established in 1599 and, of course, hosted Shakespeare’s plays while the Bard was still alive. Among all sites, it has additional uniqueness due to the cosmo-logic ...
