PANDEMIC, THEATER OF VIOLENCE

Today's capricious spree in the Brooklyn subway, with its many victims, its smoke-bomb and disappearing perp (along with the two-year rise in random shootings) puts us in mind of that great man of the theater, Antonin Artaud. He said (in French): "If theater in its essence is like the pandemic, it's not because it is contagious, but because, like the pandemic, it is the revelation, the showcasing, the turning inside-out of a depth of latent cruelty through which all the perverse possibilities of the spirit center on an individual or a people."