Fp18 John Ryskamp Introduction Curtain Rises

Left: ‘August Strindberg’, by Gosta Adrian-Nilsson
(1915)

We had earlier published John Ryskamp’s poem “The
Twenty-First Century”, which was described
as:

“[A] brilliant bolt from the blue. A pestilent persona,
struck in the mint of French symbolism and surrealism,
reflects Prufrock-like upon the arcade and arcadia of
his poetic/historical existence.”

He followed that piece with works that were both
Constructivist & Post-Contructivist, Modern &
Postmodern.

We include
here all 97 pages of his play The
Curtain Rises on the Revolution in PDF form.
We’re also including the following notes which the
author sent along with his play. They explain his
philosopher’s approach to the work, which illuminates
this exercise on the nature of language in the theater:

What’s the aesthetic? Strindberg on meth. I wanted to do
a play which was not a literary, or armchair, play (you
know, one just for reading). At the same time, I wanted
to eliminate all the elephantine baggage of theatre:
sets, characters, plot–everything traditional I could
think of. In short, I wanted a new performable play, in
which the question is: HOW to perform this? Not, CAN
this be performed?

I wanted to do this as a challenge after poetry. As
you know, writers have tried to cross disciplines and
they largely have been unsuccessful: Joyce, not a good
poet, James and Eliot, not good playwrights,
Strindberg, not a good novelist, and so on.

You have NO idea how difficult this was and how long
it took: well, until now! Above all, dialogue in any
other form is not dialogue in drama. You can’t simply
pull dialogue out of a novel and put it on stage.
Dialogue in drama is somewhere between a diagram and a
score–very different. Try crossing this disciplinary
boundary sometime–tres difficile!!

So, the revolution referred to is one in drama. It’s
somewhere between Buchner’s Danton’s Death and Gogol’s
Inspector General.

– John Ryskamp

Prose Poems… http://www.flashpointmag.com/ryspro1.htm