Pytania o dramat
Drama Questions

Summary/Abstract: The text’s basic thesis boils down to the statement that from the standpoint of transformations occurring in the theatre in the recent years, and in the light of texts written for the theatre, any question that may be posed today about drama as a literary kind or genre must as a rule be pointless. As per its still valid definition, as ‘universalised’ through our school education and recipient habits and expectations shaped by it, drama is an explicitly historic phenomenon, one that only encompasses some literary pieces designed for stage production – as part of the hitherto binding, although mostly unwritten or implied, interdependencies between the word and other means of expression. In order to prove the above thesis, the Author shows the differences between the output of the absurdists, which still tends to be unjustly treated by most Polish scholars as the obligatory model of the most important avant-garde tendencies, and the most recent texts written for the theatre (incl., inter alia, the French parlecrit or the English Verbatim). The latter are situated against the background of theatrical aesthetics getting transformed as it is affected by (para)theatrical experiments (happening, fluxus, performance arts) inasmuch as by inter-media experiments, with video and digital/virtual arts coming to the fore. It is also proposed to discern between three basic performing-capacity tiers for our contemporary texts which cannot be situated within the hitherto binding paradigm, primarily due to their projected interaction with the viewers. These would require that new reception mechanisms, along with novel analytic and interpretative tools, be elaborated.

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