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"This is not a play ... We are not acting ... We are not pretending ... We are not playing ... We represent nothing ... This is not half of one world ... not the standard idea of two worlds ... We primarily negate ... a prologue to ... "  ... Peter Handke, Offending the Audience

Is Offending the Audience offensive?

"For the thoughtless crowd of pearl-wearing theatergoers Handke assumed he was offending, these tactics might have been a surprise. Now, however, you can't surf past a Facebook page without noticing that life is a floor show, and we are all its stars" ... review

"There is nothing offensive in what is represented on the stage; the offense of the title is that nothing at all is represented" ... review

Maybe people are missing the point.  Or declining to let it impact on themselves?  This is not a play about theater, or appearances, or artifice.  Its a play about life, about the human condition, about ways we all approach the world and our place in it all of the time, and about  problems with that that we are reluctant to acknowledge.  It is a play about

"the variety of quite different concerns triggered by a relatively straightforward set of observations suggesting that what we experience is always a construction, an idiosyncratic resolution of inputs that are themselves always ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations"

and about

"the dark side of that tale.  A script that separated us from one another."

and about the need to somehow find

"a meaningful zone of human existence in between an exclusive preoccupation with experiential singularity and an unwarranted belief in objective, universal reality"

Offending the Audience is a play about "againstness."  It is, of course, about refusing theatrical conventions but it is about much more than that. It is about acknowledging that "life is a floor show, and we are all its stars" is a facile cover story hiding a much deeper issue needing to be wrestled with: the possibility that we are all products of an evolving system that lacks meaning except insofar as we create it, that we each create meaning somewhat differently, and that there is no authority outside of ourselves to adjudicate our differences.  We are not actors in a play and there are no stars.  We do not "represent" something, we just are.   There is only our lives and the world we live in,  the different meanings we attribute to that, and the inevitable againstnesses that result from it.   Audiences may not, in this day and age, be offended by someone who challenges theatrical conventions, but the play is intended to challenge social and individual conventions much more broadly, and the meanings we use to justify them.  I suspect more people would be offended by the play if they noticed that Handke was challenging not only theatrical conventions but their own conventions and meanings as well. 

But there is much more to the play than being offensive.   Particularly in Mark's hands, it is a play that plays with againstness not as negation or denial but rather as the impetus for exploring new ways of being, as the creative drive that opens new possibilities of existence, not only for the theater but for humans generally, both individually and collectively.   My own guess is that it is indeed along this path that we will all, individually and collectively, find an appealing way to make sense of ourselves not only as creators of meaning but as the source of differences in meaning from which new meanings and ways of being evolve (see Replacing blame with generosity in education, inquiry, and culture). 

Thanks, Mark, for a compelling exploration (as opposed to "representation") of the potentials of not only acknowledging but embracing againstness.