ABSTRACT
The efforts of the vaunted intellectual tradition of The West not to exist nearly succeeded. When Descartes sundered the body and mind, setting the mind apart from material contingency, he provided the justification for the mind’s effort to subjugate not only the body, but all bodies. Europe’s aristocratic theatre was caught up in the project, privileging representation over reality and eventually arriving at naturalism as the triumphant fulfillment of theatre’s potential. The silent audience and the actors offering up the human spectacle for presumptively objective observation became Cartesian dualism in the flesh. When the Enlightenment’s positivism went up in flames in the mid-twentieth century, naturalism did, too. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot saved the day. Beckett’s burning sense of emptiness recaptures the religious absurdity of the theology of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard, and his plays’ meticulous doing in spite of sense catch actors and audiences up in the mechanism of medieval ritual. Theatre following Beckett has religiously pursued what the body can make, as opposed to what the mind can think.
