«Lemma»: Jay Wright’s Idiorrhythmic American Theater

• Authors: Daddario Will
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This essay presents Jay Wright’s play Lemma as a historiographical challenge and also as a piece of idiorrhythmic American theater. Consonant with his life’s work of poetry, dramatic literature, and philosophical writing, Lemma showcases Wright’s expansive intellectual framework with which he constructs vivid, dynamic, and complex visions of American life. The “America” conjured here is steeped in many traditions, traditions typically kept distinct by academic discourse, such as West African cosmology, Enlightenment philosophy, jazz music theory, Ancient Greek theater, neo-Baroque modifications of Christian theology, pre-Columbian indigenous ways of knowing, etymological connections between Spanish and Gaelic, the materiality of John Donne’s poetry, and the lives of enslaved Africans in the New World. What is the purpose of Wright’s theatrical conjuration? How do we approach a text with such a diverse body of intellectual and literary sources? The author answers these questions and ends with a call to treat Lemma as a much needed point of view that opens lines of sight into Black and American theater far outside the well-worn territory of the Black Arts Movement.

Keywords

EN

Jay Wright; Lemma; musical dramaturgy; American theater; idiorrhythmy; ritual; Blackness; performance philosophy

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Sztuki PAN
• Journal: Pamiętnik Teatralny
• Year: 2021
• Issue: 4(279)
• Pages: 121-140

Contributors

author

Daddario Will

References

• Anscombe, G. E. M. Intention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Barthes, Roland. How To Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces. Translated by Kate Briggs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
• Brearton, Fran. “Robert Graves and The White Goddess.” Proceedings of the British Academy 131 (2005): 273–301. https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197263518.001.0001.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• Forster, E. M. “The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy.” In Pharos and Pharillon, 110–117. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.
• Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
• Jones, Olive, and George Russell. “A New Theory for Jazz.” The Black Perspective in Music 2, no. 1 (1974): 63–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/1214151.
• Lees-Jeffries, Hester. “‘Thou Hast Made this Bed Thine Altar’: John Donne’s Sheets.” In Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World, edited by Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, 269–287. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
• Russell, George. The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization: The Art and Science of Tonal Gravity. New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2001 [1953].
• Wright, Jay. “Desire’s Design, Vision’s Resonance: Black Poetry’s Ritual and Historical Voice.” Callaloo, no. 30 (1987): 13–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/2930633.
• Wright, Jay. Explications/Interpretations. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1984.

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.36744/pt.985