Very strange play. A man (the Emperor of Assyria) crash lands on an island where another man (whom the Emperor baptizes the Architect) has lived in solitude for quite some time. After two years of cohabitation, they've established a nominally teacher-student relationship and spend their days play-acting, with each man taking on a number of different roles. The Architect has great powers: for instance, he's able to communicate with the other living creatures of the island and he can make night fall on command. Their little routines are often obscene and blasphemous, and they're both really emotional. They are pretty crazy.

In the second act of the play, they enact a trial in which the Emperor is accused of killing his mother after having an extended incestuous relationship with her. He plays the role of the witnesses for the prosecution, speaking as his brother, his wife, and a few others who had intimate knowledge of the relationship between mother and son. The Architect is the judge. They sometimes pull off their masks and interject as themselves, and as the trial goes on the lines between fiction and reality are blurred. The Emperor finally decrees that, due to his guilt, the Architect is to enact a rather extreme form of justice. The end of the play shows us that this is only one cycle of existence on the desert island.

There are a few books by Fernando Arrabal that I see from time to time in used bookstores and I'd never thought to buy one. I kind of figured that their persistent presence was a sign that maybe he wasn't the most amazing author. I often draw these conclusions based on the idea that if books by certain authors are always at used bookstores, that means they weren't good enough for previous readers to want to hold on to. I bear a mild prejudice against Carlos Fuentes for this reason: when can't you find a Carlos Fuentes book (or have your choice of Carlos Fuentes books) at the used bookstore? But my experience with this play has led me to see the error of my ways. Fernando Arrabal is a really cool guy: he's known for forming the "Grupo Pánico" (as in "Pan," not "Panic!") along with the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, and their work is known for its neo-Dada bent. He went to Paris in the 1960s and spent a few years frequenting a cafe where André Breton held court with the old guard of Surrealism, and he went on to write a huge quantity of plays, novels, essays, books of poetry and books about chess. He's had a long career and seems to be one of those special people who never stops creating, or never runs out of ideas.

I've been reading chapters from a book called Modernisms, by Peter Nicholls, that defines and explains the different -isms and explains their place in the greater Modernist paradigm. I've read about Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. The book has helped me understand works of fiction from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century (Alfred Jarry really was the man), and it also helped me appreciate Arrabal's play. I had at least a basic conception of Dada ideas on theater and its aspirations to create "great, negative works of destruction" (I think that's how Nicholls put it), so as I read the interactions between the Emperor and the Architect, which were often bizarre, vile, blasphemous, and downright disgusting, I could think of it as not just a unique work whose author isn't afraid of crossing some lines (or crossing every line), but as a play that fits into the European traditions of the 20th century.

Arrabal also has his own web site at http://www.arrabal.org/. It's surprising to see an author who once hung out with André Breton in Paris still alive and present on the internet. Sometimes those modernist movements seem so distant in time, and I enjoyed experiencing in this play a sort of bridge between the European avant-garde of so many decades ago and the 21st century. ( )