Introduction

Introductory Note to The Vase

"We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, whose only value lies in its excruciating, magical connection with reality and with danger."

Antonin Artaud, The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)

The novel you are about to read attempts to explore the artistic moment in New York City occurring and/or developing after World War II in which several forms of art simultaneously exploded with a freedom and vitality never before witnessed. Included in this explosion was the Abstract Expressionist movement in painting which featured at its height Jackson Pollock's "drip" paintings for which he would become famous/infamous by the early 50s. At the same time many jazz artists began working in small groups creating bebop, in some ways as abstract and revolutionary and free and powerful compared to the big band sounds from which most of the practitioners came from as the painters' from their more realistic training. Charlie Parker would become the star of that movement. Less well known and actually later as far as the theory was the "projective verse" of Charles Olson, which promoted the concept of poetry being placed on the page as a reflection of the heartbeat and the breath of its composer. As far as theater goes, Antonin Artaud, an actor, playwright, theorist and famous madman from France wrote a polemic called, "The Theater and Its Double," from which the above quote was taken in which he insisted theater had to be dangerously alive and of the moment instead of museum pieces.