«Lemma»: Jay Wright’s Idiorrhythmic American Theater
Will Daddario
Independent scholar, Asheville, NC (United States)
Abstract
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:
Jay Wright, «Lemma», musical dramaturgy, American theater, idiorrhythmy, ritual, Blackness, performance philosophyReferences
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Authors
Will DaddarioIndependent scholar, Asheville, NC United States
Will Daddario is a theater historiographer, performance philosopher, grief worker, and student in training to become a mental health counselor. He is a founder of the global research network known as Performance Philosophy and an editor of that group’s open access online journal (performancephilosophy.org/journal) and Book Series (with Rowman International). He is the author of nearly twenty articles and chapters that explore the philosophical territories of theater and performance studies. His books include Baroque, Venice, Theatre, Philosophy (2017) and the forthcoming Pitch and Revelation: reconfigurations of poetry, philosophy, and reading in the works of Jay Wright, written with Matthew Goulish. He is also Project Editor for a three-volume work that includes two volumes of Wright’s selected plays (forthcoming in 2022 and 2023).
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