THE PANCAKE PEOPLE, OR, “THE GODS ARE POUNDING MY HEAD” by Richard Foreman
A Statement
When I began rehearsing, I thought The Gods Are Pounding My Head would be totally metaphysical in its orientation. But as rehearsals continued, I found echoes of the real world of 2004 creeping into many of my directorial choices. So be it.
Nevertheless, this very—to my mind—elegiac play does delineate my own philosophical dilemma. I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.
And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate— especially during the final period of “Romanticism-Modernism”—to cut down , like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to heroically stake new claim to the ancient inherited land— this was the ploy of the avant-garde.
But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or “super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so—and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.
But, at the end, hope still springs eternal…
