Gotta keep on truckin’. Here’s my latest: a book chapter proposal for a forthcoming book by Routledge Press called Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Risk theatre seems to fit the call for chapter proposal like a glove. Time will tell!

Here’s my proposal:

Book Chapter Proposal “How might we move beyond Aristotle’s predominance in the classroom?”

One interesting, but laborious, way to move beyond established structures in theatre is to start from the ground up with a new theory of drama. Yesterday’s models of drama served the past well: Aristotle taught us to consider our emotions; Hegel made plays a springboard into discussions on ethics; Nietzsche paved the way for Strindberg and O’Neill to explore the subconscious through theatre. Yesterday’s theorists touched on cardinal themes in the yesteryear. That was then. Today’s theory must speak to today’s audiences.

Whether the murder of George Floyd, the pandemic, climate change, or growing nativist movements, one theme that binds modernity together is risk. Risk is to moderns what pity and fear were to the ancients, ethics were to neoclassicists, and Dionysus to existentialists. Risk encapsulates the highest concerns of our pre-postindustrial age: uncertainty, hazard, unintended consequences, daring, strife, volatility, and the impact of the highly improbable. We are haunted by our past and wary of our future.

In 2018, I launched an international playwriting competition inviting playwrights to explore risk (risktheatre.com). In addition to a workshop and staged reading, the competition–now in its fourth year–awards over $12,000 cash to playwrights annually. In 2019, I presented a template of how to make risk the dramatic fulcrum of the action in my book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. My second book, When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays, will come out in 2022. It brings together prize-winning plays from the competition along with essays on chance, uncertainty, and the unexpected. Theatre enthusiasts all over the world from diverse backgrounds—from playwrights to jurors, dramaturgs, actors, and audiences—are exploring the dramatic possibilities of risk like never before.

I would like to contribute an essay to Decentered Playwriting on how we can move beyond Aristotle’s predominance in the classroom by reimagining theatre as a stage of risk. Risk theatre is igniting an important twenty-first century arts movement that is bringing together artists, teachers, playwrights, dramaturgs, and academics across a variety of disciplines, backgrounds, and lifestyles. While we cannot all agree on Aristotle, we can agree on risk. Theatre is a dress rehearsal for life. When risk is the fulcrum of the action, new voices can use the theatre as a stage to model, simulate, and explore risk in all its guises. If you build it, they will come.

Sample Playwriting Exercise

Risk is linked with reward. To take a risk, however, is to gamble because risk involves uncertainty. If the uncertainty were removed, there would be no risk. Think of tragic protagonists as gamblers who have a foolproof plan, but are struck down by unexpected, low-probability, high-consequence events. Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth has a perfect plan to become king. He antes up the milk of human kindness. But he is struck down when, against all odds, Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Joe Keller in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons has a perfect plan to support his family. He lays his honesty on the line. But he is struck down when the highly improbable happens: Annie arrives with a letter from the past. Oedipus in Sophocles’s Oedipus rex has the perfect plan to lift the plague. He stakes his reputation on his success: having outsmarted the Sphinx, he is the cleverest person in the room. But he is undone, when, unexpectedly, he comes face to face with two old acquaintances: the Corinthian Messenger and the Shepherd.

In this exercise, create a protagonist-gambler who wagers all-in on a sure-fire bet. Then come up with an unexpected event (unexpected to the protagonist but one which the audience can see coming) that strikes the protagonist down. Make the audience feel anticipation for the magnitude of the protagonist’s wager and apprehension for how it will all go wrong. Give us a brief synopsis, in a few sentences, of how the risk event unfolds.

Bio

Edwin Wong is an Asian-Canadian theatre maker who specializes in the intersection between probability and drama. He has been called “an Aristotle for the 21^st century” (David Konstan, NYU). He has been invited to speak at venues from the Kennedy Center to the National New Play Network, the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, Working Title Playwrights, the Society of Classical Studies, the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, and many theatres and universities across North America and Europe. Current projects include his second book, When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre, and a series of essays for Salem Press on the role of probability, chance, and the unexpected in tragedy, comedy, and the novel. Recent essays for Salem Press include: “Greek Tragedy, Black Swans, and the Coronavirus: The Consolation of Theatre,” “Faces of Chance in Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Othello’s Handkerchief and Macbeth’s Moving Grove,” “The Price of Patriotism: Opportunity Cost and the American Dream in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons,” “Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes: A Patriot’s Portrait of a Patriot,” “Tragedy, Comedy, and Chance in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd,” and “But Who Does Caesar Render Unto? Three Faces of Risk in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.” He curates the international Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Playwriting Competition. He was educated at Brown University, where he read ancient theatre and lives in Victoria, Canada.

And here’s the original Call for Chapter Proposal: