At first glance, Big Thick Rod might look like a play filled with penis jokes and double entendres. Which it is. But it's also something more. The play's outrageousness, its seeming silliness, serve to heighten the effectiveness of its treatment of much darker themes. Below, we go deeper with Big Thick Rod.

Rod goes deeper

Dramaturgical Context | Thematic Issues | W.H. Auden | Larger Significance

Larger Significance

Auden famously made the claim, "Poetry makes nothing happen." He was answering the very real question of what role does art really have when it comes to the issues of the world? We try to make a case for the cultural relevance or significance of this play, but is this really a worthwhile pursuit? Is there a greater importance in a work of art than its own self-serving?

Picasso pointed out, “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” And perhaps it is precisely the unreality of art that allows it to force its audience to see the reality of the world in which they live. When the Players come to Elsinore, Hamlet instructs them to "hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature"; i.e., to reflect the reality of the events of the time in which they live through their performance. Certainly a theatre artist such as Jerzy Grotowski took this instruction to heart; he saw theatre as a way of life, one which “…provides an opportunity for what we would call integration, the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance: a totality of physical and mental reactions.” Grotowski saw theatre as a way for actors to reveal truths rather than simply to play make believe.

Perhaps art, on its own, is incapable of enacting tangible change. It can, however, have a real effect, perhaps not on the large scale of influencing a government or altering the course of a war, but certainly in its ability to affect the individual. When considering how to measure the success of his anti-Vietnam War play US, the British director Peter Brook wrote:

"If no act of theatre can stop a war, if it can neither influence a nation nor a government nor a city, this does not mean that it is impossible for a theatre to be both objective and political. An auditorium is like a small restaurant whose responsibility is to nourish its customer. In a theatre perhaps a hundred and rarely more than a thousand people come to a performance: the field is circumscribed by the walls of the place and duration of the event – this is precisely where our responsibility to provide good food begins and ends. A performance has the possibility to turn words about a better life into direct experience, and in this way it can be a powerful antidote to despair. There is only one test: do the spectators leave the playhouse with slightly more courage, more strength, than when they came in? If the answer is yes, then the food is healthy."

Brook recognized that his play was not going to be the force that singlehandedly ended the Vietnam War. Yet he understood its real potential to remind even just one person that things can and do improve.

In this way a specific work of art has real, definable meaning in what it is capable of reflecting about the times in which it is created, and what relevance those reflections might have to the individuals who view it. Dana Gioia, in an introduction to Auden's poems in the collection Poetry Speaks, considers, "In the larger political sense [Auden] intended, he was probably right. But in terms of shaping the individual imagination, his poetry certainly changed my life – enlarging my sense of the world, language, and the human heart." What a compelling notion that is about the power of a work of art – that it can, in some way, directly affect an individual. In doing so, it can also be capable of changing something larger, if given the opportunity to affect enough individuals.

For Further Study:

Works Consulted
Aliano, Kelly. The Revolution Will Be Live. Unpublished Thesis, 2007.
Auden, W. H. “Hic et Ille.” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random
House, 1962. 93 – 106.
Gioia, Dana. “Dana Gioia on W. H. Auden.” Poetry Speaks. Eds. Elise Paschen and
Rebekah Presson Mosby. Naperville, IL, 2001. 165 – 7.
Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Kustow, Michael. Peter Brook – A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005.
Kustow, Michael, Geoffrey Reeves, and Albert Hunt. Tell Me Lies. New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1992.
Ludlam, Charles. The Complete Plays. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.
Marranca, Bonnie, and Gautum Dasgupta, eds. Theatre of the Ridiculous. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1998.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.

Dramaturgical Context | Thematic Issues | W.H. Auden | Larger Significance