Edwin Wong might be the most unusual literary critic and theater mogul you ever know. And he might be one of the most creative, too.
His new book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, offers an update on (arguably) the most important form of literature. According to Wong, tragedy poses the same kinds of high-stakes risks you might find on Wall Street, in SEALs teams, and in nuclear brinkmanship. The hero confronts a massive problem and has to make a calculated guess about what to do. Since the hero is larger than life, full of energy and ego, he often takes the biggest gamble of all.
Classic dramatic theory focuses on hamartia, the hero’s tragic error or flaw. But to Wong, the problem is not that he made a tragic mistake–although that could be the case too–but that he played the odds and lost.
Inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, Wong is fascinated by the low-risk/high-consequence decisions that can throw the world off its axis. The hero makes perfectly reasonable decisions that backfire. To Wong, that’s the stuff of tragedy.
Consider Macbeth. Under classic theory, Macbeth’s tragic flaw is powerlust and ego, not to mention his inability to resist his wife’s dastardly scheme. But for Wong, risk provides the fulcrum for the tragedy. Macbeth could have pulled off his scheme, if only …
Risk creates excitement, a glimpse into characters’ throbbing minds and souls, not to mention suspense about the outcome. Of course, tragedy is a different genre than thrillers. But the best literature turns on Wong’s notion of risk. Do you want to call Julius Caesar a history, A Confederacy of Dunces and Huckleberry Finn comedies, and The Power Broker a political biography? Fine, but they’re also tragedies. Wong’s risk theory has lots to offer all these genres. Tragedy simply ups the ante.
Wong’s approach offers insights for the long tradition of tragedy but is especially pertinent to the modern condition. For most of history, the consequences of decisions were for the most part local. Today, even minor decisions can have global repercussions. Also, we live in the age of science, where calculation of odds has become commonplace. many bemoan that this calculation takes the heart and soul out of life. The Age of the Algorithm can, in fact, suck the agency out of even the most strong-willed people. All the more reason for Wong’s brilliant thesis.
If you think Wong is steeped in the data-driven theories of econometric analysis, think again. He is steeped in the classics, for which he earned an M.A. at Brown. His touchstones are Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, along with contemporary writers like Arthur Miller and Richard Jessup.
Wong, 44, who lives in Victoria, B.C., is a plumber by trade. When he first wrote his masterwork, academic publishers told him to try theater presses; theater presses told him to try academic presses. After a year of to-and-fro, he self-published it. Concerned that the book would get no attention, he teamed with the Langham Court Theater in Victoria to start an international competition for writing a risk tragedy. In its first year, it has already become the world’s biggest theater competition. The first winner is the New York playwright Gabriel Jason Dean for In Bloom, the tale of a journalist who uncovers a sex ring but, by taking certain risks, upends countless lives.
I talked with Edwin by email and phone. He can be reached at melpomeneswork.com. You can get his book on Amazon.
You begin with a bold claim–that tragedy has lost its place in modern literature and storytelling. It is, you say, a “tired art.”
While tragedies are still being written, writers don’t call them tragedies. They can be histories. They can be drama. They can be biography. But not tragedy. Tragedy seems to be a dirty word. Maybe it’s because it’s associated with kings, queens, and other one-percenters who have lost the crowd. Maybe it has a mystique with pity, fear, catharsis, harmatia, hubris, and other concepts that seem distant, out of touch with today’s audiences. I think, however, that people get the idea of risk. Rebranding tragedy as a theatre of risk, a place where risk goes awry might be able to bring the term tragedy back. Maybe it’s not the art of tragedy that’s tired, but the term tragedy.
You argue that all great tragic acts are risks–gambles, willful acts to change circumstances, calculated to upset the order of things. Why is that? What makes a tragic character so prone to throwing the dice rather than working through problems? Is it a matter of character or circumstance?
Both character and circumstance motivate characters to take on risk. Caesar in Shakespeare’s play takes on risk by going to the Forum despite all the ill omens, dreams, and warnings telling him to stay home. But because he is Caesar, he’s as constant as the North Star, so once he makes a choice, he has to stick to it. Brutus, however, takes on risk because of circumstance. He comes from a family of tyrant slayers and he’s afraid Caesar will declare himself a king. Time is running out, the clock is ticking, he must act quickly … [The leading characters] take great and decisive action rather than deal with things in a more tempered way: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune …”
You note that “the thrill of gambling drives tragic heroes to hazard higher enterprise.” So is it all about playing with fire? Is a great gamble necessary to truly understand the stakes of a challenge? Is this existential moment the only thing that can awaken us—and reveal the deeply hidden dangers and horrors of life?
Tragic heroes have an appetite for life, to want it all and to want it now. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine has to conquer the world, one kingdom is not enough. His Faust is similar. It’s not enough to digest all of theology, law, medicine, and science. He has to have the entire cosmos. If you could ask Oedipus or Tamburlaine or Faust, they would say they take high-risk gambles to experience all that life offers. They think they can overcome any hidden dangers and horrors. They believe in their supreme capacities. They have the “best-laid plans of mice and men.”
By going all-in, they expose themselves to too much risk. And the unexpected catches them off guard. Then they lose all. But they’re not thinking they will lose all. It’s like that poker game between the Cincinnati Kid and Lancey “The Man” Howard in Jessup’s novel. The Kid goes all-in on the last hand. He should win. But the unexpected happens. Lancey beats him. When The Kid asks Lancey how he did it, all Lancey says is: “I made the wrong move at the right time.” Appetite is the word I associate with tragic heroes. It’s the desire to experience all of life to the fullest for the thrill of it all.
Could you have made this thesis before the rise of rational choice and game theory? How much do these insights lend to your thinking about tragedy? Or is it deeper than that–that in a nuclear and global age, countless acts can result in catastrophe? Is risk theory an apocalyptic theory?
Countless acts can result in catastrophe. I like to say that yesterday’s local risks are today’s global risks. One example would be the Irish Potato Famine in the 1800s. To increase yields, farmers went to a monoculture and planted one variety of potato. Unfortunately, that breed was susceptible to a certain fungus, which devastated yields for almost a decade. It was catastrophic, but local. Today, with GMOs, there is a tendency to plant superior yielding monocultures globally. What if these modified crops have a secret, hidden Achilles’ heel that we don’t know about? Now the ramifications will be global. It’s the same with war. With the threat of a nuclear conflict, war has global consequences. This isn’t like Athens and Sparta duking it out on the Peloponnese two-thousand years ago.
I’m fascinated by gambling and, in particular, stock market bubbles: Dutch tulip mania in Newton’s time, the South Sea Bubble, the Great Depression. In all these cases, a real opportunity arose. For example, the New World was opening up to trade when the South Sea Bubble started inflating. Then people start piling in. Next, people start going all-in. And that’s when the trouble starts. When you go all-in, you expose yourself to all sorts of unpredictable risks. That’s what I see tragic protagonists doing: Going all-in. That’s when the trouble starts.
It’s fascinating to look at the protagonist’s actions through rational choice and game theory. For too long people have been looking at the protagonist’s actions as an error for which they pay a comeuppance. What if the protagonist has made a good, solid bet that another rational agent, should they have been in the protagonist’s position, would have also made? It’s only the unexpected low-probability, high-consequence event that throw things awry. This way, tragedy is more a lesson in risk management than a lesson in ethics. More things can happen than what we think will happen!
The risk theater follows Aristotle’s narrative arc, but with different emphasis — from temptation (Act I) to wager (Act II) to casting the die (Act III). In this sense, the “resolution” seems to have more to do with upsetting the universe than setting it right. Is that a fair statement?
Absolutely, heroes upset and test the limits of what’s possible. In Aristotle, drama’s end goal is to elicit pity and fear. We identify with the hero. The hero could be us. So we feel pity and fear (since the hero could be us). When the hero falls, we’re purged or cleansed of these emotions.
In risk theatre, the telos is to elicit anticipation and apprehension. We experience anticipation because we are expecting some kind of gambling act. We say to ourselves, What human value will the protagonist wager? And then, when the gambling act is revealed, we feel apprehension because we know that the unexpected event is coming. What will happen?
Might we restate the risk theory like this: We live in an age in which we cannot solve problems, only push them along and reveal new aspects of the problem; therefore, characters (and their storytellers) desperately reach for the “Hail Mary” of risky moves? In other words, risk theater shows the essential unsolvability of problems.
The characters, I think, do believe they can solve problems. They don’t foresee, of course, the unexpected low-probability, high-consequence event coming out of left field though. But yes, since the characters often lose all, I could see how the audience could walk away from risk theatre pondering the unsolvability of problems. How can the problem be solvable when you can’t see the unintended consequences? I hadn’t thought of this but, yes, I see how people could see it this way.
What is for you, the most telling moment of tragedy? Is it that moment of calculation, resolve, vacillation, when the hero either hedges his bets or throws caution to the winds?
The moment of tragedy that gives me the shivers is when a character “gets it,” understands that their best-laid plans have [produced terrible consequences] because of an exceedingly low-probability, but high-consequence event. In Macbeth, it’s when Macduff tells Macbeth that he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.” In Death of a Salesman, it’s when it suddenly dawns on Loman that his insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive. In Mourning Becomes Electra, it’s when Lavinia realizes (to her horror) she’s become her mother and Orin realizes he’s become his father. In this moment, each character realizes the power of chance and blind luck over their intentions, motives, and strategies. The smallness of human intention in the face of the vastness of the random element…
As Aristotle noted, resolutions of great dramas have two qualities: they are surpising but at the same time feel inevitable. Is this a reflection of Littlewood’s Law, namely, that we can expect to see one-in-a-million occurrences about once a month? That our life is filled with “storms of the century,” and it’s the dramatists’s job to point them out and make (some) sense of them?
Exactly! To me, tragedy dramatizes not the event that happens 99 times out of 100, but the event the happens 1 out of 100 times. I think the tragic playwright’s job is to dramatize risk to get people to think about risk. Then it’s the audience’s job to think about risk, to ponder and wonder: “What happens when more things that I thought could happen happen?” By showing the triumph of the one-in-a-million events, tragedy offers a lesson in risk management. It may only happen one time out of a million, but man, when it happens that one time, it sure has far-reaching consequences! And yes, absolutely, I think we should be thinking about risk and “storms of the century” because, like you say, Littlewood’s Law says, they actually happen once a month.
One of my favorite plays is Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. It’s the only play in the canon where you can statistically prove the odds of what happened and what did not happen. Civil war. Seven attacking captains (one of whom is Eteocles). Seven defending captains (one of whom is his brother Polyneices). The city has seven gates. What are the odds that the brothers will be assigned to the seventh gate? The odds are unlikely, about 2 percent or one out of 49. What are the odds that the brothers are assigned to the other gates? In 48 out of 49 times, the brothers don’t go to the final gate and kill themselves and spread pollution. But that’s not what Aeschylus dramatizes. He dramatizes the one-out-of-49 outcome, the least likely outcome. Of course, the audience knows what’s going to happen at the beginning of the play. But Aeschylus suppresses this outcome with all his tools as a dramatist. When it does happen, the audience is “surprised.”
You make a distinction between open and closed systems and forward- and backward-looking stories. Do you know Jim Carse’s work Finite and Infinite Games? Might the problem be encapsulated like this: Tragedies involve characters who don’t understand or appreciate the importance of “keeping the game going”?
Most characters are going for something temporal, or finite: wealth, status, power, glory, the opportunity for revenge. Some characters, are part of something bigger. Take Orestes in Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. He seems to be part of an infinite game. His actions transform the crude “eye for an eye” retributive justice of the heroic age into the enlightened “trial by jury” system of the archaic and classical ages. But of course, Orestes isn’t aware of this. He just wants to save his own skin and for the Furies to stop chasing him!
You could write a tragedy where the hero thinks that he is in a finite game, but loses all because he is actually in an infinite game. Or vice-verse. This would be very interesting to see.
Isn’t risk theater, ultimately, about characters with different ideas about what is the “price to be paid” for their actions—and different concerns about who pays those process?
Yes, absolutely! Because characters have different ideas about what they are willing to ante up to achieve their desires, tragedy is a valuing mechanism for human values. How much is the soul worth? To Faust, it’s worth 24 years of world domination. How much is compassion or “the milk of human kindness” worth? To Macbeth, one Scotch crown. And yes, different people can pay the price as well. So in Ibsen’s Master Builder, Solness pays the price by giving up happiness, but also all those around him must give up their happiness as well. I think one of the fascinating things about risk theatre for audiences is to see what characters are willing to pay, and for what end.
