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Edwin Wong (1974-) is a classicist and theatre researcher specializing in the impact of the highly improbable. He has been invited to talk at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra in Portugal to international conferences held by the National New Play Network, the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, the Society of Classical Studies, and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. His first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, is igniting an international arts movement. He was educated at Brown University and lives in Victoria, Canada.
BOOKS:
The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected (FriesenPress, 2019) $17.99 9781525537561
When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays (FriesenPress, 2022) $18.99 9781039135093
[BCBW 2022]
When Life Gives You Risk,
Make Risk Theatre:
Three Tragedies and Six Essays
by Edwin Wong (FriesenPress $18.99)
Classicist and theatre researcher, Edwin Wong spent 13 years developing a new theory of theatre, published in 2019, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected (FriesenPress) launched an international playwriting competition (risktheatre.com). Wong has now released his second book, When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays. BC BookWorld talked to Wong about the origin of his theories on risk.
BC BookWorld: When did you become interested in theatre?
Edwin Wong: During my teens, I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche. I was at Munro’s Bookstore [in Victoria], and quite randomly, I bought The Birth of Tragedy. Up to then, I had been reading Hardy Boys books and comics. The Birth of Tragedy—Nietzsche’s theory on how the dramatic art form of tragedy begins and ends—blew me away. I knew I had to dedicate my life to coming up with a theory of tragedy myself. Because Nietzsche was a classicist who specialized in ancient Greek and Latin, I did the same, enrolling at UVic and then going to Brown University. All this time I was reading and seeing plays, wondering how to create a modern theory of tragedy. I’m 47 now. It’s been a long time.
BCBW: When did you start to focus on risk and its impact on human lives?
EW: Back in the winter of 2006, a book in the economic section of a bookstore caught my eye: mathematician, philosopher and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. Taleb’s take is that traders blow up in the market, losing stupendous sums of money when they underestimate the impact of low-probability, high-consequence events. They plan on history repeating itself and the dangers that they can foresee. But they don’t plan for what they don’t see coming. The problem is, something unexpected always happens. When I read his book, I thought: “This is exactly what happens in tragedy, in the plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles, of Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill.” Tragedy can be looked at as the dramatization of risk events gone awry. It was at this point that I started writing the first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy. It was a lucky 13 years in the writing.
BCBW: Did you encounter backlash for your new ideas?
EW: The first book was criticized for hardly discussing the established theories of tragedy (by Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche and others). That’s a fair point. The reason for this was that the first book came in at over three hundred pages, and I needed all of them to unfold how risk works in drama. I introduced a whole new dramatic vocabulary based on risk: the poetics of chaos, the opportunity cost of choice, and so on. In the second book, I’ve started to compare and contrast risk theatre to Aristotle’s Poetics. And in the essays that I’m currently working on, I’m branching out to differentiate risk theatre from the literary theories of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Barthes and Foucault.
The second type of backlash to risk theatre is that it is not Aristotle’s Poetics. For many theatre practitioners, Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, his theory of tragedy based on the feelings of pity and fear, is the be-all and end-all. In the second book, I’ve extended an olive branch to the folks who want a theory based on emotion. I argue that the emotional impact of risk theatre is anticipation (for the unexpected) and apprehension (for the bad consequences that must follow).
The third type of backlash is that the idea of risk is just too vague. Risk can mean anything. That is true. But I would say that is the reason why I chose risk: it is fruitfully ambiguous.
BCBW: What will readers learn from your new book, When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre?
EW: That theatre is a dress rehearsal for life. You go to the theatre and see the effects of risk and chance so that you can do better in life. A lot of the time, we live life based on forecasts, predictions and projections. We don’t factor chance and blind luck into these calculations. Risk theatre reminds us it’s not what we plan for that affects us most. The empire of chance is truly powerful, and a force to be reckoned with. 9781039135093
[BCBW 2022]
BOOKS:
The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected (FriesenPress, 2019) $17.99 9781525537561
When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays (FriesenPress, 2022) $18.99 9781039135093
[BCBW 2022]
When Life Gives You Risk,
Make Risk Theatre:
Three Tragedies and Six Essays
by Edwin Wong (FriesenPress $18.99)
Classicist and theatre researcher, Edwin Wong spent 13 years developing a new theory of theatre, published in 2019, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected (FriesenPress) launched an international playwriting competition (risktheatre.com). Wong has now released his second book, When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays. BC BookWorld talked to Wong about the origin of his theories on risk.
BC BookWorld: When did you become interested in theatre?
Edwin Wong: During my teens, I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche. I was at Munro’s Bookstore [in Victoria], and quite randomly, I bought The Birth of Tragedy. Up to then, I had been reading Hardy Boys books and comics. The Birth of Tragedy—Nietzsche’s theory on how the dramatic art form of tragedy begins and ends—blew me away. I knew I had to dedicate my life to coming up with a theory of tragedy myself. Because Nietzsche was a classicist who specialized in ancient Greek and Latin, I did the same, enrolling at UVic and then going to Brown University. All this time I was reading and seeing plays, wondering how to create a modern theory of tragedy. I’m 47 now. It’s been a long time.
BCBW: When did you start to focus on risk and its impact on human lives?
EW: Back in the winter of 2006, a book in the economic section of a bookstore caught my eye: mathematician, philosopher and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. Taleb’s take is that traders blow up in the market, losing stupendous sums of money when they underestimate the impact of low-probability, high-consequence events. They plan on history repeating itself and the dangers that they can foresee. But they don’t plan for what they don’t see coming. The problem is, something unexpected always happens. When I read his book, I thought: “This is exactly what happens in tragedy, in the plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles, of Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill.” Tragedy can be looked at as the dramatization of risk events gone awry. It was at this point that I started writing the first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy. It was a lucky 13 years in the writing.
BCBW: Did you encounter backlash for your new ideas?
EW: The first book was criticized for hardly discussing the established theories of tragedy (by Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche and others). That’s a fair point. The reason for this was that the first book came in at over three hundred pages, and I needed all of them to unfold how risk works in drama. I introduced a whole new dramatic vocabulary based on risk: the poetics of chaos, the opportunity cost of choice, and so on. In the second book, I’ve started to compare and contrast risk theatre to Aristotle’s Poetics. And in the essays that I’m currently working on, I’m branching out to differentiate risk theatre from the literary theories of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Barthes and Foucault.
The second type of backlash to risk theatre is that it is not Aristotle’s Poetics. For many theatre practitioners, Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, his theory of tragedy based on the feelings of pity and fear, is the be-all and end-all. In the second book, I’ve extended an olive branch to the folks who want a theory based on emotion. I argue that the emotional impact of risk theatre is anticipation (for the unexpected) and apprehension (for the bad consequences that must follow).
The third type of backlash is that the idea of risk is just too vague. Risk can mean anything. That is true. But I would say that is the reason why I chose risk: it is fruitfully ambiguous.
BCBW: What will readers learn from your new book, When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre?
EW: That theatre is a dress rehearsal for life. You go to the theatre and see the effects of risk and chance so that you can do better in life. A lot of the time, we live life based on forecasts, predictions and projections. We don’t factor chance and blind luck into these calculations. Risk theatre reminds us it’s not what we plan for that affects us most. The empire of chance is truly powerful, and a force to be reckoned with. 9781039135093
[BCBW 2022]
