Literary-cultural Origins
Simon Gray employs the colloquial slang term in your face to describe contemporary theatre dialogue in his play Japes, which premiered in London, in early February 2001. In Japes, Michael Cartts, a middle-aged author, rages against a new kind of writing that he describes as "in your face". After watching a new play by a young playwright, Cartts describes the stage characters as follows:
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had the impertinence, no, the hubris to utter those most terrifying of words, "I love you," what did they mean by them? They meant "I've fucked you and now I need to fuck you again, and possibly a few more times after that and I'll be jealous, insane with jealousy if anyone else fucks you" .... All they do is fuck each other and all they talk about is how they do it, and who they'd really rather be doing it with or to—and they don't cloak it in their language .... No words that even hint at inner lives, no friendships except as opportunities for sexual competition and betrayal, no interests or passions or feelings, as if the man were the cock, the cock the man, the woman the cunt, the cunt the woman, and the only purpose in life to ram cock into cunt, jam cunt over cock .... And you know—you know the worst thing—the worst thing is that they speak grammatically. They construct sentences. Construct them! And with some elegance. Why? Tell me why? (Little pause.) Actually, I know why. So that the verbs and nouns stick out—in your face. In your face. That's the phrase, isn't it? That's the phrase! In your face! |
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Appropriating the slang British spelling used by the band In Yer Face, extending the theatrical contexts exposed in Gray's play Japes, and, as the OED observes, employing the more-frequently-hyphenated adjectival form, Sierz used in yer face in his category "in-yer-face theatre" as defined in his book of that title.
Read more about this topic: In-yer-face Theatre
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)