ecently I received an email from Nicola Roberts, a drama student studying at Liverpool Hope University College (located in Hope Park in Liverpool, England).  As part of her degree she was undertaking "a module in Political Theatre," which required her to gain responses to a comment made by David Edgar in 1979. (Not knowing who Edgar was, I did a quick search, finding out that he has a long history of writing politically oriented plays as well as penning the 1981 eight-hour version of Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company.)

This was Edgar's comment:  "We don't have a popular tradition that is still feasible, or a revolutionary artistic tradition much beyond Brecht on which to draw. So one of the mistakes that agit-prop and a lot of left wing groups have made is to say that we will relate to ordinary people by taking on their forms, as a kind of passport into their consciousness." (Note: This statement was made before Augusto Boal began doing much of his work.)

In another email to me (because I was not as quick with my response as I should have been), she shortened her request to asking me to answer the question, "Does Political Theatre still work for today's audience?" I duly penned a response that pleased her, but the question lingered because it is elemental to my own self-conception as a playwright. Here are some of my later-come thoughts.

First, a self-definition: to me, "political theatre" is theatre that advances progressive/leftist politics, a politics in opposition to a conservative status quo (being fully aware that the meanings of "progressive/leftist" and "conservative" vary from country to country and historical period).  Second, political theatre aims to convince its audience, both inside and outside the theatre, that the values of the status quo should be changed into the progressive/leftist values in order to achieve some version of social justice and a redistribution of power. In short, "political theatre" is theatre aimed at righting a wrong and creating the conditions for liberation.  The methods can range from the cool anatomizing of Brecht to fervid street theatre, but the aim, more or less, is the same: use theatre to move society toward an exercise of power associated with peace, justice, and equality.

(To be sure, political theatre can also come from the right, but its purpose would be to reinstate some supposedly lost set of values and practices, revolutionary, to be sure, but in a retrograde fashion. This essay doesn't take up that branch of the political theatre family.)

Given these defintions, and speaking from the perspective of the United States (which is the only one I know), political theatre does not "work," if by "work" we mean that theatre, or a theatrical piece, moves an American audience towards the left. We do have the anecdote about Odets' Waiting for

Lefty galvanizing people to leave the theatre in a revolutionary fever, but that was hedged by a lot of irony (the taxi drivers' strike at the heart of the play had already been settled) and also took place

at a politically piquant time in our history.  But in general, American audiences do not go to theatre to seek political understanding or motivation -- they go to escape political considerations, to be entertained; or they go to be moved, but only internally, in a kind of gastro-intestinal practice of art. 

And this is because American citizens do not look to their artists for guidance in the debates about power because they know that American artists by and large do not work from a strong, interwoven connection with the causes of their historical place and time. They have been cordoned off (often by their own choice) into aesthetic camps where their work as artists and their work as citizens have only the most tenuous relationship, if any at all, and this estrangement does not make them trustworthy guides.

Furthermore, American theatre artists are not very good at political theatre.  They lack the gene for artistico-political sophistication one finds in Europe or Latin America, and too often they mistake the stage for the pulpit or the lectern (not to mention date themselves -- can Waiting for Lefty be done as anything but a museum piece? -- or sound simply foolish, like that much-gasped at monologue in Rebecca Gilman's Spinning into Butter about American race relations).

But I'm not willing yet to give up on theatre being used for political purposes, that is, as a contributor to the debates about power that govern our lives -- but it has to be done more subtly, more in keeping with the transformative power that live theatre can have on an audience rather than trying to adapt for the stage the borrowed techniques of the sermon and the lecture.

A more fertile approach to political theatre must begin with the desire of the playwright to use his or her theatre to raise questions about current beliefs and, most importantly, to present possibilities for existential liberation. When the playwright writes from this foundation, then the theatre can "work" politically, even though not tied to agenda politics, because it is about the effect a particular political/historical situation has on the flesh and blood of human beings. It is one kind of action to do an agit-prop presentation on the loss of jobs because of globalization. It is another to do a play about the "lived reality" of the effects the job loss has on a family's ability to care for itself and live out its dreams, where perhaps the breadwinners, suddenly seeing a broader horizon than themselves, go off to Seattle or wherever to protest the WTO in a move that, for them, proves liberating and refreshing.

The theatre is a wonderful way to present these kinds of liberating "lived realities." They cannot only honor the present but also convey possibilities/alternatives to that present (even if that consists of seeing no possibilities for change, which can be just as eye-opening and igniting).  Plays like these can have just as strong a political message as a piece overtly constructed to bring a message or argue a point or anatomize a hypocrisy because they present alternate possibilities in the exercise of power in a way that feels lived and earned.

There are many things in American theatre that stand in the way of creating works like this. One is the American penchant for wanting psychological explanations and "back story," which is an essentially conservative desire and very limiting in terms characters and stories. Another is a mistaken (and conservative) belief that only the "dark side" of things can hold elemental human truths and things must therefore be "edgy" and caustic to be true. 

But there are antidotes to these strait-jackets, such as the kind of communal theatre in places like Pittsburgh where a historical play about steel-making involved the community deeply in its creation and performance and gave everyone a sense of ownership that was not proprietary but custodial and healing. (And let us not forget Augusto Boal's Forum Theatre.)

And the Pittsburg experience points out how Edgar's statement needs to be completed. He may be right that most appeals to "ordinary people" are done through ersatz and imperialist appropriations of their culture (one is tempted to cite the soundtrack for Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? as an example).  The solution is to make sure that the creators and keepers of that culture are invited in to contribute their creative ideas in its use. Real emancipatory theatre (which is what I mean by "political") will happen when audience, creators, time and place, and history all interlace not only to review what has happened but to look beyond our given moment to see what is possible, what can be changed, how the better angels of our nature can gain the upper hand as we try to figure out what is to be done, how power can be used to forward the human condition, not destroy it.

Of course, this would be a very different kind of theatre than what we have today -- Boal's Forum Theatre is never going to be presented at mid-town. But that does not stop us from rehearsing our own new political possibilities and re-imagining a theatre less industrial in its model and more embroidered into the everyday lives of people. Theatre that people actually depended upon to help them sort out their thoughts and potentialities would be a political theatre unlike anything we see today in the United States -- a useful art.  Now that is a sweet thought.

© 2001 Michael Bettencourt

Michael Bettencourt has had his plays
 produced in New York, Chicago,
Boston, and Los Angeles, among others.
  Continued thanks to his "prime mate"
and wife, Maria-Beatriz

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