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This mulish mourning over a dead and dangerous presidential simpleton. Memos from people supposedly pledged to uphold the law justifying why law is an obstacle to the executive exercise of political barbarism. Soldiers dying so that an occupied nation can be employed as a payback to private companies who have supported a corrupt administration. Hackable touch-screen voting machines made by a company that is a major contributor to the Bush money machine.
And Pucci scarves now a minor rage on Madison Avenue.
What is a playwright to do?
I am not altogether sure. Almost three years ago I wrote a piece about writing plays in a time of war. I ended with this more-or-less hopeful manifesto-ish thought:
This is what it means to create plays in the time of war -- to allow rage its inks and to be ready to scribble down what it divulges while not allowing everything and everywhere to be over-written by its typographies — to use the art to keep some corner of the soul available to light without denying the "darkness visible" that also pulses there. Both lights shine in us — plays in the time of war need the illumination of both to be honest, and it is honesty above all — not patriotism, not revenge, not the "affairs of state" or the consolidations of power — that will keep us, momentarily — momentarily — secure and healed as human beings.
I must have been whistling past a very long graveyard because given the events of the last year, and the coming bread-and-circus Republican convention here in Gotham, I find it harder and harder to believe what I wrote then. Given the stupendous imbalance between the machinery that Karl Rove can crank up to publish lies to the world and my small brain-factory that may, after creating a script and putting it through reading/workshop/development hell, get a production in a forty-seat house for a couple of weeks, a playwright committed to using his or her writing as a way to become a vital player in the public agora of ideas has a commitment to a noble folly.
To bolster my spirits and to help find some answers, I attended a panel discussion hosted by the Lark Theatre on "The Playwrights' Role in Fostering Social Change," with Kia Corthron, Lisa D'Amour, Betty Shamieh, Sung Rno, and John Weidman. Impressive panel, impressive thinking — but it was also clear that plays, by themselves, and theatre as an entertainment medium, though they may "raise" issues, can never really "lead the discussion." There are a lot of reasons for this, ranging from the economics of theatre (social change and $90 tickets are a difficult match) to the fact that most playwrights and many theatres are not members of any larger community for which they can speak and reflect.
So, back to "What is a playwright to do?"
Here is the answer I did not want to think about but which has been "thinking me" regardless of what I want: Nothing. That is, in a culture as image-saturated and time-truncated as ours, theatre writing is not a useful way to broadcast anything important. Perhaps the Internet can become an alternate way to pamphleteer, but most likely not. So I think it's best not even try to use my art, art in general, as a way to forward ideas about justice, harmony, mercy, (fill in your own blank).
Because art, though it can deal with politics as subject matter, and become politicized when elephant dung is used as part of an artist's palette, is not in its heart "politics." Politics is about the exercise of power, about Hobbes' state of every man against every man translated to more physically benign but no less savage arenas called the legislature, the courts, and so on. To effect political change, to bend a system toward the values that most of us would call humane and just, means acting in a political manner, to take up the lance and sword and leap into the melee. It is not about painting a Guernica or writing agit-prop — those activities, though possibly helpful in getting people to focus and broaden their minds, do nothing to change anything in any substantial way. Art is a palliative, another version of Dionysius' gift of forgetful wine to a suffering people. Or a respite from a grinding world. Or a stimulus to inward journeys. In other words, we often value art for the qualities that politics does not, and cannot, have.
What is a playwright to do? Hit the streets, staff the phone banks, hand out the flyers, organize the community, run for alderman, start a radio talk show, own a newspaper. Anything but think that the next script is going to change one iota of anything. That is not what theater can do or should do.
And I am ready, and hungry, to be refuted.
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Postscript: Too negative an ending, and I have been trying to re-mix it, with these half-ass results.
- There is no "playwright's role in social change." There is only the playwright's role in writing plays, in making theatre that takes people from where they are to where they haven't been. If theatre, or any art, can make us feel unlike ourselves, if it can radically re-size familiarity so that we come to see what could not be seen with familiar eyes, then it has done the social work it is meant to do. Load too much educational freight onto the art, make it too documentary, and the maker risks taking away from the audience member the freedom to feel strange and singular in response. If there is a social role for playwrights, it is this: take a look at the world, tell us a story both familiar and strange, leave us at the end amazed and uncertain enough so that the first words out of our mouths are not "Where would you like to eat?" but "What the fuck was that all about?", and make it so that we are really, really interested in finding an answer to that question. With that done, enough said.
- But then I go to see Michael Moore's movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," and beyond feeling refreshed in my outrage (even the choir needs to be preached to once in a while), I'm impressed not just by the power of an artistic medium to strike at people's hearts and heads but also the scale of the attempt: imagine a play opening in 800 theatres on a specific date and thousands of people going to see the play in one large communal endeavor. (The recent Lysistrata Project was the closest to achieving something like this.) So, a split response that brings me back to my original dilemma: how can I, as a playwright, achieve some similar kind of social and political impact when the means I have at my disposal are inevitably so local and minimal?
Hmmmm..... Open to any and all responses.
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