American Political Plays and Culture Post 9/11
By Allan Havis
Obvious to our society is the sharp turning point America has experienced, not by entering the year 2000, but by enduring the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The great trauma to our nation has touched every aspect of American life, from commercial travel to safety in our neighborhood schools. Clearly, the public trust had been undermined by lax security and by the unaffordable luxury of our complacency in a shifting global situation. Although the Cold War has subsided with the dramatic reunification of Germany in 1989 and the transformation of Communist Russia in the 1990s, the stateless enemies of the United States have created a new polarity that effectively supplants the long standing superpower rivalry. From a national perspective, America’s criminal justice system has been severely tested and compromised by our detention camp for terrorists suspects in Guantanamo Bay, our civil rights and privacy have been challenged by the federal Patriot Act enacted October 26, 2001, and our image in the world has been altered perhaps irrevocably by our invasion of Iraq and our soldiers’ misconduct with Abu Ghraib prisoners.
Beginning with the Federal Theatre and the Group Theatre in the 1930s, political performance had taken root for generations and the reflection today holds a degree of truth all the way back to the once banned, 1937 leftist labor musical The Cradle Will Rock(by Marc Blitzstein/direction by Orson Welles). It may be axiomatic to say that political theatre has often played, at best, a secondary role in American stage life. Still, the value of political theatre is indisputable to our cultural dialogue, our notion of freedom, and our artistic collective identity. Seventy years after Blitzstein’s legendary production, it is eye opening to consider Connecticut’s Wilton High School and the controversy engendered by the principal’s cancellation of student composed play, Voices in Conflict , for being too inflammatory and partisan about the Iraqi War. The text was inspired in part by the emotional letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in the war. Bonnie Dickinson who has taught theatre at Wilton for thirteen years, explained to the New York Times, “If I had just done Grease, this would not be happening.” 1 Some First Amendment attorneys have defended the principal, saying that he had latitude to intervene because of public disruption and controlling “educational merit” during the school day. This was not the only censorship issue at the high school; the student newspaper ran into trouble for criticizing the administration and the Gay Straight Alliance had to take down posters hung in the school stairwells. In response to this action, the Public Theatre and the Vineyard Theatre in New York City, had invited the high school students to present the play at their prestigious theatres in June 2007.
The Wilton case was not the only publicized example of accusations involving theatrical censorship of political works in recent years. Off Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop encountered a storm of protest by cancelling Alan Rickman’s production of My Name is Rachel Corey originally scheduled March 2006, after a notable London premiere. Using diary entries, My Name is Rachel Corey documents the life and death of activist American Rachel Corey protesting Israeli actions against Palestinians. Complicating the matter was not the literary material per se but the various groups and media interpreting the play’s propaganda value in light of the current crisis in Israel. Furthermore, New York City has the largest concentration of American Jews who figure prominently in the cultural life of the city. When the play went on to a New York opening at another venue, many key critics were unconvinced of the play’s aesthetic voltage, objectivity, and theatrical necessity. 2 & 3 Certainly, the greater drama had occurred outside the play than within the play.
What became apparent to the world after September 11, 2001 was the paradoxical reality of United States’ vulnerability and majesty - which is to say that our country as the one remaining superpower was overripe as a target for terrorism. We were rendered a helpless giant in pursuit of an invisible nemesis. Prior to the direct threat from Islamic radicals, federal authorities were widely focused on the grass roots militia and separatists movements that, in part, spurred badly handled stand-offs at Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge. Regrettably, the demonic shadow of terrorism could be delineated from afar and within our own backyard. The Oklahoma Federal Building bombing in April 19, 1995, the first attack on the World Trade Center in February 26, 1993, and the anthrax scare just months after September 11 had cautioned the nation about any domestic catastrophe; still the magnitude of the Al Qaeda airline scheme had surpassed the imagination of our best defenses. Beyond the realm of homeland security, a cry from the heart was heard from our cultural elite, with many pundits calling for the “end of irony” in our literary life. Included in this circle were Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair editor, and Roger Rosenblatt of Time magazine. Had irony died as a result of September 11th or was societal cynicism just knocked down senseless?
Six days after September 11th , comedian Bill Maher on his ABC TV show Political Incorrect , generated a firestorm of controversial by parrying in so many words that the Al Qaeda plane hijackers were not cowardly (he admitted they may have been stupid), but we were cowards for lobbing cruise missiles 2,000 miles away. Maher’s remarks triggered his show’s cancellation instantaneously and launched a sensational media debate on free speech and patriotism.
Coming to Maher’s defense was New York Times Sunday columnist Frank Rich. The argument, by a Times’ writer, for ‘unpunished’ free speech in our media was not surprising. Rich’s career metamorphosis into politics was significant since he initially found fame as the Times’ first string, acerbic theatre critic throughout the 1980s. One of Rich’s running themes in the last few years is the unsavory cross-pollination between American entertainment and the transparent market strategies of political camps and their campaigns. The White House’s theatre of war in Iraq and the president’s exploitation of the September 11th tragedy, according to Rich, have gone on for years despite numerous statements from Bush’s own party about the folly of this endeavor. 4
To many political and cultural analysts, theatres reacted dully and cautiously to the seismic action of the newly emerging threats from foreign terrorists and from our government’s responses to these threats. With hundreds of professional regional theatres scattered around the continent, few institutions commissioned or presented shows to acknowledge recent events. Hollywood’s response was equally measured with a few films such as Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002), Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), Paul Greengrass’ United 93 (2006. ) Of course, other powerful issues were also impacting this period of history. Novelist John Updike amazed many literary critics when he moved away from his “adultery in suburban” milieu and published Terrorist (2006). 5 Our nation’s confidence had been punctured in 2000 after a phenomenal burst in the Internet economic bubble, in anticipation of the tsunami from Massachusetts (granting legal gay marriage in 2004), shocked by a hurricane called Katrina, and unnerved by Enron’s colossal corporate fraud. Moreover, older controversies such as abortion and affirmative action were back in the news along with futuristic concerns regarding stem cell research and cloning. Quite telling of our society’s ‘progressive’ race and sexual relations was CBS management firing radio personality Don Imus, April 12, 2007, for loutish remarks directed toward the champion female Rutgers basketball team. The corporate decision was slow in coming, despite the public uproar about “nappy-headed hos”, and the daily media circus implemented perfect unscripted political theatre. In addition, there were star political figures such as Senator Barack Obama saying that he would never again appear on Imus’ show again as if Imus never misspoke before. 6 Finally, Vice President Dick Cheney’s unmarried, lesbian daughter, Mary, gave birth to a boy in 2007; American conservatism and every organization that touted family values remained braced for anything worse. Dramatic irony was resuscitated and looking rather good again.
Perhaps one of the most discussed and celebrated overt play about September 11th and our nation’s military adventure in Iraq was from a British playwright, David Hare. Hare’s Stuff Happens (the bald title comes from U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s response to the unchecked looting of Iraqi museums) triumphed in London before moving to non-profit theatres in Los Angeles (2005) and New York (2006). A highly memorable scene in the Hare’s writing has Condoleezza Rice informing Colin Powell – a higher ranking cabinet secretary and her senior - that Powell has lost his standing and usefulness with the president. The playwright explained in an interview, “I describe it as a play about how a supposedly stupid man, George W. Bush, gets everything he wants – and a supposedly clever man, Tony Blair, ends up with nothing he wants.” 7
Hare’s caustic script (more proof that irony’s alive) was not the sole political production that commanded attention outside the scope of the national theatre community. Just months after the September 11th attack, Tony Kushner’s prescient Homebody/Kabul – his first significant work after his 1994 Pulitzer winning Angels in America - was produced by New York Theatre Workshop. In Kushner’s play, the profound corruption and hardship in contemporary Afghanistan is witnessed in an extended, sophisticated monologue by a middle-aged British woman as if attempting to reconcile the various historical accounts, guide books, and her own fragile common sense. Certainly, the Taliban was in the international news before the Al-Qaeda affair on our jets; in March 2001, the Taliban had ordered the demolition of two massive Buddhist sacred statues (circa 507 and 554 AD) in Bamiyan, Afghanistan and in 1996 the Taliban invited Osama bin-Laden to leave the Sudan. Al Qaeda found a perfect new alliance inside Afghanistan. Kushner’s ambitious drama intensified the warped Western lens of scrutiny on a major hot spot half way around the world. Islamic fundamentalism, as an underestimated theatrical character on the global stage, was ready to make an unmistakably striking presence.
Other lesser known theatre offerings arose on the heels of September 11th. In Yussef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat, two government agents wreck havoc on the life of obliging Khaled, seemingly a luckless Arab-American. The importance of the play is aided and abetted by the Federal Patriot Act. The Guys, Ann Nelson’s elegant two character drama, depicts a damaged fire department captain who relies on a woman writer to shape fitting tributes for the officer’s fallen colleagues. Irish singer/song writer Larry Kirwan’s The Heart Has a Mind of Its Own places emphasis on Lieutenant Brian Murphy of New York’s Police Deparment, who perished in the line of duty that fateful day. Elena K. Holy, artistic director of a tiny New York group (the Present Company), had commissioned several writers to address 9/11 – the result was Response: Stories About What Happened (works by Julia Lee Barclay, C. Rusch, and Leslie Bramm). From New York’s Stuyvesant High School a respectable work was assembled by student and faculty testimony, and edited by their high school teacher Annie Thoms. Stuyvesant’s With Their Eyes had productions outside of New York in Kansas City, Missouri and in Los Angeles. Robert Maese’s The Fallen 9/11 was a supernatural story about a trapped attorney inside an elevator shaft saved by firefighters and Saint Barbara. Seen on in Southern California and developed at the Sundance Theatre Lab, actress/playwright Adiana Sevan dramatized in Taking Flight her own experiences of assisting a dear friend who nearly died on September 11th.
Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout wrote a scolding treatise in 2005, When Drama Becomes Propaganda-Why is so much political art so awful? , in which he lost all patience for politically relevant theatre.8 Analyzing Sam Shepard’s Bush-baiting The God of Hell (2004), Teachout declared the satire from one of the best contemporary American playwrights half-baked and wholly unfunny. The critic classified the burden on the political dramatist to be both a good artist and a competent journalist. Moreover, Teachout faulted leading authors such as Tony Kushner for unabashed self-righteousness and, again, Shepard for club-thumbed sententiousness. He slammed popular actor/writer Tim Robbins for his anti-war play Embedded (2003) and marked down Jules Feiffer’s McCarthy era story, A Bad Friend (2003) for idealizing the “progressives” of Feiffer’s Brooklyn youth. Teachout’s key criticism was to blame the artists named not for their leftist identity, but for coasting on their leftism and their gargantuan self-satisfaction. However, he did have words of praise for Doug Wrights’ 2004 Pulitzer Prize play, I Am My Own Wife, about a German transvestite who survived the Nazis and the Communist regime in East Berlin, and for Heather Raffo’s one woman show entitled Nine Parts of Desire (2004) covering a range of women’s lives impacted by Saddam Hussein.
Teachout may have been reacting to an upbeat New York Times Friday edition Critic’s Notebook piece by theatre reviewer Bruce Weber, with respect to the explosion of political plays hitting the American scene. 9 Weber quoted Tocqueville on the visitor’s point of view on our nation as a way to weigh British playwright David Edgar’s two play cycle, Continental Divide upon its recent 2003 U.S. premiere. Although Weber praised the erudite work (ostensibly a California statehouse election drama) and Edgar’s venues at prestigious Oregon Shakespeare Festival and La Jolla Playhouse, the relevance of Edgar’s saucy political commentary and plotting was brutally eclipsed, if not by the unexpected gubernatorial victory of film star and bodybuilder Arnold Swarzenegger, by the four missile jets in September. Weber cited a positive direction for American dramatists (sensibility left of center) in response to the rise of George W. Bush, September 11th infamy, the undefined war in Iraq, the shifting composition of the Supreme Court, and the discernible realignment of the political forces from blue to red states. In addition, he identified the historical liberal proclivities of the professional theatre community. The article highlighted Richard Goldberg’s Take Me Out (2002) – a Broadway play with sustained frontal nudity and winner of a Tony Award about a gay ballplayer – and seven other mostly New York based shows with distinctive political overtones. John Patrick Shanley’s Dirty Story and A. R. Gurney’s O Jerusalem were two 2003 tales centered on America and the Middle East conflict. Gurney also updated his older play The Fourth Wall from 1992 that pokes harsh fun at Bush senior’s presidency and the hideous callousness of the GOP toward those Americans struggling to make ends meet. Presented around the nation with many Hollywood stars enacting the script, The Exonerated (2002) by Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank depicted mercilessly their indictment of the death penalty in a “docu-drama”. At the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues (2002) satirizes the notion of a second coming inside a third world, Latin police state and attracting a callow American camera crew. In its 2002 New York premiere, Book of Days, Lanford Wilson’s reinvention of Wilder’s classic Our Town links the web of corruption from corporate America to church, home and the Republican Party. British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) – a cautionary fable about an unnamed authoritarian regime - was showcased at New York Theatre Workshop. Of course, Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul appeared in the pedigree roundup.
With enthusiasm, the New York Times article asserted that this new wave of political theatre in the United States had not been rivaled since the Vietnam War/Watergate era. Webber selected an apt quotation from playwright Richard Greenberg, “You do see American theatre that by default, by what it accepts, promotes conservative thinking. But activist to the right? Theatre doesn’t seem to be the medium for that. Maybe it’s not right place for demagoguery. Nobody ever wrote Waiting for Righty, did they?” The seventy year jump from Clifford Odets’ 1935 classic ‘call to action’ play, Waiting for Lefty is instructive about what remains timeless in our society and what strains of change we must confront. 1930s union membership battles and unfair labor laws were a far cry to what conditions face the American wage earner today. American theatres continue to support soft edge, social narrative over heated, political accusatory tracts. Even John Patrick Shanley’s 2005 Pulitzer winning script Doubt that bears down on the Catholic Church’s sex scandals is constructed in a restrained and quiet temper. The recent spate of successful agit-prop (agitation-propaganda) documentary films by Michael Moore (Sicko) , Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), and Al Gore/David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) suggest what might appear as a more attractive and influential medium for politicized entertainment.
What was curiously missing in Weber’s essay in linking the present artistic activity with theatre life during the Vietnam/Watergate period: the plethora of influential ideological theatre groups that helped define that epoch and the splendid unfolding known as “off off Broadway”. Julian Beck’s The Living Theatre, Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Richard Schneckner’s Performance Garage, Peter Schuman’s Bread and Puppet Theater, Squat Theatre, Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino, Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous, Lee Breuer’s Mabou Mines, Andre Gregory’s Manhattan Project, Richard Foreman’s Ontological/Hysterical Theatre, the Talking Band, and the Wooster Group. Some of these theatre groups have endured with sheer tenacity and sweat equity. The health of these groups is not unrelated to the continuum of political plays by political playwrights. The scrappy, site specific, political group from the 1980s and 1990s, New York’s En Garde Arts folded when funds dried up and its artistic director Anne Hamburger nabbed a royal salaried position with Disneyland.
The economics of survival for experimental/political theatre groups is rudely Darwinian. New York real estate escalations have made low budget, loft theatre virtually unthinkable. The same can be said of most major theatre cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Seattle. While the dollar continues to shrink in value, funding organizations and state agencies prioritize grants to the larger artistic enterprises over the “bottom fish”. Typically, the larger theatres play it safer than the small ones. In addition, the attraction of premium television cable productions and the rise of independent films have drawn a good deal of theatre talent away from live performance. For most stage actors and artists, there is no health insurance and no 401k retirement annuities. Toward a poor man’s theatre was a more acceptable idea during the hippie revolution. Non-profit theatre and corporate business have merged after a courtship in the 1980s. The results are convoluted, but clearly the bean counting CPAs are running much of the show. Hence, regional theatres have been careful about selecting political work first seen in New York since the days of Wallace Shawn’s controversial Aunt Dan and Lemon (it’s closing monologue argues ironically for genocide) and again a dozen years later with Paula Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer play on incest and social denial, How I Learned to Drive. Driving the life and the artistic decisions of regional theatres is the preservation of the subscriber base; loading up the season with “ lush upholstery drama” and avoiding confrontational art makes wise sense to the board members of any large cultural palace with an operational budget five million dollars and upward. Quoting a campaign line from the 1992 Bill Clinton arsenal, “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Another observation that may be very insightful: commercially successful playwrights such as David Mamet and Paddy Chayefsky made their most blatant political and satirical statements in film scripts such as Wag the Dog (1997) and Network (1976) respectively, reaching an audience in the millions. When British playwright Harold Pinter received the Nobel Prize in 2005, his acceptance speech was a long diatribe aimed squarely on George Bush’s foreign policy and American questionable values. Likewise, activist American dramatists such as Tony Kushner, Naomi Wallace, and Larry Kramer have no qualms mixing their daily politics with their body of works.
Harold Clurman, the renowned founder of the depression era Group Theatre, once declared that all outstanding plays are political, be they the family plays of Eugene O’Neill (Desire Under the Elms, 1924), Tennessee Williams (Glass Menagerie, 1947), and Arthur Miller (All My Sons, 1947), or the more demonstrative political works from German dramatist Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage and Her Children, 1939) and American John Howard Lawson (Processional, 1925). Is it the audience’s obligation to provide the larger social context when nothing within the narrative is politically overt? Clurman’s statement begs the question of themes both explicit and implicit. Certainly, his Group Theatre made every attempt to foster social and ideological change. But if the play’s intention is quietly implicit of political content, does the writer’s message have the commensurate power and provocation of more brash drama? Was there a considerable risk personally or economically in staging the play? Should an autobiographical playwright ask nakedly, “Is my life someone’s propaganda?”
In future years the American stage, as is its want, will revive favorite plays and musicals from our time and the plays of Shakespeare. The politics of our age may become passé and irrelevant, along with the self-absorbed fashions of our time. That wish, to some perhaps, sounds exceedingly refreshing. Indeed, the recent nostalgia for Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing (1935) at Lincoln Center may have little to do with anything pointedly political today. But in the mirror of our cultural face, we must account and accept our blemished, political features. Theatre is our life. Certainly, an unexamined life is not worth living. Our eternal memory of truth resides inside this mirror and, in some profound capacity, so does our nation’s destiny.
Notes:
1. Cowan, Alison Leigh, Play about Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School, New York Times article March 24, 2007
2. Brantley, Ben. Notes From a Young Idealist in a World Gone Awry, New York Times review of My Name is Rachel Corrie, October 16, 2006.
3. McCarter, Jeremy. Stand and Don’t Deliver, New York Magazine review of My Name is Rachel Corrie, October 30, 2006
4. Rich, Frank. Someone Tell the President the War Is Over. New York Times Op/Ed piece, August 14, 20054
5. Kakutani, Michiko. Book of the Times: John Updike’s “Terrorist” imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security, June 6, 2006
6. Tapper, Jake. www.ABC.com, article on Senator Barack Obama calling for the firing of Don Imus, April 11, 2007
7. Jaffe, Ina. Stuff Happens’: The Iraq War as History Play, NPR, August 26, 2005
8. Teachout, Terry. When Drama Becomes Propaganda-Why is so much political art so awful?, Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2005
9. Weber, Bruce. Critic’s Notebook: Political Plays, Alive and Fiery, March 14, 2003