Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Sunday, 27 January 2008
UPDATE, 28 January: Noah Diamond responds here. My apologies to Amanda Sisk for having misspelled her name in the first paragraph of my original post.
Going unremarked to date is this recent post from nytheatre.com founder and editor Martin Denton. It concerns the cancellation (or postponement, or what have you) of a play about democracy's tendencies towards totalitarianism, Zeitgeist 2030 by Noah Diamond and Amanda Sisk. Diamond and Sisk had been planning to self-produce the show through their Nero Fiddled company this season. But on 24 January they made this announcement:
After months of working on Zeitgeist 2030, we have reluctantly decided that this season is not the right time for this show.
We love the songs we've written. The problem is that Zeitgeist 2030 takes place twenty-two years from now, and presents a very cynical view of America's future -- a dystopia wherein the president has been in office for thirteen years. It's just not where we want our heads to be during this election year. Our hope for the Nero Fiddled political shows is that they might inspire our audience to become more politically involved. The bleak vision of Zeitgeist 2030 seems more likely to have the opposite effect. It seems to be saying that the outcome of the 2008 election is irrelevant, because look how bad things are, either way, in 2030. It's the opposite of agitprop: political theatre which inspires complacency and defeat.
That's not to say we won't ever return to this show. We're happy with what we've written so far, and we believe in the message, which is that the world's greatest democracy is never far from the brink of totalitarianism. It's just not a message that plays well this year. We'd prefer to write about 2008 and 2009.
Denton's response: "I applaud Diamond and Sisk for doing the right thing here. Let's greet the election with the optimism and promise that it’s supposed to signify: let's embrace the idea that we can select the right people to run our country, people who will move it forward positively and justly. In 2000, a lot of people said they couldn't tell the difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Those people were letting a disaffected postmodernist ennui rule their thinking. We can't afford that ... not in the arts. ... The point is not what your politics are -- the point is to have some -- to have convictions and to stick to them. Bravo to Noah and Amanda for setting a great example."
We've been down the path of the self-suppression of political speech before, with the My Name is Rachel Corrie/NYTW controversy in 2006, and though this instance is unlikely to generate the general wailing and gnashing of teeth of that particular instance, many of the threads seem similar. Here is a work of art, generated from the sincere intent to express a broad political issue and investigate it fully, pulled from a season for reasons unrelated to the quality of a work, but for a reason directly related to its content. And, like the Rachel Corrie "postponement," it's related to the timing of the production: "It’s just not where we want our heads to be during this election year. Our hope for the Nero Fiddled political shows is that they might inspire our audience to become more politically involved. The bleak vision of Zeitgeist 2030 seems more likely to have the opposite effect. It seems to be saying that the outcome of the 2008 election is irrelevant, because look how bad things are, either way, in 2030."
No play, or other work of art, is either ahead of or behind its time; it is always precisely of its time; art is not created in time machines. If Diamond and Sisk found it a work they wanted to create now, then now is the time for it (and they must have felt it somehow necessary to do so as artists, or it would not have been conceived in the first place). And, to my mind, the description of the show -- "that the outcome of the 2008 election is irrelevant, because look how bad things are, either way, in 2030" -- is a perfectly valid if unpopular position to take, and one more implicitly radical in a political sense than its opposite (not to mention an entirely justifiable, and urgent, message precisely in an election year). In his 2006 book on pessimism and political action, UCLA professor of political science Joshua Foa Dienstag states the case for political and personal activity in the context of a philosophy of pessimism: "For centuries, much philosophy ... has been premised on the idea ... of a gradual improvement of the human condition. But what if we grapple with the possibility that such a melioration cannot be expected, that we must make do with who and what we are? Pessimism is the philosophy that accepts this challenge. ... Pessimism's goal is not to depress us, but to edify us about our condition and to fortify us for the life that lies ahead. ... [Pessimism] must suggest a kind of fortification of the self against an enemy that is already inside the gates of the soul."
Denton's casual dismissal of such messages as "a disaffected postmodernist ennui" is simplistic, arrogant and, as Dienstag's book demonstrates, just plain wrong (Dienstag begins his discussion with the eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers Rousseau and Leopardi, whom few have claimed for the postmodernist clan). Worse is that he thinks that "we can't afford that ... not in the arts," makes me wonder just where he does think we can afford it; it suggests a profoundly limited vision of just what the possibilities of political theatre are. Not to mention that chilling proposition that the arts are not the place for one kind of expression or another, at any time.
But it's not my intention here to call the wrath of God down upon any playwright or critic. What concerns me is what concerned me about the Rachel Corrie controversy: that it brings to light certain unspoken and/or unexamined assumptions in the New York theatre community about the kinds of expression that are or are not welcome on stages here; the extent to which an artist or production organisation will suppress his, her or its own speech in the interest of some higher ideological "good" (in this case, political progressivism); the perceived need to undermine even some of the darkest, most sublime artwork of our time with a call to a false "hope"; and the question as to whether or not this may be a concern that has relevance to the broader decision-making process as to which plays are granted that vague label of "producible" at a particular place and time. Perhaps the sentiments of Diamond, Sisk and Denton are held by only a minority of New York theatre artists, producers and critics. But perhaps they're only the tip of the iceberg.
Diamond and Sisk's decision says just as much about the tendency of democracy towards totalitarianism as their play could, perhaps; what need do we have of government, corporate or institutional suppression of political speech when we so readily suppress it within ourselves, a sad (if inevitable, according to Adorno) internalisation of the totalitarian urge? And not only that, but to be congratulated for it; Denton's "Bravo to Noah and Amanda for setting a great example" is, to say the least, a problematic statement from a critic who claims to support the broad efforts of what he calls the "indie theatre" movement. ("Bravo" for a decision to hide a play -- any play -- from the light of day?) For any New York City dramatist who finds himself drawn to the possibility of theatre for the unique expression of difficult truths about human experience as he sees them, this is a very discouraging morning.
Posted at 10.44 am in /Politics
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