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Home > Guardian
Monday, 01 March 2010
"Political theatre, it seems, just won't go away," says the narrator in
this video that accompanies David Edgar's "Enter the new wave of political playwrights,"
published in the Guardian yesterday. It's a bracing if perhaps
unintentional response to the Ben Brantley/Charles Isherwood dialogue about the dearth of U.S. political theatre
published in the 17 February New York Times. The six rather
grim-faced playwrights profiled in the Guardian piece are
young men and women who seem to be enjoying some time in the sun: their
work is being featured at several of London's more prominent off-West-End
theatres such as the Royal Court, the Bush and the Arcola. Edgar's piece
itself notes that even some of the more notorious in-yer-face
plays of the previous generation, often dismissed as sensationalistic
shockers, nonetheless had deep roots in political issues:
The so-called in-yer-face generation of playwrights emerged
in the
mid-1990s. The eventual biodegradation of in-yer-face drama into plays
about young people shooting up in south London flats has tended to obscure
the fact that Sarah Kane's Blasted is about the Bosnian war and
Gregory Burke's Gagarin Way about anti-capitalist protesters.
Mark Ravenhill's big subject is a mordant elegy for lost political
certainties. As a character puts it in his Some Explicit
Polaroids: "I want communism and apartheid. I want the finger on the
nuclear trigger. I want the gay plague. I want to know where I am."
Edgar goes on to note the formally exploratory nature of this work,
adding, "[U]ltimately, fact-based drama seems like a kind of abdication of
the writer's role to inhabit and to explain (as opposed to just assembling
the documentary evidence, and inviting the audience to make of it what it
will). No surprise, perhaps, that much verbatim drama became decadently
metatextual, less about the subjects it dealt with than about the business
of assembling the evidence. In one wittily effective case, playwright
Dennis Kelly fooled audiences into thinking that a fictional play about a
woman accused of murdering her baby was a real documentary drama."
One of America's most notable political playwrights (if I can be
forgiven labelling her so) is Naomi Wallace, whose The Trestle at Pope
Lick Creek closed last night at the University of North Carolina at
Asheville, where Theatre Ideas' Scott Walters hangs his hat.
This morning in his post "Formal Exclusion," Scott is troubled by the reaction
of two audience members who attended the show on Saturday night:
These are two people, probably in their late 70s or early
80s, who
attend all of our productions, many of which are very challenging. Last
night, after having watched the 2 hour and 30 minute production, they
stayed for the post-show discussion afterward. By now, it was past 10:30
— they were very tired, but they stayed out of some desire to
understand
what they had just seen. They listened carefully to the discussion, which
was quite good, but afterwards they approached the director and pleaded
with her to give them a synopsis of the play's events that they could take
home and study. When the director explained that she didn't have one, they
asked again — "Are you sure you don't have a synopsis? Maybe I can
find
one of the internet — you can find anything on the internet."
These were two people who in 1936 were likely around the
same age as Pace and Dalton, people who perhaps could identify with having
a parent who had lost a job in the Depression, or who knew what it felt
like to have the wolf at the door. In other words, this was a play that
could have deeply affected them. But instead of being able to bring their
experiences to bear, instead of being reminded of the parallel between
then and today, they were left desperately trying to figure out what the
hell happened. Instead of trusting the power of her story and the humanity
of her characters, Wallace had turned her play into an elaborate
puzzle.
Scott lays the blame for their confusion flat at the door of the
playwright herself. "Many of her plays are about the poor and uneducated,
and she has a deep sense of commitment to such people. But she writes like
an artist-specialist with a grad degree (Univ of Iowa) writing for other
artist-specialists and for people whose education makes them capable of
deciphering narrative lines and exploring obscure symbols. The people
about whom she writes, like the elderly couple in the audience a few
nights ago, would find it very difficult to understand what she was
writing about, even though she is writing about ... them."
I do not know this play, though I did see Wallace's more recent
Things of Dry Hours at the New York Theatre Workshop last season,
which with its rather flat naturalism and even flatter lyricism didn't
seem to me to exhibit the kind of deliberately alienating aesthetic
audience obfuscation that Pope Lick Creek demonstrated to Scott.
A self-described populist and anti-Modernist, Scott concludes,
"[Most people] simply want to experience a story that helps them to
understand themselves and their world more fully, helps them experience
life more vibrantly, helps them find significance in the experiences that
make up their lives. And instead, they encounter plays that deny them
this, that seem to exist to confuse them, to point out their
interpretational inadequacies, to tell them that they are not part of the
'in' crowd that understands these things. ... I want to find ways to reach
everybody, not just the educated, not just the wealthy, and not just the
city dwellers. I seek a profound theatre that enriches everybody, not just
people who have as much education as I have."
No doubt Scott believes what he says, but something about it seems as
much a shame as this alienating formal experimentalism that he
excoriates. Works of art do not exist to provide answers, or even clarity:
not to provide synopses for audience members to take home and study
afterwards, or to reconfirm the interpretive adequacies of its audience.
Art provides experience, not a moral lesson or even
entertainment (which remains dear even to the Guardian's new wave
of political dramatists), and this experience should lead us into deeper
places, not readily interpreted — into a personal chaos that
provides new possibilities for seeing our lives and experience afresh.
There will always be those who find this kind of chaos alienating; Scott
fails to mention those who may have attended Pope Lick Creek and
had their eyes thereby opened to new connections that the dramatist
offered to them. Surely they are just as worthy an audience as any other,
whatever their cultural, educational or personal background. The populist
theatre apparently seeks to be all things to all people — and
there's no
surer way, perhaps, to be nothing to anybody.
Home > Guardian
Tuesday, 29 December 2009
It's unlikely I'll make too many year-end top-ten lists, so a
note to acknowledge the presence of Superfluities Redux in Chris
Wilkinson's Guardian rundown of his best theatre blogs of 2009, even in the
honorable mention category. We're writing as hard as we can.
Home > Guardian
Wednesday, 06 May 2009
Prime Minister Jim Hacker:
Savior of the American Theatre?
I'm not sure if I "enter the ring" so much as flit rather reluctantly
around it, but Chris Wilkinson has more on what he calls "the Great
American Theatre Debate" today at the Guardian. Opines Chris:
Hunka is unconvinced by the arguments of both Daisey and Olson about
the way that "institutional theatres" operate. "At bottom," he says, "they
are arguing issues of power – who should have it, who should not. The
most
important American theatre, however, is being made outside of these
institutions, a fact that neither Daisey nor Olson deigns to notice."
Hunka goes on to state that Daisey's reluctance to discuss what theatre
should be doing from a creative and aesthetic point of view is where his
core problem lies.
Of course, Daisey is never one to shy away from a fight. And in his
point-by-point response to Hunka, he tackles the argument
head-on. He is reluctant, he says, to discuss what theatre should be doing
"because it's unnecessary and destructive. My work has been primarily to
illuminate and illustrate what is broken in the current system: you do not
have to create a new system in order to do that." In one respect, both of
them are right: institutional exploitation in any industry is something
that needs to be attacked, and the practical problems that face many
artists can be very damaging creatively. But the institutions that Daisey
is concerned about are not the only places where art can be produced, and
if they are not working properly, then artists just have to find other
contexts in which to be creative.
Fair enough. The full post is here. In the interests of pouring yet another
ingredient into the simmering cauldron of faultfinding and
constructive criticism, I added this in the comments section; make of
it what you will:
In more playful moments I think about the fictional PM Jim Hacker's
approach to the bricks-and-mortar vs.
money-for-performers issue. In [a 1988]
episode of Yes Prime Minister called "The Patron of the Arts," Hacker
suggested the sale of the UK National Theatre building, the money
therefrom to be put into a fund that would benefit all theatre artists
across the United Kingdom.
If "The Hacker Plan," as we can call it, were to be instituted in the
United States, several acres of very expensive New York real estate would
be freed up. The Public Theater (where Mike regularly performs), the
Lincoln Center Theatre complex (where one of Mike's immediate predecessors
in the field of solo performance, Spalding Gray, regularly performed)
– these buildings and the real estate upon which they sit, much of
which is actually owned by the city itself, could fetch hundreds of
millions of dollars. This, and the endowments that underwrite these
theatres, could form the core of a fund that could provide health
insurance and other kinds of financial support to artists and small
artistic organizations that don't maintain their own spaces. The
administrative and management classes, who now benefit more from the
current situation than artists, would then be available on a freelance
basis to administer and provide development support for these smaller
theatre companies, just as actors, directors and playwrights maintain
their relationships with these institutional theatres on a freelance basis
now.
On the other hand: Administration of this fund would still be required,
whether those administrators are artists, managers, or some combination
thereof. The questions of who would get this money, or how much, would
still be determined by considerations of theatre and theatre artists
"worthy" of this fund's support. Should it go to [Scott Walters'] project, or to
mine? [Or Mike Daisey's? After all, the money available, even hundreds
of millions of
dollars of it, would still be finite. Some would receive support;
others would not; such is the way of the world. – GH] Once again,
the question would devolve into the political and
aesthetic question of what consititutes "worthwhile," "relevant" theatre,
and these would remain the central issues even if Hacker's modest proposal
were put fully in effect.
Still. Yes Prime Minister was a hell of a show.
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