American Playwriting and the Anti-Political Prejudice

Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Perspectives

N. Pressley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137415189
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Twenty years after Tony Kushner's influential Angels in America seemed to declare a revitalized potency for the popular political play, there is a "No Politics" prejudice undermining US production and writing. This book explores the largely unrecognized cultural patterns that discourage political playwriting on the contemporary American stage.

1. “Politics”

The idea of the “political playwright” has slouched into conspicuous disfavor in the United States. “I am vexed and challenged by the difficulties of representing political struggle on stage without embarrassing everyone,” Kushner writes (Fisher 208). It is important at the outset to distinguish “political theater” from “political playwriting,” for while there is a certain amount of the former—in collectively driven works, devised works, documentary/verbatim works, etc.—the latter is commonly treated with open hostility (as will be argued in chapter 2).

Yet it is also critical to avoid the hazard of stumbling at the starting line over what might reasonably be seen as “the political” in US drama. On this issue, there is no consensus, and it is worth lingering over the traditions and complexities surrounding the idea and practice of political theater. Kushner’s essay, “Notes about Political Theater,” which usefully describes the pitfalls of writing directly on issues, is typical in its frustrated imprecision about describing exactly what “political theater” is. “The political, in one sense, is a realm of conscious intent to enter the world of struggle, change, activism, revolution, and growth,” Kushner writes (26). Yet the dearth of an active mainstream American practice poses sharp definitional difficulties, even as broad claims are routinely made for a political function for the stage. “From Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare,” Emily Mann writes in the preface to Political Stages: Plays That Shaped a Century, “to Kushner, Marc Wolf, and Adrienne Kennedy—from poetic drama to documentary theatre—the great plays of an age are invariably the political plays of that age” (Mann v). “All theater is political,” claims Michael Patterson on the opening page of Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights (2003). Partly owing to the public nature of performance, Patterson continues, “indeed, it is the most political of all art forms” (1).

Jeanne Colleran and Jenny Spencer, in the collection Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, are among the scholars who have wrangled with the instability of the category “political theater.” As they recruited essayists, the heading was “for some commodious and for others uselessly ambiguous . . . But what counts as political theater, how and if it can hold the line against political reaction, can remain an open question only if the category itself remains relevant” (Colleran 1). Like many, if not most, scholars addressing the subject, they begin with the shadow of Bertolt Brecht, noting that Brecht’s theories of the epic and the Verfremdungseffekt lie behind “the discussion and practice of political theater” (2). The contributions of Erwin Piscator and anti-naturalist agitprop are acknowledged; then the authors gesture toward contemporary complications (“thinking of political theater as a cultural practice that self-consciously operates at the level of interrogation, critique, and intervention, unable to stand outside the very institutions and attitudes it seeks to change”) that include postmodern thought and media influences that may render the effects of any political theater practically “undecidable.” The assurance to the reader is that despite grave definitional misgivings, the editors instructed their essayists to presume the existence of a discussable political theater anyway (2–3).

Complicating the definitional problem is the lack of a clear body of contemporary American work filling the void that Kushner laments. “There is little evidence today that dramatists are considered spokespeople for anything other than their own work. The entire field wrestles with its own irrelevance,” Todd London writes in his 2009 study of American playwriting conditions, Outrageous Fortune (247). Disengagement with the most obvious kind of politically committed writing, confusion over exactly what constitutes a political play, and, perhaps most vexing, an almost ritual disavowal of political playwriting as a positive or even legitimate presence on the American stage: these are the ingredients that contribute to a forbidding social horizon of expectations for American political playwriting. The result is a field lacking serious discourse about political writing, and a field in crisis regarding theatrical language for dramatists taking aim at what Arthur Miller all but patented in this country as “the social.”

Yet a long tradition of such writing exists, and the memory of the theater artist—usually, but not always, the playwright—engaged in social protest is one of the most powerful images deposited into the American theatrical archive. Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1937), produced by John Houseman and directed by Orson Welles, is part of the long roster of popular mainstream works challenging the socioeconomic status quo, and the high drama surrounding its opening casts a particularly long shadow. The Federal Theater Project production was branded as a leftist threat and ordered closed by the government; Welles’s company famously responded by marching to an empty theater, gathering an audience from the streets along the way, and performing from the house—a “scenario,” to use Diana Taylor’s term from The Archive and The Repertoire, reactivated and embellished by the Tim Robbins film Cradle Will Rock (1999). This “archive” is thick with examples/images of American theater, forged in the 1930s and reinforced in the 1950s and 1960s, addressing the body politic and performing resistance.

Consider America’s two most recognizable postwar playwrights, who found it impossible not to be touched, if not formed, by this crusading mold. The young (age 27) Tennessee Williams intuitively used the stage to muckrake, working from a shocking case history and indicting prison conditions in Not about Nightingales, the 1938 work (which he submitted, without success, to the Group Theatre) that preceded the more slyly subversive, against-the-grain dramas for which he became renowned. Miller, though he wrote in a number of modes before fully breaking into public view, worked with the FTP in the 1930s, and emerged with his own muckraking indictment All My Sons (attacking corporate corruption) in 1947 and Death of a Salesman (fundamentally dealing with capitalist ethics and economic imbalances) in 1949. “The play could reflect what I had always sensed as the unbroken tissue that was man and society, a single unit rather than two,” Miller wrote of Salesman, adding this about the “austere” and “elevated” death title:

Now it would be claimed by a joker, a bleeding mass of contradictions, a clown, and there was something funny about that, something like a thumb in the eye, too. Yes, and in some far corner of my mind possibly something political; there was the smell in the air of a new American Empire in the making, if only because, as I had witnessed, Europe was dying or dead, and I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer. On the play’s opening night a woman who shall not be named was outraged, calling it “a time bomb under American capitalism”; I hoped it was, or at least under the bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last. (Timebends 182–184).

The political vilification of Miller and other writers during the Red Scare years of the 1950s and their ritual summoning (and in some cases, their resistance) before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee contribute another lasting scenario to the archive of images surrounding the playwright. The public drama was clear: To cooperate, or not to cooperate? Miller and Lillian Hellman remain lionized for not naming names before a Congress so intent on rooting out Communists that, in 1939, one member famously inquired of Hallie Flanagan if the Christopher Marlowe she mentioned might be a fellow traveler (Flanagan 342). Hellman penned perhaps the most penetratingly resistant line of the decade as she submitted a letter to the committee that read, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to suit this year’s fashions.” Miller, in response to the harsh political climate and anticipating the committee’s shenanigans (he was summoned four years later), in 1952 wrote The Crucible.

These are powerful ghosts, as defined by Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Carlson, building on the ideas of the director–performance theorist Herbert Blau and performance theorist Joseph Roach, quotes Blau: “The present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modified by the processes of recycling and recollection.” Working through Roland Barthes’s ideas of intertextuality and the reception theory/“horizon of expectations” of Hans Robert Jauss, Carlson establishes the operation of what he calls a “repository of memories,” which is not unlike Taylor’s idea of archive and repertoire. In short, that which we have seen before, we expect to see again, refreshed by alterations and variations. Carlson sees as foundational the intertextuality principle that “every new work may also be seen as a new assemblage of material from old works” (Carlson 3). He cites Barthes, from Image, Music, Text: “We now know that the text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the ‘message’ of an Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture” (note 4). Carlson accepts intertextuality as fundamental to what we think of as literacy, an understanding built on memory and recognition of familiar patterns, refreshed and reorganized. This leads to a focus on reception: on Jauss and the horizon of expectations, which, through a combination of social, cultural, literary, and other factors necessarily frames the possibilities of meaning for a given work and its reader/audience, and Stanley Fish’s “interpretive communities,” or bodies of culturally informed/conditioned readers/audiences equipped to respond to a given work. These theories, Carlson contends, rely on an overlay of memory selectively applied to experience. Works outside audience memory fall outside audience expectations, but most operate within, and thus add to the repository of memories (6).

Carlson’s term for such memory operations in the theater is ghosting—something the audience has seen before, but that now appears in a different context (7). Carlson argues that familiarity of form is a driving force in the highly traditional Japanese and Chinese theaters, a tradition not so familiar in the West in part because the Romantic movement prized individualism, genius, and originality (“an ideal now almost totally discredited by postmodern theory and thought,” 11). The history of “ghosting” is long, and Carlson invokes Derrida: “Among all literary forms it is the drama preeminently that has always been centrally concerned not simply with the telling of stories but with the retelling of stories already known to its public” (17).¹ Aristotle’s Poetics, among other theories, allows for new stories but privileges the familiar as more probable, accepted, and verifiable (18–21). For Carlson, the fact that a story line is well-worn should be appealing to writers, who have evidence that audiences have already found value in the tale’s contours (23)—an idea with valence in Jauss and in Susan Bennett’s reception theories, as well as in the programming choices of theaters (even the not-for-profit variety) calculating how to meet budgets and bottom lines. The comparative brevity of the drama compels efficiency, which is why Greek drama favored a late point of narrative attack. These factors contribute to what Carlson calls an “ease of reception” (23). Though it is not part of Carlson’s argument, this ease of reception—ghosting theatrical and public history, engaging with familiar public topics—would seem to be of particular interest to writers dramatizing political matters (and thus presumably hoping to engage and persuade the greatest possible numbers of viewers).

The problems with Carlson’s theory include one that he frequently acknowledges: that the modern ethos (to say nothing of contemporary critical attitudes, which arguably intensify the disposition) privileges individual originality over the formula of familiarity made artful by variation. Further, the dominance of realism in Western drama severely hampers comparisons with the closely held forms and patterns of Eastern theater and even with much US and British theater practice through the nineteenth century, practices that capitalized on the creative recycling of everything from roles and genres to the public personas of well-known actors. Carlson repeatedly resorts to disclaimers as he butts up against modern times: “The close connection between a popular actor and an often-revived vehicle role is less common in the twentieth century, particularly in the American commercial theater, in which the nineteenth century practice of frequent revivals has been replaced by the single long run” (66). More: “This attitude [lines of business, etc.] toward acting and performance memory may seem a bit odd, even unnatural, to a theatergoer in modern America, within a theatrical culture that places relatively little value on either memory or tradition” (82). “In more modern times, in which theoretical, aesthetic, and even legal concerns are often allied against the practice of ‘passing down’ a specific costume from production to production, such recycling is generally even more negatively considered” (129). “Ghosting generated by the repeated use of a certain physical space has much diminished in the modern commercial theater” (162). The contemporary practitioners who actually embrace “ghosting,” Carlson writes, are the postmodernists who do so self-consciously, appropriating and re-forming à la the Wooster Group, the principal subject of Carlson’s final chapter.

Still, if the essence of “ghosting” is an intertexuality that is inseparable from literacy in combination with a semiotic culture in which practically no space is innocent,² the twentieth and twenty-first centuries may not be as resistant to the concept as Carlson suggests, even if the patterns he tracks begin to thin. It may be argued that what Carlson explores continues to be an intuitive, possibly even elemental component of reception that is second nature to artists, audience, and critics. In the Feb. 12, 2010, New York Times, critic Alistair Macaulay responded to choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s Ghosts, a dance thatdeployed the kind of ghosting described by Carlson. Wheeldon appropriated movements from at least four choreographers that Macaulay recognized: George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Frederick Ashton, and Kenneth MacMillan, “sometimes verbatim, sometimes adapted.” Macaulay continues:

All of this—even the quotations that at first look most derivative—is perfectly fine. Mr. Wheeldon chooses a different palette of new and borrowed movement in each composition, and he’s no clone. “Ghosts” would be a good title for all of his work: everything he has made to date is powerfully haunted by dead choreographers, and usually it’s a pleasure to recognize his sources, if you can. (Macaulay “Wheeldon’s”)

This intertextual hunt for influences and creative fingerprints is also closely related to film’s auteur theory, of course, in which wildly disparate films in a director’s ouvre can be ghosted by that director’s historic tics, techniques, and bows to forerunners.

Diana Taylor’s archive is akin to ghosting in its reliance on cultural memory (which, like Carlson’s theory, depends upon an initiated and literate audience). However, Taylor announces her focus as less concerned with Western and North American logocentricity and more driven by historical and contemporary public actions (viewed as “performances”), its frame of reference more anthropological and ethnographic. Taylor’s overall thesis is concerned with staking out territory for performance as an analytical site, and the trigger is often particular contested cultural territories and the shifting of meanings as borders are blurred—deliberately as she examines Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . . , with Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco ironically performing as aborigines in a cage, and mysteriously as Taylor analyzes the intercontinental reverberations of Diana Spencer’s death. “Repertoire” is an action, an incident, something performed. The “archive,” on the other hand, is the less changeable, but not unchangeable, repository of materials and potential materials from which the repertoire is drawn. For Taylor, performance, like identity as argued by Judith Butler, is drawn from a limited stock of already understood possibilities. The potential for originality and change arrives in the specific performance, the push and pull between a particular new embodiment and its primary form. “The scenario makes visible, yet again, what is already there: the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes,” Taylor writes (28). Taylor acknowledges the risk of stereotyping, but suggests that there is room for friction between familiar roles and the social actors themselves (29).

Taylor’s idea of memory activated by embodiment is perhaps mostly intriguingly explored in the chapter on the international grieving over Princess Diana. Taylor uses street murals to help chronicle the response by people hemispherically and culturally distanced from Diana, yet responding tangibly and strongly. What, in that moment, were people who only had mediated experiences of Diana actually performing? Taylor surveys a range of models and figures, including Selena Quintanilla-Perez, the popular Mexican singer who was murdered in 1995 at age 23, and Evita Peron, comparing and contrasting their images and international mobility thereof—their “visas”—with Diana’s. The murals are evidence of the mixed and variable responses possible when a scenario is enacted transculturally.

Taylor’s final chapter makes clear that hers is a social justice project. She cites a gathering in Central Park, full of music—largely rumba, which she explains has a historic association with political resistance—where the police arrived and disrupted the gathering. The authorities’ reason, Taylor asserts, is that the gathering was dominated by brown people; her conclusion is that subaltern cultures can be exhibited inside the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art but not “performed”—a more dangerous, less controllable proposition—in the less regulated environment of the park. Such are the conflicts Taylor seeks to study. In the passa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: No Politics, Please, We’re American
• 1.   “Politics”
• 2.   The Case of Kushner
• 3.   Reception and the Anti-Political Prejudice in America
• 4.   State of the Nation: The United Kingdom and the United States
• 5.   American Shenanigans
• 6.   Wendy Wasserstein’s Washington
• 7.   Erasing the Playwright
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index