The term “political theatre” means different things to different people. Unfortunately, for many people it means the same thing: Heavy-handed theatre; didactic theatre; propagandistic, dogmatic, boring theatre; strident, Vietnam-era dramas or hippies marching down Lake Shore Drive, waving a giant George W. Bush puppet with horns.

But those with a wider view can reel off dozens of examples of political theatre ranging far outside mere polemics. I asked a variety of theatre artists and experts to name their favorite political plays, and they came back with everything from Tony Kushner to Lorraine Hansberry to Tennessee Williams.

Yes, that Tennessee Williams.

“Williams is thought of primarily as someone who wrote plays about psychological problems and psychological extremes, and certainly there’s that,” explains author and theatre historian Bruce McConachie, “but he was also very interested in the politics of sexuality, the politics of outsiders trying to break in.” For that reason, McConachie places Mr. Streetcar high in the ranks of America’s political playwrights, along with some who dealt more explicitly with political themes, like Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets.

McConachie also names Arthur Miller as a great political playwright; so, too, does Tony Taccone, the artistic director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in San Francisco. Death of a Salesman, says Taccone, “defines a certain sort of relationship within the context of not just a particular individual, but in terms of an entire society. And that’s what we mean by political.”

Taccone is currently directing Mother’s Against, part of David Edgar’s two-play investigation of American politics, and he was one of the original directors of Kushner’s landmark Angels in America. “I think that everything I do,” he says, “is political theatre.

“Political for me just means the system of relationships—social, economic, cultural, spiritual, psychological—that define a particular moment in history. To the extent that a writer seeks to explore how those relationships are intertwined, they create a larger perspective on the incidents that they’re talking about.”

For similar reasons, the critic and director Robert Brustein puts Chekhov in the pantheon of great political playwrights, citing that writer’s maxim that “theatre must deal with politics in order to put up a defense against politics.” Substantive political theatre, Brustein contends, takes a wide view.

“Cherry Orchard is a deeply political play,” Brustein contends, “but it doesn’t come down on any side of a problem, it doesn’t agitate for change—it chronicles change…theatre should be political to put up a defense against politics, against narrow political thinking, narrow ideological thinking.”

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When theatre holds politics in a tighter embrace, when it chooses sides—becoming what Brustein calls “activist theatre, theatre with a tendency”—certain dangers emerge. Primary among them is the danger of becoming less artful and more propagandistic.

The Madness of George Dubya

Speaking very broadly, the theatre community has made no secret of its position on the war in Iraq. There was The Lysistrata Project (which opened the first article in our series on politics and theatre); that event, on March 3rd, had theatres all over the world performing Aristophanes’ Lysistrata as a form of anti-war protest. The Theatres Against War coalition is claiming at least 100 affiliated theatres on their Web site, as far flung as Minnesota and Thailand. Getting wild response on the West End is The Madness of George Dubya, which gently parodies The Madness of King George and Dr. Strangelove while fiercely parodying the American president. And on April 26, a New York theatre complex called Theatre for the New City hosted “Resistance: A Festival for Peace,” billed as “an all-day cultural event with theatre, dance, poetry, music, spoken word, video and film,” in which “artists will cry out for peace and an end to the humiliating abuse of war.”

Does this kind of work represent a great outpouring of theatre inspired by geopolitical realities? Or is it a great rush of leftist propaganda? It’s a question that practitioners of political art wrestle with.

Well, some of them. “Listen, there’s good art, there’s bad art, and there’s medium art. If it’s no good, it’s no good.” That doesn’t make it propaganda, says Crystal Field, the executive director of Theatre for the New City, and a player on the downtown New York scene since the late 1960s’ heyday of American political theatre. Field’s politics are fervently left, and she is unconcerned that events like “Resistance” will turn her theatre from an artistic center into a political organ.

Theatre that advocates one or another political position, “I don’t consider to be propaganda…if it’s written by an author, and it’s artistic, and it’s done through imagination, then it’s art,” Field continues. “Propaganda is artless. Propaganda is [the government saying] 'We’ve won the war in Iraq.’ That’s propaganda. But if somebody wants to write a play that shows that we won the war in Iraq, is that propaganda? No, it’s art. It’s political theatre. I may not agree with it, but it’s political theatre. Propaganda has no art in it.”

On the other end of the country, Amos Glick at the San Francisco Mime Troupe is a bit more cautious. The SFMT, founded in 1959, calls itself “the country’s foremost political theatre company” and presents annual outdoor extravaganzas in San Fran’s public parks, each one centered around a current sociopolitical issue. Making sure those shows are artful and not just political harangues is a constant component of the company’s work, says Glick.

The Mime Troupe “does not want to be seen as a very simplistic propaganda machine,” says Glick. “Though we’re more successful at it in some plays than others.” He recalls their 2000 revue, called Eating It—about genetically modified foods—as one recent success in which they gave perspectives from all sides of the issue. Glick makes no bones about the theatre’s general attitude: “We have a very avowed point of view, and it’s a very specific, progressive one.”

The American theatre generally shies from a specific political agenda these days; SFMT is one of very few contemporary American theatre companies that self-identifies as political (next issue we’ll take a closer look at just how active political theatre is, here and overseas).

Even theatre work that is self-consciously 'about’ something tries not to be seen as just straightforward advocacy. Jessica Blank is co-author, with her husband Erik Jensen, of The Exonerated, a play about wrongly convicted death row inmates currently running off-Broadway and beginning to open in regional theatres across the country. In writing the show, Blank explains, they wanted to bring attention to the issue—but not at the cost of making a quality show.

“First and foremost, what we wanted to do was make a good piece of theatre, political or not,” Blank says. “If the piece also has a purpose, it can serve that purpose better the better a work of art it is. Our focus was telling the story as best we could, creating a sound structure for the actors to work in, those kinds of concerns.”

The Exonerated

An article in the New York Times, shortly after the play opened, seemed to show that The Exonerated was succeeding, both as art and as a way of bringing an issue to the fore. Former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White told the Times that the play included a 'very powerful image’ of the justice system’s failings; the article ended with her issuing an apology to one of the play’s subjects, “on behalf of the nation.”

That’s obviously a positive outcome for a writer taken with a cause, like Blank, or for more unabashedly political artists like Field and Glick—that their work will have some effect on the realities it chooses to address. Such has certainly been the case with The Laramie Project, the documentary drama by Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project about the gay-bashing murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming.

A recent production of the show at Riverside Theatre in Iowa City, like many of Laramie’s regional productions, was picketed by the virulently anti-gay Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church. In response, a gay and lesbian student group organized a protest; the result was an outpouring of community support for the Riverside Theatre and its show.

“What was really wonderful is it turned into a fabulous piece of street theatre,” says Jody Hovland, who directed The Laramie Project at Riverside. “There were eight people from Westboro and more than 400 people standing in counter-protes...it took on sort of a Mardi Gras feel and was remarkably joyous and affirming.”

Hovland’s feeling are seconded by Dave Neyens, a member of the gay and lesbian student group at the University of Iowa.

“Out of the hate that [Phelps] brings and demonstrates in a community, there’s a lot of good that happens. Communities come together with the common goal of saying 'We don’t think like that,’” Neyens says. As it has in many towns, the production of Laramie sent ripples through the community.

Clearly, theatre about social issues, though it runs the risk of “creating a very narrow theatre,” as Brustein says, can also “create a very exciting theatre…like in Odets’ Waiting for Lefty. At the end of the play, the actors come forward to the front of the stage and start screaming 'strike! Strike!’ Well, the whole audience started saying 'strike’ along with them.”

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Labor activism? Gay and lesbian rights? Anti-death penalty? Genetically engineered food? Does political theatre always means leftist theatre?

“Theatre is a communal art, a social art,” says Brustein. “People connect with each other collaboratively to produce theatre”—the implication being that collaboration and connection are liberal values.

Mark Harelik

Chicago’s Charlie Newell, artistic director at the Court, offers a similar explanation, first giving his own biases: “Being a card-carrying liberal and Democrat myself, from age zero, I would like to think that theatre is about questioning and the possibilities of idealism and inclusiveness, and taking care of each other and being in a room together as we collectively have an imaginative experience.”

Newell then pauses for a moment and considers.

“See, but now my conservative Republican friends who are hardcore theatregoers will say 'What are you talking about? We believe in those things, too!’ So maybe the best answer is just, I don’t know.”

Crystal Field at Theatre for the New City makes no such equivocations. “Most artists are liberal or progressive,” she says, “Because they see the truth. That’s their job, to look for the truth…and in seeking that they will always end up being liberal, progressive, forward-thinking, human, and humanistic. Because that is the truth.”

Richard Abrons just wrote a play called Family Values about abortion rights, a hot button issue if ever there was one. He too has noticed that conservative playwrights are few and far between. But why? “I think that conservatives are much more sure of themselves…whereas liberals tend to be somewhat more diffuse. There’s a phrase 'knee-jerk liberal’, but I think conservatives are more knee-jerk people. If you want to write a drama, you can’t do that. You can write a knee-jerk conservative editorial, but if you want to interest people in the lives of characters, I think you’ve got to make them more complex. You do have to take in the other side, and [conservatives] don’t like to take in the other side at all.”

Where conservatism seeps into the theatre, figures Taccone at the Berkeley Rep, is at the level of staging. “If I could make somewhat of a radical statement,” he says, “The conservative theatre that you see would be what I would call non-adventurous ways of staging classical material…not mixing period, not trying to do multi-cultural casting, not challenging the text in terms of the relevance now. There’s ways to fold a conservative impulse into a kind of run-of-the-mill show.”

Of course there are some conservatives in the theatre, Taccone concludes: “I don’t know too many theatre artists that are staunch members of the Republican party, but certainly a lot of our audience members are. And I think that we always deal with that, we always sort of traffic with that.”

Which means making hard decisions about how much and what sorts of political themes can be safely injected into the theatre. Next in our series, we’ll find out—just how much political theatre going on in America these days?

Home

Part 1: History of Political Theatre

Part 3: How political is the American Theatre?

Part 4: World Politics and Theatre