The argument could be made that American theatre these days is woefully, even shamefully, apolitical.

Scan the season listing of your average regional theatre and you’ll find a couple of unsophisticated romances, a couple of mildly sophisticated revivals, a literary adaptation, a zany comedy, and, if you’re lucky, some August Wilson for variety. On Broadway, this situation is not much better. Yes, a revival of Master Harold…and the Boys is on its way in, and Urinetown sort of pretends to be about politics, but the biggest hits are on the lines of Mamma Mia, a play so bleached of politics it makes The Music Man look like All The President’s Men. But to the charge that the American theatre is a wasteland to the politically minded, there are several defenses.

Defense Number One: It’s Not That Bad.

Writers with political ideas, not to mention directors, do manage to slip through the cracks. Grant McKernie, author of “A Cultural History of Theatre,” names a number of writers, including Anna Deavere Smith, Susan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Paula Vogel, and Maria Irene Fornes, whom he calls political.

“And these writers,” he notes, “find theatres willing to present their work and give voice to these individuals.” McKernie is currently living and working in the Netherlands, and he says that “in my personal experiences that American theatre in general…is as political as that of Europe.”

Tony Kushner

Indeed, recent months have brought a raft of politicized work from David Edgar’s Continental Divide, a two-parter at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to The Exonerated off Broadway. Ben Cameron, president of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), adds to the list Anne Nelson’s The Guys, and “a number of other post-9/11 plays.” There is at present, Cameron argues, “an emerging sense of social consciousness and an eagerness for the audiences to engage in social issues.”

Perhaps the pioneer for this trend was Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, which debuted right after September 11. The show is “a deeply ambitious play and a hard play for audiences, politically dense and long,” says Cameron. “And yet it packed them in. You’re seeing a rise in that among many theatres.”

Defense Number Two: Why Should It Be?

In the meantime, Cameron offers another reason that American theatre isn’t overly political, namely because we’re silly to expect it to be.

“I think a good institution has clear values it wants to serve, and those are very different for different organizations,” he says. “There are some [theatres] that are founded to be advocates for social change, and other theatres are not necessarily engaged in that debate by definition.”

In other words, don’t blame the American regional theatre for being the American regional theatre. And look elsewhere—look, for example, to smaller and storefront theatres, which are overwhelmingly more able and willing to take risks on politically engaged material.

Why? For one thing, because “it costs an enormous amount of money to produce a work of theatre for anything other than a storefront operation,” says Tracy C. Davis at Northwestern. “So that’s one reason why we don’t see radical arguments made very often in mainstream theatre.”

Defense Number Three: Look Closer.

The best answer is that American theatre may be a lot more political than it looks on the surface. As we’ve discovered in previous installments of this series, the politics of American plays has traditionally been more subtle, and revolving around questions of personal identity rather than, say, party affiliation. Playwrights like Tennessee Williams and August Wilson are deeply immersed in the politics of identity, in the relationship of Self to Other, which is as political in its way as a David Rabe piece about Vietnam.

“I think American playwrights have had to mask their political agendas,” figures theatre historian Bruce McConaghie. “Because American audiences haven’t been much interested in overtly political plays.” Nor is that a bad thing.

“Sometimes this has improved their politics in the sense that they don’t devolve into propaganda.” He notes that “Clifford Odets was pretty overtly political, and I think he’s a very good American playwright. But he pays the price for having his politics right out there; they don’t get produced anymore.”

Which means that the politics are under the surface, rather than worn on the sleeve, as you might find them in other countries. (Though not all—McKernie reports that in Lithuania, a tradition of masterfully subtle political theatre grew up in the Soviet era). “[In America] we go through occasional phases that are explicitly political,” says critic and director Robert Brustein, but “it’s hard to think of a single playwright in England who is not political. Edward Bond is political. Harold Pinter is very political. David Hare is political. There isn’t one that isn’t political.”

No surprise maybe that the play considered the the big political hit of this season, a two-show take on the two-party system, is by a Brit, David Edgar. And further no surprise maybe that, to artistic director Libby Appel, who brought Continental Divide to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the politics are secondary.

“What I think is thrilling is not only the kind of political conversation that everybody, every audience member walks away with…but the deeper issues,” she says of Edgar’s plays. “The question of principles, the question of family, the question of life’s journey.”

Ours is a land where the politics is personal; Cameron names Cornerstone Theatre in Los Angeles as a political theatre because they do stuff like a recent festival of religious-themed plays. “They did a festival bringing in 80 or 90 pieces, trying to bring together diverse religious communities to listen and find common ground among religions,” he recalls. “And given the state of the world today, given what we’re trying to find common ground among religions, well, that’s a deeply political statement, frankly.”

Joan Channick, Cameron’s colleague at the TCG and the president of the American branch of the American Theatre Institute, was kind enough to look up how many of the 450 theatres responding to a TCG questionnaire identified “politics and social issues” as among their areas of interest. I was surprised by the answer—so was Channick.
“I would say roughly 100,” she reports, and “that’s pretty substantial. My gut reaction would have been that it’s a smaller percentage, so I’m intrigued to hear that that many theatres indeed have an overtly political or social mission that’s an important part of their agenda. That’s good to hear.”

We don’t think of there being so many—certainly not as many as in the 1960s, when a landslide of theatres declared themselves to have a political agenda, whether it was against the war, for the cause of Civil Rights, or around another of the red-letter issues of that era.

“I think there’s always been a strand of theatres for whom political activism is always at the forefront,” says Cameron. “Irondale Ensemble [in New York], I think Mabou Mimes has a strong political orientation, of course the San Francisco Mime Troupe.”

Cameron might also have mentioned Capital Steps in DC, or any of several other parody companies, up to and including any of the branches of Second City. Bread and Puppet Theatre in Vermont, definitely. In a similar vein, In the Heart of the Beast up in Minnesota.

And then we return to the issue of identity, as Cameron adds to his list of political theatres, “a number of feminist theatres or gay and lesbian theatres, that implicitly have a fairly political agenda by the way they are voices for underserved communities or activists for social change in their communities.”

Even if they include it on the questionnaire, most theatres these days tend to shy away from being considered primarily a “political theatre.” One of the few that doesn’t is the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

“One of our things we say is that we’re the foremost political theatre in America—we do use that term,” says company member Amos Glick, and then explains how the meaning of the term has evolved since the company’s founding in the mid-1950s. “Historically, for the company, 'political’ may have meant sort of steeping yourself in sort of the socialist and communist ideology, analyzing everything from the worker’s perspective…I would say that in general what we do now, we’re pretty anti-corporate, but it’s more about looking at the issues that we feel in our company are of most direct importance and making a play about those things. We have a very avowed point of view, a very specifically progressive one.”

That kind of specific political perspective for a company may be less frequent today, but meanwhile another sort of theatre is becoming more common: community-based, socially conscious theatres whose very existence is a form of politics such as the New Orleans-based Junebug, an outgrowth of the Free Southern Theatre, which was heavily involved in the civil rights movement in the 60s.

Junebug takes as its mission to create theatre and music “that represents, supports and encourages African-Americans in the Black Belt South of ordinary means who are working to improve the quality of life available to themselves and the similarly oppressed who work for justice in the world at large.”

It’s a sort of work well outside what is considered the American—i.e. sophisticated institutions creating refined work for generally wealthy audiences—and largely off the radar screen of the cultural press. Junebug is connected to Alternate ROOTS, a group of Southeastern arts groups similarly rooted in their communities.

The most famous example of this type of work may be Swamp Gravy, a play based on the oral histories and actual present lives of the citizens of the town of Colquitt, Georgia, and produced by them, too. It was originally created in 1991 and has been re-written and re-produced every year since. Not only has the play addressed various of Colquitt’s conflicts, born from racial and economic tensions, but it’s become a sort of cottage industry for the town, creating a tourism industry from scratch.

“I do consider this kind of work to be political,” says Richard Owen Geer, who was involved in creating Swamp Gravy and has since returned to his native Chicago, where he is artistic director of a similarly engaged theatre, Scrap Mettle SOUL in Edgewater Uptown. He calls this kind of theatre “of, by, and for the people:” plays created by the people the work is about, and for the people the work is meant to affect.

Instead of being partisan about issues, he says, “What I am much more interested in is getting all sides of whatever the community issues are in the room together, and engaging them in a process of making a piece of performance.”

The most famous proponent of this kind of work—in which theatre actually becomes politics, instead of just being about politics—is the Brazilian director and theorist Augusto Boal, who has suggested that much cultural production acts as a kind of oppression, unless it is a living part o the community it serves.

“For Boal, in order for theatre to have an impact, in order for theatre to facilitate change, to rehearse possibilities for change, it has to be interactive,” explains Mark Weinberg, a Boal expert at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “It has to have a component of dialog.”

Geer notes that a project like Swamp Gravy or a Scrap Mettle SOUL show is in rehearsal much longer than your average play—both because the casts are unused to performing, and because much of the real “work” of the show takes place in the rehearsal hall.

“In community performance, the real change work is done in the close circle of the people who are in the play and who are directly related to it and in support of it, and the families thereof,” he says. “I think performance is important, and the interaction between finished product and the audience, sure. But because there are so many people in the process, the primary growth, the primary work is being done there. That’s where leadership is being developed—a new way for the community to envision itself.”

Now that’s politics.

Next issue, we’ll talk more about how much our current political era—from Election 2000 to the fall of Baghdad—has influenced the current wave of playwriting.

Home

Part 1: History of Political Theatre

Part 2: Politics, Propoganda and Theatre

Part 4: World Politics and Theatre