You might not have heard of him yet, but young playwright Beau Willimon can already lay claim to one extraordinary accomplishment in his career: He wrote the first play about 9/11.

Beau Willimon

Willimon is a graduate student at New York’s Columbia University, who happened to be in London when the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center took place; he also happened to have signed up for a 24-hour-play festival at the Battersea Arts Center, where each writer was to concoct a new short play over the course of a single day.

What Willimon came up with was called Never-Never Land, and on Sept. 30, 2001, Variety called the short piece by the then-23-year-old Willimon “possibly the first play inspired by the attacks.” What’s interesting, Willimon muses now, is not that Never-Never Land dealt with the World Trade Center’s destruction, but that none of the other plays in the workshop did, considering it was held on Sept. 15.

“This thing happened and it was this total shock, and we had this assignment four days after,” Willimon recalls. “I figured there was no way I could avoid writing about Sept. 11, even if it was a 24-hour-play and only 10 minutes long. I had an opportunity to comment on something political, urgent, and important almost simultaneously to its actual happening…so there was politics smacking up against me trying to say something.”

I met Willimon 20 months after Sept. 11 in a New York City—and a world—that has been radically transformed. The fall of Baghdad is just the latest in an extraordinary series of events that began with the World Trade Center, a series of upheavals that has included the bombing of Kabul, the birth of the Homeland Security Department, and the passage of the USA Patriot Act.

On a gloomy Monday in May, Willimon and I were among a group of New Yorkers assessing the impact of those dramas on theatre, and what impact theatre might have in return. After six weeks of inquiring about politics and theatre for this newspaper, I wondered now whether theatre artists have a special responsibility to engage in their work with the kinds of issues and anxieties born of recent events.

“It’s not a responsibility, it’s an opportunity,” said one of the assembled, the writer and performer Anna Deavere Smith. She is an artist uniquely at the intersection of politics and performance, both by virtue of her incendiary social-commentary shows (like Fires in the Mirror and Twilight) and her role as the National Security Advisor on “The West Wing.” Theatre’s value doesn’t come just from its artistry, she says, but also from its place in society.
“Almost every major profession you can think of has lost the public trust,” Deavere Smith says. “Lawyers, doctors, politicians, investment bankers…and artists still have the public trust. Theatre still has the public trust. The question is, what are you going to do with it?”

Sigourney Weaver and Liev Schreiber in MCC Theatre's Mercy Seat.

Some people have already done plenty, and some people are planning more. Besides the spookily prescient Homebody/Kabul by Tony Kushner and rapid-fire responses like Willimon’s, we’ve seen a series of new plays emerge from the issues: Anne Nelson’s The Guys (already forthcoming in movie form) and Neil LaBute’s Mercy Seat. Both of those plays are beginning to move from New York to regional productions, and a handful of new plays, like Stuart Flack’s Homeland Security, are being born at places like Victory Gardens in Chicago.

But in the wider view, such works appear to be the exception. Look over the 2003-04 season announcement of America’s regional theatres and the forthcoming Broadway offerings and, on the whole, there’s little about 9/11, little about Iraq, little on Afghanistan. Where Willimon’s reaction was immediate, and Anne Nelson’s was only slightly less so (The Guys opened at New York’s Flea Theatre in Tribeca in December, 2001), as the months have passed and more and more unexpected events have piled on, it doesn’t seem as if the American theatre has risen to match the new political intensity of the times.

Is this because the plays aren’t being written, or because they’re not being performed? One group of young playwrights, colleagues of Willimon’s in the grad program at Columbia, seemed hesitant to directly deal with the “issues of our day.” They were loathe, it was explained, to use 9/11 “as just an excuse to write crappy plays.”
Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winning cultural critic for the New York Times, said she hopes writers will address the “new anxieties,” but that is a mistake to try and expect it.

“You can’t make people write or create what isn’t inside them,” she says—though she hopes that writers will “start asking [themselves] to think beyond conventions of theatre you’ve been used to. It’s going to take a long, difficult process for 9/11 to be turned into coherent artistic form.”

Daryl Roth

“At some level yes, there is a responsibility,” says the producer Daryl Roth, who has shepherded such sharp social fare as How I Learned to Drive (Paula Vogel) and Three Tall Women (Edward Albee). But if plays and playwrights don’t grapple with these issues, she says, that’s OK too. “If you want to write Dinner at Eight, that’s fine.”

Roth says she has not seen a spike in the number of politically or socially themed plays that cross her desk but, she points out, she’s a commercial producer. “They’re seeing more of that in the not-for-profit world; I come into it in the second round.” The “second round” of production is where more money comes into it—point being that even in a time of heightened political concern and anxiety, the traditional difficulties of finding the money to do risky or controversial work remain.

Tracy C. Davis, professor of performing arts and English at Northwestern, reminds us that “it costs an enormous amount of money to produce a work of theatre for anything other than a storefront operation.”

Anthony Mosely at Chicago’s Collaboraction notes that, in preparing for their winter festival of new works, Sketchbook, they’ve seen a glut of submissions with a pointed worldview.

“We are getting a high percentage of plays that deal with the current state of the world,” Mosely reports. “Probably because they are short and all world premieres, they are directly related to what is going on. Obviously the short nature of them allows for quick turnaround and, therefore, a lot of connection to what is going on.”

Davis adds that the best reason to expect that the theatre world will deal in depth with the issues of our time is that it always has found a way to do so in the past—although, as we’ve seen in previous installments of this series, sometimes those ways are subtle and indirect. It might be in “storefront operations” now, but Davis is confident that ultimately a theatrical response to our new world will emerge.

“There’s so much concern among theatre artists about, for example, the inappropriateness of American imperial aggression in Iraq,” says Davis, “And theatre is a very likely medium for considered, deliberate debate and critique. It takes longer to get that into public circulation, but it will come.

“Will we see it in Lincoln Center straightway, will we see it at the Goodman? I don’t know…I don’t think you’d see the same kind of work coming even to regional theatres in Chicago as you would see to regional theatres in, say, the Carolinas, where the economy is much more dependent upon the military.”

“Being a liberal, I naturally hope that a new political fervency will be the outcome of the present administration’s policies, but history does not give us great comfort,” says Grant McKernie, theatre professor and author. “Arthur Miller attacked the McCarthyites in The Crucible, and the Hollywood 10 became infamous for their bravery, but few other writers of the day were willing to stand up and be counted.”

Critic and director Robert Brustein, at least, says that it is “inevitable” that politically minded plays are being written. I spoke to Brustein at the height of the US bombing campaign against Iraq. “It is inevitable that playwrights are hard at work, even as we speak. There’s probably a lot of theatre being written right now against the war.” He adds, with a chuckle, “Though I doubt if you’ll find any that support the war.”

“Some of the most powerful individual voices are as political as they come,” says Joan Channick, Deputy Director of the Theatre Communications Group. And there is a need among audiences at times like these for politically engaged writing, says Channick: “There’s a hunger for it.”

“I think it’d be really interesting to look back a couple years from now, to look at what this era was like, to see whether there’s an increase in political programming,” Channick continues. “And is it just of the moment, or does it represent a heightened political conscious?”

“There is no doubt,” says Tony Ciccone at the Berkeley Rep, “that since 9/11 our consciousness about the forces with which we are intertwined, it’s become much more on the minds of every artist, and on the minds of the audience, as well.” Berkeley Rep is one of the various local regional theatres currently producing The Guys. But Ciccone reminds us that not everyone wants their art, even their theatre, to be politically engaged and controversial.
“People look to art and to entertainment for a very wide variety of things,” he says. “Some are looking to art to describe the world in really accurate terms and help in some way, and other people are looking for the opposite: Take me away, I don’t want to hear about it.”

Beau Willimon, the first playwright to weigh in after 9/11, has continued writing, and his newest work is called Nobody’s Child. It’s a play about a young woman dealing with the aftermath of having an abortion, and it had its first reading, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, as part of a weeklong festival in early May.

The play is in no way about 9/11 and the world it created, Willimon says—but at the same time it sort of is.
“No true artist or writer can escape the politics of his or her time,” says Willimon. “In that sense, anything they write is going to be affected by those politics. Now, what does an abortion have to do with 9/11? In one small story, you’re dealing with a woman who has a very traumatic, emotional thing happen to her that has to do with the loss of something, the death of something. Most of the American public felt something like that on 9/11, and we dealt with it in different ways.

“Telling one person’s story and how they deal with traumatic loss and how they connect with the people around them as a result of that loss, I think it comments on something that is pretty universal.”

Even if he never writes another “9/11 play” or a play about the bombing of Baghdad or the Patriot Act, even if no American playwright engages directly with these things ever again, they are a part of our theatre now. It’s just a question of what we do with them.

Home

Part 1: History of Political Theatre

Part 2: Politics, Propoganda and Theatre

Part 3: How political is the American Theatre?