When it isn't busy putting the choir to sleep, political theater can become the target of two (somewhat contradictory) criticisms: It tells us what we already know from the evening news, or it mistakenly places facts and ideology above human drama. New York's theater critics are all too ready to trot out one or the other cavil rather than actually engage the ideas of a play or tip their own ideological hand as regards consumerism, foreign policy or their own niche in the ecosystem. Don't get me wrong: I know that political theater can often fail to be profoundly political or effectively theatrical, and the road to dramaturgical hell is paved with good intentions, but I've gotten to the point where I'd just like a play to at least fucking try to be relevant. To participate in the so-called discourse of the day. To rouse the rabble or fill the stage with vigorous rhetoric. To give me a sense that the playwright did his or her research, has a point of view, a firm grasp of the subject and the history of issue-driven drama, and isn't afraid both to flaunt his or her ideological bias, and challenge the same. It's been said many times in recent years, but theaters in the U.K. are simply shaming us with their engaged and passionate programming.
I know there are some polemicists or theoreticians out there who believe that political drama along the lines of David Hare or Arthur Miller is part of the problem - containing the anarchic energies of truly revolutionary thought in the bourgeois literary conventions of Ibsenite melodrama and such - but we're dealing with a cultural climate that has been bomb-blasted back to a condition where even the most rudimentary forms of political-theater pabulum are absent from the scene. We don't even have bad political theater. It's. That. Bad. I tried to sketch out the troubled scene on Salon back in June.
This is just my way of saying that J.T. Rogers' The Overwhelming is in previews at the Laura Pels Theatre. It's a Graham Greene-like tale of a white American college professor, his teenage son, and his African-American second wife in Rwanda in the weeks before the 1994 genocide. On page, I found Rogers' tale taut, informative and nicely suspenseful, with a brutal ending. I don't think it will singlehandedly revive American political drama, but it's the type of show we should see more of each season. Be curious to see how it works on stage, under the direction of the great Max Stafford-Clark. Rather surprisingly, this is a Roundabout Theatre Company production, and apparently there was something of a bidding war on the show after it opened last May at London's National Theatre. I wrote a preview of the show in TONY here. I'm looking foward to seeing it later this month.
Also in TONY: a review of the video-saturated food fight that is Ivo van Hove's engaging (if scattered) vision of The Misanthrope and my NY1 review of Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate. This weekend on NY1's On Stage (Sat & Sun at 9:30am & 7:30pm), they'll broadcast my Misanthrope review too.
I remember Critical Theory class in college and being taught that there is no avoiding the political and that every action, every choice we make is inherently political. I see your point about wanting people to work out the problems of our time onstage in front of us, but I think that will lead to the bad political drama you say we are lacking. I would venture to say that all drama is political and whether a playwright chooses to address current or continuing global or local topics is itself political. All dramas are political in the sense that they reflect just how disinterested most americans (and most self-described artists) have become in this day and age. This raises the question of why did they write this at all, and generally it doesn't have to do with raising awareness or anything other than their own individual profile.
But I agree. I would like to see more theater of ideas that is not just inherently political, but wholly political in its discourse. Where better to argue ideas and work out the world's problems than on a New York stage?
Posted by: SAETD | October 10, 2007 at 11:43 AM