Joel Brouwer

Ha! I’ve been fussing at the old rosary of whether activist drama has any usefulness whatsoever, and then I stumble across this play in which the author shrewdly avoids the need to answer that question by instead simply stating it. It’s an exquisitely and numbingly honest setup: Two idealists are racked with doubt about their ability to change the world. Making themselves and each other miserable. One of them decides to just give up. The other one decides to just keep trying. They both remain racked with doubt and miserable. The end!

This is a great example to pull out when you hear someone complaining that such and such a movie, novel, play, etc. is “formulaic.” Life is formulaic!

The use of rape as an instrument of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most horrific ongoing crises in the world today. Lynn Nottage and Kate Whoriskey traveled to the DRC and heard the stories of many rape victims first-hand. Nottage used this material to write this play, which Whoriskey directed.

I can think of few other examples of works of art which so vividly demonstrate the problem of the representation of human depravity. That problem being that on the one hand, one wishes to see terrible crimes brought to light, in hopes that once exposed they will be ended and punished, but on the other hand one despairs to see the indescribably horrible described, since any such description inevitably minimizes the scope of the crime.

Nottage’s play succeeds for me in theory, because it draws attention to a crisis which is not receiving enough attention. But it fails in practice, because it turns that crisis into a narrative, with types for characters and a classic Freytag pyramid for a plot, and so provides a coherence, structure, catharsis, and sense of resolution which the reality in the Congo does not possess.

I’ve been asking this question of myself for twenty years, and I know I sound like a broken record, a whiny American bourgeois, a useless intellectual who would have been shipped out on the first train to the pig farms during the Cultural Revolution, but the question persists regardless, namely, how does the politically-engaged artist ensure that the audience won’t feel they’ve already done something to help just by experiencing the art?

Can you tell I’m trying to find a play or two to use for my “Uses of History” course this fall?

It seems clear that Prebble’s play loses more than most by just being read on the page rather than seen on the stage, since apparently the production itself is a real extravaganza of dance, music, zippy high-tech effects, and so on. Spectacle is no doubt an appropriate mode for this story, which is all about the use of smoke and mirrors to occlude reality. The play itself is loose and lively, with lots of fast-paced short scenes stitched together, rather than long lugubrious capital-D dramatic scenes. I’d have to see it to say much more, but this seems to me a promising mode for coping with the problems of depicting historical realities on stage.

In my comments on David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, I opened up a little vein regarding Anglo/American relations as played out, so to speak, through the vector of theater. Add this to that, filed under Interesting and Unexplained: Prebble’s play was a smash hit in London but absolutely bombed when it moved to Broadway. Thoughts?

I only read this, I didn’t see it. That’s an image from a Public Theater/Yale Rep production directed by Richard Foreman.

I really loved Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, but this one was a big disappointment for me. It was disappointing in an interesting way, though, namely, it’s a vivid instance of the imitative fallacy: Parks makes a spectacle of Saartjie Baartman as she attempts to condemn those who made a spectacle of Saartjie Baartman. I rush to make clear that I well understand that Parks has created her spectacle out of sympathy, while Baartman’s captors acted out of ignorance and cruelty. Still, this is a play which makes little to no effort to empathize with Baartman’s plight; instead, she is set down on the stage, presented for our consideration, and talked about. Which is to say, she’s made a spectacle of.

Elizabeth Alexander wrote a book of poems about Baartman, and Barbara Chase-Riboud wrote a novel about her, and those works, like Parks’ play, also seemed to me sadly flat. I commend all three authors for trying, since this is a story which exemplifies in microcosm so many forms of repugnant injustice and prejudice–racism, sexism, and colonialism, for starters–and so, I think, is an important one to tell. But it seems that when a particular situation is so overwhelmingly blatantly obviously horrid, artworks which try to represent it often just sort of point at it and say, “Look. Look how horrid.” Which of course we already know.

But does that mean Baartman–or Auschwitz, or My Lai, or Emmett Till–shouldn’t be represented by artists? Certainly not! I’m just saying that artists who pick up subjects like these have set themselves up for some serious challenges, to say the least.

Didn’t see it, just read it, but I think it’s as much meant to be read, as the characters spend a lot of time reading off position-paper type speeches along the lines of

People who blame materialism blame it because they feel it doesn’t nourish them. And you could say it’s true: materialism, by definition, isn’t heroic. In the West we no longer prize heroism. People no longer want to do dangerous, outstanding things. All they want is to live as long and as comfortably as possible. And so this new Western ethic of survival, simply surviving as a human being–merely surviving–as though the world were everything, and the manner in which you live in it secondary–seems to other people, other cultures . . . well, ignoble.

This and much like it is delivered not in a classroom or on a political talk show, but at dinner. I sometimes host dinner parties, and I think many of my guests might well hold opinions not dissimilar from those expressed above, but I can’t recall any of them fulminating quite so explicitly over wine and salad, as if they were explaining the world to a sixth-grader.

That said, I found myself quite enjoying the way Hare manages to leaven his extended flat political speeches with a fairly bubbly Albee-ish family drama, wherein a creepy but brilliant father playfully bats at his faithful but dull son’s lover, a Yale professor who’s so desperate to do the right thing at every moment that she almost never succeeds.

I’m sure much hay was made of the fact that the men are British and the woman American — Hare offers commentary throughout on the different ways in which the two nations do power, war, gender, politics, education, medicine, et. al. — but that sort of thing both bores me and makes me feel sorry for the British, because when they they appear so bent on defining themselves on the basis of their differences from us, as they so often do, it just makes them look pathetic. (A hint for the Commonwealth: The opposite of affection is indifference, not disdain. We know you love us “underneath.”)