Political Theater: Trust

It's very easy, in the current political climate, the conclude that democracy is a binary system of government. 1 = Democracy, 0 = Dictatorship. A whole range of governments can fall into 0: Putin's Autocracy-in-sheep's-clothes, Lebanon's terrorist-hijacked-confessionalism, China's outright-totalitarianism, and Chavez's centralized cult-of-personality. In the other category, differences are considered purely superficial, divided between two categories: parliamentary or American-style.

But in reality, it is not just the form of government which determins the "democracy" of a country-- whether or not the people are free and representative. It is also the nation's culture. Voter apathy may make a government unrepresentative, or a culture in which politicians are not held accountable can become unrepresentative. One need only look at the titles of some of the 20th Century's greatest villain, to notice that Chancellor Adolf Hitler, President Mugabe, President Milosovic, or President Taylor all ran so-called "democratic" countries that quickly made it undemocratic, even when preserving most of the country's laws (except a few of the most important).

Our founding fathers, in addition to the form of our government, tried to instill a culture of revolution in our country, or at least a culture of criticism and skepticism. That's why we've engrained the protection of multiplicity of voices; why libel and slander laws don't protect public officials the same way, and why freedom of the press is held as important as a fair trial. Because in order for our democracy to stay a democracy, we need to examine the way that power is being allocated--not just in theory, but in practice. This is precisely the sort of examination we need to make today.

So why is this post about Theater? Because the form of my play Orchestration is designed for the examination of power on the stage. Because it is not just heads of state and international organizations who wield power; even on the personal level, the examination of power is key. Racism, sexism, marriage, education; almost any issue can be examined from an angle of power verses powerlessness. Perfect equality is perfectly impossible, so there is always a power balance, which is the nature of drama.

So this form which I've developed is built to exaine precisely that. Because I believe that you can never have something as the subject of the play which is not built into the form of the play. And indeed, the form of the play can also be part of the subject; a play willing to lay itself open to examination encourages that examination from the audience both in itself and in the world outside.

The form is as thus:

• to create a theatrical world on the stage which is aware of its own theatricality
• to invest power over that theatrical world in one of those characters
• to allow that theatrical world to both come into being and leave existence before the eyes of the audience.

Orchestration proceeded as such: a character named Jean enters the space, greets the audience, and leads in characters. He cues the music, organizes the dance, and proceeds to control the play as it progresses. Power flows out from him, through his pet creatures, and into the world. What is important is that at no point does he actually force anything onto the characters of the play; when one ensemble-member rebels, it is the other ensemble members who (at Jean's prompting but without coersion) force him to conform again. As more and more characters become alienated from Jean, however, the power fades, until at the end, Jean is powerless over the ensemble, who leave. Jean then ends the lights, lashes out at the technical operator onstage, and ejects the audience from the theater.

The universe of power is consistent, because it revolves around power as a mutual belief. In human society, one of the most powerful phenomena are the collaborative fictions which are given the weight of truth. Take, for instance, money. Money has absolutely no intrinsic value; even in the days of gold bars/coins, it was intrinsically valueless, and nowadays we have pieces of paper which by their own admission are only valued inasmuch as they represent something elsewhere. In short, money is only worth because we all agree on what money is worth. And as our collaborative belief in money gains or loses confidence, so does the worth of the money.

Yet if you read a play like Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross, you can see the power that this fictional concept of "money" can wield over people. Why? Because of our belief in money. These beliefs, invested with our suspension of disbelief, can have such complicated and absurd powers as to take on a life of their own; an excellent description of this is in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, when he discusses the confrontation between Farmers and the representatives of the bank:

The tenant men looked up alarmed. But what'll happen to us? How will we eat?

You'll have to get off the land. The plows'll go through the dooryard. ... We know that--all that. It's not us, ti's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster....

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you're wrong there--quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

It is imporant to know about these collaborative fictions and their effects, for obvious reasons. At the end of the day, it is possible to control them; in our current banking crisis, for instance, there are options of how to control or allieviate the beast.

In Orchestration, the ensemble enters the play with the implicit assumption that Jean carries that power. Like Laws in the United States, if enough people strongly believe that a law is real, it doesn't matter what makes them believe the law is true. The question of "Why?" is irrelevant. One strong example of this, for me, is in the audience. When Jean ends the show abruptly, when he speaks after having not spoken for more than half of the play, the audience is jarred. Why? They have implicitly taken the assumptions and conventions of theater to be their own, because they trust the production. We call this trust "suspension of disbelief." They trust that there is a reason the artist wants things this way, so it does not entirely matter why. So too does it not matter why Jean has power over the ensemble; he simply does.

Then the ensemble discovers, almost by accident and almost by fate, that there is no power at all except the power that has been in their minds. This liberation can only happens when the vast majority are of the same opinion--for instance, when one character in the first half rebels on his own, he is unable to break free. But when each of the characters has abandoned Jean, it is inevitable that they break free.

My history teacher once remarked that the transition from 'kings' to 'tyrants' in Ancient Greece was the first step toward democracy, because 'tyrants' could only rule when a majority of the military was on their side; they were often forced to be populist. Plato, in his Seventh Letter, describes a tyrant who abuses the people, philosophers, politicians, but suddenly finds himself in danger when he attempts to lower the pay of the soldiers. A far cry from representative democracy, but the first moment when a group of 'people' has the right to hold a leader accountable.

Why is a 'king' not the same way? Because a 'king' has, behind him, the collaborative fiction of religious right to rule. The early kings were absolutists; they had absolute power because they ruled by divine right. And so long as the people respected that divine right, the rule of power could be easily passed down from king to king. But once the fiction of 'divine right' was overturned (in England, for instance, at about the time of the Magna Carta and King James I), Kings lost the safety which allowed them to disregard the desires of the people.

The inspiration for this train of thought in my work, which is far more eloquent than I could ever be, is President Vaclav Havel's essay "Power of the Powerless" about totalitarian communism. Because more than any other society in the world, totalitarian communism had a deliberately constructed form of collaborative fiction; communism had a loaded, complicated set of assumptions that folks were required to be a part of in order to avoid punishment.

This is the power of belief; the power of mental enslavement. Orwell's 1984 is another excellent exploration of the phenomenon; or Aldoux Huxley's Brave New World. In fact, most Utopian/Dystopian "worlds" require the author to knit a very tight, worldwide collaborative fiction in order to hold their clockwork societies in place. With 1984 it is the important maxims of "War = Peace; Freedom = Slavery" and the concept of doublethink; with Brave New World it is the important role that "soma" plays in society. In both, it is a childlike trust in the policies and directions of the leader.

Trust. Trust is a form of belief which grants a huge amount of power to the person in whom trust is vested. Whether its Big Brother or Lenin, in order to turn over a large amount of power to any one individual it requires a large amount of trust. Patriotism, for instance, has been defined as some as trust in your country. This is why it is invoked by those who want more power; they want you to 'trust' them to run the country right.

Is trust compatible with democracy? Yes. In fact, democracy cannot operate without trust. Yet at the same time, democracy cannot operate with total trust; Americans, for instance, have an innate and deep trust that no matter what happens, America will survive of prevail. It does not matter who is in charge, the worst that can happens is something bad for certain people. But the truth is, there needs to be a constant scrutiny--distrust--in society to keep it operating.

And yet at the same time, in order for solutions to be found, some folks must earn our trust; some folks must be given the power to search for solutions and implement them. If we distrust that our government can ever provide healthcare or services to the poor, then we will never empower them to provide those things.

Trust is a dicey issue, as is power, which is why we never tire of seeing it in art or in the media. Our country obsesses about trust and its betrayal--certainly, the media around the recent resignation of Eliot Spitzer and the divison between Clinton's voters and Obama's voters speaks to certain cynicisms regarding trust. Just as we continue to love even with our hearts broken, we continue to trust even after betrayals. But we need to continue to examine trust and where we invest it.

Politics: Lawrence Lessig + Change Congress

Earlier this week, I was uplifted and excited to hear news that one of the men I most respect in the public sphere, Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is a Stanford Law Professor, and though fairly young has achieved a certain level of internet fame. He has published a few books, mostly around his idea of Free Culture.

As a Stanford Constitutional law professor, his main area of focus seemed to be how our law system is being transformed by the Internet--not surprising for a young law scholar, because that's the new frontier of our society. Once there, his attention was drawn to Intellectual Property law--which he believes is currently highly onerous, and I tend to agree in fairly strong terms. Finding inspiration in folks like Richard Stallman (who in 1983 started the GNU Project, which fostered Linux) who believed that intellectual property could survive without extreme protections (like the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, or the DMCA), Lessig began a series of lectures and books to examine the issues of free culture. This led him to co-found the Creative Commons, which offers an alternative to copyright.

People like Stallman and Lessig have at this point been tagged as the 'copyleft' movement, because of their progressive alternatives to copyright. As an artist, Lessig is more important to me than Stallman (The Creative Commons caters mostly to artists and academics; GNU Project is a programmer's venture). The show I am currently working on would be far more expensive if I had to pay each individual rights; I am not 'stealing' anyone's work, but I would still probably be charged thousands of dollars. The ability to share and create works based on old works is part of the lifeblood of me and artists like me; it is the corporate world which objects to this, for the most part.

But starting from the end of last year, Lessig made a shift that was surprising to people like me who aren't very close to him personally: he decided to leave the copyleft movement in favor of an anti-corruption movement which had not yet formed. He created an anti-corruption wiki (which was an engaging concept: politics by wiki), and started to stump for Barack Obama. Outside of the internet world, he's not a very widely known academic, so it didn't make that much of an impact.

This week, it looked like that was about to change. In Lessig's home district (CA 12), US Representative Tom Lantos died, and a special election was brewing. Lessig formed an exploratory committee to explore launching the Change Congress movement (the name of the anti-corruption movement now).

My reaction was, on the whole positive. I'm still highly positive for that idea, although I don't live in CA12. Why?

• Lessig is a knowledgable Constitutional Law professor, who has argued cases before the Supreme Court.
• Lessig was portrayed by Christopher Lloyd on the West Wing. (That's not a real reason, but it's cool).
• Lessig is one of the few people who I know of in the political sphere who have ever even given thought to Intellectual Property. You don't hear anyone talking about it, you don't see it anywhere. There's a massive copyright lobby, but the copyleft lobby is still in its infancy; new organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are still in their infancy.
• Lessig wants to create a progressivist movement, which I think this country badly needs; Barack Obama's current traction and the 'change' buzzword are indicators of this.
• Lessig is one of the few 'change' people out there who has fully articulated that real 'change' transcends the individual issues; the ways in which issues are resolved have to be tackled.

This is why I would have loved to see a Lessig '08 and even though he wouldn't have represented me, I would have donated for him.

Unfortunately, a few days later, he was already posting that he was not going to run. His reasoning, although saddening, was sound: he wasn't going to win. The opponent in the Democratic primary, Jackie Speier (although I don't know her) is apparently a very popular, very well respected, very experienced Democrat. Although I also think Lessig would do a good job, there doesn't appear to be a chance that Lessig would unseat Speier, and he would wind up hurting Change Congress.

The important thing, however, is that the Change Congress movement is still out there. Nine months away from the election--Change Congress could have a baby by then. A baby of democracy, I suppose. This is the movement we need, a progressive answer to the Republican Revolution of 1996. But we need to know more; the website, currently, is just a mailing list signup. I want to know where Lessig is going with this movement. How do they want to change Congress? How are they going to tackle nonprocedural issues?

I'm dying to know. And I hope I'll soon find out.

Review-Idea: Bad Plays; Frogs

Yesterday, I was working on a friend on the Onion's crossword. One of the clues was "Where 'good' is 'bad.'" The answer was "in slang," but today I'm thinking the answer might sometimes be "the theater." This thought dawns on me because I've just come from the play Frogs, or Old Comedy, or Another Play Entirely; a play so chaotic that it has three names, depending on where you're hearing about it from.

The conceit, although confusing to sort through, seems to be thus: a production of Aristophanes' Frogs is being put on. Aristophanes' Frogs is a comedy wherein Dionysus, god of wine and drama, takes his slave Xanthias into Hell to try and find Euripides. Dionysus wants Euripides to come back and save Athens through his beautiful poetry. But the production of Another Play Entirely is not in any way 'faithful' to the original production; chaos reigns onstage, actors swap roles continually, texts from John Lennon, Bob Marley, MLK, and Charles Cavendish Clifford impose themselves on the text.

This play is very problematic to review because, by any of the usual standards of theater, it is terrible. But precisely for every reason that the play would normally be considered 'terrible,' it actually succeeds. The key is in the deep sincerity of the actors and the need to tell the story. The irreverence and the childishness is not in a spirit of opposition, where the actors condescend or assault the audience; rather they are trying to help the audience understand, to tell them a story. It is rather like having a child tell you an important story.

Take, for instance, the music, composed by Thomas Cabaniss and the cast as a whole, and performed with accompaniment by Jonathan Hart Makwaia. The songs are chaotic, sporadic, and often overpowering; there is a bluntness of style that helps convey the rawness of the material being sung about. At one point, for instance, the ensemble appears as frogs (for which the play bears its original name). They sing the original Greek chant which the frogs traditionally sing ("brekekeke koaxkoax") in loud, brassy tones, and cavort around the stage in a faux-ballet, mimicking all the while closeminded critics. The tone is too sharp and (ironically) too chaotic to be arrived at by accident. There is a distinct, unsettling effect which all of this mayhem aims at.

And this is not unpleasant. The characters are endearing; John Kurzynowski's Dionysus is a truly empathetic character, no matter how flagrant his show-queen attitude is. He provides one of the windows through which the audience can watch this strange spectacle and not be completely alienated; he continues to long for a show without the constant interruption of liberal politics and heavy cynicism (both of which pervade the play). At one point he sings about wanting another number about show queens, because they're tame and uncomplicated; several times he repeats the phrase "This was supposed to be a comedy."

There is, often in art, a strain of almost anti-artistic art; art that takes bad taste or blunt content and use them to stir up stronger feelings in the audience than the usual tame, formally pleasing fare. And yet, in order to succeed they need a heavy reliance on comedy. Bertold Brecht, for instance, constantly strove for a way to overthrow the traditional ways of looking at theater, and often held up 'bad' theater as examples of better ways of approaching his theater. And often audiences have embraced shows despite their violations of all the rules; neo-classical scholars had to exempt Shakespeare from their perfect Aristotelian unities. Certainly, Another Play Entirely makes a sporting event to throw all the rules it can lay its hands on out the window, and despite the odds against it makes itself an enjoyable evening.

Review: Imminence

Things do not happen quickly in the play Imminence; tensions build slowly and passively until the moment where pressures are let loose in a shuddering quake. As the play progresses, it charts three generations of a family, through memories and simple moments, slowly illuminating their lives and how they cope with the loss of one of their own. Realizations and understandings steal slowly over the audience as the storytelling moves quietly forward.

The opening moments of the show are crucial for setting the stage. A simple domestic scene is set, with pedantic, everyday talk. But other actors stand at one side of the stage, humming and singing a tender acoustic song composed by Ellen Maddow. The talk at the table and the movements of the actors become part of the music, providing their own unique rhythms and melodies to the music. The care with which each actor performs their role, and the quiet, unassuming emotions with which the music is embued, allowed me to tune my ears to hear much subtler and more potent strains of conversation.

From that moment forward, the dialogue and the actions onstage became surreal, even though they were simple actions in life. Writer-Director Paul Zimet provides a highly minimalist script, understanding that if each moment is simple and highly specific, it can have the power of an entire television epic. The actors perform in such roles with an openness and simplicity that drives such moments home: Will Badgett, as Victor, can turns a scene where he does nothing more than shuffle to the bathroom and back in the middle of the night into a quiet, potent scene. He performs roughly that same scene three times; only the third time, he addresses the audience with a heartbreakingly beautiful monologue.

The technical elements were, for the most part, as minimalist as the show. Carol Mullins' lighting design matches the tone of the show, creating the effect of streetlamps through shutters at night with a poetic precision. The exception which proves the rule of minimalism is the set, two black platforms designed by Nic Ularu, which split in half, and over the course of the play drift further and further away from each other. At times, this set choice didn't seem to be used as powerfully as it could have, but when it was fully utilized--such as for Hilary Easton's choreography, Will Badgett's monologue, or a scene in which Rory (David Brooks) confronts his family from across the divide--the result was simple and powerful.

There were, admittedly, some scenes that were less effective overall, and could have been jettisoned without damaging the experience. But because of the gentle pace and the wonderful gifts which I received, I was not bothered too badly. It is very rare that I form such a deep empathy with the performers onstage, and--as if reciprocating the performer's welcoming spirit--I cannot judge them for a few missteps.

Review: Macbeth

Shakespeare seems so dry, so removed from our times, that it is hard to imagine it having a deep, visceral impact. Richard Foreman once said that all theater is about death because in the act of freezing it and performing it exactly, over and over, we've killed it. If that's true, then Shakespeare has been dead for hundreds of years. The production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, directed by Rupert Goold and staring Patrick Stewart (Macbeth) and Kate Fleetwood (Lady Macbeth), does create that visceral feeling. This is what a remounting of a classic should be: absolutely grounded in our guts.

The set, designed by Anthony Ward, provides an immediate base from which the play can already begin its powerful effect. It is gray and dingy, at once recalling ugly kitchens, sinister morgues, interrogation rooms, or whatever gloomy industrial needs one might have. As the play progresses, a few small moving set pieces are all that is needed to transform this set into whatever locale is needed.

Meanwhile, an equally sinister story is being told onstage. Macbeth and his companion Banquo (Martin Turner) come back from the war as heroes, but a prophecy from three demonic sisters (Sophie Hunter, Polly Frame, Niamh McGrady) gives him an appetite for more: he and his wife collude to murder the King of Scotland, and everyone who stands in their way.

The play has a very distinct tone, set in place not only by the set, but also by powerful sound choices from designer Adam Cork, subtle lighting design by Howard Harrison, and video/projection design by Lorna Heavey. The tone was very distinctly set, creating a very heavy and sometimes overpoweringly suspenseful backdrop to all of the character's actions.

Sometimes, early on, this was not ideal--it seemed as though the choices were so powerful that they'd have nowhere else to go as the play progressed. The video projections in particular were often less helpful; it seemed to me as though they should have either been used more, or used less. Some visions, such as the appearance of a ghost near the end of the second act, were accompanied by strong psychedelic projections. But others, like the infamous "is that a dagger which I see before me?" were played without any projection at all. I found it difficult to understand what the logic was behind certain choices of projection versus others. But there was no denying that even before the end of the first scene, the show's tone and mood was very powerfully set, and that all of the design elements had played a part.

Of course, had the mood prevailed in one tone for an entire show, it might have become overpowering, even stifling. And it is here that the director and the actors are to be commended for balancing out the mood. The heavy tones of the play could have been insufferably relentless, but at times became a springboard to turn even the subtlest humor into a real joy and release. In one scene, Macbeth is discussing ordering a murder. As he does so, he prepares a sandwich for himself and for the murderers, putting it in one murderer's mouth to stifle objection. The choice brought humor into a stark moment, but the care with which the choice was deployed turned an intellectual concept about greed into a human moment of hunger.

This transformation of intellectual concepts into visceral, emotional experiences was clear in each of the actors. Patrick Stewart's Macbeth was a very human incarnation, whose soliloquoys seemed to be honest conversations with the audience. No matter how many murders, or how vile his actions were, there was a human being looking for something, whether it be from the audience or from other members of the ensemble. Kate Fleetwood's Lady Macbeth was equally invested with life; like Lady Macbeth she seemed to be able to slide from one end of Lady Macbeth's existence to the other without destroying the integrity of the character. Neither character ever milked the "great lines" of Shakespeare any more than the moment dictated.

The term 'modernization' is bandied about a lot in reference to Shakespeare, but it seems strange to talk about this production as 'modernizing' Macbeth. Although the prop elements (also from Anthony Ward) and the costume choices (supervised by Christine Rowland) were 'modern,' the feeling was not that this is what Macbeth would look like if it happened in the 21st Century. It looked to me as though this story was a universal story, and that all of these 'modern' elements had been selected for no other reason than to make the story work. The time in which the play took place was not important--what was important is that it was happening now, in the visceral sort of way that theater has of always happening now.

Culture Future

We have a culture. It is unavoidable to have a culture. Culture, it seems, is something which simply happens. It develops, like an organism, over time. It (and I hope I'm not being too controversial) evolves, shedding antiquated layers and developing new strategies for survival. Cultures stack; the way that cells combine to form tissues and tissues for organs and so on, so too do local cultures combine with larger cultures. There is a global culture, Western and Eastern cultures, national cultures, state cultures, all the way down to neighborhood cultures.

Culture is often portrayed as something almost fate-like in origin. Unseen and unalterable rules govern its existence, forming its members the way that water forms mountains. Sometimes we excuse bad actions as being cultural in origins, sometimes we see events and call them inevitable because of their cultural origins. This is partly because culture is overwhelming: it encapsulates everything we do, all of the spheres of our thoughts and our public and private activities. To manage our image of culture, we imagine that only the best of culture is actually culture; Rembrant is called 'cultural' but Hannah Montana is not.

Unfortunately, culture is everything. And everything is overwhelming. It is easy to believe that we cannot change culture, because it is so large. So we throw our hands up and accept it as fate. But it doesn't have to be. In fact, it is because we treat culture's problems as large problems that we are helpless in the face of it. But culture does not need to be vast and monolithic. It may be greater than the sum of its parts, but it is still vulnerable to changes in any of its parts. By altering the parts of culture within our reach, we can slowly shift the seemingly massive edifice of culture, first on a local level, then on larger and larger levels.

And, of course, the more people you have working with you, the more change you can make. What we notice as 'history' are those moments when enough people, or a few people in just the right places, have the opportunity to shift the edifice of culture more than just a little bit. But those opportunities always exist, in greater and lesser degrees.

This blog is about the future of culture. It cannot be about the future of all culture, only the future of culture from one perspective. The things I am interested will influence what, in culture, I am focusing on: theater, politics, and satire are among the elements that awaken my own critical focus. Because the first step in changing culture is observing it, understanding it, and seeing how the cogs turn. Then the discussion begins as to whether the culture needs the change, and how to effect it. These changes should not have to be radical, but they can happen, and they can happen for good.