MWC Special Features,

Mendacity: The Prospects of Progressive Theater Under Capitalism
by  Walter A. Davis

“Mendacity is the system we live in.  Liquor is one way out and death’s the other.”
Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  

I. You Don’t Need a Weatherman Because There’s No Wind

Claudius: Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in it?

Hamlet: No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest.
Hamlet 

      Last week in Counterpunch I offered a critique of the decision by the New York Theatre Workshop to cancel a planned production of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie. My effort in that essay  was to contextualize this controversy so that we won’t fail to comprehend the large issues it raises.

The present essay supplements that one with an argument that will surprise many readers of the earlier piece.  The Corrie controversy continues but it has now largely become an example of how easily we get trapped by ideology in simple alternatives, false dichotomies and fatal assumptions. Many of them are illustrated by the current rallying around this play and the lionizing of it as a model of progressive theatre; and examplar, to the shame of the NYTW of the “exploration of political and historical events and institutions that shape contemporary life.” [1]  Extravagant claims on behalf of this play are now a matter of course, though few New Yorkers have seen or read it. [2] 

The fact of its cancellation offers all the assurance many people need that this play must be something truly daring and remarkable, the cause celebre for those of us who want to stand up in support of serious theatre. 

This has become an axiom of PC thought on this controversy.  As a result when the play opens in New York (soon no doubt) it will be hard for anyone to attend without feeling that one has indeed experienced precisely the kind of thing that “progressive theatre” is all about. But as the song goes, it ain’t necessarily so.  Ideology sets its traps for those on the left as well as on the right.  Those who have condemned the play sight unseen for its incendiary content are mirrored by those who will laud its theatrical brilliance and daring. 

The desultory result, as I’ll show, is the “censoring” of genuinely serious, progressive theatre.  I.e., the kind of theatre we need if we are to break the hold that  plays such as My Name Is Rachel Corrie have not only over our political thought but over our very ability to think and feel in the more complex ways required for experiencing anything theatrically radical.  Here too we are so often lemmings salivating on cue when told that the kind of daring theatrical experience we crave is available to us under the bright lights right here in The Big Apple.

II. Where Have You Gone Marat/Sade?

“Audiences know what to expect, and that is all they can believe.”
The Player-King in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

      Art begins when a traumatic experience seeks a form adequate to it.  Average writers find a form already extant in some set of generic conventions.  They pour their material into it.  Significant writers realize that writing is sui generis.  For them the search for and creation of new forms is the essential act.  Thereby an experience that would otherwise be subsumed under the operations of ideology breaks free of it. A new way of thinking and feeling is born. 

Art has become part of political struggle in the richest sense of that term. Old forms, conventions, and genres offer, in contrast, yet another recycling of the same.  New subjects may be treated in them but the same old structures of feeling remain in control with the same predictable reiteration of the same old humanistic platitudes. “Audiences know what to expect and that is all they can believe,” as Stoppard’s Player-King contends, because the plays we are offered by our theatres create in us the emotional and ideological needs that determine what we are able to experience.  Finding a principled way to challenge this situation formulates in a nutshell the task of any theatre that would earn the labels progressive, radical, controversial, bold, cutting edge, daringly experimental. 

      On those rare occasions when a play succeeds in preserving the conditions of genuine art, it offers its community a challenge that goes far deeper than controversial comments on a given political topic.  For such works cleanse the doors of perception, thereby transforming our relationship to ourselves and the world.  We feel and experience everything in new ways, ways fraught with anxiety but also with the pulse of transgressive discovery.  Ideology no longer retains its habitual and automatic control over our minds. It is in this sense that Hamlet and Marat/Sade and Three Sisters are political in a way far more radical than The Permanent Way to Victoria Britain or Guantanamo or to strike closer to home, the confused Messianic (and non Benjaminian) aesthetic of Angels in America or the self-congratulatory sexual posturing of The Vagina Monologues.

      In transforming the very terms of our experience radical works of art exposes their audience to the pervasive ways in which we are prisoners of ideologies that severely limit our possibilities of thinking and feeling.  Plays that perform such a function need never directly address a political topic in order to be political in the deepest sense by making it impossible for us to experience the world the way we previously did.   The popular concept and practice of political theatre, in contrast, severely truncates this possibility.  It offers us no more than a quick ideological fix on some current issue.  As a result we are more the slave of ideology—be it liberal or conservative, religious or secular, or whatever—than we were before.  All such dramas do is incite the faithful so that we’ll fall into line the next time we’re polled on some issue or asked to contribute cash to some politician campaign. [3] 

      Such are the general criteria that could be used to judge the merits of any play or Theatre declaring itself “progressive.”   As we’ll see, by such criteria My Name is Rachel Corrie does not fare very well.  It has already, however, become the rallying cry and the model of what supposedly constitutes “progressive” theatre.  Such is the power of ideology to dictate what we think and predetermine what we will eventual experience when we see this show.   (Those readers interested only in the Rachel Corrie controversy as a public debate can skip to section V.) 

III. Author, Author! 

“A plague on both your houses.”
Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet  

      Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner do not claim authorship for the play My Name is Rachel Corrie. [4]  They list themselves as the editors of the writings of Rachel Corrie.  There is something misplaced and finally disingenuous about this modesty.  Selections from the 184  pages of journals, writings, and emails that Rachel’s parents made available have been arranged by them to form the dramatic structure of a play.  That form (and its relative merits or defects) is not Rachel’s doing. There is no way to know what she would have done with these materials nor what she would think of the play that Rickman and Viner have fashioned from them. Alan Rickman claims that Rachel’s writings are evidence that had she lived “there would have been novels and plays pouring out of her.”[5]  We can’t know what those works would be, though, as I’ll show, there are signs that they would have been far different aesthetically and politically from the work that Rickman and Viner have fashioned, determining the artistic integrity for which they bear the primary responsibility.

      For example, the play concludes with a video of Rachel aged 10 speaking at her school’s “Fifth Grade Press Conference on World Hunger.”   In context this speech increases the pathos of Rachel’s death which was reported in the immediately prior scene via the transcript of an eyewitness account played over a TV set.  (This speech is one of the few passages in the play not written by Rachel and the only one not spoken by her. It is a gruesome, horrifying account that moved this reader to tears. I too was thus perfectly positioned for the young Rachel’s final words to work their magic.

      Drama is structure.  Feeling is a function of that process.  The audience is positioned for the effect these two speeches are intended to have by the long scene that precedes them.  It is based on an email that Rachel sent to her mother shortly before her death.  Dramatic placement thus identify these words as a final summing up by Rachel of what she’s learned  from her experience.  This “message” finds its culmination in two paragraphs where Rachel both reaffirms and questions “the core assumption” from which she’s been operating “for a long time;” namely, that “we are all essentially the same inside” and can thus (no matter how bad things get) sustain our “fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature.”  Rachel’s words here  recall Anne Frank’s from the end of her journal as read by her father at the end of the play that bears her name: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” [6]   Placed at this point in the drama Rachel’s words perform the same function Anne’s did.  The audience is bathed in the waters of an essentialistic a-historical humanism, which once again provides the reassurance and the guarantees that cleanse us of politics and history.  Never is the need for this ideology more acute than at the end of the play. 

Whatever a drama may put us through it better end with a nice “catharsis” that reaffirms trans-historical values so that the audience members can feel a collective embrace that blossoms in the applause that drenches the stage with the warm fellow feeling that ripples through the theater.  Such is what we’ve been trained to expect and demand from even the most “serious” plays—bathos, pathos, sentimentality and nostalgia and nobody does it better than those who know how to end their plays—as Arthur Miller for example always does—by reminding us that we all participate in a humanity that transcends our historical conflicts.  We’re then free to regress to childhood, as Rachel herself is forced to do as the 10 year old Rachel proclaims her belief in “the light that shines” from the future.  A play purporting to be about a political-historical trauma thus ends by cleansing us of history.

      What kind of play then have Rickman and Viner written?  At first glance a  hodgepodge composed of virtually anything Rachel wrote that they choose to include under the dispensation that they are offering a “portrait” that will “uncover the young woman behind the political symbol.” [7] Anything Rachel says from age 10 to age 23 is welcomed into such a play which will be as formless as its subject.  The title in fact is a misnomer since there is no identity here nor should we expect one from the writings of a young person between ages 10 and 23. (This holds whether we’re Ericksonians or Derrideans.)  Youth: a subject in formation continually changing and deconstructing itself. Or is this the portrait of the artist as a young woman? Recall here Rickman’s claims regarding Rachel’s future authorship.  Or a portrait of the gestation of a political activist?  Or all this and more: all the rich and wonderful and silly and naďve and moving and stupid and brilliant things Rachel Corrie was in her brief life.  A drama derived from such materials, in keeping with the assumption that controls most of performance art today, need have no concern with form or dramatic structure because the “portrait” so conceived (and as such the antithesis of what Joyce did) can have none.  The trouble with such a play, however, is that it quickly becomes boring, as does reading the diaries of adolescents and young adults. Unless, that is, we constantly remember that the end crowns all, Rachel’s death casting a reflected light of sorrow and loss that sanctifies even the most trivial utterances.