Irony and Deeper Significance: Where Are the Plays?

Joan and Todd labor at constructing big, decorative hats in the first half of Caryl Churchill's latest play, Far Away. ¹ A series of short scenes shows them shaping colorful felt around Styrofoam molds and affixing plumes, ribbons, and tassels while they flirt, excoriate their exploitative bosses, and chat about the upcoming parade and competition where their millinery concoctions will be featured. The celebration is presented when "a procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat" (as the stage directions put it) advances downstage in rows, accompanied by majestic military oompah and the loud clanking of the chains, thrown into relief by cold white lighting. Only then do we begin to understand what it is all about: the fanciful hats prettify a gruesome death march of the condemned. Our affable, appealing artisans are revealed to be nonchalant apparatchiks in a promiscuous state practice of political execution.

In the scene immediately following the parade, Todd and Joan discuss the fate of their whimsical handiwork:

JOAN It seems so sad to burn them with the bodies.

TODD No. I think that's the joy of it. The hats are ephemeral. It's like a metaphor for something or other.

JOAN Well, life.

TODD Well, life. There you are.

This is one of many astonishing and chilly moments of recognition in Churchill's apocalyptic work. The play tersely tumbles toward primal chaos, proceeding through a series of scenes when we catch ourselves realizing first the substance of a horror, and then the casualness with which the characters respond to it. It's like a metaphor for something or other. And Churchill's tight, laconic writing opens space for us to draw the correspondences between the choices we face (or avoid) amid the overweening consumerism, hyped-up nationalisms, and everyday brutalities of our world and the surreal dystopia she imagines. Far Away's world degenerates into a muddled Manichaean total war, in which "the cats have come in on the side of the French," "the elephants went over to the Dutch," and even the weather takes sides.

The play opens with Joan, as a young child, visiting her aunt in the countryside. She has come out of her bedroom late in the night to complain to her aunt that noises outdoors kept her from sleeping. She admits that she snuck out of the window to investigate, and she asks increasingly disturbing questions that paint a picture of terror in the backyard: "If it's a party, why was there so much blood?" We piece the picture together along with Joan and see how the little girl experiences the first quelling of her will to question. In answering Joan's relentless litany of queries, after at first offering placating platitudes, the aunt explains that the uncle "only hit the traitors" and that Joan must keep quiet about what she saw because she is "part of a big movement now to make things better." When the action leaps in the next scene to the haberdashery, we see how thoroughly Joan's rebellious spirit has been contained within the dominant values of the political culture. Her moral choices are limited to whether she should risk her livelihood by challenging the corruption of the hat-shop bosses; she has completely internalized the values that demand the making of the hats at all.

Dramaturgical Detox

Are today's theater artists in a similar position? Are we building ever more extravagant decorations for an ever more mean-spirited society, the terms of our dissent narrowly set by the dominant discourses of corporate media and mass entertainment? More than anything I've seen in the theater for a long time, Far Away raises, among other things, a challenge about the possibilities for a resistant art.

This special issue of Theater considers a wide range of approaches to taking up that challenge. In essays, mini-manifestos, interviews, and conversations, critics, activists, and artists reflect on the meanings and methods of a theater concerned...