American Political Plays after 9/11: #REF!

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION Obvious to our society is the sharp turning point America has experienced, not by entering the year 2000 but by enduring the event and the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The great trauma to our nation has touched every aspect of American life, from commercial air travel to basic safety in our neighborhood schools and shopping centers. Clearly, the public trust had been undermined by lax security and by the unaffordable luxury of our complacency in a mercurial global situation. Although the Cold War has subsided with the dramatic reunification of Germany in 1989 and the transformation of Communist Russia in the 1990s, stateless enemies of the United States have created a new polarity that effectively supplants the long-standing superpower rivalry. From a national perspective, America’s criminal-justice system has been severely tested and compromised by our detention camp for suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, our civil rights and privacy have been challenged by the USA Patriot Act enacted October 26, 2001, and our image in the world has been altered perhaps irrevocably by our invasion of Iraq and our soldiers’ misconduct with Abu Ghraib prisoners. Stating this as a prelude to this anthology’s introduction, the inspiration to form an artful kaleidoscope of revelatory dramatic texts was first and foremost a way of approximating the American zeitgeist as this millennium decade unfolded in cascading waves of shock, pain, and reawakening. Looking at our national character and our social challenges vis-à-vis new plays often yields pungent truths about a shifting culture, and yet the treasured record of political literature for our theatrical heritage has elements of abundance and occasional deficiencies reflecting American denial. Further, the examination of playwriting trends is a worthwhile effort in the nation’s self-analysis. There is concrete correlation among community activism, aesthetic sensibilities, and the pulse of the national theater scene as early as the 1920s, as the suffragette movement, Prohibition laws, and socialist energies brought plays to the public +DYLV,QWURLQGG 30 Allan Havis 2 eye: Elmer Rice’s Adding Machine (1923), Eugene O’Neill’s Hairy Ape (1922), and Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928). Beginning with the Federal Theatre and the Group Theatre in the 1930s, political performance in the United States had taken root for at least one generation, and the reflection today holds a degree of veracity all the way back to the once-banned, 1937 leftist labor musical The Cradle Will Rock (by Marc Blitzstein and direction by Orson Welles). Harold Clurman, the renowned founder of the depression-era Group Theatre and respected theater critic, once declared that all outstanding plays are political, be they the family plays of Eugene O’Neill (Desire under the Elms, 1924), Tennessee Williams (Glass Menagerie , 1947), and Arthur Miller (All My Sons, 1947) or the more demonstrative political works from German dramatist Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage and Her Children, 1939) and American John Howard Lawson (Processional, 1925). Is it the audience’s obligation to provide the larger social context when nothing within the narrative is politically overt? Clurman’s statement begs the question of themes both explicit and implicit. Certainly, his Group Theatre made every attempt to foster social and ideological change. But if the play’s intention is quietly implicit of political content, does the writer’s message have the commensurate power and provocation of more brash drama? Was there a considerable risk personally or economically in staging the play? Should an autobiographical playwright ask nakedly, “Is my life someone’s propaganda?” It’s axiomatic to say that political theater has often played, at best, a secondary role in American stage life. Still, the value of political theater is indisputable to our cultural dialogue, our notion of freedom, and our artistic collective identity. Seventy years after Blitzstein’s legendary production, it is eye-opening to consider Connecticut’s Wilton High School and the controversy engendered by the principal’s cancellation of the student-composed play Voices in Conflict for being too inflammatory and partisan about the Iraq War. The text was inspired in part by the emotional letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in the war. Bonnie Dickinson, who has taught theater at Wilton for thirteen years, explained to the New York Times, “If I had just done Grease, this would not be happening.”1 Some First Amendment attorneys have defended the principal, saying that he had latitude to intervene because of public disruption and controlling “educational merit” during the school day. This was not...