Political Stages: Plays That Shaped a Century (review)

In 1994, at the height of the success of the seven-hour epic, Angels in America, Tony Kushner said in an interview for American Theatre, "Because of Brecht I started to think of a career in the theatre. It seemed the kind of thing one could do and still retain some dignity as a person engaged in society. I didn't think that you could just be a theatre artist" (in Savran 1994:23). I heard a similar sentiment articulated by Peter Sellers in the beginning of 2003 when he spoke about his production of The Children of Herakles. Sellers's project was ambitious, beginning with a panel discussion every night with different guests on the subject of war and displacement; incorporating a chorus of refugee children who lived in each city where the international touring production took place; and ending the evening with a film on the same subject, which he cur-ated. The morning after I saw the event at American Repertory Theatre, I had an opportunity to hear Sellars talk to students. "I didn't want to just do a show," he said, acknowledging his intention. And in his cheerful and animated manner, he declared the current political climate of eroding civil rights as an urgent and dangerous situation, and passionately advocated theatre that called for social change. Now is not the time to be just doing a show.

So then, who is better qualified than Emily Mann, the author of the powerful play, Execution of Justice, to assess the landscape of not "just shows" but the political voices of the past century onstage? In 1983 Mann blasted American theatre with her play based on documented facts and interviews, making an unmistakable political stand. Many artists followed her tradition, including Marc Wolf, whose Another American: Asking and Telling (1999) is in the anthology. Mann, however, steers away from overburdening the book with her own tradition and achieves an anthology wide-ranging in style and themes.

The anthology contains twelve plays by American playwrights, spanning roughly eight decades of the 20th century, and defines the term "political" loosely: the subject matters range from racial and gender identities, to social oppression, to an actual discussion of a political ideology. As a whole, the book builds up to a question of justice verses satisfaction. All forms of oppression exist because the population in power allows them to exist, and they do so because they do not want to give up some level of economic, political, social, and/or emotional satisfaction. For the oppressed, desire for satisfaction is far more complex; from the self-hatred of Sarah in Adrienne Kennedy's Funny-house of a Negro (1964) to Jim's suicidal jump into the ocean for freedom in Tennessee William's Not About Nightingales (1940), self-contempt is the price of justice deferred. In Jon Robin Baitz's The Film Society (1989), set in South Africa during apartheid, Terry, a radical teacher of a boys' school says, "Perhaps taking action requires a certain amount of stupid faith" (12). The play asks how one can survive under oppression, what one can compromise while still preserving human decency. Which is more important, your life as you live it or your life as you should live it? It is the classic Antigone question.

This question appears in many of the plays in different forms. In Waiting for Lefty (1935), Miller, a lab assistant who is offered a promotion and a raise to spy on his superior during a production of poison gas, refuses the offer and loses his job. "Rather dig ditches first!" the young scientist cries out. In Kushner's Slaves! (1995), old men in their afterlife, resigned to broken hearts for failed Communist ideology, ask themselves:

the immortal question [...] the question which challenges us to both contemplation and, if we love the world, to action; the question that implies: Something is terribly wrong with the world, and avers: Human beings...