Up Front

Introducing a general issue of the magazine is like reviewing a festival or a season: the temptation is to tie all the bits and pieces together and make them illustrate a nice neat theory. The easiest way to do this here would be to say that being in bits and pieces exactly reflects the structure of American theater in the late 1990s. After all, the conventional wisdom for twenty years has been that fragmentation is the essence of our situation, whether it’s seen (by academic theorists) as a positive result of postmodernity or (by neocon/neolib critics) as a negative beast slouching towards bedlam.

But the plays, essays, and interviews in this issue, however disparate they seem, don’t reflect contemporary American theater so much as they reflect on it. (Take the pun either way you like.) And the conventional wisdom is, at least in this case, wrong.

The not-for-profit resident theaters—which represent theater per se for Americans in most of the country—aren’t fragmented at all. On the contrary: they exhibit a rather desperate uniformity. Look at the 1998–99 seasons announced by TCG. Every second regional seems to be doing How I Learned to Drive (a true improvement over the Oleanna sweep of a few years back, but still a herd phenomenon and a safe choice). Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer-winners of 1948 and 1949, the mainstream of the Cold War fifties and early sixties, are the revivals of choice, probably out of yearning for a time when popular success could come to serious plays. Their mild liberal politics and wee stabs at nonrealist staging seem more interesting, I suppose, now that theater people have internalized the conservatism of the eighties and nineties, a conservatism in many ways greater than that of the fifties because so little new art and so few political movements challenge it.

Still, it’s our job to find a way out of the bind in which artistic life is so stifling and static. Each piece in this issue is either a meditation on or a challenge to American theater’s present condition, casting the light of contradiction, complexity, and plain orneriness on its various strands. David Greenspan looks (myopically but also farsightedly) at theatricality and our available dramatic traditions. Suzan-Lori Parks thinks about the nature of a playwright’s work, at a point in her own writing life when she is making deep changes in her style.

The Bindlestiffs have resurrected an old notion of popular performance and thumbed their collective nose at Ringling and all propriety by taking advanced gender-bending to the sticks. Erik Ehn sees theater as applied ethics utterly against the grain of both chic irony and the easier strands of reformist progressivism. Thalia Field, resolute in her experimentation, insists that form can be an illumination of the nature of choice. And Mark Lord questions how we’re training new generations and what this says about our vision for American theater’s future. (This is an enormous question to which Theater plans to devote an entire issue next year.)

All these writers are American and relatively young. But we’re also publishing George Tabori’s 1979 play My Mother’s Courage. How does such a work relate to our situation? First, publishing Tabori, whose neglect in this country should be incredible, is a reproach to the parochialism of our theater. We don’t know anything about other parts of the world—not even Europe, let alone the other Americas, Asia, Africa—and we hardly ever translate and produce those works that could inspire us. Second, American journalists, intellectuals, and scholars (outside theater) are paying a lot of attention to the questions of fifty years ago. So many books about Nazism, Stalinism, and World War II, while in the theater our awareness of the period is limited to Williams and Miller. Finally, the 1997 film of this play is the least sentimental, and thus the most truly moving while unexploitative, fiction film about the Holocaust I have seen.