Up Front

September 25, 2001: Except for the page you are reading and the image facing it, "Theater and Social Change" was written a year ago and immutably laid out three months ago. Before. Before the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, before America entered the same bloody history, the same fear and craziness, the same monstrous sleep of reason in which so much of the world has lived since we beat the evil empire.

This issue should already be out of date, suddenly stripped of meaning like so much else including most of American theater. Instead it's suddenly filled with new meaning. Our puppet president has been legitimated by fear, and enormous cultural forces have been mobilized to drown dissent in jingoism and piety. I don't know whether some sort of war or some sort of peace will frame these writings once they're published in November. Six weeks seem very far away. But no matter what happens our society will have changed, our lives will be different, and performers and spectators both will be enduring a seismic shift in understanding who they are and where they live.

Theaters must be a stage for America's debates. The histories, techniques, ideologies, indeed the mistakes recorded here can help us think our way through. They record work that for decades has been directed against acquiescence and stupidity. They form a textbook of ways to connect theater, citizenship, questioning, and resistance.

Many of the artists and institutions in this issue were already responding a few days after the attacks. And so were many mainstream theater people not included here. Among the latter, Paula Vogel wrote eloquently in the New York Times: "Right now, in our time of national mourning, as religious leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson cast the first stones against their fellow Americans, as inflamed citizens kill and persecute Muslim Americans, the theater hears a call to another form of patriotism: to portray the 'other' as protagonist, to question the crowd as it chants 'U-S-A!'"

And this email came from Reverend Billy: "Yes, we changed the name of the church from the Church of Stop Shopping to The Church of Radical Forgiveness but this morning we're conference calling and we're inclined to move the name to The Church of Stop the Cartoon Evil You Adolescent Dry Drunk. We have decided that it's important to change the church's name every morning and make the gods disposable like cheap flashlights, because we ourselves are crusade and jihad-prone. Bless you."

Vogel says out front what liberal politicians don't dare utter; Rev. Billy makes wise jokes when most lefties are stuck in slogans. Both are turning what for years have been mere cliches about theater into a reality. That is, they are being public, useful, and present--and so should we all.

--Erika Munk

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