Up Front

The New Booboisie

I want to introduce this issue by discussing something that's not in it. Two stacks of paper are sitting next to my computer: the page proofs for the magazine and about eighty press releases for this summer's New York International Fringe Festival. They represent two kinds of theater so completely removed from each other that it's hard to imagine both were created by white, secular, middle-class, first-world culture at the same moment of flood, famine, corruption, financial collapse, war, and threats of war.

The Fringe Festival theaters want to convince their potential spectators that the outside world and its catastrophes won't exist for an hour or two if they buy tickets. Their PR hysterically insists that performances are "wacky," "manic," or "zany," anxiously reassures us that "this dirty show is good clean fun . . . there is no nudity or four-letter words," tries to soothe us with a play about "the relevance of trivia in the post 9/11 world," exhorts us to "come for the Boobs! Stay for the Boobs!"

The works themselves may be more artful, more serious, or smarter than this, and the releases (written by the theaters) may simply reflect a profound contempt for the New York public. As 90 percent of these groups are American and many were formed by recent graduates of MFA and BFA theater programs, such contempt would be its own problem. But assuming the releases aren't total lies, they form a gloomy portrait of the youngest generation of outside-the-mainstream theater artists, a portrait that condemns the way they've been taught, the cultural atmosphere in which they've grown up, and older theater itself, whether conventional or avant-garde. Of course there were a dozen lively announcements, too—half of them from outside the United States. But the productions added up to an overwhelming show of fear, a collective performance of the desire to strip art of risk and responsibility, a mass denial that American theater people should think about American power, or think at all.

Of course some do. Carl Hancock Rux's Talk, at the Joseph Papp Public Theater this spring (2002), inspired some talk we direly need about race, culture, and American history. Rinne Groff's play in this issue is another example: witty and distanced without obscurantism, heartfelt without pandering to its audience, it connects our present dilemmas back to Reagan. And thus to the beginnings of that decades-long conservatism in which the playmakers of the Fringe Festival grew up and were throttled. The other works reported on here are all European and quite different from each other— heavily subsidized classics, provocations, attempts to claim a role for variously marginalized people: their usefulness in this context is simply to show various ways in which theater can live actively in the world.

Sometimes Europe learns from America, sometimes we can learn from Europe. This is one of the latter times. Our homage to Jan Kott, however, can remind us of yet another few years, when American theater and the rest of the world were intertwined in many ways and influence ran in several directions—when if we met the booboisie, it wasn't us.