What Moral Order?: Observations from the Trenches

What Moral Order? Observations from the Trenches Steve Scott Let me begin with a brief disclaimer. I am from the world of professional theatre, not academics; although I do teach, direct , and occasionally act, I make my living primarily as a producer at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. To many people, especially certain talent agents I could name, a sentence containing the terms producer and moral order creates an oxymoron of dizzying proportions. I am also a gay man and (perhaps by self-de¤nition only) an artist, both of which in our current moral and political climate would seem to land me well outside any popularly described de¤nitions of moral norms. Quite frankly, when I was given the topic on which I was expected to speak, I was terri¤ed. What business do I have discussing, especially in the company of scholars much better read in this topic than I, a concept that a majority of people today would say doesn’t even include me? What follows, then, is not a researched essay, not a scholarly treatise, but rather my own random thoughts and responses to the topic at hand, based on my own particular vantage point, as well as my discussions with peers, associates, students, and anyone else that I could bully into commenting on the relationship between our art and morality. When I began thinking about this topic in earnest, I did go to a few of my favorite authors for advice on the question—with some predictably illuminating responses. Lorca, for example, in his 1934 essay “The Authority of the Theatre,” offered the following observations: The theatre is one of the most useful and expressive instruments for a country’s edi¤cation, the barometer which registers its greatness or its decline . A theatre that, in every branch, from tragedy to vaudeville, is sensi- tive and well-oriented, can in a few years change the sensibility of a people, and a broken-down theatre, where wings have given way to cloven hoofs, can coarsen and benumb a whole nation. The theatre is a school of weeping and of laughter, a rostrum where men are free to expose old and equivocal standards of conduct, and explain with living examples the eternal norms of the heart and feelings of man. 1 I found an even more cogent codi¤cation of the various approaches to “moral-based” drama in John Galsworthy’s 1909 essay “Some Platitudes Concerning Drama”: Now, in writing plays, there are, in this matter of the moral, three courses open to the serious dramatist. The ¤rst is: To de¤nitely set before the public that which it wishes to have set before it, the views and codes of life by which the public lives and in which it believes. This way is the most common, successful, and popular. It makes the dramatist’s position sure, and not too obviously authoritative. The second course is: To de¤nitely set before the public those views and codes of life by which the dramatist himself lives, those theories in which he himself believes, the more effectively if they are the opposite of what the public wishes to have placed before it, presenting them so that the audience may swallow them like powder in a spoonful of jam. There is a third course: To set before the public no cut-and-dried codes, but the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted, by the dramatist’s outlook, set down without fear, favor, or prejudice , leaving the public to draw such poor moral as nature may afford. This third method requires a certain detachment; it requires a sympathy with, a love of, and a curiosity as to, things for their own sake; it requires a far view, together with patient industry, for no immediately practical result. 2 These are accurate summations, I think, for the theories on which you and I were raised: that one of the primary duties of the theatre artist in society is to question moral authority, moral precepts and pronouncements , in order to re¤ne—or at least shake up—the moral order, the moral status quo. Armed with these ideas, I then...