Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent ed. by Jenny Spencer (review)

This excellently edited volume analyzes activist performances and protests created in the United States and UK between 9/11 and the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president. Pointing to the close alliance between these two governments during this period, Spencer finds it important to include works created in both countries by artists enacting related strategies of protest. The book’s subtitle, “Patriotic Dissent,” reflects the surge of nationalism in both countries after 9/11, which seeped into performances rife with anger and frustration. The book is divided into two parts, “Mainstages” and “Alternative Spaces,” and contains essays on musicals, adaptations of classical, Renaissance, and Vietnamera plays, documentaries and verbatim theatre, and street performance. While focusing primarily on the pieces created during these seven years, it is solidly grounded in historical work detailing the long trajectories of street performance and radical protest plays. Additionally, the chapters’ analyses and descriptions offer a rich history of the military and political events that defined the War on Terror. It will prove invaluable, in part or in whole, in theatre courses on political, activist, and protest performance.

In her introduction, Jenny Spencer establishes the stakes of this work by articulating a new artistic moment in the history of protest performance. Arguing that political theatre, by the end of the millennium, had shifted from the broad social movements directed at the expansion of civil rights and peace to more local, community-based gestures, she finds that 9/11 created a resurgence in global activism and civic engagement through performance modes. Essentially, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 created a paradigm shift not only in politics, but also in the aesthetic range and depth of political theatre. This new mode of protest performance, while often Brechtian in style, avoids looking at politics and international relations as black and white, instead focusing on the gray areas overlooked by two government administrations intent on using an “us/them” rhetoric to justify violence.

Two chapters take up the conversation about Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and the representation of prisoner abuse. In chapter 2, “The Ubiquitous Orange Jumpsuit: Staging Iconic Images and the Production of the Commons,” Joshua Abrams wonders if the use of the orange jumpsuit onstage might reveal the performative construction of these atrocity photographs, underscoring the audiences’ complicity in creating the conditions that produced these images. He considers the 2005 London remounting of Hair, the National Theatre’s 2004 Measure for Measure, and Peter Sellers’s 2002 production of The Children of Heraklesto argue that adaptations “interrupt the fixity of photographic images” (38). By combining affection with rationality, the intertextuality of these adaptations and the anachronism of characters from previous eras attired in the orange jumpsuit opens a space to reconsider the state, interstate relations, and the public, from the Enlightenment down to the present day. In chapter 4, Spencer draws connections between the brutality of images and footage showing prisoner abuse and the aesthetics of stage brutality in “in yer face” theatre, such as Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot / Get Treasure / Repeat(2007).

In addition to considering prisoner abuse, more broadly, the anthology tackles the way that post-9/11 politics have made a spectacle out of rights and questions of identity. In chapter 3, Amelia Howe Kritzer analyzes Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?(2006), which argues that the governmental violations of civil and national rights are representative of a long-standing practice. Marcia Blumberg, in chapter 5, delves into the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch(2006), which used theatrical spectacle to critique the government’s coercion of soldiers. Examining the different approaches to staging trauma before and after 9/11, Emily Klein, in chapter 7, looks at Eve Ensler’s The Treatment(2006) and Kathryn Blume’s The Accidental Activist(2004), pieces that directly address the changing role of the artist in a new political climate. Jeanne Colleran’s essay (chapter 8) on...