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  • Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change by Dani Snyder-Young
  • John Fletcher
THEATRE OF GOOD INTENTIONS: CHALLENGES AND HOPES FOR THEATRE AND SOCIAL CHANGE. By Dani Snyder-Young. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; pp. 176.

Confronted by traumas and injustices, we ask the pressing question: “What is to be done?” Theatre scholar-practitioners offer a sure answer: “Some theatre.” Struggling with systemic oppressions? Try applied drama. Working with disenfranchised groups? Use community-based performance. Frustrated with uncritical attitudes? Unleash some Verfremdungseffekt. Theatre people believe in—we have experienced—the power of performance to reveal difficult truths, shock people out of complacency, or kindle empathy.

Although she affirms theatre’s power, Dani Snyder-Young nevertheless introduces some welcome incredulity to this easy faith in theatre’s efficacy. The very qualities that make performance enticing—its public liveness, its not-realness, its collaborative problem-solving—can short-circuit social-transformational aims in practice. Using theatre for social change effectively, she argues, requires that we recognize theatre’s limitations. Snyder-Young’s volume provides a quick though thoughtful survey of these limits in US-based social-change performance.

Snyder-Young divides her study into two parts, each featuring three case studies of performance projects. In the first part, “Impacting Participants,” she investigates how two widespread performance models, applied drama (Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed) and community-based theatre, fare when deployed in institutional settings. In the first two chapters she relates co-facilitating a Boalian workshop with teenagers in an urban charter school. She finds that the same theatrical not-realness that helps students stage “global poverty” also made the issue seem hopelessly remote. In a format (Boalian forum theatre) that relies upon clear oppressor antagonist/oppressed protagonist roles, students could not imagine where they fit in. In another scene, her participants staged and staunchly defended a patriarchal social structure. Try though she might, Snyder-Young could not move the spect-actors to a more equitable view. She faced a dilemma: should she press for the “right” (progressive) response, or should she support the participants’ representational agency? Theatre of the Oppressed, she notes, aims to be at once participant-directed and anti-oppressive. But the two do not always go together, as “popular positions and ideas are not necessarily progressive” (40; emphasis in original).

In the third chapter, the author focuses on an original musical that Storycatchers Theatre co-created with a group of incarcerated girls at a youth detention center in Chicago. Although moving, Snyder-Young writes, the show necessarily makes concessions to institutional authority structures. The script gives voice to and then defuses the participants’ frustrations at their situation. Energies that might flow toward social rebellion get rerouted into institution-friendly narratives of self-improvement.

In the second part, “Impacting Audiences,” Snyder-Young steps out of the workshop and into the audience. She relates watching shows performed by survivors of horrific political oppression (chapter 4), by an ensemble of housed and homeless people in Minneapolis (chapter 5), and by artists performing in and about post-levee-break New Orleans (chapter 6). All of these, she avers, were powerful in their own way. But what effect, she asks, does watching a show have beyond the moment of production?

In Free Theatre Belarus’s production of Being Harold Pinter, for example, Snyder-Young relates a shattering presentation of the political violence endured by the artists producing the play, as well as a searing indictment of audiences privileged enough to experience such violence as art. This was, she stresses, a very good production, one that managed an expert balance of empathy and critical distance; it “worked” as a masterful piece of political theatre. As shaken as she was by the performers’ stories and virtuosity, however, she writes that “Being Harold Pinter did not lead me to: give any money beyond the price of my ticket, attend any additional events beyond the performance itself, [End Page 579] write any letters to anyone,” or act in any context beyond the immediate performance (93). In many ways, the show inculcated the sad, guilty audience paralysis that it had tried to challenge. “Does this make social change?” she...

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