Different Hats

Without research, which no one will ever bother to undertake, neither the circumstances nor the attitude of the maker towards her or his hat is finallyknowable.

—The Homebody in Homebody/Kabul

Last year, a few short months after words like Taliban and Kabul had leaped into the forefront of American consciousness and media chatter, Tony Kushner's strangely prescient Homebody sat on the stage of the New York Theatre Workshop talking about, of all things, hats.

A year later, on the same stage, Caryl Churchill's eerily unconscious characters stood before strangely accoutred workbenches and made, of all things, hats. In the next scene, those hats and many others were worn in, of all things, a parade of prisoners, a death march.

I seize on this image of hats, serendipitously shared by what were, arguably, the two most important plays of the past year, because for me it constellates—in a uniquely theatrical and decidedly ironic way—many of the main issues, challenges, and possibilities that face political theater in this era of globalization, this age of realigning the "far away" with the "near and dear." The hats that the Homebody speaks of evoke difference and distance, as well as the desire to experience—however superficially and playfully—the "far away." She tells of going looking for certain hats that she remembers having seen in an exotic part of London, wanting to use them for a party she is planning and for which some festivity will need to be manufactured. The hats she holds in memory are fabulous, jeweled, magical. The ones she actually finds make her think immediately (as "this century has taught us" to do, she says) of the suffering and exploitation behind them. Yet for all the economic and political mystery and misery they represent, the hats are "beautiful." And, she adds, "sad. As dislocations are. And marvelous, as dislocations are."

The hats of Far Away manage to be, grimly, both dislocational and marvelous. They are extravagant creations (we watch a few being constructed before our eyes, then see dozens more in the parade). Colossal creations of grotesque proportions, bizarre shapes, and riotous colors, they silently scream out the horror that results when aesthetics loses all concern for the material reality from which it works. As the two characters work steadily and diligently, assembling their wild concoctions, the seduction of pure form is palpable, distracting us from the bleak sweatshop they work in, just as their preoccupation with the particulars of their employment seems to distract them from the brutality of the system they serve. There could hardly be a more graphic rendering of a social contract in tatters, a world where art and labor have been turned into weapons of domination and alienation.

The first two acts of Far Away stage the progressive rending of the social contract, first through lies and then through non sequiturs so disturbing they make one nostalgic for lies. In act 1, a woman (played with frightening bitterness by Frances McDormand) answers her young niece's questions about the brutality the child has witnessed right outside the house, deftly covering each violent and bloody detail with banal explanations. It is chilling to see how easily moral and political concerns can be deflected, how easily the habit of not seeing what one sees can be cultivated. In act 2, things have gone much further. The girl, now a young woman, learns fast how to not even ask questions, how to keep on doggedly talking about the wrong thing.

While the "hat act" is the most visually stunning of the play, its final "animal act" is far and away (so to speak) its most...