amirican theatre today: where is it?
US theatre is a reflection, of course, of this sad nation now. Duped and strong-armed by the Bush-led extreme right, the prostitute media, and lobbyists for the Enemies of Humanity, the theatre has become an evil-coloured puddle of imperialist commerce. The most expensive and well-financed is ‘The Great White Way’, world famous Broadway. Now reduced to peddling the state-produced music hall gifts of England, e.g., ‘The Phantom of The Opera’, ‘Les Miserables’, ‘Cats’, ‘Ms Vietnam’, the most publicized and apparently the most profitable shows.
Then there’s the musical and comic retreads from old Broadway, ’42d St.’, ‘Man of La Mancha’ , ‘Cabaret’, ‘Gypsy’, &c. Always the workhorse of lightweight Broadway comedy, Neil Simon. More contemporarily there’s even an ingenious bit of plagiarized and disguised Brecht, called ‘Chicago’, a depoliticized version of ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ (Hitler as a Chicago gangster) now made into an entertaining Academy Award winning film!
Since the US is the only one of the Industrial giants that has no National Repertory Theatre, there has been some movement in the last few years to tantalize the public with reruns of Arthur Miller, e.g., ‘The Crucible’, ‘View From the Bridge’, Tennessee Williams, a more maudlin ‘Glass Menagerie’, or ‘Street Car’, a film of Odets’ ‘Awake & Sing’, even an occasional ‘Three Penny’ or two, various reupholstered versions of Shakespeare, at one point a truly impressive version of ‘Richard III’ with film famous Al Pacino, which lasted a few weeks and only because no critics were invited till the last week. At which time the New Jersey Star Ledger in a surprisingly forthright demonstration of Anglo-American national chauvinism said, ‘Pacino sounded like a lower east side (NYC) fruit peddler.’
Right now, in NYC’s Central Park , can you believe it, a revamped version of the most nationalistic work of Shakespeare’s, ‘Henry V’ , which rests on an English war against the French, (like Bush’s contemporary propaganda one) played by actor Liev Schreiber! In the production, the actors at first are dressed in Elizabethan garb, then midway, they change to costumes, which the reviewers say, reminded one perhaps of ‘Vietnam’!.
Another tidbit anchored in cryptographic lobby for the US government’s dismal foreign policy is the production ‘Letters from Golda’, about the storied prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, which, it seems, wants to project her as a grandmotherly lovable old lady, dealing with the excesses of her adversaries with the charming yet sophisticated and delightfully pungent wit of geriatric wisdom.
There are the media hits, comedies, musicals, deep thrashing about some theme once rendered ‘controversial.’ Works by Albee, Sam Shepherd, David Mamet, or proposed as ‘serious’ or contemporarily controversial issues, heterosexuality, homosexuality, wealth or the puckish contemplation of it, negroes, mental illness and even occasionally a black playwright, like August Wilson, now winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for his chronicle of black life in well-written metaphor. The biggest and most praised hit on the board right now is ‘The Producers’, a re-run of an old musical… The most serious works have limited runs, and are announced as such. O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey which was written in the playwright’s period of self-searching navel contemplation is receiving acclaim right now.
Off-Broadway is not much different, only off (and now even physically not far off) Broadway. The domestic perusals, the hurts of standard Catholicism, minority issues, even Langston Hughes, plus the sprinkling of estimable names, Brecht, Williams, Shepherd, works that appeared but did not fare well on The GWW, a breeze of new names, not long lasting. More sophisticated musicals from the 30’s¾Cole Porter, Noel Coward, even reruns of Fats Waller, with occasional thrusts at the recently living to pretend there is still breathing going on, e.g., redux Sam Beckett, Pirandello, Pinter, the unknown Dario Fo, from Italy or Lorca, Ibsen, Shaw, more rarely O’Casey, the Communist. But, in essence, this theatre is not much more original, except in its inconsistent attempts to resurrect classics of innovative theater, than On Broadway. Where Broadway is homicidally commercial, even though the biggest English imports are usually produced with public funds (their badge of social democracy) in Great Britain, they are sold to US producers who turn them, for Broadway producers and, one would imagine, their English associates, into a steep profit, the fat ones running like ‘Cats’, ‘Phantom’, and ‘Les Miserables’ for over a decade. Off Broadway is small-producer oriented, though ultimately made possible by various grants, foundations, cultural organizations, academic projects, or spin-off tax saving packages for the Big Boys. Both floors of this US theatre are mainly lightweight, topically evasive, insignificant intellectually vis-a-vis innovation, racist, meek, and politically submissive, not given to daring, though sometimes there is the presentation of oddity and crank exoticism, usually involving Sex ( where the bourgeois pretend to be intrepid).
George Thomson’s book, On Marxism and Poetry, proposes that the theatre is most alive and inspiring during times of political and social upsurge. This seems a relevant analysis to me, particularly if one compares the US theatre of forty years ago, of Social Dynamism, Lorraine Hansberry, Jack Gelber, James Baldwin, Edward Albee, Arnold Weinstein, LeRoi Jones, Adrienne Kennedy, later Sam Shepherd. Rising at the same time, The Black Arts Theater movement, (certainly in part inspired by Hansberry and Baldwin) LeRoi Jones (soon Amiri Baraka), Ron Milner, Ed Bullins, Ben Caldwell, Marvin X, Carol Freeman, Jimmy Garrett, Joseph White, Ronald Drayton, Charles Patterson, and a little later Oyamo, Aishah Rahman, Toni Morrison, revivals of Theodore Ward, Hughes, DuBois, Aime Cesaire, (from Martinique) and Ngugi wa Thiongo, Ousman Sembene and Wole Soyinika from Africa. Add the re-ignited socially impacting classics of earlier national political upsurges, e.g., Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, ugene O’Neil, Langston Hughes, plus the refreshing innovations of the so-called Theatre of The Absurd, Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, newly re-discovered Lorca and Artaud, Pirandello, Adamov, Adrienne Kennedy, poets like Frank O’Hara, Sonia Sanchez, and Kenneth Koch.
Make no mistake: there was a drama being produced at the same time as this wellspring that was in contradiction to the mainly socially conscious and democratically positive theatre I have outlined but it has been given enough projection by the bourgeois mainstream of critics and academics so I have neither the inclination nor time to delve into it. But, as one instance, there was a play, by a Reactionary Negro (sic) dramatist, Charles Gordone, (and I am not certain whether another work of his received such publicity or if it even exists) No Place To Be Somebody which attacked and ridiculed the sharpest themes of the progressive Black Arts Theatre Movement, i.e., Self Determination, Cultural Awareness and Self Consciousness, the Social and Political Struggle for Democracy, ‘Black Power’, and as such marked the beginning of the American Theatre’s retreat from Revolutionary, Innovative, Independent themes. At least where the production of insurgent Afro-American drama was concerned.
So that today, US theatre, Where Is It, could be summarized by pointing out that in the most recent, ‘Black Theatre Festival’ in Winston Salem, North Carolina, one of the principal works was Neil Simon’s ‘Barefoot In the Park’ (done in Negro) plus awards to Black film stars. This is not actually completely shocking since the coloured director of the once exciting Public Theatre (New York) came to prominence following the presentation of his ‘The Negro Museum’ which ridiculed and caricatured the great Lorraine Hansberry. Since then one of this theatre’s retrograde productions was a fantasy on how a homosexual Negro graduate student went back in time to try to seduce the black slave insurrectionary, Nat Turner.
But what, one is driven to inquire, is the rationale, other than perhaps an obsessive fantasy of the writer’s and producer’s? But this enabled this same producer to appear on Broadway where he has received two Pulitzer prizes as director of two homosexually explicit, but happily anti-imperialist, works, ‘Angels In America’ along with the author, Tony Kushner. But these works have at least the virtue of being ‘untraditional’ though obviously, for a time, of great commercial value. As for the rest of Broadway, ‘Rent’, a transposed Off-Broadway musical (like ‘Hair’, its earlier downtown-uptown incarnation), glamorizing the trials and tribulations of Bohemian/ Artsy NYC denizens’ resistance to big-time commercial America, except in its fictional retelling.
Then there is Big River (a re-working of Mark Twain), Golda, The Lion King (Mickey Mouse’ father Walt Disney’s cartoon Live), ‘Chicago’, ‘Hairspray’, a new light-hearted musical hit about NYC sophisticated mores, ‘Aida’ (rewritten by a Rock Star), ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’, not the movie or the book, and so forth. I could go on, but it gets worse. Suffice it to say, until the people, the artists and the cultural workers themselves, reconstruct, re-produce, and re-present a more socially relevant, progressive and authentic voice of the living democratic and even proto-socialist culture of the US, the excesses of US imperialist commercial culture, e.g., current North American theatre, will be mostly stagnant and loathsome.
Poet and playwright Amiri Baraka is New Jersey & Newark Schools’ Poet Laureate
US theatre is a reflection, of course, of this sad nation now. Duped and strong-armed by the Bush-led extreme right, the prostitute media, and lobbyists for the Enemies of Humanity, the theatre has become an evil-coloured puddle of imperialist commerce. The most expensive and well-financed is ‘The Great White Way’, world famous Broadway. Now reduced…