Exceptions abound, but New York Theater Workshop’s actions point to a trend: the institutional narrowing of what the theatre is, what it can talk about and deal with. To many artists who publicly and privately expressed outrage at New York Theater Workshop’s decision to cancel My Name Is Rachel Corrie, what was especially confusing was that this was a theatre whose mission statement in part read that it was committed to “challenging and unpredictable new theater” that explores “perspectives on our collective history and responses to the events and institutions that shape our lives.” The contra- diction between its words and actions seemed obvious to so many artists – how could the theater’s leaders miss it?
This past year has given us many opportunities to mull over that general question and many related ones. Theatrical work is coming under attack in school districts in “red” states and in the most progressive cities in the Western world. My Name Is Rachel Corrie is only one of many works to come under attack. Consider these incidents from the last year:
- American high-school productions of Grease, Ragtime, and The Crucible came under fire from religious leaders and conservative activists, leading in the former cases to softened language and cuts, in the latter case to cancellation.
- In Spain, playwright Pepe Rubianes pulled his play about Federico García Lorca after receiving death threats from far-right political groups.
- In Paris, the Comédie-Française canceled a production of a new play by the Austrian writer Peter Handke because of statements he made about Slobodan Milosevic, prompting the Nobel-Prize winning writer Elfriede Jelinek to say, “By not putting on this play, the Comédie-Française, with its rich past, is following in the worst tradition of cultural institutions under dictatorships, who throw out artists who cause trouble and condemn them to silence.”
- In Germany, Berlin’s Deutsche Oper canceled a three-year-old production of Mozart’s Idomeneo because it included a scene that showed the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad. (After months of widespread and diverse criticism – including from Chancellor Angela Merkel – this decision was reversed.)
In a sense, there is not much more to say about this. We have already heard many respected artists and intellectuals argue that these works should have gone on, that freedom of expression is important whether we agree with the expression or not, that the decisions to postpone, cancel, or change these works were cowardly and self-defeating, etc. So if most reasonable members of the artistic community can agree on these points, the question becomes, why were the decisions made in the first place?
It is difficult to answer this question definitively since in most cases those who made the decisions offered banalities and obfuscation in their defense. Some seeking a deeper analysis have speculated about the fear artistic organizations have of offending conservative subscribers, as well as individual, private, and government funders. Others have invoked the dangers theaters face when they produce controversial work, in light of the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a member of an Islamist militant organization, and the deadly protests that followed the publication of twelve Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet, Muhammad.
If we take these speculations as reasonable, or at least as partially illuminating of the anxiety artistic leaders around the world are feeling, the question then shifts from how these factors affect artistic institutions to how they affect the artists those institutions serve. John Patrick Shanley made a statement about this subject on New York Public Radio’s Brian Lehrer Show on March 22 of this year, shortly after New York Theater Workshop’s cancellation of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. What he had to say points us in an interesting direction:
“The motives of the people who were going to produce this play Off-Broadway in New York are not adequately known and I think that they should be aired. But it highlights a larger phenomenon, which is an international gangsterism towards the arts at this time. I consider the New York Times not publishing the cartoons about Muhammad to be an act of editorial cowardice and inappropriate – obviously it was major news – and this idea of it being ‘sensitive’ to religion, respectful to religion, not to air differences, not to air slurs, not to air slights, is just giving into intimidation of different kinds. Now the theater in New York may not have been afraid that they were going to be killed, they may have been afraid they were going to lose funding from somebody, that I don’t know. But I do know there is intimidation across this country in the arts, where plays like Grease are being vetoed by local organizations as being too racy and cartoons are being called unworthy of publication because the sensitivities of people of a certain religion trumps the need of people of every persuasion to know. And I think it has to be looked at. There’s a certain degree of cowardice involved and I think people are going to have to get used to the idea that doing these things – like what happened to van Gogh in the Netherlands – may lead to them being killed.”
Shanley is criticizing arts institutions that display “cowardice” in the face of the various dangers that taking a political risk threatens to bring about. He more than implies that artists and those who serve them may have to be willing to die if they wish to create politically engaged works in a world where the threat of terrorism, particularly from Islamic extremists, is very real. Shanley does not explicitly make the link between Christian fundamentalism in the United States and the controversies surrounding high-school productions of Grease, Ragtime, and The Crucible; nor does he explicitly examine how American writers might be affected by New York Theater Workshop’s canceling of Corrie, whether the reason be that which was initially proffered by Nicola or the one Shanley offers when he wonders if fears of loss of funding motivated the decision.
But his statement leads us to those questions. To translate it into practical terms, let us imagine what a political playwright today might have to think through before she sits down to begin writing a new play. “How do I write truthfully if I feel I can’t make a decent living doing so, or may not even be allowed to live if I do so? Do I want to write truthfully and struggle financially and perhaps be hurt or killed, or do I want to write less truthfully and prosper and live safe from threats?”
To claim that these questions are histrionic is legitimate, but one need only point to the above examples to show that, while extreme, they are not in fact ridiculous. (Even before 9/11, these questions were something a political playwright might have thought about – one need only recall the fatwa issued in 1999 by Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad and the British Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun against Terrence McNally when his play Corpus Christi opened in London.) Breaking these questions down into their component parts sheds even more light on the task facing a political playwright as she begins work on a new play. Let us imagine her thought process in simple language:
- What should I write about in my experience of the world? Should I write politically?
- What kind of audience is there if I write politically; does it exist?
- What kinds of theaters exist to put on my political plays; will they be able to pay me a living wage?
- How am I to make a living as a writer in Hollywood given the concerns that I express in my political plays; are there TV and film producers who will hire me based on these plays, so that I can make a living writing?
- What kind of chance do I have that there are regional theaters across the United States that will produce a political play following its initial production?
- Are there people who have financial ties to these theatres that may not want to hear what I have to say about certain political issues, and will an artistic director be thinking about their concerns when programming a season?
- What kinds of people are out there who might threaten or try to harm or kill me if I write political plays?
- Why should I write plays that put me at mortal or financial risk?
How do concerns such as these, however conscious or unconscious they may actually be, affect what we write? To argue that these concerns have no effect on our work, or that we may override their effect in a willful act of deciding to do so, is a naïve position. We are made by history as much as we make it. Some things simply cannot be transcended, even in America, a country built on the idea that any and everything can be overcome. (There is a profound difference between overcoming and overlooking, though it is shocking how often the latter is confused with the former.) If we accept that we are bound to be affected by the pressures and realities of contemporary life in composing our plays, what can we realistically expect of the institutions that serve us? It would seem that an increasing conservatism, perhaps cloaked as a particular aesthetic sensibility, is inevitable. Some would say it’s already here, in force.
But it is easy to criticize theatres who fail playwrights who take political and artistic risks. It is much more difficult to sustain our asking the difficult questions of ourselves when our lives and livelihoods are at stake. It is hard enough to simply write a good play; to consistently confront oneself with the disappointments and deprivations one may face as a playwright verges on the impossible. To imagine the deeper forces at play in oneself in the process of creating a work of art can lead one to the brink of despair.
And yet I believe that this is the work we must do – get to the bottom of our artistic selves, our fraught relationship to the times we live in, to the communities we speak to and derive our income from. This work delivers us to our tragic core, to the wound that made us want to be artists in the first place. It brings us back to the writers who first disturbed us, to the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to Ibsen, to Brecht, to those who had the courage to say what they felt and to sing about the dark times; it painfully links us to the horrors of history, to the demands of tradition, to, in Pinsky’s great phrase, “the responsibilities of the poet.” This is not an easy thing, but I think it is an essential thing. Maybe it is the only thing.
If one needs a bit of hope at this point, I think that there is always the hope that if we do our part in this task, the institutions will do theirs. The cynic would say that I’m a fool for believing that, and the cynic might be right. But at the very least even the cynic must admit that this work cannot start with the institutions; it has to start with us.