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COUNTERBALANCING THE PENDULUM EFFECT: POLITICS AND THE DISCOURSE OF POST-9/11 THEATRE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2007

James M. Harding
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Extract

If a model haunts my inauguration of “Critical Stages,” then it is the “Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001” that David Román commissioned for the March 2002 issue of Theatre Journal. Yet there would be little room in that important historical document for what I have to say here. Though I greatly admire Román for commissioning that forum and am still profoundly moved by the thoughts of its twenty-seven contributors, I must ask how much more significant that forum would have been had the original commission focused on “Theatre and Politics” rather than “Theatre and Tragedy.” Would Diana Taylor's suggestion that the events of 9/11 have given us “a different kind of tragedy” have been a suggestion that 9/11 has given us a different kind of political theatre? What is that theatre? Is it even progressive? At the very least, a more direct focus on theatre and politics in the forum might have constituted a reply to the debate among theatre practitioners (particularly those in the United States) about the role of theatre in the politics of a post-9/11 world. As Marvin Carlson has pointed out, those debates initially centered on whether, in one fell swoop, historical forces had cowed political theatre into voluntary silence if not obsolescence. Five years later, what he describes as a retreat “from any consideration of an engaged theatre”—a retreat that ran the gamut from the “commercial theatre of Broadway” to “New York's most experimental and uncommercial ventures”—casts a shadow out of which we have yet to emerge.

Type
Critical Stages: Edited by Mike Sell
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , May 2007 , pp. 19 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc. 2007

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References

ENDNOTES

1. Taylor, in Román, David, ed., “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001,” Theatre Journal 54.1 (2002): 95–138, at 96Google Scholar.

2. Carlson, , “9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq: The Response of the New York Theatre,” Theatre Survey 45.1 (2004): 3–17, at 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Kershaw, , The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (New York and London: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar; and Sell, , Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005)Google Scholar. In his book, Kershaw is more concerned with revitalizing the concept of the radical by shifting the contexts in which it is applied, whereas Sell is advocating a full-scale reconsideration of the inherent recuperative tendencies in critical discourses about radical vanguard performance.

4. Román, , Performance in America: Contemporary Culture and the Performing Arts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 258CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Diamond, in “Forum on Theatre and Tragedy,” at 137.

6. Dolan, , Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Román, Performance in America, 259.

8. In no way is this distrust of the abstract a coded distrust of critical theory, the rigorous application of which I would argue is still largely indispensable to a significant excavation of the ideological cast in the historiographies that we practice and the histories that we receive.

9. Reinelt, Review of Stuff Happens by David Hare, dir. Nick Hytner. Royal National Theatre (Olivier), 1 September 2004. Theatre Journal 57.2 (2005): 303–6, at 305.

10. Harold Pinter, “Art, Truth, & Politics,” 7 December 2005. Available online at [nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html] (accessed 23 October 2006). (PDF versions in four languages are also available there for download.)

11. The phrase “speak truth to power” dates back to the 1950s and was used as part of a discourse of opposition to the assumptions of cold-war politics. My use of the phrase in this context is inspired by Mohamed ElBaradei's Nobel Lecture upon receiving the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. In using the expression in his lecture [available online at [nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2005/elbaradei-lecture-en.html] (accessed 16 January 2007)], ElBaradei was highlighting the International Atomic Energy Agency's criticism of the Bush administration's justifications for going to war with Iraq.