As a playwright I have no political responsibility. I’m an artist. I write plays, not political propaganda. If you want easy solutions, turn on the boob tube. Social and political issues on TV are cartoons; the good guy wears a white hat; the bad guy a black hat. Cartoons don’t interest me. We are living through a time of deep transition, so everyone is unsettled. I’m as angry, scared and confused as the rest of you. I don’t have answers.
David Mamet
Growing up in an environment of whackily dedicated theatre aficionados, I have had more than any deserved share of Oedipuses, Hamlets, Seagulls, and Doll’s Houses. Do not get me wrong, I would not trade the innumerable hours of aesthetic enjoyment for any digitally mastered wonder; however virtuously drawn these technological contraptions may appear to be, nothing can replace the thrilling sensation of seeing people ‘make’ theatre. I’ve repeatedly asked myself, before and after curtain calls, what does it all mean?
How do we make theatre in a contemporary world which fosters many forms of cultural disenfranchisement and individual annihilation?
How does one make theatre in/of the multi-vocal spaces of let’s say American cultural life? Can drama as a literary genre and at the same time a popular culture good foster intra/intercultural communication, allowing space for dialogue between the private and the public consciousness? If so, does this re-scripting of drama as both a ‘dramatizing’ and a ‘politicizing’ theatre act suggest a final departure from the ‘aesthetic formalist’ discourse that tends to nurture and shelter this artistic form?
Coming to American Studies via a Comparative Literature charter, I almost dare not say that I strongly believe that the recent work (namely, in the last fifty years) of American dramatic traditions attests to the emergence of a theatre whose commitment to an artful and at the same time, socially-conscious drama continues to question the ‘democratic framework’ of our present-day reality.
For that and other particular reasons, I have patiently admired the selection of theoretical readings assigned in Professor Tucker's theorizing of America seminar, week in and week out eagerly awaiting for the revelatory piece of theoretical fiction which would lead me unquestioningly into the promised land of engaged theatre practice.
However, since my epiphaneous mountain never fully arrived, I decided to pay it another visit.
Roaming through my extemporaneously taken notes during the seminar's theoretically challenging festivities, I slowly came to realize that there is a great deal of theatrically useful scholarly work amidst the weekly readings. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer’s theoretical work on the futility of mass-produced goods in the cultural climate immediately preceding and following the Second World War, titled “The culture industry: enlightement as mass deception” has provoked my late twentieth-century popular culture sensibilities, while, at the same time encouraging me to become more closely acquainted with the Frankfurt School philosophers’ writings on the relationship between culture (as a multi-faceted concept and practice) and aesthetic criticism (as a theoretical tool, a metronome of sorts, dissecting its every representation).
In the last few weeks, I have immersed myself in the long process of deconstructing (for my layman scholarly potentials) the theoretical assumptions of the ‘double character’ in/of drama and theatre (as a ‘high art’ form) postulated in Adorno’s larger-than-life theoretical evocation simply called Aesthetic Theory.
Written in the last years of his life, after Adorno had said his final good-byes to the United States, the work sets out (bravely) to examine art’s autonomy, art as a product of the immanent division existing between intellectual and physical labor. Profoundly affected by revolutionary Marxism (a shared trait with other intellectuals reared in the decades of the Great Depression and Hitler’s totalitarian rule over Germany), Adorno sets out to reject the idea of committed art as seen by two other leading western European intellectuals at the time (Bertold Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre), since he dismissed their acquiescence of art’s political platform. However, by using the metaphor of Leibniz’s monad (i.e., entities as individual and internally dynamic unities) and translating it to the realm of art, Adorno views each work of art as one such monad, a symbol awaiting its interpretation, drawing attention to socially volatile spaces without always directly addressing pertinent social conditions.
On the other hand, Adorno’s lassiez-faire view of art that is strong enough to transcend the pettiness of map lines and time slots tends to blur the historical specificity of the time we live in, and thus proving itself insufficient enough to relate the reality of multiple political, social and historical forces engaged behind the cultural formation and production of contemporary American theatre. Reading Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s insightful take on the preeminent presence/meaning of race as “an unstable, “decentered” complex of social meanings being transformed by political struggle”, (55) in past, present and future U.S. society, adequately titled Racial Formation in the United States, has profoundly stirred up my “old world” views on the ethnicity theory as a dominant paradigm of race and racial dynamics.
And, there is also the unavoidable work of scholar extraordinaire Judith Butler on the re-conceptualization of the category of gender as a “perfomative act”, aptly titled Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. In it, Butler contests the prevailing idea around gender as a surface expression of a deeper “sex”, thus marking a noteworthy step forward in a long-awaited scholarly attempt to consider the ways through which language constructs all objects it contends merely to describe. Both of these works help me raise questions with my own approach to the study of commercially successful and socially appealing culture products, such as for example the dramatic work of Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka, Spalding Gray, August Wilson, etc., i.e., they challenge me to look for alternative ways to be constructively critical of social normativity and its tightening grip on otherwise ‘liberated’ politics of art’s cultural legitimacy. These culturally significant theories, in turn, allow for my broader understanding of the distinct ways through which race and gender discourses engage the dynamics of American contemporary theatre as a socially art-FUL commitment.
Coming full circle, I am reconsidering Mr. Mamet’s words about ‘artistry’ and ‘not having all the answers.’ I can’t speak for the entire theatre-going community when I say that the least thing we are looking for in a play, in a David Mamet text, is the answer to it all. What we look for are artistically-driven spaces of culture performance through which both author(s) and active participants can engage in a multi-vocal discourse, listening and commenting on each other’s different cultural views and understandings.
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