Death of the Liberal Class (17 page)
Read Death of the Liberal Class Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism
The
Living Newspapers
were wildly popular. Sixty thousand people bought tickets to
Power
while the play was still being created.
The Nation
said it was a modern morality play: “Its theme is the search of Everyman for cheap electric power with which to make a better life.” Harry Hopkins called it “a great show.” It made him laugh and feel: “It’s propaganda to educate the consumer who’s paying for power. It’s about time someone had some propaganda for him.” The bolder and more popular the Federal Theatre Project became, the more it was accused of being a breeding ground for communism. In a popular children’s play,
The Revolt of the Beavers
, actors dressed as beavers, rushing around on roller skates, overthrew an evil beaver king so all the beavers could eat ice cream, play, and be nine years old. Congressional critics attacked the beaver actors for disseminating communism.
Living Newspapers
were wildly popular. Sixty thousand people bought tickets to
Power
while the play was still being created.
The Nation
said it was a modern morality play: “Its theme is the search of Everyman for cheap electric power with which to make a better life.” Harry Hopkins called it “a great show.” It made him laugh and feel: “It’s propaganda to educate the consumer who’s paying for power. It’s about time someone had some propaganda for him.” The bolder and more popular the Federal Theatre Project became, the more it was accused of being a breeding ground for communism. In a popular children’s play,
The Revolt of the Beavers
, actors dressed as beavers, rushing around on roller skates, overthrew an evil beaver king so all the beavers could eat ice cream, play, and be nine years old. Congressional critics attacked the beaver actors for disseminating communism.
The opponents of the New Deal, backed and funded by the business elite, announced that President Roosevelt had permitted communists to infiltrate the government and government-funded programs, such as the Federal Theatre Project. And that project was the first target of the Dies Committee, led by Texas democrat Martin Dies. The theater project was denounced in a series of hearings in August and November 1938. The Dies committee eventually became HUAC. Flanagan was asked about an article she had written titled “A Theatre Is Born,” in which she described the enthusiasm of the federal theaters as having “a certain Marlowesque madness.”
“You are quoting from this Marlowe,” observed Alabama representative Joseph Starnes from the committee. “Is he a Communist?”
“The room rocked with laughter, but I did not laugh,” Flanagan remembered. “Eight thousand people might lose their jobs because a Congressional Committee had so prejudged us that even the classics were ‘communistic.’ I said, ‘I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.’”
“Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper references, because that is all we want to do,” Starnes said.
“Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare, immediately preceding Shakespeare,” Flanagan answered.
By 1939 the theater project was killed. The final performances of the Federal Theatre around the country were often poignant. The Ritz Theater in New York provided a new ending for
Pinocchio
. “Pinocchio, having conquered selfishness and greed, did not become a living boy,” Flanagan wrote. “Instead he was turned back into a puppet.” “So let the bells proclaim our grief,” intoned the company at the finish, “that his small life was all too brief.” The stagehands knocked down the sets in front of the audience, and the company laid Pinocchio in a pine box with the legend “Born December 23, 1938; Killed by Act of Congress, June 30, 1939.”
33
At the Adelphi Theatre in New York, the play
Sing for Your Supper
reached its final climax with the “Ballad of Uncle Sam
.
” The chorus sang:
Pinocchio
. “Pinocchio, having conquered selfishness and greed, did not become a living boy,” Flanagan wrote. “Instead he was turned back into a puppet.” “So let the bells proclaim our grief,” intoned the company at the finish, “that his small life was all too brief.” The stagehands knocked down the sets in front of the audience, and the company laid Pinocchio in a pine box with the legend “Born December 23, 1938; Killed by Act of Congress, June 30, 1939.”
33
At the Adelphi Theatre in New York, the play
Sing for Your Supper
reached its final climax with the “Ballad of Uncle Sam
.
” The chorus sang:
Out of the cheating, out of the shouting . . .
Out of the windbags, the patriotic spouting,
Out of uncertainty and doubting . . .
Out of the carpet-bag and the brass spittoon
It will come again
Our marching song will come again
34
The Federal Theater Project was the first of the WPA projects to go, “a reminder,” Malpede said, “of the power of the theater.” As Flanagan remembered:
If this first government theater in our country had been less alive it might have lived longer. But I do not believe anyone who worked on it regrets that it stood from first to last against reaction, against prejudice, against racial, religious, and political intolerance. It strove for a more dramatic statement and a better understanding of the great forces of our life today; it fought for a free theater as one of the many expressions of a civilized, informed, and vigorous life. Anyone who thinks those things do not need fighting for today is out of touch with reality.
35
As for HUAC, it “terrorized and split the artistic community, and, worse, it led to the self-imposed censorship among American theater workers who, for the sake of their careers, largely fostered and accepted the notion that politics and art don’t mix, that ipso facto, any play that was politically relevant had to be bad art,” Malpede said. “The exceptions to the rule, of course, were Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman, both defenders in their well-made plays of the earlier commitment to social justice as a necessary artistic theme. But the majority of American theater neutered itself, becoming prey to the basest commercial and escapist interests.”
It was not until the civil-rights movement that theater regained its energy. African American artists and playwrights cut their ties with the commercial theater, along with many white artists, to speak out of their own experience. Barbara Ann Teer, a successful actress, moved uptown to Harlem and in 1968 began the National Black Theatre, mixing African ritual performance techniques with American Method acting. LeRoi Jones in 1964 wrote
Dutchman
and
The Slave
and changed his name to Amiri Baraka. He mounted a searing production called
Slave Ship
. Ntozake Shange in 1976 wrote
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
.
Dutchman
and
The Slave
and changed his name to Amiri Baraka. He mounted a searing production called
Slave Ship
. Ntozake Shange in 1976 wrote
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
.
Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s The Living Theatre, which had begun in 1947, produced Kenneth Brown’s
The Brig
, set in a Marine prison during the Korean War. The Open Theater, founded by Joseph Chaikin, who had been an actor in the Living Theatre, created a series of plays like Jean-Claude van Itallie’s
America Hurrah
, which denounced the sterility of American suburban life. The Living and the Open theaters harbored many pacifists. The founders of these theaters often spent time in jail for nonviolent civil disobedience against the Vietnam War. The turmoil of the 1960s, like the turmoil that roiled the country during the Depression, unleashed the energies of artists who took over café spaces of the Lower East Side. Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornés, as well as inventive producers such as Ellen Stewart of La MaMa, pushed back against the rigid constraints of commercial theater. The Bread and Puppet Theatre led antiwar marches. Peter Schumann’s tragic Vietnamese puppet-women, their mourning faces painted on papier mâché masks, walked under the spreading wings of huge white birds—all the puppets being inhabited and animated by artist-activists. Crystal Field and George Bartenieff co-founded Theater for the New City, which became the producing home for many socially conscious artists. They hosted Angry Arts, a festival of opposition to the war by artists, and in 1991 they hosted a weekend of theater expressions against the Gulf War.
The Brig
, set in a Marine prison during the Korean War. The Open Theater, founded by Joseph Chaikin, who had been an actor in the Living Theatre, created a series of plays like Jean-Claude van Itallie’s
America Hurrah
, which denounced the sterility of American suburban life. The Living and the Open theaters harbored many pacifists. The founders of these theaters often spent time in jail for nonviolent civil disobedience against the Vietnam War. The turmoil of the 1960s, like the turmoil that roiled the country during the Depression, unleashed the energies of artists who took over café spaces of the Lower East Side. Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornés, as well as inventive producers such as Ellen Stewart of La MaMa, pushed back against the rigid constraints of commercial theater. The Bread and Puppet Theatre led antiwar marches. Peter Schumann’s tragic Vietnamese puppet-women, their mourning faces painted on papier mâché masks, walked under the spreading wings of huge white birds—all the puppets being inhabited and animated by artist-activists. Crystal Field and George Bartenieff co-founded Theater for the New City, which became the producing home for many socially conscious artists. They hosted Angry Arts, a festival of opposition to the war by artists, and in 1991 they hosted a weekend of theater expressions against the Gulf War.
There was never much money behind these productions. But for most of this time it was still relatively inexpensive to live in New York. Space could be rented without huge deposits. These new productions began to attract wider audiences, and eventually they attracted grant money from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Kaplan Foundations. Richard Nixon, who remained frightened enough of the counterculture to attempt to placate its demands, encouraged the National Endowment for the Arts, which had been founded in 1965 during the Lyndon Johnson administration. The NEA, at the start, funded the radical theater movements. Ticket prices were kept low, and, as in the 1930s, the productions attracted a wide and varied audience.
“What happened?” Malpede asked.
The Vietnam War finally ended, but the Peace Movement persisted in large numbers through the dirty wars in South America and the growing antinuclear movement. Yet, it became more and more difficult to produce socially conscious, poetic theater. The old dogma of the 1950s reasserted itself: art and politics don’t mix. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he immediately ordered that NEA grants to small - read leftist - theaters be abolished. Reaganism eroded the public perception that a great democracy deserves great art.
“Without government support for funding innovation and the non-commercial, the theater began to institutionalize and to censor itself,” Malpede went on.
The growing network of regional theaters became ever more reliant upon planning subscription seasons which would not offend any of their local donors, and the institutional theaters began to function more and more as social clubs for the wealthy and philanthropic. Sometimes, there was a breakthrough.
Angels in Americ
a was one—the result, too, of an aggressive gay activist movement. But to a large degree, the theater no longer wanted to shake people up. The institutional theaters began to “develop” plays—a process geared to securing grants from the few foundations which still, in our age of austerity, fund the arts. Development means that most new plays receive a series of readings and workshops during which all sorts of dramaturges, literary managers, directors, and artistic directors give their “input,” most often thoroughly confusing, especially to young playwrights, and frequently damaging whatever was authentic to begin with. Fewer and fewer of these plays ever reach production. As the economy worsens, fewer and fewer risks are taken. Some subjects are out of bounds altogether, including strong critiques of capitalism or American foreign policy, in other words, anything that might cause individual donors to stop donating.
Theater, once again unplugged from what gave it vitality, became increasingly mediocre and was produced as spectacle or celebrity-driven entertainment. Audiences dwindled and aged. Critical debate onstage was largely banished. Entertainment has become, as Macdonald wrote of his age, directed toward the mass, a set of statistics, what he called the “non-man.” Mass art denies the existence of individual taste or experience, of an individual conscience, of anything that differentiates people from one another. Art is an individual experience. It forces us to examine ourselves. It broadens perspective. Entertainment masquerading as art, by contrast, herds viewers and audiences into the collective. It limits perspective to that experienced by the mass. “With the effective disempowering of artists, and with artists’ collusion in their own disempowerment, the theater now serves no meaningful function,” said Malpede. “It seldom startles, enlivens, enrages, or encourages its audience to become more fiercely aware of their own or of others’ humanity.”
Malpede’s 2009 play
Prophecy
, which centers on the tragic effect of wars on individual lives from Vietnam, to the Israeli attacks in Lebanon and Gaza, to the war in Iraq, was not one a corporate sponsor would touch. It opened in London, where it won four stars in
Time Out London
and two Critics’ Choice citations in 2008. But Malpede struggled to find a theater in New York. Her portrayal of Muslims as victims of indiscriminate Israeli and American violence, and its unrelenting condemnation of war, put it far outside the liberal spectrum.
Prophecy
, which centers on the tragic effect of wars on individual lives from Vietnam, to the Israeli attacks in Lebanon and Gaza, to the war in Iraq, was not one a corporate sponsor would touch. It opened in London, where it won four stars in
Time Out London
and two Critics’ Choice citations in 2008. But Malpede struggled to find a theater in New York. Her portrayal of Muslims as victims of indiscriminate Israeli and American violence, and its unrelenting condemnation of war, put it far outside the liberal spectrum.
“What is to be done?” Malpede asked of the commercial restraints on theater:
Here I speak only from experience. My recent play
Prophecy
had six public readings, each packed with attentive and wildly enthusiastic audiences, yet was refused production by every theater that hosted these readings and by others to whom the play was sent. One producer called the play “brilliant” but told me it was “too risky” and he would “never produce” it at his theater. His was among the most honest responses. Another producer told me she found the play “very moving” when she read it, but is of the opinion that neither critics nor audiences wish to “see anything about anything.” Another potential producer, who, after witnessing 150 people at the Kennedy Center become totally engrossed in a reading and hearing their amazingly positive feedback afterwards, wrote me, coolly, that he “had received negative e-mails” and withdrew his offer to consider the play. George Bartenieff, my partner, and I decided we had to produce the play ourselves. We had developed a devoted core audience, and the play had no trouble attracting wonderfully talented actors. In fact, I had written it for Najla Said and Kathleen Chalfant, and both were eager to do it. Najla went to London, where
Prophecy
premiered in a coproduction, which we partially funded, mainly from a small pension fund of mine left over after I had been denied tenure at the Tisch School of the Arts [at New York University] for “being an artist,” not a postmodern theorist. Bartenieff and I maintain a small not-for-profit organization, Theater Three Collaborative, just for the purpose of creating the sort of poetic, social theater we revere. We had already produced [Malpede’s]
The Beekeeper’s Daughter
, about a Bosnian refugee, and
I Will Bear Witness
, based on the Victor Klemperer diaries. After London, we set about raising the money mainly from our core audience members, and finally completely depleting my pension, to produce
Prophecy
in New York.
It is only when artists control their own work, as Malpede did with her production of
Prophecy
, that great, socially relevant theater can be sustained. The funding for this kind of work will never come out of the world of corporate sponsorships which, like Mr. Mister, uses theater and the arts as a diversion.
Prophecy
, that great, socially relevant theater can be sustained. The funding for this kind of work will never come out of the world of corporate sponsorships which, like Mr. Mister, uses theater and the arts as a diversion.
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