Safe In Their Seats

Ghastly piece in the Sunday LA Times on political theatre, "Uncomfortable In Our Seats." It's another chestnut on how theatre should challenge our assumptions.

Mark Twain once said there's nothing that needs reforming so much as other people's habits. To Times staff writer Charles McNulty, there's nothing that needs challenging so much as other people's politics.

His jumping off point is the trouble the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie is having in getting a New York production. The play is a tribute to the young American woman who died fighting for the Palestinian cause. A success in London, its politics apparently need to be contextualized before Americans can handle it.

This may seem odd at first, but it's quite easy to explain. The average New York theatregoer shares the politics of the average London or even European theatregoer with one glaring exception--Europeans hate Israel, so the play goes down easy overseas. If the play were Rachel Corrie Was A Foolish Racist, it wouldn't see the light of day in London.

Yet, McNulty feels the need to ask, melodramatically, "[h]ow daringly political will we allow our stages to become?" The answer is, not very. When theatre groups put on their predictably leftist plays, the leftist audience leave feeling quite pleased, even smug. (I'm not saying the right doesn't do the same thing--it's just that theatre isn't its preferred milieu.)

A better question would be what quality of plays are we looking for. Drama ripped from the headlines can be fun, but most of it is awful. (I once went to see a friend in a play that turned out to be a two-act, three-hour screed against Clarence Thomas. If it were a movie, I could have walked out, but since I was only one of three people in the audience, I was stuck.)

McNulty even admits much political drama leaves something to be desired, though he laughably feels "they make up in courage and conviction what they lack in sophisticated artistry." Courage? Exactly what will happen to people who put on productions that question how America treats war prisoners? Will they get hurt by all the awards people throw at them? Don't talk to me about courage until there's a West End production of The Life Of Mohammed.

McNulty is at his worst when he claims these plays don't generally point in the same political direction. Amazingly, his example is David Hare's huge success about the Iraq War, Stuff Happens:

...instead of skewing the material toward a predictable bias, Hare finds in Colin Powell a protagonist who can movingly embody the diplomatic tragedy that paves the road to any war.

McNulty is so far up the cocoon, the big difference to him is Hare finds a positive tragic figure instead of a comic villain to explain how horrible Iraq is.

McNulty makes his main point near the end:

[My Name Is Rachel Corrie] will open minds and hearts to a situation that's less black and white than many have been told.

So don't worry about McNulty, he's already got the truth. We're the ones who need help.

Maybe, just maybe, Mr. McNulty could benefit from having his political assumptions questioned. There's one place, however, I can almost guarantee that won't happen--political theatre.