The Unbelievable World of American Theater

3,635 words

I’ve been involved in theater off and on for over forty years, acting, writing, and not succeeding at it in any worldly terms. I’m an okay character actor, I’ve written good plays that are considered well-written, literate, humorous, and that no one wants to put on. 

“Your writing is too intelligent,” was one actress’ s highly raised English-accented judgement after a play reading. 

As one college theater professor explained to me, they only do “commercially viable” plays. This means they stick to works that have either had a good run on Broadway, regional theater, or one of the old war horses. 

Fair enough. I find prose more rewarding and, as for commercialism, Gore Vidal defined it as the ability to do well what should not be done at all. The last play I acted in was a community college production of Macbeth where I played royal Malcom in two scenes, was killed off in an explosion of blood, and went off-stage to catch up on my reading, writing, stage gossip, until my bow at final curtain. One of the cast I talked shop with was Dennis Corcoran, who played Old Seward, and lived off-stage as did I except in the last act. 

Dennis is white-haired, portly, genial and a rewarding conversationalist whose eyes are mirrors…not into the soul, but of stage talent. Unlike me, his plays get put on, and wander into regional productions. He’s a good writer, devoted especially to Ireland, whose Irish plays emote powerful language, character, and suffering.  

Recently he had a reading of his latest play The Bhutto Project, dealing with the late Benazir Bhutto, the female prime minister of Pakistan assassinated in 2007. 

Dennis’s treatment of Bhutto was hagiographic, and awarded her a secondary role in a script dealing with a young Pakistani girl who wanted to be a doctor but struggled against the social rules of Islamic society and her father’s (written gruff but sympathetic) insistence that she be traditional. She hated wearing the hijab, being chaperoned by her brother, and gets him to drive her a hundred miles to hear Benazir Bhutto speak.  

The girl wants to be a good Muslim, quotes Koran passages she claims offers freedom for women and valuing their intellect. She dies in a bus explosion triggered by Islamic militants. 

The play is well-written. Dennis knows his craft and is sympathetic to third-world issues, especially regarding women. He co-wrote the play with a Pakistani man to get the social setting and Islamic references right. 

Dennis enjoys my writing, and when a play I wrote about the Iraq war was (!!!) actually staged, his criticism for a local radio station was encouraging: This is a play that had to be written. 

My feelings about The Bhutto Project were mixed. I thought the notorious corruption of the Bhutto family was ignored (but it’s Pakistan: who isn’t corrupt?), and Bhutto’s secondary character status reminded me of the Sir Walter Scott style of historical fiction, where historical characters play second fiddle to the problems of the young protagonist. In Scott’s Rob Roy there is little of the highland rebel and patriot, but a lot of Frank Osbaldistone, who sorts out his family’s legal mess and courtship of the fair Diane Vernon. Much of it even takes place in Northern England, not Scotland. 

Obviously, a title like Rob Roy would attract readers where Frank Osbaldistone wouldn’t. The stirring 1995 film Rob Roy chucked Frank and got to the heart of highland rebellion. Liam Neeson’s defiant Rob Roy MacGregor was a box office hit. 

My major problem with The Bhutto Project is it feels a trite bourgeois and dated. I don’t mean the subject of women’s rights in Islamic countries are irrelevant, but the war in Gaza and Lebanon overshadows concerns about wearing a hijab, studying, and progressive rights for women. In Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank, Muslims are being bombed and starved. They’re being slaughtered, a great many of them women and children, and I think simply staying alive is a more existential matter than “rights.” 

Survival, especially on your ancestral lands, is certainly the most basic right. 

But women’s rights are standard bourgeois fare in theater, one that the aging, overwhelmingly liberal audience identifies with. Talking about the slaughter in Palestine inevitably leads to the Jews, and theater mostly relates to Jews in connection with the Holocaust or as wise, funny dispensers of urban wisdom…the bagels and lox Jewishness we grew up with in the sixties. The baby-boomer audience is the one who buys theater tickets, and as polls show, they are overwhelmingly on Israel’s side. 

In Dennis’s play, the girl and her friend complain of Pakistanis who have gone to live in England, the prejudice they faced, the insult of being called “Pakis.” Well, okay, but If you don’t like it there, why go? Political repression in Pakistan, yes, but many more have simply flooded the country. Then there are the Rotherham scandals, where Pakistani gangs raped, imprisoned and abused many women and nothing is said or done by the authorities. To even mention this gives you the scarlet letter of “Racist.” In effect, the invader brings his values and worldview along with his passport. After all, when the Saxons invaded England, it wasn’t to become good and responsible Britons. It was to make Britain into their transplanted home: Anglo-Saxon was the result. 

I can’t imagine Dennis or his Pakistani co-writer bringing this up. The bourgeois theater-goer avoids his eyes and ears on this subject. 

Dennis loves Ireland. His passion for the land, language, and people is unquestioned. His play The Two Sisters offered a stark yet lyrical study of a women’s prison in Armagh for IRA supporters. An earlier play, The Conversation, depicted an imaginative dialogue between Queen Elizabeth and Grainne Mhaol (Grace O’Malley), the sturdy Irish female landowner and sometimes pirate. Yet I don’t see him addressing the invasion of Ireland by third worlders which is, I believe, a planned and intentional replacement of the native Irish. I suspect he is silent about the current situation, where numbers of Irish have protested against this invasion, wanting to keep Ireland native. That is, white. 

Like most Irish intellectuals and thinkers, he follows the consensus that Ireland has a special connection to the third world. As many such thinkers say, Ireland was the first English colony. It understands colonial oppression. These same Irish argue that Ireland has more in common with Africa than Europe because of colonialism. This is almost dogma for these Irish, and seeing it flooded with third world masses can only be for the best.

Similarly, when the uprisings in Northern Ireland began, many Irish activists didn’t claim English oppression as their inspiration, but rather, the demonstrations of Martin Luther King. Even something so basic as Irish freedom needs a black twinge to make it acceptable to the dictates of anti-colonialism. 

When Mary Robinson, the progressive prime minister of Ireland was elected in the nineties, it was the signal for Ireland to join the world. No more poverty, oppressive priests, or isolation and chronic unemployment. Instead, it was software corporations, EU blessings, vacations to Spain and, inevitably, third world mass immigration. When Robinson left office, an official farewell had two girls offer flowers to her. One of the chosen was African-Irish. As noted in the November, 1997, American Spectator, there was some ridicule over this, especially when it was realized how desperately Robinson’s staff must have scoured the country to find a black girl.

Yet now, Ireland is facing an existential crisis every bit as desperate as Russia and Israel. The government keeps sending brown peoples in who must be accepted and the Irish agree to their own displacement. 

It’s truly sad and ironic, as the American Spectator noted, that Ireland is the only country in Europe never to have invaded anyone, yet the Irish are getting hosed with political correctness without ever having had anything to be politically correct about. 

I thought of this when I went to a concert featuring A Taste of Ireland, an Irish performance group carrying the mantle of Riverdance. A rousing evening of Irish dance and song, lots of tap dancing, and on the wall behind the performers are silent films of Ireland, from the 1900’s, to the rebellion, the twenties, forties, ending in Mary Robinson’s taking office, where the priests and Eamon De Valera’s stern visage are replaced by the “new” Ireland. 

The show was rousing, and the packed concert hall was full of cheer, claps, and smiles from all ages. The audience was really into it. A Taste of Ireland offered dances from Irish myth, even, if it can be believed, a tap dance depicting the famine of 1845.

I was touched by the total enthusiasm for Irish culture and song, and performers, music, and crowd were completely white. No one would be proud of that, many would fervently shake their heads at this, but that’s what it is…the pride that dare not speak its name. 

A pride and reality now under attack, and slated for the wastebasket of history. 

 ***

Washington University in St. Louis has one of the better university drama departments in the area. Their October production of Pride and Prejudice (hereafter P&P) Is a guaranteed “commercially viable” play like Our Town, Cat  on a Hot Tin Roof, or A Streetcar Named Desire. Staging Jane Austen is very much in the comfort zone of bourgeois theater.

Kate Hamill’s adaptation has been widely produced. She’s one of mainstream theater’s big guns. Her adaptation of P&P cut fourteen parts to eight, mixing the genders, gladly showing men in women’s dress and vice versa. The actor who played Mr. Collins also played Miss Bingley. Mr. Bennett also played Charlotte Lucas.

William Whitaker, the director for the Washington University production, had an excess of actors, so he cast fifteen actors, but approved of the “push into the comedic fun of the character and gender shifting.” Uh-oh. I noted in the program notes each cast member had he/him and she/her before their name, marking the fashion of gender pronouns to show inclusiveness. I also noted the publicity photo had a mugging actress in full regency dress…an asian/ mulatto woman with a prominent tattoo on her arm. More uh-oh. 

Adapter Hamill says P&P “has a lot to show how we manage shame-shame about one’s vulnerabilities and imperfections, about one’s family, about love and attraction.” 

I believe Austen’s works, including P&P, is less about shame or really romantic love, but about inward order and clarity, which will radiate into social order. Austen demonstrates that people who do not know themselves will not know others. They will neither marry well nor wisely, and be misled by first impressions, which was Austen’s original title for P&P. 

Gender and racial choices were forced upon the story and, I think, marred the production. The stage was plain and functional in a good way, and before the lights went up, English country dance music floated through the sound system, preparing us for a veddy English romp.

Mr. Bennet was played by an Indian actor. Wickam, the caddish suitor to Lydia, was played by a Chinese actor wearing a man bun. The imperious Lady Catherine de Bourgh was played by a Chinese woman who had a pronounced Chinese accent

Darcy was played by a handsome white male…almost the only one in the cast. Elizabeth Bennett was played by a short black actress whose delivery was slurred and hurried at times.

There was one less Bennett sister (Kitty was cut), but Mary was a real eyesore, played by a tall man wearing a hoodie and black tutu. He stuck out like a sore thumb, as did his constant mugging, coughing, and stage business that was annoying, but I assumed “Mary’s” annoying presence was essential to the adapter’s vision of the Bennett family. 

Mary also was counselor and advisor to Elizabeth and everyone in a way that is certainly not in the book, and the new Mary was, I expect, the trans world’s way of keeping watch on the commercially viable theater world. 

The costuming matched modern mores sneaking in. Why did Elizabeth, under her gown, wear jeans and sneakers? Or Bingley (another Indian actor) wear the same?

Mr. Collins, the lugubrious suitor to Elizabeth, was played by a porky woman, 

Offering snatches of poetry to no real purpose to the scene, any scene. 

Throughout the play there were ringing bells at scene changes. I wondered why. To remind us of bells summoning servants? Perhaps like the bell in the boxing arena, summoning a new round of sexual and mannered skirmish. 

It was odd that in act one, the two scenes between Darcy and Caroline Bingley were the most effective because both were white and the actors had leading man/leading lady tone and presence. Caroline also eschewed jeans and sneakers, her mien and mode in regency style. Also, freaking Mary was nowhere to be found. 

The second act was more cogent than the first because the actors had scenes to interact and bring out conflict. Elizabeth had dialogue to play off with other characters, especially Darcy, although she still looked out of place with him. 

There was also a lot of humorous stage business. When Elizabeth went to Pemberley, Darcy’s residence, Darcy enters on stage, steps into a child’s plastic pool and stage hands squirt water on him; a parody of the BBC P&P where Colin Firth’s Darcy wading into the pond set viewers hearts fluttering. It got a good laugh, and highlighted that Hamill’s adaptation leaned on parody. It was a script liking oddballs more than the story. Elizabeth seemed at times to play second fiddle to assorted fringes, especially that freaking Mary. 

The final confrontation between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine, instead of them going one on one as Austen wrote, was done before the assembled cast, diluting the drama of both characters facing off where Elizabeth confronts Lady Catherine and wins, making her fit to be mistress of Pemberley.

And yes, in that scene, Mary got to add her two overly inflated cents worth.

It wasn’t a disastrous performance, I think. The second act was more structured, and there were bits that got intended giggles, but with the multicultural cast, I felt as if I was looking at a future that was no longer mine: The Camp of the Saints as a road show. 

Hamill’s P&P was a watered-down version for the contemporary theatergoer. 

Grace, dignity, and historical setting jettisoned in favor of cramming minorities onstage and as many gender ambiguities to keep the he/him she/her crowd coming back for more/less. 

Cultural dilution is one of our banes or selling points, take your pick. It reminds me how stories evolve and dilute; Morte D’Arthur became Shakespeare’s history plays, then Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances, and this has now dribbled into the obligatory nihilism in Game of Thrones.

Multiculturalism remakes our literature, dumbing it down to accommodate all. 

I recall a production of Moliere’s Tartuffe I saw at my alma mater with a half-black, half-white cast. The blacks seemed to have a problem with the language and rhymed couplets (actresses slurred their ing endings), and the white actors had more control of the text. In a scene near the end, after Orgon, having been conned by Tartuffe, is consoled by Cleante, his brother-in-law and the play’s voice of moderation. Orgon was white, Cleante was black, and Cleante’s thick voice (he had trouble completing final t’s) recited his closing speech: 

“Don’t humor fraud, but also don’t asperse 

True piety; the latter fault is worse, 

And it is best to err, if err one must 

As you have done, upon the side of trust.” 

After this, Cleante shot out: 

“And you gotta remember: y’all fucked up!” 

That got howls from the audience; all white, and like the usual theater crowd, obedient to any P.C. dictates.  

One wonders how long classical drama will last; if the audience for it will simply die out, or so much P.C. work will simply make the script unfathomable. Will it be like a college production I saw of that warhorse The Crucible, where a “feminist” interpretation made no attempt at period costumes and included scenes of young girls doing witch incantations before every scene, accompanied by loud rock music. In puritan New England? 

Perhaps history or its revised version will demand falsification to please the new non-white audience. I think of the Netflix series Bridgerton, a historical fantasy where blacks are magically made the center of regency society. We have a black Darcy wooing a white Elizabeth. Queen Charlotte, of German ancestry, is magically made black. It’s a sample of our time’s artistic trend to re-imagine history not as a period of white excellence, but of multicultural rule. A series of if only, where blacks really were at the center, only to have their dominance stolen by whites. History doesn’t matter. The erasure of white dominance does. 

Many people in the west have been conditioned by this reinforcing. A woman I dated enjoyed Bridgerton, especially a ball scene where the crowd were black, Chinese, Hispanic, Indian…and some token whites here and there, not unlike the P&P I saw. She enjoyed seeing all races onscreen, and not just whites. And this was a woman who voted for Trump and has many bones to pick with standard liberalism. 

For almost a generation, the prime spiritual goal of the middle class is to will itself out of existence, despite the continual ingratitude of those colored races who will presumably take over. One wonders if P&P and other works of art will continue in a relay race of passing on the torch of excellence, or simply disappear from indifference? 

Disappear with the connivance of a middle class ignoring what George Orwell said were truths as obvious as the nose in front of your face. 

I’m veering into 1984 territory here. When I read Orwell’s book in my youth, it was first and foremost about communism and totalitarian rule. But it’s not so dogmatic, so easily filed, is it? The salient point of Winston Smith’s life on Airstrip One is how the class he belongs to–the outer party, which are the glorified monks and clerisy of the inner party and Big Brother–readily and without question believe whatever they are told. Their intellectual lives, such as they are, are ones of unquestioning obedience to the party lest they commit crimethink. To even think incorrect thoughts is ghastly.  

How far is that from accepting a mixed gender Mary Bennett? Or ending a Moliere speech with ya’ll fucked up? Or nodding to Black History Month’s assertion that blacks “created civilization.” Or Fauci’s slips of evasive wisdom means uncritically believing in science? We could go on and on. 

It’s relevant that theater, the world of disbelief, is a prime nest for misinformation and nodding at the cause de jure. In 1984, it is emphasized that Winston has to check his face, that to show emotion alerts the thought police. No emotions are vital, except those used to pour vitriol on the enemy of the moment. To show facial expressions is facethink. 

In the 90s, at Yale and other universities, women complained of men watching them, looking at them without permission, committing Lookism. This is only a slight change from facecrime. Acceptance of dogma and racial displacement is the middle-class virtue now. Not going along is in effect refusing to be part of the show, for 1984 is finally a story about performance. Every day in Oceania is a show. Winston Smith finds it hard to go along with the outer party’s passivity and mindless switch to whatever the Party demands. In effect, Winston is arrested, tortured, re-educated, not because he defies the system or seeks freedom, but because he is a bad actor. His performance is inadequate, and O’Brien’s relentless hammering is a drama coach getting his star actor to perform, to make him stop looking for meaning and subtlety in human experience, and settle for first impressions. And first impressions, whatever their intellectual or character flaws, are in our age very commercially viable. 

I think of a theater group I went to last week where three plays were read, the central production a one-act about two women and their life-long struggle to keep abortion legal. The only male part was a man screaming about “these bitches killin’ babies,” and of course opposing this lout was a badge of honor for both women, although what the man said–what in effect abortion is–is naturally, in a middle-class genteel way, euphemized. 

In my comments to the group, I admired the characters and dialogue, which was clever and keeping in tone with the play, although I thought the script was essentially didactic. Going back to the opening play in this essay, I see how obsessed women are with feminism and abortion. They simply will never let it go, these aging miniskirts.  Theater, certainly in America and most of the West is a middle-class art form, and older women are much of the audience. The working class eschews theater, happier at the movies or, if they go to a stage play, it is almost always musicals, where families pack the seats even for a “hit” like Wicked, which, shorn of its Wizard of Oz shell, is a Jewish attack on whites and embracing the Wicked Witch, who becomes a kind of Anne Frank clothed in Broadway razzmatazz. A not-so-subtle attempt to make white culture wrong and the outsider right. 

Does the usual crowd catch any kind of subtle racial message in Wicked, or pass it by because they just came to enjoy a “show?” Much of America’s intellectual and political, perhaps spiritual life is, as Miss Austen would note, based on first impressions. 

One wonders if there is a second act in America.