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I’m often identified as someone who writes “issues” plays, but I’m less high-minded about my subject matter than I should probably admit. Generally, I don’t decide to write a play because I know I want to say something important about gun violence, military veterans, or the exploitation of young women—although I care deeply about these topics.

I’m activated to write about a subject when I have a Wait…What? moment. It’s what I call the moment when I find an idea so difficult to fathom that I react by saying to myself, sometimes out loud:

“Wait…what?”

I come across loads of stories where I think, I could write about that, but I feel no urgency.  A Wait… What? moment tells me that there’s a question begging to be investigated. And that if I don’t give it the attention it demands, someone nimbler will discover it and carry it forward. In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes that she imagines ideas floating in space, poking us until they get our attention. She argues that if an idea is generous enough to present itself, it is our responsibility to coax it over and incubate it—and to give it life by channeling it through our distinctly personal thoughts and experiences, and even our generational histories. Gilbert argues, and I would agree, that if you don’t embrace and dance with an idea that shows up for you, the rascal will float off and find someone worthy—like a jilted lover who suddenly understands their value.

Certain Wait… What? ideas land with an iron thunk so heavy I can’t ignore them if I try. In 2014 I read an article about a 95-year-old German woman who had just come forward to tell her story of being conscripted to be one of Adolf Hitler’s food tasters. She claimed that he chose only young women who were of “good German stock” to test his food for poison.

Wait…what? Just when I thought I had heard every abhorrent thing about Hitler, I learned he had people test his food for poison. He didn’t choose Jews, Poles, homosexuals, or members of any number of communities he hated for this job. Rather, he conscripted young German women who were ostensibly the future of the Reich—the anticipated bearers of his ideal Aryan children. I imagined a room of girls alternately amusing and turning against each other to kill time between meals; waiting to see if they would die.

Suddenly, through the lens of incredible, reportedly true events, I had my opportunity to work through long-simmering questions I had about the way society treats young women as expendable, and the dangers of complacency.

I told myself I would not write my H*tler’s Tasters idea before I could do airtight research. But then, in 2016, I took part in a 48-hour playwriting challenge. Each participant got a sealed envelope containing writing prompts, and we had 48 hours to create a play—the only rule was that we could never look back and edit what we had written. The process is grueling, but also thrilling, in the way that you don’t have time to censor yourself.

I hadn’t researched the “tasters” at all at that point, but as soon as I broke the envelope’s seal, I felt the play screaming to be revealed. So I wrote. I set the story around 1944, but I gave the girls cell phones. I didn’t want them to feel like sepia-toned people in history. It felt critical that we could recognize our daughters, sisters, friends, and ourselves in the young women conscripted to do this terrible job for a madman. Forty-eight fuzzy hours later I had my first draft of H*tler’s Tasters. I started the hard work of investigating those threads that would make the play less impulsive and more grounded.

The line between past and present blurred. I was stunned to find that the rhetoric I heard during the 2016 election cycle paralleled those of 1930s and ’40s Germany—sometimes word for authoritarian word. Wait…What? I double- and triple-checked my sources to be sure. Vile rants about women during the 2016 campaign reinforced and deepened the intensity of scenarios I created for my female tasters.

Later on, when Trump firings ensued—underlings blamed and even jailed for offenses that came from the very top—I noticed another striking parallel. The young German women of H*tler’s Tasters were ostensibly at the top of society, and were sacrificed without a second thought. Ultimately, a tyrant will turn on his own. No amount of privilege will save any of us.

When I started working on my newest play, Room 1214, the Wait…What was more like, Wait… What the F***?  While researching another project, I had the great honor of meeting Ivy Schamis, a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Two students in Ms. Schamis’ classroom were killed when a young gunman, swastikas etched into his combat boots and the bullets in his gun, shot his way through the school on February 14, 2018.

I thought I knew all the details of that event. But I hadn’t realized that Ms. Schamis was teaching a Holocaust history class—students literally studying hate crimes—when the shooting took place. Wait… What? Room 1214 became my attempt to make sense of a seemingly endless well of hate, and our collective cultural ability to shrug, shake our heads, and go back to business as usual.

Can we learn anything new about our personal and universal sins by sitting in an off-Broadway theater? When I get into an existential crisis about my time spent writing, wondering if there’s a better way to serve the world, I remind myself what the author Kazuo Ishiguro said in his Nobel Prize lecture, “…stories are about one person saying to another, This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”

When the Wait… What strikes, it sparks something in me that desperately needs to connect, to know if this feeling of pained disbelief resonates with anyone else. If Elizabeth Gilbert’s theory is correct, then perhaps there is some metaphysical design that causes ideas to circle back in search of a medium, demanding we wrestle with them until, perhaps, we assign them their deserved value.

We live in a time when we are besieged with information, when it’s easy to feel numb to absurdity and bad news. I offer that sitting in a theater, collectively breathing and receiving stories, we experience a collision of past, present, and future in a space where everyone is vulnerable. The playwright offers her work to be scrutinized. The actors lay bare their bodies to sink into someone else’s skin. The audience members open themselves up to myriad discomforts—from turning off their phones for a couple of hours to watching a bitter truth on stage.

In that small moment in time, in the dark, we have the time and space to collectively feel the Wait…What together. Perhaps it is here, where strangers seem safe instead of suspicious, that we can open ourselves up to reckon with the sins of our past and their implications for our collective future.

The post A Playwright’s ‘Wait … What?’ Approach to Difficult History appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What can we do?

As we stare at a broken world, malignant and sense-deadening, what response—as thinking, feeling people—are we left to have? What action can we take? No matter who we are, it seems that we are stuck, our ability to make positive change stalemated, our governing system overheated thanks to the mounds of sand thrown into its gears over decades by prevaricators and other malefactors. Our hearts break at the seemingly daily list of purposeless tragedies at home and abroad, and our minds struggle with the magnitude of suffering, the sheer droning monotony of frequent exposure threatening to make us inured—accustomed to the worst of life and hardened into inaction.

We have become equally habituated to lies and falsehoods, to gaslighting and hot air and harangues against all who challenge a lie that’s passing as the truth. In our era of alternative facts and post-truth, it’s no wonder we are at loggerheads about what is true. Even phrases such as “We hold these truths to be self-evident” seem jejune.

In the face of an avalanche of lies, how should the artist respond for the sake of truth?

Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgement to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons.

This is the beginning paragraph from Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 essay entitled “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties.” Nearly 90 years later, these words by the-greatest-playwright-of-all-time-not-named-Shakespeare take the fractured light of our own political and cultural moment of truth and come to life again.

Granted, not all of the essay stands the test of time. Written in Denmark, where Brecht lived for six years in exile after fleeing the rise of Hitler, much of the essay feels stuck in its own particularities. But if its factual correlations were removed, or replaced with examples from our own time and world, might the essay still hold true? Brecht observes that the “Five Difficulties” “are formidable problems for writers living under fascism, but they exist also for those writers who have fled or been exiled; they exist even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails.” Post-January 6th, with a weaponized, extremist Supreme Court of the land and civil disunion growing seemingly every day no matter what we do, our civil liberties are drying up like Lake Mead in front of our eyes. My Brother’s/Sister’s Keeper? Not bloody likely.

The problem with writing the truth, as Brecht explains, is that not all truths are created equal. There are general truths that confer importance; platitudes about the triumph of the human spirit or the wickedness of the world may be momentarily intoxicating, but they don’t do a lot. Such lower-hanging fruit might seem ripe for telling, since harder truths are never easily ascertained. Facts demand study and thought, and can be hard to unearth because they are often and everywhere suppressed. That is neither general nor easy. Such truths grow high on the tree—high enough to break your neck. And according to Brecht’s thesis, these harder truths are written to produce a result—or even better, an action—in someone else’s life.

The prevaricators of Brecht’s time and ours have an intense dislike for significant change. “They would like to see everything remain the same—for a thousand years if possible,” Brecht writes. “They would love it if sun and moon stood still.” It takes quite a bit of courage “to speak truth to power”—a phrase coined by the great Bayard Rustin to describe the battle for civil and gay rights and against the hard truths of our own American shamelessness and treachery—and it demands just as much keenness as ever from the artist to recognize the truth amidst the stress of a million constant distractions, siren songs, and insincerities. The writer must indeed manipulate the truth as a weapon, if for no other reason than to fight back against the thousand cuts of bald-faced lies we receive every time we open our device of choice.

Although there is a not-so-hidden pejorative in the word, manipulation more positively translates as choreography—composing a sequence of steps and directing the elements to produce a desired effect. Weaponizing the word gives it a martial spin, as in developing the proper stance to deliver a blow. But we all know that it will take more than one good punch to fell the heavyweight champion of lies that reigns over our time.

But to convey the truth in an active way, one needs not just deftness but cunning. An invention is necessary: a devised machine engineered to speed the process of an action, designed to spread truths in novel ways around obstacles and past the difficulties of widespread falsehoods, using ingenious methods that appeal to each person’s sense of what is unjust. Injustice generates the force of the current.

Plays are staged actions awaiting the response of real people. Almost every time, the general response is the expected ovation (seated or standing), followed by the drive home and the invariable drink or two before bed and the promise of a new day. But, when the play or playwright is special, the on-stage action causes reactions that far outdistance simple entertainment. Sometimes a play is not just a play, but a kind of Trojan Horse for change.

Plays are constructs, vessels to fill with the intention to take us places. The truly amazing thing about them is that the creator is never quite sure whether their intentions will be fulfilled or not, and the viewer/reader can only watch as the play will either meet their expectations or reverse off them. Certain truths are indeed self-evident in the play, but the harder truths are by needs up in the air—open-ended, contingent on where we stand and what’s at stake in our lives.

That is possibly where the mysterious nature of plays factors in—namely, their prismatic ability to bend the light of the moment and to mean more than the sum of their parts. Though Brecht was dogmatic in his politics, his plays (by nature of being so very good) refuse to fly under any one flag. The free will he cannot help but give his characters fights against dogma, and the copious amounts of suffering and poverty he pours upon his protagonists inspire compassion, empathy and understanding from his audience. The larger human truth shines through the slant of action in Brecht’s dramatis personae, as they would in any really good play. Among many other reasons, his greatest characters ring true because they are agents of change.

When in The Good Person of Szechwan the good Shen Teh is forced to mask her identity, splitting not only her values but her personality and gender, in order to survive a decidedly godless world, or when Galileo, in the eponymous play, is publicly forced by the Inquisition to recant his scientific discoveries and destroy his reputation yet secretly smuggles out his new book for dissemination abroad, both characters are engaging in active and soul-killing betrayals of their society and their own hard-won identities. But not all betrayals are created equal in a changing world. Does betraying the betrayer—even if it’s you—get the truth past the gatekeepers? Both Shen Teh and Galileo are willing to take the chance.

While Brecht’s essay “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties,” provocative as it may be, gets stuck in its historical correlatives, Brecht’s plays are free to make new connections and sever old ones, as need be. Their very dramatic choreography demands that they balance militancy with strategy as the world changes all around them. Brecht’s essential political point of view may not change, but—because of the cunning of their artistry, more cunning than even their creator could control—his characters’ interactions constantly pick up or slough off the lived experience of their audience, then and now. In their moments of ignominy, the characters seem to lose everything yet gain hard-won knowledge that they pass to us, if we’ll take it. They don’t resemble us, and we wouldn’t want to be them—yet we are.

A world away, a very different writer and revolutionary wrote:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

Emily Dickinson knew what Brecht was searching for—that there’s a certain slant of light that reveals the truth. Perhaps, the slant itself is where the truth lies. And perhaps, despite the myriad difficulties, the truth’s superb surprise is only an invention away.

The post Writing the Truth in a World of Lies appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A man leaps into the air. The theater audience gasps, then relaxes as he safely lands. Jan Karski—scholar, diplomat, World War II Polish Resistance fighter, and the messenger who brought news of the then-secret Holocaust to the world when there was still time to stop it—has just escaped from Gestapo custody into the literal arms of Polish Resistance fighters, who will nurse him back to health.

The actor playing Karski, David Strathairn, tells the audience in Karski’s melodious Eastern European accent that after the escape, the Gestapo rounded up 100 Poles in retaliation. And executed 32 of them.

“Thirty-two lives for his one,” the play’s co-author, Clark Young, told me—describing the scene as a “profound moment of failure and trauma” for the protagonist.

The burden of Karski’s mission was tremendous, Young and co-author Derek Goldman highlight in their one-man play Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, which opens off-Broadway this month. The show debuted in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2019 and played at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in the fall of 2021, which is when I saw it.

The play is a powerful reminder of Karski’s principles—truth and valor in the face of forces more powerful than you. The playwrights have shared Karski’s life and work with students at Georgetown University, where the real-life Jan Karski taught international relations. They and inclusive pedagogy specialist Ijeoma Njaka have been teaching a course focusing on the play since 2020.

During the play, the character of Jan Karski lands safely after jumping from a third-floor window to escape Gestapo custody. Photo by Rich Hein.

“It’s the kind of thing that truly inspires students, to see there is value even when you ‘fail,’” Young said. And Karski’s “failure” was truly profound: When world leaders did not act upon the proof of the Holocaust Karski delivered, millions died.

Like Karski, I was born in Łódź, Poland, and I also ended up in America, as he did after the war. When two childhood friends invite me to see Remember This in Chicago I initially balk. I struggle with the Polish part of my identity, distressed by developments in my homeland. But I revere Karski, so I go. And I am deeply grateful. Words and truth and witness—always an indelible part of my core—are so important, particularly today.

Jan Karski was born in 1914, and trained as a soldier and diplomat. He joined the fledgling Polish Resistance at the onset of World War II, after Poland was attacked by both Germany and Russia. Karski worked as a courier, delivering messages about clandestine German and Russian operations to the Polish government-in-exile in London. In late 1940, he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured for three days. He feared he would reveal secrets and tried to kill himself. The Gestapo took him to an army hospital, where he recovered from his suicide attempt and then escaped, a pivotal scene in the play.

Remember This opens in early World War II, when Germans established the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, forcing one-third of the city’s population into a section comprising just over two percent of its area. Leaders of the Jewish Underground arranged for Karski to enter the ghetto so he could report what was happening to the Polish government-in-exile, as well as to British and U.S. officials. He and Jewish and Polish Resistance fighters believed that if they told the world—if the Powers That Be realized what was happening—they might stop it.

Karski visited the ghetto twice in 1942 and saw the horrors we today know all too well: starvation and death and decay. Disguised as a camp guard, he later entered a transit camp from which thousands of Polish Jews were transported to Belzec death camp.

In 1943, Karski traveled to London and Washington to meet with Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Karski was told Churchill was too busy; he was passed off to the British foreign secretary. Karski met with FDR—who addressed him as “young man” and inquired about the fate of Poland’s horses, but did not ask a single question about Karski’s horrifying news about German Nazi death camps.

“You will tell your leaders that we shall win this war,” FDR told Karski. “The United States will not abandon your country.” But as we know, as Karski and the Jewish and Polish leaders would come to know, as the millions slaughtered would come to know, FDR and Churchill did not act to stop the Holocaust.

After his meeting with FDR, Karski stayed in the U.S. He published a memoir in early 1944, and earned his PhD from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service eight years later.

He taught at the university for 40 years, but did not speak publicly about his war activities for decades, until Claude Lanzmann interviewed him for the Holocaust documentary Shoah in 1985. In his first appearance in the film, Karski is silent for a few beats, breathing deeply. “Now, I go back,” he says. But he cannot. He breaks down and walks off screen. The trauma that still haunts him is painfully clear. Then he returns, and speaks.

In the documentary, Karski details his work with Szmul Zygielbojm, a Polish Jewish leader who figures prominently in the play. In a poignant scene, Karski reads a letter from Zygielbojm, written after the Warsaw Ghetto has been destroyed and most of Zygielbojm’s family has perished. Zygielbojm is anguished but still believes something can be done. “The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime,” the letter—a suicide note, it turns out—reads.

Zygielbojm hopes his final act of protest will finally spur action. But it does not.

A photo of the real-life Jan Karski on screen while the actor David Strathairn as Jan Karski stand on stage. Photo by Rich Hein.

That’s something that the Georgetown students passionately debate, Georgetown’s Njaka told me: What does it mean to tell, speak, live the truth in the face of such monumental opposition? They also discuss witnessing trauma that isn’t one’s own, especially relevant in many students’ passion for racial and social justice, she said.

It’s relevant to me too, and is why the plays affects me so.

Karski died in 2000. A decade later, I arrived in D.C. to attend journalism school and then went to work as a content director at the Polish embassy—where Karski had stayed when he came to warn FDR. I felt his presence everywhere: in the embassy’s hallways; in the robin’s-egg-blue main room where we held events and where he sits during the interviews I viewed on YouTube. On the anniversary of his death one hot July afternoon, I accompanied embassy officials to lay a wreath at his grave, on a sloping hillside in Mount Olivet Cemetery. The stone is stark, with just his and his wife’s names, and dates of birth and death. I also visited his memorial bench at Georgetown University—where Njaka held some of her classes on Karski this past fall.

When I watch Remember This, it is my first time in a theater since the pandemic began, and I am spellbound. I scribble notes in my program. I also weep—for Karski and his courage; for the Resistance fighters who helped him over and over again; and for today’s Poland: this small country that matters so much to me and my fellow Poles, but probably not to many others. I think about how one of the greatest sins against humanity was perpetrated on our soil and how terrible that legacy is. I think about the trauma that is so deep within those of us whose families were killed, and in those of us whose families survived.

Today’s Poland has veered away from Karski’s message of unity, humanity, and hope, embracing antisemitism and nationalism, declaring that the LGBTQ+ community is “an ideology worse than communism,” and enacting oppressive anti-choice laws.

Maybe this is why the current Polish government’s cruelty feels especially atrocious to me: You know better, I think. You know what it means when you define and vilify one part of a population as Other. You know what it means when people who can help, don’t.

At the end of the play, Karski says—about all he’s seen, all he’s witnessed: “It haunts me. And I want it to be so.”

I too was, and am, haunted. And I too want it to be so.

The post Why a Polish Resistance Fighter’s ‘Failure’ to Stop the Holocaust Resonates Today appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Like any great aphorism, the dramatist Anton Chekhov’s advice can be taken many ways. In our 21st century moment of constant and obsessive self-reflection, only exacerbated by the pandemic, the maxim rings truer than ever: Art and Life are not just connected—they reflect, permeate, and imitate one another.

This is great playwriting advice, but you don’t have to be a playwright to get the point. Life demands work if you want it to mean something, just as art demands work if you want it to truly play: that is, to happen in front of us, to engage and connect and challenge and jolt us into receptiveness.

I recently played hooky from work as a live artist to see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film Drive My Car. Based on Haruki Murakami’s eponymous short story, Drive My Car won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and has been nominated for four Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture. Like 2020’s Best Picture winner, Parasite, it has the chance to run the table.

But unlike Bong Joon-ho’s masterful cinematic provocation, this film plays on an entirely different strategy, burrowing down to the intertwined roots of its characters’ life and art.

Yūsuke Kafuku, the film’s main character, is an actor/director of international prominence who has a highly particular, even odd, method of staging plays—in this case, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Not only does he seek a multinational company of actors, but he wants them to speak in their own languages. The actors come from all over the Far East. Although English is the default language in rehearsal, individual cast members speak the lines of the play in Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog, and Japanese. The effect is at first blush a headscratcher: How is this going to work for an audience? How are the players supposed to understand one another?

It is not quite as eccentric or exotic as it may seem. Since the middle of the 20th century, multinational companies of actors, dancers, musicians, and others have formed and traveled widely through the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the Americas doing plays that treat audiences as partners in a style that is sometimes called “a walking theater.” Among an array of legendary theater directors working in this style—Grotowski, Serban, Mnouchshkine, LePage— the preeminent practitioner is Peter Brook, known for his work at the International Centre for Theatre Research (CIRT).

Brook—like the film’s main character, named Yūsuke Kafuku—works with great texts, including those by Chekhov. And they both use non-directional directing, wherein an actor discovers on their own, without the director telling them, who or what they are. Rather, the director’s job is to attempt to call forth existing emotions and connections within the actor. As Brook has said repeatedly in discussing his acting and training techniques, “Human connection is the essence of good theater.”

In this style, the theater is not the art of imitation, but the art of suggestion. “A move from one creates a tremor from another; an impulse from a third, an immediate chain reaction,” Brook has said. What is interesting and ultimately of great importance is the relation between one thing and another. For Brook, truth in the theater is always on the move, and people from very different backgrounds can partake, understanding each other and coming together without losing their essential nature. We come to see not only the player but the audience member truly as an individual. The invisible is made visible, and we realize our fundamental humanity beyond surface differences.

Easier said than done. But the exercise of investigating classic texts in this manner has made for some of the great art of the late 20th century, climaxed by Brook’s productions of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Vyasa’s The Mahabharata at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

These were emotional experiences as much as productions. For one thing, they were long; The Mahabharata ran well over five hours. With Chekhov, Brook cleared not only the stage but the entire theater space, leaving only the bare audience seats, thus creating a shell without artifice shared by the actors and the audience. In its 1988 review, the New York Times said: “By banishing all forms of theatrical realism except the only one that really matters—emotional truth—Mr. Brook has found the pulse of a play that its author called ‘not a drama but a comedy, in places almost a farce.’”

In this kind of work, categories fall away.

In the decades since those Brook productions, art has gone in different directions (as it should), and the experience of non-directional theater may well feel foreign for many people. Yet this kind of work creates powerful resonances in 2022, in the midst of our own present moment of polarity, around the world and in our own communities and families. It is harder than ever for us to simply sit together, breathe the same air, and enjoy our interconnectedness.

Our technology sorts us by category, separates our likes and dislikes, anticipates our choice-making based on past purchases and searches, and stresses our peculiar tastes, hermetically sealing us from new or different tastes. Our politics are tribal. Our economy is unbalanced. And nowhere is the wicket stickier than with the question of race.

The stress keeps separating us, striating our heart muscles. And that separation keeps us dependent on surface opinions and judgements of who is with us or against us, and of what is worthy of connection. All the resulting noise of our era leads us to facile conclusions and pat expectations. And so we find it more difficult to receive, harder to breathe, and nearly impossible to reconnect to our intertwining underground roots.

Perhaps that is why Drive My Car feels like an exercise in non-direction. In an age of movies running and trumping one another, this is very much a walking film, full of suggestion, breathing at its own pace, making the invisible visible, and stripping away artificial separations and categorizations. It may tonally be a drama, but it has elements of comedy and farce. It doesn’t tell you how to feel, but it does ask you to walk alongside—or, in this case, ride along in the car.

There is no real reason to do the kind of work Yūsuke Kafuku does, unless you want to learn something new—about yourself and the person sitting next to you, whether you know them or not—and unless you’re willing to let go of the wheel.

Letting go is precisely what happens through much of the film, particularly in the Uncle Vanya rehearsals. The work between the actors has gotten so minimal as to be telepathic. No one is telling them, or us, how the world works or how to feel about it. We are not being talked at. But we are being included directly in the investigation. We have been given license to enter the discussion.

“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” is a Zulu phrase made popular worldwide by the likes of the late Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela in the 1980s and 1990s, as they broke down apartheid in South Africa and strove to forgive the sins of their former oppressors. Although it can be translated many ways, the phrase basically means that a person is a person through other persons: “I am because you are—and since you are, definitely I am.”

Shared aims, shared needs, shared loves, and shared losses. A certain light appears, and something special begins to happen, something we would never have thought of alone, on our own. We live it together.

Putting on a play, writing a short story, making a film, or forgiving the guilty, takes work—lots of it. But when we experience that work as play, then it doesn’t feel like work anymore.

The post Can <em>Uncle Vanya</em> Work in Four Different Languages? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The level of stress we feel can be harder to cut than a Butterball turkey: Not only are we homing in on the family dinner table where so much that has determined us has happened, but this Diwali or Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or Christmas feast is a kind of recurring dream (or nightmare, as the case may be). We may not be thinking about it, but we are keeping the dead alive with each family reunion and culinary tradition. We are keeping customs so longstanding that we barely know their origins.

No wonder we feel a little crazy around the holidays.

And we continue to celebrate the pull of family ties even as they unravel, sometimes quite noticeably, all around us. It may seem as if our family identities are experiencing a forced reboot where preferred pronouns, critical race theory debates, and a million other powder kegs threaten to blow up the system—even before the turkey gets carved. We feel our present moment is especially fraught, even though our predecessors sometimes literally stepped through minefields to make their way home to hearth and family, even when it meant sitting across from John Birchers, segregationists, religious bigots, and worse.

Still, this year’s feast may seem like the last straw. Was it ever thus, or have we finally come to the family tipping point? Will this be our last supper before the great cancelling? Knowing the carnage to come, should we even come home at all? Are the ties that bind stronger than the tribalistic othering of our extended family’s persecutions?

Has coming home for the holidays become the definition of craziness?

We are likely to never know our whole family story, and we are probably lucky that we don’t—but it’s all still there underneath the silt of Time, affecting our actions and relationships through the sediment in unexpected ways. We are related to and loved by individuals who have survived wars and other global catastrophes just to get here, who have made choices and espoused beliefs antithetical to everything we care about, who may barely condone our life choices, and yet who share our blood. This is the primordial ooze that glazes our table’s honey-baked ham.

Indeed, we are indentured to family; it’s in the word itself—family. The Latin famulus is a servant or slave, and the historical idea of family goes beyond lineage to estate, property, and the collective value of a domestic household. We may adhere to it or rebel from it, but we will always have its mark on us.

The faddish interest in family trees and finding our roots makes sense, not only in trying to get beyond what we already know of parents and grandparents, but in helping us determine a narrative thread amid what is otherwise a tangle of opposing family values. Sepia photos seem less controversial than the talking heads on Fox or MSNBC. Perhaps genetic ancestry can bring us all together and off the firing line.

DNA may not lie—but what does it all really tell us? What meanings can we cobble together from racial and ethnic percentages on pie charts? What does a ship’s manifest really say about the long-lost antecedent emigrating from pogrom or famine? Perhaps it connects us to world history writ large enough to read in the dark. But the family mystery remains: Who were they really? Would they have understood me? Sure, we’re family, but might we have been friends? And beneath the old-world fashions and foreign names, what secret madness were they hiding?

Out of this fundament of doubt arises the family play. Of course, the genre exists also on film and in novels, but on stage the family play has grown roots so deep that they intertwine with the electrics and the plumbing and threaten to raise the floorboards. It would seem that the theater was made for teasing out the knots of ancestry one sin at a time.

We Americans are particularly good at dramatizing such narrative threads, but we certainly don’t own the rights. The Mahabharata, the immense Sanskrit epic about cousins who go to war over politics, sexism, and immorality penned by Srila Vyasadeva and Ganesha, recounts events from more than 5,000 years ago, 2,500 years before Oedipus Rex appeared. In the intervening millennia we have been inundated with families misbehaving in ways we can’t unsee. But you don’t have to carve your own eyes out of your head to get the underlying point: The families on stage are extreme versions of the ones we go home to.

In this moment of trigger warnings, let it be said that all family plays are triggers and that good plays trigger with intent. They zero in on past trauma and make it present and immediate. They cause a very specific kind of emotional distress: The audience, transported by memory, may find itself unable to remain present in the moment—yet it cannot look away, it cannot press pause.

Birthrights, grudges, feuds, illicit unions, and deeply buried secrets keep us watching even when we don’t want to. According to my mother, my own father sat watching all four acts of Eugene O’Neill’s great mid-century play Long Day’s Journey into Night while obsessively gnawing the skin off the cuticle of his thumb. Did he recognize his own mother in the doomed Mary Tyrone? Did Mary’s doomed son Edmund’s psychic stress reflect his own love/hate relationship to a family torn apart by the American Depression?

I wish I could have asked him. But when I am gnawing at my own thumb while writing my own versions of the family play, I realize that writers are, in a way, cannibals when we attempt to tell the tale of those who came before, tearing at themselves in the piteous search for the narrative thread. Mary Tyrone was not my father’s mother, nor was Edmund my father. Yet somehow, they trod the same narrative path with my father over the same Donner Pass in the dead of bleak midwinter. And watching it made him chew his own flesh.

But it doesn’t always have to be like that. In 1931, Thornton Wilder wrote The Long Christmas Dinner, a play where 90 years go by without a pause in the action. This is a narrative thread on an epic scale yet told in just a few scant minutes. Life courses come and go without fanfare but with love. Characters enter from a portal decorated with fruit and flowers and exit through another hung with black velvet. They age in front of us with little or no physical alteration, and the audience must examine a life span all at once.

The result is funny and tragic, often at the same time. Although no specific dialogue presages the specific rancor of our political tribalism, we get the sense that the holiday table is a place where family unloads upon one another their frustrations and fears—same as it ever was. “Every last twig is wrapped around with ice. You almost never see that,” remarks the unofficial family historian of the play and the character most aware of Time passing, Young Genevieve, not knowing that her mother observed the same thing years before, and that her daughter-in-law will make the same remark years from now at the same table. But, thanks to the telescoped nature of the piece, the audience remembers. They can’t forget, and they wouldn’t want to.

We are all the crazy children of parents too difficult to forget. Nature, nurture, love, damage: It’s all there at the family dinner table, somewhere between the rice and peas and the alcohol, and sometimes it might seem like it’s just too much to bear—especially when the narrative thread gets frayed.

Plays are both prompts and provocations. They point to the madness of our ancestors to help us understand the instabilities of our own lives, tendrils of triggering hostilities growing deep down just under the festive tablecloth. We differ more by degree than kind; we may share DNA or the scars of war, but at least we have perspective, as Shakespeare tells us, “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Whether in the hands of Sophocles, O’Neill, Wilder, or the scores of other playwrights, the family play helps us see that aside from the birthing and the dying, our experiences are not all that different from each other’s. We are all a little crazy and a lot unforgettable. It is quite literally all in the family. The madness is both intrafamilial and interfamilial. Whatever madness awaits you at home for the holidays, not only will you get through it, but you’ll likely see—or have already seen—aspects of it on stage at some point. Perhaps your reflection will help you get through the next meal amongst those who made you what you are.

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But this isn’t a story about America in the 21st century. It’s a story about ancient Greece in 430 B.C.E. That year, a mysterious disease (likely typhus or typhoid fever) hit the crowded city-state of Athens. Already burdened by being at war with Sparta, the Athenians sought guidance from a long-standing source of wisdom: ghosts.

The belief in ghosts was so well refined among the ancient Greeks that there were three different categories of the spectral beings: the deceased who were not buried with the proper rituals, those who suffered premature or untimely deaths, and victims of violence, including casualties of war. If someone died under those circumstances, it was felt that the soul was caught between two worlds, and could not move on to the Greek concept of the afterlife. Sometimes, this lack of final fulfillment was so great that a ghostly spirit could appear among the living, occasionally set on revenge.

The Greeks also believed that the ghosts of the dead had special knowledge to share with the living, coming to their rescue to provide advice on what to do in difficult situations. A mysterious pandemic was just the kind of dilemma in which the ancient Greeks would seek out some spectral advice—and one of the easiest haunts to find ghosts in ancient Greece was, arguably, the stage.

Ancient Greeks enthusiastically supported their theater, and in fact, historians believe that the outdoor theater of Dionysus in Athens remained open during the pandemic, even drawing large crowds. And stage-ghosts, or eidolon, common in ancient Greek dramas, were a device to offer words of wisdom to audiences from beyond the grave.

The classical Greek dramatist Aeschylus is one of the best known for utilizing ghosts in his plays. Knowing that the wisdom of ghosts would carry far more weight than the word of flesh-and-blood human characters, Aeschylus used them for important storylines in some of his most notable works. In his drama The Libation Bearers, for instance, the lead characters, Orestes and his sister Electra, summon the ghost of their late father, Agamemnon, in hopes that his spirit will provide guidance for how to punish his murderer—Agamemnon’s wife and their mother, Clytemnestra. The spirits of the dead were believed to hover near their final resting place and could be called upon to work either for good or for evil. Electra pays a visit to Agamemnon’s tomb, where she pours libations (an important part of the proper Greek burial ritual, usually consisting of wine, water, honey or oils) on his gravesite in hopes of conjuring his ghost. She is successful, and Agamemnon’s ghostly counsel helps Orestes succeed in murdering Clytemnestra.

Aeschylus continued this genre of ghost tales with The Eumenides, which opens after Clytemnestra’s death. Now it is her ghost that is seeking vengeance. But just when it seems she will initiate another round of revenge killings, a group of spirits called the Furies come to the rescue and put an end to the cycle of violence. The Furies were originally considered to be the vengeance-fixated ghosts of murder victims, but Aeschylus has them act as a force for justice here, reflecting the fact that as Greek society evolved, the Furies also become known as the titular Eumenides, or the “Kindly Ones.” This softened stance toward the spirits no doubt would have soothed anxious Athenians watching in plague times, who may have thought what was happening around them was a curse from their pantheon of gods. While the Greeks worshipped their gods, they knew they might mete out punishment to humans on a whim or as part of an inter-deity competition. The benevolence of the kinder, gentler Furies might reassure Athenians that the plague was not necessarily a penalty for warring with Sparta, for instance.

It was not just Greek tragedies in which ghosts made their presence known on stage. Ancient Greek comedy also featured their own ghostly guest spots. There are references by writers from the Classical period, for example, to the comic Greek playwright Eupolis, who lived in Athens during the time of the 430 B.C.E. plague. In his play Demes, Eupolis suggested how life in Athens might ultimately get back to a “new normal” again through ghosts of the great Athenian statesmen Aristides, Pericles, and Solon. Unfortunately, their exact dialogue has been lost to us, but Athenian audiences were likely able to gain historical perspective from the satiric spirits who offered comedic advice to the embattled city-state (experts traditionally believe Demes was written around 412 B.C.E. after another Athenian disaster, in this case the military expedition to Sicily). Their presence, after all, was a reminder that life in ancient Greece had never been without tribulation. Yet society continued on.

Like the ancient Greeks during their time of plague, people today living through the time of COVID may find their own solace in seeking out ghostly counsel. It is no coincidence that the advent of spiritualism in the United States rose greatly in popularity after such deadly cataclysms as the Civil War and World War I. People wanted to hear from their lost loved ones, to know that they were happy in the afterlife, and seek insight into a bewildering present and an unknown future.

While popular culture today has expanded to include ghostly offerings on everything from television to TikTok, maybe the Athenians were onto something when it came to stage-ghosts. Archaeological evidence suggests ancient Greeks saw a connection between theater and healing. So, as was the case in smaller towns around the Greek countryside, a temple to Asklepios, the god of healing, was built adjacent to the theatre of Dionysus in Athens. And so, when plague patients would have been brought to the temple, it may have been felt that listening to a play nearby aided in their recovery—and, perhaps, with the help of some eidolon even offered them a bit of solace.

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Even if you can’t stand the religion or politics of your local churches, you might find their congregations to be valuable saviors—of your historic and endangered movie theaters.

In other words, please think twice before engaging in a holy war like the one in Fresno over the historic Tower Theater.

The Tower, first opened in 1939, is an arrow-shaped, Streamline Moderne gem anchoring a neighborhood of retail, restaurants, and arts known as the Tower District. But, like so many of California’s signature theaters, it has struggled, especially in the pandemic. So, the theater’s owner is trying to sell. The owner’s preferred buyer is an evangelical church that has opposed same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ministers.

As a practical matter, church takeovers of old theaters make sense. Movies and live shows are often not enough to support the expensive upkeep of these dilapidated palaces. Churches with growing congregations can regularly fill the seats while raising money for maintenance and improvements—and keeping the space available to the community for events and screenings.

But these are polarized, not practical, times. And many growing churches are non-traditional, evangelical, or politically conservative, and thus don’t fit the more secular and progressive entertainment districts where you find old theaters.

In some places, churches and their neighbors look past their differences and focus on their shared interest in the old buildings. Responsible churches agree to preserve and maintain theaters they take over, in exchange for neighborhoods accommodating the traffic or parking headaches of hosting a congregation. Fresno has seen something like that happen when churches took over other theaters.

But at the Tower Theater, conflicts between the church, the theater owner, and the community have escalated, turning a neighborhood problem into statewide controversy.

To summarize: during the pandemic, the Tower Theater owner allowed Adventure Church, a largely Latino congregation located elsewhere in the Tower District, to hold services there (a questionable decision given COVID-19’s perils). Adventure liked it so much that, when Tower’s owner put the property up for sale late last year, the church agreed to purchase it—and keep it open for shows and non-profit events.

But when word of the purchase agreement leaked, many people in the Tower District understandably saw the transfer of the iconic theater to the church not just as a threat to the theater but as an attack on the spirit of the artsy, inclusive neighborhood. A petition opposing the sale circulated widely, and weekly Sunday protests grew. Local businesses also questioned whether zoning permitted having a church there, and thus whether Adventure’s presence might create zoning or licensing problems for bars and cannabis businesses.

The anti-church protests soon drew counter-protestors from right-wing groups, and police erected barriers to keep them separate. Either the church or the theater owner—it’s not clear whom—raised the political temperature by displaying a tribute to the late right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, infamous for his homophobic rhetoric, on the theater marquee. California media, obsessed with culture wars, fueled the controversy with their coverage.

The conflict grew from there. The Tower property includes restaurants; one of them sued to block the sale, saying its own agreement entitled it to purchase the property. Fresno’s mayor, seeking to defuse the situation, offered the church an alternative property, which Adventure turned down. Other city officials floated the idea of taking the theater by eminent domain. There is also considerable talk of other people or institutions who might want to buy the place.

If the neighborhood can find a savior for the theater less problematic than Adventure, that would be wonderful. But there are reasons to doubt whether a relatively poor city government like Fresno’s, or a restaurant, can successfully operate an old and costly theater. If that’s the case, then Adventure or another church might end up being the best option, and it could be smart for the community to hold its nose and negotiate.

Yes, I can hear the howls at the idea of any compromising with an anti-gay church. But a keep-your-enemies-close approach makes more sense. Adventure is already in the Tower District, whether it occupies the theater or not. And if you’re going to have to put up with such a church, why not try to benefit from its presence, by getting it to fix up and preserve the Tower? And if you want the church to stop spreading hate, what better way than to engage with the church, with the goal of changing the hearts and minds of the congregation?

I’ve witnessed this more conciliatory approach bear fruit in two California places. One is Redding, where the huge Bethel Church, and its School of Supernatural Ministry, have long been controversial. Bethel has supported gay conversion therapy and attempts to perform miracles such as using prayer to resurrect a dead toddler. Yet when Redding’s civic auditorium was in trouble, Bethel Church and its members, even in the face of considerable criticism and fear of the church in the community, helped form a non-profit, Advance Redding, to save and manage the auditorium. The deal has been a civic success, with the auditorium hosting a variety of shows and the ministry school making rent payments to support the facility.

The other theater is literally around the corner from my San Gabriel Valley home. The historic Rialto, which famously played itself in movies (as the murder scene in Robert Altman’s The Player, and as the date spot where Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone watch old movies in La La Land) sat vacant and decaying for nearly a decade until Mosaic Church, a growing mega-church with congregations from Hollywood to Mexico City, moved in.

There was some community resistance to the church’s arrival, and concern for what the theater might become. Mosaic is not my cup of tea—I attended services, and while I liked the diverse and young congregation, your cynical columnist cringed at the pop-style music and the over-the-top positivity of the message.

But, three years later, Mosaic is undeniably a neighborhood asset. The church has carefully helped repair the theater, and taken care to keep the place open and welcoming to the community.

Before the pandemic, Mosaic was even screening movies on the Rialto’s giant screen. One of the last films we saw before COVID-19 hit was a Mosaic-sponsored showing of Miracle on 34th Street, the classic Christmas film about having faith in people whose beliefs we do not share.

The post Why Not Let the Church You Loathe Save the Theater You Love? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I couldn’t stop crying. God, I prayed, I need a break, I need a win, and I need some of this grace.

In one fell swoop last spring, the pandemic took away some of the biggest opportunities of my career:

1. My first lead on a TV show, a series regular role that never ended up happening. It officially got scrapped because it needed a live studio audience and one of the cast members sadly and unexpectedly died from an aneurism.
2. Three international speaking gigs at large festivals.
3. Another TV job in the mecca, New York City.
4. And the chance to do my one-man show, The Real James Bond… Was Dominican!, on a multiple city tour.

Just like that, I went from being poised to make more money in a month than what I’d earned in my entire life to praying that my unemployment would go through and that paying rent wouldn’t become an issue (it did).

This pandemic may have challenged my financial security and my physical safety, but worst of all, it took away my place of worship: the stage.

Many months into the pandemic, my heart was still filled with fears and doubts around whether I chose the right profession, whether I would ever recover mentally from a severe depression, and if I had invested too much time and money in being an artist.

And then I watched Aretha singing in that church full of souls ready to receive and give, celebrate and sing, and be moved.

And grace my Fears relieved
How precious did
That grace appear
The hour I first believed.

That was a tipping point. I needed this reminder of grace, and more importantly, I needed to remember the power of what happens when people gather and celebrate.

Through many dangers
Toils and snares
We have already come
‘Twas grace hath brought
Us safe thus far
And grace will lead us home

This whole pandemic, I was so focused on surviving and feeling better that I never made space to grieve.

I was born in New York City; the theater is what unlocked my magic. Seeing John Leguizamo’s one-man shows at 15 years old was a reminder that there was room for someone who looked like me. Witnessing a man of color being heard, being received—a Latin man, specifically, who comes from where I come from—was a revelation. I knew right then that I wanted to be on that stage one day. Those communal gathering between audience and performer has been holy to me even since.

Aretha was born into the church, her father was a pastor, and the choir was where she found her magic, put in her time, and got to share her gifts. Church for her was not just a place of worship to a god, but a home for her craft, a place to express her love.

Seeing Aretha on stage, I finally let myself weep for the loss of that great love. As she blessed others and was blessed in return, I remembered that’s what performance does—it feeds us, it generates hope. We need these spaces of performance, temples of song and chanting, churches of theater, art, dance, devotion, and love.

Who knows when we will stand in front of a packed-ass house again? It’s something to grieve, desire, daydream, and have absolute rage about. I’d give anything to be in a slow tech rehearsal right now.

Live performance contributes more than $760 billion annually to the U.S. economy, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. But two-thirds of performers are now unemployed. Millions of people who have dedicated their whole lives to doing one thing—a thing many people probably told them they were crazy for pursuing—can’t make a living at it right now. The arts have always been vulnerable, and now they’re in an even more precarious of a situation.

Of course, even without income or rent money, most of the artists I know in Los Angeles are still making art. Many theater companies are doing so at an extraordinary rate—La Mama and Culture Hub, for example, are producing shows on a weekly basis from artists all over the world, while creating and pioneering innovative online video conferencing platforms for performing and sharing a theatrical experience—because Zoom, Skype, and Google Hangout are certainly not the most aesthetically pleasing of platforms.

Even though the best virtual space still lacks the intimate magic and shared energy of a packed room, it is sorely needed. It may not allow for the traditional covenant between artist and performer—that we have both entered a new space together, and will stay for however long we will both agree to be present here, without a screen between us, without the distractions of our home, poor internet connection and improper lighting. But it still raises morale, creates community, and lightens the darkness.

How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me

It’s about halfway through her rendition of “Amazing Grace” when Aretha herself starts crying. Then there isn’t a dry eye in the house; everyone is letting something go, being moved, and finding what they need.

Ungrieved losses become open wounds, and open wounds hurt, they fester, and they grow, unless we let them go. That’s what performance does, that’s what art does. It feeds us, it generates hope in us, and it allows us to see, stop, and take a step back.

Only then, only when I stop rushing, only when I am able to be still, can I begin to grieve, to see what still hurts, and recognize that I’ll never gain back all that was lost. Only by taking the space to grieve can I recognize that others are also grieving—that I am not alone in this.

In the essay Notes on Grief, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes, “Grief is forcing new skins on me.” Grieving provides me with the strength and tools to be present in the face of so much that is scary and uncomfortable. It gives me patience as I learn new things about myself and watch old wounds come to the surface. It builds a new skin of kindness around me, and it reminds me I didn’t make a mistake choosing to be an artist. I don’t have to doubt all my life choices, and that I’m not alone.

Grieving strengthens my commitment to creating more art that will be shared in safe and healing environments in which listening can take place and habits can be transformed. And it gives me a new level of appreciation for gathering, the energy of other people, shared sweat in hot rooms, contagious laughter and contagious tears, and the thunderous roar of an applause.

“And grace will lead us Home,” sings Aretha, and my thoughts turn to the stage, a home as far back as I can remember. Who knows when we’ll be together again—in our churches, homes, and places of worship—full to the brim with bodies, spirits, breath, hooting and hollering, energy, excitement, and anticipation.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus knows he can never return to how things were before he leaves Ithaca to fight in the Trojan War, but he keeps sailing all those long, lonely years. He finds courage and resilience in the face of all that is hostile, unfair, shitty, and indifferent in the hopes of returning home with new eyes and a renewed spirit.

They say that grief has steps. I feel like calling them steps is really misleading, because it gives the illusion that coping with grief is a linear path, when in all actuality it is more like juggling many things all at once. While we all go through grief, none of us have the same experience.

My home has changed during this pandemic, many homes have changed, I have changed. There is a lot to juggle. Remembering and honoring that there is no right way to grieve the facts that loss and change have occurred gives me the strength to keep going. As the song goes,

I once was lost
But now I’m found
Was blind, but now I see.

The post The Pandemic Shoved Me Off the Stage. Then Aretha Franklin Opened My Eyes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When the new Confederate insurrectionists entered the Capitol on January 6 with their old battle flag, their white aggrievement, and their plan to sabotage the democratic transition of power, the American system held firm and stayed functional—barely. Now all of us are tasked with not only renewing the basic functionality of the Union but remaking it, and there’s not a moment to lose. “Build Back Better” may have sounded quaint a few months ago: Now it’s a mantra.

But how?

May I suggest that we look to playwriting for examples of reconstruction. The theatre is not a place for answers, but it is by nature a place for questions about what works and what doesn’t. If all good writing is rewriting, then all good construction is reconstruction.

Even the job title playwright denotes that the writer makes or builds their play, the way one might make or build a barrel or a wheel. Plays are constructs, and the best of them are built and rebuilt over time for optimal function.

Many wags have compared our current political players to Shakespeare as a way to read their characters, but I would prefer to focus on American plays—not simply to make pithy parallels, but to show how our theater history reflects our national history, and how playwrights and other theatre artists have struggled with that reflection, constructing and reconstructing over the decades. We own this history, whether we want to or not.

After all, Lincoln was shot while watching Our American Cousin. Although that play had an all-white cast, the post-Civil War Reconstruction was a time of minstrel shows and blackface. Stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (faithful and otherwise) played nationwide. One of the first known plays by an African American writer, The Escape, Or A Leap to Freedom, by William Wells Brown, was published in 1858 but did not receive a full production until 1871. If the Reconstruction had not been stopped in its tracks by the Compromise of 1876 and the KKK, then we might have seen more plays about the Black experience—possibly even with actual African Americans playing themselves.

It wouldn’t be until the Civil Rights Era that BIPOC artists finally constructed a stage of their own design and peopled it freely, giving voice and body to actual people of color. Productions such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), Ed Bullins’ Goin’ a Buffalo (1968), Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), and many more.

The dramatic breakthroughs didn’t only happen in cities. Using flatbed trucks as makeshift stages, playwright Luis Valdez reflected the fears and desires, not to mention the comedy, of grape pickers on strike in Delano, California, with actos such as Quinta Temporada. Perhaps for the first time, the workers saw themselves.

The progress could be slow. Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman became the first Asian American play to receive a major New York production—but not until 1972. It would be longer still before Native American playwrights could bring their stories to light on stage. But they did, with time. As Civil Rights legislation addressed our original sin of discrimination and reconstructed something closer to equity in housing, voting, and policing, American plays such as these put dark meat on the bone.

These plays have inspired new work on both stage and film ever since; they help us not just to see, but to feel what it was like to be a person of color in America in a time when discrimination still ruled. They question power. They zero in on the cracks in the monolith, and they summon drama to break through to the other side—whether in terms of race, gender, economics, or any other identifiers used to divide and monetize us.

Perhaps, in order to reconstruct for better function, we need a bit of deconstruction too—particularly when it comes to ideals and concepts. Plays don’t just mean what we think they mean today, because meaning changes over time. What signified as progressive in the 19th century may look regressive now. It’s inevitable that the progressive constructs of our moment will one day look chintzy, wrongheaded, ignorant. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying to point to the painful places where America can improve to build back as best we can.

Set in 1898 in “A Deep South of the Mind,” a play of mine called Ragged Time (1996) takes on the original sins of slavery and discrimination. In a scene between Abe the Newsboy, a Jewish immigrant and self-proclaimed hero of a thousand fights and Freda, the woman he loves, who happens to be an African American prostitute trying to pass, the following dialogue occurs:

ABE: This is history. You, me. Hell, we make our own history. No matter
what happened in the past. This country is our slate—right now, right here—and we get to rub it clean. (a fighting pose) I’m the slate. And look at me now! Abe the Newsboy!
FREDA: (with disdain) Real clean.
ABE: I think so. I come a long way. And my kid is gonna come a long way
further. And his kid. And all the way, till we finally get to Zion. That’s what
a kid can be to folks like us. (tenderly) You done a bad t’ing. I done bad
t’ings too. But it’s got to stop. It’s got to stop! This is a free country!
FREDA: Nothing free. We both know that.
ABE: But one day it’ll be.

The “bad t’ing” here involves the sale of an abandoned Mexican boy, whom they might foster. Talk about an American nuclear family.

Plays of the New Reconstruction must not be cowed by “safetyism” and censorship. Trigger warnings are fine, but plays are about triggers—and good ones are willing to shoot. If plays can’t tell it like it is, then they lose what power they have left. Plays test us, force characters to make choices, and follow the consequences—even when things get ugly.

In America Adjacent (2019), the brilliant young Filipino American playwright Boni B. Alvarez writes about a group of expectant mothers of so-called anchor babies. Their children will receive U.S. passports, but the mothers are beginning to wonder if America is all it’s cracked up to be.

Sampaguita, a Filipina from the provinces who speaks Visayan, not Tagalog, starts her American journey with youthful curiosity, but grows disillusioned. She begins to form her own judgement about the big lie about freedom, which feels more and more like a prison:

We hide in chairs, living in low volume, pretending to America we are not here … if we are willing to endure these hardships for our children, it means our country is not as good, no?” she asks. “If our country is not so good as the U.S., that means we, Filipinos, we are unimportant compared to Americans also. … It is as if—it seems if our islands drown in the ocean tonight, the world will not be affected. Like nothing happened. This is not true for America, I don’t think.

Speaking about his play, Alvarez told the Los Angeles Times: “I’m still trying to find my place. I think that’s why my plays don’t really offer solutions or timelines. My plays just offer you things to think about, from multiple lenses.”

We may have dodged the bullet of the New Confederacy on January 6, but plays of the New Reconstruction must imagine what might have happened had the bullet hit. In 1935, as Hitler solidified his half-nelson on the neck of the German people, Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, about a fictional American dictator’s rapid rise and the fall of democracy as we know it. No wonder the novel, and the play it became in 1936, have received renewed attention in the last five years.

The ancients desired catharsis in their staged tragedies so that they might cleanse and purify their minds and hearts, and thus renew, restore, and rebuild their human selves. Catharsis demands purgation. As in Lincoln’s time and during the Civil Rights Movement, we have reached a moment that calls us not only to bind open wounds, but to disinfect them.

Congresses and presidents and courts can only do so much. Art made by us and for us may well turn out to be the best disinfectant, its basic ingredients being truth, reconciliation, and recompense. These must go together if we are to ever truly sanitize the original sin of American injustice symbolized by the Confederate battle flag. Truth is essential. Reconciliation is a choice. Recompense is long overdue.

That’s why we need writers nationwide to engage directly in our New Reconstruction. Last year at USC’s School for Dramatic Arts, the actor David Warshofsky and I created New Theatre For Right Now, an event that will take place each fall, inviting actors and writers in our Master’s of Fine Arts program to deal head-on with the problems of our immediate present—from pandemic to protest, from climate change to loneliness. This and future years will give our student artists a new palate of themes from which to choose.

Chances are good that the next generation of United Statesians will be wondering how to build back the broken aspects of the national cultural institutions we hold dear. Writers can and should do the same. As one rebuilds a corroded barrel or a busted wheel, the new work of playwrights needs to test the function and then reconstruct our sense of who we really are, how we really feel, and why the Confederate battle flag and other symbols of injustice have no place in the Capitol, or anywhere else.

If thought moves at the speed of sound, then feeling moves at the speed of light. As our political thinkers in Washington, D.C., sound out ideas post-insurrection, what feelings will inspire change in the dramas yet to be told?

The post Can Playwrights Lead the Next American Reconstruction? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.