EXCHANGING ‘CHALLENGES AND VISIONS’

The flap that gripped Baltimore’s Theatre of Nations over the exclusion of the National Theatre of Great Britain’s production of “Animal Farm” had its reverberations on the ivy-covered Smith College campus here, where the thoroughly American Theatre Communications Group recently held its sixth biennial conference.

“Animal Farm” was eventually allowed to go on in Baltimore, but was separated from the festival by the International Theatre Institute, sponsor of the event, after the Soviets objected to its anti-totalitarian message. (What had they expected?) The contretemps brought cries of censorship from the National’s Sir Peter Hall (and the later withdrawal, on the same grounds, of a $45,000 grant to the festival by the U.S. Information Agency).

Meanwhile, the circumstances were just sticky enough to prompt Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, president of ITI, to cancel his Northampton appearance. (No reason was officially offered, but he had been scheduled to follow the National’s associate director, John Faulkner, in a Saturday slot, which may have been too close for comfort.)

Politics of all kinds are hardly new to conferences of this nature. The Theatre Communications Group is a valuable, multifaceted service organization for nonprofit resident theaters nationwide. Its membership includes some of the regional theater’s most prominent activists, and one of its principal services may be this bringing together at the well those artists who might otherwise touch only peripherally.

Delegates use these occasions, as one of them put it, “to work the room.” Personal contacts are made, or renewed, new connections established. Conversations over box lunches and late evening socials over plastic potato chips may be the most productive of the sessions--planned and unplanned.

As such, the conference is a form of artistic retreat (a first experience for this writer). Certainly, on Smith’s 100-plus-year-old campus, it had the feel of one, with an intensive five-day program of seminars, panels, lectures, round tables and performances clustered around the all-encompassing theme of “New Challenges and Visions for the American Theatre.”

This generalized title was a convenience for including an assortment of topics. Its unstated purpose may have been to reflect, in these changing and pressured times, on the resident theaters’ increasingly urgent need for R&R;: revision and renewal. Certainly the subject kept coming up (obliquely--no one likes to admit to battle fatigue). The subtextual questions: Is everyone doing the right thing? Doing enough? Trying to be too many things? Doing too little? Doing too much?

On the surface, the sessions provided eclectic nourishment for anyone interested in the nature and business of theater art. They concerned themselves with the whys, hows, philosophies, styles, contexts of theater. Most were handled by individuals addressing their own modus operandi.

They ranged from the non-controversial (writer/translator Richard Wilbur reading delightfully from his own works) and educational (“Finding the Visual and Physical Complement,” Julie Taymor’s subjective view of design as integral context) to such knottier items as theater and repression in Argentina (with playwright/journalist Alberto Minero and novelist Luisa Valenzuela).

This segued logically into some formal and informal debate of the American theater’s shortcomings in relation to its Hispanic component (especially its failure to tap into the richness of Hispanic dramatic literature) and a scrutiny of the theater’s fulfillment--or not--of its broader social responsibilities (“Theatre as a Social Forum”).

This session, moderated by playwright Jack Gelber (“The Connection”) and shared by the San Francisco Eureka Theatre’s Anthony Taccone, playwright Keith Reddin and actor/playwright Wallace Shawn, found Shawn deadpanning that Americans are desperately out of touch (“We’re . . . killers and murderers but we aren’t aware of it”).

“I write to increase my self-awareness and that of the members of the audience,” he said, describing himself as “a crank” and his plays as “designed to upset and disturb.

“My experience has been a kind of non-meeting of minds. I tend to be bookish, overeducated and my plays have a certain mandarin quality about them. I only consider that a piece is ready when I really get sick reading it. Most people reject my plays. (Those) who come expecting some solace from their lives as hard-working murderers don’t get it. For me, it’s more than a joke.”

Reddin complained of the “U.S. political amnesia” he ran into with his “Rum and Coke” (a play about the Bay of Pigs, “often confused,” he said, “with the Cuban missile crisis”). Taccone outlined politically disappointing responses to Emily Mann’s “Execution of Justice,” produced by him at the Eureka and dealing with the Dan White assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

The talk was serious, but guilty of its own amnesia by largely ignoring the role of artistic merit. The Mann play is not the best dramatic treatment of its subject, and only the Mark Taper Forum’s Gordon Davidson allowed for the possibility that “We are not doing all that we should do well enough .” In a gathering that rarely brought up the issue of quality , his was a lone voice of self-scrutiny.

Critics got their usual drumming--healthier in many ways than the faintly patronizing recognition by the Arena Stage’s Zelda Fichandler of the merits of David Richards (Washington Post) and Mike Steele (Minneapolis Tribune). The conference’s most sensible statements about criticism came from director Anne Bogart (“I want to feel in a review that someone is not for you but with you”) and from performance artist Ping Chong who wisely pleaded for “a sense of progression and context.”

Yet certain other political issues simply wouldn’t go away. The theater’s inadequacyat providing working parity for minorities kept coming up, mostly from the underground: in questions and complaints from minority members of the floor. If they felt snubbed by panelist Robert Brustein’s haughty classification of theater as “a meritocracy, not a democracy” or his snappy dismissal of the feminist Interart as “a single issue theater,” they were not alone.

Another neglected minority consisted of the delegates from west of Chicago who could not help but notice the conference’s heavily East Coast orientation. For all its awareness of a national constituency, TCG still has work to do if it is to give equal voice to the concerns of the West and Midwest--and not a moment too soon.

Most performances at the conference were non-traditional, exposing the group to the perplexing (Czech artist Bolek Polivka), the clever (Fred Curchak) and the rare (Italian satirist Dario Fo in his first American foray).

Fo was the highlight. He offered a slight condensation of his astonishing “Mistero Buffo,” a stream-of-consciousness debunking of everything from prostitution in 16th-Century Venice, to the discovery of America, the birth of capitalism and the resurrection of Lazarus, with strong reverberations in the present.

Satirists are the most moral of creatures and Fo’s spectacular display was an extension of the conference’s recurrent preoccupation with morality (a sign of the times?). The physical clowning was so expert, the funny stuff so subtle and rousing that this audience of otherwise sane colleagues became a cheering mob.

Curchak’s bawdy and iconoclastic one-man take-off on “The Tempest” (“Stuff As Dreams Are Made On”), full of optical illusion, enthused some and incensed others--none more so than director John Hirsch who saw it as a misappropriation of the classics, something he had earlier deplored in a session with Mark Lamos, artistic director of the Hartford Stage Company. (“I distrust the idea of young artists always looking for new forms,” director Bogart had said in another context. “It always sounds so old. “)

Hirsch and Lamos, who both have worked Stratford, Ontario (Lamos as director, Hirsch as artistic director), talked of Shakespeare’s capacity to re-animate childlike fantasy, his plays beginning in turmoil, ending in renewal--”chaos giving way to order through death,” as Lamos put it.

Both despaired of finding in new generations of American actors the required passion, knowledge, training or inquisitiveness to do justice to the classics, with Hirsch bemoaning one student’s unconscious approach to the classics “as a trampoline for (my) own ideas,” while another wanted to do “As You Like It” underwater.

“Without spending enough time looking at the material, they run to external solutions,” said Hirsch, who sees the triumph of fundamentalism as a reaction to the bankruptcy of art. “There is not enough search for ambiguities. The ongoing traffic of great plays is the human connection between man and fellow man, man and family, man and society, man and cosmos. People must get a metaphysical reflection out of the theater. It’s about miracles, survival, wonderment. We live in a horrific society. If we feel like collaborators in murder, these plays heal our souls. (They) have a powerful moral center.”

The theater’s great strength has always been the infinity of its possibilities, which is its hope, allowing forms to merge and ideas to connect in brave new ways.

When performance artist Ping Chong talked about being the product of 2,000 years of literacy in a 200-year-old culture, and about being “more interested in kinesthetics than text” because “we’re living in a post-literate society,” it provided a glimpse of the bewildering explorations ahead.

The eclectic Bogart shared the session on new forms with him. Her most recent piece, “1951,” stemmed from a vision of the politics of McCarthyism in the 50s as “a huge political triumph separating art from life.”

“Dealing with your obsessions,” she said, “leads you to doing theater, which leads you to using whatever you can get, which leads you to new forms. I try to choose material that puts in question something that I can feel. . . . Considering the world today, one must stay close to what is least comfortable. It’s about looking at a very uncomfortable national culture from a world viewpoint.”

She and Wallace Shawn may have something to collaborate about. This kind of bridging was one of the conference’s most visible benefits.

Confronting the problems, hearing other voices, seeing how others do it, venting anger and mixing ideas with drinks at the watering holes--had its calming and clarifying effect. It was something to take home. Even the denial.