A NEW ROLE FOR THEATER: ‘THEY ARE US’

Everyone agrees that Lt. Col. Oliver North’s testimony at the Iran- contra hearings was “good theater.” It wasn’t just North’s presentation. It was his highly dramatic picture of the world. The nation was at risk; the adversary was in our front yard; there was no time to waste.

One could imagine a squared-away colonel briefing a panel in the Kremlin with the same urgency, casting the United States in the role of adversary. One could imagine a lieutenant in the Irish Republican Army talking his recruits through the same scenario in Belfast, with Margaret Thatcher as the villain. Or an Iranian squad leader filling in his teen-age troops about the demonic tricks of the Iraqis.

Unfortunately, human beings have never needed much filling-in as to the evil of the people on the other side of the line. In the midst of a war, it’s easy to think of the other side as vermin. Forty years later, the veterans on both sides get together on the former battlefield and exchange pictures of their grandchildren.

We have gotten away with this process ever since the Greeks fought the Trojans. But the next war might not leave any alumni. So it might be time for some preemptive conceptualization. It might be time to phase out the notion that it’s either Us or Them, and to introduce the notion that They are Us.

Theater and films can help with this. In fact, they already have. One of the things that healed the breach between the United States and Japan after World War II were the Japanese films that started to show up in the new American art theaters in the early 1950s--”Rashomon” and the like. You couldn’t put a hateful cartoon-face on a people who told stories of such beauty and complexity.

Similarly, a country that produces a Chekhov--and continues to flock to his plays, in state-supported theaters--can’t be seen as an Evil Empire, no matter what one thinks of its government.

Of course, one sees the point in calling it an Evil Empire. This turns it into a myth, a dark kingdom out of “Star Wars.” Taking arms against an Evil Empire would be something like playing a video game--zap-zap, there goes Moscow. But Chekhov reminds us that there are people living over there.

Theater, then, can provide a reality-check against the theatrics that all governments deal in, with their medals of freedom and their heroes of the people and their torch-light parades. This is why agitprop theater is so depressing, even when one agrees with the point of view being put forth. It stoops to the same game as governments and editorial cartoonists: Reducing the adversary to a stock symbol, which everyone righteously boos. Where does that get us?

In a world where officially sanctioned melodrama plays as reality--TV being the stage--we need the kind of theater that encourages us to look twice: The man coming toward you in the dark might be your own reflection in the mirror.

Shakespeare knew it. The Globe Playhouse in West Hollywood once presented a dramatic version of the Danish legend on which “Hamlet” is based. It was a rip-roaring revenge saga with an ending worthy of “Rambo”: The prince rips off the disguise of a crazy person, torches his uncle, liberates his mother and, of course, gets the girl.

Compare the moment where Hamlet discovers his uncle at his prayers and can’t find it in himself to kill the wretch. Interestingly, the audience goes through a similar process. What do you do with a villain who berates himself for his inability to pray (“Words without thoughts seldom to heaven go”)? You start to see him as a man. Not a figure of evil, and yet capable of evil. The situation begins to look a little more complicated, like the ones that people and nations actually go through.

Melodrama says that the other guy is the problem, and that the solution is to blow him away. Shakespeare says that human nature is the problem and that the solution will take skill, a point also made by Aeschylus at the end of the “House of Atreus” trilogy. Attentive productions of the classics (attentive, that is, to the playwright rather than to the statement the director wants to make about the play) remind us that playwrights have been talking about Us vs. Them for 2,500 years.

What about new plays? Harvard Prof. Kenneth Reich recently called for stories that would “speak less of triumph, conquest or magnanimity (this also a factor in Us-vs.-Them thinking) and more of the intricate tasks of forging mutual responsibilities and enforcing mutual obligations.”

In Reich’s new mythology, there would be “fewer triumphant loners among the heroes, and more talented teammates and dedicated stewards. The villains will be found not in broad categories of malevolent others, but in the cynical betrayers of trust found even close by.”

If this sounds wimpish in the abstract, it also sounds a lot like the stories told on “MASH,” not a series that had trouble attracting audiences. Our concept of what’s “dramatic” will probably always hinge on the notion of conflict, but that doesn’t necessarily imply Sylvester Stallone going head-to-head with a bulldozer.

But one can’t tell playwrights what stories to write, or even what kind of stories to write. All one can do is to encourage them to tell the truth, even when it’s a small, unmelodramatic truth. LeRoi Jones recently wrote an article for Calendar paying a belated tribute to Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” a truer statement of black reality and ideals than he had realized back in the explosive 1960s.

“Raisin” was also a play that taught at least one white viewer a lesson in those days. There’s a scene where the grandmother cautions the wife, calling in sick on behalf of her husband, to tell his white employer that he’s got a cold. “Otherwise, they’ll think he’s been cut up or somethin’.”

My God, I said to myself in the balcony of the Orpheum Theater in St. Paul, that’s just what I would think. Rather a revealing moment for a member of the Catholic Interracial Justice Council.

Probably this kind of thing is the best that theater can do in reducing the distance between black and white, male and female, friend and foe, Them and Us. Art can’t change what’s out there. It can only change the pictures in our heads.,

But that’s not nothing. As the old furniture dealer says in Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” “It’s a mental world.”