The Politics of Drama, Act Two

“Angels in America” seems like a long time ago.

Fueled by leftist outrage over Reagan-era social policies, Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play debuted at the Mark Taper Forum in 1992. Here was old-fashioned political engagement on a stage, light on its feet and ready to rumble. It felt fresh yet linked to our theatrical past--the Federal Theatre Project’s Depression-era efforts (the inventive ones, anyway), as well as passionate work three decades later provoked by the war in Vietnam and its attendant wars at home.

Today, the winds are calmer. This year’s Pulitzer winner for drama, “Dinner With Friends” by Donald Margulies (which opens the new Geffen Playhouse season), concerns itself with the vicissitudes of marriage and middle age. No one would claim that the year 2000 is a hot one for politically engaged drama, whatever the stripe.

Have audiences simply had it with politics? Have playwrights, producers and directors waylaid political concerns for personal ones? Can the two be separated?

On the brink of the Democratic National Convention, the one representing the party that hasn’t attempted to rid the country of federal arts support, we talked to a group of L.A.-based theater artists.

Playwright, director and MacArthur grant recipient Luis Alfaro is co-director of the Taper’s Latino Theatre Initiative. Alfaro’s boss, Gordon Davidson, runs the Center Theatre Group, which includes the Taper. He made the Taper’s national reputation largely on such projects as Daniel Berrigan and Saul Levitt’s Vietnam War protest chronicle, “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine” (1971), and Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit” (1978).

Amy Levinson serves as literary manager of the Geffen Playhouse. Laural Meade is co-head of Indecent Exposure Theatre Company. Her plays include “Harry Thaw Hates Everybody,” a blend of vaudeville, music, the soapbox and the history books.

Richard Montoya is one-third of the Chicano theater troupe Culture Clash. The plays of Suzan-Lori Parks include mind- and language-benders such as “The America Play,” as well as more straight-ahead works. One of the latter, “Topdog/Underdog,” opens in New York in January. Parks is about to begin a three-year stint as head of a new playwriting program at California Institute of the Arts.

Michael Phillips: I think we can agree the phrase “political theater” is a very slippery one. It has come to mean everything and nothing. Too often it has meant the worst kind of finger-wagging. Suzan-Lori, in your introduction to “The America Play and Other Works,” you took on what you called “Theater of Schmaltz”--writing intended to, as you put it, “produce some reaction of sorts, to discuss some issue: the play-as-wrapping-paper-version-of-hot-newspaper-headline, trying so hard to be so hip; so uninterested in the craft of writing. . . . Theater seems mired in the interest of staging some point, or tugging some heart string, or landing a laugh, or making a splash, or wagging a finger.”

Richard Montoya: God, she just described Culture Clash.

Suzan-Lori Parks: Well, I wrote that a long time ago. [laughter] Political theater to me means things people say to me about my work. “Oh, your play is so political.” I hear that a lot. And I just go, “Huh? Wha? What does that mean?” I ask the person, and they’ll say, “Well, it’s dealing with . . . issues.”

The difficulty I have with that is people believe the writer enters into writing mode with an issue she wants to shove into a size 3 pair of jeans. Like we used to wear in the ‘70s.

Q: I’ve heard people more or less snort at the phrase “political theater” lately, as if it were dead and gone.

Montoya: Well, it certainly means something to us. Culture Clash has been doing a lot of site-specific work, going to different regions of the country, doing interview-based work, which doesn’t sound too original or political. But in that journalistic approach, we’re finding that race is still the No. 1 issue. And you can’t get more political than race.

We use the work to dive into that area, whether it’s the border here in California, or Cuban Americans in Miami, or police brutality in New York City. It’s still viable to us. There’s a lot of madness going on around us, and we’re trying to record it as fast as we can and report it back to our audience. The Spanish classics will have to wait right now.

When we played D.C., the Arena Stage subscribers made Gordon’s [Taper] subscribers look pretty hip and cool. These are not cool-looking white folks. These are “McLaughlin Group” white folks. . . . We take our political brand of theater to a crowd like that--and we’re thanked for it.

Something’s happening, something is allowing for us to keep going. There’s a lot of bad political theater. But we’re still at it, still champing at the bit.

Luis Alfaro: I got into theater as a means of creating social change. All my work is intensely political, [but] I think political theater in this country has shifted. The ideas are more sophisticated. We’re dealing with different kinds of politics--the politics of the body, talking about identity from another point of view.

I just think we couldn’t talk about politics in the same way for so long and expect the audience to stay with us. So in some ways, there’s been a shift toward examining the poetry of the politics.

Q: Is that poetry a way of reaching past the people who walk into a show basically agreeing with your viewpoint? A way of getting to the undecided voters?

Alfaro: Yes. You have to think about doing more than preaching to the converted. Although Joan Holden [of the highly politicized San Francisco Mime Troupe] said once at a conference: “What’s wrong with preaching to the converted? The converted need a lot of help!” But really we’re most effective when we’re not just preaching to the converted.

Amy Levinson: Just in the last two years, I’ve seen a shift in what scripts I’ve been reading [at the Geffen]. I’d describe almost all the work I see as incredibly personal, more so than political. I’m not saying the personal can’t be political, but writing about the body or writing about the self, or how you are represented within society--these are intensely personal issues. . . . And often it’s not work we want to take to our audiences, because it’s so personal it won’t be universal.

Laural Meade: I wear a lot of hats in the company I co-run, and we have a mandate to create work that effects progressive social change. But often, when I try to think about my own plays as doing that, I find that my artistry drops right out. . . .

As an artist, I work from what I find inspiring. I write work about American history because I’m not much of a storyteller in the classic sense. My talent doesn’t necessarily lie in making up stories from scratch. I teach playwriting, and in my classes, I’m saying things like, “You must examine theme first, your plays have to be about something, look at what’s going on in your life.” I have a variety of exercises for pulling stories out of the air. Well, I can’t pull stories out of the air. I’ve never been able to do it. So I go to stories that have been fully enacted before I ever come to it. Our culture suffers from a lack of understanding of its own history.

Q: If you test the political winds right now, what do they tell us? How would they inform what we’re seeing on our stages now?

Gordon Davidson: I’d like to put it in a historical context, since I’m the senior member of this table. I’m a child of the Depression era, began working out here in the ‘60s. There seemed to be a real connection between the world outside and the world depicted in the theater.

All theater is political, one way or another. Obviously there’s a difference between what’s politics and what’s political. In this day and age, political conventions may be the most interesting political theater, because millions of people see it, and it has a tremendous immediacy, even if people are skeptical or think it’s “just a show.” I mean, the stakes are high.

They are high, even if people don’t quite realize they’re high.

I was fortunate personally to come to theater in Los Angeles in the late ‘60s and the ‘70s when issues having to do with civil rights or the Vietnam War or women’s rights mattered to society.

The most potent example was “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine.” It came out just ahead of the curve when people first began to feel they could protest the war. Now, you don’t want to just present the issue. But the Berrigans did something. [Catholic priests Daniel and his brother Philip Berrigan were tried on charges that they burned draft records in Maryland in 1968.] They stood there to be arrested, to argue their point, and in a sense [the play] turned directly to the public--the audience--and said: This is what we did, because this is what we believed in. What are you going to do?

I used to do a lot of post-play discussions in those days, and I remember standing on the stage of the Taper one night after “Catonsville Nine.” And I felt that if I asked the audience to come with me down to the federal courthouse to stage a protest, everyone would’ve done it. The play had energized them.

People are searching for a way to connect to the life outside. I think it’s harder today. It’s hard to get a consensus. It’s one of the issues facing the two political parties. Have they just both moved to the center, and you can’t really tell who’s who? I don’t think so. There’s still a far right, and maybe a less vocal far left.

Q: The right’s been vocal, all right. Back in ‘95, here’s what Lynne V. Cheney, then head of the National Endowment for the Humanities [and now campaigning with her husband, Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney] said around the time she tried to abolish her own agency: “The humanities--like the arts--have become highly politicized. Many academics and artists now see their purpose not as revealing truth or beauty, but as achieving social and political transformation.”

Which seems to disallow for anybody who might have both in mind.

Parks: Right. That’s right. They’re the same thing!

Levinson: Right now I think the parties are just meeting in the middle, and have both agreed to drop the [federal arts funding] issue. A lot of Democrats consider it so far to the left they’re deliberately ignoring it. They felt like it was important but it hurt them in the past.

Davidson: It’s not on the radar screen, but it’s more on the minds of Democrats in general than on the minds of Republicans. I sit on the National Council on the Arts, and I hear the debates, and when Congress became a Republican Congress in ‘92, the [National Endowment for the Arts] started to go out of business. Simple as that. Now it’s barely holding on.

Meade: If either of the two parties valued culture, they’d talk about it. Someone would open their mouth and say it was important. . . . We’re talking about the value of interaction, whether it’s in the flesh, in the theater, looking at a painting, or hearing music, or seeing dance. If you don’t talk about it, you devalue it.

Alfaro: In a strange, S&M; sort of way, I want Bush to win. Just to see if the left can get galvanized again.

I miss the extremes of my old work, I miss the extremists on the right and on the left. They gave you something to react to.

Right now we’re reading plays for the Taper’s New Work Festival, and if I had to pick an overriding theme for the 100 or so plays so far, it’s disillusionment. It’s about nostalgia. And that’s kind of scary.

Parks: When I hear something like that, I think we have to be careful not to follow the culture. Once we start following instead of leading, then it’s all disillusionment.

Davidson: When you believe you can make a difference, it leads you to share your thoughts, your passions. I think many people today feel somewhat disassociated, and they’re not believing in the political process. Why do so few people vote? Why will the ratings of the conventions be so much lower than “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”?

That’s why it’s important to remember: There are real differences between the two parties.

Q: Richard, what would you tell Al Gore if you had five minutes with him?

Montoya: I’d tell him to put Tipper in charge of the Ministry of Rap Music.