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The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era

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The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era

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The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era

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Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat” is a portrait of the America that came undone.

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How Theater Stepped Up to Meet the Trump Era

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How Theater Stepped Up to Meet the Trump Era

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How Theater Stepped Up to Meet the Trump Era (Published 2021)

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As artists saw liberties threatened and inequities exacerbated, the stage became more thrillingly urgent than it had been in decades.

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The First Great Theatrical Work of the Trump Era

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The First Great Theatrical Work of the Trump Era

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Imagine a man who, despite being born to great privilege, has yet to be granted the absolute dominance that he craves. Imagine that, from childhood on, his personality has been disfigured by a knowledge of his own inadequacy in the eyes of others-and that, in compensation, he has nurtured an overweening self-love, a narcissist's cultivation of the very characteristics for which others loathe him. Imagine how this malignant shame might metastasize, over time, into a boundless resentment, and how that resentment might propel this man to defy all those civil conventions by which he feels he has been devalued. Imagine a man like this, who cuts a ruthless path to power by violating the bodies of women, and who incites others to violence on his behalf, heedless of any consequence but his own elevation. Then picture him, alone with his curdled thoughts, anticipating the triumph of which he feels assured but which the wider world around him has so far failed to imagine.

Last weekend, as the final few days of Donald Trump's noxious Presidential campaign unspooled, this scene played out on the stage of the Howard Gilman Opera House, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in "Kings of War," directed by Ivo van Hove and performed by the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. (Van Hove is the company's general manager; I profiled him last year.) A condensation of Shakespeare's English-history plays presented chronologically, from the reign of Henry V to that of Richard III, "Kings of War" premièred in June of 2015, and has since been performed in Amsterdam and London. It runs for four and a half hours, and is performed entirely in Dutch, with supertitles in English projected above the stage. Despite these apparent challenges to securing an American audience's attention, all four performances-in a theatre with two-thousand-odd seats-were close to sold out.

Judging by the way the show riveted the audience of which I was a member, those seats could have been filled for weeks-even before the election results cast a still starker light upon van Hove's prescient artistic choices. "Kings of War" dramatizes a seemingly inexorable moral decline-from the resolve of Henry V, who seeks to be an ethical ruler but nonetheless leads his country into war, with all its costs; to the weakness of Henry VI, whose lack of resolve is exploited by courtiers, to his own and the country's detriment; to the malevolence of Richard III, who throws both his own royal house and the country at large into war and havoc for the sake of personal ambition.

As always in revisiting canonical works, van Hove eschewed period costume and sets. His actors wore suits, or skirts and heels. They sat on low-slung couches and modernist leather armchairs, as if in a midtown hotel lobby; contemporary music surged periodically through the action. It is a familiar piety to suggest that Shakespeare's dramas speak to an eternal human condition. But van Hove's interpretation of the plays-four-hundred-year-old texts, about seven-hundred-year-old monarchs-offered an unparallelled, precise insight into our own political crisis. In one indelible theatrical moment, the audience was witness to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in solitary anticipation of his impending coronation as Richard III. As played by Hans Kesting, a veteran of van Hove's company, Richard preened before a full-length mirror, assuming a regal decorousness. Then, gleefully embodying his detractors' worst characterizations of his monstrousness, he transformed, and started capering around the stage, snarling like a bloodthirsty animal, the crown on his head prematurely grasped, an oriental rug thrown across his hunched shoulders to stand in for an ermine-edged cloak. It was a delirious, degenerate pantomime of authority seized and undermined.

It is no accident that "Kings of War" was scheduled to run immediately in advance of the election, but even Joseph Melillo, the executive producer of BAM, could not have foreseen how crucial, and illuminating, it would turn out to be. Even as the audience, in the darkness of the theatre, shut off phones and quieted newsfeeds, there was more to be learned onstage about the political drama unfolding in the country than there might have been from reading any amount of analysis in the Upshot, or watching any quantity of coverage on CNN.

This is not to suggest that the play offered a facile analogy to the conditions of Trump's ascendancy, though there were moments when Kesting, assuming the privileges that would have been enjoyed by a sixteenth-century actor at the Globe, offered topical improvisations. Did I say the play was entirely in Dutch? Well, there was a comical spattering of German, Russian, and English, when Kesting, picking up a series of telephones on a desk, pretended to call Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin, and Barack Obama. There was a mutter of "Such a nasty woman" when Richard dismissed the dignified Queen Margaret, his brother's widow. But this was not theatre as political satire. This was not "Saturday Night Live." Rather, "Kings of War"-which premièred a year before British voters said yes to Brexit, and a week and a half before Donald Trump declared his improbable-seeming candidacy for the Presidency-offered a reminder that artists, rather than pundits, can sometimes be our most reliable cultural diagnosticians, and our most insightful political prognosticators.

Artists will be struggling to make sense of this week's election results. (On Wednesday morning, I ran into a theatre-director friend who was about to go and address his cast, of a physical comedy that is currently in previews. "I'm going to tell them to stay low, and get ready," he told me, taking up the physical stance of a fighter ready to absorb a blow, or deliver one; it seems like good advice even for those of us not treading the boards.) They will also be responding in ways that cannot yet be imagined, and foreseeing scenarios that may be hard for the rest of us to discern.

Art can tell us truths when more conventional means of conveying intelligence have failed us. Established works can take on new shades of meaning in the light of changed circumstances. " Hamilton," the great theatrical accomplishment of the Obama era, has, until now, largely been received as a celebration of diversity, a heralding of the triumph of progressive values. In the wake of this election's result, that musical's darker notes-about the perilous fragility of America's democratic institutions and of the peace, justice, and equality they seek to insure-will be all the more resonant. Meanwhile, those New Yorkers fortunate enough to have been in the audience at BAM last weekend-a mile from the Clinton campaign's headquarters, a short hop across the river from Trump's-had the privilege of witnessing the first great theatrical work of the Trump era, moments before that era began.

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The First Great Theatrical Work of the Trump Era

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Rebecca Mead writes about the relevance of "Kings of War," Ivo van Hove's condensation of Shakespeare's English-history plays.

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Denver Curious Theatre to produce playwright’s rapid response to the Trump era

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Denver Curious Theatre to produce playwright’s rapid response to the Trump era

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Denver Curious Theatre to produce playwright’s rapid response to the Trump era

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Written in the two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the play seizes on theater’s potential to quickly respond to current events.

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Why Thornton Wilder Matters in the Trump Era

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Why Thornton Wilder Matters in the Trump Era

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Why Thornton Wilder Matters in the Trump Era — Thornton Wilder

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Several admirers of the play spoke recently about why “The Skin of Our Teeth” endures, what makes it problematic and why this could be a ripe time for its resurgence. Here are edited excerpts from those interviews.

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revival of a Shakespeare tragedy did the impossible earlier this year: It made headlines. In June, New York’s Public Theater performed Julius Caesar in Central Park in a modern-dress production

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Trump gets a bold Shakespearean twist in new play ‘The 47th’

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Trump gets a bold Shakespearean twist in new play ‘The 47th’

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Trump gets a bold Shakespearean twist in new play ‘The 47th’

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A play that offers an audaciously Shakespearean take on recent and future U.S. politics is running at London’s Old Vic theater.

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Just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power, Schauspielhaus Zurich theatre began to evolve into a bastion against racial fanaticism and antisemitism.

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Swiss National Museum - Swiss history blog

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Just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power, Schauspielhaus Zurich theatre began to evolve into a bastion against racial fanaticism and antisemitism.

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A Look at Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros in San Francisco

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A Look at Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros in San Francisco

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A Look at Eugène Ionesco's Production Photos Rhinoceros in San Francisco The absurdist play, directed by Frank Galati, runs at the American Conservatory Theater through June 23.

The American Conservatory Theater production of Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros began performances in San Francisco May 29, for a run set to continue through June 23. The production, directed by Frank Galati, stars David Breitbarth, Matt DeCaro, Rona Figueroa, Trish Mulholland, Göran Norquist, Danny Scheie, Lauren Spencer, Teddy Spencer, and Jomar Tagatac.

According to production notes, "in the opening moments of Ionesco's masterpiece of absurdist satire, a rhinoceros rampages through a village square. At the local café, people argue over what they saw. Was it really a rhino, or just fake news? As the eccentric villagers shed refined façades for hides and horns-smashing windows and crushing flowerbeds-rumpled everyman Berenger faces a desperate choice: take a stand against the armored brutes or join the mindless herd?"
Flip through photos from the production below:

Production Photos: Rhinoceros at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater

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A Look at Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros in San Francisco

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The absurdist play, directed by Frank Galati, runs at the American Conservatory Theater through June 23.

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Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

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Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

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Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

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A young member of a Portuguese clan questions her family’s custom in this moving drama.

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‘The Arsonists’ review: 1950s play sounds like an indictment of politics in the age of Facebook

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‘The Arsonists’ review: 1950s play sounds like an indictment of politics in the age of Facebook

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Theater review

Gottlieb Biedermann has a problem.

Despite his prosperous business selling "hair rejuvenator," his well-appointed house, and delightful name that's fun to say, there's danger lurking in his attic.

Or is there? He can't quite make up his mind about the two homeless people (one ex-wrestler for a circus, one ex-head-waiter at a fancy restaurant) who've wheedled their way into the Biedermanns' bourgeois home and may or may not be the dreaded arsonists who, according to the newspapers, have been setting fatal fires all over town.

Biedermann (played with bellowing bluster by Mario Orallo-Molinaro in The Horse in Motion 's lively production) might be confused, but we are not. Among the arsonists' previous targets: a circus and a restaurant. His guests are stockpiling gasoline in the attic. And we have a handy chorus of firefighters who surveil both us and their fellow actors throughout, occasionally chiming in with portentous hints like: "Woe unto us! ... The timid see dangers with no danger there. They fear their own shadows. Brave when it's only a rumor, they stumble through life filled with fear, till one day the rumor walks in through the door."

That reads like an indictment of corrosive Facebook culture: We're quick to tremble or howl with outrage over nothings, then eagerly repost dangerously ginned-up content from Russian bots and trolls posing as rightists or leftists, per their tactical needs. But Max Frisch wrote his first sketch of "The Arsonists" in 1946, then finished it in 1958.

The play has lived several lives with several interpretations, according to the threat du jour. People have read "The Arsonists" as a warning about the spread of Soviet-style communism, or as a critique of Swiss neutrality ( which also happened to be profitable) during the rise of Nazism. London's Royal Court Theatre revived it (featuring Benedict Cumberbatch) during the George W. Bush years. Woolly Mammoth staged it in Washington, D.C., during the first several months of the Trump presidency.

Frisch might have liked that prism of readings. An early devotee of Bertolt Brecht's Marx-flavored theater, he later decided that approach was too didactic and he gave "The Arsonists" a helpfully cryptic subtitle: "an instructive play without a lesson" or, as Alistair Beaton wrote in his new translation, "a moral play without a moral."

So where's the danger in 2019? And which side are you on?

The Horse in Motion asks us to decide as soon as we walk into Gallery Erato in Pioneer Square, a long space with red-brick walls, high ceilings, and a conveniently visible balcony (sporting a simple but elegant wooden balustrade) for the action in the attic.

On the table when you check in: three programs to choose from, each with a bold logo asking us to join a team. One: "Tired of the way things are? Burn it down!" Two: "Serve your community - keep this town safe. Join the firefighters!" Three: "In a world on fire, protect your family, protect your home."

Director Bobbin Ramsey (who directed "The Nether" at Washington Ensemble Theatre last year) said she hopes people will pick a preference before the play begins, then wonder afterward if they should've chosen differently. "The big question we want people to ask," she said, "is what will you do when the match is lit?" (The "burn it down" programs go fastest, she said, but laughingly acknowledged that nowadays, a pro-status-quo stance is a little gauche.)

This "Arsonists" feels self-conscious and artificial, though it's written in that Brechtian, the-audience-shouldn't-pretend-they're-anywhere-other-than-in-a-theater style. The play doesn't expect us to suspend disbelief and imagine our local firefighters chant like a Greek chorus, so the production tries to win us over with big gestures.

Orallo-Molinaro is fun to watch, stretched to panic by the battle royale of his vanity. He doesn't want to be seen as cowardly or credulous or henpecked - spoiler alert: he's all of those things - and the supposedly homeless houseguests merrily play on his shallow motives like a xylophone. Biedermann lets them stay, even though his suspicions and his wife (Tatiana Pavela, who performs the big-pearl-wearing lady of the house like a nervous, shrill bird) demand otherwise.

The arsonists are fun, too. The ex-wrestler (Jordan Moeller) looks and acts like a lumberjack with his big beard, leather suspenders, and boorish table manners. The ex-waiter (Amber Tanaka) is nimbler and more clever, brazenly asking Biedermann to help her measure a fuse while he pretends to not care that his attic is full of gasoline barrels. "In my experience, the best, the most reliable tactic is still the naked truth," she tells him with a wry smile. "Because, funnily enough, nobody believes it."

"The Arsonists" doesn't stick every landing, and some of that is the play's fault. It's tough to keep an audience hooked with a parable, following the blow-by-blow moments when we know where the tragicomic farce is going - but that's also the point.

We can see what Biedermann refuses to acknowledge but, "The Arsonists" asks, can we see what's happening right now, in our collective attic, once the applause is over and we walk back into the world?

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"The Arsonists" by Max Frisch, translated by Alistair Beaton. Through June 3; The Horse in Motion at Gallery Erato, 309 First Ave. S., Seattle; $17-$28; 800-838-3006, thehorseinmotion.org

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'The Arsonists' review: 1950s play sounds like an indictment of politics in the age of Facebook

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Seattle-based theater company The Horse in Motion mounts a lively production of "The Arsonists," a 1950s play that has lived several lives with several interpretations.

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American plunder didn’t begin with this administration. Our theatrical dissent must be grounded in a holistic critique of state violence.

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O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be.
- Langston Hughes

In Albrecht Dürer's 1497 woodcut, four horsemen representing Conquest, War, Famine, and Death are galloping toward us, determined to slaughter all those who stand before them. Their horses crush under their hooves anybody who stands in their way. This work, a dramatically distilled version of the passage from the Book of Revelation, is one of the most potent visual representations of apocalypse ever to appear before our eyes.

That is, it would seem, until Donald Trump stepped onto the stage as our 45th president. And yet the image of Trump, and the obsessive focus on the archvillain himself, on his personality, distracts us from the truth of how we got here. And in doing so, we obscure the means to get out of here and make real change.

Trump is not an aberration, an abnormality, a sinkhole that has mysteriously opened up within our democracy. As playwright and essayist John Steppling writes, "Trump is the logical culmination of the rightward drift of U.S. liberalism over the last 50 years. He is the sun-lamped face of capital."

While civil liberties and human rights are suffering further setbacks under the Trump presidency, those people and topics that were already criminalized and censored will now be doubly so. However, instead of seeing the cyber-shenanigans of a foreign power as the main problem, or rallying to the defense of a standard neoliberal agenda as the solution, we in the theatre community should dig for and expose the deeper structural problems at the root of our malaise. We must embrace the opportunity to use our work, spaces, bodies, and voices to engage in the aesthetics and politics of true empathy and resistance to injustice in all its forms.

The heads of the mainstream televised "resistance" to Trump do not represent a way forward, despite the noise they are able to generate in the media. This "resistance," which is largely spearheaded by an elite within the Democratic Party, remains mostly silent about the burning questions of our time-and it is most certainly not concerned with what Martin Luther King Jr. identified 50 years ago as the triple evils, or "giant triplets," of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation, or "extreme materialism." For the most part, this "resistance" does not move against continued mass incarceration, police brutality, or the erosion civil liberties, not to mention systemic racial inequality and environmental destruction. Its leaders do not speak to the madness of the more than 800 U.S. military bases straddling the globe, the bloated military budget, or the influence of the arms industry on politics.

We cannot look to them to condemn the massive body counts of Arab and Muslim civilians racked up during our endless wars, many of which were fought at their behest and at great profit to them and their benefactors. Nor, quite predictably, does this so-called resistance utter a word about U.S.-backed apartheid in Palestine or other loathsome U.S.-backed regimes, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

We would argue, therefore, that this is a moment to reject the lure of the mainstream anti-Trump wave, and instead to step back and realize that much of American history has in reality been the age of Trump in one way or another, especially for the most marginalized. That is the story.

Yes, Trump personifies-aesthetically, professionally, and morally-the tackiest sort of charlatanism. But he's nothing new: he's a figure straight out of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. What if the actual reason Trump is so scary to the mainstream media, to Democratic politicians and liberal institutions, is precisely because he exposes what they have so diligently covered up, talked around, and band-aided away for decades-namely, the profoundly violent and racist nature of the United States since its founding? Seen this way, to claim to be in opposition to Trump and "Trumpism" without recognizing and opposing the larger, longstanding, entrenched structures of American violence and inequality, we are in fact aiding and abetting this willed myopia. Our cultural and political elite are and have long been complicit in this sordid project, even if at times unwittingly.

"Every single empire," wrote Edward Said, "in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest ' mission civilisatrice '."

Since WWII the U.S. has intervened in and bombed more than 70 countries. We are talking about millions of deaths (3 million in Vietnam alone), and most of them civilians. In 2015, Physicians for Social Responsibility released a report estimating 1.3 million deaths as a result of the "War on Terror" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, between 2001 and 2013. This staggering figure does not include the more than 10,000 dead in Yemen as a result of U.S. drone strikes, as well as the subsequent and ongoing U.S.-backed Saudi air war against the impoverished nation of 27 million. Nor does this number include the deaths of Iraqi civilians as a result of the first Gulf War and U.S. sanctions of the 1990s (the latter the handiwork of a Democratic administration), which would add nearly a million more deaths to the already grisly calculus of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East over the last quarter of a century. To focus solely on Trump's daily antics, then, is to make invisible this wake of death not only trailing behind us, but pooling at our feet.

As writers we believe it is imperative to hold this brutal history alive within this present moment in which we create, and not lose sight of what it really means to be American, or at least what it means to live in an age of American power. In so doing, we must always locate ourselves in relation to white supremacy and empire. This might mean, in the words of the Federation of Artists Manifesto issued by the Paris Commune in April 1871, working "cooperatively toward our regeneration, the birth of communal luxury, future splendors and the Universal Republic."

This would also mean decentralizing the flow of history, reimagining and foregrounding an America that defies empire. In this spirit we can challenge ourselves to create a stage that is welcoming to those who have the most to teach us: the marginalized, the targeted, the undocumented. Surely it is in these often neglected communities and spaces, where dissent is not only at its most lucid in its understanding of the aforementioned structures of violence and bigotry, but also the most courageous and creative in its modes of opposition. It is to these communities we must look for a new aesthetics of defiance and useful tactics for holistic dissent and action.

However, many voices challenging the system in its entirety are censored by mainstream media, including the theatre and film industries. This censorship also happens through economic oppression and deprivation, which leads to everything from the underfunding of our less commercially oriented theatres to the defunding our educational system, our public spaces, our libraries, and our independent artists, journalists, and thinkers. To believe that our theatre is without censorship is a dangerous misconception, and typical of the self-congratulatory liberal politics that has gripped us in recent years, but especially over the past 12 months. The topic of Palestine is just one example of such censorship, whether onstage, on campuses, or in the media. And it's stubbornly persistent: In 1989, Joseph Papp, under pressure from his board, canceled the El-Hakawati Palestinian theatre production at the Public Theater. Twenty-seven years later, the Public again canceled a Palestinian production, The Siege, from the Jenin Freedom Theater. Even more recently, the Public canceled the English-language world premiere of our adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani's novel Returning to Haifa-a project the theatre had itself commissioned, and that its artistic director, Oskar Eustis, was set to direct. And while this "Palestine exception to free speech" is in some ways an anomaly, in other ways it is a bellwether, a dangerous precedent and a blueprint for just how easy it is to silence dissent and chill free speech, even in broad daylight.

So what stories do we bring to the stage? Whose histories? How do we stop chattering about Trump and instead listen to the reservations, the ghettos and prisons, the gutted corners and corridors of the United States, and to the bombed and besieged periphery of empire, where the laboratories of the arms and "security" industries are located, from places like Pine Ridge to Gaza to Ferguson? As activist and scholar Angela Davis reminds us, "Justice must be everywhere and always indivisible." In our work for the stage, do we perpetuate stereotypes, perhaps even unwittingly, in the service of the status quo? Young playwrights are still too often encouraged to peer inside themselves for stories, to explore domesticity, often under the guise of tackling controversial topics. Antonin Artaud's searing critique of theatre in the 1930s is still relevant today: "Given the theatre as we see it here, one would say there is nothing more to life than knowing...how we cope with our little pangs of conscience, and whether we will become conscious of our 'complexes' or if indeed our complexes will do us in. Rarely, moreover, does the debate rise to a social level, rarely do we question our social and moral system."

Our moral system, from our health and "justice system" to our country's involvement in Conquest, War, Famine, and Death are not dry political topics-grist for the dreaded "issues" play-that we must engage with onstage only in these more obvious Trump Times. Rather these phenomena are the very stuff of which drama is made, the meat and bread of our shared tragedies and in turn our common humanity. As playwrights, diving into these wrecks of human histories is to discover not despair but hope. It is to encounter creativity, wild visions and vivid dreams of another way of being, living, and dying. To appropriate Peter Kropotkin's vision, theatre should seek "to extend itself to universalize itself . . . In place of communal privileges it has to put human solidarity."

We must, therefore, break through the conventional thinking that corrodes our abilities as writers to see what is real. As the black surrealist from Martinique, Jules Monnerot, writes: "Conventional thinking corrodes slowly even the most rigorous concepts circulating like blood, and thanks to this the poison of conventional thinking becomes permanent and definite." Monnerot calls for "a dialectical reinvention of magic"-real magic that makes real alternatives to racialized capitalism, a modern world system, according to Cedric Robinson, that evolved from and is dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. Art, Eduardo Galeano reminds us, has the power to "express the magical reality at the core of the hideous reality of the world."

To achieve this alchemy in our lives and work, we must know what we are for as well as what we are against, to turn our holistic (as opposed to compartmentalized) dissent into intertwining visions for the future. This requires real alliances based on radical empathy, solidarity, reciprocity. If we have not already, let us learn hard and deep the necessary strategies from America's black radical tradition, not to appropriate or replicate it but to understand its logic and fundamental demand: a complete critique of Western civilization and, as Franz Fanon put it, a disordering of our current (colonial) social order. Let us study and embrace the Movement for Black Lives platform, a coalition of 60 different organizations, an ambitious, ever-evolving map for today's political and cultural resistance, including our theatres and stages. As the historian Robin D.G. Kelley writes: "'A Vision for Black Lives' is less a political platform than a plan for ending structural racism, saving the planet, and transforming the entire nation-not just black lives." By decentering the conformist surge we have a better chance of resisting the system rather than getting stuck in the Slough of Despond facing the hideous Apollyon. "The best of our struggles," Kelley maintains, " are not reactions to misery but quests for freedom."

Creating itself is a quest for freedom. We can fire up our imaginations through learning about and supporting such organizations as the Black Youth Project 100, Million Hoodies, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Dream Defenders, the Organization for Black Struggle, Southerners on New Ground (SONG), LEAP, and many others. For those of us who are white, we might also join SURJ, a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice. We can also find inspiration with the Water Protectors at Standing Rock, indigenous communities that have been at the forefront of protecting our natural world; with queer rights workers, with immigrant rights workers, and with the decades long Palestinian non-violent movement for liberation, including but not limited to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement.

And while we call on ourselves to put banished, buried histories of conflict and resistance onto our center stages, let us not forget those who have been carrying the torch for decades, writing vital, dangerous theatre. We theatre artists have a rich history to draw upon. Writers, directors, alternative and/or radical theatre spaces have been facing down the horsemen of the apocalypse for decades now, prying open the elite doors of mainstream theatre, making them a little wider for others traditionally unwelcomed to the stage. We have a wealth of theatre artists who engage with what Henry Giroux calls the "pedagogies of repression," usurping the "dead zones of the imagination" to give us glimpses of other possibilities than a culture addicted to consumerism, war, and self-aggrandizement. And as we create our inventive, subversive, ever-changing maps of resistance and possibility for the stage, we might well remember the words the South African artist Thuli Gamedze used to describe the black imagination-words which lend themselves to the kind of theatre we might aspire to, a theatre of "improvisation, a dance in an obstacle course, a performance inside a burning room. It is impermanent and has no binaries to hide behind."

As theatre folk, we can and must strive to create a multiracial, cross-class movement that centers people of color's leadership to subvert the status quo workings of our theatre world (and not just by achieving diversity quotas in casting, for instance). U.S. theatre is overwhelmingly, at times blindingly, white, not only in terms of who makes decisions and who fills the (generally very expensive) seats, but in its core politics and worldview. How can we circumvent the gatekeepers and subvert, or at least redefine, the insitutions they run? It is a tall order, but within our imaginations and collaborations are charts to guide us. We are, after all, storytellers. Who said we cannot write the story of a future that is for and by us? As Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us, "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable-but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."

So, yes, the horsemen of the apocalypse are still riding, and surely they are terrifying to behold. But rather than allow ourselves to become entranced by their spectacle, let us ask instead: Who stabled their horses before they rode out into the night? Who gave the horsemen shelter and food before they mounted? To answer these questions, we must become critical thinkers and writers, undermining the systems of power that diminish our lives, that diminish our ancestors as well as generations to follow. As Giroux suggests, such critical thinking "is the precondition for nurturing the ethical imagination that enables engaged citizens to learn how to govern rather than be governed."

When perhaps our most brilliant critic of American history, W.E.B. Du Bois, turned 93, he wrote: "Today I have reached my conclusion: Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction." Du Bois knew that racial capitalism was the true recurring apocalypse and that we would need all of our bodies and creative capacities to oppose it. And on these ever expanding, inspiring and electric stages, we will surely find, as he promises, space to stretch our arms and souls, "the right to breathe...thinking, dreaming, working as (we) will in a kingdom of beauty and love."
Playwrights Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi are frequent collaborators. For more about the authors, go here. An incomplete list of these playwrights includes: Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Kennedy, Kia Corthron, David Henry Hwang, Roger Guenveur Smith, William S. Yellow Robe Jr., and George C. Wolfe. And more recently Kwame Kwei-Armah, George Brant, Branden Jacob-Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lisa B. Thompson, Stephen Orlov, Tanya Barfield, Caridad Svich, Tanya Saracho, Taylor Mac, Yussef El Guindi, Betty Shamieh, and Young Jean Lee. And let us continue to support and encourage our fearless younger writers: Jackie Sibblies Drury, Kara Lee Corthron, MJ Kaufman, Hanah Khalil, Fernanda Coppel, Elizabeth Irwin, Andrew Saito, and Aeneas Hemphill.

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American plunder didn't begin with this administration. Our theatrical dissent must be grounded in a holistic critique of state violence.

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Theatre: A Counterweight for Heavy Times

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Theatre: A Counterweight for Heavy Times

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Theatre: A Counterweight for Heavy Times

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The nonprofit theatre’s mandate to serve as a town hall, a sort of secular church for the democratic spirit, has seldom been more salient.

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How has this unlikely presidential candidate gotten so far? By setting the stage and giving the performance of a lifetime.

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How has this unlikely presidential candidate gotten so far? By setting the stage and giving the performance of a lifetime.

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Theater in the Trump Era

By Kevin Broccoli on February 1st, 2017

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AD World: Theater in the Trump Era - Motif

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Borrowing from the great American Theatre Magazine, Motif reached out to several artistic directors in the area to get their response to the current political climate and how they see […]

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Written in 1935 during the rise of fascism in Europe, Lewis’ darkly satirical It Can’t Happen Here follows the ascent of a demagogue who becomes president of the United States by promising to return the country to greatness. In 2016, Berkeley Rep unveiled a new stage adaptation of Lewis’ prescient novel, one week after that production ended, the presidential election roiled our nation. Now, Berkeley Rep reprises that production with the same director, but this time as a radio play in four episodes, just in time for the 2020 presidential election. We’re delighted to welcome back much of the original cast including David Kelly as the candidate Buzz Windrip, and to have Academy Award nominee David Strathairn join us as the liberal protagonist Doremus Jessup.

The novel, It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis was published in 1935 and was quickly adapted into a play and produced by the WPA's Federal Theater Project on October 27, 1936, in 21 U.S. theatres in 17 states. To honor that event and once again affirm the critical role that theatre can play in the nation's social discourse, Berkeley Rep has partnered with Center Theatre Group and over 60 theatres to broadcast this new radio play version.

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Digital Stage (free). Available on demand beginning October 13.