Theatre Examples

I wrote about the power of theatre in a recent democratic engagement post, but did not give any examples, as my most loyal reader noted, of how theatre has become the site "where we work out many of the perplexities of everyday life." Furthermore, I did not explain how it has become "our collective conscience writ large and writ bare for all to tear down or build up" and can act as the best public space for articulating the civic philosophy that animates our thinking and spurs on our actions. I went on to say, again without examples, that theatre matters as no other art form does. It shapes how we see ourselves, including our very identities, and without it we are diminished as thinkers, creators, and doers. 

So my challenge at this point is to offer examples of how theatre does this. One example that comes to mind is Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart," a play from the mid-1980s about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and how desperate people were to understand what was happening to their community, while also retaining their humanity and their need to reach out to others, regardless of what some saw as great risks. We recently saw a revival of this play, and there is no way in a few words to capture the passion, the love, and the sheer desolation of people diagnosed with a fatal disease they did not understand. But the compulsion on the part of the protagonist of the Normal Heart to speak out loud about the suffering he saw around him and to call on people to rally around one another makes this a vivid and lasting document of a most distressing period.

Clybourne Park is another play that comes to mind, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, that tells the story of a Chicago neighborhood in two periods, first in 1959 and then 50 years later in 2009. It is a story about race and racism, about gentrification and historic preservation, but it is ultimately a story of the lengths people will go to to hold their communities together, even if this means excluding people solely because of their color, because somehow you think it is in your best interests to do so. The people in this play are not racist in the usual sense, but they are so trapped by what the culture seems to want they cannot see or think straight and therefore are willing to do great damage to themselves and their loved ones to uphold property values and keep a community "whole." It is also a play about how time, 50 years in this case, can so completely change the situation that the original dilemma about racial contamination seems quaint at best, and idiotic at worst.

A third example is a play we recently saw by Horton Foote at the Signature Theatre. It is a play called "Old Friends," and it is about a old southern family and how obsessed the family members are to preserve their wealth and their pride and how startling in character and respect the exception to this rule proves to be. Foote shows us people at their worst and at their best and in the process offers a portrait of a community in which the whole range of human emotions and possibilities is on display. We are in the course of the play both appalled and delighted by what we witness and all of this is accomplished through portraits of individuals that are, on the whole, balanced and true.

My final example is Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," which we recently saw in modern dress and which relies on the premise that the two families are divided by race - the Capulets being Black and the Montagues being White. This premise adds interest and contemporary relevance, but the fact remains that the main part of the action, the tension between undying love for a romantic partner and the responsibility to do what a parent desires, remains as strong as ever. The two lovers come from feuding families and their parents want them to select different mates, but all they can see is that they love one another beyond all reason. Their fate as star-crossed lovers, so innocent and so utterly unaware of the mores of their society, remains as poignant as ever. Their parents' objections, which represent all of the rules and expectations of a civilized society, come across as destructive and impertinent, and ultimately serve as the tragic basis for the loss of the two beautiful lovers.

I could go on, and I will admit I may not have made the case as well as I would have liked, but my passion for theatre as the site for hashing out our most searing cultural conflicts remains as strong as ever. Of course, there is nothing like a lovely musical. But great plays that excavate the issues that matter most to us are one of the things, at least for me, that continues to make life worth living.