From the WSJ Opinion Archives
ON STAGE
When Drama Becomes Propaganda
Why is so much political art so awful?
You see a lot of plays when you're a drama critic, and you don't always get to pick them. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most of us have a way of sinking deeper into the velvet-lined ruts of our own well-established tastes when left exclusively to our own devices. To be a working drama critic, on the other hand, is to engage with what's out there, good and bad alike. Just because I expect to be exasperated by a show, or bored silly, doesn't mean I can afford to pass it by. Besides, I've been a critic long enough to know that only a fool writes his review on the way to the show. I can't tell you how often I've been surprised at the theater--both ways.
The most recent play to surprise me was a one-woman show called "Nine Parts of Desire." In it, Heather Raffo, an Iraqi-American actress and playwright, portrays nine characters based on a large and diverse group of real-life Iraqi women--a doctor, a painter who ran the Saddam Art Center, a political exile living in London, a young girl who loves the music of 'N Sync--whom she interviewed over the past decade. As interesting (and timely) as it sounded on paper, though, I hesitated before going to see "Nine Parts of Desire," because I feared that its perspective on life in Iraq would prove to be both predictable and tendentious. Specifically, I assumed that the characters would give every indication of having been carefully chosen (and their utterances no less carefully edited) so as to support a particular point of view about the war in Iraq, and that this point of view would be well to the left of center.
Why did I make these assumptions about a play I hadn't seen? Because I've seen, read and heard about enough contemporary American and British plays to know that the political point of view of most of their authors is well to the left of center. Henry Luce, the founder and publisher of Time and Life, was once asked why he hired so many liberals to write for his magazines, given that his own political views were unabashedly conservative. "For some goddamn reason," he replied, "Republicans can't write." Well, they've learned how, but for some other goddamn reason, they don't write plays. Of the 200-odd new plays I've seen in my two years as a working critic, not one could be described as embodying a specifically right-wing political perspective, nor do I know any New York-based playwrights or actors who are openly conservative.
For this reason alone, the odds were good that "Nine Parts of Desire" would reflect in a more or less explicit way the political consensus of what New Yorkers working in theater like to call "the theater community," and that it would do so in a way so blatant as to kill any semblance of drama. Yet it didn't. Never did I feel, not even for a moment, that Ms. Raffo was making her characters tell us what we--or she--wanted to hear. Some of them supported the war, others opposed it. Most expressed no settled opinion about the war, even though its continuing effects permeated their lives, and it soon became clear that her purpose in writing "Nine Parts of Desire" had been not to make a statement about the American presence in Iraq, but simply to suggest something of what it feels like to live there.
That's one kind of "political" play. An example of the other kind is Sam Shepard's "The God of Hell," which I saw around the same time as "Nine Parts of Desire." Mr. Shepard, who is one of America's most celebrated playwrights, described "The God of Hell" as a "satire" of "Republican fascism." Except for the fact that satires are supposed to be funny, I'd say that was a fair enough description of the play, in which a smirking, prancing fellow made up to look like Paul Wolfowitz invades the home of a Wisconsin farmer and his wife, festoons their kitchen with American flags, hooks up the genitalia of the man of the house to an electronic torture machine, and administers painful shocks until he agrees to surrender his heifers to the government for use in an unspecified but self-evidently nefarious secret project.
The New York Times called "The God of Hell" "robust" and "encouragingly feisty." My own opinion was best summed up by the woman with whom I saw the play, a staunchly liberal, theatrically savvy playgoer who, like me, admires Sam Shepard greatly. When the play was over, I noticed that my friend wasn't clapping, so I leaned over and whispered in her ear, "I'm afraid you guys are going to have to do a little better than that."
"Maybe we would have done better on Election Day if we had," she hissed in exasperated reply.
I wish I could tell you that "The God of Hell" was an aberration and "Nine Parts of Desire" the norm, but as I look back on the specifically political plays I've reviewed in the past two years, I find that--to borrow the oft-quoted words of Dorothy Parker, who covered Broadway for Vanity Fair and, later, The New Yorker--too many of them ran the gamut from A to B. To date I've seen three plays about the Hollywood blacklist, one of which, "Trumbo," was a tribute to a Communist screenwriter who went to his grave without once publicly expressing the mildest of reservations about the policies of Joseph Stalin, whose murderous regime he had enthusiastically supported throughout the 1930s and '40s. I've seen "Embedded," an antiwar tract of such modest political sophistication that Tim Robbins, its author, put into the mouth of the political philosopher Leo Strauss a phony quote that he'd found in a magazine published by Lyndon LaRouche. I've seen "Guantánamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,' " a British "documentary play" about the internment of suspected Arab terrorists that was so dramatically inert even the roomful of political activists with whom I saw it could summon up only tepid applause at evening's end.
All these plays were bad, by which I mean they were both crude and predictable, a fact that should surprise no one. Any work of art that seeks to persuade an audience to take some specific form of external action, political or otherwise, tends to be bad. But the line is not a bright one, and it is possible to make good, even great art that is intended to serve as the persuasive instrument of an exterior purpose. (That's why the great cathedrals of Europe were built.) Hence it serves no purpose to assert that political art is ever and always bad, as too many conservatives are wont to do. A conservative aesthete may be emotionally drawn to such sweeping statements as this one, made by a Russian émigré novelist in Kingsley Amis's "The Russian Girl":
Everywhere in the world literature is in retreat from politics and unless resisted the one will crush the other. You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish, though as we've all seen you can make a big fuss and have a lot of fun trying. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes, as you propose to do.In the end, though, they amount to little more than confessions of artistic faith. Like Sam Shepard, one must do a little better than that in order to better understand the intrinsic problems of political art.
Exactly what is it that art does? Countless books have been written to answer this question, and I can do no more in the compass of an essay than to suggest something of what they tell us. To begin with, it's generally agreed that great art has some mysterious yet ultimately intelligible relationship to truth. The nature of that relationship was nicely described by Fairfield Porter, a major American painter who was also a gifted art critic. "When I paint," Porter said, "I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful." No matter who said it first, this statement points gracefully to one of the most important things that art does: It portrays the world creatively, in the process heightening our perception and awareness of things as they are. (Whether and how abstract art performs this function is beyond the scope of the present essay, though the composer Felix Mendelssohn hinted at one possible answer in an 1842 letter to Marc-André Souchay: "The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.")
Can political art contain that kind of creative impulse? It can, of course, but the more specific its political purpose, the greater the temptations to dishonesty that are placed in the artist's path. "Instrumentalized" political art, for instance, often makes highly specific truth claims, as in the case of "The Exonerated," the documentary play recently telecast on Court TV about a group of American prisoners who were sentenced to death but later freed.
All art, as I have said, has something to do with truth, but there is a difference in kind between the truth claims of, say, religious art, which are not temporally verifiable, and those of a documentary play, which (usually) are. No matter how artful a play like "The Exonerated" may be, its effect as art will dissipate if its claims to truthfulness can be significantly and successfully challenged (as those of "The Exonerated" have been).
This necessarily places a heavy burden on the political artist, who must not only be a good artist but also a competent reporter and researcher. Just as important, though, it may tempt him to cut his factual coat to fit his persuasive cloth. Turning messy fact into orderly fiction necessarily entails simplification; turning it into artful fiction demands as well that this simplification acknowledge the full complexity of human nature and human experience. These seemingly contradictory requirements can easily be fumbled by the artist whose principal goal is to persuade an audience of the rectitude of his cause. We do not expect him to portray the world creatively, but to tell us the unadorned truth about things as they really are. Yet propagandists are rarely prepared to tell the whole truth and nothing but. They alter reality not in order to "make everything more beautiful" but to stack the deck.
Note, by the way, that in describing political art I've emphasized its persuasiveness. This is a quality it has in common with apolitical art. Both seek to persuade us of their believability in order to accomplish the larger purpose of which C.S. Lewis wrote in the last chapter of "An Experiment in Criticism":
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.This is the meaning of the cliché that great art "takes you out of yourself." By definition, it then puts you into somebody else, and in so doing enriches your understanding of reality. To do this successfully, it must be in the deepest sense sympathetic. The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines sympathy as "the fact or capacity of sharing or being responsive to the feelings or condition of another or others." Such a capacity is a sine qua non of all serious art. It is what makes Shakespeare's villains believable: We feel we can understand their motives, even if we don't share them. It is also central to the persuasive power of great art. Without sympathy there can be no persuasion. Even a caricature, however cruel, must acknowledge the humanity of its subject in order to be funny. The artist must create a whole character and not simply show the side of him that will most convince us of his villainy.
What I find striking about much of today's political art, by contrast, is its unwillingness to make such acknowledgments. Instead of seeking to persuade--to change the minds of its viewers--it takes for granted their concurrence. It assumes that everyone in the audience is already smart enough to hate Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and, above all, George W. Bush, and thus does not need to be reminded of their underlying humanity, or of the possibility, however remote, that their intentions might be good. By extension it also takes for granted that no truly creative artist could possibly think otherwise, that good art is by definition liberal (or, to use the term commonly preferred by such artists, "progressive") in its view of the world, and that only progressive thinkers are truly creative. Conservatives are generally thought too repressed or narrow-minded for creative activities.
This attitude can be found in its most extreme form in the plays of Tony Kushner, the author of "Angels in America" and "Homebody/Kabul," but it is also held by a very large number of other American artists, many of whom expressed themselves in a strikingly unguarded way after the last presidential election. One of them, the novelist Jane Smiley, tipped her hand in a postelection essay for Slate:
The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. . . . The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red-state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are--they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue-state citizens make the Rousseauvian [sic] mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind.Two things are worth noting about this article. The first is that it was written by a well-known, much-admired novelist. The second is that it appears to be representative of the political views of a considerable number of other artists who think that all conservatives (including conservative artists) are evil or stupid, or both. Ms. Smiley goes so far as to use the theological term "invincible ignorance," which implies that there's no point in arguing with such benighted folk, since their ignorance is invincible.
One finds the same quasireligious language in virtually all of Mr. Kushner's plays, used to much the same purpose: it is meant to indicate that disagreement with the author is not merely wrong but evil, and must necessarily lead to damnation. (Conversely, a play like "Trumbo" exists not to persuade anyone of Dalton Trumbo's goodness--that is taken for granted--but to serve as a quasireligious ritual of collective self-congratulation, an opportunity for progressives to join together in celebrating a fearless defender of the true faith. That the defender in question was a hack screenwriter who tacitly connived at mass murder on a near-genocidal scale is irrelevant; all that matters is that he "stood pat" when ordered by the House Un-American Activities Committee to inform on his similarly complicit colleagues.)
Now, it's one thing to feel like this, much less to say so out loud, if you're an elected official. That way lies a more proximate form of damnation. But what if you're an artist? What if you not only believe that more than half of your fellow men are ignorant, but allow this belief to influence the way you make art? The answer is to be found in plays like "The God of Hell" and "Embedded," which are written not for a hypothetical mixed audience of red and blue Americans but for a 100% left-liberal audience whose 100% agreement is presupposed.
You might go so far as to say that the authors of such plays suffer from what conservatives call the "entitlement mentality." It isn't just that they feel no responsibility to make arguments that might prove persuasive to those who disagree with them, or at least haven't yet made up their minds. They no longer acknowledge any responsibility to their audiences. They appear to believe instead that so long as an artist thinks all the right things, he need not go to the trouble to be amusing, subtle or even interesting. All he need do is make his characters say the right things, and he's entitled to the approval of his enlightened brethren. No one else matters.
That's what Sam Shepard must have been thinking, consciously or not, when he wrote "The God of Hell." After all, he knows how to write a good play, one that seizes an audience's attention and holds it for two hours. He didn't take that attention for granted when he wrote "True West." Now, it seems, he does.
What makes political artists think they can get away with such shoddy work? In New York and other American cities of similar political disposition, the answer is plain to see. Look at the 2004 election returns: 82% of Manhattan residents voted for John Kerry. No doubt Mr. Bush did rather better in the suburbs, but there's every reason to think that most art-loving New Yorkers are as unswervingly liberal as that statistic suggests. Yet there is no less reason to think that a substantial number of them expect more out of art, and refuse to accept less.
The English novelist Christopher Isherwood, who started out as a left-wing pacifist with strong Communist sympathies, started to change his tune by the end of the 30s. Writing in his third-person memoir "Christopher and His Kind" about a shipboard conversation he had in 1939 with his friend W.H. Auden, Isherwood recalled:
One morning, when they were walking on the deck, Christopher heard himself say: "You know, it just doesn't mean anything to me any more--the Popular Front, the party line, the anti-fascist struggle. I suppose they're okay but something's wrong with me. I simply cannot swallow another mouthful." To which Wystan answered: "Neither can I."It strikes me that we've been living in an age that bears a certain resemblance, aesthetically speaking, to the bad old days of the Popular Front. (Witness the near-hysterical obituary tributes recently paid to Arthur Miller, a second-rate playwright whose leaden style was founded on the simplifications and crudities of Popular Front-style dramaturgy.) And it further strikes me that a growing number of aesthetically sensitive liberals may be growing as tired as did Auden and Isherwood of the various ways in which politics has removed the creative impulse from contemporary art. My playgoing friend's shamefaced response to "The God of Hell" is a sign of that exhaustion, as was the tepid audience response to "Guantánamo," not to mention the fact that the highly publicized "Embedded," even though it was written and directed by a movie star, failed to transfer to a Broadway theater. Nor should it be overlooked that the two most stringently politicized musicals of last season, Tony Kushner's "Caroline, or Change" and Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins," failed to please a sufficiently large number of playgoers and had their runs cut short as a result.
No less interesting has been the enthusiastic reception of several recent political plays that steered clear of rigid political reductionism. The most artistically and commercially successful of these was Doug Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning "I Am My Own Wife." Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wright met Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a 65-year-old male transvestite who owned an East Berlin museum of fin-de-siècle knickknacks. At first he saw Charlotte as a gay hero, a courageous changeling who "navigated a path between the two most repressive regimes the Western world has ever known--the Nazis and the Communists--in a pair of heels," and began to interview her in order to write a play about her life.
But Wright quickly discovered that Charlotte was no hero. To save "her" own skin, she became an informer for the East German secret police, going so far as to denounce one of her closest friends. So instead of producing an exercise in homosexual hagiography, Wright wrote an autobiographical play in which he concealed nothing about Charlotte from the audience, not even his still-powerful longing to idealize her. "I need to believe in her stories as much as she does," he admitted in "I Am My Own Wife"--yet he paid us the compliment of letting us make up our own minds about this strange creature, instead of telling us what progressive minds ought to think.
I confess to not having expected "I Am My Own Wife" to be so honest, any more than I expected Jules Feiffer to tell the truth about Stalinism in "A Bad Friend." But Mr. Feiffer, though he is the deepest-dyed of Old Leftists, knows better than to idealize the "progressives" of his Brooklyn youth, for his older sister was a fanatical Communist, and he wove their unhappy relationship into his script. Naomi, the antiheroine of "A Bad Friend," is a steely-eyed, Stalin-worshipping harpy who believes every word in the Daily Worker and means to make sure her henpecked husband and precocious teenage daughter do the same. Unlikely as it may sound, her robotic chatter is eerily reminiscent of "The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg," Robert Warshow's devastating 1953 essay about the effects of Popular Front Stalinism on American culture:
Whether he cheers the Yankees or the Dodgers, whether he damns Franklin Roosevelt as a warmonger or adores him as the champion of human rights, the Communist is always celebrating the same thing: the great empty Idea which has taken on the outlines of his personality.Not that there is anything remotely courageous about holding Communist agitprop up to ridicule today--Mr. Feiffer missed his chance to say something courageous about Communism by at least a quarter-century--but it was still gratifying, as well as surprising, to see a play in which a left-wing author frankly acknowledged the extent to which American Communists betrayed their minds in order to serve their dark god.
Plays like "I Am My Own Wife" and "A Bad Friend," as well as films like those made by the left-wing director-screenwriter John Sayles, remind us that political art need not be simpleminded, much less uncreative, in its view of human behavior. Asked by an interviewer why so few American directors make political movies, Sayles replied, "I think more than being political or not political, it's often the problem of being complex: The characters aren't heroic. Sometimes they do things you don't like, even if you may like them, and it's hard to know exactly who the good guys and bad guys are, because everybody is a little bit compromised." I can't think of a more concise way to sum up the difference between "I Am My Own Wife" and "Angels in America," or between "A Bad Friend" and "The God of Hell." The biggest problem with such political artists as Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard, and Tim Robbins is not that they are leftists, but that they coast on their leftism. Their plays are as self-satisfied as they are simpleminded--and self-satisfaction is the death of serious art and creativity more generally.
The good news is that most of the art I see in New York, be it on stage, in a bookstore, or at a gallery, is not even implicitly political. What's more, it's actually become possible in the past few years for artists to get away with expressing impatience with the demands of political correctness, so long as they do it with a smile.
The best new musical to open on Broadway since I became a drama critic, for instance, is "Avenue Q," a satire of life among the 20-somethings in which PC is mocked with unprintable verve. Among its songs is a catchy ditty called "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist":
Everyone's a little bit racist--it's trueWhatever else that is, it's definitely not a New York Times editorial set to music. Yet "Avenue Q" has been the hottest ticket on Broadway ever since it opened two years ago, and shows no signs of fading popularity. I don't want to suggest that contemporary American artists are becoming any more diverse in their political views--I see no sign of that--but the political views of a good artist, if not necessarily irrelevant to the substance of his art, are far from the most important thing about it. It doesn't matter who the writers of "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" voted for. What matters is that they are prepared to tell us what the world looks like to them, not what they think we ought to think it looks like. And having done so, they're more than willing, like Doug Wright in "I Am My Own Wife," to let us take it from there.
But everyone is just about as racist--as you!
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit
And everyone stopped being so PC,
Maybe we could live in--harmony!
All of which brings us back to "Nine Parts of Desire." I know nothing of Heather Raffo's political views, and the fact that I cannot deduce them with any certainty says something important about the pitfalls and the potential of political art, both of which are considerable. After the re-election of President Bush, the continued fighting in Iraq was the top news story of 2004, yet the mainstream media had little of interest to say about the everyday lives of the Iraqi people, and told us next to nothing about their feelings and fears. Ms. Raffo's play, by contrast, brought its viewers closer to Iraq's inner life than a thousand slick-surfaced TV reports, even though its author was not a "professional" journalist but merely an artist. It is a prime example of political art at its most persuasive.
At the same time, "Nine Parts of Desire," while it is based on interviews with real people, is also a full-fledged, beautifully shaped play--a product of the unfettered creative imagination--rather than a stodgily earnest piece of documentary theater. Therein lies the source of its power: It is persuasive precisely because it is beautiful. All art, political or not, must make everything more beautiful in order to fulfill its most essential function, that of seizing and holding the viewer's attention. Any political artist who aspires to be more than a cheerleader for the converted must first learn this lesson, and learn it well. A boring work of art cannot convince anyone of anything, not even that we should believe what it tells us about the world in which we live. And nothing is more boring--or less believable--than a story with only one side.
Mr. Teachout is drama critic of The Wall Street Journal. He writes about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. This article appears in the Spring issue of In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues.
