Theatre is for Revolution

A blog looking at theatre and social progress | Header photo is from Ivo Van Hove's production of Angels in America | I try to update weekly | I also tweet at @ajhasawebbrand.

[mccartertheatrecenter]

The Winter’s Tale Written by William Shakespeare Directed by Rebecca Taichman Set Design by Christine Jones Costume Design by David Zinn Lighting Design by Christopher Akerlind Photos by T. Charles Erickson

April 2 - 21, 2013 McCarter Theatre Center

[theatrecommunist]

In terms of abolishing private property I always get a little hung up about people not “owning” things that have sentimental value to them, but there’s probs an arguement that that’s just a facet of commodity fetishism, and if the social motivation behind living collectively is “don’t be an asshole” then i think we’d let people hold onto objects that are important to them

[dil-chaspi]

By whitewashing the poorest district in Panem, the the filmmakers successfully depoliticized the story. They removed any possibility of Panem being a racist country, of poverty and race somehow being related. Sure, Rue was still black, but Katniss was white. White people are just as oppressed as people of color, therefore race isn’t an issue in Panem. Race is taken out of the equation. Why not just make the tagline #AllLivesMatter? And even though people of color suffer alongside white people, it’s white people whose narratives we follow, white people who are allowed complexity and sympathy, and white people who are allowed to survive in the end… The Hunger Games is successful as a franchise because it doesn’t force us to think. By removing racism from the equation, it gives us an easy, non-controversial image of oppression. Oppression is a bad thing done by bad people. It’s sad, it’s hard to watch, and innocent people die, but uncomfortable things like racism are never brought up. It doesn’t explore why social inequality and poverty exist, they just do. Never mind that in Mississippi, the infant mortality rate exceeds that of Botswana, and that black infants are almost twice as likely as white infants to die. Never mind that black and brown people are more likely to be housed in environmentally-hazardous areas, where they’re exposed to dangerous materials more than the average, middle-class white person. No, never mind these things, because they make us uncomfortable, and we don’t want to be uncomfortable when we go see a movie. We want to be entertained. And oppression is only entertaining when the oppressed are conventionally-attractive white people.In a strange way, The Hunger Games has become a parody of itself. It’s gone from the story of a young woman of color rising up against a racist, totalitarian society and struggling with PTSD, to a glamorized, monetized spectacle in which millions of dollars have been invested. The Capitol didn’t watch simply for the death, it watched for the drama, the star-crossed lovers of District 12, the suffering and betrayal. And we in our own way are the Capitol, consuming the deaths of innocent people for our own entertainment, declaring ourselves “Team Peeta” or “Team Gale,” buying makeup from Covergirl’s Capitol Collection, turning a story of resistance into an extravagant spectacle to be marketed and sold like anything else in a capitalist society. Just as the Capitol watches for the drama, so do we. And I think part of that is inevitable in storytelling. But part of it is also preventable.We are a country founded on genocide, slave labor, and police brutality. We’re not in danger of becoming Panem; we have always been Panem.

From Panem to Ferguson: How Oppression Narratives Lost Their Meaning in the 21st Century (via hawtnip)

[rosswolfe]

Marxism and legal theory

Marxism and legal theory

About two months ago, when news broke that Chief Justice Antonin Scalia had died, my friend and esteemed comrade Donald Parkinson of the Communist League of Tampa wrote: “Scalia isn’t enough; lets see the whole rule of law die.”

Within minutes the thread was flooded with responses, many of them hostile. Incredulous that someone would propose to abolish the rule of law altogether — not just of…

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[devilduck]

[starlingsongs-deactivated201608]

Green cities and landlords cannot coexist.

[starlingsongs-deactivated201608]

I saw one of those photoshop mockups of a greener city, where like, every single rooftop is alive with gardens and walls were hung with vines and a couple of those always-just-on-the-horizon vertical farms, and it occurred to me.

This is totally incompatible with private ownership. Nobody would want to be a landlord in this city. The level of land use regulation and architectural oversight by the city which it would demand would be intolerable to maximizing profit. Cities today attempting to realize some sort of green dream (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, PORTLAND) are only able to accomplish a facsimile of it by rendering their urban centers wildly expensive to live in. And if the goal of the green city is sustainability, then you’ve got yourself in the foot right there on the starting line. Because there’s a very important resource that every city absolutely must have to survive:

Laborers.

And the people who can afford these green-approved condos and apartments? Are not laborers. So your workforce, the will and effort that turns the gears, is all coming from your urban sprawl: concentric belts of slapdash development, run down slums made of mid-century prop ups. See, if it were mandated that, say, you had to make these green places cheap enough for workers to live in? There wouldn’t be any in the first place. Because it’s profit based, they can only keep up these upscale urban dream homes by charging an arm and a leg for them. The only way landlords can profit on the presence of the poor is to spend nothing keeping up their property – offer you nothing but a leaking, moldy shack and tell you that you should be lucky to have that much. But because of that, the city isn’t really green at all.

You can throw all the trains and hybrid buses you want at the problem, it’s never going to work out. The majority of your city, by area and by population, is a desert of air, ground, and water pollution. And then you get the de facto or deliberate segregation of services (it’s just not worth spending money on those parts of the city,) policy meant to culture this walled garden that drives out industry (because that’s profit-based too,) all to create a live-in theme park of the clean, green future for the exceptionally wealthy.

But it’s a sham. Just an island of green in a sea of worsening decay. And sooner or later, either your real city is going to empty, out, or they’re going to demand reform. In the case of Portland, I honestly wonder if anyone cares enough about this town to stay and fight for it.

[starlingsongs-deactivated201608]

I would like to emphasize that the labor population i’m talking about in this post is by majority people of color, many of them immigrants, relegated to the most grueling and thankless jobs that the near enough entirely white upper class’ luxurious lifestyle depends upon.

And this is not an accident or a coincidence.

[theechrysalisamidst]

@BUFFALO next time. 

[devlishthoughts]

@lionantlers maybe you have thoughts my solarpunk friend?

[luminox12066]

I think OP is right. In the current setting, landlords are incompatible with solarpunk. But I would like the zoom out, broaden the picture a bit.

Solarpunk isn’t just about green, sustainable, and renewable technologies. A large part of the movement is dedicated to the social advancement of discriminated peoples. We have to do two things as a global society to make things work. 1) Acknowledge the effort of laborers and exactly what they contribute to society. 2) Think to ourselves, what is that contribution worth, and pay laborers accordingly.

We need, first and foremost, for the highest paid people to stop being greedy. If not that, enact laws that force the highest paid people to pay their fair share of a tax, which will go towards paying for green homes for low income people and families. We need to find ways to make sustainable/renewable technologies financially feasible for low income people and families. That won’t happen today, or tomorrow. That might not happen for a long time. However, the more money the wealthiest people give towards the research and development of those technologies, the more available and cheaper they will be.

We need, on a global social scale, to recognize that if companies can afford for something to be cheaper and easier to get, IT SHOULD BE.

Within that construct, then the poorest people can have green homes. Within that construct, maybe landlords still aren’t compatible. Maybe there’s a company you rent an apartment from, and a building manager, and maybe people actually CARE about their fellow human beings.

[theatrecommunist]

The greatest act of courage is to love

Noah Haidle, Smokefall

[theatrecommunist]

Theatre Journal: Richard III

I saw Richard III last night at the Steppenwolf Garage. I’m always looking for new, contemporary takes on Shakespeare plays, so I really wanted it to be good. And it did have its moments, but overall it fell flat.

The production had a lot of really great, really bold goals which lost something in their execution. It brought a focus to Richard’s disability by using a disabled actor--who also happened to be the company’s artistic director--in a variety of assistive devices from a wheelchair to a walker to a mechanical walking device. The focus on disability was a great direction to take the play in, but it seemed to be more of an aesthetic than an added perspective. If there were any new observations about how disability affects Richard and the chaos he causes, it was lost on me. Furthermore, the actor playing Richard wasn’t right for the part. He had a very amicable and conversational tone, but there wasn’t much of a motivator underneath. He seemed to be going through a low-stakes career path more than clawing his way up the hierarchical ladder. Richard can be charming and friendly, but there has to be a motivation to do these horrible things lying beneath, and that wasn’t apparent in this interpretation.

My favorite aspect of the production concept was the image-based direction. It worked amazingly in a couple instances--when Richard broke the rapid-fire dialogue with Lady Anne to arduously move out of his wheelchair to stand in his walker and at the top of the second act when he emerged in mechanical leg braces for his coronation--but many other moments felt trite or underdone.

Other highs included the costume design and stylized staging, while awkward sound design and confusing and unnecessary doubling rounds out the lows. Ticket prices were also expensive at $40 apiece without the hard-to-come-by student discount that I had to call the box office to get.

Overall, I admire what they were trying to do, but wish they had just done it a little better.

[fandomshateblackpeople]

What's so bad about Hamilton? I haven't heard anything but praise for the music and performances. Not trying to be rude or anything. Just genuinely curious. 🤔

The creator, Lin-Manuel, is not black, yet his musical about is about slave owners and “abolition”, which Hamilton was not for, at least not in the case of his friends who owned slaves. Hamilton’s wife’s family  made a LIVING off slave trading. I really do not like black people being cast as said slave traders, slave owners, and slave rapists, and I especially do not like this Latino man making them sing R&B and rap in said musical.

It’s not his story to tell and I’m disgusted by all these fancasts with black celebs casting them as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, like these are fictional characters. These are monsters responsible for all of black people’s problems today. It’s not quirky or intelligent to make slavery “relatable”. 

It’s insensitive, deplorable, and extremely anti-black that this non-black Latino man is making a profit from retelling the “history of slavery”, and no amount of rapping and R&B can make slavery “fun”.

[seamusheaneygone]

I don’t want to eat drink breathe love a woman a man a child an animal anymore. I don’t want to die anymore. I don’t want to kill anymore.

Heiner Mueller, from The Hamletmachine (tr. by Dennis Redmond)

[theatrecommunist]

Political vs Artistic Revolution, or the problem with Hamilton

There’s this idea in artistic circles that art is inherently revolutionary. That the things we create are subversive because *we’re artists* and always sitting on the side of progress. This is bullshit. Art is inherently political, yes, but so is everything. And art can just as easily be reactionary as progressive. Most importantly, stylistic innovations in the arts don’t automatically make the piece more progressive ideologically. This is the dichotomy of political and artistic revolution.

A landmark example of this is the musical Hamilton which is currently Broadway’s biggest hit and is capturing the attention of people across the country. I’m sure if you’re reading a theatre blog on tumblr you know what Hamilton is, but some relevant points just in case: Hamilton is the second major musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also stars as the title character. The musical has gotten a lot of attention for its use of hip-hop and colorblind casting of the founding fathers. However, many have seen this as an act of social justice, which is not the case. More qualified people than me have talked about the fact that casting actors of color as white historical figures (”reclaiming” a historical narrative for people excluded from it) is simply another way to elevate these slaveowners who created their own country on stolen land. Rather than exploring the (enormous) flaws of these often-idolized historical figures, the musical just idolizes them in a different way, while drawing parallels to modern revolutions such as Black Lives Matter and thereby ignoring the fact that the american revolution wasn’t helping anyone disenfranchised, just allowing rich white men get taxed less and hold the type of power that nobility held in England. Reframing America and the revolution that created it as a movement to create a country where everyone is equal isn’t an act of revolution but propaganda. What’s more, it’s propaganda that you can see in every history book, where the ideologies of racial equality and feminism are said to be implicit in our founding documents that really did nothing for those disenfranchised (and enslaved) groups.

So the question becomes, why does Hamilton get seen as this “revolutionary” play when it’s really just a tactic of bringing nationalism to a new demographic? That’s where artistic revolution comes in. Bringing new musical styles to a stale theatre landscape is a way of overhauling the artistic techniques, not the political goals they’re trying to achieve. Retelling a historical story in a way that incorporates groups and perspectives often let out of it is an innovation in narrative art, not political message. In this instance, even color-inclusive acting falls more on the side of artistic revolution than political (although this is an area that is best looked at on a case-by-case basis). And artistic revolution is good. I love artistic revolution. I love Hamilton as a piece of art. The problem is that we can’t seem to separtate between political and artistic innovation.

We, as artists, like to assume that if a piece is bringing new techniques to the creative landscape, that means it is automatically bringing new ideas to the political landscape too. But if we want to be political artists--and since no art exists in a vacuum, we have to be political artists--we need to be examining the political connotations of everything we create and consume. And that doesn’t mean we have to hate things with bad politics. It’s nice to just enjoy a fluffy heterosexual love story that jumps between alternate realities every once in a while. It’s nice to listen to a musical using styles that have never gotten attention on Broadway before, even if the message isn’t the call to revolution you want it to be. But innovative pieces will not always be pushing progressive politics, and we need to understand that. And we need to support pieces that do have revolutionary messages. And we need to create pieces that have revolutionary messages.

A postscript because I ripped into Hamilton more than I meant to: I don’t want to say Hamilton is advocating conservatism in any way. I stand by all my criticisms of it, but its political message is one upholding the status quo, not some special exception of bad politics. Things like the goodness of America are easy to take at face value at this point in time, so it’s easy for art to uphold them even unconsciously. It’s not good, but it’s something to raise awareness about, not place blame for.

[theatrecommunist]

Big Changes

So I’m in rehearsal right now, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the arts can and should be used for social change. Once I have free time I want to overhaul this blog to explore those ideas in a complex way. Address how theatre and the arts are complicit in/beholden to capitalism. Explore theatre for social justice. Explore the flaws in a lot of avante garde theatre from a social perspective. Look at modern productions pushing (or not pushing) leftist agendas. I’ve got a lot to say and this is gonna be a great platform for me to say it. Get ready for this. It’s gonna be great.

[dylanmarron]

Do you have a favorite Neo-Futurist play, either by yourself or by another company member?

It’s a play called “OPEN CASTING: Romantic Movie Climax” by a brilliant, brilliant artist named Jacquelyn Landgraf.

Here it is:

OPEN CASTING: Romantic Movie Climax

© 2007 Jacquelyn Landgraf

Jacquelyn perches astride a ladder d.s.l., her head resting on a pillow, facing away from center stage. A light comes up on her, she thrashes about restlessly.

A spotlight comes up center stage on no one.

A toy car pulls up into spotlight.

(beat.)

Neo A enters and stand just outside center spot, holding out a trenchcoat ready for someone to put on.

(beat.)

Neo B enters and places a boombox at edge of center spot.

(beat).

Softly, Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” begins. It increases in volume incrementally, hopefully as the audience chatter and kerfuffle begins.

Fingers crossed, eventually an audience member comes on stage, puts on trench coat, and holds boom box above their head. AT THAT EXACT MOMENT, the music blasts full volume, which cues Jacquelyn to rise from the pillow, slowly climb down the ladder, cross stage, and reward that audience member with a make out session.

CURTAIN.

***alt. ending

IF still no one comes up, song continues to play quietly, someone calls CURTAIN and all are disappointed and disdainful toward the audience members for not having seen Say Anything.

(this never happened)

[funhomes]

The thing that gets me about the fact that they don’t release professional recordings of Broadway shows is that they literally record all of them anyway

I’d get it if it was too much of an undertaking to record and release every show. I’d understand. But they already do that, and they’re archived at the Library of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and people with a New York library card can set up screenings of any show they want. The thing is, hardly anyone knows about it, and it’s only open to NY residents.  

If you’re recording them anyway, if you have them on file, why not release the recordings to the public after the show closes? No harm done, and theatre is accessible to people who don’t have the means to see shows live.

[anothermusicalanothershow]

A Good Audition Song...

Fits the time period of the show 

{Don’t bring in I Could Have Danced All Night for Catch Me If You Can}

Fits the style of the show 

{Thoroughly Modern Millie and Urinetown were written the same year but are definitely NOT the same style}

Not overdone 

{Not the time to bust out your Phantom of the Opera material}

Has a clear arc of beginning, middle, end 

{Even if you are singing for 20 seconds, there should still be a story and a journey to what you’re singing}

Written in present tense 

{Story songs can be really great but if you just sang a part of Meadowlark, you kind of miss the point}

Directed towards another person

 {It makes your acting more clear and concise. So don’t try and address the entire Argentine population Eva Peron}

Has at least one good sustained note 

{Give ‘em that money note. But not your absolute highest. Make ‘em want more. Play hard to get}

Playable for you accompanist 

{Jason Robert Brown writes great stuff but have mercy on your accompanist. They are people too}

Can be reasonably cut into an appropriate length for audition purposes 

{Some songs aren’t meant to be trimmed into 16 bar cuts. They need to roam wild and free}

Something you love to sing

{If you hate it, everyone behind the table will know}

[theatrecommunist]

7 Signs You Were A Theater Kid

Were you one of those young people who lived for the glitz and glamour of life onstage? No matter what your career is now, these seven signs will prove that you were almost certainly a theater kid.

[theatrecommunist]

I’m Still Here

I know it’s been ages since I posted. I want to change that, I’m just not sure what direction to go with this blog. When I started it I wanted it to be sort of a one-stop theatre resource that would teach people about newer plays they may not have heard of and also provide things like public domain scripts and audition songs and monologues. However, I quickly ran out of plays that I knew and considered worth talking about, and I don’t know what a good format to share monologues even is. Considering I’m in this rut, I figured I’d throw the ball to you, my readers, to find out what you want to see on here.

So tell me, what do you want to see in a theatre blog?