It’s refreshing to come across a theater book entitled “Crisis” that’s not about the crisis in theater, but about every other crisis in the world – a book that makes the case that theater has been a good place to address all these other crises. In “Crisis: The Theater Responds“(Salamander Street, 254 pages), author Carol Rocamora offers a selective survey of specific plays and playwrights that have responded to the issues of the day over the past century. In the process, some also have created new forms of theater.
The first of her ten chapters summarizes the lives and works of three major playwrights of the twentieth century who “set the standard” for the role of playwright in times of crisis; each “made sacrifices and suffered severe consequences” for creating their art: Bertolt Brecht, whose “epic theater” (such as “Mother Courage and Her Children”) condemned war and tyranny, especially Nazism in Germany; Athol Fugard, whose plays (such as “Master Harold and the Boys”) fought apartheid in South Africa, and Vaclav Havel, fighting the ruthless Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
The next chapter details Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” created in response to the AIDS epidemic; Anna Deavere Smith’s verbatim theater series, On The Road: The Search for American Character, especially the first two, each an account of the lead-up to and aftermath of an urban race riot, “Fires in the Mirror” and “Twilight Los Angeles, 1992; and “The Laramie Project,” Moises Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project’s account of the aftermath of a gay hate crime, the killing of Matthew Shepard.
There are a total of some sixty-five plays included in the ten chapters of the book, organized into groups according to playwright or theater company (Caryl Churchill and Belarus Free Theatre each get their own chapter); by specific eras (Chapter 4 is entitled “A Decade of Conflict (2000-2010)”), or by the crisis the plays focus on (there are chapters entitled “Black Plays Matter” and “Immigration and Identity.”)
Fortified with an index, a list of plays referenced, a bibliography and end notes, “Crisis: The Theatre Responds” might prove helpful as a memory aid for a specific play or playwright. Although she follows no set format for all of the plays, Rocamora — a critic, playwright and long-time teacher at NYU’s Tisch School of Arts – gives the plot of most of them, and often offers some critical analysis, as well as such details as the production history. The book might also serve as a prompt for further thought and study. Reading through “Crisis” provokes more questions than it explicitly addresses:
Has the theater’s response to crisis ever made a tangible, verifiable difference? Has theater ever changed the world? When fewer people are attending theater, especially since the pandemic, why is it the best medium to respond to crises, rather than the mass media of the movies, or television? A character in a recent play argues that even the movies can no longer change the world; such persuasion now happens on the Internet. That particular play brings up another question: How does one separate art from advocacy from propaganda? Where is the line? Can a play be a work of art if the playwright is promoting a specific political cause or point of view in hopes of swinging the audience to their side? Can such a play stand the test of time? On the other hand, are playwrights actually temperamentally unsuited for such advocacy? In a recent essay, New York Times theater critic Jesse Green argues that the crisis of antisemitism “has often seemed too complex for artists, with their tendency toward both-sides-ism, to face. (What about free speech? What about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians?) Especially in the theater, a supposed safe space for Jews, the response to historical, no less than imminent, threats has always been erratic and constrained.”
Rocamora likes to call the playwrights in her book “first responders,” but, if you define a crisis as an urgent event or acute series of events, can any artist process such an event more quickly than, say, a journalist, who simply has to try to nail down the facts, rather than get at what’s behind them?
Some of these questions came up in an enlightening discussion about the book at one of the Drama Book Shop’s regularly held author events., with Rocamora and three of the playwrights she writes about:
Antoinette Nwandu, whose play “Pass Over,” modeled on “Waiting for Godot,” tackles police brutality. Her play was the first to open on Broadway, in August 2021, after the pandemic shutdown; It was the first on Broadway to address the police killing of African Americans in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement; it was also the first of an unprecedented seven plays written by Black playwrights that debuted on Broadway that season.
Eleanor Burgess, whose 2016 play “The Niceties” — about an encounter between a student and a teacher that explodes over matters of race and class and history — feels especially prescient right now.
Keith Hamilton Cobb, whose 2015 play “American Moor” is about a Black actor’s demeaning audition before a clueless white director to portray Othello. The play is discussed, understandably, in the “Black Plays Matter” chapter. But it is also arguably the only one in Rocamora’s book that is about the crisis in the American theater.
Cobb, for one, did not sound sanguine about the art in which he makes a living, because it’s closed off to too many. “As wonderful as theater is, who gets to come?”
But, after the conversation (a recording of which the bookstore has promised to put up as a podcast eventually), some of the nagging questions about theater seemed put into a brighter (or maybe just softer) light.
There is no denying, for example, that Vaclav Havel made a difference: His Velvet Revolution toppled the Czechoslovakia puppet regime nonviolently in six weeks. But it arguably wasn’t just the man who effected change; it was his plays. Because their absurdism, which was a form of coded protest, went over the head of the censors, and helped turn theaters in Prague into the gathering places for the protest movement.
It’s true, Rocamora concedes, that few other playwrights have been able so directly to right a wrong, or stop a conflict, but “they have called attention to it, they have heightened awareness, they have enlightened and educated the public.”
During the conversation, Rocamora pointed to several plays that did respond quickly to an urgent event – including to the pandemic. There are four described in the book; two of them I had found personally delightful — Richard Nelson’s The Apple Family and Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s The Line. I suddenly realized: If these weren’t world-changing, maybe they at least changed my world.
The personal turned out to be a clue, if not the key. All three playwrights made the point that their plays had been able to respond with apparent dispatch to a national crisis because they had been grappling with it as a personal crisis long before.
Antoinette Nwandu offered a modestly uplifting approach to where we are: “Being a theater practitioner in the 21st century,” she said “is an exercise in hope.”
