There's a really fascinating conversation going on at Ta-Nehisi's place about morality vs. self-interest and people's motivations. It's a debate that's sprung up in the wake of the passing of Proposition 8. Really, go read it (And comment if you want!). I did want to highlight one part of the argument (that I somewhat disagree with) because I think it ties into some issues about theatre that we discuss on this blog from time to time.
Ta-Nehisi says this:
I don't think people really do things--en mass and maybe even individually--that isn't in their interest. I don't believe whites began supporting Civil Rights in the 60s strictly out of an attack of moral conscience--they were notinterested in being a member of a community which sanctioned the fire-hosing of children. It's clear that Jim Crow and segregation worked to the immediate advantage of some white people, but I've never believed that it worked to the long-term advantage of most white people. The price of international embarrassment, of essentially shrinking the middle-class, of destroying valuable brain-power, of sowing resentment amongst a substantial minority of the populace, of creating ghettos is high.
And I agree with it, but it's also missing a separate, important point that any student of Drama should be able to immediately jump to: Empathy, Sympathy and their cousin Pathos. Or to put it in Ta-Nehisi's terms-- I think people are able to enlarge "Self-interest" to include "interests of people I care about"... which would explain why I became passionate about Gay Equality after working in professional theater at the age of 12 on a show about homosexuality, families and AIDS and made my first out Gay friends. And then further enlarge it to "people whose shoes I can imagine myself in" and that part of why, say, Keith Olbermann gets all teary about Prop 8 or why some white people became so impassioned about civil rights issues is that empathy became a big part of the psychological equation. (Another way of saying this is that I think Ta-Nehisi's analysis of how people behave assumes waaaay too much rationality and not enough emotionality on the part of human beings).
So where does this intersect with what we've been talking about on this blog?
Well, my friends, it gets back to diversity on stage and attendant issues of representation. We work in the most human art form, an art form that involves live humans gathering to watch other live humans interact in real time. (I believe as a quick tangent that it's actually our empathic bond with those on stage that makes bad theatre so much more excruciating to watch, we feel bad for the people on stage in the bad play and our pity for them and sorrow for them eventually turns to anger against them for making us feel this way when we're the ones paying to watch them).
Theatre allows for a very diverse examination of the human experience, regardless of whether it's realistic or not. And through it we get to see people in a wide variety of moments, investigating and plumbing the depths of a variety of experiences (Again whether realistically rendered or not). To give a couple of examples: Jason Grote's 1001 looks at a romantic relationship (Between an American Jew and a Palestinian) and the ways that relationship is shaped by cultural and historic forces beyond the protagonist's control. Sarah Ruhl's Euridice- and no, haters, I don't want to have a debate about Sarah Ruhl right now, I like her, and even if you don't just go with me here- looks at grief, death and the relationships between fathers and daughters (all very real things) through a poetic and frequently abstracted take on a Greek myth.
One of the most valuable things that theatre has to contribute to society is this very thing I'm talking about. It can enlarge our humanity even if, like cold medicine, the effect wears off within a few hours. I gave an example here once on this blog, actually, of having had a fight with Anne, going to see Chris Shinn's Dying City and then midway through watching a couple fight about the Iraq war and their marriage had an epiphany about the fight and how i could be giving around it and, essentially, not be like the characters in his play. That's a little example of the things I'm talking about.
There is a way then, that the lack of diversity on our stages, and the lack of integration in our casts limits this enlargement of our humanity and capacity towards both empathy and sympathy by limiting who we see, by limiting who is allowed access to to our sympathy, or what roles they have to play in order to get it. These issues of representation also lead to a kind of monolithic understanding of identity, where we see "Black People" instead of the guy right in front of you. This is an impulse (putting people into groups along easily recognized identity metrics) that everyone does, we have tons of psychological literature on it etc. but one thing representational art forms allow us to do and in particular theatre when it's working right is to see the forest and the trees simultaneously.
Comments