Newsmax on Broadway

I received an e-mail in my inbox asking me to read and comment on this NewsMax article on Broadway and theatre. If you don't know NewsMax, they're like a sub-Fox News Right Wing "news"  outfit on the web.  They have those constant ads asking you to vote on something political that then links to their content. Current headlines include "Obama's half-brother arrested for drug charges" and "Terrorists getting Mexican Passports?" So I thought... "hey, why not?". 

The article is here. Let's go through it point by point:

Looking for a lavish hit play that’s fun for the whole family? Wicked fits the bill. Kids especially love the catchy music, flying monkeys, and colorful little Munchkins.

The trade-off? In order to fully appreciate the pageantry, you either have to ignore — or agree with — the preachy political messages.

Wicked skewers the Bush administration’s war on terror and attacks the quaint notion that evildoers should be punished. Its efforts appear to have paid off: The play won three Tony awards and broke box-office records in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, and London.

By leaning far to the left, Wicked is a lot like most hit stage plays in which a political message lurks.

I am not going to try to argue that theatre in this country doesn't lean left. It does.  But there's still issues of intellectual rigor and honestly here, namely that Paul Bond mentions one Broadway show and extrapolates from that that a viewer looking for any family friendly experience on Broadway would have to "fully appreciate the pageantry, you either have to ignore — or agree with — the preachy political messages."  I haven't seen Wicked, I know very little about its politics.  So let's grant for a moment that Bond is correct. 

But what about the other shows on Broadway? The other ones that you could take your kids to, that is.  Let's see, there's Little Mermaid, The Lion King and Mary Poppins none of which are exactly a bastion of liberal agitprop, unless for some reason Conservatives hate spoonfuls of sugar. Besides, given their views on the estate tax, I would think that Conservatives would really go for a bit of Divine Right of Kings froofra like Lion King. I'll give ya Shrek, and South Pacific was certainly liberal for its day, although the very act of reviving it is somewhat Conservative. And then there's jukebox nostalgia fest Jersey Boys. . Now, I'll agree that there aren't Big Lurking Conservative Messages in any of these, but it's hardly necessary to agree to some Democratic belief system to enjoy them. They try pretty hard to be apolitical, something which I think is virtually impossible, as supposedly "apolitical" show actually simply reify the status quo, a fundamentally conservative thing to do.

Which is why the idea that most stage plays (btw, Paul, Wicked is a musical, not a play) have hidden political messages is both obvious and kind of redundant.  All plays have lurking political messages.  They are born out of specific political contexts. Some of them have them purposefully imbedded (a la Oleanna or Angels in America), some of them simply grow out of the consciousness of the writer writing them.  

Although there has been a smattering of conservative, Christian-themed plays, most have been small, amateur affairs. That has many in the industry asking why there aren’t more big-budget stage productions that buck liberal dogma.

Beware any article that says X has many saying Y when those people are never identified. It's usually a way for a writer to thinly disguise their agenda. Of course, on NewsMax, agenda is the whole point, so I don't really know why he bothered here, but look, Many are not Asking this. Every once in awhile, someone outside the industry writes a column about it. That's about it.

Whither the plays challenging global-warming hysteria, or touting competition and capitalism over collectivism? Where are the acts with a pro-life message?

I think I address this pretty neatly here.  I don't have that much to say about it except that i tend to find most agit prop deeply boring whether it comes from the left or the right, and I think most audiences do too. Let's take the example above of a play "challenging global-warming hysteria" or as sane people would put it, the widespread global scientific consensus by people not being paid by petrochemical industries that global warming is real and a serious threat.  Anyway... How would such a play work? In order for it to work, you'd have to invent some science that doesn't exist, which would mean it would fail at its task.  You could- as South Park has done- try to make fun of people who believe in global warming, or tout discredited scientific theorums until you're forced to recant and then not really recant by saying that you would've listened all this time if the people who were right weren't such dickbags about it.  But that still doesn't work.

See, this is tough work, Paul Bond, being a playwright. What you could do instead is have a play where someone discovers that global warming may in fact be a hoax of some kind and then go through what happens to that person when they try to disclose it. You might get some interesting drama. But at the end, what you will have written is a play about challenging consensus in communities that takes global warming as its subject not global warming itself.  You could do a play built around interviews with scientists who think global warming is fake a kind of verbatim theatre, but it would have no momentum, there would be no plot, which even verbatim theatre relies on. 

Then we get some discussion with DTC's Chris Wiger about how he doesn't see Conservative plays being written, never has one come across his desk etc. Rather than actually explore in a serious way why Conservatives might not write plays (which might include that they won't be produced, i"m open but skeptical to that idea) he then says:

Jeffrey Tangeman, a professional play director who teaches script analysis at Ithaca College in New York, says he reads 200 plays a year, and about 80 percent lean left.

“Conservatives don’t explore the arts as much as do liberals,” he conveys. “Certainly they appreciate them, but beyond that, they don’t see as much value.”

Regardless of the dearth of right-leaning plays, conservative playwrights get no special consideration akin to affirmative action. In fact, Tangeman says that, if he were confronted with two scripts equally entertaining but with opposite political messages, he’d opt for the one he agreed with. The one on the left, he admits.

There's a few issues worth unpacking here. First is this bit: "conservative playwrights get no special consideration akin to affirmative action". Just feel the Right Wing White Entitlement Victimhood! Oooh! Aaaah!  It feels so good to pretend you're oppressed!  Oooh! Aaah! Okay, got that out of my system, no wait, I didn't. Because this kind of horseshit pisses me off like very very little else does. Because the translation of this sentence is basically "Unlike dark people, we white conservatives are really oppressed but have no recourse in this matter".  It's just. ugh. You know what? The Right in America is really good at funding unprofitable ventures for the purpose of disseminating ideology. It's called Wingnut Welfare and it's why there's a vast network of think tanks and magazines devoted to right wing causes. They're funded by a fairly small group of people, most famously Richard Mellon Scaife.

So you know what, Conservative America? If you want more theatre about you, stop playing the victim card and pretending US Theatre is a restaurant that won't serve you at the deli counter and go ask some of these billionaires for money to start a Conservative Theatre.  If- as this article assumes- there's some huddled mass of conservative theatre artists yearning to be free, then you should be able to create a viable theatre company or two funded by this same network. You know, like the Mormons and Scientologists do.  

You can get some of the big conservative names in theatre like David Mamet and Gary Sinese (founders of one of the most famous theaters in America if not the world) to sit on the board.   It's not my job as a director to help further beliefs that I dont' agree with.  We should respect instead of condemn artists that would turn down a job because of the content of the material.  I've turned down plays I thought were racist. I would certainly never direct Merchant of Venice or Oleanna, although I'd do As You Like It or The Cryptogram. It's called "having a conscience", something artists are supposed to cultivate.

Of course, there's a thin line between "having a conscience" and "being totally close minded and demanding all sorts of like ideological lock-steppery" which would be problematic were it the case, but I don't think it is.  There aren't that many conservatives writing plays.  The article fails on any level to address the question of why, choosing instead to blame liberals for not producing and directing them.  But the question of "why" is a difficult, uncomfortable one for all sides. I certainly don't know the answer.

To whit:

"If it’s important to conservatives to have plays they agree with, then why aren’t they making them?” A good question.

It could be they’re worried about their careers. Scott Eckern, after all, was forced to resign his post as artistic director of the California Musical Theatre after he angered liberals by donating money to support Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex marriage.

Scott Eckern didn't resign because of his programming choices, Scott Eckern resigned because his business was boycotted due to the bigoted political activities of the person in charge.  This move (which I supported) was also extremely controversial within the theater community. There's a major difference between the two. This just goes back to the "we Conservatives are such wimps that we won't even try to make it in theatre because of the Big bad liberals" meme. Gimme a break. 

This also betrays a fundamental ignorance of how theatre is made. If you want to see Conservative theatre done, grow a pair and produce it yourself, that's how the rest of us go about addressing the gaps in the theatrical landscape. By working to get our work done, and doing it ourselves when necessary. That's how theater in America got built, and when the big theaters of today have crashed and burned, it's how it will get rebuilt.

Liberals say, however, that conservatives don’t delve into the creative side of the theater business because there’s not enough money there. Or, they say, conservatives are incapable of defending their views in an entertaining way.

I would in many ways agree with this. Did you ever see that conservative answer to the Daily Show? I forget what it was called, but it wasn't funny and frequently involved trying to tweak people by like walking around in klan outfits.

Nonsense, says Evan Sayet, who heads a right-leaning troupe of comedians. The reason conservatives aren’t writing and directing theater productions is because they are grown-ups.

“The profession of ‘show’ is childish,” he says. “We don’t even call it ‘work.’ We call it ‘play.’ Show business is an immature way of looking at the world.”

Sayet knows the stage well. His Right to Laugh show has been a hit at The Laugh Factory in Hollywood for a year, and he has taken it to stages across the country. He is considering introducing political skits into the act.

Wait. So his example of how Conservatives can be entertaining and political is a little-known comedy troupe made up of conservatives that doesn't do political material? Doesn't that prove the liberal argument rather than argue against it?

It’s been done with success before, most notably by a troupe called the Capitol Steps who rely mostly on song parody to skewer both the right and the left. The group, which several Senate staffers started in 1981 and now includes members who have not been congressional workers, has earned kudos for being both clever and evenhanded.

After George W. Bush defeated Al Gore for the presidency, for example, Capitol Steps sang of Florida’s deplorable hanging-chads controversy to the tune of the 1966 Supremes song, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” More recently, the group sang of depressed retirement accounts in a song called “401K,” sung to the tune of The Village People’s “YMCA.”

The Capitol Steps actually is a good example, as it was founded by both a Republican and a Democrat.  I loved the Capitol Steps as a kid, actually.  But despite its co-ideological founding, I don't remember a lot of anti-Democrat pot shots in their material.  Neither of the examples listed above, for example, lean right in outlook. Depressed retirement acccounts? One of the ways that Obama won and without the lyrics to "You Keep Me Hangin' On" it's impossible to know the group's outlook on the issue.  I was frustrated by hanging chads. I was frustrated that poor people were given shitty equipment and were de facto disenfranchised as a result.

But conservatives looking for something meatier and perhaps more partisan in their favor, for a change, may have a new champion in David Mamet.

The famed playwright, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, declared last year that he is no longer a liberal, gladdening the hearts of conservative theatergoers everywhere.

Americans, Mamet famously wrote when coming out of the closet as a nonliberal, “are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be.” 

You can have him. I'll take Tony Kushner any day of the week.  

UPDATE: Colin over at Bitter Lemons throws in his $0.02 here. His take belies a number of unfortunate assumptions I think are worth responding to as they always come up in these kinds of conversations.  The first assumption is that Academia is Monolithically Liberal. This is not true. While it is true that some parts of academia tend to tilt leftward, there are other sectors that do not. Economics departments, for example, tend to be dominated by reactionary free market evangelists, not exactly the left-most position to take.

The second major assumption is that the only valid challenge to Liberalism is Conservatism. This is a somewhat-inevitable end result of our two party system. But it's also false.  We can do challenging, uncomfortable plays that come from further-to-the-left, for example, or from somewhere in the center etc. 

The third major assumption here is actually a misunderstanding of both the NewsMax article and my response to it.  I think Colin would agree (especially based on this part: "I am always looking to explore those ideas that challenge me, engage with those who disagree with me, write about the subjects that baffle me or enrage me, either because I don’t understand them or because they provoke something inside me that I don’t want to deal with.") that good plays work through asking a series of questions.

Some of these questions are factual in nature (what was their marriage like?) some of these are philosophical in nature (What does it mean to be human in this moment on Earth?) some of them are political in nature (what do those with privilege owe those without it?). A good production of a good play will find a way to perform these questions, to ask them throughout the creative process and to only answer those that are absolutely necessary to answer, thus allowing the audience space to experience the questions too.

I think this is what Colin is talking about in the above sentence. I agree with that above sentence. It also has nothing to do with the NewsMax article. The NewsMax article is lamenting the lack of overt Conservative messaging on our stages.  I'm dismayed by the amount of overt messaging period on our stages. I'm not upset because I disagree with a lot of the messages, nor because I think that "Has no place on stage" or whatever but rather because it's usually boring and anti-dramatic. 

When I wrote in the above post that I don't think a theatre artist should be expected to do a play whose message they disagreed with, that's what I was talking about.  I'm never going to do a play about how gay marriage is destroying America.  I would do a play that questioned the institution of marriage, however, but those are two very different things.  The NewsMax piece is lamenting that more theaters won't allow themselves to be used as Right Wing Propaganda Outfits.

Comments

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Every time I read one of these articles, I just shake my head. It's like these people come from Mars and don't quite understand the entire concept of "art" or "entertainment." Like the folks at the Big Hollywood blog, they are literally incapable of seeing anything except through the filter of their politics. Yes, there may be jokes about Bush or whatever, but that doesn't make a play or musical inherently "liberal." Tons of plays and musicals present a "conservative" worldview. They're just not agitprop. And there isn't much by the way of *actual* liberal agitprop out there either. As an artist, you reach more people when you approach something from the side or through an intriguing, complicated character. With these guys, it's like if they don't have Rush Limbaugh preaching to them on stage, then somehow it's a disappointment.