COUNTERBALANCING THE PENDULUM EFFECT: POLITICS AND THE DISCOURSE OF POST-9/11 THEATRE

Abstract

If a model haunts my inauguration of “Critical Stages,” then it is the “Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001” that David Román commissioned for the March 2002 issue of Theatre Journal. Yet there would be little room in that important historical document for what I have to say here. Though I greatly admire Román for commissioning that forum and am still profoundly moved by the thoughts of its twenty-seven contributors, I must ask how much more significant that forum would have been had the original commission focused on “Theatre and Politics” rather than “Theatre and Tragedy.” Would Diana Taylor's suggestion that the events of 9/11 have given us “a different kind of tragedy” have been a suggestion that 9/11 has given us a different kind of political theatre? What is that theatre? Is it even progressive? At the very least, a more direct focus on theatre and politics in the forum might have constituted a reply to the debate among theatre practitioners (particularly those in the United States) about the role of theatre in the politics of a post-9/11 world. As Marvin Carlson has pointed out, those debates initially centered on whether, in one fell swoop, historical forces had cowed political theatre into voluntary silence if not obsolescence. Five years later, what he describes as a retreat “from any consideration of an engaged theatre”—a retreat that ran the gamut from the “commercial theatre of Broadway” to “New York's most experimental and uncommercial ventures”—casts a shadow out of which we have yet to emerge.