After a turbulent year, Ezra Brain deconstructs political theatre and sets out his case for ‘re-Marxing’ theatre’s future.
With the onset of the pandemic, the second Black Lives Matter movement, and the economic crisis, theatre as an art form and an industry is in a period of crisis and rebuilding. This is doubly true of political theatre, which explicitly intends to dialogue with the current political moment. Artists who pride themselves on creating politically minded art are assessing their own role in the system of racism, oppression, and exploitation that we live under, and many are wondering what the path forward is. Whatever anyone believes and wherever anyone stands, the truism is that theatre cannot go back to the way it was before the pandemic, because both the world and the way people engage with it have fundamentally changed.
For years, political theatre has largely been reduced to simply calling out the problems in society, leading to a glut of plays that simply tell their (usually white, upper middle class, liberal) audiences that racism/sexism/homophobia/etc. is bad. Plays are presented either as world premieres in major metropolitan centers or as toothless revivals in regional houses that are, in essence, two-act sermons to the choir. This creates a political theatre that only challenges the ideas of those who, by and large, will never see the plays and allows those who will see the plays to pat themselves on the back for how progressive they are... Keep reading on HowlRound.
With the onset of the pandemic, the second Black Lives Matter movement, and the economic crisis, theatre as an art form and an industry is in a period of crisis and rebuilding. This is doubly true of political theatre, which explicitly intends to dialogue with the current political moment. Artists who pride themselves on creating politically minded art are assessing their own role in the system of racism, oppression, and exploitation that we live under, and many are wondering what the path forward is. Whatever anyone believes and wherever anyone stands, the truism is that theatre cannot go back to the way it was before the pandemic, because both the world and the way people engage with it have fundamentally changed.
For years, political theatre has largely been reduced to simply calling out the problems in society, leading to a glut of plays that simply tell their (usually white, upper middle class, liberal) audiences that racism/sexism/homophobia/etc. is bad. Plays are presented either as world premieres in major metropolitan centers or as toothless revivals in regional houses that are, in essence, two-act sermons to the choir. This creates a political theatre that only challenges the ideas of those who, by and large, will never see the plays and allows those who will see the plays to pat themselves on the back for how progressive they are... Keep reading on HowlRound.