The use of pepper spray has taken center stage in our cultural dialog. Be it police spraying peaceful protestors or shoppers “competing” (an amazing euphemism for unrestrained violent aggression) with other shoppers, pepper spray is there. “Casually pepper spraying cop” has become an internet meme which has honestly shocked me. An act showing such pure disregard for human welfare had, within days, become recuoperated into the narrative of consumption thereby mitigating the impact of this gruesome violation of human rights.
What is the connection between casually pepper spraying cop and the woman who assaulted a fellow human during a crazed shopping spree the day after Thanksgiving? Perhaps there is no connection and they just happened to use the same tool. Or perhaps they are both a manifestation of the same disregard for human welfare and show how fundamentally corrupt the moral structure of our culture has become. How else can Fox News commentators claim that such a weapon is “essentially a food product?” Of course when we enter the moral universe where pizza is a vegetable and corporations are humans all bets are off.
As an artist I have honestly been stunned by these events. Artistically stunned. The utter horror I have witnessed as violent disregard for human well being is seen as the legitimate response to people asking for a corrupted system to be fixed has made me at times physically ill. The violence here in the US is nowhere near the violence in Egypt, yet, the Egyptians are taking their cue from us in firing on civilians. These sequences of events shock me. The shock I am feeling is in large part making it impossible to create. As such it is forcing me to confront the role of the artist in times of upheaval.
Picasso’s Guernica is an amazing depiction of the horrors of war. What is the equivalent work for our time? In a world so heavily saturated by consumerist thinking is it possible to create a work that can stand in critique of that culture and its resulting violence without falling victim to recouperation itself? Perhaps Banksy and his ilk are the only ones. I have seen a number of new Banksy, or Banksy derived, works cropping up all over my Oakland neighborhood recently. For a cultural battle being waged in the streets, perhaps its truest artistic form must manifest in those very streets.
Or is it the rough edges of citizen journalism? In a world where moral and ethical obligations are not even considered in the dominant cultural narrative why should refined aesthetics have center stage? The rough unedited livestream documentary is the film. Not whatever reified and safely packaged docutainment Michael Moore shoves out of his studio in a year or two. The poets are on Twitter. The performance artists are hurling teargas canisters back at the lines of riot cops.
I listen to the narratives on twitter and the theater world appears functionally unaffected by the world around it. For a medium that lays claim to immediacy and the visceral experience, there is no larger conversation happening about how theater can engage this world. Sure there is the isolated individual. There is even a petition on line for #occupyBroadway doing free performances in Times Square. But how will that challenge the system? How will that stand against the dominant modes of power and control? How is that dangerous?
Merely doing a play about characters that embody the 99% misses the point. Willy Loman has nothing to do with the status quo problems. He is a product of mid-century American Capitalism. Sure it shares themes with now but we have moved past that. To do that play is to speak to the world before September 17th, 2011 when tents were set up in Liberty Park. We are on the verge of war. The powers that be have declared war in their violent repression of peaceful protestors. Now we see who will stand up.
Antigone is a play that speaks to now. The lone voice standing up for what is right against the entire force of the State apparatus. A friend of mine is currently working on a stage adaptation of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. But when we were talking about it, during the November 2nd General Strike, he mentioned that Little Brother was a post-9/11 story and that Occupy Wall Street has shifted the narrative into the next phase. Even a play that has not been finished yet is already outdated.
Theater is alive not because it is live. Peter Brooks wrote eloquently on the deadly nature of much that passes for theater. Theater is alive only when it connects directly with the world around it. When it plugs into the larger cultural stream and manifests, in physical form, our subconscious and our struggles. The Brecht and Weill debut of The Mahagonny Song Spiel caused riots in the streets. That is theater that is alive.
We do not need any more dead plays. Willy Loman is the champion for those who have not yet woken up to the radical inequalities this world faces. Willy Loman embodies the underbelly of an America we long ago sold to the highest bidder. Willy Loman died with the repeal of Glass-Steagal. Willy Loman died with Citizen’s United.
Antigone refuses to die. Antigone lives wherever the just are repressed. Antigone speaks truth to power wherever the marginalized have their voices taken from them. Antigone stands against the State whenever the State stands against its people. Antigone refuses recouperation into the dominant narrative. Antigone lives another day to chant “We don’t die/We Multiply/Hella hella Occupy.”
