'War Carnival'

[The mid-1960s were a turbulent time in the United States. The civil rights movement was getting heated, women and other disenfranchised Americans were becoming vocal and activist, the threat of nuclear war and destruction was increasing and, above all in those years, the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was a focus of the young Americans who were subject to the draft and their families and friends. Anti-war activism was becoming increasingly common all across the country and the war’s popularity was plummeting. The war and its images were being projected into the living rooms of America daily, and the war’s managers in Washington and its supporters around the country had become the villains of much of America’s youth. In 1967, New York University hired British playwright John Arden (Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance) as a visiting lecturer in the undergraduate theater program at the brand-new School of the Arts and he taught a course on politics and theater.

[Out of this class came a remarkable performance project, conceived, at the behest of the students, by Arden, an artist long associated with leftist causes (including Irish independence); his wife, actress Margaretta D’Arcy; and NYU theater games instructor Omar Shapli, a onetime member of the improvisational troupe The Second City in Chicago. The students of acting, directing, and playwriting developed the project and events in New York City around the time of its conception bore on the theme of the project, presented beginning in the afternoon of Saturday, 13 May 1967, 43 years ago today. One of those directing students was a young Leonardo Shapiro, the future leader of The Shaliko Company about whom I’ve written in the past. Already a political radical and anti-war activist, Leo (whom Arden described as a “balding bearded-weirdy”) was drawn to Arden, whom one writer characterized as “a mix of English establishment and international bohemian.”

[On 30 December 1966, members of the Bread and Puppet Theater picketed St. Patrick’s Cathedral “wearing black cowls and carrying grotesque masks impaled on poles” to protest Francis Cardinal Spellman’s public support of the war in Vietnam. One marcher set a doll spattered with red paint on the cathedral steps; another carried a sign reading “I am Mary. My Baby was napalmed in Vietnam.” At the Spring Mobilization on 15 April 1967, between 100,000 and 400,000 people demonstrated against the war at the U.N., where Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to the rally and Pete Seeger sang “This Land Is Your Land.” Some demonstrators gathered in Central Park where one activist burned an American flag in protest to the war. The next day, Chuck Connors, the actor (The Rifleman), raised a flag that had flown over the Capitol on the spot of the flag-burning as if to expiate the “desecration.” Earlier on 13 May, the very day the NYU performance, which became known as War Carnival, a "Support our Boys in Vietnam” parade, partially organized by the Johnson administration, moved down Fifth Avenue. Some of the 70,000 marchers, who included uniformed police officers and firefighters, nuns in habits, and veterans’ groups, stopped along the way to assault spectators who carried anti-war signs; one bystander, who wasn’t involved in the opposition movement, was tarred and feathered because the marchers took exception to his long hair and sandals. For students already focused on the war, such incidents so close to them in both time and location were bound to affect their imaginations. In this atmosphere, War Carnival came to be.]

John Arden, calling himself a “Britnik” playwright, characterized War Carnival, conceived as a day-long “episodic show,” as an “unscripted under-rehearsed attempt at something new.” A protest against the Vietnam conflict in particular and the military in general, War Carnival was performed free at NYU’s School of the Arts’ Central Plaza Building at 111 Second Avenue in the East Village beginning at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon, 13 May, until sometime after midnight the following morning.

Described as a “combination medieval passion play and modern day Play-In,” the piece came out of seminars Arden and D’Arcy conducted with playwriting and acting students. According to Arden’s recollection, it was principally D’Arcy who conceived the notion of the show. NYU had hired Arden as a lecturer for a course called Politics and the Theatre but then had asked him to lead some students in a performance project. D’Arcy was not formally on the payroll, but Arden agreed to conduct the workshop if his wife could officially direct the practical work, which Arden felt was more within her experience than his. In his preface to The Workhouse Donkey (1963), Arden had proposed a day-long event, with spectators coming and going and “rival attractions” offered in the atmosphere of a “fairground or amusement park” with “all sorts of thematically-relevant interludes” intermingled. Arden conceived of “a kind of ‘promenade theater,’ with performances running in a desultory fashion all day long,” and the NYU students wondered if such an event could actually be realized. Furthermore, Arden and D’Arcy, like Brecht, believed that theater must make spectators—and participants—more cognizant of the day’s important questions and provoke action. “I have been challenged by my class of drama students at NYU to put this theory [of the promenade theater] to the test,” said Arden. According to one student, the classes had been contemplating theater that was relevant to its time and audience and which involved the spectators, and some students were already concerned about Vietnam. “Why do we never discuss serious matters?” he said the students complained. So D’Arcy challenged the students: “You want to act: So act against the War.”

Arden and D’Arcy engaged Shapli, who was teaching theater games and improvisation at NYU, and they developed some material around which the student playwrights and directors (one of the latter being Leo Shapiro) built 24 small plays which formed what Shapli, who served as MC at the event, described as “a running soap opera about a family whose grandmother is Vice-President of the United States.” The Grandma cycle was presented as an “allegory of US involvement in S.E. Asia,” Arden asserted. Making use, too, of Hovey Burgess’s circus classes, the performance included war gods on stilts and actual military recruiting speeches MC Shapli used to get the audience to participate, while U.S. Army training films were being shown on a tarp behind them. (To make sure the point was obvious, another training film of similar content was also screened—one from Nazi Germany.)

Declaring that a “play should come out of the crowd,” Arden intended War Carnival to evoke the atmosphere of a Happening, the audience free “to arrive when it wants and leave when it wants,” then moving at liberty among the events and demonstrations. All around the hall were skits, films, songs, and midway games of various kinds. The visiting playwright asserted that he’d concluded that “spontaneous ensemble improvisation is perhaps the only force to jerk the theatre forward from the successive ruts in which it sticks.” One of Arden and D’Arcy’s major focuses was the investigation of theater as communal expression.

At 2:00, spectators began to flow into the Central Plaza. Signs directed them to stairs or the elevator which took the spectators to an upper lobby where they found more signs, vendors, cotton candy, balloons, and a Coke machine. Admission was free so there were no ushers or ticket-takers at the door to the large, open studio with platforms with bleacher-like seats on opposite sides, a curtain across a third side, and a tarp stretched across the fourth wall. Before the planned performance started, the space presented the appearance of a fair, with carny games like a ring-toss or one where a player throws a ball into the navel of a life-sized painting of naked woman. Suddenly, a scuffle broke out between two students and quickly became a brawl. A young woman shouted, “My God he’s dead,” and flung herself on the motionless body of a classmate. The stilt-walking war gods appeared immediately and Arden made a funeral speech ending with a call for “Peace.” In the Orwellian parlance of the event, that meant war and the events of the occasion began.

The effort in War Carnival was to encourage the spectators to engage in the Game that was at the center of the event, filling the interstices between the student-created Grandma plays. This involved members of the audience, “recruited” into either the green army or the red, each “soldier” marked with a green or red dot of greasepaint. They all wore placards hung around their necks with arbitrary character traits (“Hysterical Jewish Philosopher”; “Talkative Holy Conservative”) written on envelopes stuck to the signboards. After the soldiers were “trained” (with the help of the films projected on the tarp) by two “sergeants,” Shapli called each soldier at random to engage in “combat” which the MC designated. This consisted of verbal contests (“Make up proverbs, first man to falter is dead”; “Construct a rhyming poem, alternate lines to each player, first man who drops meter or rhyme-scheme is dead”) or physical conflicts (a race between “One-Legged Dutch Sailor” and “Athletic Russian Interpreter”). Reminiscent of Brecht’s Man Is Man, and related in a way to such experiments as Stanley Milgram’s (in)famous exercise at Yale, the Game, Arden explained, was a demonstration of how easy it is for “unprincipled demagogues” to whip up people’s emotions.

“Campaigns,” each comprised of several “combats,” occurred at intervals throughout the event; in between, the Grandma chronicle unfolded in “partially scripted, partially improvised scenes” with minimal props and costumes—including masks cut from cereal and cracker boxes—varying in style and approach but united by their focus on opposition to the Vietnam war. Forming a wildly complex tale, Grandma begins when an Air Force bomber accidentally drops a nuclear warhead on the Appalachian Valley, irradiating a family of share-croppers who “begin to glow in the dark.” In a political maneuver, Johnson (played by now-well-known actor Larry Pine) enlists Granny to run as his V.P. in the upcoming election and they win. Granny gets Johnson impeached on the grounds that the war in Vietnam is unconstitutional and she assumes the presidency. While President Granny’s on a mission of mass destruction to Vietnam, she finds that her conscientious-objector son, Obadiah, has started a revolution at home. Aided by the war gods, who’d been exhorting spectators and participants “to acts and thoughts of violence,” Granny and Obadiah confront one another.

Between episodes of Grandma and further combats, there were visiting groups such as Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre performing songs from Peter Brook’s 1966 documentary anti-Vietnam war protest play US; Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre. which at this time hadn’t moved from New York to Vermont yet; and the New York Knickerbocker Theatre, which performed scenes about civil rights. Musicians and singers, including the African-American Bethel Baptist Church choir and a rock-and-roll band, and speakers like political writer and Irish activist Conor Cruise O’Brien, poet Ned O’Gorman, and novelist John D. Caute (introduced by Arden as the British “minister of defense”) also performed. Enlisted by D’Arcy (whose idea it had been to have outside groups), the visitors presented “interludes” and multi-media displays as they came and went, demonstrating “the function of the arts in wartime.”

Following one of the frequent interludes, some planned, some spontaneous—and some of uncertain impetus, Granny, to punish her son for turning the people against her, and Obadiah, to preserve the country, kill one another and the war gods are stripped of their elaborate accouterments, revealing, like the wizard in Oz, that they were mere students. The end of the Grandma saga (which I have greatly simplified here!) was followed by a symbolic destruction of national symbols—that is, small paper flags—and Arden made as if he was about to burn an American flag that had been hanging on one of the nearby walls. “I won’t burn it because it belongs to the university,” the playwright explained, “but I would rather burn a piece of cloth than a piece of flesh.” He then spread the banner on the floor and trod on it.

War Carnival received very little coverage. Aside from a chapter in Arden’s own To Present the Pretence (1977) and a lengthy description and analysis from someone who was there (Victoria Manchester, “Let’s Do Some More Undressing: The ‘War Carnival’ at New York University,” Educational Theatre Journal 19.4 [December 1967]: 502-09), there was only one newspaper report and it came out before the event: Robert Pasolli, “John Arden’s Theatre: Rich Tibetan Nun vs. Mad Malaysian Dentist,” Village Voice, 11 May 1967: 25, 30. Not even the Washington Square News, NYU’s student paper, reported War Carnival (though it did run a very short announcement on 8 May). There is surprising little about the project in the Tisch School (the successor to the School of the Arts) archives at NYU’s Bobst Library—a few memos and letters, mostly concerning logistics and equipment requests. According to Ted Hoffman, the director of the Theatre Program, journalists were present at the performance, but none of the papers published anything on it. Arden complained that the university didn’t publicize War Carnival conscientiously, but Hoffman asserts that the university sent out releases and publicity to all New York media and to other schools. The playwright himself designed the poster, which Hoffman described as a “gem of witty Sacred Cow self-depreciation.” (Hoffman may have meant ‘self-deprecation,’ but that’s not what was published! Indeed, the title of the program director’s “postscript” to Manchester’s article was rendered as "Reconniotering Arden's 'War.'") Whatever the state of the promotion, Hoffman reported that the audience reached the capacity for the room (250 people) and that “we had to hold people outside until others left.” Manchester recorded that by 11:30 Saturday night, “the audience had increased to overflowing, sitting and standing wherever they could.” (Forty-five minutes later, Manchester wrote, the audience went “through one of its periods of turnover” as some of those Hoffman wrote of waiting outside came in to replace spectators who had left.)

Arden had participated in the event as a sort of ringmaster-cum-commentator, helping War Carnival progress. At the same time, he revealed his own feelings about the place of NYU and its community in the show’s development. He blamed the “nearly impossible conditions” imposed on his group on “the structure and attitude of the University” and assailed the “‘subconscious’ attitude” of the NYU administration which “stifle[s] creativity,” disparaging not just Hoffman, but Dean Robert Corrigan of the School of the Arts (whom the playwright compared to Alger Hiss, accused of spying for the Soviet Union in 1948) and NYU President James M. Hester. Arden essentially called the university a shill for the federal government and the Johnson administration, suppressing dissent and independent thought. In fact, at one point in War Carnival, Arden announced that he was being paid by the CIA—explaining later, “We don’t really know where my money comes from,” and since the government subsidized schools like NYU, some of his salary could, indeed, come from the same coffers as CIA funding.

Though Hoffman disputed Arden’s interpretation of the facts regarding the university’s support, an April letter from the theater chairman to Arden and D’Arcy protested any elaborate scenography in the Central Plaza space due to cost and the availability of personnel. Hoffman told Arden that the space was committed to both rehearsals and performances during the time Arden planned War Carnival and many of the students were already involved in other performances for which they were currently in rehearsal. While Hoffman’s concerns as expressed in the letter may have been wholly legitimate and reasonable, the litany of obstacles reads as if the School of the Arts administrator was throwing roadblocks and impediments in the way of Arden’s project. Nonetheless, Hoffman described War Carnival in the end as “a remarkable experience.” Whether because of Arden or despite his efforts, it was almost certainly that.

The First Amendment & The Arts

On 29 March, the New York Times reported that a student production of Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, which depicts a gay character who resembles Jesus, was canceled by Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. The university authorities cited “safety and security concerns” for the cancellation.

The next day, the Times announced that the New York Theatre Barn, an Off-Broadway-level Manhattan developmental theater, would present a new musical based on the 2008 cancellation of a Texas high school production of Rent. 

Speargrove Presents, which the company has presented as a reading in February and a benefit concert on 5 April, relates the story of Rowlett (Texas) High School’s intention to stage Rent: School Edition, a milder version of the 1996 Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play which depicts gay and straight characters contending with AIDS, drug use, poverty, love, and homelessness. 

Some parents in Rowlett felt that the choice of Rent for a student production “was inappropriate because it glamorizes drug use and homosexuality.” (In the actual incident, the Rowlett High students performed the songs from Rent at Southern Methodist University. They weren’t permitted to do the show at their school and they never got to perform the whole play.)

Similar barriers have been thrown up at schools in Newport Beach, California, and Bridgeport, West Virginia. School productions of Grease (for the drinking, smoking, and kissing) and The Vagina Monologues have also run into objections resulting in cancellations in recent years.

Corpus Christi, Rent, and The Laramie Project, Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project’s 2000 documentary play about the murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard and its repercussions, have been prime targets for censorship and suppression across the country—indeed, around the world. So have other plays from Damn Yankees to My Name Is Rachel Corrie. 

The suppressors have been government officials from senators and congressmen to local officeholders, religious leaders, and other authorities like the Texas university president as well as organizations and ad hoc groups with agendas or axes to grind. 

The targets have been well-known artists like McNally and big theaters like the Manhattan Theatre Club to teenaged authors and college or high school theater programs. Lawsuits, political and social pressure, withdrawal of funding and support, threats of violence and death, and just about any other tactic you can imagine have been levied against theaters, producers, playwrights, and casts to make them stop playing or creating scripts some people don’t like. 

The reasons range from political to religious to social and occasionally even personal—but the attempts to censor performances, some of which have been successful while others have failed, have all had one thing in common: some group unilaterally decides that no one ought to see a play because they object to something in it. 

(I’m focusing here on theater incidents because . . . well, that’s my field. But we all know of identical efforts to stop art exhibits; book publications; film productions and distribution; TV broadcasts; and musical performances, recordings, and sales.)

This drive to prevent provocative plays from being seen is not an exclusively American phenomenon; there have been prominent incidents abroad as well. 

For example, Behzti, a British play by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, a Sikh woman, depicts murder and sexual abuse in a Sikh temple. It caused a furious response in the Sikh community in Birmingham when a local rep theater produced the play in 2004 and the company was forced to withdraw it to avoid violence. 

Other countries, however, don’t have a First Amendment that’s supposed to protect artistic expression and which is enshrined in the basic law of the land, namely our Constitution. 

Not only are our governments not supposed to suppress free expression, even of ideas abhorred by the majority of the people, but they’re supposed to protect us from attacks by others who want to prevent us from speaking out. 

Law enforcement authorities and judges aren’t supposed to side with the suppressors (unless an actual law is broken, such as incitement to violence). Now, in many of the cases of would-be censorship by intimidation, the civil authorities have stood up for the First Amendment rights of the artists and audiences—but not always.

I should point out that the First Amendment constrains only government action—local, state, and federal—not private conduct. In my house or my private business, I’m allowed to censor your speech. 

Public schools, whether primary and secondary schools or state colleges and universities, are arms of the government, however. Though courts have carved out some exceptions to civil liberties within school buildings, the Constitution and its First Amendment do apply there. 

Private schools may operate under different rules, but the spirit of the First Amendment and the free exchange of ideas and opinions should nonetheless exist within their walls. 

After all, what should we be teaching our citizen students? How to use authority and control to suppress ideas we fear or of which we disapprove? Or to confront them with argument, reason, and truth? I know where I come down.

I ought to confess here that I’m pretty much a First Amendment absolutist. One of my favorite theater lines is from Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s musical 1776. 

Stephen Hopkins, the iconoclastic and cantankerous delegate from Rhode Island, declares, when asked to vote for or against an open debate on independence, declares: “Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . . !” 

That fairly well sums up my feelings: we should be allowed to talk about anything in this society, even stuff most other people don’t want to hear. The only proper response to speech we don’t like is more speech. You don’t cut people off when you don’t like what they’re saying, you debate them.

The First Amendment gives people the right to speak, write, or print whatever they believe even if it offends others. It does not, however, insulate them from the repercussions. People have the right to express their opinions, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us must accept or condone them, or allow them to go unanswered. 

Anyone may preach what he pleases, including anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, racism, fascism, and any other ugly idea man has devised, but he may not escape public opprobrium. Your right to say what you want, in other words, doesn’t trump mine. That, too, is guaranteed by the First Amendment. 

The government may not stop you, but I may respond in kind—or even unkind—if I’m so moved. When the Catholic Church found Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy objectionable in 1964, Church representatives wrote editorials and preached sermons in response—and Rev. Edward A. Molloy wrote and staged The Comforter (1964) in New York and Juan Antonio de Laiglesia composed God’s Deputy (El Vicario de Dios, 1965) for production in Madrid. 

When we hear ideas that we feel are detrimental to the society in which we live, we may not suppress them, but we must speak out against them. Our response to objectionable speech or ideas must always be to speak out loudly in opposition, not simply allow them to pass under the mistaken impression that the Constitution permits their dissemination but not their contradiction. The former is a right; the latter is its concomitant responsibility.

We are, in essence, required to answer noxious ideas with opposing words. The government can't punish someone for constitutionally protected speech, but the rest of us can shun her, berate her, denounce her, boycott her business and appearances, editorialize against her, hold her up to public ridicule and opprobrium, and so on. If she's a politician, we can turn her out of office (or not elect her to one). 

We need to remember that we have the power to act against people who say things we don't like—we aren't constrained to let people spout off with impunity; we just can't use the government to act for us. We have to let people say what they want. We don't have to just sit and take it. 

I think we forget that a lot of the time. If someone promotes racism or xenophobia, we may have to let him express his beliefs—but we should make sure that all of us who oppose him let him know it as loudly as we can. 

Thomas Aquinas admonished: "The law cannot command all virtues and forbid all vices"—indeed, it should not. We have to do some of it on our own as citizens—through the marketplace and the public forum.

I don't hold with censorship either by official fiat or by intimidation. Shutting My Name Is Rachel Corrie down at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2006 because it presents a sympathetic view of an opponent to Israeli policy (with which, by the way, I didn't agree myself) and might "offend" some Jews is about as wrong an act as I can imagine short of killing the playwright or bombing the theater (which some protesters threatened in the case of Corpus Christi and other performances). 

The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech—but there's no guarantee against having your feelings hurt!

I’d make exceptions for true national security—not the phony kind governments often invoke—and actual danger of injury or the protection of innocents like children and crime victims. 

A school, particularly a primary or secondary school, might be a special case because of the ages of the audience and the participants and because the society is sort of captive, but when I read that a Connecticut principal canceled an Iraq war play in 2007, I was disturbed. 

Since the script of Voices in Conflict had been drawn from first-hand accounts of soldiers fighting in Iraq, everyone, even high-schoolers (who could be joining the soldiers in a year or so), ought to hear what they say. (One letter was from a 19-year-old graduate of the school who’d been killed in combat a few months earlier.) 

Even if the script was edited to favor one perspective, then you write or speak about the alternative viewpoint; you argue with the play, but you don't censor it. That's the lesson the school ought to be teaching. Not censorship and suppression.

I once said that if someone wrote and produced a pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic play, I might not go see it, but I hoped I wouldn't join a campaign to shut it down. 

During the heated dispute over the original New York staging of Corpus Christi in 1998, William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, placed an ad in the New York Times announcing the Broadway production of Shylock and Sambo, a fictitious play Donohue characterized as featuring “gay Jewish slavemasters who sodomize their obsequious black slaves.” 

In a subsequent press release, Donohue asked, “Would the Arthur Millers of this world rush to defend [such] a play?” Of course Jews and African Americans would be exercised if a play like the one Donohue describes were mounted, and I'm sure there’d be protests and denunciations. 

I can’t speak for the late Arthur Miller, a fierce advocate of freedom of expression, but as a theater person myself, I’d hope that there wouldn’t be calls for censorship—and certainly not violence. 

(I vehemently reject the stance taken by the opponents to the NYTW’s proposed presentation of Rachel Corrie, but in their favor I note that the strongest element in their protest was the withdrawal of financial support. That may have been tantamount to blackmail, but it’s hardly a bomb threat. It’s also the right of people not to donate money to any institution they don’t want to support, for whatever reason. I just don’t think their cause was righteous in this instance.)

As Leonardo Shapiro, a director I knew, said, by way of analogy: “The point of an oracle—you support the oracle, you don’t support what it says. . . . When Oedipus went to the oracle and it gave him essentially his death sentence, he didn’t say, ‘Well, I’m not going to fund you anymore.’” This was his argument for supporting artists, whom he saw as oracular, who don’t always say what we like. \

We can look at this another way—that we need to hear what our rogue artists say because it’s vital to our society’s health. The best voice for this viewpoint is that of Walter Lippmann. (I’ve quoted this passage in an earlier, related ROT column, “Degrading the Arts,” 13 August 2009.) In "The Indispensable Opposition" (1939), the political commentator cautions:

It is all very well to say with Voltaire, "I wholly disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it," but as a matter of fact most men will not defend to the death the rights of other men: if they disapprove sufficiently what other men say, they will somehow suppress those men if they can.

Lippmann goes on to argue, though, that we need to hear these opposing, unsettling voices since, "because freedom of discussion improves our opinions, the liberties of other men are our own vital necessity." 

He likens the situation to a visit to a doctor whom we pay "to ask us the most embarrassing questions and to prescribe the most disagreeable diet." While we are free to seek additional opinions, we must listen to them all to determine the best course. 

As Lippmann observes, "[A]ny . . . sensible human being . . . learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters." We may not like what Rachel Corrie, Terrence McNally, or those soldiers in Iraq have to say, but we (yes, even high-schoolers) should hear it. We need to hear it.

There seem to be two strains of objectionable art which raise the hackles of the suppressors. One group, like Rachel Corrie and Voices in Conflict, expresses or even espouses political ideas or positions with which some segment of the society disagrees. In Rachel Corrie, it’s support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel; in Voices, it’s criticism of the war in Iraq. 

The other category raises a social objection: The Laramie Project is accused of promoting or defending a “gay lifestyle”; Rent depicts homosexuals and drug use. The latter group also includes socially objectionable art that contains a religious aspect, such as Corpus Christi and Behzti. 

McNally’s play raises objections among Christians, especially Catholics, not because it depicts gay characters (or even gay Christian characters) but because it depicts a gay character who resembles Jesus. 

Protestors find this blasphemous and have attempted to stop the play from being staged by one means or another ever since it first appeared. (When the 1999 London première of Corpus Christi was staged, a British imam issued a fatwa against McNally.) 

The violent threats against Behzti (the title means ‘dishonor’ in Punjabi) were prompted, the protesters claimed, because it was set inside a temple, not because of the subject matter.

At least on the surface, these slightly different kinds of art seem to demand different approaches. While superficially they all look like the same kind of targets for suppression and censorship, they’re not exactly alike. 

The plays which express political thought that some (even most) people don’t like are the simplest to defend. Political speech is exactly what the First Amendment was carved out to protect. 

According to the most fundamental belief upon which this country was founded, we’re all allowed, even encouraged, to speak our minds about the ways and means by which we’re governed and how our society is organized. 

We’re even allowed to preach communism and fascism, even theocracy or monarchism. And no one can say us nay. If Katherine Viner and Alan Rickman, who compiled Rachel Corrie from the subject’s diary and her letters and e-mails home, want to oppose the Israeli practice of bulldozing the homes of Palestinians whom the government accuses of supporting terrorism, they’re not only allowed to do that here, but we’re supposed to applaud them for speaking their minds. 

We’re supposed to listen to what they have to say, as long as they don’t promote violent acts, and then respond with debate, argument, and speech. 

Denying them the stage, as the opponents to the NYTW production did, not only doesn’t really work—the play was produced Off-Broadway later that year—but it also forces those unpopular views underground where they fester and roil until they eventually burst out in uncontrolled rage and violence. 

That’s why the First Amendment was created—so we can all hear the many voices and respond openly so that the best ones, the reasonable ones, the beneficial ones move to the front, but the rejected ones don’t feel ignored and disenfranchised. 

That’s what Stephen Hopkins means: “Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything!” As he reminds us, no idea is so dangerous that it can’t be talked about. If you aren’t convinced after you listen, fine. That’s how democracy works.

The art that offends someone’s moral sensibilities, especially their religious beliefs, seems to be a different case. A difference of political opinion with a play’s point might make you angry, but it won’t hurt you. 

If a playwright opposes the war in Iraq (Voices in Conflict), supports the Palestinian cause (Rachel Corrie), objects to the existence of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay (Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, 2004), or disapproves of the use of torture (Christopher Durang’s Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, 2009), you might feel strongly about their positions but they won’t harm you. 

When a personal ox is gored, however, people do feel hurt. They feel as if the axioms of their lives are being disrespected or dismissed. How do you defend that? It’s easy to say, like Voltaire, “You have to let them say their piece. It’s their right”; but it’s not so easy to abide by that injunction.

First, there are different ways that art addresses these kinds of topics. The most prominent in this country, the plays we see and hear about because they get high-profile press coverage and are created by recognized artists, fall into the category I’ll call criticism. 

It was never McNally’s purpose simply to tear down Catholicism. He didn’t want just to insult Catholics; he’s a Catholic himself. He set out to make a statement about feeling left out of the church to which he belonged, being rejected by his own faith. He had a point to make—a valid one, I think, one that should be heard—though dissenters can disagree with his methods and effectiveness. 

The Tectonic Theatre people weren’t intending to “promote a gay lifestyle.” The Laramie Project is examining a murder for which the creators perhaps indicted an entire community, and for which they blamed lack of tolerance and acceptance, but they didn’t compose Laramie as an argument for living a gay life. 

A plea for tolerance is not an indictable offense—it’s supposed to be a tenet of our democracy. Moisés Kaufman and his company think we should extend that tolerance to gay people; you may disagree, even vehemently, but hearing their argument won’t hurt you. 

Remember, there’s no “issue . . . so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about.” To the best of my knowledge, no one has been damaged by having seen Corpus Christi: the Earth did not split nor the Heavens rend.

Let’s also make a clear distinction between assault and criticism. What McNally, Kaufman, and others are doing is criticizing—they’re not attacking anyone. Many of the protesters don’t distinguish among disagreeing, questioning, attacking, and blaspheming. Any opposition, no matter how reasoned, is seen as betrayal.

The other kind of art to which people object on grounds of moral values is more troublesome. I’d call it “insult art.” We don’t see that much here, though it does occur. 

(The most prominent examples are the notorious caricatures of Jews that appeared in Der Stürmer in Nazi Germany. I’d categorize those 2005 Danish anti-Muslim cartoons as deliberately insulting. The cartoonists and editors seemed to want to generate the kind of reaction that they got so they could point to the Muslim world as inherently violent and intolerant. It makes Muslims easier to hate.) 

I think this kind of art is rare in the U.S. for several reasons, and this isn’t the place to analyze this phenomenon. Basically, there aren’t enough radicals here to produce that kind of art outside a small, dedicated group. There are, for instance, musical groups allied with the white supremacist/neo-Nazi movement, and they cut CD’s; but the music doesn’t circulate much outside that movement. 

We also have too many checks and balances in our production process for public art of that ilk to come to the fore. Too many hands have to get hold of a play before it gets before an audience and a gratuitously insulting script isn’t likely to get past many before someone just spikes it.

(The recent episode of South Park, the satirical TV show, in which Mohammed is portrayed wearing a bear costume, raised threats from a New York-based Islamic group. The group issued a warning that the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, might “wind up like Theo Van Gogh,” a Dutch filmmaker who was murdered because he produced a film to which some Muslims objected. 

(I’m not sure that South Park’s satire fits the insult art criteria since Parker and Stone poke sticks in almost everyone’s eye sooner or later. Satire is closer to criticism to my way of thinking; however, knowing the prohibition among Muslims of depicting the Prophet, Parker and Stone do seem to be deliberately provoking a reaction they must have known would come in some form. 

(Caution and forbearance could be construed as cowardice—which is exactly what Parker and Stone have accused their network, Comedy Central, of displaying. On the other hand, how can you justify openly triggering death threats and potential violence just to make a point? It’s a hard call to make. I am sure of one thing, however: making the threat is unequivocally wrong in this society, no matter how aggrieved you are.)

Still, in the end, the same argument holds for this kind of art, however reprehensible it may seem. If a play—say, like the one William Donohue invented for his ad (and we should note that it’s an imaginary script)—does say awful things about someone’s religion, personal beliefs, or ethical system, we need to let it be seen and heard because it’s a safety valve. 

It’s painful to get the splinter out, but you have to to let the wound heal. If the sentiment festers and goes underground, it will just grow unseen until it explodes with more force than the simple play, song, essay, or painting. 

(I wonder how famous Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ or Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary would have become if Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms, in the first instance, and Rudy Giuliani, in the second, hadn’t made a clamorous fuss over them. The cause to which the defenders thronged was the suppression, after all.) 

However offensive it may be, blasphemy is not a crime in this country. Furthermore, allowing such expressions out into the light not only exposes them to the scrutiny and opprobrium of the people, it also exposes those who harbor those ideas. Let them come forth and be heard—and seen.

We can, however, simultaneously defend the right of bigots and agitators to publish what we find repulsive and exploitive and still speak out against the content of that art. 

We have the right, even the duty, to call attention to what we find objectionable in it, to explain why it’s unacceptable and call for our fellow citizens to repudiate the philosophies expounded in it. We can campaign against the ideas expressed while, at the same time, protecting the right of our opponents to publish these ideas. 

Ideally, the result of a convincing campaign of speech will connect with another founding principle of our society: the market economy. If we persuade enough people that what’s being sold in the marketplace of ideas is wrong or harmful, they will stop buying what’s sold in the marketplace of merchandise, too. 

Admittedly, this is a longer and less certain process than simply banning the product by legislation or threat, but it’s the correct way to go about it in a democracy which truly believes in the principal of free speech.

Now, I want to say something about the impulse some among us have to make public insults to other people’s backgrounds or beliefs. 

Pleading a political or social cause, however unpopular, is sacrosanct. I don’t believe there should be any restrictions on that kind of speech in art or any other medium. (I’ve already carved out the few exceptions I accept for free expression.) 

There are, however, things we’re permitted to do that we shouldn’t necessarily go ahead and do just because we want to and can. 

I’m free to walk down the center of a narrow sidewalk so that no one can pass by in either direction, but it’s thoughtless and inconsiderate to do it. 

I can slip into a newly vacated parking space even though I see that someone’s been waiting for it (“Face it, lady, we're younger and faster”), but it’s mean and selfish. 

As we become more and more civilized, as we have when we decided that owning other human beings or passing laws that disenfranchised certain groups wasn't right, we expand the notion of what proper behavior includes. 

Now we’ve learned that calling people "nigger," "kike," "broad," or "faggot"—or even "baldy," "gimp," or "four eyes"—is wrong, too. 

I have always felt that what’s called "political correctness" is really just another term for politeness. Now, I don't think that politeness and courtesy should be legislated or coerced, but they certainly should be encouraged. 

Essentially, as I see it, being "politically correct" is simply refraining from calling people derogatory names or saying ugly things about them because of their ethnicity, race, gender, sexual preference, or religious beliefs. 

Those who disparage this behavior by putting it down as "political correctness" are saying it's all right to be mean because it expresses true feelings and the First Amendment gives them the right to say what they want, no matter whom they hurt. Well, yes, it does (outside of libel and slander). 

That, obviously, is where courtesy comes in. It fills the gap between what the law prohibits me from doing (such as murder and assault) and the anarchic savagery of the jungle. It teaches, "Yes, you can say or do such and such—but you shouldn’t." It says, "The law permits this act, but for society to work smoothly for everyone, it's counterproductive and unpleasant." 

The First Amendment permits the exhibition of art that insults and disparages others, but my response is that it should be the responsibility of the rest of us to display our disgust and opprobrium for any artist who does. 

I fall back on my earlier assertion: the Constitution protects the right to speak freely, but it doesn’t indemnify the speakers from the response of their fellow citizens. We get to let those people know how we feel about their creations and their ideas—and we should, as forcefully as we can (within the law, of course).

Artists are the oracles and whistle-blowers of society. Painter David Wojnarowicz, vilified by the forces of suppression because he used sexually explicit images in his art and bitterly indicted the American establishment for ignoring homelessness and the AIDS epidemic, was described by Leo Shapiro as "like the canary in the mines—the ones that die first." (Wojnarowicz did die, of AIDS in 1992. He was 38.) 

Do we dare lose these essential voices? Or even muffle them? If art "hold[s] the mirror up to nature"—including our own nature and that of our society—can we afford not to hear what it tells us? Even if we don’t want to, and even if we disagree with what it says? 

Like Lippmann’s unwilling patient, we imperil the health and survival our democracy if we don’t.

'Race'

By Kirk Woodward

[My friend Kirk Woodward went to see David Mamet’s Race on Thursday night, 22 April. Since I’ve seen so little theater this season, I asked Kirk to tell me about the production, which is directed by the playwright, and Kirk has allowed me to post his report. ~Rick]

I saw David Mamet’s new play Race at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in Manhattan, and I often felt I was watching not so much a play as an essay on Mamet’s playwriting, his style of directing, and his theories about acting.

The play takes place in a law office. We meet three members of the firm: two are law partners, played by James Spader (of Boston Legal fame), and David Alan Grier (first familiar from In Living Color). Spader and Grier are white and black, respectively. (Curiously, in a play about race, Mamet doesn’t delve into the complexity of the relationship between these two – what made them start the firm, how have they managed to work together for so long, what is the real racial dynamic between them?) Also in the firm is Kerry Washington as a young, black female associate.

Into this mix comes a wealthy man, played by Richard Thomas (The Waltons), looking for lawyers to defend him against the charge of raping a black woman. It wouldn’t be fair for me to give away the mysteries of the plot, such as they are, but the case is not open-and-shut, so the challenge of crafting a defense brings all sorts of racial issues to the forefront. These issues are not trivial: can the races ever be comfortable with each other? How do women’s issues relate to racial issues? Can whites and blacks ever live without taking advantage of each other? For that matter, can anyone?

To some extent, even race is not the ultimate subject of this play. Mamet’s plays are often about fierce competition, and that’s the case in Race, too. It’s always a dog-eat-dog world out there for him. So in that sense the play fits firmly in the Mamet canon. Another way it fits is that Mamet is well known for writing aggressive, punchy, clipped dialogue.

But in Race the dialogue is so clipped that I halfway suspected that Mamet first wrote a longer play and then cut every third line or so. “Elliptical” (defined by my dictionary as “expressed with extreme or excessive economy”) barely begins to describe the effect of the dialogue. Ideas dash furiously past each other. You can practically hear the lines themselves gasping for breath. The result is mentally strenuous, and in a sense stimulating, but the pell-mell haste calls attention to itself and pulls the viewer, or at least this viewer, out of the play.

However, I doubt that Mamet would object to that result. For Mamet, I suspect, the stage is a platform in more than one sense. Mamet directed Race in a style that I can best describe as “stand and deliver.” The actors, particularly in the first act, say their lines rapidly to each other in firm, emphatic tones. The lines don’t seem to spring from emotional sources; in fact, “emotion” is hardly the word the play evokes at all, even though its situation has a high emotional charge.

This effect is consistent with Mamet’s theories on acting, which he has documented himself. In his book True or False, Mamet insists that only two things should happen in a rehearsal period: “1. The play should be blocked. 2. The actors should become familiar with the actions they are going to perform.” This approach reminds me of a story Uta Hagen tells in her book Respect for Acting. As I recall, she tells of a director giving a well known actor a series of instructions for a scene, like “Stand here, then cross there, and look at her.” “I will,” the actor says to the director, “and meanwhile I’ll do all those things they pay me for doing.”

As this story suggests, we are used to seeing actors take their lines as starting points for emotional exploration. Mamet will have none of that. It’s not an actor’s duty to emote, he says; it’s an actor’s duty to present. The results are there to see in Race. For me the effect is bloodless and restrictively intellectual – a Thinker’s Theater, if, of course, you can think that fast.

A case can be made that Mamet’s approach is a useful reminder that the “standard” American acting style, out of Stanislavski by the Actors Studio, is not the only style possible. The excesses of “method acting” are well known, and alternative approaches to acting exist. But whatever the underlying technique, I find I want to see people on stage, not speakers. Back in the eighteenth century, people would talk about going to “hear a play.” Today we talk about going to “see a play”; even more than that, I want to feel a play. This fact may well be a result of my conditioning, but there it is.

Interestingly, I find that the actors in the play feel the same way. The acting style is not consistent – and I suspect the play would be close to unbearable if it were. (Or perhaps not – Race is short, and has an intermission it doesn’t need. It’s almost a long one-act.) I don’t usually pass along theater gossip, or at least I try not to, but I have it on reliable authority that after Mamet left town, the actors in Race began to do what actors do – to allow the conflicts in the play to affect them emotionally.

In other words, by the time I saw the play it contained some “Mamet” acting and some “regular” acting. So the first act of Race is more in Mamet’s style, and the second act more in the style of realistic acting we’re accustomed to. James Spader, a remarkable actor, is particularly moving as his character realizes he is flummoxed, not just about the case but about his understanding of life as a whole. David Alan Grier and Kerry Washington also expand the emotional worlds of their characters as the play goes on. (Richard Thomas’s role does not call for the same kind of development.)

And then the play stops. I am reluctant to say it “ends;” it simply turns out the lights. The effect, if I may use an analogy, resembles the moment at the end of the Beatles’ song “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” when the music abruptly vanishes in mid-measure. “There’s no ending,” as someone said to me.

In a sense Race is about moral ambiguity, so isn’t it appropriate for the ending of Race to be ambiguous? And do the strands of a play’s plot always have to be neatly tied up in a ribbon? Or did Mamet simply stop writing? Ellipsis may be a style. It may also be an evasion.

[For the record, Race began previews on 17 November 2009 and opened officially on 6 December. The producers announced on 21 April that the show has recouped its entire $2.5 million investment, the second play this season to do so. The play is scheduled to complete its Broadway run on 13 June. Look for Kirk’s next contribution to ROT, “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” 4 June.]

An Actor’s Homework, Part 4

[This installment of “An Actor’s Homework,” the second part of “Analysis,” concludes my description of Aaron Frankel’s system for preparing for the first rehearsal. Parts 1 and 2 (19 and 22 April; Part 3 was published on 25 April) covered Section I, “Free Association,” and I recommend that readers see the earlier posts to get a full view of the system.]

5. Class & Money (Status & Power): What “class position” means to the character; what “money problems” does the character have?

If money isn’t a driving force for the character, something else will be. (In classical plays, at least until the 19th century when the middle class became significant and a subject for drama, money is often not a consideration.) This is very important to know about both the play in general and your character in particular. In Earnest, for example, money is no problem but social status is very important to all the characters. In Picnic, Alan’s very conscious of both his class position and his wealth; both make him feel separated from Madge (who’s thus, in a way, unworthy of him) and superior and patronizing to Hal. Neither class nor money figure as a problem in After the Rain. Status isn’t really a question, though power is relative only to Arthur, who wields it, and Alan, who resists Arthur’s leadership. Captain Hunter is quite satisfied for Arthur to lead and for the rest to follow him. Challenges to Arthur’s authority are met with fear and distrust, but not with head-on defiance.

The circumstances in Devil are more complex, in part because it’s set in the 18th century but was composed in the 20th. Other influences are the fact that the play is based on actual events so there are historical, sociological, and cultural facts that bear on this question. Colonel Rall is very conscious of his class position. As a German, he’s accustomed to sharp distinctions between the social classes (which were many and complicated) and as a career soldier, he’s very conscious of his rank and position as regimental commander. This is particularly so since Rall was given the post over several more senior colonels. Money’s not a concern to Rall. As a soldier in Germany, his basic needs were taken care of and he was born into the military, so he’s accustomed to the Spartan life. Since plunder and “commandeering” are the custom of the day, he can take what he wants without the need for money. Power (in the military sense) and authority are natural to Rall. He expects, demands, and usually receives the abject deference and obedience due his rank and position. With life-and-death authority over everyone within his control (military and civilian), he’s instantly obeyed and served.

6. Situation: Use a personal metaphor to state the character’s problem, conflict, or obstacle.

This is a statement of what the character wants to do. Often it’s helpful if to put this in the form of a metaphor. In Picnic, for example, Alan loses control of the situation; his problem is that “He’s on a shaky ladder.” In Devil, Colonel Rall is “shackled to a stalled locomotive”; he wants to charge forward, full-steam ahead, but he can’t. In Rain, Captain Hunter is “lost in the desert without map or compass.” For Algernon in Earnest, his Bunburrying has run dry; he wants to find a new tack, a new direction, so he has to become Jack’s brother Ernest in order to meet Cecily.

7. Action: What you want to do; how the character overcomes the obstacle or solves the problem.

The “Action” in Aaron’s system is, as the device is called in some other acting techniques, the character’s superobjective, objective, or intention (or, if you know the system, what Bernard Beckerman called the project). Be careful: this isn’t the story or plot action! That’s what the playwright wrote; the character action is what you bring to the role that makes your performance different from anyone else’s. There will be many “immediate” actions, but only one main character action (or life action). You must know the outcome of the play before you determine the MCA. You should also understand that an action can fail: actions that fail are often the most dramatic. (In some analyses, one difference between comedies and tragedies is that the protagonists’ actions in comedies tend to succeed, and those in tragedies tend to fail. This, of course, is a generalization, but it’s a good way to remember that you may choose an action that doesn’t end successfully but may be a very dramatic.)

To determine the MCA, ask what your character’s action is in any moment or scene, then ask “why?” until you reach the basic “why” beyond which there’s no answer. (Answer each “why” with a verbal “action”—“to do something”—not a motivation. When you reach the ultimate level, the answer can’t be stated as a verb anymore—except a synonym for the last phrase; otherwise it will always come back as a noun or an adjective.) It’s often more effective to state the MCA as a metaphor. Your character’s MCA will help you relate to the other characters. (State a form of your MCA with respect to each character to whom you interact in the play.) Each “immediate” action for scenes and beats will also correlate to the MCA.

When expressing this action, you should always use an active, transitive verb (an action), preferably with a direct object (something or someone to act upon.) Don’t state the action as a negative phrase (“not to . . .”); it should always be couched in terms of something to do, not something to avoid doing. It’s also inadvisable to phrase the action as a state of being (“to be,” “to become,” “to seem,” and so on)—they aren’t active verbs. It’s important to state the action in the strongest form you can devise because a weak or ambiguous expression will lead you into weak choices on stage. Many of your other choices will correlate with your action; it permeates your entire character portrayal. It’s much more dramatic to make Oedipus want “to bring the murderer to justice” than it would be if all he wants is “to try to find the murderer.” (Verbs like ‘to try’ allow the actor to make tentative feints at doing something, then backing off. “Well, I tried . . .” is too easy an out.) In this, as in much of the rest of this technique, the actor should take note of an assertion of Pablo Picasso: "I do not seek; I find!" Seeking is merely a form of “trying to find”: all it takes is one feeble attempt, and you’ve fulfilled your goal.

(At that first rehearsal, play your MCA. Don’t worry about the smaller actions or the meaning of the play for the moment; there’ll be time for that. Test the choice you made for the MCA right from the start. This will both let you begin to see if the choice is correct and let you start to connect with the other actors and their characters. Be prepared, of course, to adjust the action as you learn what the other actors and, especially, the director are doing—remember Martha Graham’s admonition to come on stage to take.)

As an illustration, I decided that Colonel Rall’s MCA is “To gain glory”; “To jump-start my stalled locomotive” (it’s an excellent tactic to connect the “Action” to the “Situation”). This translated into individual actions that relate to other characters with whom Rall interacts:

with respect to the Hessian troops, the action becomes “To make them substitute for my dreams of glory”

with respect to Sherry (the camp-follower), “To impress her with my past glories”

with respect to the Brocks (the owners of the inn where Rall is quartered), “To show my superiority and control over ‘inconsequentials’”

with respect to Honeyman (the American spy), “To impress him with my military might, prowess, and confidence”

with respect to Washington (to whom Rall surrenders), “To manifest my superiority even in defeat” or “To appear undefeated”

with respect to General Howe (the British commander), “To prove myself the greatest soldier since Alexander”

with respect to Seeds (the American civilian), “To show my magnanimity and tolerance for insignificant annoyances.”

8. Time & Place

Though this is in many ways related to “Period,” it’s more specific and narrower. Like the play’s period, however, the actor should consider both the literal and the figurative or metaphorical time and place of the play. The literal time will include the period, era, date, season, day, and hour for the play and for each scene. Picnic, for instance, takes place in the late summer during the early 1950’s; Devil is set at Christmas 1776, mid-winter, a time of rebellion against a king and, thus, against God (since kings rules by divine right). The metaphorical time might include the character’s stage of life or career. In Earnest, Algernon is in the summertime of his life (and he sees Cecily and Gwendolyn as in the blossoming stage of their lives, their springtimes). Many of the scenes in Earnest take place at tea time, the high-point of the day and the beginning of the productive part of the day for Algernon and Ernest. At 51, Rall is in his late fall or early winter—but since he’s not likely to be made a general (he’s not an aristocrat), his own mid-winter is close by. In Picnic, the summer represents the end of playtime for Alan and time to get back to “serious business.”

The literal place incorporates the country, area, landscape, city, building, and specific room in which the play takes place. For Colonel Rall, the place is Trenton, New Jersey, in colonial America (that is, the personal property of a king); he’s far away from home, in a foreign land. Alan’s word is small-town Kansas—Midwestern, rural, agricultural, slow-paced, even-tempered. It’s a backwater, a stopping-off place, a way-station. The metaphorical place of the play should reflect what the literal places mean to your character, how they’re used or what happens there, and their appropriateness to the character and his behavior. In Earnest, Algernon’s house is the War Room where the plans are made and actions designed; there is a Caucus Room beyond Algernon’s “Morning Room” for small, private conferences. Cecily’s garden at Jack’s country home is a very appropriate venue for Cecily (a blossom) to meet Gwendolyn and Algernon. (Aaron spoke of Cecily and Gwedolyn as a country mouse and a city mouse. A garden is a good place for a country mouse to be at home, but a city mouse might be out of place.) In Picnic, that Midwestern town becomes the small pond for Alan’s big fish; Alan belongs to the town and it belongs to him. For Rall, Trenton is Nowheresville, a defensive position in a nothing town no one cares about, a small pond for a would-be big fish. Rall would rather be in Philadelphia enjoying the amenities of the great American capital and being toasted as the liberator of the colonies and the triumphant vanquisher of the rebels.

CONCLUSION

Let me remind you one last time: The responses I’ve provided here as illustrations of the process are mine from the time I prepared the roles. You don’t have to agree with any of them; your answers will be the ones that speak to you. That’s what makes one performance different from another. There’s no right or wrong; the responses that work best will be the ones that echo across the script and throughout the rehearsal. Remember, too, that this is all private work and you’re not obligated to make sense to anyone but you. This is a practical and pragmatic technique. Use what works, adjust it for your own practices, and keep the rest in mind for another time, another role. Refine and revise your responses as you move through the rehearsal process and discover things about your role, the play, and your fellow actors that informs what you think about your character. Don’t abandon any techniques you’ve used before that have worked successfully or new ones you learn along the way that inspire and provoke your creativity. Nothing is exclusive or proscribed. And I’ll provide one last piece of advice: Keep your notes handy during rehearsal so you have your responses available and so you can make changes as new ideas occur to you. Aaron concluded the course with suggestions for making an acting score in your script—an elaborate three-column chart with arrows and lines on the blank sides of the pages of a typescript or on paper taped to the pages of the published edition (like a fold-out) if that’s what your company’s using—but I found that cumbersome and impractical in actual rehearsals. You can find your own way to have your notes and answers at your fingertips. The point is that if you’re really doing this work to use in rehearsal, which is its purpose, you should be able to refer to the notes while you’re on stage working or back stage preparing.

Aaron also included recommendations for rehearsal behavior so that you are actually working from Day One even if the first rehearsal is no more than a sit-down reading around a table. I won’t repeat his suggestions, but I’ll sum them up: Do your work. Don’t let yourself be pressured to move the reading along just because that’s what everyone else is doing. Play your character’s action; look at and listen to the actors in your scenes; lift your eyes from the script page when you say your lines, even if you can only recite four or five words at a time. Don’t let yourself be forced into a “performance” when you’re still figuring out who you are. If you’re using this homework technique or some other preparation, give yourself permission to put the prep you’ve been doing into practice. These rehearsals are for you and the other actors, not for the playwright or even the director. Use them. It’ll pay off in spades.

[I don’t know if Aaron still teaches this technique or even if he’s still associated with HB Studios, where I took his class in How To Do Homework. As far as I know, he’s never published anything on the system and I’ve never contacted him to let him know I’ve been teaching it myself. I found the technique so useful and so thought-provoking that I’ve wanted to spread word of it as much as I could; this is my first attempt to put the process into writing—and I hope I’ve done Aaron proud in the attempt.]

An Actor’s Homework, Part 3

[This installment of “An Actor’s Homework” begins my description of Section II of Aaron Frankel’s system for preparing for the first rehearsal; the final part will be available in a few days. Parts 1 and 2 (19 and 22 April) covered Section I, “Free Association,” and I recommend that readers see the earlier posts to get a full view of the system.]

SECTION II: ANALYSIS

The responses to the prompts in the second part of Aaron’s homework technique should be based on research, study, and academic or factual knowledge. This doesn’t mean that there’s not an element of subjectivity here, especially in the realm of selection. As in all the aspects of this work, you should be choosing answers and information that work for you in rehearsal and performance, to which you respond in a personal and immediate way. When factual correctness conflicts with artistic function, the latter should always prevail. Vincent van Gogh wrote: "I do not want the beauty to come from the material, but from within myself.” So just as the painter didn’t believe that artistic truth comes from the paints, pigments, and canvases he used to create his art, your creation isn’t a matter of facts and historical information; it’s in the subjectivity, the way you bring together the media you choose, the artistry with which you select and assemble the materials you use to create your performance. On the other hand, just as van Gogh needed paint and canvas, you’ll need objective data to complete your characterization.

There are many sources of useful research aside from the standard repositories I’ll mention below, namely libraries, museums, and art galleries, among others. Many years ago, I did a children's story-theater piece with a cast of all animal characters. The cast got together one day and made a trip to the Bronx zoo to observe the animals. Another time, when I was doing an animal exercise in an acting class, I selected a bear, specifically a polar bear. I used video tapes and an opportunely scheduled nature program on TV, but I also spent an afternoon at the Central Park Zoo to see how polar bears moved and manipulated objects. Just a few weeks ago, before the play Red opened on Broadway, the New York Times published an article that discussed the research actor Alfred Molina did on the art of Mark Rothko, the artist he plays on stage. He visited galleries in Liverpool, England, and Washington, D.C., to view some of Rothko’s important works and some specific canvases relevant to the play.

1. Title: What does it mean? Consider sub- or alternate titles.

Though this is the same question with which we started the Free Association section, the more analytical consideration you make may lead you in a different direction. Don’t be concerned, however, if it doesn’t—or if the two responses conflict. Here are the responses I came up with for the roles we’re discussing:

Colonel Rall: Devil Take the Hindmost – “The reward of indecision is hell.”

Alan: Picnic – My response to the title was the same here as for Free Association (“Family Outing”), but the alternative title (the revised play, Summer Brave) was that Alan learns bravery over the summer, that is, a “trial by fire.”

Captain Hunter: After the Rain – “New society; new responsibilities.”

I didn’t find any new meaning for the title of Earnest than I had for the Free Association prompt (Algernon must appear convincingly earnest and sincere), which, if you recall, I felt was fairly literal even back then. (Apparently, I also didn’t have a response to the subtitle, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, this time around, either. It has some bearing on the next prompt, however.)

2. Academic Label: Tells you the “style” of acting and helps make some choices. Also includes the author’s “point of view” and your own “point of view.”

Knowing the academic label, the genre, of the play helps you make some choices regarding style and approach. Obviously, if you’re doing a farce, your choices will be different from those for a tragedy. So would your approach to the execution of your choices. (By the way, just because I call this “Academic Label” doesn’t mean you have to come up with terms from a lit textbook. Use your own terms to describe the play. Once again, the response must mean something to you.) Here’s what I came up with:

Devil: Adventure/Romantic Drama. (I might also have added “melodrama,” but I didn’t. Perhaps that was because I didn’t play “melodrama,” which connotes an acting style to me that conflicted with the director’s—and my own—vision of the role.)

Earnest: Comedy of Manners/High Comedy. (This label will clearly affect the way I work on this role.)

Picnic: Sentimental or situation comedy; tender comedy.

Rain: “Science Fiction”; allegorical warning. (I put sci-fi in quotation marks to note that it’s not a classical example of the genre; it’s really a note for myself. The second description is one of my own devising.) The French’s catalogue labels it a morality play.

Aaron added for this prompt that it can also include an interpretation of the author’s and your character’s own points of view. The only play for which I made this note was After the Rain:

Author’s POV: If we are not careful of our rights, we can be easily lead in times of stress and lose our individual freedom.

Hunter’s POV: When a crisis occurs, follow the strongest leader without question.

3. Period: Don’t limit this to the “grand historical” era.

Every play has its own period, even modern and contemporary pieces. Consider the period for the locale of the play (the Renaissance in Italy was different from the Renaissance in England), including clothes, objects, hairdos, and so on. Especially check out the dances and popular music of the period; they tell a lot about “style.” (Consider, for example, what the jitterbug of the 1940s says about that era as compared with what the minuet says about the society of the 1770s and how men’s long hair of the 1960s contrasts with the long hair of the 1770s.)

This is the first category where research can be very helpful and you should find time to do this all through the rehearsal period. Libraries are useful for period biographies and autobiographies, social histories, plays from the time; museums yield portraits, clothing and jewelry, and other artifacts of the day. In New York City, the public library’s invaluable Picture Collection can be a magnificent resource for period and setting research. Depending on availability and access, historical sites and even reconstructions can be very revealing. I read, for instance, that actors in the 2009-10 Hartford and New York co-production of Horton Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle visited Wharton, Texas, Foote’s hometown and the place on which he based his fictional town of Harrison; they even met some of the descendents of the real-life models for characters in the plays. Years ago, when I was assigned the Watchman’s opening monologue from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, I realized that I had visited the ruins of the place where the man had stood, the city of Mycenae. I imagined him standing over the Lion Gate, which is restored, looking out over the plain of Argos down to the Aegean Sea. I had stood there myself only a year or two before this class. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the Watchman was seeing—I’d seen some of it recently enough to call up the view in my mind.

While it’s important to know the historical period, the dates as recorded in a history text, in which a play is set, it can also be useful to define the period in metaphorical terms that communicate to you. So while Picnic takes place in the 1950s, the mid-20th century, it was helpful for me to think of that as “the Eisenhower years.” (I grew up in that era; it has connections for me.) Earnest was written in 1895, the end of Victoria’s reign, but it was also useful for me to call it the Mauve Decade (which fell between the Victorian and Edwardian eras) because it evokes pictures of clothing, hair styles, street scenes, carriages, and many more visual stimuli, as well as behavioral possibilities. Devil Take the Hindmost is, of course, set against an actual historical event, so the time and date are specific: 25-26 December 1776. That’s Colonial America, the Age of Reason, the Revolution, and a period of wars in Europe and America. (For this role, I did a lot of research. Aside from books on history, especially military history, and journals, including Boswell’s, describing Germany in the 18th century—to help with Rall’s background—one text I found especially useful was Schiller’s play Kabale und Liebe, sometimes translated as Love and Intrigue. A place to visit, if you could manage it, would be Colonial Williamsburg, providing images of the architecture of the time, the street life, transportation, even food and drink. Devil is set in a tavern and there are several reconstructed inns in Williamsburg that probably resemble the Eagle near Trenton.)

The odd man out in this section is After the Rain. How do you research the late 22nd century, when the play is set? Well, of course, you can’t. But the play was written in 1967, so you can read about the fears and premonitions of that era about the potential future for humankind. The play refers to a “past,” the year of “The Rain” that devastated the Earth, that the script puts at “two years after the play is performed” and there’s a play-within-the-play that’s set in that year. (In the original New York production, the flood occurred in 1969, for example. Today, the play’s backstory would be placed in 2012.) So there’s reading and other research that you can do on the prevailing vision today for a post-Apocalyptic Earth—how some people today see our future. An important source for this view will clearly be contemporary science fiction. (It wouldn’t have been known in 1967 or 1975, the year of the production I prepared, but there’s a little of Jim Jones of the People’s Temple in Arthur, the self-proclaimed leader of the new society in the play. Perhaps also David Koresh of the Branch Davidians. Those are areas for possible research.)

You should note, by the way, that plays written in one period but set in another, such as history plays, have two periods that might require research. It’s obvious, I think, that the time in which a play takes place is an important subject for actors to know about, but the time in which the playwright worked affects the play, too. Schiller’s 16th-century England in Maria Stuart (1801), for instance, is different from Maxwell Anderson’s in Elizabeth, the Queen and Mary of Scotland (1930 and ’33). When I did a production of Shaw’s Man of Destiny, I found that researching Napoleon was of little practical use because Shaw’s young General Bonaparte more closely reflected Shaw, the late 19th century, and England than he did France, Italy (where the play is set), and the late 18th century. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible has as much to do with the circumstances in the America of the 1950s (specifically, the McCarthy era) as it does with the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 17th century.

4. Language (as action): What we say, do, think, and feel may all be different; our feelings govern all others.

There are three types of language supplied by the playwright which you need to examine:

Spoken: verbal; oral, or written language (that is, words). This is usually “head” language (with respect to the realms of the body; see “Leading Center,” Part 2)
Non-Spoken: silent; emotional; what isn’t said; usually “heart”
Body: non-verbal, but not always silent; non-verbal gestures and noises; usually “gut”; most difficult to control: it seldom “lies”

This is one of the acting tasks that depends on a close reading of the script, finding and analyzing the kinds of language the playwright has created for your character. You should make judgments about the character based on what you learn from this evaluation. In preparing the role of Captain Hunter, I decided that the spoken language in the text indicates that he rarely speaks unless spoken to, and then only to follow prescribed procedure. Hunter occasionally gives vent to his desires which are simple—the creature comforts. Both Hunter’s non-spoken and body language coincide with his spoken language. Since he’s generally open-faced, he doesn’t guard what he says, does, or thinks.

In Picnic, Alan’s a heart person trying to be a head person; he’s primarily a thinker by his own efforts. His spoken language is carefully chosen and “masking”; he uses language as a smokescreen. Alan’s silent language is saying, “Let me go!” or “Let me out!” but also, “What do I do now?” His body language is connected to his spoken language; it shows apparent composure; very studied.

In Devil, when Colonel Rall is in control, he’s a “head” person and makes witty remarks and jokes (spoken language), but when his control breaks down, he’s a “gut” person, nervous, edgy, afraid, impulsive, insecure (non-spoken and body languages).

Incorporated in the language analysis are two textual areas the actor must examine.

A. Interior Monologue (Reaction).

The “Interior Monologue” is a familiar aspect of many acting techniques, including Stanislavsky. It’s language the actor supplies, part of the character’s unspoken language. It comprises the character’s thoughts put into words (but not necessarily in the character’s “language”). This is feedback to what other characters are doing or saying. (Some of this will relate to the character’s “Secret” as devised earlier; see Part 1.) The IM must not be memorized; the basic thoughts will be the same each time, but the precise words will be different. When the IM is right, the written lines will juxtapose with it; the IM will lead into the dialogue and proceed from it logically. If it doesn’t, the IM is following a wrong action.

It’s hard to predict the IM; it may even change from rehearsal to rehearsal and performance to performance. Even studying the lines of your scene partners can be misleading until you hear what they do with them as well as what the director provides. A general wash of the character’s IM can be determined, however, at least for the first rehearsal, giving you a place to start working. Captain Hunter’s IM, for instance, basically centers on his duty and obedience to Arthur (the leader of the survivors who believes he’s divine), survival, and distrust of Alan (who’s construed to be Arthur’s rival).

B. Hearsay.

“Hearsay” is what the other characters say about your character. Read only the other characters’ lines and make judgments about whether the statements are right or wrong, or true or false, always considering the sources of the comments. You must also consider what the character says about her- or himself or writes in diaries and letters. Here are a few examples from my notes on two of the roles:

Captain Hunter:

The LECTURER notes that I kept the Ship’s Log (“The Book of Arthur”) irregularly before Arthur arrived and entered “a number of asterisks that may have referred . . . to some solitary sexual practices.” Probably correct.

ARTHUR refers to me as one of the “less intelligent” carried along to do the “rough work.” He notes that I don’t refuse to do it. Correct.

MYSELF: Retired by the army for lack of intelligence; failed at bar-keeping for low IQ; can’t handle the technological world; selected to sail the raft by default (the rest were “nut cases or Norwegians”). Lax in personal discipline. I realize I’m “not bright”; I wonder what’s going to happen to people like me; I expect them to be “automated.” All correct.

Colonel Rall:

WORTHINGTON [British captain]: “I’ve known them as professional soldiers, and men of honor.” Half true. We are professional soldiers, fighting for pay and plunder as was our custom in European warfare. As for “men of honor,” Worthington is seeing us through rose-colored glasses. Our “honor” does not much extend beyond our own kind and we have little respect for the Americans, Tory or Whig, and do not distinguish between loyalist and rebel. A conquered enemy is fair game for pillaging and robbing, regardless of rank or position.

HONEYMAN [American spy]: “. . . Col. Rall . . . Fierce soldier, but weak for a pretty face and brandy.” True. Except when engaged in direct military offensives, I am a heavy drinker, carouser, card player, and womanizer. I have no stomach for defense and take no time to prepare. When in garrison, I am usually drinking heavily and “partying” with friends and other officers.

HOMBURG [Hessian soldier]: “You remember when Rall had Kraig shot for sleeping at his post?” True. I am an unbending disciplinarian with my soldiers. In small matters, I am adamant: parades, inspections, spit-and-polish, deference to rank, etc.—and I demand the maximum penalty for even the smallest infractions of the rules.

[Part 4 will cover thew second half of “Analysis,” the second section of Aaron Frankel’s homework technique. Return to ROT in a few days for the concluding parts of the process.]