'A Man’s a Man'

On 24 and 27 January, I published a two-part theater-history article on ROT called “Dueling Brechts” which related the saga of two nearly simultaneous Off-Broadway productions of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mann ist Mann in 1962.  One of the two was called A Man’s a Man, presented by the New Repertory Theatre Company in a translation by Eric Bentley; the other was entitled Man Is Man, directed by Julian Beck for the Living Theatre using a translation by Gerhard Nellhaus.  Mann ist Mann has never been a popular Brecht script, showing up on New York City stages maybe once every eight or 10 years, but the Classic Stage Company has just presented a new staging of A Man’s a Man using a translation by Nellhaus.  (The CSC staging is clearly based on one of Brecht’s later revisions of the play—he cut Widow Begbick’s three daughters out and shortened the script in 1931, which Nellhaus also translated, and later made more pointed intimations about Nazism to which he was vehemently opposed—but I don’t know which one Brian Kulick directed.)  The production began previews on 10 January and opened on 30 January; it closed today, 16 February.  My friend Diana and I caught the performance on Friday evening, 7 February, at CSC’s home on East 13th Street in the East Village.

A Man’s a Man is Brecht’s study of the mutability of the human character, including a person’s most fervently held beliefs and principles.  According to the playwright, anyone will abandon one personality and set of principles and take on another as exigency dictates, or, as Brecht put it in one of his first interviews, the play’s “about a man being taken to pieces and rebuilt as someone else for a particular purpose.”  Along the way, Brecht denigrates war and the military, the machine age and modern society, and capitalism.  Set in Brecht’s idea of Kiplingesque India in 1925, A Man’s a Man tells the story of the innocent and compliant Galy Gay, a simple Irish porter out to buy his wife a fish for their supper who’s enlisted by three British soldiers, Uriah Shelley, Polly Baker, and Jesse Mahoney, who need a replacement for one of their machinegun unit.  The soldiers had just tried to loot a temple for cash to buy beer, sustenance for the coming war, and had to leave their fourth man, Jeraiah Jip, behind when they fled.  The soldiers are terrified of their sergeant, the notorious Bloody Five, known for his bloodthirstiness both in battle and in the barracks, so they cajole, persuade, threaten, and hoodwink Gay into taking Jip’s place.  Along his way, Gay’s introduced to the Widow Begbick, the proprietor of a traveling canteen where the soldiers relax and carouse.  As Gay becomes more and more the kind of killing machine he’s led to believe he’s supposed to be, he witnesses his own “execution” and funeral, even delivering a eulogy for himself.  In the end, he takes part in a war against Tibet, single-handedly conquers a fortress, and is declared a hero for his ferocity.  He’s become the perfect soldier.  When Jip returns to reclaim his position, his former comrades turn him away with Gay’s old identity papers.  (A more detailed synopsis of the plot would probably be misleading and confusing.  It’s not quite “incomprehensible,” as the characters warn us in the performance, but it is absurd and alogical.  Telling a story was not Brecht’s point, you understand.)

In “Dueling Brechts,” I laid out a brief history of the play and some of its important productions, which I won’t recap here.  (Go to http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2014/01/dueling-brechts-part-1.html for those details.)  I will add, however, that six years before writing Mann ist Mann, Brecht started working on a play called Galgei, set in Munich, in which “some villains” tell “solid citizen” Joseph Galgei he’s “wicked” merchant Pick and Galgei eventually succumbs.  Over two days in 1926, fortified by “½  bottle of brandy, 4 bottles of seltzer and eight to ten cigars,” Brecht reported that he transformed Galgei into Mann ist Mann.   Between 1920 and 1926, during the script’s transition, Brecht took up the study of Marxism, rejected German Expressionism, and came under the influence of the Neue Sachlichkeit, which Kulick, also artistic director of CSC, translated as the “New Matter-of-Factness” (but which is very hard to pin down in English). 

Though I’ve read the script (principally in Nellhaus’s translation for the Living Theater mounting) and done research on those long-ago productions, I’d never seen a performance of any version of Mann ist Mann before now.  The CSC production was very interesting and well executed within director Kulick’s interpretation.  As I start to write this report, however, I haven’t sorted out if the interpretation is what I’d have chosen, or really whether I actually liked the performance or just appreciated it.   Maybe by the time I finish the report, I’ll have worked it out.  In any case, I might as well begin with the performances and the production and get to themes and the interpretation when I’ve had some time to cogitate.

I’ll start with the set, because it was a striking evocation of Kulick and designer Paul Steinberg’s notion of what Brecht was on about in A Man’s a Man.  CSC has a relatively small stage area, a thrust configuration that’s pretty much a large square.  For Man, the floor was essentially bare—no constructed scenery on stage—with the fly space festooned with bright green palm fronds evoking the tropics.  (Kilkoa, the setting of Man, is an imaginary place, so its geographic location is wherever Brecht and the director want it to be.)  The back wall of the acting area incorporated a large metal garage-like door that served various purposes and could be obscured by sliding panels painted with motifs suggesting various locations during the play; there was a smaller wooden door to stage right of the big one.  The most salient element of the design were the orange-painted oil barrels stacked seemingly haphazardly around the stage at the pre-set, suggesting huge palm tree trunks.  (The color, designer Steinberg explained, “is meant to be slightly vulgar and intense.”) The barrels were moved, restacked, and transformed by suggestion and imagination into many disparate objects all during the performance.  Steinberg explained that the barrels came from a reference in the play to the coming war.  The soldiers don’t know who the enemy will be or where they’ll be fighting, and point out that if it’s about cotton, they’ll be fighting in Tibet and if it’s about oil, the fight will be in Pamir (a region of Afghanistan).  Steinberg said, “To me there’s no more potent symbol in today’s world than oil as a force for wars.  And so that’s where those things come from.”  (The war in Man is in Tibet in the end, so Steinberg’s allusion is demonstrably a contemporary reference to our recent wars in Iraq and Kuwait and our conflicts with Iran to keep the Persian Gulf open to oil shipping.)  The barrels are the packages Galy Gay carries as a porter, the “leather box” in which Jeraiah Jip hides when he’s left behind at the temple, Begbick’s beer wagon, the “elephant” Gay is hoodwinked into selling illegally, the train cars in which the soldiers ride to war, and so on.  They became an emblematic image for the production.

The costumes, by Gabriel Berry, were mostly World War I-era British army field uniforms, with the four machine gunners wearing the familiar pie-plate helmet.  (Bloody Five wore a dress uniform with Sam Browne belt and a peaked cap.)  The widow wore a patterned ’20s drop-waisted dress.  The overall effect was to reinforce the period without commenting on it or the styles overtly.  Justin Townsend’s lighting, essentially bright and white as if the sun were shining at its height all the time, was in a similarly straightforward vein.

While Bentley endeavored to make his Brecht translations idiomatically American, Nellhaus didn’t, retaining the faux-British feeling Brecht seems to have intended.  (I’ve read some Brecht in the original German, but not Mann ist Mann, so I’m extrapolating here.  Nellhaus’s rendition of the play for the Living’s 1962 staging was authorized by the Brecht heirs; I know nothing about the CSC version, but the endorsement suggests he hewed close to Brecht’s use of language.)  Given the fantasy depiction of the British Raj (besides the fact that Kilkoa doesn’t exist, Brecht gave England a queen in 1925), Nellhaus’s approach seems apt (as long as the actors can handle the alien speech, which the CSC cast did) and also in line with Brecht’s famous striving for unfamiliar stage life to remind us that this is a show, a demonstration, not reality.  To that effect, Brecht inserted songs into the script, another non-realistic technique to accomplish his intention that we pay attention to his points and not be drawn into an empathetic relationship with the characters.  The lyrics of CSC’s A Man’s a Man, of course, were Nellhaus’s renditions of Brecht’s verse—Brecht was also a poet as well as a playwright—but the music for the production was new, composed by Duncan Sheik, composer for Spring Awakening (Off-Broadway, Broadway, 2006-09) and the recent London production of American Psycho (2013-14).  Maybe I’m too hung up on Kurt Weill, but I found the new score too lyrical, too tuneful for Brecht and A Man’s a Man.  In contrast to, say, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, in which the pretty music (by Richard Peaslee) clashed with the brutal imagery of the words, there was no conflict in Sheik’s compositions.  Brecht’s lyrics were inspired by troop songs (via Rudyard Kipling), but there wasn’t much martial in Sheik’s music, which subverts the disorienting function of the songs.  Remember, Brecht wasn’t about entertainment and appeasing an audience: “I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed,” he declared in that 1926 interview. 

The performances were generally fine, though perhaps a little too much in the realistic vein.  I didn’t see Kulick’s previous Brecht work at CSC, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (2013) and Galileo (2012), so I don’t know if A Man’s a Man is typical of his approach to the writer, but style wasn’t a main element in this production.  If anything, Kulick subdued stylistic aspects of the production in almost every department except the set design.  (It may be significant that Steinberg’s principal field of design is opera, often a showier medium.  In his interview, the designer remarked that “in any musical theatre, the design is often a bridge between the abstraction of music and the literal quality of the words.  It has a different place in the structure.  But for a play it’s a more one-to-one dialogue with words.”)  I can’t say that Kulick’s approach didn’t work for me, but it wasn’t as starkly interesting and provocative as I expect from Brecht; on the other hand, it didn’t iron out all the Brechtian quirkiness, a tactic that turns his plays into mush.  So I guess I was left with neither fish nor fowl—but at least I didn’t get pabulum.  In the worlds of theater and Brecht, that counts as a win.  (It also comes close to damning with faint praise, and I regret that.  If the play were still running, I might have rephrased that statement.)

The central performances were all a little problematical, but not immensely off base.  As Galy Gay, Gibson Frazier was a little more a nebbish than I think he ought to be; Charles Isherwood of the New York Times dubbed him “boyish but rather anonymous.”  I don’t mean the character, who is, as he says, a “nobody,” but as a stage presence.  Frazier, however much he may wish otherwise, was following in the footsteps of the likes of Peter Lorre, whose 1931 performance raised a critical howl which Brecht felt compelled to answer in print; Joe Chaikin, who won an Obie for the portrayal in 1962; and even Bill Murray, who did the role in a 1986 staging in Hyde Park, New York.  But Frazier barely stood out from the ensemble, and “the peculiar oddity of ‘A Man’s a Man,’” wrote Isherwood, “is that it’s hard to lament the disappearance of Galy Gay, because there was never anything much there to disappear.”  We’re not supposed to empathize with Gay, according to Brecht’s theatrical philosophy, but we are supposed to take notice. 

As the Widow Begbick, Justin Vivian Bond brought the fresh (I think) element of drag impersonation to the role.  (I learned of a production in Los Angeles in which Galy Gay was played by a woman, but I never read of a man appearing as Begbick before.)  Previous Begbicks have been Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife; Judith Malina in the Living’s version; Olympia Dukakis, winner of the 1962 Obie for her portrayal in the competing production; and Stockard Channing in 1986 opposite Bill Murray.  Formerly Kiki of the comic musical duet Kiki and Herb (1990s-2000s), Bond is certainly statuesque.  (Bond seemed taller than all the men in the cast, particularly 5’ 9” Stephen Spinella’s Bloody Five.)  But I kept feeling that v was in a different play from everyone else, almost doing a solo act in the middle of A Man’s a Man.  (As a transgender person, Bond insists on not identifying with either sex and prefers to use v as the suitable pronoun, so I will oblige.)  I can’t put my finger precisely on what was disconnecting, but it had to do with v’s energy and “presence,” if that makes any sense.  Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York  Daily News said, “Bond’s acting is one-note,” and despite her flapper garb, Bond’s Begbick was from a different time and place somehow.  (Bond’s program credits list few traditional plays and I wonder how much work v’s done with a cast and a script.  V was a little like some of those old-time movie actors who just did their own thing, irrespective of what anyone else on the screen was doing.)  Because this was Brecht, however, it wasn’t as damaging as it might have been had the play been a Shaw, say, or a Shakespeare, and Bond’s smoky, dark voice was appropriately Brechtian to my ear, even if the songs v sang rang a little too lilting. 

In the late 1950s, a translator-playwright was contemplating a rendition of Mann ist Mann in New York City.  The actor to whom the English script was to be offered was Marlon Brando “because of the ‘wonderful role’ in it for him.”  I assume the offer would have been for Galy Gay, but Brando probably would have been more credibly cast as Bloody Five.  In that light, Stephen Spinella was an odd choice for the fearsome military veteran and the actor’s slight build emphasized this.  Despite the abundant facial hair the actor sported, he seemed like a boy dressed up in his father’s uniform—or perhaps an old granddad in his former regalia.  Again, this being Brecht, such a disconnect might have been appropriate had I not felt that Spinella was the slightest bit uncomfortable in the role.  Watching him, I couldn’t help wondering what a bigger man would be like as he dissolved into jelly.

The other soldiers—Jason Babinsky as Polly Baker, Steven Skybell as Jesse Mahoney, Martin Moran as Uriah Shelley, and Andrew Weems (who replaced an injured Bill Buell in January) as Jeraiah Jip—as well as Ching Valdes-Aran as Mr. Wang, the temple priest, were all fine.  (Allan K. Washington played all the other characters, including Mrs. Galy Gay.)  Nothing really stood out in the ensemble, but it all worked well.  (Interestingly, as if to balance the transgender Bond’s playing Widow Begbick, Valdes-Aran, a female actor, was billed as Mr. Wang, though the role as presented by the actor and Kulick is essentially gender-neutral—and gender-irrelevant.  Wang’s costume, a tunic and turban, looking like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, was probably modeled on male garb, but to a Westerner, it was ambiguous.) 

I’m still struggling with Kulick’s interpretation.  Mann ist Mann predates Brecht’s famous theater theories, including Epic Theater and the so-called Alienation Effect, but he did insert rudimentary versions of them into the stage work when he directed the revised play in 1931.  Today, of course, most theater people will find the seeds of the playwright’s ideas in the script and bring them to the fore, at least in each director’s vision of them.  Since, as I acknowledged, I haven’t seen Kulick’s earlier Brecht presentations, I don’t know if he has a consistent Brechtian viewpoint or not, but on the basis of A Man’s a Man, I’d say he soft-pedals the starker aspects of Brecht’s theories.  Hence, I imagine, the semi-realistic performance style and the wholly realistic costuming.  Perhaps it was also the rationale for the lyrical musical style in which Duncan Sheik composed, influenced (as it should have been) by the director’s vision.  (Paul Steinberg’s scenography, as I said, was a different matter.)  I’d also say that Kulick emphasized the comedy over the more barbed political and polemical points Brecht was making—though it’s hard to roll over them completely.  In the end, Kulick created an enjoyable and interesting piece of theater—but just how much Brecht was present is in question for me.  I’m unquestionably glad I saw this performance, though I’m not sure what I learned from it other than having gotten to see a version of this play on stage finally.  (Brecht has copped to making at least 10 revisions of Mann ist Mann from 1926 to his death in 1956.)

In the press, Newsman Dziemianowicz reported, “The first half delivers a clean, smooth, energetic ride and buckles you in tight. . . .  But the second act is shaggy, inert, less musical and loses its grip,” due in part to “sluggish pacing.”  “Overall,” he wrote however, “performances click.”  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli opened her review with: “There’s a reason we don’t see Brecht’s ‘A Man’s a Man’ very often: It’s not all that good.  To come alive, it needs a brilliant production – and this clunky Classic Stage Company revival isn’t it.”  Commenting on the accident that sidelined an original cast member, the Postwoman complained, “Sadly, that was far more exciting than what unfolds onstage,” but added that Sheik’s music was “quite pleasant, especially in the hands of Justin Vivian Bond.”  Singling out Bond and Spinella for praise, Vincentelli wrote that “the rest of the ensemble is dull” and “the action is both sluggish and incoherent.”  The reviewer closed with a quip: “When one of the soldiers . . . wonders out loud, ‘What is happening here?,’ the widow turns to the audience and shrugs comically, as if to say, ‘Beats me.’  You and me both, Begbick.” 

The New York Times writer Charles Isherwood called CSC’s A Man’s a Man “this hard-working but uninvolving production [that] moves with the lumbering tread of a pachyderm in no hurry to get to the watering hole,” although he allowed that this wasn’t necessarily Kulick’s fault, or that of the cast, “who embody their cartoonish characters with energy and verve.”  Said the Timesman, “All do their best to lift Brecht’s meandering parable about the dehumanizing nature of military life (or maybe modern life) to . . . playful heights.”  Brecht’s play, Isherwood observed, “lacks the cogency and tangy theatrical vitality of his later, better-known works” and “galumphs along awkwardly and with only modestly funny satirical flourishes, leaving us to grind our teeth as we wait for Brecht’s ideas to heave oh so slowly into view.”  Composer Sheik, the Times reviewer reported, “provides polished and haunting work” and, as Begbick, “Bond gives a cheerfully louche, funny performance”; Spinella, “almost unrecognizable underneath a fierce outcropping of military facial hair,” Isherwood wrote, “gives a sharply funny portrait of the savage Bloody Five.”  In the end, he asked, “Does any of this sound riotously funny?  Yes, well, I’m afraid it isn’t.”  As Isherwood pointed out, “Brecht was never exactly renowned for the lightness of his touch, and despite the cast’s cheerily unearnest efforts, much of the comedy comes across in rather heavy quotation marks.”  In am New York, Matt Windman, calling the CSC revival an “intimate production,” felt that the company “may have overreached in bringing back ‘A Man’s a Man’” in a performance that “comes off as slow, disjointed and altogether uninteresting” and “is otherwise a dull affair” because “the humor fails to land.”  Newsday’s Linda Winer averred that CSC had “mounted a tedious production that annoys in the noisy, look-at-me manner of bad children's theater.”  Winer added, “Sweet/bitter harmonies and oompa rhythms by Duncan Sheik (‘Spring Awakening’) offer little compensation.”

Brendan Lemon of the Financial Times capsulized his experience of A Man’s a Man by writing, “I regret to say that I was neither much amused nor touched.”  His disappointment, he said, “has something to do with the casting”: “none of [the ensemble] is able to summon and sustain the odd-comic tone that Brecht’s near-vaudeville project requires.”  The cast, Lemon lamented, is “not helped by the staging (from the usually inspired Brian Kulick), which tends to lag during the scene changes.”  CSC’s “robust new revival,” wrote Elysa Gardner in USA Today, “proves as deliciously farcical – and sobering – as ever.”  “[U]nder Brian Kulick's brisk, stinging direction,” wrote Gardner, the cast “proves both adept at broad humor and capable of stunning us into thoughtfulness.”  In the end, the review-writer concluded that “however bizarre or surreal the journey, A Man's a Man will leave you shaken, and invigorated.” 

In the Village Voice, Alexis Soloski called Kulick’s A Man’s a Man “long, loud, and slow” and pointed out that “[t]he script is more obvious than some of Brecht's later works.”  The New Yorker described A Man’s a Man as a play that “has the anguished, disjointed quality of a man racing to keep up with his own ideas” while the CSC production “embraces the frenzy, and, like its protagonist, gets deliriously lost within itself.” 

In his Hollywood Reporter review, Frank Scheck expressed the opinion that A Man’s a Man is “hopelessly dated even in the most expert hands” and that “[d]espite an exuberant staging . . . and the addition of some tuneful songs . . ., this determinedly cartoonish production never fully succeeds in delivering the playwright’s message . . . with sufficient bite.”  Scheck added, “The tonally uneven production is ultimately unsuccessful in making the strange proceedings sufficiently comprehensible” and even found Steinberg’s set ultimately “monotonous.”  In Time Out New York, Adam Feldman felt, “Patches of the play are messy, and some are blunt” but that the writing’s “incisive enough to draw a little blood.”  Director Kulick, said the man from TONY, brought “out the play’s vaudevillian aspects” in a “lively revival,” but Feldman admonished that “the play is no mere goof.” 

In the cyberpress, Fern Siegel of Huffington Post dubbed the Man revival a “smart production” which offered “a rare opportunity to see early Brecht deftly presented.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer called the CSC production “smartly staged” with which “there's a lot that's right.”  Sommer described the cast as merely “okay,” citing drawbacks such as Frazier’s failure “to bring out this innocent abroad's Chaplinesque qualities” in Galy Gay and the fact that the other soldiers’ “comic antics are only fitfully funny.”  Tulis McCall of New York Theatre Guide complained that despite “the best efforts of this fine cast and excellent production values – this still feels like an evening that will never get to the end.”  In spite of “boatloads and boatloads of words that hinder rather than guide the observer,” McCall reported “we are buoyed up by work of this excellent cast.”  Calling Kulick’s staging “a disappointingly reductive production that's a little bit like being cornered at an alt-rock concert by a militantly anti-war lefty who insists ‘it's all about the oil, man,’” Zachary Stewart wrote on TheaterMania, “With the help of Sheik's dreamy, mellow, and often beautiful songs, this play set in a warzone creeps along at a sleepy pace, offering very few ‘aha’ moments.” 

Reflections on Theater Etiquette

by Kirk Woodward

[If it seems like I’m turning ROT over to my friend Kirk Woodward, you aren’t far from wrong.  (Well, to be honest, starting the blog was his idea.)   Kirk turned in “Religious Drama,” posted this past 24 January, and he’s got another piece in the pipeline for me (and his daughter has one in progress as well!).  This time around, Kirk examines how actors behave back stage and on stage while they’re working—or at least how they should behave.  Actors have all kinds of reputations, not all of which are even valid (thanks to Hollywood’s fictional portrayals), but one thing is (and has to be) so: they’re a sensitive lot.  Not just in the meaning of perceptive or even touchy, though those characteristics are part of the equation.  Actors, like many other artists, can be easily thrown by even the most minor intrusions or disruptions, derailed from the tracks of their work or performance.  Think of it as the performance equivalent to the dust particles that can ruin a delicate lab experiment.  What looks to outsiders like a kind of narcissism is usually nothing more than artistic self-defense.  Most theater etiquette comes from efforts over the centuries to minimize tectonic disturbances.]

What’s it like to work in theater? People get their impressions of the answer to this question from many sources – for example, from popular songs, like Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (Annie Get Your Gun, 1946), with its cheery opinion that show folk “smile when they are low.” A little less general, perhaps, is Cole Porter’s presentation of first night jitters in “Another Openin’, Another Show” (Kiss Me, Kate, 1948). Positively glum – except for the bright music – are the many details of life on the road as described in Stephen Sondheim’s “The Glamorous Life” (A Little Night Music, 1973).   

And then there are the many movies and TV shows, for example, All About Eve (1950) and Smash (2012–2013), that present theater as a cauldron of bitterly competitive relationships and combative personalities. Those show folk! How frenetic! How bizarre!

So it may be useful to affirm that behind the scenes, theater isn’t all that different from “real life” for teachers, soldiers, cashiers, clerks, the clergy, or any other group of people working together. All work situations have their tensions and conflicts, as the comic strip Dilbert demonstrates daily. Actors, we say with only slight hesitation, are people too. (“They are?” says Max Bialystock in The Producers. “Have you ever eaten with one?”)

But there are structural differences between acting and other careers. There are very few other work situations where every job is temporary, and also where one’s job performance is actively judged by every person who comes in contact with it. A bricklayer, laying bricks, doesn’t have every person who will ever walk on that sidewalk commenting on how well the bricks are being laid. Actors lay bricks – alas, sometimes in more than one sense – in front of everyone, and everyone has an opinion on the result.

In the current environment of live theater, every actor is a step away from the breadline, and there just aren’t that many jobs available. In an article in the New York Times some years ago (“Broadway’s Anonymous Stars” by Peter Marks, February 2, 1996), a brilliant actress and singer (Liz Callaway) described how, a few months after getting a Tony Award nomination, she was working in a gift shop, because she couldn’t find another role.

In nations where the theater is subsidized, the situation is less dire, but the constant question of failure or success is still there. Actors, in other words, are always on the brink. The natural result is a heightened level of tension, which can express itself in various forms, like competitiveness, anxiety, superstition… Even a routine rehearsal is an Event, with a degree of success and failure riding on it, and with the great purpose of creating some sort of a work of art giving an additional dimension to the experience.

Because theater is in some ways different from everyday life, people do sometimes behave somewhat differently in it. That’s what this piece is about – stage etiquette, that is, how people behave in the theater, as opposed to how they perform. Those are two different things. Sometimes they are harder to keep separate than one might expect. Theater people sometimes feel, act, and even believe that the world of the theater is the only world there is. Sometimes there are consequences for feeling that way.

Theater people have a reputation for being extravagant, unpredictable folks. Some are, of course. Most, though, would never stand out in a crowd, except for that undefinable something that compels them to go on the stage in the first place. However, because of the nature of their work, actors tend to be insecure people, and this insecurity can lead to strange behavior. Awareness helps, some.

For example, being insecure, actors will accept help from anyone. “My manager said I should do the part this way . . . . “My agent said the scene doesn’t work for me . . . .” Directors can get testy over that kind of thing. They don’t like to think that someone besides themselves is doing the directing. It would be wonderful if every actor would learn not to tell the director (or anybody else) that someone else knows how to do their job better than they do.

In fact, generalizing from this example, just about all stage etiquette is contained in four words: Mind your own business.

Here’s an example of that principle that I personally find myself frequently yelling about: an actor should never, never, never tell another actor how to do a part, a line, a moment . . . anything.  Correcting an actor’s performance is the director’s job, and nobody else’s. One actor telling another how to do something in a show is the grossest breach of stage etiquette.

And as often happens, there’s an artistic reason for that piece of theatrical etiquette, as well as a behavioral reason. When one actor gives another actor “notes” on something the actor is doing, she or he stops being an actor and becomes a spectator. Instead of performing, the actor, essentially, is directing. And, incidentally, not minding his or her own business.

As always, the details of the principle I’ve just described can be difficult to work out. What if another actor asks you how to do something? I’d say the best answer is, “I’m afraid I’m too focused on my own part, but I’ll bet the director can help.” This is the ideal. But what if the director can’t help – if the director is completely inept? I would say that if possible, the actor who knows better should lead by example. But this takes a great deal of willpower.

Although nowadays classes are offered on every aspect of art, I suspect it’s still true that the best way to teach, in the arts, is by example. Those who are capable of learning, will understand and apply the lesson. Those who aren’t, won’t, no matter what. Artists both influence and inspire each other, and they do pay attention to what others are doing (whether out of a search for knowledge, or out of jealousy). As someone has said, “The best criticism of a work of art is another work of art.”

Artists can be critical, even picky, people, for several reasons. Their work is always being evaluated; they work in competitive fields, no matter how little they want to acknowledge it; they are members of a small community, in which people tend to know a great deal about each other.

Insecurity is highest at a first reading of a script. All concerned are trying to prove that they’re worth casting (even though they’ve already been cast). The remedy for insecurity in this case is the same as the answer for most problems in the theater: focus on the script. Easier, however, said than done.

This air of excitement and creativity is one of my favorite things about theater. I love to see plays performed, but I don’t know anyplace I’d rather be than a rehearsal. It almost doesn’t matter what the rehearsal is for – I just love the feeling of it.

When a show is going badly – or sometimes even when it’s not – actors tend to look for someone to blame. This tendency to blame can get badly out of hand, and once it starts, it’s hard to stop. One director I know begins each production by saying to the cast, “Anything that goes wrong in this show is my fault. Is everyone clear on that? Good. Then we can get started,” thus, he hopes, getting blame out of the way early.

When blaming does start, the atmosphere can become poisonous quickly. Carping spreads like a prairie fire. There’s a relevant verse in the Bible:  “Avoid profane chatter, for their talk will spread like gangrene. . . . Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.” (2 Timothy 2) Good advice, but sometimes hard to remember.

A great deal of theater etiquette has to do with being a professional. A professional, in theater, is a person who does a job consistently, under all circumstances. An amateur is a person who doesn’t, although the word should mean someone who loves doing it. That is to say, an artist should be both. The poet W. B. Yeats captures professionalism perfectly in his poem “Lapis Lazuli”: 

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.

Professionalism counts for a great deal in the theater. No matter how creative and full of ideas directors may be, at heart they really only want two things: for the actors to show up on time, and for them to know their lines. Given a choice between the two, they’ll take the latter.

Professionalism can be as simple a matter as always having a pencil handy. In a theater it’s always a good idea to have a pencil. You never know when the director might tell you something you’ll want to write down. For example, where to stand, where to walk . . . . They get depressed when you say, “Don’t worry, I’ll remember it.”

Much of theater etiquette has to do with how one treats one’s colleagues backstage. Of course actors are frequently reported in the press as hating each other, and sometimes they actually do. This makes their satisfaction at giving good performances all the greater. But real satisfaction, I’ve noticed, comes when actors support and encourage each other. This happens most frequently when someone in the cast consciously starts the ball rolling by making it a point to praise and encourage. Others follow along, because everyone wants praise and encouragement – they just sometimes forget to give it.

Actors are notorious for being superstitious, although not are. Many backstage practices look like superstition, but on examination turn out to be just training. For example, performers have their own preparation routines. Before a show, they may hum, sing, pray, meditate, beg others to run lines with them, huddle in a corner and say nothing, talk loudly to whoever will listen; and some, although fortunately not all, will do vocal exercises consisting of high-pitched, piercing noises like the sounds of trains braking. Other actors will almost never tell these people to stop, not that they wouldn’t love to.

Actors seem seldom to force their religious beliefs on others. On the other hand, they promote their superstitions with the fervor of the newly-converted. I will say that there don’t seem to be as many theatrical superstitions in force as there used to be. However, the one about not saying the word “Macbeth” is still in full swing. The play is supposed to be unlucky, which strikes me as odd since the time I directed it was one of my best theater experiences. . . . I wonder how people will avoid saying “Macbeth” in a time like the present when practically every production that’s not Les Miserables seems to be Macbeth.

I was a member of a theater company where everyone assiduously avoided walking under ladders, until a member pointed out how odd that behavior was for people who claimed to believe in God. I had to acknowledge the justice of her comment, and since then have walked under ladders with abandon, with no ill results so far.

Speaking of walking under ladders, actors aren’t the only people involved in theater etiquette. Shows have technical staffs too. Smart performers recognize the members of the stage crew as colleagues. “Techie” (technical worker) simply means someone who can do things the actors can’t do, or don’t want to. The technicians wouldn’t be doing the Broadway show without the actors, but then the actors wouldn’t be doing the Broadway show without the technicians either.

Everyone is supported by someone. Actors are supported by technicians. When Lady Gaga introduces herself to all the members of the orchestra at the recording studio, that’s her theater training showing. Of course, just because they’re actors, doesn’t mean they’re inferior to technicians either.

If you are on a ladder or catwalk, above the stage, and drop something, you are supposed to yell “HEADS”! A good technician, they say, is one who shouts “HEADS” while falling off a ladder.

Theater etiquette also extends to how one relates to one’s colleagues when they’re in a show and you’re not – especially when they’re in a bad show. There is only one correct thing to say to a person involved in a bad show: “You were great,” and don’t elaborate. There is only one correct answer to a compliment, whether deserved or undeserved: “Thank you” – again without elaboration.

Despite the above, theater people keep thinking up ingenious and deliberately ambiguous things to say to someone whose performance, or show, falls short:

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It was amazing.”

“You’ve never been better.”

“I can’t wait to tell everybody about it.”

“I wish you’d been out front.”

A line like that should be better rehearsed than the performance, perhaps, was.

Another offstage area for practicing theater etiquette is social situations. At parties, theater people talk about their own work, and if a visual representation is available, they watch it. This is fine. In fact actors are permitted to talk about themselves anytime, anywhere.

Except – in auditions, where the advice Michael Shurtleff gives in his excellent book Audition must be followed: don’t talk about yourself. Directors don’t want to know why the train was late, what you had for breakfast, why you chose those pants . . . . Directors are busy thinking about themselves. Let them.

Story: An actor on tour comes home unexpectedly and finds his wife in bed with his best friend, also an actor. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!”  the husband explodes. “Well,” the friend replies, “I’ve got a commercial, and I just did an indie, and next week I start rehearsals for . . . .”

The arts are primarily about mentoring – about “ways to do it” that are passed along, often through the generations. Sometimes the process is conscious, sometimes unconscious. It’s a reason that age, in theater, actually gets some respect now and then.

But the principle is the same as above: mind your own business. If at all possible we should only pass on to future generations the good stuff that’s in our heads, not the nonsense.

[As I read Kirk’s exploration of stage etiquette, I found myself thinking back on some of my own experiences and conclusions about actors and how we behaved on stage and back stage.  I made the word-processing equivalent of marginal notations, which I sent to Kirk along with my editorial comments.  His suggestion was that I preserve those somewhat random thoughts and use them as commentary on the blog post itself.  So, in more or less the order in which Kirk raises these issues, I append my own thoughts on the subject of back-stage behavior by working actors.

[One of my one-time actor friends used to love to say, “Actors are the only people who’ll work for nothing . . . if you let them!”

[Acting is one of the few professions (perhaps the only one outside modeling) in which appearance is of vital importance.  It’s not just whether you’re handsome or pretty—although that’s part of it—but how tall or short you are, how old you look (not are) or can pass for, what color hair you have (and how much!), and so on, and so on.  I once knew an actor who lost a role because he didn’t fit into the costume!

[And then there’s me . . . the Jew who lost a part because I wasn’t “Jewish enough”?  Where else does that happen?

[Acting is also one of the few professions where someone has to invite you to work.  Writers and composers, painters, and others can work when they wish—even if they don’t sell their work, even singers and musicians can sing or play for themselves or friends—but an actor can’t very much wake up and say, “I think I’ll do a little acting today.”

[The Producers line Kirk cites about actors and eating always makes me chuckle because when I was an actor, hanging out with other actors, I soon noticed what seemed to be a universal truth: When there are actors and free food, don’t get between the actors and the buffet table!  Don’t even try to engage them in conversation while they’re around food—you won’t get anywhere.  If there’s free food around and you want to find some actor—look where the food is—she or he’ll be there!  (Some actors drink, some don’t; some smoke or toke and some don’t—but all actors eat and they can divine free eats!)

[How many other fields are there where you can train, study, and accumulate experience and still lose a job to a guy who used to be a football player or a gal who’s a pop singer?

[Speaking of newspapers (and, hence, reviewers), is there another field in which a publication would go eenie-meenie-miney-mo to select a review-writer even when the writer has no experience or background in the subject?  Cars?  Music?  Books (well, maybe)?  Clothes?  Video games?  Architecture?

[I once worked with an actor (twice, I believe) who had the annoying habit of making “suggestions” about scenes we had together.  (He was directing them, to be frank.)  I always just ignored his comments but after a while, I told him straight out to let the director make the decisions, at least about other actors’ work, and not to put his two cents in—essentially, Mind your own business.  He still did it, but I no longer felt I had to respond in any way.  (The clincher was that he wasn’t an especially good actor and could have benefited by paying more attention to his own work.)

[Most actors who do this, of course, are really trying to get you to alter your performance so they can do something they want to do—not really to “improve” your work.

[On the other hand, with respect to directors who are inept (or, in this case, inattentive), I have once or twice had to be part of a conspiracy to direct a scene together with the other actors, on our own.  I did this with the England scene in Macbeth: the actors playing Macduff and Malcolm and I rehearsed together on our own, directing ourselves and each other (by agreement) because the director, who was playing Macbeth, wasn’t doing it.  (Some spectators told us it was the best scene in the production, though I don’t know if that was really true.  We felt good enough about the work that the three of us took the scene around to auditions; if one of us had an audition, the other two would come along to do the scene.)  I also was in a cast of An Ideal Husband in which the director refused to set any blocking.  After floating about the stage for a few weeks, feeling insecure and adrift, the whole cast got together and blocked the play.  Of course, we had to direct each other a little to accomplish this.  These, of course, are extreme circumstances.  (I was also the beneficiary of a situation in which a cast collectively fired its director—and I was asked to come in and take over.  That was The Importance of Being Earnest, my first gig.)

[Like Kirk, I always loved rehearsing, too.  The energy and creative potential is almost heady!  Performing was the desert, but rehearsing was the nourishing meal.

[The norm with theater casts, in my experience, is that they become temporary family groups.  When I was in the army in Berlin, we started a theater group because we didn’t like the practice at the official brigade theater of coming together, doing a show, and disbursing with no follow up.  We wanted contact even when we weren’t in production for anything.  (I’ve always theorized that theater people practice serial marriage so often because when a couple are in a show together, especially one in which their characters fall in love, the actors fall in love, too.  It’s very intimate work, very exposed, and close friendships, love, and sometimes intense enmity, can result from that.  It doesn’t happen that way in an office or a factory.  (It can happen that way in the military, especially in combat.)

[I did two productions of Macbeth and both were fine and un-endangered.  (The second had artistic problems, as I’ve hinted, but nothing life-threatening.)

[I had an acquaintance—she was a stage manager for one of my shows—who had a code system with her friends when they saw each other’s performances.  If the play was so bad, despite the friend’s work, that the others couldn’t sit through it, they sent a note back stage with one word on it: “Potemkin.”  I don’t know why that word was selected, but it meant: “I love you dearly, but this show is just dreck!”

[The age and mentoring notion—there’s a little of that in Richard Nelson’s script of That Hopey Changey Thing (and possibly the other Apple plays, since the old actor, Uncle Benjamin, and the young one, Tim, are in all the plays together).  I reported on a performance of this play on ROT on 15 December 2013.]

Culture War

[When Hilton Kramer, New York Times art critic from 1965 to 1982, died on 27 March 2012 at 84, he was nearly universally lionized as a perceptive and knowledgeable commentator on the art of the 20th century.  He was also acknowledged as a fierce fighter for conservative views in the culture war of the 1980s and ’90s.  William Grimes put it this way in the Times, a paper the critic spent decades denigrating as a bastion of liberalism in its rival New York Post: “Admired for his intellectual range and feared for his imperious judgments, Mr. Kramer . . . was a passionate defender of high art against the claims of popular culture and saw himself . . . as a warrior upholding the values that made civilized life worthwhile.”  (In the New Criterion, the opinion journal Kramer started, editor Roger Kimball eulogized his mentor: “Hilton called things exactly as he saw them.  He did not temper his disapprobation—nor his praise, come to that—to suit the politesse of any establishment.”)  While the art critic championed the work of artists he liked (David Smith, Milton Avery, Arthur Dove), he had little tolerance for work or movements he thought were unworthy or which didn’t meet his standards.  With only a few exceptions, the critic dismissed much art that came after, say, 1970 and even some of the more popular styles of the decades before such as Pop Art, which he called “a very great disaster”; Op Art; Conceptualism, labeled “scrapbook art”; and, especially, Postmodernism, described as “modernism with a sneer, a giggle, modernism without any animating faith in the nobility and pertinence of its cultural mandate.”  He saw those movements as mere graphic design and interior décor or nonce fads which cheapened the appreciation of good art by both artists and viewers.  Kramer accused Andy Warhol, for instance, of making spectators “less serious, less introspective, less willing or able to distinguish between achievement and its trashy simulacrum.” 

[Kramer’s was the opinion that conservative politicians and activists cited to legitimize their disapproval of art they didn’t like. One example is the uproar against Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment in 1989, part of the battle that launched the modern culture war.  When Revs. Donald Wildmon and Pat Robertson; Sens. Jesse Helms, William Armstrong, and Alphonse D’Amato; Reps. Dick Armey and Dana Rohrabacher; and columnist Pat Buchanan launched a campaign of opposition and condemnation against the National Endowment for the Arts; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati; and Mapplethorpe (eventually among other radical and controversial artists), Kramer labeled the artist “the most overrated photographer of our time.” 

[The esteemed critic was an opponent of public funding and government support of art, which he declared had politicized and bureaucratized art by creating an “immense superstructure of art advisers, art consultants, art lobbyists, art activists, and other non-artist art professionals, working in close conjunction with a vast network of arts councils, offices of cultural affairs, public art projects, minority and ‘community’ arts groups, and other special-interest cultural organizations, both in and out of government,” to exert “enormous influence in determining public policy as well as private patronage in the art world.”  Kramer asserted that “this bureaucratic leviathan” was “completely captive to the political Left,” intent on advancing “the radical Left’s agenda for the cultural revolution.”  The theater and film fields had already been coopted, Kramer believed, and classical music and “serious literature” were under threat.  He wasn’t above calling on the funding agencies, however, to deny sustenance to art of which he disapproved.  He saw no contradiction in using the art support system for political purposes or allowing political considerations to invade the granting process—as long as it was his kind of politics that did the influencing.  In the pages of The New Criterion, which he co-founded in 1982 and edited, he campaigned for not just high standards of art and art criticism but for conservative artistic values—art that reflected what he deemed to be “the highest achievement of our civilization.”

[Though it’s taken me longer than I planned to work this all out, Kramer’s death provoked me to write about the culture war that reached its height of vehemence in the 1980s and ’90s and which reappears, sometimes not so subtly, from time to time.  The critic wasn’t alone, of course: he was among a cohort of public figures, including elected officials like Republican Congressmen Henry Hyde of Illinois and Rohrabacher of California, conservative clergy like Jerry Falwell and Robertson, other writers and commentators such as George Will and Buchanan, and even some curators and museum administrators who agreed with Kramer’s positions and views.  Here’s a brief discussion, biased, I’ll admit, of some of what went on in those decades.] 

In the cultural war, which encompasses many fields including art and theater—on which I’ll be focusing here—both the liberal and conservative viewpoints can be argued persuasively.  Wikipedia innocuously defines “culture war” as “a struggle between two sets of conflicting cultural values,” while Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, James Davison Hunter’s 1991 exegesis of the struggle, more ominously defined the conflict “very simply as political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding.”  Hunter predicted, “The end to which these hostilities tend is the domination of one cultural and moral ethos over all others.”  Instead of calling the opponents “conservative” and “liberal” or “right” and “left,” the University of Virginia sociologist designated them “orthodox,” who are “adherents to an external, definable, and transcendent authority,” and “progressivists,” whose moral authority “tends to be defined by the spirit of the modern age, a spirit of rationalism and subjectivism. . . .  From this standpoint, truth tends to be viewed as a process, as a reality that is ever unfolding.”  

The orthodox, Hunter explained, support art that “serves [a] high public purpose” and reinforces the values and tastes of the community at large.  For the progressivists, art is “a statement of being,” for “[t]o express oneself is to declare one’s existence.”  The stakes, Hunter asserted, are the very standards by which we “determine whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, accepted or unaccepted, and so on.”  In other words, the struggle is over nothing less than “the power to define reality.”  As stage director Leonardo Shapiro, a progressive, asked shortly before his 1997 death: “Who makes culture?  Is it too late?”  At the 1992 Republican National Convention, on the other side of the battlefield, conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan gave a primetime speech declaring, “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.  It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”  The problem, Hunter concluded, is that the two sides speak different languages.  Since, as Hunter analyzed it, “the culture war emerges over fundamentally different conceptions of moral authority, over different ideas and beliefs about truth, the good, obligation to one another, the nature of community, and so on,” the likelihood of compromise or accommodation is nonexistent:

The real significance of such sentiments is that they reaffirm the basic characteristic of the contemporary culture war, namely the nigh complete disjunction of moral understanding between the orthodox and progressivist communities—in this case, on what constitutes art.

As recently as February 2012, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times that “the culture wars are still inevitably significant, for the very simple reason that there’s no common ground on which to call a truce.”  Hunter concluded, “Our most fundamental ideas about who we are as Americans are now at odds,” and conservative art critic Hilton Kramer expounded in 1993 on his claim that it wasn’t the forces of totalitarianism who were mounting “the gravest assaults on art and its institutions” as they maneuvered “to impose an absolute and remorseless control over every aspect of life and thought.”  His perceived threat was coming from the political left which was applying and enforcing political tests on “virtually every field of artistic and intellectual endeavor.”  Kramer, who insisted that “the arts have been effectively strangled in the interest of a radical political agenda,” warned:

Artistic criteria of value and achievement are supplanted by claims to preferment made in the name of group rights, racial justice, sexual equality, minority empowerment, and other politically correct petitions for advancement on the basis of extra-artistic interests.  Art that is not explicitly enlisted in the service of some approved social, sexual, racial, or similar political mission is now an interest that dare not speak its name in the councils of the new arts bureaucracy.  Nor are distinctions between high art and popular culture permitted in the kind of bureaucratic discourse that is specifically formulated to eradicate such distinctions lest the dreaded demons of “elitism,” “excellence,” “quality,” and other challenges to a radical and leveling egalitarianism persist in reminding us that in art, as in life, some things are by their nature discernibly superior to others. 

“While advocating greater public access to the arts so that more and more people may enjoy their pleasures and benefits,” argued Kramer, “the new cultural commissars carry on an unremitting campaign to strip high art of everything but its name in order to render it more appealing to larger numbers of people.”  As this makes clear, his attack on progressivism reverses the arguments the left makes against the orthodox when they try to restrict funding and support for work outside “the traditional fine arts.” 

The conservatives oppose support for art that’s a “symbolic presentation of behavior and ideas that test the limits of social acceptability.”  The state, Living Theatre co-founder Julian Beck cautioned us, isn’t really interested in bringing art to its citizens, however; it wants “diamonds in its crown” and cultural propaganda for its causes and tenets.  In the 1960s, for instance, when my father was with the agency responsible for cultural propaganda abroad, the State Department wouldn’t sponsor tours of West Side Story, arguably one of our greatest achievements in musical theater, because it showed our society in a violent and unflattering way.  (Strictly speaking, this wasn’t censorship because privately-financed tours were free to travel abroad and there was no attempt to suppress productions at home.  The rejection was purely a matter of officially sanctioned art that supported the authorized depiction of the establishment.) 

The distinction is parallel to the one George Bernard Shaw described in his 1913 revision of the essay “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” the contrast between the real and the ideal.  In “Eric Bentley – An Appreciation,” a profile on this blog about the critic, essayist, and public intellectual (published on 4 December 2012), my friend Kirk Woodward characterized the dichotomy this way:

In “ideals” . . . Shaw sees generalities that take the place of understanding the real . . . nature of the world.  What sort of ideals?  Love . . . patriotism . . . nationalism . . . fatherhood . . . motherhood . . . any high-sounding, well-meaning generality can conceal an ideal that takes the place of serious analysis and comprehension.

The orthodox want art that depicts this ideal and don’t want to support art that explores what’s really happening in our society—what artists (and their subjects) really see, experience, think, and feel.  The progressives see this exploration as not only the legitimate focus of art and artists, but an important benefit that art provides to society and one we can’t do without if we’re going to keep, much less advance, our democracy.  Theater director Shapiro warned that “this seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle so that audiences are less and less able to deal with any kind of emotional complexity, relational content, in fact with any of the great themes and subjects of art and literature” rather than what he saw as “anti-relational propaganda,” his take on Shaw’s generalized “ideal.”  Artist David Wojnarowicz, who declared, “People should witness things.  They should, at the very bottom level, be witnessed,” explained that for him art

can produce images of authenticity that break down the walls of state-sanctioned ignorance in the forms of mass media/mass hypnosis and stir people to do what is considered taboo and that is to speak.  Breaking silence about needs or experiences can break the chains of the code of silence.  Describing the once indescribable can dismantle the power of taboo.  Speaking about the once unspeakable can make the invisible familiar if repeated often enough in loud and clear tones and pictures. 

“Images,” Wojnarowicz added, “can be used as tools of alert, or tools of organization.  [An] image can be a disruption of previously unchallenged power.”  In the view of the progressivists, this is a threat to the forces of orthodoxy.

Though Vincent van Gogh wrote that “officially recognized art [is] stagnant-minded and moldering,” art that reinforces accepted sentiments, celebratory art that “reflects the sublime,” is important, and some of it is good.  (Oklahoma! is celebratory theater, as is South Pacific, two other great works of the musical stage.)  A question to be asked, however, has to be, Who defines “sublime”?  Who sets the standards for “high public purpose”?  To many progressives, certainly, testing the limits of social acceptability is an American and democratic virtue—it’s how many expansions of social, artistic, and political boundaries have occurred.  In a few cases, dissenting art has been instrumental in defeating, or at least spotlighting, systems of which even the most orthodox American establishmentarians disapproved: dramatists like Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia and Janusz Glowacki of Poland constantly reminded the rest of the world what life was like under Soviet communism; Athol Fugard’s and Mbongeni Ngema’s pointed opposition to apartheid in South Africa helped isolate and ultimately bring down that regime.  Artists like these, today recognized as important figures in world culture, were frequently harassed, oppressed, jailed, or exiled because they tested the limits of social acceptability in their countries.  In fact, in the very days when Soviet communism was toppling, Havel declared: “An artist must challenge, must controvert the established order.  To limit that creative spirit in the name of public sensibility is to deny society one of its most significant resources.”   

The United States isn’t indemnified from such prodding and goading from its artists, either.  Consider this passage from the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 (P.L. 89-209), the law that established the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities:

An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.

Avant-gardist Shapiro, who viewed the arts as oracular, echoed this sentiment: “The point of an oracle—you support the oracle, you don’t support what it says.  It doesn’t always give you good news.  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.’”

Hunter asserted that what the orthodox activists support is art as a celebration of mainstream American patriotic and religious values and sentiments that make the viewer or listener feel good and cheer.  (Consider Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware or Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull.)  There’s art—even good and great art—that’s celebratory; a lot of the world’s classical art comes from that impulse, and most sacred art falls into that category.  (In the latter category, consider Michelangelo’s Pietà, arguably the most sublime piece of marble ever carved, and Sistine Chapel frescoes, and Salvador Dalí’s Sacrament of the Last Supper.)  In fact, the orthodox forces put an awful lot of their efforts into putting religious—mostly Christian, but not exclusively; conservative Jews occasionally get into the act, too—tenets and practices into particular fields at issue.  One significant non-arts issue in the culture war is, of course, the place of prayer in the schools—along with the teaching of “values,” which almost always means, in this debate, religious values—or, put simply, God—in the classroom and schoolhouse, the courthouse, the public square, and so on.  While I agree that the progressivists have often gone overboard banning religious expression in the public forum, even in schools, no amount of argument will ever make it seem all right to me for any public function to include religious observance for the very simple reason that it’s impossible to invent a form that doesn’t exclude someone’s faith (not to ignore those who have no faith).  It can’t be inclusive, and therefore it’s exclusive—and, therefore, privileges some faiths over others.  By the most basic interpretation, that’s un-Constitutional. 

While the progressives want to make their definitions more inclusive and open, however, the orthodox want to restrict access and acceptability.  What the progressives want to do allows everyone to choose what they see, hear, do, enjoy, and so on, but the orthodox want to deny everyone the right to see, hear, et cetera, anything that they decide is unacceptable.  Short of that, they want to make it as difficult as they can to see, hear, et cetera, stuff of which they don’t approve by denying it funding, a venue, airtime, publicity, sponsorship, or whatever.  That strikes me as fundamentally undemocratic and un-American, and no matter how sincerely you feel about the offensiveness or vileness of some art, movie, book, show, or song (or any other creation), I get hung up on the restrictiveness and denial of access—and who makes the decisions in all our behalves.  If the progressivists win, then everything is accessible and we get to decide for ourselves if it’s offensive, vile, blasphemous, unpatriotic, obscene, or nasty—and we don’t go see it.  And you can preach, write, demonstrate, protest, and persuade against it—but you don’t get to shut it down for me.  If the orthodox win, no one gets to see anything someone decides is objectionable.  You can opt out under progressivism; you can’t opt in under orthodoxy.

Ironically, Hilton Kramer turned this principle on its head, too.  “‘[A]ccess’ often means nothing but censorship in the service of ‘diversity,’” the art critic insisted.  It “is now instantly recognized as a signal to ‘dumb down’ the arts in order to make some approved substitute qualify as the real thing,” he declared.

Not coincidentally, the very authorities who legislated the agency intended to support American artists, the NEA, addressed the issue of art as the canary in the mineshaft.  In “Establishing a National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities,” the Senate Special Committee on Arts and Humanities, chaired by Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, wrote in a section entitled “Freedom of Expression” of the Senate Report which accompanied the 1965 Arts and Humanities Act:

It is the intent of the committee that in the administration of this act there be given the fullest attention to freedom of artistic and humanistic expression.  One of the artist’s and the humanist’s great values to society is the mirror of self-examination which they raise so that society can become aware of its shortcomings as well as its strengths.

Those radicals in the Senate wanted to support art that challenged the status quo, criticized the culture, made us see the wrongs as well as the strengths.  They also wanted to support art that was innovative and challenging in style and form as well as content, as they further stated in “Freedom of Expression”:

Therefore, the committee affirms that the intent of this act should be the encouragement of free inquiry and expression.  The committee wishes to make clear that conformity for its own sake is not to be encouraged, and that no undue preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought or expression.  Nor is innovation for its own sake to be favored.  The standard should be artistic and humanistic excellence.  While evaluation in terms of such an abstract and subjective standard will necessarily vary, the committee believes such a standard to be sufficiently identifiable to serve the broad purpose of the act and the committee’s concern with the cultural values involved.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the arts that celebrate the status quo, the collective mythology of the nation—the Shavian “ideal,” if you will—will be vastly more popular overall than art that tests the boundaries and challenges the received wisdom of the culture.  The one needs less official funding because it attracts support on its own merits.  The other, though, needs the midwifery of organizations and foundations because its appeal—though by no means its significance or potential impact—is narrower.  Furthermore, as Tom Schaefer, a columnist with the Wichita, Kansas, Eagle-Beacon, wrote in 1989: “. . . [I]f art teaches us anything, particularly religious art, it’s that shocking new images can become, in time, conveyors of meaning for people who are struggling to make sense of life.  That’s worth a pause before rushing to judgment.”  The same body that called for support of outlier art recognized that history has shown that what one generation dismisses as junk and trash is embraced by a later generation as great and important art, asserting:

Moreover, modes of expression are not static, but are constantly evolving.  Countless times in history artists and humanists who were vilified by their contemporaries because of their innovations in style or mode of expression have become prophets to a later age.

Think Ibsen for one example, the production of whose realistic plays was banned in many countries (Ghosts) or caused near riots (Doll House), or van Gogh, whose work was dismissed in his lifetime and now brings millions.  Both artists today are highly esteemed in nearly everyone’s estimation.

Unsurprisingly, when those like the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Pat Buchanan worked to subvert and lessen access to government support of the arts, which artists and others deemed a sinister form of censorship, many among the arts community opposed them.  “Where do you derive your authority?” asked playwright Mac Wellman of their conservative adversaries.  “You’re not mentioned in the Bible, so where do you get your authority?”  Stage director Shapiro contested that “because some Buchanan, or whoever the latest loudmouth is, can mobilize some superficial opposition to one or more arts or arts groups, that that means that they are more representing the American people than the artists.”  Frequent New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis proclaimed “that this is a grown-up country, that we want no pecksniffs here, that we are not going to let a few self-appointed bluenoses decide what all the rest of us are allowed to read and see.”

The argument over funding and censorship involves both money and motivation.  As for the funding, those who want to restrict access to public money for art of which they disapprove say with Richard Bernstein in his New York Times article “Subsidies for Artists: Is Denying a Grant Really Censorship?” that withholding tax money from an artist such as performance artist Karen Finley, one of the so-called NEA Four, isn’t censorship because she’s still able to perform or exhibit where she wants, she just can’t do it on the public’s check.  “It would seem to be one thing to deny some artists Federal funds on the ground that what they do is offensive to some taxpayers,” posited Bernstein, “and another to deprive them of their freedom of expression.”  In response, director Shapiro, a pacifist, quipped, “I am against the government using my tax money to kill people . . . .  And yes, I would also be against the government using my money to fund artists to kill people, no matter how elegantly.”  Shapiro pointed out that someone well-known like Finley may be able to find funding and a venue by other means, but what about artists and groups of whom we’ve never heard?

Where are the thousands of Black, Latino, Inuit, Korean, Polish, Native American, Chinese, Arab Karen Finleys?  Where are the thousands of multi-cultural groups celebrating the rebirth of their vision in communities across this huge country?

In his defense of freedom of artistic expression, director, teacher, and producer Robert Brustein wrote that government support of art “means acknowledging that, yes, every artist has a First Amendment right to subsidy.”  Hilton Kramer, however, voiced the conservatives’ position on such a response, explaining that “‘pluralism’ . . . is now merely a euphemism for multiculturalism and enforced ‘diversity,’” despite the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act’s declaration:

The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States.

The arts and the humanities reflect the high place accorded by the American people to the nation’s rich cultural heritage and to the fostering of mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.

It is vital to democracy to honor and preserve its multicultural artistic heritage as well as support new ideas . . . . 

It heightens the conflict, of course, that the progressivists saw the attempts to silence individual artists or groups as skirmishes in a campaign to decimate the avant-garde and experimental art world entirely.  Indeed, Paul Mattick, author of “Arts and the State” in The Nation, warned of a truly devastating potential:

It is the right-wing agenda itself—the call for austerity and the distrust of creativity in all spheres of life other than those of corporate profitability.  Opposing this means the effort to explore, in analysis and, where possible, in practice, the complex relations of art to present-day society and to the possibility of changing it.

The atmosphere across the country was poisoned by what Mattick dubbed “Helms and Co.” and other promoters of cultural orthodoxy like Pat Buchanan and Hilton Kramer who’d been condemning public arts funding.  Dominating the airwaves and the press with their version of the situation, these spokespeople for the right defined the issue for the public and the “mainstream moved right.”  Contrarily, William J. Bennett, President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education and President George H. W. Bush’s director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, maintained in a 2012 commentary called “Republicans lost the culture war,” “For decades liberals have succeeded in defining the national discourse . . . .  They have successfully set the parameters and focus of the national and political dialogue . . . .”

Poet Robert Browning declared, “Art remains the one way possible / Of speaking truth,” and Congress, noting that one of an artist’s responsibilities is to point out society’s shortcomings, addressed this issue.  At the establishment of the NEA and the NEH, legislators explicitly directed that grants be made with principal consideration of the freedom of expression and that artistic quality alone be the criterion.  Congress affirmed that the NEA’s purpose must be to encourage open inquiry and ordered “that no undue preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought or expression.”  Nonetheless, in 1990, the leadership of the NEA succumbed to external pressure from conservative activists and politicians to deny grants to artists who offended orthodox sensitivities, resulting in the infamous “NEA Four” incident.

While Kramer asserted that “the radical Left . . . knew how to exploit liberal sentiment for its own illiberal causes” and “was far more expert than [conservatives] about the many ways in which the resources of both the government and the private sector could be made useful to the cultural revolution,” Shapiro cautioned, “The system has already learned to exclude, efficiently and quietly, art that doesn’t support ruling class ideology and values.”  In Bernstein’s Times article, poet Alan Ginsberg announced, “We are in a dead-end totalitarian ecological trap,” and Karen Finley claimed, “A year ago I was in a country of free expression; now I am not.”  Though Bernstein himself demurred on whether denial of federal money is censorship, many artists, as he reported, feel not only that it is but saw the efforts to rein in the NEA as the beginning of a conservative offensive against free expression and thought of which they disapprove.  The artists feared, furthermore, that the move was an overture to more widespread efforts at suppression.  Impresario Joseph Papp cautioned, “There’s no genuine repression yet, but there are little brush fires that are happening at the same time.”  Leonardo Shapiro affirmed, “The few tokens” being fought over in the press and in Congress “are significant not only because they show the new boldness of the right in wanting to mop up the left-over freaks and dissidents, but also because they show how few tokens are available to be censored.”  Shapiro asked, “If we haven’t censored the creators of our contemporary culture, where are they—on vacation?”  The director concluded:

The repression in America has been so successful that we accept it as the way things are, and are not able to identify it as the consequence of deliberate policy decisions made by a ruling class as part of an overall plan to keep and consolidate power and wealth.

After Dennis Barrie, the curator of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, was indicted on 7 April 1990 on obscenity charges for mounting Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, a touring exhibit of the artist’s photographs, producer Papp, who was one of the most prominent arts people to refuse a grant rather than sign an anti-obscenity pledge, issued a direr warning: “It’s a serious thing when people are arrested and charged.  This is where the weather vane could be pointing.” 

What the arbiters of public taste and culture are looking for, Peter Brook said, isn’t a theater that reveals hidden truths, a “Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible,” but “the tame play where ‘higher’ only means ‘nicer’—being noble only means being decent.”  It’s what dramatist Mac Wellman called “the Theater of Good Intentions” and “the theater of the non-event” in contrast to a chaotic and complex poetic theater.  Antonin Artaud said that conventional Western theater confuses “aestheticism” with “art,” and that theater’s goal should be “to express objectively certain secret truths, to bring into the light of day . . . certain aspects of truth that have been buried under forms in their encounters with Becoming.”  The kind of theater that Artaud envisioned, Wellman writes, and Brook produces has little respect for establishment values, and little patience, Wellman pronounced.  “[P]oetic theater,” the playwright avowed, “takes impossible and ridiculous shortcuts; makes a mockery of the Aristotelian, better class of narrative.”  Julian Beck, depicting avant-garde artists as those “who took the risk of exploring strange lands and of bringing back the unfamiliar things they had created out of their discoveries for all to see,” perceived that

[b]ecause he makes this voyage, he is mocked as an alien is usually mocked.  Because he rejects the popular way of doing things in favor of new forms that may aid him to make his discoveries, he is regarded with hostility. 

But the forces of orthodoxy viewed this special mission as a danger—much as Plato saw it in The Republic in which he condemned poets—and Hilton Kramer, who believed “that while winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union abroad, the conservatives in Washington lost the culture war to our own commissars at home,” expressed the consequences:

The cultural revolution, which had its origins in the antiwar movement and counterculture of the 1960s, now presents this country with the gravest domestic crisis it has faced since the end of the Vietnam War. It has already gone a long way toward destroying our institutions of high culture and our institutions of higher learning. It has made every serious artistic pursuit more problematical than it has been in this country within living memory. And because the cultural revolution has turned every aspect of family and sexual life into an arena of political combat and made every problem deriving from race and ethnicity a battle zone, the culture war is also a moral and social crisis of vast dimensions.

The culture war battles which dominated the political landscape of the late 1980s through the middle 1990s, including congressional and presidential campaigns, subsided somewhat, or at least were no longer headline material at the end of the 20th century into the start of the 21st.  There were flare-ups, especially over gun laws and abortion, and same-sex marriage laws and court cases became high-profile subjects for action, debate, and commentary in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.  The war itself, however, is still in progress in pockets around the country and occasionally on the national field.  In 2004, Buchanan declared that “the culture wars have been reignited.”  In the same year, Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, warned, “We're in this for the long haul, and the people on the other side had best understand, this is not for dilettantes, not for weekend warriors.”  In 2006, Bill O’Reilly published Culture Warrior, in which the conservative TV commentator, assailing the “secular-progressive movement,” pronounced that a culture war “desperately needs to be fought, because today the stakes are as high as they get.” 

The Spring 2011 issue of Censorship News, the newsletter of the National Coalition Against Censorship, included an editorial called “Culture Wars Returning? Or Did They Ever Go Away?” which declared: “In the fall of 2010 culture wars rhetoric seemed like a thing of the past . . . .  And then the firestorm hit.”  And New York magazine seemed to respond in a 2012 article entitled “The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy Is on Your Screen” which found “a pervasive, if not total, liberalism” all over the TV dial.  In 2013, the flare-ups included the charges of racism against Paula Deen, host of a popular TV food show, when she confessed to the casual use of the word “Nigger”; Megyn Kelly’s declaration on Fox News that “Santa just is white”; and the firing (and subsequent rehiring) of A&E’s Duck Dynasty’s star, Phil Robertson, after he expressed his anti-gay beliefs in GQ magazine.  That same year, Pat Buchanan, himself a Catholic, berated Pope Francis, whom he accused of “moral relativism” for seeking “to move the Catholic Church to a stance of non-belligerence, if not neutrality, in the culture war for the soul of the West.”

This year we’ve already seen the legal battles over the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate waged by organizations affiliated with the Catholic Church and former Arkansas governor, and one-time Republican candidate for the party’s presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee chimed in on the alleged “war on women” in the Republican Party at an RNC meeting.  Just as I was writing the final version of this article in late January, the New York Times ran a front-page, above-the-fold headline that read, “Parties Seize on Abortion Issues in Midterm Race,” predicting that that conflict would be an important election question in the coming campaign, but it looks more like the continuing controversy over gay marriage, becoming legal in more and more states, will be the paramount culture issue—unless, of course, there’s a new chocolate Jesus in someone’s studio.

While some analysts insist that the culture war isn’t what American voters really care about, being more concerned with issues of leadership and security rather than the moral questions the political elites and media pundits tell us are important (Morris P. Fiorina, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, 2010) others, like columnist Ross Douthat, point out that while “politics is mostly about jobs and the economy and the state of the public purse,” the pocketbook issues that affect voters’ daily lives, “the arguments that we remember longest, that define what it means to be democratic and American, are often the . . . culture war debates,” possibly because they are fights over symbols embedded deep in our psyches in a way that bread-and-butter issues aren’t.  Political observers conclude that the electorate may say it’s fed up with these conflicts, that they’re nothing but tiresome distractions from the important matters, but the activists on both sides see them as truly life-and-death issues that affect every citizen at the most fundamental level.  When push comes to shove, inside the voting booth or the caucus room, even the weary voter is loath to give up his or her fervently held social convictions.

[Most of “Culture War” has been devoted to discussing and examining the politics and activism of the 1980s and ’90s, but the cultural struggle has never gone away.  It flares up and hits the headlines every few months or even weeks over issues like abortion; evolution; guns; religion in the public square; education policy and curricula; art, literature, and censorship; gender issues and sexuality; and a host of other topics.  Elections are catnip to the culture warriors, and so political campaigns, whether presidential, congressional, or local, become fields for new battles and skirmishes.  We saw it in 2012 and we will again in 2014. 

[Like Hilton Kramer (1928-2012), some of the other main figures of the last big battle of the culture war have departed—Paul Goodman (1911–1972), Julian Beck (1925-85), Joe Papp (1921-91), Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), Alan Ginsberg (1926-97), Jerry Falwell (1933-2007), Jesse Helms (1921-2008), Claiborne Pell (1918-2009), Robert Novak (1931-2009), Anthony Lewis (1927-2013), not to forget artists Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89) and David Wojnarowicz (1954-92)—but others are still fighting as new voices, such as Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Rick Santorum, and the Weekly Standard on the right and Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Corey Booker, and the Huffington Post on the left, join them.  One thing seems certain: whenever someone declares the culture war over and won, it turns out to have been a short-term cease-fire as the ammo’s restocked and the weapons are cleaned and oiled.  Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are few conscientious objectors in the culture war.]