Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 3, December 2003
_______________________________________________________________
By
This
paper addresses the way in which the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
commonly referred to in the U.S. as “9/11” (and the anthrax scare that
post-dated the attacks) affected a group of theatre artists in Atlanta, GA, and
how the work in which they were already engaged, the Naomi Wallace Festival,
became a response to those events, both publicly and in their personal lives. It
will also attempt to address, from the standpoint of mid-July, 2002, some
lasting impact of the response on the theatre ecology of Atlanta. “[i]
Within
the theatrical community across America, two concerns emerged as soon as the
initial shock of 9/11 sank in: 1) Is the theatre still economically viable, will
people want to show up for something as trivial as entertainment?
And 2) Is there any moral validity in what I am doing personally?
Within
a matter of weeks or months, these questions had evaporated, often in a sense
that public entertainment is justification enough.[ii]
For theatres and producers whose work might be provoke thoughts and questions in
the aftermath of the attacks and the ongoing rescue attempts on the World Trade
Center site, an additional question arose. Columnists and radio personalities
were fired for asking sensible questions, and the talk-show host Bill Maher was
suspended for questioning whether men willing to fly into buildings could
accurately be described as “cowardly.”[iii]
In
Manhattan, theatre entrepreneurs found themselves hurrying to cancel any
upcoming productions that carried a hint of controversy, such as a revival of
Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, whose producers and left-liberal director
rapidly issued a press release saying they were delaying the production because
it was “a play that asks serious questions about American society, and now is
not the place for such questions.”[iv]
The most common “response” to 9/11 among American theatres was a curtain
call rendition of either America the Beautiful or the National Anthem.[v]
In
Atlanta, 12 different theatres had been working on the Naomi Wallace Festival,
most for close to a year. Naomi Wallace’s work is centered upon a poetic and
often erotic examination of American and English society that
encompasses race, sex, gender, class, and imperialism with a fervor and
analysis that makes Assassins look like a somewhat pointed Saturday Night
Live sketch. Two of the plays, In the Heart of America and The
Retreating World, specifically stood out because both are directly concerned
with the aftermath of the Gulf War—the former ties American military
involvements over the past half-century to male fear of otherness; the latter is
told from the standpoint of an Iraqi conscript fleeing in advance of Desert
Storm, who describes some of what happened afterward that all the world it
seems, with the exception of the American public, had long been aware of.
Singing the National Anthem for the curtain call would have seemed addle-headed
at best.
The
Naomi Wallace Festival was the brainchild of Vincent Murphy, a professor at
Emory University and Artistic Producing Director for Theatre Emory, the
semi-professional theatre company associated with the university’s theatre
program. Murphy, the most significant leader in the Atlanta theatre scene, had
organized or assisted in the creation of a number of Festivals involving a range
of Atlanta theatres producing the work of a single playwright simultaneously.
Previous festivals had focused on established masters, living and dead, such as
Athol Fugard, Samuel Beckett, Wole Soyinka, Shakespeare and Moliere, along with
others focused on an Atlanta playwright’s work. (Living writers were always in
attendance for some or all of the festival.) Murphy was introduced to Naomi
Wallace’s work at the 1998 Humana Festival of New Plays at the Actors’
Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky. He was immediately struck by her theatrical
“voice” and felt that the time was ripe for a festival on a living
playwright of international acclaim[vi]
who was “not a household name.” (In fact, none of her plays had been
produced in Atlanta.)[vii]
Rehearsals
for the first production had just begun on 9/11. Others were be begin within
days. Some theatres’ boards, already nervous about the politics and sexuality
of Wallace’s work, found new reason for concern: Was Atlanta more willing to
face “serious questions about American society” than Manhattan? Almost all
the theatres pressed on, however. In many cases they found strength from the
work, as events in the plays gained deeper meaning as connections to the larger
world presented themselves.
At
Actor’s Express, where The Retreating World was already rehearsal,
director Weir Harman’s immediate reaction to bombings was similar to many
people’s across the country: worry about friends in New York City, then shock
and anger at the deaths; “It took some time to get back to the play,” he
said in a radio interview in September 2001. Harman and actor Brad Davidorff
discussed dropping the production. Davidorff’s concern was that that the piece
might be “anachronistic” in the changed climate.[viii]
Watching
the television coverage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the days
following the attacks, the actor discovered a renewed connection to the
material. Americans, Davidorff felt, had a “new vulnerability” that would
allow them a greater understanding of the horrors recounted in The Retreating
World. He and Harman now saw the character, a man opposed to Saddam Hussein
yet conscripted into his army, as a way to humanize Arabs and Muslims at a time
when dangerous stereotypes were rampant.[ix] Harman told Jennifer Deer
that he found his “emotional investment” in the project soaring. “At a
time when a lot of artists are questioning the value of art, I’m reminded of
its clarifying value in a moment like this, when I am lucky enough to be working
on a piece that is so meaningful.” [x]
The production went on, although it eventually became a book-in-hand staged
reading rather than a full production (Harman theorizes that this allowed
Davidorff the emotional distance “he needed just to be able to do it in
public”[xi]),
most Festival participants shared Harman’s sense of increased importance to
the work.
At
PushPush Theatre, where In the Heart of America and two other plays by
Naomi Wallace were in rehearsal, director Tim Haberger saw “ a reigniting of
racial profiling issues and general anti-Muslim, anti-Arab feelings that were
echoed in our actors' personal lives.”[xii]
[One leading character was played by a young Arab-American woman, Suhayda Samir.
Her “brother” the central focus of the play, was portrayed by Joshua
Waterstone, a young Jewish-American.]
For
the feminist Synchronicity Performance Group, which was about to begin
rehearsals for Wallace’s best-known work, One Flea Spare, the events of
9/11 struck home in a different way for director, Rachel May.
May had gone to visit relatives in Boston, and found herself, on the
morning of 9/11, being evacuated from Logan International Airport.[xiii]
Stranded, May found new relevance in the play, set in a room of a London
townhouse in 1666, where the quarantine has been extended after a runaway sailor
and a young girl are caught sneaking in for shelter.[xiv]
After 9/11, One Flea Spare “took
on a larger social context.” It
became a play “about an invisible enemy, and people isolating themselves to
keep from getting hurt.”[xv] Actress Kathleen Wattis
was struck by other parallels: “We’re all suspicious of each other and the
air we breathe and the water we drink. Are we in danger?”[xvi]
For
Theatre Emory, Vincent Murphy had chosen to direct Wallace’s The Trestle at
Pope Lick Creek, a play set in Kentucky during the Great Depression. This
play stands at a greater distance from the events of 9/11, but it too felt some
of the impact. Public radio producer Jennifer Deer was putting together a
half-hour radio program about the Festival.[xvii] Murphy’s interview for
the program was scheduled for noon on 9/11. He arrived to a scene many of us
remember from that day – people wandering around in a daze, in this case
watching the banks of screens present in any broadcasting building. Seeing him,
Murphy said, Deer asked, “Why should we do this [the interview]?” Murphy’s
response was: “We should do it now more than ever.”[xviii]
On the final program, Murphy does not mention the events of the day, but his
feelings perhaps show when he paints an image of utopian Platonic reconciliation
in praising Wallace’s “recognition that we’re all halves of something,
that we’re all much more erotic and tender and forgiving than we can allow
ourselves to be.”
Eight
days later, one of his students was beaten up and put in the hospital because he
attempted to come to the aid of a man being beaten at a highway rest area
because his assailants thought him to be “Arab;” the man was actually
Indian. These and other similar events drifted into the rehearsal room.
From
the festival’s first performance—a staged reading of Wallace’s War Boys
(a play never professionally produced in the U.S.) at the trendy Dad’s Garage
Theatre, it was obvious that something special was happening—and that
Murphy’s brainstorm had been visionary. This play, about young vigilantes on
the Texas-Mexico border, benefited from Dad’s frat boy style, resulting in a
testosterone-infused seventy
minutes that made the play’s themes more powerful and organic, mediating the
didactic impression created by the text on the page.
In
all the productions and readings I witnessed, the sense of purpose resulted in
some of the most consistently strong direction, acting, and ensemble work seen
in Atlanta theatres in many years.
Rachel
May feels that the Festival itself was a help for its participants.
“We had already gotten people to work together
on a common goal. . . . Anything having to do with community at that time
was good. 9/11 crystallized the experience of working together. We wanted to be
in rehearsal rather than in front of our TVs watching CNN. It helped us get
through the aftermath because its issues allowed us to deal with what we were
going through as a group.” [Emphasis mine] Talking with actors
who were involved in other projects at the time, May found that this
sense of positive community and sense of a safety zone was not universal in
Atlanta. “People who were doing
gut-busting comedies were getting a great cathartic release out of being able to
go out and make people laugh. The others seemed to be having a harder time
processing things.” [xix]
Several
actors felt a personal benefit from acting in the Festival. Joshua Waterstone,
playing a lead role in The Heart of America, was particularly affected.
“I’m Jewish, and I had heard the Israeli side. I had never thought of the
other point of view, Playing a Palestinian-American was helpful in my gaining
empathy in how someone in this position feels.” He and Suhayda Samir
“found we could relate as brother and sister, with no regard to our
ethnicity. I even had dinner with her family, and found it interesting to see
some of the cultural conflict between Suhayda, who is very Americanized, and her
father, who is an immigrant . . . and very traditional.” [xx]
Kathleen
Wattis also found the plays increasing her awareness of viewpoints often absent
in U.S. mainstream media and discourse. “Our media did a good job of
keeping them [the Iraqis] faceless and nameless. So it winds up being a constant
revelation to Americans that someone can hate us.”
Along with Wattis and Waterstone, Tim Haberger and Vincent Murphy found
the post-show “talkbacks” held by many theatres, and a public talk by Naomi
Wallace at Theatre Emory (expecting an audience of fifty or so, Emory personnel
found themselves coping with an audience in the hundreds), to be fascinating.
These discussions often became a forum for debating the idea of patriotism
following 9/11, with some audience members expressing the view that it was
unpatriotic to present work such as Wallace’s at that moment (this even
occurred at Trestle on Pope Lick Creek), and others, many of whom felt
they had no other public voice, arguing that criticism of U.S. problems and
mistakes is an essentially patriotic act in a democracy.
Of the full productions, One Flea Spare was clearly
the box office winner, selling out its entire run and being extended for a week,
closing only because the venue was needed for another booking.[xxi]
May and Wattis both feel some of the play’s success was due to its
“accessibility:” One Flea Spare is much closer to the “well-made”
model than most of Wallace’s other plays, in which theme and poetry often fill
the foreground of the plays’ canvases.[xxii]
One Flea Spare’s metaphoric strength, which accounted for the strong
effect it had on the Synchronicity company, may also have given the play’s
politics and paranoiac mood an aesthetic distance which the Gulf War plays
lacked, especially in placing the issues within a perspective three hundred
years in the past. Several audience members expressed the feeling that the
historical setting provided a safety feature for them. For a younger, more
literal-minded, generation, the setting sometimes distanced the viewer too far.
Although his social and political horizons were broadened through acting in Heart
of America, Joshua Waterstone saw One Flea Spare as a play “about
some other time,” with no relationship to The Retreating World
or the play he had acted in.
In
contrast, In the Heart of America and The Retreating World offered
the audience no sense of being in “some other time.” Although the production
showed a theatricality and wit which is easy to miss on the page, it was strong
medicine so close to the attacks. Kathleen Wattis identified a “common
challenge” the plays posed to the audience: ‘How can you ask me to feel
sympathy for them when I’m so angry about being attacked?’ I think that was
a common challenge: how do you manage to see the other side through the emotions
of the moment?” [xxiii]
Nine
months after the bombings, a range of residual impact was still felt by
participants. Some, such as Wier Harman, seem to have lost much of the fervor
expressed in September. Most, however, felt a stronger continuing
influence on their work.
While
American actors are limited in the degree to which their personal beliefs can
dictate their choice of work, both Kathleen Wattis and Joshua Waterstone find a
stronger sense of purpose in acting, and are interested in finding more work of
similar resonance. “I decided during rehearsals that you don’t work just to
work, because time is precious,” Wattis says. “What if this is the last show
I work on? I haven’t been able to limit myself only to meaningful work, but I
try harder to find something in all the work I do that will make it important
for someone.”
PushPush
Theatre has already continued its involvement with Naomi Wallace’s work. One
of the plays produced during the Festival, The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole
in Her Jumper (a children’s play written by Wallace and her partner, Bruce
MacLeod), was revived in February; the theatre also presented a small, dark
night production of Wallace and MacLeod’s In the Sweat, with a
cast drawn largely from students at Atlanta’s arts magnet high school, in the
spring of 2002. “We wanted to work on the piece because it had a great sense
of language regarding racism and other ‘isms,’” said Artistic Director
Haberger. “We didn't expect it to be much more than an exercise for our
artists,” but “because the festival made Naomi's voice more understandable
to a larger audience, we had a tremendous audience response.”
At
the Georgia Shakespeare Festival, Richard Garner feels that participation in the
Wallace Festival, and the reading of The Inland Sea, has encouraged his
Board of Directors to take additional chances, perhaps leading to the premiere
of a new play. Garner feels that some influence of the Wallace Festival was felt
at his theatre’s 2002 summer season in Vincent Murphy’s production of Arthur
Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which was praised by critics and audience
for offering new insight on the play.[xxiv]
An
important impact on Atlanta’s theatre ecology provoked by the Festival is
greatly increased interest and willingness for collaboration between theatres,
along with a stronger sense of community and willingness to take risks among the
theatrical leadership. Atlanta theatre is “suddenly
in a place where there is much less fear of politics among theatre people, and
an evident willingness to seek involvement,” says Murphy. Weir Harman claims
he “can’t pick up the phone or check email without being induced into some
sort of collaboration” May sees this growing interest as part of a an
evolutionary process well underway before 9/11, but most others believe the
terrorist attacks gave the collaboration a sense of context and urgency.
While
Vincent Murphy has “always believed that theatre is a social and political
meeting place,” the Wallace Festival had an major impact on him as a rare
occasion in theatre where everything seems to happen together at the same time,
on all sorts of levels. . . Naomi’s writing emphasizes the need for context in
understanding anything, whether it’s the Middle East or a play, and the
Festival, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, concretely fixed the importance
of that need. It changed the ecology of theatre in Atlanta.” He feels unable
to “ direct right now . . . without Naomi’s gift of context,”[xxv] and credits his success
with Death of a Salesman to his experiences in the Festival. [xxvi]
For
Murphy, a positive example of the Festival’s lasting impact is The Political
Party 2002, a live theatre “talk show” co-sponsored by the Atlanta free
weekly Creative Loafing, Hands On Atlanta (an organization which
coordinates community volunteerism) and Dad’s Garage Theatre, which produced a
staged reading of Naomi Wallace’s The War Boys, the first public
performance of the Festival.
Dad’s
Garage is a young theatre (Artistic Director Sean Daniels recently turned 30)
that has built a reputation for broad, sometimes sophomoric,
farces, some of which have achieved some national attention.[xxvii]
Their presence in the Wallace Festival was considered a major surprise by many
in the Atlanta theatre community. Dad’s Garage in return seemed surprise at
the enthusiastic response The War Boys received.
To
explain the creation of the Political Party 2002 (described in a press release
as “a series of spirited, live talk shows [extending to the November
elections] featuring prominent Atlantans, from entertainers to business leaders
to politicians,” aimed at “new audiences interested and involved in
politics, civics and social change”), Sean Daniels points to a 2002 poll
showing that more than two-thirds of Atlantans were unable to identify either of
Georgia’s two U. S. Senators, and his growing awareness of the ways in which
politics interrelates with even a “fun” theatre’s survival and success.
The
publisher of Creative Loafing, Ken Edelstein, cites the “presence” of
Dad’s Garage within its local neighborhood and among younger people. Dad’s
is definitely an “audience-friendly” venue with a “safer” and definitely
hipper climate for the target audience than any of the larger theatres. Even in
taking this step toward activism, Daniels
shrewdly manages to maintain his hipster
doofus street cred in the only
quote directly attributed to him in
the press release: the faux-militant proclamation that "We're tired of The
Man holdin' us down." The Political Party may be only a baby step toward
greater political awareness, but it is a very hopeful sign that Naomi
Wallace’s “gift of context” for 9/11 may have a continuing positive effect
on the future on the ecology of Atlanta’s theatre.
[i] “Theatre ecology” is a phrase used by the theatre management expert George Thorne; Thorne sees successful theatrical communities as existing in a symbiotic relationship, rather than in cut-throat competition with each other.
[ii] In the case of Broadway productions, theatre attendance was even seen as an act of resistance to terrorism, somewhat akin to President George W. Bush’s call for Americans to shop in the weeks following 9/11.
[iii] New York Times, September 28, 2001. The extent to which some media went in the interest in avoiding “uncomfortable feelings” during this time can be seen in the list Harry Youtt provides of songs taken off the playlist of a major radio network.
[iv] Even a coalition of playwrights planning an evening of theatre in protest of the US embargo of Iraq felt it necessary to postpone the event more than a month and lost one playwright who felt the cause “unpatriotic” in the current climate.
[v] One theatre may have chosen the slightly more ambiguous “This Land Is Your Land.” (personal interview with Debra L. Wicks, artistic director of Meadow Brook Theatre, Michigan.
[vi] In addition to Actors’ Theatre, Wallace’s work has also been produced Off-Broadway and at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is also a MacArthur Fellow
[vii] Walter Bilderback, “Atlanta Embraces Naomi Wallace,” American Theatre, January 2002, where some material in the present article first appeared.
[viii] Interview with Jennifer Deer, “ArtVoice,” WABE-FM, Atlanta, GA
[ix] Over Labor Day weekend, I found myself seated next to a non-Muslim Iranian émigré who insisted that “99 per cent of all Muslims hate Christians and Jews” and were intent on their eradication.
[x] Jennifer Deer interview.
[xi] Interview with the author, July 3, 2002. Unless noted otherwise, all subsequent quotes come from live or phone interviews with the author between July 3 and July 18, 2002.
[xii] Email message to author, July 16, 2002.
[xiii] Where the two United Airlines flights that were flown into the WTC towers had taken off.
[xiv] When asked by the sailor (Bunce), why the guards didn’t stop them when they were seen, the guard Kabe responds “Not our job. . . . We make sure no one gets out. If they get in, well, that’s just luck.” (Heart of America, p. 12)
[xv] interview with author, September 20, 2001.
[xvi] Jennifer Deer interview
[xvii] For which the author was also interviewed.
[xviii] Interview with the author, October 2001.
[xix] Like Kathleen Wattis, she reports a feeling of every human connection being intensified because of an awareness of the uncertainty of life.
[xx] Reportedly, Samir’s father was very impressed by Waterstone and disappointed that, as a non-Muslim, he was not a “suitable” candidate for his daughter’s hand.
[xxi] Kathleen Wattis confessed that she and other members of the cast were happy to close the show, due to the emotional toll it took on them.
[xxiv] the author served as dramaturg for the production.
[xxv] Richard Garner also commented, in an email immediately following the Festival and a more recent conversation, on how much it has affected his responses to the world and to plays. Was very strongly affected by the perspective it brought me for looking at the world, then and now. Hearing of the US bombing on a wedding in Afghanistan brought The Retreating World right back to me.
[xxvi] One very important result was an increased consideration of the social context of the play for an Atlanta community. As a result, Willy Loman’s car remained visible at the back of the stage throughout the performance. Willy was first seen behind the wheel, then stepping out to enter the house. The last image of Willy was behind the wheel of the car, illuminated only by the car’s ceiling light, with a gleeful Ben riding “shotgun” beside him. “If I had been doing the play in Boston [or another town with mass transit/pedestrian environment], it would not necessarily have even made sense to me. But I found it essential to physicalize it because in Atlanta, we’re in the midst of a car culture. We’ve seen those headlights in our eyes. We know the driving experience. We have some awareness of the isolation and alienation from the rest of the world that results from being in cars all the time.”
[xxvii] For instance, the world premieres of Cannibal: The Musical, by South Park creator Trey Parker, and a play by the late Graham Chapman of Monty Python. Their most recent production is Carrie White: The Musical, which they created when they could not secure the rights to the notorious Broadway flop based upon the Brian DePalma film.