To start with, theater is all about politics. How could a live communal art be otherwise? Groups of people performing before other groups of people, depicting real-life situations, are inevitably political in that they have to do with power relationships. In this sense, even a play about love or family (the favorite American dramatic subjects) has political implications.

Arts & Politics Part Five

Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette Click illustration to view larger version. This is the last of a series of articles on the convergence of art and politics in the 2004 presidential campaign. Previous coverage Sunday: Stars of every stripe stump for their candidate Monday: TV, radio reflect left, right, 'West' wings Tuesday: Election-year influence nothing new for Hollywood Wednesday: Visual artists mix paints and prints with politics

But it is the more specific politics of peoples' relationships with their government that is our subject here, especially electoral politics and the partisanship it arouses. And in these areas, Greenberg is doubtless right that the majority of plays that seem to take an active stand are on the liberal side.

There are two important caveats, however. As Greenberg says, much theater is conservative by default, a market-driven entertainment (think Disney musicals) that promotes consumerism and never challenges the ruling government or business elite. The second is that with political passions inflamed by war and a contested election, even seemingly neutral subject matter like class, death or money comes to seem partisan.

That's what artistic director Tracy Brigden found last year at City Theatre when she staged Leslie Avayzian's "Lovely Day." Brigden says she believed the country was "more divided than at any time in my life, [so] I purposefully chose a play that affords an opportunity for a conversation between two sides."

In "Lovely Day," a mother and father divide on whether their son should register for the draft -- both sides are aired. But Brigden discovered in post-show talk-backs that people didn't want to listen to the "other" side. She believes the "profound effect of politics on the arts" today is "a pervasive, conservative and judgmental over-morality," a resistance to debate, that starts with the Bush administration. "Does this mean I should only do stories of redemption? I still think telling the bald, honest truth is beneficial."

Ted Pappas, head of the Pittsburgh Public Theater, has a similar take on the current influence of politics on theater. "I'm feeling a trickle-down effect from the anxiety we're all feeling -- politically, economically and in terms of safety." In such times, he says, two things happen: "Audiences become more conservative with spending and leaving home, and artists become braver about tackling issues. I think that happens consistently in our history -- we shouldn't be surprised. Audiences become more cautious and artists braver."

Have playwrights really become braver?

Depends whom you talk to. Theater people, who generally tend to be liberal, believe curtailed public funding and audience squeamishness have made theaters more cautious. But those to the right of center counter that, within the theater, conservative politics are so unpopular that they have to hide their true thoughts.

It's hard to see the truth through all the political activism, controversy and journalistic attention. Locally, there hasn't been any upsurge in "political" plays, but perhaps the prism of our electoral passions makes us expect it.

For example, the largest new subject for theater is the complex of issues related to 9/11 and homeland security, in plays that have percolated through the development pipeline for three years. Arriving now, they inevitably impinge on electoral politics. But theater always does this: No matter how much it aspires to the "universal," it is grounded in real life, which pushes it toward politics.

That pressure also comes from the other side. Even if playwrights and actors had no interest in the forces that affect them, which is absurd, the powers that be have usually taken an anxious interest in the behavior and sentiments of people gathered to witness possibly subversive ideas.

Consider the animosity to the arts coming out of Washington in recent years. The plastic arts have a long tradition of providing a ruling class with objects of beauty, but the lively arts that deal with ideas are also likely to offend the rulers' obsession with civic order (i.e., control).

Not in the beginning, which is to say ancient Greece. There, theater was sponsored directly by the state as part of the great civic/religious festivals, and politicians participated in dramatic festivals as a way to gain popular favor. Although tragedies could question religious and political orthodoxy (think "Antigone"), they gave artistic dignity to civic institutions. Comedy, however, had a license to mock the powerful; subversive ideas were thereby aired.

In Shakespeare's day, the Elizabethan state had a rage for order. Spies were everywhere. So Shakespeare and his contemporaries hid their discourse on politics in tales from far away or the English past. All those history plays are really about the policies of Elizabeth I and her ministers, and much is by implication critical.

Thus the conservative Elizabethan state was as wary of theater's subversive tendencies as the state's enemies, the radical Puritans, were wary of its luxuriant imagination. That ideological heritage continues in America, where conservative (defense of property, social control) and puritan (inhibition of sexuality, distrust of imagination) long ago merged. Criticism of this national conservative status quo is of course most likely to come from the left, for plenty of reasons, including the liberal values (diversity, moral relativity, artistic freedom, distrust of commerce) that attract people into artistic work to start with.

Political commitment needs only such passions as those of the current year to stir it to life. Those passions see electoral politics everywhere. Take the Republican convention: Its organizers decided that even the mass market attractions of Broadway were too risky for those troops -- the open sexual politics of "Avenue Q," the ribaldry of "The Producers," even the 1950s integrationist politics of "Hairspray." After all, in this politically charged atmosphere, actor Gary Sinise is considered a conservative for gathering school supplies for our military to distribute to Iraqi children.

There has been enough specific theatrical response to President Bush and his administration to justify a cover story in the September issue of American Theatre. "American theater is joining the [electoral] debate," it says, "occasionally taking sides, more often urging audiences to come to grips with the questions" -- hardly very partisan. Overtly political plays are often just dull propaganda or calisthenics for the converted, except in the hands of a genius like Tony Kushner, whose "Angels in America" (very anti-Reagan) melds political with intellectual passion.

In its brisk survey, American Theatre sampled 20 "politically resonant productions." Most of them talk about politics the way Shakespeare did, using the past to interrogate the present. At a big regional theater like San Jose Rep, that means doing Shaw's "Major Barbara" -- full of thorny issues of capitalism and war, sure, but safely a classic. At Portland's Second Stage, Chris Coleman (a CMU grad who has directed at the Pittsburgh Public) goes farther, doing "King Lear" as a play about "ego and the illusion of power" -- presumably a reflection on what he perceives as the arrogance of the Bush administration.

New York's Women's Project is staging "The Antigone Project," five short plays that re-examine that political rebel in terms of the Patriot Act and homeland security, claiming that "compassionate conservatism manifests itself in an authoritarian administration." There are a number of geopolitical farces, too. More personal attacks are Jane Martin's "Laura's Bush" (staged in liberal Seattle, San Francisco and Ann Arbor), in which the first lady reveals that "her husband has been replaced by a captured body-double of Saddam's," on the presumed theory that Bush is really doing terrorist work by inspiring hatred of America.

Another Jane Martin play, "Flags," in Minneapolis, is about a conservative Vietnam vet whose son is killed in Baghdad and who flies the son's flag upside down, prompting angry reactions from the neighbors, news media and government. And Kushner has a play in which Laura Bush is seen reading stories to dead Iraqi children.

But what's happening in Pittsburgh? A search of the Post-Gazette's Sept. 10 fall theater preview turns up nothing with overt electoral politics, although smaller, more irreverent companies are still to be heard from.

There's certainly nothing here like David Hare's "Stuff Happens," a caustic view of the invasion of Iraq, its title taken from Donald Rumsfeld's reaction to the initial looting. That's playing on the most visible stage in London, the National Theatre, but it is said that the political leftist Hare balances his indictment by giving voice to the humanitarian case for the war.

Another apparently powerful critique of American politics is Englishman David Edgar's "Continental Divide," two plays which dramatize internal Republican and Democratic campaigns with critical zest. Surprisingly, the liberal Edgar is said to admire the fictional Republican leader more than the Democratic.

Such balance is more difficult to maintain among American playwrights. But A.R. Gurney, once an Eastern establishment Republican, took comic aim at both Bush Republicans and self-satisfied Democrats in "The Fourth Wall" before writing "O Jerusalem," which he describes as "about American imperialism and the ... insensitivity of our foreign policy."

As Brigden puts it, American playwrights "tend to write about the living room, not about the world." They have left that to the British. But, reading hundreds of new plays as Brigden does, she says she now sees American plays "touching more on political issues than they ever have." Gurney is one example. So is John Patrick Shanley, whose "Dirty Story" is another attack on American arrogance abroad.

"The streets have become politicized," Shanley told the Times. "Everything has political overtones, whether you like it or not."