Apologies, kind reader, for the hiatus in my posts here on Digital Runes. On Monday I completed a brief, ACTF-sponsored tour that invited me to drive more than 1500 miles to five different colleges over the course of ten days.
As I see it, one of the most important services provided by KC/ACTF (a national organization for the advancement of college-level theatre) is that of the “response session,” in which a colleague well-versed in academic theatre is invited to respond to a college production. While I volunteered to respond to these shows, I feel honored by each of my hosts to have been invited to share my comments. I’d like to thank them for giving me an opportunity to see their engaging, challenging, and excellently entertaining work:
Thanks to Colby College for their beautiful, surprising, and reflective production of The Tempest. Those spirits (and their plays within plays) still haunt me.
Thanks to the University of Maine at Machias for provocative social engagement and bold silence speaking volumes in their production of The Moonlight Room.
Thanks to Franklin Pierce College (and particularly to Bob Lawson, for his hospitality), where I found myself transported and challenged by an intellectual, emotional fantasia on Edgar Allen Poe in Dark Cathedrals of the Heart.
Thanks to Eastern Connecticut State University (and guest artist Larry Hunt) for fascinating me with poignant and compelling masks and faces in their utterly engaging rendition of Plautus’ Roman comedy in The Brothers M.
Thanks to Dean College for bringing me Plautus, too, (his play, of course, not the man himself), in a Menaechmi both bold and blatant. This Saturday evening was sexy without being cheap, brave without being rash, and kept me laughing all the way home.
Many thanks to Jim Beauregard for making the whole trip possible.
And an additional thank-you to Ashleigh Ward (Saint Michael’s College ’04) for inviting me to Newburyport, Massachusetts, for an excellent cap to the entire “tour” via a fully professional production of a new play, Cannibals, whose irony-soaked investigation of the lives of frustrated actresses gave me cause to reflect on why I chose a profession in academic theatre over the performance industry.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Monday, November 22, 2004
Spinning Coins and Shifting Winds
Imagine two minor characters, rendered famous by Tom Stoppard, standing in a deceptive void. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern await their entrance on Denmark's stage - or Denmark's entrance on their stage (it all depends on your point of view). They pass the time by spinning coins: a simple game of chance, in which one player flips a coin and the other calls it (heads or tails), winner take all.
Upon them creeps the dawning realization that their coins have spun "heads" more than sixty times in a row. "Enough to make one doubt the laws of probability," one ventures. At any rate, sufficient to impart the dawning notion that something is happening, even though the action appears invisible or absent. Something is happening, the winds are changing direction, and our two unheroic heroes cannot tell which way those winds are blowing.
Imagine ourselves, unfamous, infamous, or otherwise, standing in a deceptive void, assured in the knowledge (if you can call it that) that change is upon us, but unable to discern direction or source - like those two expendable courtiers, unable to tell a hawk from a handsaw or even if the wind is southerly. We need weathervanes.
Upon them creeps the dawning realization that their coins have spun "heads" more than sixty times in a row. "Enough to make one doubt the laws of probability," one ventures. At any rate, sufficient to impart the dawning notion that something is happening, even though the action appears invisible or absent. Something is happening, the winds are changing direction, and our two unheroic heroes cannot tell which way those winds are blowing.
Imagine ourselves, unfamous, infamous, or otherwise, standing in a deceptive void, assured in the knowledge (if you can call it that) that change is upon us, but unable to discern direction or source - like those two expendable courtiers, unable to tell a hawk from a handsaw or even if the wind is southerly. We need weathervanes.
Friday, November 05, 2004
Simple News for a Complex Reality
The need for an authoritative narrative voice will compel most elements of the news media to quickly re-instate the status quo, and move as quickly as possible to a consensus on the outcome of the presidential election. Setting aside for the moment the possibility that differences between exit polls and election results might indicate the presence of fraud, technical failures, or both, and assuming that the vote accurately reflects the choice of the American electorate, it is neither accurate nor ethical to describe a 51% - 49% majority as some kind of mandate. Nevertheless, it is in news networks' and wire services’ best interest to simplify the results as quickly as possible, in order to “heal the nation” and “move on” (i.e. find a new story before the audience turns the channel). It is true that democracy is built on the principle of majority rule, and in 2004, it appears that Bush the Younger was the choice of slightly (2%) more voters than John Kerry. But it seems both naïve and negligent to presume without question that democratic contests should be “winner take all,” and in stepping to the next chapter of the Election Saga, newspeople in all media – by taking up the question of why the Democrats failed (losing the vote) rather than evidence of how they succeeded (marshalling the largest numbers of votes against a sitting President in history) – tell a story that betrays rather than reflects the democratic process.
Democracy in practice functions most effectively through compromise and coalition. One defender of the Electoral College indicated that this was a Constitutional mechanism for ensuring that regional coalitions – the states – would be guaranteed power and influence in a federal (i.e. nationally centralized) system. Multiple-party systems ensure that politicians must compromise in order to be effective (whereas two-party systems tend to encourage politicians to stonewall whenever they can claim a majority), which in turn ensures that a legitimate debate and discussion must take place in the operation of government. Most important, however, is the notion that representative government can lead to the construction of a collective consensus that legitimately reflects the dividing, converging, and overlapping opinions of the people. When genuine negotiation takes place among opposing viewpoints, each side must listen to and understand the grievances and desires of the other. Such a mechanism – upon which democracy is fundamentally based – can lead to the active construction of agreement based on understanding and dialogue.
What we have now, however, is an understanding of our own system that leads to the imposition or fabrication of consensus, not the building of it. No matter who won, media and political operatives alike (and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart) would prefer to simplify the story, because winners and losers are much easier to describe – in nice, clear, typically black-and-white terms – than shifting alliances and demographic variances. Take the red-state vs. blue-state dichotomy that the press now accepts as Gospel: the map invariably used to demonstrate what entire regions monolithically believe only shows who won, not the margin of victory. All of Ohio appears red (even on the county maps); but what if the map were weighted by population, and not by geography? An entirely different story would appear. But this level of complexity is hard to research, harder to explain, and probably (as a result) very hard to sell, at least for an industry that prefers tried methods over experimentation.
Just as exit pollsters simplified the entire landscape of ethics to an empty set (“moral values” – either a meaninglessly broad descriptor, or a code word for conservative Christian ethics), the story our press sells us is simplified by design from complex reality to clarified melodrama. In fact, reporting in the news industry tends to follow a basic commercial principle – keep the audience coming back for more. One of the simplest ways to do that is to promise more conflict. Unless you’re selling comedy, nuance is hard to market. But the actual goal of the democratic process is to resolve conflict by building mutual agreement. If you love democracy – a system that depends on active and informed discussion and debate – which is more important: the winner, or how the discussion led us (or can lead us) to future agreement rather than greater conflict?
Our narratives are very powerful; our stories sometimes seem to be telling us. Given the extent to which the very means of telling stories – our media – are being seized from the public domain by private companies, perhaps this is the reason that I feel more and more as if American public discourse is becoming a dream, further and further detached from experience. Or perhaps I feel this way because – as a dreamer often feels carried by a dream, and unable to steer it – the story America seems to be telling itself is increasingly told with instruments beyond my control, and by storytellers it seems impossible to hold accountable.
Democracy in practice functions most effectively through compromise and coalition. One defender of the Electoral College indicated that this was a Constitutional mechanism for ensuring that regional coalitions – the states – would be guaranteed power and influence in a federal (i.e. nationally centralized) system. Multiple-party systems ensure that politicians must compromise in order to be effective (whereas two-party systems tend to encourage politicians to stonewall whenever they can claim a majority), which in turn ensures that a legitimate debate and discussion must take place in the operation of government. Most important, however, is the notion that representative government can lead to the construction of a collective consensus that legitimately reflects the dividing, converging, and overlapping opinions of the people. When genuine negotiation takes place among opposing viewpoints, each side must listen to and understand the grievances and desires of the other. Such a mechanism – upon which democracy is fundamentally based – can lead to the active construction of agreement based on understanding and dialogue.
What we have now, however, is an understanding of our own system that leads to the imposition or fabrication of consensus, not the building of it. No matter who won, media and political operatives alike (and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart) would prefer to simplify the story, because winners and losers are much easier to describe – in nice, clear, typically black-and-white terms – than shifting alliances and demographic variances. Take the red-state vs. blue-state dichotomy that the press now accepts as Gospel: the map invariably used to demonstrate what entire regions monolithically believe only shows who won, not the margin of victory. All of Ohio appears red (even on the county maps); but what if the map were weighted by population, and not by geography? An entirely different story would appear. But this level of complexity is hard to research, harder to explain, and probably (as a result) very hard to sell, at least for an industry that prefers tried methods over experimentation.
Just as exit pollsters simplified the entire landscape of ethics to an empty set (“moral values” – either a meaninglessly broad descriptor, or a code word for conservative Christian ethics), the story our press sells us is simplified by design from complex reality to clarified melodrama. In fact, reporting in the news industry tends to follow a basic commercial principle – keep the audience coming back for more. One of the simplest ways to do that is to promise more conflict. Unless you’re selling comedy, nuance is hard to market. But the actual goal of the democratic process is to resolve conflict by building mutual agreement. If you love democracy – a system that depends on active and informed discussion and debate – which is more important: the winner, or how the discussion led us (or can lead us) to future agreement rather than greater conflict?
Our narratives are very powerful; our stories sometimes seem to be telling us. Given the extent to which the very means of telling stories – our media – are being seized from the public domain by private companies, perhaps this is the reason that I feel more and more as if American public discourse is becoming a dream, further and further detached from experience. Or perhaps I feel this way because – as a dreamer often feels carried by a dream, and unable to steer it – the story America seems to be telling itself is increasingly told with instruments beyond my control, and by storytellers it seems impossible to hold accountable.
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