Davis, Walter. �Theater, Ideology and the Censorship of �My Name is Rachel Corrie�: The Play�s the Thing.� Counterpunch. 6 March �06.
Yesterday, Walter Davis posted this article about the cancellation, he claims censoring, of a controversial play about a woman killed in Palestine by an Israeli bulldozer. The article is not about Israel/Palestine but about what he argues is the �purpose of serious theater� which apparently can be �stated simply�to challenge the audience to examine everything that they don�t want to face about themselves and their world� (Davis 1).
Theatre, in his argument, is the art of political subversion, of enacting change, �not in order to relieve or �cathart� our dilemmas� (1).
�Other public institutions, (Churches, Political forums, the Media) are dedicated primarily to something else: the celebration and perpetuation of ideology, the programming of a mass audience with the beliefs, ideas, and feelings they need to internalize so that ideology will secure its grand function� (1).
Davis argues polemically (sometimes incoherently) that good theatre can seek to challenge exactly those notions that its audiences deem to be sacred, specifically including religion, but also the political and social ideologies that dominate a great deal of our thinking. In this, I absolutely, whole-heartedly agree with him. I have no idea of the circumstances of the cancellation of this particular play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, so I won�t comment on that, but his explanation of what good theatre can do is quite convincing. Anything that inspires people to question their own beliefs such that they can decide if they ought to believe them, is great! The unexamined life, and all that. However, the implications of his definition are also criminally rigid and not-just-a-little insulting to potential audience members.
I�m honestly baffled by his assertion that theatre and �the Media� are somehow separate, by definition, or mutually exclusive. I can only assume that by �the Media� he means television and film, and perhaps journalism, but probably not the print kind. Here we find a very similar self-fulfilling definitional prophecy as we did with Howe�s paper, in which �mass culture� is simply that art that is bad. In Davis� construction, �the Media� is an extremely fuzzy word that connotes generic entertainment, aimed at the fabled �lowest common denominator� (a truly odd mathematical metaphor in the midst of discussions of art and culture). My point, put simply, is that �theatre� is a form of �media,� and Davis either misses that fact, or deliberately uses the word�s colloquial meaning to deflect away from it.
Also like Howe�s conception, Davis� model of good theatre is unidirectional. It talks of putting the audience �in the proper theatrical condition� in which �all of their ways of thinking and responding are turned back against them� (6). Again, I have to stress that I don�t disagree that good theatre can do this, nor do I claim that it�s inherently evil to do so, but I also cannot read that line without thinking that it�s incredibly manipulative, and relies on an assumption of a combative metaphor for art in which the art assaults viewers, lobs idea grenades at them, until they are defeated and have to admit that they�re pre-conceived notions are inappropriate. Which is to say that Davis� model assumes that the art knows better than the audience, in fact that its �purpose� (from his opening statement) is to know better than the audience. The corollary and unintended implication is that �the Media� (from his second sentence) must not know better, must be unsophisticated, must merely reflect the preconceived ideas of the audience. Again, I don�t think smart art is bad, and I am forced to agree that a lot of mainstream entertainment does merely preach to the choir, but Davis� categorical definition of the two, theatre and media, is logically nonsensical.
The central irony of this article, though, is that it starts with Davis� objection to the cancellation of a play, but ends with him offering the reader the outline for another play as if to counter-balance all the �bad� media. He builds a model of media, throughout the essay, and then trumps it using an example of theatre. There�s a word for that in logical philosophy. It�s called a strawman. His objection is not to the presence of bad art, which his proposed play might cure, but to the absence of the good kind. It would seem far more conceptually consistent, therefore, to give us a detailed description of the play that New Yorkers can now not see, the one that was cancelled, My Name is Rachel Corrie, which seems to have been lost in the shuffle.
Posted by orion at March 7, 2006 5:40 PM