What am I scared of?
Before we make theater, we sit in a room together.
I’m scared of the generation that is coming to the fore in the arts. There is a unique and unfamiliar current of cruelty running through the community. For the first time, people within our community are called out and/or canceled in the harshest, cruelest, and most public fashion. This mode of discourse can barely be called discourse at all. We can no longer “talk” to each other. There is no real conversation to move and change things. This methodology which has taken hold is pessimistic, it is destructive of art, and ultimately it is futile. Underneath it is a non-belief in individual growth and change, a blanket rejection of whole groups of people. The paradox is that in tandem with this nastiness, this generation claims to prioritize “care” and not doing “harm.”
This aggressive intolerance is an issue that precedes the question of art making. I am talking about an atmosphere in the theater community that is uniquely degenerative and in opposition to the art making process itself. All artists know that the inherent obstacles to successfully creating work are daunting and ever-present. In pitting ourselves against one another without the possibility of conversation, we burden the art making process to the point of near impossibility.
Individual artist’s moral, social, and political perspectives vary immensely, and the artist’s aesthetic is part of this individuality that we honor and protect. Although one may find another artist’s perspective to be wrong or even repugnant, I nonetheless contend that our fellow artists should NOT be an enemy to eradicate, but first a collaborator to have discourse with towards the direction of positive and necessary change. If the intent is to redress long standing ills and inequities in the community, then it is paramount that we focus our adversarial energies on the appropriate adversary. For example, large institutions that have maintained longstanding racial, ethnic, and gender biases ought to be powerfully called out until change occurs.
This is not to exempt smaller institutions or individuals from the essential need to examine their biases and presumptions in regards to race and gender. The spirit of reconsideration of “the givens” in these areas is essential and overdue. It is crucial though that the process be one of strengthening alliances rather than destroying them. In fact, the more blatant the injustice the more likely that a panoply of allies will be present in abundance and inclined toward action. Yet the current state of affairs — one of demonization and condemnation — is such that the larger the injustice, the more likely it will go unaddressed because people are inclined toward retreating into the safety of solitude and silence rather than risk being canceled. As a very skillful D.E.I. leader recently said, “We need to stop calling people OUT and start calling people IN.” Honest, difficult conversations are possible if based on the presumption that all participants are worthy of a common, fundamental level of shared respect and acceptance.
Inclusion is infusion. Nothing is more life giving than for the artistic community to widen its doors to artists whose voices have previously been ignored. My urgency to set aside this brutal infighting is increased exponentially by the fact we are facing a looming existential threat: the eradication of democracy. While we tweet ad hominem attacks on one another, the Republican party is undertaking an effort to achieve permanent one party rule at the Federal level. Yes, on the one hand a strong case can be made for there being a negligible difference between the two major political parties but consider the historical record regarding Authoritarian rule and repression of the arts. The Authoritarian apparatus considers art a special form of threat that requires a special form of annihilation. It would be tragic if one day we glance up from a Twitter feeding frenzy to discover that the limited, flawed, valuable freedoms we currently possess have been terminated. Our capacity to fight the inequities that plague our country would be placed permanently out of reach. Unfortunately, in our small but virulent way, we are helping to usher in this grim reality.
