Political theater is different this year, and not just because it’s on screens rather than stages. There is a palpable sense of urgency.
The weeks counting down to Election Day may have always seemed a good excuse for art and entertainment about campaigns and candidates, drawing from a long American theatrical tradition.
That tradition is on display in a new online exhibition, with the unfortunate title West Wing Ha!, presenting 25 of theater caricaturist Al Hirschfeld’s depictions of American presidents over the 80 years of his career (he died at age 99.) These include real presidents from Lincoln to Bush, but also characters from such Broadway shows as Mr. President, Irving Berlin’s last musical; The Gershwins’ Let Em Eat Cake; Leonard Bernstein’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; Sondheim’s Assassins; and Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, a play that remains a perennial favorite.
Indeed, The Best Man is being revived tonight at 8pm (virtual reading, available for 72 hours. Tickets: $5) In it, a Secretary of State and a U. S. Senator contend for the Presidential nomination and, most importantly, for the endorsement of a colorful and canny ex-President. The starry 19-member cast features Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Zachary Quinto, Vanessa Williams, and Stacy Keach,
More representative of this year’s election offerings are probably the several productions of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ 1936 play about a newly elected president who turns the United States into a violent dictatorship. Four years ago, the New York-based Peccadillo Theater Company staged a one-night only reading of the play, with the audience laughing at the line in which the candidate promises to “build a wall of steel.” This year, Berkeley Rep and more than 100 other theaters across the country (including Arena Stage and Howard University Department of Theatre Arts in DC) are presenting the play as a four-part audio drama from October 13 to November 8, and nine New York theater companies are streaming It Can’t Happen Here in English, Yiddish, Spanish, Turkish and Hebrew, from October 28 to November 1.
Every Wednesday in October, the National Black Theatre is presenting new “micro commissions,” grounded in the legacy of Shirley Chisholm, under the title of the phrase the 1970s political figure made popular: Unbought and Unbossed: Reclaiming Our Vote. The short original works are written by Ngozi Anyanwu, Hope Boykin, Mahogany L. Browne, Dane Figueroa Edidi, Candice Hoyes, Val Jeanty, and Dianne Smith.
Starting on October 15, Washington Ensemble Theatre of Seattle presents Vote Art Vote, a collection of newly conceived performances “urging audiences to remember the power a single voice (and vote) can hold.”
On October 16, Amazon Prime will start showing What The Constitution Means to Me, a film of the amusing, angry and pointed Broadway play by Heidi Schreck about her encounter with the U.S. Constitution, as a young student, and now. (My review when it was Off-Broadway.)
Starting October 19 (and available through November 1), the Mint Theater, a company whose mission is to bring back old neglected plays, will offer a recording of its previous production of Conflict, a 1925 political love story by Miles Malleson (1888-1969, largely known as a character actor.) In it, a woman is lovers with a Conservative candidate for Parliament, whose opponent believes passionately in social justice. She is caught in-between them. “Politics become personal, and mudslinging threatens to soil them all.”
On October 20, three theater companies – Theaterworks Hartford, Theatersquared in Arkansas and The Civilians in New York – are presenting Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy. The multimedia collaborative play by Sarah Gancher is inspired by the actual transcripts from the Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency in the run-up to the 2016 election. There will be five live performances through October 24, with encore viewing on demand through November 2 (the day before Election Day.)
On October 22 to 24, American Vicarious will present Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley, a restaging of the 1965 televised debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., on the topic: “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”
On October 24, International City Theatre presents Daisy, Sean Devine’s play about the 1964 “Daisy” campaign ad, aired in support of incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson and considered “the most devastating political ad ever conceived.” More than a lookback on political advertising, the play dwells on the impact that fear, as created through advertising, has on our democracy. The play streams through Nov 7.
Also on October 24, TheaterWorksUSA will debut We The People: America Rocks!, Joe Iconis’s Off-Broadway children’s musical on Stars in the House. In the show, which was filmed without an audience at Paper Mill Playhouse, America’s Founding Fathers help a teenager win her school election and teach her how to make a difference.
On October 27, Ars Nova will present The Other Other whose authors, queer interracial couple Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Kameron Neal, claim inspiration from Kamala Harris’ vice presidential nomination, and the count down to the 2020 Election, to attempt to situate their relationship in a larger constellation of Black and Desi encounters.
In his “exit interview” after 27 years as a theater critic at the New York Times, Ben Brantley made an observation yesterday about political theater: “I am thrilled when politics and art converge in a way that energizes and rearranges your thoughts, when the form and the message are inseparable.”
The work that most illustrated this for him was Belarus Free Theater’s Being Harold Pinter but also recent work by Black playwrights Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview), Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon) and Aleshea Harris (What to Send Up When It Goes Down). that, like Harold Pinter, embodied “urgent theater… as a tool of social reckoning.”
These plays encompass a definition of “political theater” that is more accurate because less narrow than stage plays and musicals that focus on politicians and electoral politics. But in the three weeks remaining of this most contentious, uncertain and anxiety-ridden electoral season, in the midst of the Senate battle over a sudden Supreme Court nominee, “political theater” takes on a specific set of meanings, much of which is beyond imagination.
This is a nice roundup but I have to disagree that the Hirschfeld exhibition’s title is “unfortunate.” For those who know Hirschfeld’s work, they get both the reference to the best selling book he illustrated for SJ Perleman, “Westward Ha! (Or Around The World in 80 Cliches), but also the subtle poke in the ribs about Presidents in general. I agree that there is an urgent air to these times, but let’s not forget to smile a bit as well.