Thinking Out Loud in Public

I read Carl Hendrick’s “Ultra-Processed Minds” and I find myself wishing I could start my teaching career over again, and refuse to give so much away to “coverage.” Eventually, I was speeding through 2500 years of theater history and literature in a single semester, an impossible task, and doubtlessly a blur to students. Even when I was fortunate enough to spend an entire semester exploring a single playwright, I would cover a new play every two days. Instead, I would like to teach what Maryanne Wolf calls “cognitive patience” and what Keats called “negative capability” and the value of contemplation. Even then, that would have been a resistance to our culture of speed and superficiality instead of an adaptation to it.

I had a dream last night that my wife has insisted I share because it is so complete and plotted. I must say, it is unusual for me – I don’t usually have dreams with stories. Anyway, here it is:

I dreamed that my wife's aunt owned an island estate, and she asked me to help her because she wanted to sell it and she was having a meeting with a bunch of high-powered lawyers and realtors. When I arrived, the house was filled with said lawyers and realtors, but as I wandered the house and grounds I also found that the house was being used by a Very Famous musical playwright as a rehearsal space for his next major musical. One room was filled with costumers sewing elaborate period costumes, in another the choreographer was rehearsing a dance number, in another the orchestra was rehearsing with the singers, and in another scenery was being built. None of the people were talking to each other, and as I wandered through the rooms and hallways it was clear that nobody seemed to be working on the same play, but instead every artist was following their own inclinations and paying no attention to creating a cohesive production. I became increasingly angry and frustrated at the waste of time and money, and the lack of actual artistic thought.

Suddenly, there was one of those shift in scenes that sometimes occur in my dreams. The cacophony of the production continued, but the scene was now in a Broadway theater. Different groups were scattered across the multi-leveled set, talking and singing and dancing and laughing and creating a scene of total chaos. Suddenly, in stomped a character who stomped to center stage and shouted "Shut up!" Nothing -- the chaos continued. "SHUT UP!" Again, no change. At the top of his lungs: "SHHUUUUUUUTTTTT UPPPPPPPPP!!!" Suddenly silence fell. Somebody shouted, "What?"

The character said: "Thank you for your attention. I have been hanging around this production process for a while, and it is clear to me that this is going to be a disaster." General hub bub. Quiets down. "People come to the theater to hear a story. I have read the script, and there IS a story in there, but it is being buried inside of all kinds of fat and gilt and spectacle to the point where the story is being completely lost. That's why I've been sent to take over."

"You? Who are you?," someone demanded to know. The central character turned, steely-eyed: "I'll tell you who I am after you tell me who you are." "The director," he said. "Former director," the central character said. Commotion. Then: "So who are you?" "Me? I. Am. The Dramaturg."

Silence. Another voice: "The Dramaturg? What the hell does a dramaturg do?"

"What does a dramaturg do," the Dramaturg repeated calmly. "What do you _think _ I'm going to do?..."I'm gonna save the fucking day."

Suddenly, the voice of a TV announcer says "Get your tickets to the smash Broadway hit, _The Dramaturg_ by going online at DramaturgonBroadway.com..." The orchestra swings into a song.

And....dream.

Michael Rushton informs us that “Freakonomics Radio has a new three part series on the economic landscape facing live theatre. Part One is here, and Part Two is here, which, as a supporting act in an episode with Lin-Manuel Miranda, has me trying to coherently explain cost disease in the theatre, where it comes from and its implications. Part three will come next week, but if I say so myself it is a really informative series so far.”

I haven’t listened, and am not certain that I can stomach it (the presence of Lin-Manuel Miranda as a spokesman for theater, which he hasn’t done for years, kind of sours it for me). Still, might be worth a listen.

I’ve been reading Ma’Ikwe Ludwig’s book Together Resilient: Building Community in the Age of Climate Disruption, an interesting discussion of the best practices of successful intentional communities. In it, Ludwig references Joanna Macy’s work on social movements, especially World as lover, world as self : courage for global justice and planetary awakening, in which Macy describes the three types of activism in every social movement:

1. Holding actions: basically, stopping more bad things from happening. This includes protests, civil disobedience, petitions, boycotts, and legal actions. If you have political power, it might include things like President Obama’s halting of new leases on public lands for fossil fuel exploitation. None of these alone solve the problem, and most of them are temporary, but they do two things: they buy time, and they draw attention to the issue because holding actions are almost always acts that are outside of the norms of polite behavior or business as usual, and therefore draw attention.

2. Systems change: changing how we act within the current system, changing how the system is fundamentally set up, and/or embodying an entirely new system.

3. Worldview changes: reinventing our values and fundamental relationship to ourselves and others, including consciousness work. This is foundational for even getting started on real social change: we have to revision where we are headed and what we want. We simply can’t embody a new system when we are operating out of old consciousness.

Ludwig explains that “not every person is going to participate in all three of these approaches” but an overall movement “can’t prosper and really progress without all three of these happening: we need to change our consciousness, and buy time, and use that time to create news systems embodying fundamentally different values, techniques, and technologies.”

In regards to our current political situation, it seems to me that we have focused our attention almost entirely on holding actions: protests, civil disobedience, petitions, boycotts, and legal actions. All of which are undeniably important. But I see very little evidence of ideas concerning systems change and worldview changes. Most pundits operate on the belief that everything's all right if we could only get the criminals out of power, so resist and look forward to the 2026 midterms. But there are some, and I include myself in this group, who want more than simply a return to the way things were pre-Trump. We need both a systems change and a worldview change if we hope to survive, and this, it seems to me, is where artists are crucially important.

When I wrote [_Building a Sustainable Theater_](https://theaterskunkworks.com/books/building-a-sustainable-theater/index), I was addressing the need for a systems change in the way theater is made, and proposing the embodiment of a new system. But when I finished the book, it became clear that without "reinventing our values and fundamental relationships to ourselves and others," i.e., without a worldview change, the new system would forever be undermined by inherited values of the old way of doing things, by which I mean the competitive, individualistic, capitalist ideas that define our beliefs about success, career, and our role as artists.

And yet, it is within the category of worldview changes that artists find their greatest purpose and power. Trump knows this, which is why he took over the Kennedy Center and, to the surprise of many, did not dissolve the NEA but instead imposed upon it ideological requirements for grant recipients. He's trying to change worldviews through propaganda. The problem is that, if an artist accepts those strictures, they almost by definition give up their role as artists and become politicians. It isn't that artists can't create "patriotic" art in the sense of art that celebrates traditional values and events (see Aeschylus's _Oresteia_, which celebrates the establishment of a Greek justice system), or even art that mourns past tragedies (e.g., Aeschylus's _The Persians_), but doing so must be an individual _choice_ made by the artist and not one imposed by a political party or leader. The value of an artist lies in their unique way of seeing the world, and the way that they reflect our time through the prism of their soul. Even artists with a strong desire to support a particular ideology -- Bertolt Brecht in Germany, Vsevelod Meyerhold in the USSR -- very quickly find that their creative vision falls afoul of those who wish them to submit to the party line. They can't do so and remain an artist.

But I see very few artists, especially in theater and film, who are engaged in imagining and dramatizing a new way of being in the world. I'm not talking about those artists who use their work didactically to preach and teach -- that kind of work primarily falls within the realm of holding actions, necessary but insufficient. Ursula K. Le Guin did this kind of work in many of her novels, as more recently did Becky Chambers in [_Psalm for the Wild-Bilt_](https://search.worldcat.org/title/1240266570) and [_A Prayer for the Crown-Shy_](https://search.worldcat.org/title/1300756362). Perhaps it is easier to do in the science fiction and fantasy genre, but theater seems to be almost incapable of seeing beyond today's values. One sees possibilities, perhaps, in a musical like _Come from Away_ with its vision of how people might interact differently as a result of a tragedy (9/11, in this case). Rebecca Solnit's _Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities_ examines similar stories. Both Solnit's book and the musical were highly successful, suggesting a desire within the general public for a vision of another way to live life as part of a community.

Nevertheless, such stories provide one vision of the purpose of the arts in our society, and possibly a justification for support: the arts encourage us to imagine new ways of living in the world, and does so in a way that touches not only the mind but the emotions as well. Michael Rushton has pretty much [debunked the economic reasons](https://substack.com/home/post/p-161091067?source=queue) for support, and has similarly [destroyed the idea of an ideological purpose](https://michaelrushton.substack.com/p/what-to-do-with-the-national-endowment-dc4). And the idea that being exposed to the arts somehow make us "better people" has effectively been shown to be nonsense, no matter how much Lin-Manuel Miranda and Phylicia Rashad want to trot that old chestnut out. But the idea that the arts provide an opportunity for us to broaden our imaginations and visualize a different way of being seems to me to be undeniable. But is it valuable? Not to those who are comfortably embedded in the status quo, of course, but to those who suffer within a culture of greed, competition, misinformation, and meaninglessness, stories and beauty provide a lifeline, a reminder of David Greaber's hidden truth of the world, which is that the world "is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently."

But first we must imagine it.

When I went off to the CUNY Graduate Center to get my doctorate in theater history/criticism/literature, I wrote to Bonnie Marranca, the co-founder and editor of Performing Arts Journal offering to volunteer to help out in any way was needed. I had been reading back issues in the library at Illinois State University, where I was working on my masters degree, and I was inspired by the vision for the theater that Marranca and her husband, Gautam Dasgupta, put forward issue after issue. I was amazed when I received a letter back from Bonnie offering me a job as an Editorial Assistant. I arrived in the late summer of 1989, and I remember sitting in the office discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and event about which I was more skeptical than they were. As usual, they were right.

I worked there mornings for two years. My knowledge of the New York avant garde, much less the European version, was very much lacking, and I am afraid I appreciated only in retrospect the people who showed up at the PAJ office: Robert Foreman, Robert Wilson (whose office was just a few doors down the hall from PAJ), Maria Irene Fornes, and many other artists and intellectuals. Bonnie and Gautam were always discussing some new idea, and I tried to soak up what I was hearing. But I was also, at the time, interested in structuralism and Marxist theory, and not as tuned into the more literary tradition in which the worked. At the time, Bonnie was in a historical and pastoral phase in her writing, in which she published Hudson Valley Lives: Writings From the 17th Century to the Present and American Garden Writing, which were decidedly not theatrical.

After two years, I returned to Illinois State to begin my teaching and administrative career (while struggling to write a dissertation that I had to abandon and then start over entirely). But I have always looked back fondly on the time I spent in the Varick Street office.

So it is with some sadness that I happened up the announcement that the final issue of Performing Arts Journal had been printed, and Bonnie had retired as editor as of Fall 2024. I’m glad that she and MIT Press did not continue publication after her departure – there are some institutions that should not be passed on to the next generation because to do so would be to move in a different direction from the original impetus and end up being a contradiction.

Here is an interview with Bonnie Marranca, published by MIT in January of this year, in which Bonnie evaluates the impact of Performing Arts Journal. The interview is called “Saying farewell to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art with editor Bonnie Marranca," and it is worth a read. You can also watch the interview here. I was particularly taken with her description of PAJ’s main competitor at founding, The Drama Review (TDR), and how they differentiated themselves from that journal.

Well done, Bonnie – 48 years as editor is an amazing feat. I hope you can enjoy your Hudson Valley home.

“Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see. To do so he does not need to be aggressive or rebellious; he needs to have his eyes open, to be fully awake, and willing to take the responsibility to open the eyes of those who are in danger of perishing because they are half asleep.”

On Disobedience Erich Fromm

WTAF

Total market manipulation. I have put all of my retirement savings into cash and CDs. I will not support this dishonest use of the federal government. Disgusting.

Science tells us that nearly every cell in our body is replaced every 7 to 10 years. I have a former student who has been incarcerated for 41 years, since he was 17. So, for at least the past 31 years, we have been imprisoning someone who had nothing to do with the crime.

And if you find this argument specious, you should read some of the arguments for keeping him there by so-called criminologists and tell if they are any better. At least mine has proven science to back it up.

I find our “criminal justice system” an abomination, and little I saw during the 20 years I taught in them has changed my mind.

I just deactivated my Threads account as the first step to erasing the account completely. I had 99 followers, so not a major loss. It was OK as long as I stayed in the “Following” column, but the “For You” column made me feel like we are a nation of people who simply repeat variations on the uninspired talking point of the day.