nick manhattan I remembered reading once about how Brecht in the 40's had tried to articulate an aesthetic he dubbed the Theatre of Scandal. In preparing a question for you on DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS I tried to find a reference to this (what I remembered to be) expansion of the Epic theatre tradition that Brecht and Piscator had initiated in Germany in the 1920s. I never did find the Theatre of Scandal reference. But I did find material on an interesting form of documentary theatre known as the Living Newspaper. It was developed within the WPA Federal Theatre Project from 1935-1939.

In playwright's note attached to the script you instruct that "the play should be staged presentationally -- anti-illusionistically." This again brings to mind Brecht's Epic theatre and the Living Newspaper referenced here, as well as numerous other forms of agit-prop or guerilla theatre throughout the century. But DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS appears to be a different breed of documentary theatre than the others.

Normally theatrical productions in this form of theatre would consist of dramatizations of current events, social problems, and controversial issues, with appropriate suggestions for improvement or cure. But DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS gives the tabloid version of the same. Instead of controversial issues and social problems, there are only controversial celebrities with problems. And the Celebrity is the living breathing current event itself, awaiting capture by the paparazzo and his audience. In this piece of documentary theatre, this Living Tabloid, the Stars and their dearest Fans (lover, wives, and daughters) attempt to become "real."

How is the paparazzo and his audience akin or different from the audience in Annex theatre watching a production of DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS?

paul budraitis It's nice to see the Brechtian structure of the play being plumbed. It makes me wonder how Brecht would approach creating theatre today. In his mind, theatre was an effective form of mass communication and thereby a potential agent for social change. Of course, the current shape of theatre makes the idea of theatre as mass communication ridiculous. On top of which, cynicism is rampant (due in part, I believe, to the state of mass communication and its effect on how we eat, entertain and inform ourselves, vote (HA!), etc.), so the question then becomes: what is theatre's place now? What positive ends is it even capable of achieving, and how do you communicate to a cynical audience that likely will tune out the moment they think they're being prescribed a course of action?

I recently had a conversation with Chris J. about an epic idea he has for a cross country train play that picks people up and continues to evolve as it travels. The scope of the thing is magnificent and insane (a pleasing combination to be sure) but in today's world, WOULD IT MATTER? CNN maybe does a minute-long piece on it, and it fades, and then what? Of course, I realize one person reading this message performed a play in a teepee under a bridge, but I'm wrestling with these things right now, and it helps to sound it all out. What the hell are we doing? Does theatre as we know it matter anymore? I fully believe that on a small scale, it can have a profound impact. But what more? What about Brecht's vision for affecting social change? Is that possible today without access to a goddamn broadcast medium? Should theatre try to change to work within this new reality, or should it resist that temptation and just do what it knows it is capable of doing? The WTO protest happened in large part due to loose but highly effective organizing efforts over the internet. Very radical, very disparate, and very motivated groups got no less than the world's attention that day. Destruction was part of it, yes, and the effect of that is a separate debate, but the question remains: Is there something we should learn from this? What would Brecht have to say about N3099?

Jeez, who put a nickel in me?

My question:

Mythology has always been used as a means of cultural definition and training. Its stories (not unlike urban legend) tell us about who we are, what values we share, and what consequences exist when those values are violated. In DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS, it could be argued that the audience is being presented with a contemporary mythology, with our culture's celebrities playing the role that was reserved for gods and their ilk in times of antiquity. Do you agree with that assessment? If so, what are we to learn from these modern gods? What are the lessons we should take away from experiencing their stories?

jeffrey jones There are so many interesting ideas that I hardly know where to begin. So I'll try to stick a series of thoughts together and, in the process, address the questions per se, although the preambles and asides are equally rich and interesting.

What first caught my attention was the notion of social change: explicit in Paul's remarks, implicit certainly in Nick's. Of course, social change, like growth and death, goes on all the time. When we use the term, we are really speaking of directed or purposive social change, managed by us, toward ends we desire. This definition of change is so basic to our understanding of politics and our social lives in their broadest sense that we may forget how time-bound it is. In fact, it has very little meaning outside of the context of representative government (which is hardly the norm throughout human history) and in Western history, at any rate, is directly tied to the abolition of monarchy. Less obvious--except in its historic context--is its ties to Christian thought. In particular, to the notions of antagonism toward the state (which is really kind of paradoxical otherwise), and the need for a moral basis for action (as exemplified, say, by the worthy Mr. Ehn).

Now why should art of any kind be an agent of directed social change? There is precious little evidence of it: Music and Dance are out by virtue of their relative inability to express argument. In the annals of the novel, perhaps Uncle Tom's Cabin would count, but only if you believed that the novel actually fuelled the Abolitionist movement, instead of being used by that movement as fuel. Poetry? Painting? Some people thought that Blowin' In The Wind was a vector of change. But if you think about the arts as a whole, what they are really good at is celebrating the status quo. There are any number of examples in painting and verse of works that were created and accepted as expressions of shared identity (public or private). This extends, especially in drama, to expressions of willed or wished-for identity. One way of thinking about melioristic (agenda-driven, message oriented) drama is that it defines what the audience collectively wishes to be, or to become. As such, it is easy to assume that this art is in fact driving the audience toward achieving that goal. But again, I propose this is just a simple mistake. An audience which wishes itself to be more virtuous than it is (in whatever way virtue is to be defined) is really no closer to achieving that virtue than someone who commissions a portrait which makes them look more magisterial, noble, handsome or assured than they really are. In fact, if the purpose of a great deal of art is to express what we "are," it is almost by definition incapable of addressing how we need to change. Art strikes me as a lagging, not a leading indicator. Which is not a bad thing at all, unless your prime mission in life is to effect social change. If this is what you want to do, then there are really far more effective ways of going about it--as the conservative wing of the republican party, to name but one example, has shown over the last 40 years.

Now Brecht, while a great genius, was to my mind a rather malign genius, and it is this malignancy--manifest in the rather constant cruelty which lurks only slightly below the surface of almost all his plays--that makes his work interesting to me. As an avowed communist--and a German communist from the 1930's at that!--his definitions of "mass communication" and "social change" might be rather disagreeable to you and me. What's more, he's good and dead, which means among other things that he doesn't need to trouble himself about the implementation of change any more (not that he did all that much to distinguish himself as an activist under the East German or Nazi regimes, either, when you think about it). As far as I'm concerned, Brecht had some very interesting ideas, wrote some reasonably interesting ideas, talked a good game and otherwise pretty much conducted himself as a louse, so it's hard for me to take him terribly seriously in any discussion of social responsibility.

The Living Newspaper (and American communists of the 1930's) stand in marked contrast--both for the highmindedness of their ideals (for the most part) and their vigorous immersion in directed social action (for which they paid a much higher price than B. Brecht, by the way). The first point of difference between then and now, however, has to do with the role of the newspaper. Despite a full awareness of what people like Hearst and Luce were up to (to say nothing of the rapid tabloid press of the day), the Living Newspaper still represents a belief that somehow, somewhere, someone is printing the truth on broadsheets and getting them into the streets. In choosing tabloids as my source, I was by contrast quite aware that I was choosing a medium known for its unreliability. Tabloids pretty much trade in two kinds of stories: astounding tales (of nonentities) and celebrity gossip.

Now myth is another term I prefer not to use. The only kind of myth I know anything about is Greco-Hellenistic-Roman myth, and here alone there is a world of difference between the use of myth in Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Ovid. Moreover, it's clear that myth in much of the Hellenistic world subsumed what we would also call history and religion. So I would prefer to use the much more common-sensical term, "Stories everybody knows." Every culture is indeed defined by the stories everybody knows--and those stories can (and do) include factual and fictitious tales, parables, fantasies, histories, romances and so forth. Everyone from Jesus to John Dillinger to Richard Nixon to Richard III. In fact, one of the things that's interesting and obvious about these stories (and about myth) is that while we tend to focus on the nature of the story, the material is just as much about the "personality" as it is about any individual tale. So Athena, if you think about it, takes precedence over all the stories in which she appears. The unifying factor, the most prominent element, is the personage--not the story. It might be more accurate to define myth as "People everybody knows" or "Stories everybody knows about People everybody knows." And in that sense, DLS is definitely dealing with the same kind of material.

For the record, let me just point out the obvious: My method in writing the play couldn't have been more traditional. I simply set out to render the interior life of my characters in sympathetic and emotional terms--which is my understanding of the avowed goal of the most common, "naturalistic" school of contemporary playwriting. I wanted my audience to "care" about these characters. Of course, I was well aware that applying this method to the material I had selected was in fact quite subversive. For one thing, these are characters we are otherwise predisposed NOT to care about (one of the commonalities of gossip being the expression of a shared contempt for the subject of the gossip). And on a deeper level, I wanted to encourage people to wonder, after they found themselves "caring," who it was they were actually caring about. The intended progress, in other words, was from "I can't believe I actually found myself feeling sorry for Pam Anderson and Frank Sinatra" to "Who the hell is Pam Anderson or Frank Sinatra, anyway...?"

So this is one principal point of difference between the paparazzo and Jeff Jones (or his audience). Not just that the paparazzo doesn't for the most part invite one to "care" (though with princess Diana and a few other figures, there is more of that than you might imagine. And the interesting thing there is how akin the emotions of sympathy (read pity) and contempt (read envy) really are. They are both a kind of kitsch, and kitsch is interesting because it is so protean and mutable. But I digress), but that the photograph of the paparazzo does not encourage either examination of one's own response or of the identity of its subjects.

Another point of difference, of course, would be the authenticity conferred on the source medium. But I think the real difference is that the paparazzo's photograph is without irony. It really is---has to be-a picture of Bill hugging Monica (or Fergie getting her toes sucked, or whatever). It has to be the real Bill and the real Monica or the point is lost. Imagine looking at a picture captioned "J. Edgar Hoover in a Dress, taking it up the ass" next to a picture captioned "Frank Dell, dressed as J. Edgar Hoover in a dress, taking it up the ass." Wouldn't matter if Frank Dell looked EXACTLY LIKE J. EDGAR HOOVER in every detail. Wouldn't matter if it was the SAME PICTURE!!! Knowing it's J. Edgar Hoover makes all the difference.

Now in my play, of course, Pam and Frank never appear on stage... except as characters. This is so much the central premise of all drama that we accept it without question. The really interesting thing to me in working with the material, however, is how these figures from the mediated world of gossip behave--how differently, to be specific, their behaviour in a play is from that of any other living historical figure. Another thought experiment. Take any other living figure--even a figure who might be the subject of informal social gossip (the Pope? Woody Allen? Hillary Clinton?) and try imagining them as characters in a play. It seems to me you run right smack into this basic credibility problem. Because we know the pope and woody allen and hillary as real people, we can ONLY accept a stage representation of them as fake, as a character. So we reject them. In fact, I think it might be just as hard to accept either of those three people as a character in a play in which they played themselves. That's how strongly the force of dramatic convention asserts itself. Once a character steps on stage and announces that she is "Hillary Clinton" we automatically answer, "No you're not, because you're in a play." Even if the characters happened to be Hillary and Bill themselves in a limited Broadway run of their play called "The Night Bill Told Me Everything." This is very curious.

But even more curious to me--and this was the main reason I opted for the doubling--is how these peripheral figures (whom we sort-of know) can become "real" characters--and I think it is because we only know them as "fake" (that is to say, mediated) characters anyway. I had never thought about this before, but it may be the same reason MC Kat (the little 12" stuffed animal) can be a character on stage. Just as it's impossible to render anything "real" onstage because of the law of dramatic impersonation, so it is possible to "convert" anything which is already abstract (or symbolic, or synthetic, or virtual--whatever term you prefer) into a stage character--because stage characters are also synthetic or virtual or whatever... They are symbolic constructs IMPERSONATED by, manipulated by, an actor. We tend not to be aware of this because of our deep acceptance of the broader set of dramatic conventions (which may go far to explain their curious rigidity and persistence in today's culture). Because the rules for impersonation are so codified, we accept them without awareness of their artifice.

In fact, in the play, I create a distinction within the world of the characters themselves between the celebrity "characters" they play in real life and "who they really are." I did this instinctively--that is, all this theorizing comes after the fact--but again I think it was because I knew I could get away with it. In fact, because the rule of dramatic reality demanded and enforced just this sort of "distinction."

Paul wonders whether theatre "matters" any more in a world in which mediated experiences are increasingly the rule. Of course I believe that they do, but only because by virtue of being immediate, personal and private they are necessarily below the radar of the mediated world. I am well on my way to being an old fart, closer the grave than the cradle, so I will probably join B. Brecht in the thought-free zone before the world changes too much more. But if you share an alarm about and profound distrust of the mediated world, then you have to accept that our private space HAS TO REMAIN UNMEDIATED. If you are sitting in your teepee by choice, you can only be terribly terribly angry and afraid if CNN wants to do a one-minute piece. You cannot want a LONGER PIECE. This is a deep conundrum which our culture has only begun to wrestle with. All of our models--whether for social activism or the making of art--share the assumption that publicity is ultimately good. We don't yet really know how to perform these activities in a world in which publicity is inherently corrupting and destructive. And our initial response is to question the very value of these activities. Can it still be possible, we ask ourselves, to make theatre or work toward social change in a world in which TimeWarner and Disney control the market/information complex?

Well, of course, it is even more important, but it is up to us to figure out how and why. TimeWarner will not tell us; but neither will Percy Bysse Shelley or even James Joyce (certainly not Picasso or Andy Warhol!!). I do not know any more than you do, except to feel that my own life is--has to be--the first, best example; and that communication-honest communication--one person's actual thoughts directed to the thoughts of another person--is essential. Without that, we have only silence and I am not quite Zen enough to be able to embrace silence. Remember my first distinction between social change and directed social change. History informs us that the success rate of directed social change is relatively low; that things rarely turn out the way people intend. On the other hand, social change is precisely the collective result of all the lives actually led. If you argue that my vision is too quietist, I won't disagree, but I would urge anyone who is deeply driven to affect social change to read deeply in the history of change and to examine their own motivations unsparingly. I have no problem with living a hubristic life; one of the great life-long joys of art is the sustained belief that one's own life and thoughts and words have deep and lasting significance. But I have somewhat less respect for the unexamined hubristic life. And I know very few activists who approach their tasks with a Zen-like acceptance of the likelihood of their insignificance. Which is too bad, as it would bring both humor and humanity to what I find an all too Christian (even if it is the Christianity that calls itself Marxism) endeavour. If you can seriously say to yourself that you want to change the world--even in the slightest degree--why should it be so hard to go one step further and accept that you are probably a fool and that all your efforts will sooner or later come to naught (if not worse) and that the whole damned thing is just one fucking joke. Or at least best approached as such.

And yes, that is my final answer.

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