THE FUTURE RIGHT NOW: A MANIFESTO


The artistic integrity of theatre is in crisis,

says Hugo

says Strindberg

says Miller

says Brantley


The theatre’s always in crisis.

You know what else is in crisis? The systemic racist violence in the US. The healthcare system (or lack thereof). The poverty rates. The housing crisis. The exploitation and rape of women. The ceaseless violence of American imperialism

And you know what’s only just beginning? The climate crisis.

And on the anniversary of our plague year, let me say, it is these crises to the nth degree.

And you know what the climate crisis is? It’s the racist, sexist, classist, homophobic inequalities left unsolved. It is the coagulation of the failed state of America.

I’m not worried about aesthetics in the theatre—that’s like complaining about the aesthetic of a houseless community in a park. You’re missing the bigger picture.

But artists have a role to play in the revolution, in the survival of humanity, because despite how fucking annoying theatremakers are, we are great mobilizers, problem-solvers, empathetic ambassadors, team members, critical thinkers.

We can build communities, we can tell stories, we can expand perspectives. And we can move fast.

But many of us don’t. Our current system encourages atrophy, paralysis, altars to dead gods, because of our fetishization of aesthetic—we’re still tied to antiquated, romantic notions of Western beauty, of pleasant emotions, of what ‘good art’ is. And that aesthetic is a white supremacist practice.

This practice is concerned with white subscribers, with maintaining white people in positions of power, with gatekeeping, with posturing, with offering ‘diversity’ as an amuse-bouche—it is endlessly adaptable, as all oppressive structures are. But what always remains the same? The audience, the ideal spectator as Jill Dolan describes them, is a singular mass of male-cis whiteness.

The American Theatre doesn’t have an aesthetic problem. It has a practice problem.

None of what I’m saying is new.
Maybe stuff about the climate crisis,
but Exon Mobil knew about that shit in the 80s and yet here we fucking are,
Maybe the stuff about posturing is new, but our radical elders KNEW how oppressive systems were adapting, and the opposition is co-opting liberal terminology faster than Ted Cruz bought those tickets to Cancun.

And no, I’m not gonna talk about progress.
Fuck the ‘progress’ I was taught in school. Let’s differentiate the wins from the compromises.
Fanny Lou Hamer said it best: “We’re not free until everyone is free.”
And we need to create one fucking amazing community if we’re gonna liberate all from the clutches of the climate crisis.

What I AM gonna talk about: my artistic practice. My manifesto for artistic liberation, in this moment, at 8:29 PM EST on April 22nd, 2021.

As adrienne maree brown evokes in her timely book, Emergent Strategy, small is all.

Our everyday practices are rehearsals for the revolution, as Augusto Boal—how we act now is gonna be how we act as crisis ripples and reverberates out.

So we better start practicing.


THE AIMS:

1. Using and acknowledging difference to cultivate a true, present relationship with the audience

2. Using abjection/cringe/enfreakment to show/remind audiences that our identities/lives/communities are CONSTRUCTED, and therefore require inquiry and participation to flourish.

3. Using respites of comfort actively and specifically to cultivate communities and collective hope.

4. Staging the unspeakable in movement, touch, and silences to plant the seeds for real dialogue.

5. Implementing solution-based storytelling to ideate livable, liberated futures for a world too acclimated to apocalypse.

#TrustTheProcess,NotSystems

THE RULES/ RESPONSIBILITIES

Theatre is defined by the relationship to the audience. ALWAYS. The fourth wall is an illusion that showed up 200 odd years ago—it is not sacred. But the reverberations of someone’s voice in my sternum when I hear them onstage are sacred. Theory is not very useful if we can’t feel its effects on our bodies. Therefore, cultivating bodily sensations such as abjection and comfort/ease are primary tools of the playwright.

The solution-based playwright is a feminist critic of her own work, always evolving, always questioning who her work is for and who is in the audience and who can be brought together and on what grounds. The haunting of the American Theatre by Jill Dolan’s ‘ideal spectator’,
by the unemotional ‘objective viewer’,
by the ghoul of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,
MUST be exorcised, and to do that,
differences must be named,
examined,
questioned,
treasured.

Audre Lorde told us to, and we must oblige.

Being white is not the default. Being cis is not the default. Being able-bodied is not the default. These are identities that deserve examination, especially in an industry that made and makes more money than I’ll ever have in my life on selling viewership of the ‘freaks’ outside of the non-existent default. As a writer, I will always challenge the white viewer, and make them question their passive, superior role that the industry, individual theatres, and they themselves are cast as.

My work will always be about race because whiteness will always be a part of my work. Whiteness may not run about unexamined in my playworlds. Whiteness unexamined is racist power and violence. I don’t believe in writing solely about my own experience, but I have a responsibility to draw attention to whiteness’s presence and how it operates in my world. Sometimes that will be white characters looking inward or challenging one another, sometimes that will be white characters and BIPOC characters sparring, learning, fighting, making mistakes, loving, and growing together.

I work with the extremes in my storytelling, and trauma is depicted in my plays. I am careful with who is at the center of my stories because I have no intention of profiting off of BIPOC trauma. I will not write plays that center on Blackness, Asian identity, or other BIPOC identities because I recognize a) those aren’t my stories, b) I shouldn’t be profiting off of them, and c) I know I cannot speak to them with the deep nuance they deserve.

So what will I do? I will consciously engage with difference onstage. (Thank you, Audre) I’m speaking to racial difference specifically right now, but this extends to gender, neurology, sexuality, ability, etc.

What might that look like?

I look to Jeannie Hutchins’s work in Robbie McCauley’s Sally’s Rape:

“What we first see of McCauley and Hutchins is their friendship, their easiness with each other. And because of this, I think, the white people in the audience drop their guard. . . . White people always want these stories—please—to have some Hero Caucasians. But Hutchins is not a hero. Or a villain. She plays a regular white person. That’s exactly what makes some white people uncomfortable.”

I look to how Hutchins, who engaged with McCauley’s deep exploration of racism, social haunting, and many versions of rape in development and performance (including improvisation), generously brought her whole self to the process without making it about herself. Her conversations with McCauley were genuine, and their communications and boundaries were clear. She’s allowed flaws, she’s allowed misunderstandings, but the ultimate respect is there for McCauley’s intentions: to bear witness about racism, and to investigate that experience with a multi-racial audience. The difference onstage and in the audience fuels McCauley’s work, and both creates and models the kind of right relationships we need to see between white women and WOC.

Everything different from whiteness is always othered, named and pathologized in some way. Race? A social construct weaponized by racist power to maintain it, justified by religions and scientists. Gender? A social construct weaponized by sexist power to maintain it, justified by religions and scientists. Neurotypicality? A social construct weaponized by neurotypical power to maintain it, justified by religion and scientists. Beginning to see a pattern? Perhaps not yet, but the more we recognize how these concepts and their regularly enforced binaries continue to yield more and more fluidity, the more we question their very nature. If all of these concepts are shaped by social structures to some extent, we can recognize that our identities are constructed to a certain point. The fear of racial difference, gender difference, neurodivergence, is that they take the initiative (sometimes forced, sometimes of their own volition) to actively construct who they want to be. THAT is a force of liberation, and that is inherently threatening to all oppressive power.

Didn’t you get Susan Stryker’s invitation from the 90s?

“Harken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent . . . you are as constructed as me: the same anarchic womb has birthed us both . . . Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.”

How do I actively construct myself? How do I show others they can actively construct themselves and the world they live in?

I use cringe. I use abjection (disgust). I let my characters embrace their freak status so it can no longer be used against them.

My work will be accused of not making sense, of being shocking for its own sake, of being too unwieldy. If beauty and ‘good art’ are continually judged on a white supremacist aesthetic, then cringe, abjection, and self-enfreakment are wonderful tools to tear down the master’s house with (thanks again, Audre).

“[W]hat is abject . . . the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain ‘ego’ that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away . . . And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.”

-Julia Kristeva

Come on, Annalise.
What?
We’re building futures here. Why do you get to be an annoying, inaccessible artist, who boasts about not making sense?
What if I’m getting at something beyond language?
You’re a PLAYWRIGHT. It’s your JOB to make meaning out of words. Tbh, this whole manifeso is starting to sound elitist to me.
Wow, inner thought, thanks for the segue. Lemme borrow something from Suzan-Lori Parks’ Elements of Style real quick.

“a spell
An elongated or heightened (rest). Denoted by a repetition of figures’ names with no dialogue . . . this is a place where the figures experience their true simple state. While no ‘action’ or ‘stage business’ is necessary, directors should fill this moment as they best see fit . . . A spell is a place of great (unspoken) emotion.”

Terminology, written language: these are not neutral tools. These were and are still wielded as tools of oppression. There are experiences that exist outside of language, and trapping them in language can eliminate their meaning. Sometimes, my characters are shy. Sometimes, they don’t want to talk. Sometimes, people don’t want to talk. Sometimes, people don’t want to talk to you. Sometimes, people don’t want to educate you. Just because language is considered the primary tool of the playwright does not mean it’s the only way to convey meaning. Helen Keller became a master of words, but she mourned her Phantom—herself before she was ‘tamed’ by Annie Sullivan and an ableist society. Phantom’s experience and world are just as valid as Helen’s, and we will never know it. Sometimes, I refuse to be anything other than an ambassador to mystery and infinite fluidity.

Our differences, our freakishness, embraced and honored, unite us. (Thank you, Audre).