The term “political theatre” acquired new meaning in 1980, when a former actor became President of the United States. Once the phrase simply meant theatre of a political nature; today it has become equally applicable to politics of a theatrical nature. With Ronald Reagan in the White House, the relationship between politics and public performance has become far more pronounced. And from the union of politics and performance a series of new theatrical events has emerged—events which find their settings in the courtroom, in the streets, on the six o’clock news, rather than on theatre stages. These events originate not in the imagination of a playwright or the political commitment of a theatre company, but rather in the strategies and counter-strategies of the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon, and movements across the political spectrum from the Right to the Left.
In the early 1970s, Robert Brustein criticized the American leftists whose revolutionary rhetoric was merely media showmanship, “revolution as theatre.” Now it has also become necessary to consider Presidential and Pentagon politics as theatre—the policies of men in power have become so theatrical that more conventional political theatre pales by comparison. The Pentagon spends billions to develop and publicize scenarios for a “theatre” of nuclear war in Europe, and opens its production with the installation of new missiles across a continent; the President promotes a “Star Wars” plan which suggests, inadvertently or not, that nuclear war can be as popular and safely watched as a Hollywood film. The President himself has used his smile and relaxed manner—his performance—as effectively as any strategy in gaining and keeping the confidence of the American people. On occasion his style has backfired—as in the case of the widely publicized radio warm-up in which he quipped that Russia had just been outlawed and bombing was to begin in five minutes—but more often than not, his sense of the theatrical moment has worked effectively on his behalf, as have an army of media advisors and the services of an advertising firm previously best known for selling Pepsi Cola.
In this context, theatrical demonstrations staged by the Left no longer need to be regarded as mere rhetoric; they function as “counter-plays,” new forms of theatre devised to answer and parody government displays of power.
Several of these recent anti-war events took the form of war crimes tribunals. While the proceedings have antecedents in the Nuremberg Tribunal that followed World War II and the tribunal which Bertrand Russell sponsored in 1967 to investigate Vietnam war crimes, organizers of such events in the ’80s are more consciously practicing politics as theatre: puppets, parades, songs, poems, plays and comic monologues were part of the tribunals staged at Nuremberg in 1983 and in New York’s Times Square in 1984. Sharp-edged satire—by such groups as the Berkeley-based Plutonium Players, which first achieved national attention in 1980 with their “Reagan for Shah” campaign—infuses some of these occasions with Swiftian humor.
To say that these events are “staged” immediately raises questions about the relationship between their theatrical and political purposes. Is a war crimes tribunal a form of theatre or a judicial inquiry? Could it be both? More of these tribunals will be held under the auspices of the Center for Constitutional Rights during 1985. They deserve consideration as theatre, if only because they address current political affairs with a theatrical immediacy and sense of mission rarely evident in new American plays.
Courtroom drama is not particularly new, of course. Aeschylus depicted a trial in The Oresteia, and since ancient Greek times playwrights have continued to stage, or re-stage, trials. In the early ’30s, Bertolt Brecht wanted to open a theatre in Berlin devoted exclusively to the staging of famous trials—“Two trials an evening, each lasting an hour and a quarter,” he specified. “For example, the trial of Socrates, a witches’ trial, the trial of Karl Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung [a German-language newspaper), the trial of George Grosz on the charge of blasphemy for his cartoon of Christ in a gas-mask…” As the Russian writer Sergei Tretyakov noted, Brecht’s plan elaborated a tendency already evident in his plays—he wanted to create drama as convincing as court pleas, and to teach the audience to reach a verdict, “transforming the spectator’s chair into that of the judge.”
Brecht never realized his plan for a theatre of trials, but his impulse to turn spectators into judges has been shared and extended by later political groups, among them Germany’s Berliner Kommune and the Green Party, which sponsored the 1983 Nuremberg Tribunal. The German playwright Peter Handke wrote favorably of the Kommune’s courtroom “drama” in the late ’60s, praising the activist group for being more politically effective than Brecht. “Committed theatre these days doesn’t happen in theatres (those falsifying domains of art where every word and movement is emptied of significance),” wrote Handke; he preferred to watch the Berliner Kommune’s “theatricalize real life by ‘terrorizing’ it and quite rightly making fun of it.”
Kommune members were arrested and taken to trial in 1968 after Fritz Teufel and friends distributed leaflets proposing that department stores should be burned down to bring the Vietnam war and its horrors home to the German public. Teufel and his colleagues testified that their leaflets were satires, “modest proposals” in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, and their argument was backed up by literary scholars and critics in court. The satirists were acquitted. Hans Mayer, the noted German drama critic, observed that Teufel had created “a fully realized play for the courtroom…Literature—a leaflet having satirical intent and not hiding its debt to Swift—had been treated as reality and alloyed into reality by the state’s attorney. In turnabout, the reality of the judicial jargon was displaced into literature, recast in the aesthetic realm. The play went beautifully, according to its wholly fresh playing rules, and could not have ended any other way but with a happy ending.”
Americans had their own equivalent to the Kommune trial when Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin and other leftists were accused of conspiring to lead a riot during the 1968 Democratic Convention. The defendants became known as “the Chicago Seven,” and several plays have been based on the transcript of the trial, including Frank Condon and Ron Sossi’s The Chicago Conspiracy Trial, first produced by Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in 1979. A scene in the play explicitly acknowledges the theatricality of politics: When poet Allen Ginsberg is asked if he recalls what Abbie Hoffman told him in February 1968, he replies:
Yippee! Among other things. He said that politics had become theatre and magic; that it was the manipulation of imagery through the mass media that was confusing and hypnotizing the people in the United States and making them accept a war which they did not really believe in.
The Yippies, with fellow-travelers Ginsberg, novelists William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, and French playwright Jean Genet, sought to counteract mass media manipulation of events with their own communications—in public demonstrations, press conferences, essays, court. room testimony. (The Yippies wrote no plays. Jerry Rubin in his book Do It! asked readers to “become theatres” as well as actors—but not playwrights. “You are the stage. You are the actor. There is no audience,” he declared. Those who watched Rubin cavort in front of cameras, however, might question his own willingness to forget about audiences.)
Attorney William Kunstler, who defended Hoffman, Rubin and associates in Chicago, more recently prosecuted the president of the United States in a mock-trial. The June 9, 1984 trial charged Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Caspar Weinberger with violation of the charters of the United Nations, Nuremberg and the Organization of American States, as well as the U.S. Constitution. Fifteen-foot-high päpier maché replicas of the defendants rode through the streets of New York City along a parade route from United Nations Plaza to Times Square, where the mock-trial was staged outdoors.
The event was sponsored by the New York Coalition against U.S. Intervention in Central America (an amalgam of more than 100 peace, disarmament and anti-intervention organizations). The demonstration was half festive protest, half mock-serious legal proceeding. Before the trial began at Times Square, 10,000 demonstrators cheered a series of performances by actors, poets and dancers near the United Nations. The crowd then paraded with street dancers, banners and marching band behind a truck carrying the huge puppet defendants to Times Square’s Armed Forces Recruitment Center.
In the pre-trial pageantry, the puppets became the central actors in an elaborate scenario, devised by dozens of cultural and political participants. An excerpt (provided by one of its authors, Charles Frederick) suggests the stage directions of a surreal play:
Episode Title: Entrance of the Odious Puppets (Reagan, Kissinger, Kirkpatrick, Weinberger)
Performance Space: a) First Avenue, b) Midway, c) West Sound Stage
Time: 11:45 a.m.
Episode Units: a) Death Squad Entrance, taking positions at all stages. b) All performances end, performers strike. c) Band leads puppet entrance (music: “Hail to the Chief”). d) Puppets follow through Midway to West Stage. e) Puppets followed by Macabre Entourage. f) Serious Bizness [musical group] halted. g) Death Squad surrounds Master of Ceremonies. h) Neruda poem (“I must speak to those dead now …”). i) Entourage deposes M.C.
The trial itself offered only the slightest pretense of being fair to the accused. The four puppets “spoke” in their own defense, briefly and comically, in taped statements prepared by voice impersonators. Most of the testimony came from poets, folk singers, political activists, and one Guatemalan refugee masked to protect his identity; all objected to American foreign policy in Latin America. Kunstler served more as a master of ceremonies than as a conventional prosecutor, and a black judge, Margaret Burnham, shared this role with him. The evidence collected was later submitted to the United Nations.
The June 9 proceedings fused satire, theatre media manipulation and political activism in a manner its sponsors hoped would serve as a model for other protests. It had far more impact on mass media (it was covered on both NBC and ABC news programs) than on world law. The Center for Constitutional Rights published a copy of the indictment of Reagan and his colleagues, along with an advertisement urging others to “hold a mock trial to accuse the Administration of war crimes—then let the people decide.” This invitation comes close to self-parody in its suggestion that anyone can hold a war crimes tribunal.
How “legitimate,” in fact, are such tribunals? The question creates a curious form of audience involvement and suspense during the events. How willing are the spectators to see themselves as judges? Suppose they agree that the accused are guilty? Who will enforce the verdict? In Stockholm at the 1967 Bertrand Russell tribunal on Vietnam war crimes, one of the judges, Jean-Paul Sartre, said that for such tribunals “the judges are everywhere; they are the peoples of the world, and in particular the American people. It is for them we are working.” His statement suggests that only massive public agreement with the verdicts will give the self-appointed courts legitimacy.
In an effort to draw on the internationally accepted legitimacy of the first Nuremberg Tribunal, the Green Party of West Germany held another war crimes trial there in February 1983. The Greens, a political party which opposes all nuclear weapons and advocates protection of the environment, won over five percent of the national vote in 1983, and subsequently seated 28 delegates in the West German Parliament, among them American-educated Petra Kelly and former NATO general Gert Bastian, organizers of the tribunal.
The event, which received little press coverage, was only one of many recent European protests against militarism and industrial pollution—but as theatre, it was unique. The setting, the same site where Nazi war criminals were placed on trial, resonated with history. Rather than re-enacting those earlier trials, the Greens evoked the possibility of new, more horrible war crimes, indicting the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and other nuclear powers for their preparations for nuclear war.
Government officials from the countries involved declined invitations to attend. Besides the Greens, those taking part were mainly members of the international peace movement, including American anti-war veterans Daniel Ellsberg, Philip Berrigan, Barry Commoner, Richard Falk and Nobel laureate George Wald. According to co-organizer Joachim Wernicke, a West Berlin medical doctor, the tribunal was not conceived as a theatre event—in fact, he was concerned that “elements of theatre” would distract from the issues. But the hearings, in spite of lively moments, never became a circus of parody of justice. Former American CIA agent Philip Agee delivered a comic monologue about his former employer, George Bush; Daniel Ellsberg recalled that when he first read the Pentagon Papers years ago, with the plans to escalate to nuclear war in a Berlin crisis, he felt he was reading “evidence for future war crimes trials”—and it is just such “evidence” that the Greens aimed to collect at Nuremberg. The event ended with the issuing of a declaration that “any use and the threat of using atomic, biological and chemical weapons is contrary to international law and criminal.”
One play was staged during the 1983 proceedings—Daniel Berrigan’s courtroom documentary about his own trial for war resistance, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, originally produced by the Mark Taper Forum in 1970-71. The play established a sense of solidarity between the Berrigan brothers’ and the Greens’ efforts to create new, anti-militaristic laws through public testimony. And it indirectly reaffirmed that more conventional forms of political theatre are not obsolete. (Those forms, in fact, continue to be seen on American stages—the 26-year-old San Francisco Mime Troupe tours annually, the plays of Dario Fo and Wole Soyinka have been imported by regional theatres, and grassroots troupes such as the Dakota Theater Caravan, Boston’s Little Flags Theatre and California’s El Teatro Campesino remain popular among their constituencies.)
For Americans who sense that no parodic trial or tribunal is going to unseat the men in power—that militarism and patriarchy are the order of the day—there is another theatrical choice: if you can’t beat those who shape the law, join the L.A.W. (Ladies Against Women). L.A.W. is one of several alternative identities of the Plutonium Players, a group of political satirists who, like the tribunal organizers, transform their political goals into public performances. The Berkeley grou’s “Reagan for Shah” campaign—which called on the President to assume a position better suited to his love of wealthy, anti-Communist dictators—was the first of many extended Plutonium Players performances which mock conservatism by clownishly embracing it to excess.
Other “organizations” founded by the group have names that embrace the worst aspects of militarism and patriarchy as if there were nothing better: the National Association of Grenade Owners (favoring legalization of grenades for personal self-defense and hunting), Another Mother for World Domination, Voice of the Unconceived (“Sperms and Eggs are People, too,” they claim). By impersonating the members of these imaginary organizations, the Plutonium Players more or less capture their enemies—they can make supporters of Reagan, of Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell or of anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly appear ridiculous, by speaking for them, moving the logic and dress code of these figures beyond plausibility.
Slight variations on the titles of existing organizations have provided the Plutoniums with other alternative identities: the Moral Monopoly (“We have a monopoly on Morality”), Ladies Against Women’s Men’s Auxiliary, Students for War, Millionaire Mommies with Nannies Against State Childcare, the Lt. Calley Institute for Boys, Citizens Against a Girl V.P., the Committee to Intervene Anywhere (C.I.A.), the Nancy for Queen Fan Club and China Friendship League, and the Moral Sorority.
The most popular of the Plutonium’s acts has been Ladies Against Women, an anti-feminist bevy of five women who greet Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell at rallies across the United States. They carry signs declaring “I’d Rather Be Ironing” and “Make America a Man Again,” and wear old-fashioned dresses, pillbox hats, white gloves and furs. L.A.W. seems to appear everywhere, because the Plutonium Players encourage small groups across the country to imitate their act—in fact, they send out scripts to prospective followers (marking perhaps the first time that a political organization has expanded its membership by handing out stage directions). Virtually any woman can participate in this amalgam of politics and clowning, if she can lay hands on the requisite costume. In this sense, the group’s theatre is democratic and highly participatory.
The Plutonium Players also present short comic plays indoors, but it is their outdoor, media-directed demonstrations that are most innovative—merging realism with cynicism, satire with political endorsement, they cheer on national leaders of the Right while thoroughly supporting the Left.
What Brecht once said of Erwin Piscator’s Berlin stage (where Brecht himself worked in the late 1920s) applies to the activist art of the Plutonium Players, and to the recent tribunals as well: “It didn’t want only to provide its spectator with an experience, but also to squeeze from him a practical decision to intervene actively in life.” It is the spectacle of dissent created by such groups as the Plutonium Players, the Green Party at Nuremberg and the June 9 protesters in Times Square that most clearly responds to the Reagan ’80s, a time when politics are almost inseparable from theatre.
This article is adapted from a new book, Durov’s Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre, scheduled to be published by Theatre Communications Group later this year. Joel Schechter is the editor of Theater magazine and a member of the faculty of Yale School of Drama.
