We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
—Preamble to the U.S. Constitution
Throughout this 50th birthday year, TCG has been celebrating and exploring its four core values. To date, in the first three quarters of the 2011–12 season, we’ve focused on artistry, diversity and global citizenship. In this issue of American Theatre, the emphasis is on activism.
Activism was woven into our country’s DNA with those opening phrases of our Constitution. Two radical, activist notions jostle against each other: first, that the power and responsibility to affect change is shared equally amongst we the people; and second, that our actions should tend toward union, however imperfect it may seem.
The history of our union is illuminated by the courage of activists agitating for civil rights, gender equality, fair labor laws, environmental protections and social justice. That history of activism is inexorably intertwined with our legacy in the arts. From the Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project in the ’30s, to the Free Southern Theater bringing “art and social awareness” to the Deep South in the ’60s, to the long-haul commitment of such activist troupes as the venerable Bread and Puppet Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Cornerstone Theater Company, theatre artists have long been at the center of social change.
We see that legacy continue, as when Moisés Kaufmann’s The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later helped bring about the Matthew Shepard Act, expanding the 1969 U.S. federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation or disability. We see it when Mike Daisey—whose lively essay on activism appears on page 10—successfully put pressure on the unjust labor practices of Apple’s factories in China with his play, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. We see it when plays like Theater Grottesco of Santa Fe’s STORM and the Civilians of New York City’s The Great Immensity [see “Front & Center,” Feb ’12] challenge audience to think actively about global warming.
Of course, these theatres and artists couldn’t do this work with the support of their communities, and in this age of austerity and polarization, that support—from local politicians, business leaders, individual donors and volunteers—is its own kind of activism. Without strong and sustained support for the arts—the kind nurtured by the close relationships between theatremakers and politicians featured in a pair of articles on page 30—the remarkable gains of the resident theatre movement might never have been accomplished.
That movement was in part sparked when Margo Jones, who founded Theatre ’47 in Dallas in 1947 (the titular number changed with the years), imagined a network of 30 resident theatres across the country to fulfill a radical idea: that Americans everywhere have the right to engage with great theatre. This would be a theatre freed from commercial constraints, Jones foresaw, with artists empowered to engage deeply in the life of their community.
As it turned out, Jones underestimated the impact of her and other founders’ example! TCG’s membership now includes 500-plus companies, with our research indicating that as many as 2,000 not-for-profit professional companies are now operating across the country. That growth was fueled by the activism of visionary funders like the Ford Foundation, and sustained by the activism that formed and funded the National Endowment for the Arts.
Looking in the mirror, I’m asking, ‘Am I the change I long to see?’
You know the world is just a picture of what’s inside of you and me.
—Eric Bibb, lyrics to “Spirit I Am”
Whether you advocate for the arts or through the arts, that activist spirit is more important than ever. The promises of our still-imperfect union remain unfulfilled. In our field, inequities remain for women and theatremakers of color, and access to theatre remains unevenly distributed across geography and class. While we look for models that work to change these dynamics, we must never stop looking in the mirror and asking, “Are we the change we long to see?”
At TCG, we empower theatre artists to help us look in that mirror and illuminate the complicated beauty of our existence. It could be that the very act of making theatre—of coming together to take that unflinching look at what’s inside of us—is by definition a kind of activism: In an audience, you and I become we the people, and together with the artists on stage, we imagine how a more perfect union might come to be.
A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.
—Gloria Steinem
The borders of our country’s union grow more porous every day, as the consequences of economic, political and cultural change defy state lines. Therefore our theatre, local as it always must be, also needs to become an international movement, using its warmth and motion to help establish justice, promote the general welfare and secure all the imperfect blessings of liberty for ourselves—and, we can hope, for all the people of the world.
