If you tuned in to cable news last fall, you may have gotten the impression that the Occupy Wall Street movement was a freak-filled circus sideshow, a bunch of homeless people living in tents, a loud and unsanitary public nuisance, a protest without a coherent message, or all of the above.
But if you were paying even casual attention, you learned that this decentralized yet powerful movement has managed to shift the national conversation from Tea Party-stoked fears about the debt ceiling to the crises of chronic joblessness and growing income inequality. While Occupy Wall Street’s mantra, “We are the 99 percent,” resonated strongly with many Americans, the movement’s messages were also communicated by striking and often playful images—from the ubiquitous giant Lady Liberty puppet, to the money-sucking squid dressed as a Goldman Sachs spokesperson, to the movement’s first poster of a dancer pirouetting on top of the Wall Street bull. Witness, too, an array of simple but moving dramatic flourishes: the people’s microphone, in which a protester’s words are echoed to a larger group; the HIV/AIDS “die-ins” at Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park; the disruption of a huge foreclosures sale at a Brooklyn courthouse, using music and performance; and the meta-spectacle of real-life Occupy activists storming a fake Occupy encampment created for an episode of “Law & Order: SVU.”
Indeed, creative resistance has become central to the Occupy movement—just as it has been in countless movements for social change throughout history, from the powerful tactics of ACT UP protesters during the height of the AIDS crisis (chaining themselves to the VIP balcony of the New York Stock Exchange), to the theatrical creativity of the civil rights and antiwar activists of the ’60s, to the mass-choreographed labor strikes of the early 20th century.
“Art and cultural resistance have to be part of the movement to help make that point—I think that’s how you capture the world’s attention. I mean, the play was the thing that Hamlet used to capture the attention of the king,” says author and activist Benjamin Shepard, whose book examining the liberating role of public space, The Beach Beneath the Streets, helped inspire an Occupy Broadway event at a Midtown Manhattan plaza in early December. “These theatrical images create an urgency that helps people understand issues on a visceral level.”
OWS supporter Mike Daisey, the monologuist and raconteur, echoes Shepard: “The idea of creative resistance is a vital one, because resistance needs different paths. If your only way of resisting is violent, things don’t tend to work out long-term; violent resistance tends to consume itself. And if your only way of resisting is nonviolent and passive, the people doing the act of dispersing you, they learn ways to adapt to that. Art and theatre is actually a very effective way to connect with other humans in a space. That’s the heart of what theatre is.”
While the OWS movement has spread to U.S. cities large and small, its roots can be traced to international protest tactics. Indeed, when the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters first put out its call-to-action on its website for people to take to take to the streets and “occupy Wall Street” on Sept. 17, the announcement referenced Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising, exclaiming, “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” While Occupy had more homegrown forebears—like the massive Wisconsin protests in early 2011 by public employee unions defending their collective bargaining rights—Occupy is simultaneously viewed as part of a worldwide labor and human rights struggle that’s shining a light on the inequities of unfettered global capitalism.
Despite the movement’s showmanship, the New York theatre community (particularly its larger institutional theatres) has seemed hesitant to get involved. Nevertheless, in early December—just a few weeks after protesters were evicted from Zuccotti Park—both individual theatre artists and some downtown companies dipped their toes in the water, teaming up with Occupy activists for a creative direct-action event smack in the middle of Broadway.
During one 24-hour timespan, theatre artists and OWS activists united in tourist-choked Times Square and marched north several blocks to the Paramount building, across the street from the Winter Garden Theatre (home of long-running cash cow Mamma Mia!). There, they transformed a largely uninviting, windswept “bonus” plaza in front of the Paramount building into the People’s Performance Plaza, teeming with live theatre, music, dance and puppetry.
Veteran performance artist Penny Arcade and anti-consumerism activist Reverend Billy (aka Bill Talen) spoke passionately to the assembled throng. The East Village-based Foundry Theatre contributed selections from its adaptation of the 1937 labor revue Pins & Needles. There were musical performances by the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, the New York City Labor Chorus and the investigative theatre company the Civilians. (Steered by artistic director Steve Cosson, the Civilians are working on a new project about the Occupy movement under the umbrella title Occupy Your Mind; thus far the project has yielded several OWS-themed editions of the group’s cabaret series, Let Me Ascertain You, at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub venue.)
Elevator Repair Service ensemble member Aaron Landsman, whose new performance piece City Council Meeting shifts for each city in which it’s performed, utilized the people’s mike to read a moving report on his visits to four Occupy encampments across the country. Merry pranksters the Yes Men showed up wearing inflatable SurvivaBall costumes, posing as members of the 1 percent. There were selections from something called The Big Bank: A Musical and 10-minute plays penned by Adam Rapp and others.
At midnight on that Friday, Daisey turned up and gave a rousing and hilarious 25-minute monologue that attacked the scourges of corporatism and complacency and blasted Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to evict protestors from Zuccotti Park. The size of the crowd fluctuated from early Friday evening to late Saturday afternoon, numbering 300-400 at its peak (much smaller than the thousands who turned out for October’s massive Occupy Times Square demonstration).
Occupy Broadway stood as one of the first major fusions of OWS and the downtown theatre community—and while attendance wasn’t huge, energy was high despite the blustery cold. Despite its name, however, few members of the Broadway community participated, save for a Saturday afternoon appearance by Hair writer James Rado and friends, leading a sing-along of “Let the Sunshine In” and other songs from the landmark 1967 protest musical.
It’s mid-February, and Morgan Jenness, the literary agent, dramaturg and self-described “pyromaniacal yenta” who helped organize Occupy Broadway, is standing in Washington Square Park in front of an Occupy-affiliated “Bed-In” event, in which onlookers are asked to consider the implications of the various corporate interests to which they find themselves hitched.
“I find the theatre community has been tentative in getting involved, quite frankly,” Jenness says, “perhaps understandably, since so many of them are courting the 1 percent—corporations, banks, individuals—for funding and to serve on their boards. Involvement has been more individual, since the ‘professional theatre’ (including the nonprofits) tends mostly to cater to the top 10 percent of the population. I think they’re very curious about the movement, but they don’t know what to do with it.”
Though they aren’t necessarily in the business of inciting revolution, LORT theatres of all sizes have been known to program work, however sporadically, grappling with questions that concern the Occupy movement. Those issues can even bubble up in the usually spectacle-driven world of Broadway—witness the depictions of economic uncertainty in David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, or Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit, which premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2010 and will land in New York in the fall.
With Occupy now regrouping and planning its next phase, are U.S. theatres programming their future seasons with OWS in mind? Says ERS’s Landsman, “The movement is so vital that if I was running an institutional theatre, I might feel foolish not trying to bring some of that energy into my space.”
Rob Orchard, executive director of ArtsEmerson in Boston, concurs: “My guess is that most theatres are thinking about it and embracing it in their programming when it feels sincere.” As for individual writers or theatremakers, Orchard figures, “It takes a little time, it takes a little distance—which is why I don’t think you’ll see very many good plays that truly tie back to the Occupy movement for maybe another year or so. We should just wait for the artists to come forward with it—they’re the ones that are going to be inspired or not.”
Michael John Garcés, artistic director of the L.A.–based Cornerstone Theater Company, whose ensemble is deeply invested in community collaboration and social engagement, sees activism flourishing in the U.S. He points to theatres like the Foundry, Sojourn Theatre of Portland, Ore., Roadside Theater of Virginia, Junebug Productions of New Orleans—in fact, any of the companies associated with the Southern coalition Alternate ROOTS—as grassroots hotspots where Occupy-inspired work might sprout. Over the next five years, Cornerstone will present a series of plays, The Hunger Cycle, that investigate the issues surrounding food equity and access.
“Is there a deep current of conservatism in our national theatre? Absolutely,” says Garcés. “But there’s also a lot of really forward-thinking artists and, I would say, even administrators and others, both at LORT theatres and more grassroots organizations, who want to be socially engaged.”
Back in Washington Square Park, Jenness is talking about the centrality of performance to protest. An Arts and Culture Working Group, she notes, was part of the OWS general assembly from its earliest, pre-Zuccotti days, planning a New York Fun Exchange Carnival near Wall Street for Sept. 17, the seminal date that Adbusters set for protestors to descend on Lower Manhattan. At Zuccotti, Daniel Ball ran “The People Staged,” allowing anyone (including famous names like Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine) to sign up and perform. Since the eviction, “The People Staged” has popped up in such locales as Tompkins Square Park and Occupy Broadway.
The Occupy Performance Guild, an outgrowth of the Arts and Culture Working Group, has spawned numerous street-theatre direct actions, including an excerpt from Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! at a pop-up occupation in Washington Square Park in January (future performances are planned). For the Nov. 17 Day of Action in the wake of the Zuccotti eviction, activists marched around Lower Manhattan dressed as the “Shrub Block,” in reference to the twist ending of Macbeth, in which Malcolm’s men disguise themselves with tree branches from Birnam Wood. “When a forest comes to the castle, Macbeth will fall—so our idea was that when activists occupy Wall Street, Wall Street will fall,” Ben Shepard explained. “We have tried to refer to theatre whenever we possibly can.”
Dickens, then, would seem inevitable, and sure enough, Occupy-themed A Christmas Carol adaptations sprouted up on both coasts during the holidays as street theatre. The New York Occupiers remade Ebenezer into Mayor Bloomscrooge and Jacob Marley into a philanthropic John D. Rockefeller, and in the spirit of Occupy, let the audience decide by consensus whether the humbugger was redeemed or not. Meanwhile, San Francisco Mime Troupe’s resident playwright Michael Gene Sullivan wrote an adaptation of the classic for the 21st century, transforming Scrooge into a corporate banker and transporting Bob Cratchit and his downtrodden family to an Occupy encampment, where they live in tents.
The People’s Puppets, led by Joseph Therrien, has also been a key working group within Occupy, offering radical puppetry performances around New York City. The company is working on a toy-theatre series to be staged on subway cars and based on the theme “Another World Is Possible.” The series will imagine a future that boasts fantastical places such as the Possible Hospital and the University of Opportunity.
Meanwhile, some playwrights’ OWS ruminations have already surfaced. In mid-March at NYC’s Judson Memorial Church, Sarah Duncan and Kate Foster of the Occupy Performance Guild staged Occupy the Empty Space, which took its title from Peter Brook and placed a particular focus on work dealing with housing as a human right. This new-play festival showcased 15 short plays by a range of writers, from new Midwestern voices to major names like Naomi Wallace and Kia Corthron. There were intriguing titles like How to Stop the Empire While Keeping Your Day Job, by writer and performer Dan Kinch, among the 230 submissions from around the globe. The idea for the festival was sparked by an open-ended Twitter discussion, hosted by the American Voices New Play Institute’s online journal HowlRound, asking how playwrights might respond to the Occupy movement in an immediate way.
Indeed, the horizontal nature of the movement—the idea that everyone has the power to make something happen—is what attracted many to OWS in the first place. “Sarah [Duncan] and I have taken that model and applied it to the theatrical process,” says Kate Foster. “How can we celebrate everyone? How can we stay noncommercial and still be selective? How can we be selective and equally inclusive? It’s a valuable conversation, not just in terms of this event, but in the larger context of the theatre and entertainment industry.”
The Civilians haven’t yet figured out how the Occupy Your Mind project will grow into a full-fledged show within the company’s unique brand of monologues and lively songs. In the meantime, they’ve tossed the ball back to the audience: People of all stripes are invited to interview Occupiers near their own hometowns, create a live performance based on the interviews, then submit a video to be archived on the Occupy Your Mind website. The idea is to capture the living history of the movement as it unfolds.
“The media has to cover this movement as ‘What does it mean? What’s happening now? How will this affect the election?’” says the Civilians’ Michael Friedman. “We don’t have to guess what’s happening next. We can just follow it, which allows people to be more honest with what’s going on.”
OWS has also spurred artists to ask a pragmatic question: Can theatre be a successful tool for social change? Daisey, who has appeared on countless panels broaching the topic, has a definitive answer in the affirmative—and nearly irrefutable firsthand evidence. His hit monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which he’s been performing around the country for the past year and a half, delves into the brutal labor conditions and possible human rights violations in the Chinese factories that make most of the world’s electronic devices, including the iPhone. The ensuing media attention pressured Apple to take unprecedented steps toward greater transparency [see Daisey’s essay for the full story]. Daisey says reports on these factories had been a matter of public record for a decade, but no one had acted on the information. “Giant stories that should’ve been told years ago can fly by if they’re only being covered exclusively by economists and journalists. You need artists to really galvanize.”
Cornerstone’s Garcés agrees, but adds that artists are often caught within a paradox when they follow their activist impulses. “There’s a distrust of simple solutions or straightforward action, because artists tend to want to hear everybody’s story and have a more complex perspective. We get bogged down in talking about what it all means, what the alternatives are. We clearly see the drama, and we can certainly write a play about it. But at the end of the play, the audience still has to walk out and decide what to do.”
Foundry Theatre producing artistic director Melanie Joseph notes that artists haven’t traditionally been at the planning table of social movements—they’re often the entertainment, or asked to make message-based work. She’s enthused that artists are finding their place as thinkers and planners of OWS. “I’m inspired by work that imagines possibility—whether it mirrors what’s already here or whether it looks to the sky,” she says. “I heard [Slovenian philosopher] Slavoj Zizek say to the Occupiers: ‘You’re not here to tear down capitalism. It’s going to take care of itself. What you’re here to do is generate proposals for how else it could be.’
“So if we’re going to imagine another world, how are artists engaged in the practice of making that world?” Joseph continues. “It’s not like creative resistance and the glorious history of artistic intervention isn’t valuable. But I don’t think that’s the only expression or purpose of art in organizing a different world.”
To that point, Joseph and the Foundry are hosting an April 20–22 festival at Cooper Union titled “This Is How We Do It.” The event will be a kind of show-and-tell spotlighting people who are working and living within innovative, alternative systems that have reconfigured modes of social organization and the usual way of doing business. The Industrial Workers of the World, Joseph notes, declared in the early 20th century its intention “to build the new world in the shell of the old.” The 96-year old social activist and author Grace Lee Boggs will be on hand for the Foundry event.
Still, how can theatres aggressively critique the status quo if they’re financially dependent on corporations and wealthy funders? “A theatre can still be fueled with ideas,” argues Jenness. “No, you probably can’t be a theatre and declare, ‘Millionaires should pay their fair share of taxes, and we should investigate all the banks.’ But theatres can empower their audiences, not as consumers but as citizens, not as ticket-buyers but as a real audience that’s there to have dialogue and hopefully find themselves awakened,” Jenness contends. “Theatres don’t have to talk politics or finances. They don’t have to mention a CEO’s name. But if theatre really becomes the Agora, a place where public discourse happens, if it becomes affordable or even free, you don’t have to go near Occupy Wall Street. Because when you do that, you are Occupy Wall Street—at the core.”
Arts reporter Christopher Wallenberg writes regularly for this magazine.
