From the Executive Director

How Theatre Saved America, Part 2

By Teresa Eyring

At TCG’s National Conference in June, the British playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah gave a roof-raising talk about the potential role for theatre in realizing a better image and international understanding of the U.S. He received thunderous applause when he stated, “Whoever is looking after your international P.R. is not doing a very good job.” He wasn’t seeking to pin our image problem solely on the missteps of George W. Bush, the war in Iraq or debacles such as the subprime mortgage crisis. He also challenged the TV and film industries for exporting damaging and pervasive stereotypes, citing, for instance, how the African-American community (current presidential candidate notwithstanding) is largely seen in the context of gang violence and oversexed music videos. Meanwhile, he said, our politicians and media often spew forth “over-simple monosyllabic isolationism.”

Kwei-Armah’s own impression of the U.S. changed when he came here to have his plays produced and learned about the richness of our theatre scene. And so he issued a charge to the assembled: “How will you look for and find new ways of getting your brilliant theatre out into the world some more? So we can actually see the intelligent America, the caring America, the brilliant America?”

In decades past, theatre has played a role in shaping our national image, serving as a kind of under-the-radar foreign policy—and a means of blunting the edges of potentially deadly standoffs. During the Cold War, the arms race was complemented by a kind of “cultural Olympics” in which, for example, the U.S.S.R. would send the Bolshoi Ballet to the U.S., and the U.S. would send Arena Stage to the U.S.S.R. At a time when two heavily armed superpowers publicly agreed to despise each other, the exchange of artists allowed each nation’s citizens to see the beauty, humanity and intellectual complexity of the other. When glasnost came about under Mikhail Gorbachev, interactions among Soviet and U.S. theatre people were given a share of the credit for a new openness toward the West, accompanied by policies favoring freedom of speech.

Former U.S.-ITI director Martha Coigney brims with stories on theatre’s role in this kind of cultural diplomacy. She recalls that when the U.S. was embroiled in Vietnam, “what saved our bacon was a really quiet, theatrical presence in the world, especially in Eastern and Western Europe.” Companies like the Living Theatre, La MaMa, Open Theatre and Performing Garage were working internationally. Instead of the U.S. being known only through news about our warmongering ways and our television and second-run movies, we had some of our most brilliant theatrical innovators working overseas—and, in the process, helping to cultivate a different view of our nation and its people. Coigney further recalls that while the 1967 U.S.-ITI World Congress was taking place in New York, the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East. A United Nations General Assembly emergency session was called. On Friday many of the ITI delegates went to observe the U.N. debate. On Saturday at the closing session of the ITI Congress, actor Mikhail I. Tsarev, who was then head of the Soviet center of ITI, stood and said, “Yesterday, we listened to diplomats; today I say: We are the diplomats!”

While the world is not polarized by the same stark organizing principle as it was during the Cold War, tensions and negative perceptions of the U.S. seem to be more far-flung and far-reaching today. And there are obstacles to reversing that situation, not least of which is our own isolationism.

But the number of U.S. artists and companies involved in exchanges, education programs, relationship development, touring and artistic collaboration with practitioners in other countries is not insignificant, and it seems to be growing. U.S.-organized play-development programs are thriving in Japan and East Africa; the International Theater and Literacy Program, founded four years ago, brings American theatre educators and artists together with Tanzanian young people to define, among other things, what they should keep and what they should leave behind of their traditions and values as they modernize. (Look no further than this issue’s News in Brief section for more examples.)

Coigney also observes that theatre has an impact on the world through small gestures, at the spot where it’s created. It can’t mass-distribute, so its influence is through people meeting people, artist-to-artist, teacher-to-student, audience-to-performance—and somehow these acts add up.

Or, to put it in pop terms, while summoning lyrics from the musical [title of show]:

I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing
Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing...
Those nine people will tell nine people
Then we’ll have eighteen people lovin’ the show!
Then eighteen people will grow into
Five hundred and twenty-five thousand,
Six hundred people all lovin’ our show!

A few small international gestures that make a big impact lead to more such gestures and more such impact. And it builds exponentially over time, all contributing to how theatre has saved and can save America.