For The Curious: I’m going back to see “Vicuña” again.
Two weeks ago, I said,
Vicuña, John Robbin Baitz’s world premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre is going to be a radically different play in a week.
That’s not because he’s going to change anything but because the country is going to change around it.
When I wrote those lines I, like so many of us, assumed that the country would change to leave “Vicuña” and the Trump-like character at its center, Kurt Seaman, behind. I wondered whether the election would render this play “an odd comic footnote or a prophetic, tragic warning?” I assumed comic footnote.
I was wrong.
So I’m going back to the theater to see how the world has now changed this play.
1 comment:
A few caveats before I begin: as I’ve commented before, Greek democracy wasn’t anywhere near a utopia, so we should stop holding it up as a standard (and early democracy likely predates Greece.) Also, I don’t believe the absence of theatre from popular culture has any bearing on the results of this election. Electorates have made plenty of bad decisions while theatre was popular.
Having said that, this idea of the world shifting around a work is interesting to me… this idea that suddenly a piece of art, essentially unchanged, can take on new meaning and immediacy in response to major events. The work hasn’t changed, we have. We see things with new eyes.
Though I would like to agree that theatre is where we learn to listen to the other, I’m not sure that’s true right now. Theatre is, generally, made by and for people with similar world-views. There has been a lot of discussion lately about echo chambers for good reason. In the coming years we are going to need works that are audacious and angry and challenge the new authority AND we are going to need works that make us, theatre makers, uncomfortable: we are going to need vigorous, but human investigations of the real other side: the side who voted for President-Elect Trump.
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