Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Robert Brustein Doesn’t Understand Consent: The Dangers of the White Male “Genius”
Bitter Gertrude: As a very young woman, I haunted thrift stores, which, in those days, were chock full of amazing finds. Thrift store book sections filled my library, and I would buy anything related to theatre and devour it to supplement the reading I was doing in my theatre classes. Eventually, a slow, sinking realization started creeping in at the edges as I read book after book by theatrical “geniuses,” all white men. I remember paging through Robert Brustein’s Theatre of Revolt thinking, He does not consider women people.
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If Hitler wrote a book that in the 1930s was as famous as the bible, would we still today say that it is a necessary piece of literature? Would we use it to teach classes and say that Hitler’s ideas are still important, and we should use them even today? Chances are, probably not. So, why are they saying that male playwrights that have been and are still today taught in schools as important pieces of literature, when quite a few famous ones have been proven to be sexual assaulters, bigots, racists, etc. Modern times are supposed to improve everything that has gone wrong in our past, and so a great way to do that, would be to study the works of female playwrights, to put on shows with female leads, to not make every play about a straight white couple, when so much of the world and of our country is neither straight nor white.
I think the author could have gone a step further when saying “these men have had valuable, positive impacts on our field. Yet we must also admit that several of these men have also, simultaneously, had problematic impacts on our field.” I don’t think this is the only problem with these men and society at the time. The problem is that other people’s voices weren’t valued at all because they weren’t heard. These men’s voices forced out other voices because society, for the most part, didn’t care about anything other than voices that would continue male dominance. I agree very much with the author that Robert Brustein is completely wrong with this thoughts and ideas. The author very smartly puts how Brustein is wrong saying that he views these white men as “geniuses” even though there is nothing saying that these men have to be looked up to. The author overall very well puts how there is a problem in the entertainment industry with how white males are viewed.
this article had a lot of good points and things that we really need to look at and evaluate. But personally, the part about how we educate people about theater is what stood out to me most. This is probably so because right now I am at a stage in my life where I want to learn as much as I can about theater and the places I am getting instruction resemble what this article describes, instruction about theater form white men who don’t tend to recognize women or people of color as producing the same level of theater. Where I think this is the most apparent in my personal education is the choice of the season for 2017-2018. All of the shows that are mainstages and granted the largest budget and given the most publicity are white men. What is that saying to the student body of the school of drama? We are slowly becoming a more diverse ensemble of performers and designers, having amazing artist who are people of color and women in our student body. The student’s outspoken frustration with this year’s season put a lot of pressure on next year’s season. I’m anxious to see how or if the school responded to the students outcry for diversity.
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