14 December 2005

Pee for Prejudice

            Of all the different ways that theater can attempt social commentary, the most immediate and most relevant seem to be the most effective.  Two plays stood out to me this semester as completely different approaches toward promoting the same urgent cause: of building a just society where human beings and their rights are valued above anything else.  Those plays were Urinetown: The Musical, performed at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston; and Institutionalized, a production of the Campus Conversations on Race Action Committee at Emerson College.  Although I first perceived the subjects to be very different – racism and urine – the plays speak against two very similar plagues, the commodification of basic human rights in a capitalist society, and the institutionalization of racism in schools of higher education.  Ultimately, the form in which these plays were directed reflects the different ways they affected their audiences, which to me were as different as they were powerful.
            Urinetown mainly uses the device of irony.  In this overtly fictional world where the corporation Urine Good Company has appropriated the act of urinating, clearly defined caricatures of good and evil exuberantly proclaim the ridiculousness of these circumstances, while hinting at a very real and immediate danger that the audience must confront after they leave the play.  This kind of self-awareness is achieved first through the characters of Little Sally and Office Lockstock, who not only refer to the audience in Brecthian manner, but analyze the play itself and its capacity to create social change. Little Sally says:  “I don't think too many people are going to come see this musical,” and Officer Lockstock replies “Why do you say that, Little Sally? Don't you think people want to be told their way of life is unsustainable?”  Not only in the writing, but in the direction of the play we see a passive-aggressive confrontation of the audience’s values, and their sense of responsibility towards society.  Any resulting tension, however, is eased by the completely ridiculous and light-hearted tone of the performance.  No character’s death is taken too seriously, no trouble is too severe, and heroic struggles are always accompanied by satirical melodrama.  This way the audience is free to disengage from the serious underlying issues if they prefer to see it as pure entertainment value.
            In this respect, Institutionalized is different.  Irony and satire are major aspects of every character represented by the five actors, but the performances honestly reflect high stakes, and severe consequences for even the subtlest psychological circumstances.  Not only that, but the satire addresses its subject directly (the institution of Emerson College), rather than finding a fictional icon to replace it, as Urinetown does using Urine Good Company to represent corporations like McDonalds, etc.  Institutionalized begins with an Orientation Leader bursting into the room with a hyperactive rant about what great activities lie ahead for the incoming batch of students (he addresses the audience).  The subtext:  these are the privileges of a social class that can afford over-priced tuition, and who can enjoy a wide variety of escapist entertainment guised as higher education.  If the OL is excited enough, the play suggests, he will convince the students that the college experience is worth the money.  If the students are convinced and happy, the parents are willing, the demand is satisfied, and the market for the college business expands to reach more and more affluent Americans – and the obligatory number of scholarship-sponsored minorities.  Every scene following this one, while continuing the satirical tone, exemplifies the escalating ill effects of this seemingly benign business mentality.  First we hear the story of an incoming student from American Samoa, whose father was killed fighting for the US army a week before her arrival at school.  Amidst the flurry of jovial college induction ceremonies, she cannot find one individual sincerely open to her suffering, and gets through the week by faking the expected gleeful behavior.  The juxtaposition of the Orientation Leader and the Samoan girl, with her beautiful traditional dress and flower, immediately jolts the audience away from the expected sequence of slapstick stereotypes.  Suddenly the issue has become serious, but we can still laugh at the OL, and countless other characters that follow.
            Here, comedy is used even more effectively than in Urinetown, because it reflects a truth closer to the lives of the characters, the actors and the audience.  This is achieved partly because the play was written and directed collectively by the five members, each creating their own characters and monologues.  Because of this decision, the nature and demeanor of the characters in the play is irreplaceably genuine.  Urinetown is strong because it is a reflection of a broader section of the population, the common oppressed citizen, living under the strong influence of corporations.  The characters, however, seldom transcend their stereotypes, and display complexities that are mainly fabricated for the purpose of furthering the character struggle, rather than to reflect a more specific experience such as that of an African American being expected to act like Malcolm X by one of his professors at a college in contemporary Boston.  This more limited depth in Urinetown occurs partly because the world of the play, while brilliantly developed and richly metaphorical, can only represent reality to a certain extent.  Urinetown is not a plausible town, its characters and their required traits are larger than life, and while it paints a disturbing picture of what complete corporate control could mean, the story could easily pass for a benign allusion to real issues, before it had a chance to seriously challenge them.
            This problem, however, is helped by the self-referential segments, which serve mainly to remove any doubts as to whether the musical is meant to make a political statement.  The scenes towards the end, for instance, make a less-than-subtle push for the establishment of a sustainable world-wide system for preserving drinkable water.  An effective scene shows blankets representing rivers, that get sucked into a hole on the stage, disappearing too quickly for anyone to do anything.  Perhaps here the message of the musical is taken more seriously, when even the new generation of empowered citizens is not able to reverse the destructive effects the previous generations had on the environment.
            Even with all the elaborate costumes, production design, expertly choreographed dances, and memorable lyrics and motos (“I am free to pee”), there still lacks the powerful effect that a more immediate reflection of reality can have.  Institutionalized had the most bare-minimum design, costume changes and blocking.  Most of the time we listened to monologues, sometimes watched an interview take place, a one-sided phone conversation, some multi-media displays, or a disembodied voice interact briefly with a character onstage.  With these essential elements, however, extensive material was conveyed about the subject of racism, with a level of sophistication and meditation that no writer or deconstructionist philosopher could replicate if they pretended to be a college youth attending Emerson College in the early 2000’s.  It takes a strong, well balanced story structure to convey, without ever saying it directly, the idea that a college that is run like a business will foster classism, isolationism, passivity, indifference, ignorance, and as a result of all of those, racism.
            At the heart of Urinetown and Institutionalized are honest efforts toward raising awareness, not merely of singular issues, but the entire reality of the world that allows those issues to propagate, unresolved.  The plays are directed differently, each to fit appropriately the forms in which they were written, and to most effectively convey the style, themes and ideas.  Nevertheless, the underlying point of either play, according to my interpretation, turns out to be one, simple and the same:  that the progress of our society is horribly stunted by the corporate appropriation of nearly everything, from the environment to education.  Advancement, the natural and constant state of society, is only possible when human beings can dialogue about their differences and similarities, free of this foundational flaw in modern-day politics, economy and philosophy:  that human beings are here to acquire material, claim possession of it, and devalue each other in the process.

 

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