Art as Mirror and Wayback machine
Oct 16 '00
I work as a dramaturg for a small theater company in New York. One of the first things I get asked when I tell people that is "what is a dramaturg?" I usually tell them it's an "in-house theater historian," but really I'm finding it's a state of perpetual studenthood.
The company I work for has been doing American plays from before the 1920's; often the plays they do haven't been seen by audiences in about 100 years. For a lot of the shows, I write up a booklet on the history of each play -- with biographies of the playwright and actors, an overview of the critics' reactions at the time, and a lengthy piece on the topic of the play itself (what it was and why people of the turn of the last century wanted to see plays about it).
What's fascinating in all of this is I'm finding just how little has changed. I've seen plays from what are supposed to be the "good old days" dealing with drug abuse, unwed motherhood, prostitution, arranged marriages, brain damage, the effect of religion on society, sex scandals in politics, immigration, and the afterlife. I'm reading critical attacks written in 1908 that sound almost exactly like attacks that get flung at some plays today. I'm reading items in turn-of-the-century gossip columns about actors and actresses that rival items in modern gossip columns. One of the pieces that was most fun to research was a piece about a political sex scandal -- nearly the same uproar as just happened in congress over the Lewinsky scandal was to be found in this play from 1911. Moreover, when I began looking into other presidential sex scandals, I found that other presidents did more shocking and far weirder things.
What I'm finding in reading these old plays and looking into the newspaper articles of the time is that VERY LITTLE HAS CHANGED. All the things we are worrying about now are all the same things they were worrying about then. We have a whitewashed and nostalgic impression of the United States at the dawn of the 20th Century, but if you go back and look at the newspapers and read the books and read over the plays they were looking at then, you'll find that they were also watching scandalously adult plays and reading sexy books and there were controversies raging over them then as well. Sometimes they were even worse than what we have today.
David Belasco, a theater producer from the turn of the century, once wrote a note in a program defending a play he produced that received a lot of critical attack because of its scandalous material. "Art is a mirror," he argued; presumably, then, if this particular play was offending people, the fault was with the subject of the play, not with the image that his theater was reflecting back. He was right; art IS a mirror. It can give a very telling depiction of what people of the past thought and felt; even its distortions can be telling, as when a play of the past pokes fun at different ethnic stereotypes. But just like any play, these playwrights from the past were reflecting back a first-hand image of the world around them as they saw it at that time.
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Location: New York, NY
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