Behzti cancellation notice, Birmingham Repertory Theatre ... - Theater

Behzti cancellation notice,
Birmingham Repertory Theatre,
Birmingham, England, 2004.
Photo: Steve Parkin,
AFP/Getty Images

Up Front
Connecting Dots
This editorial page frequently chronicles new controversies surrounding individual
theater productions: cancellations, bans, death threats, alterations made under pressure,
funding rescinded or denied. Rarely do we face a shortage of such incidents to
comment upon; when the time comes to prepare this section, a story of suppression,
authoritarianism, or contested expression is always reliably in sight.
For this issue, we wanted to ask why. Any serious critic will confirm that the
American theater — or the international one, for that matter — is no more politically
engaged than in past decades; if anything, it has largely been guilty of navel-gazing
even in a time of global strife and transformation, mirroring the society it depicts.
Stunned by the self-censoring timidity of some theater professionals in the United
States, we also noted the risks defiantly undertaken by stage artists elsewhere — like
director Mark Weil, assassinated in 2007 after his sustained creative dissent with the
regime in Uzbekistan.
But although new art isn’t more political, culture is now rigidly politicized; far
from ending the so-called culture wars of the 1990s, the process has been sped up and
dumbed down by twenty-first-century media and its electronic echo chambers. Audiences
in the West — accustomed to tailoring their news sources, customizing their
music, gating their communities, and filtering their social networks — increasingly
believe they have a “right” not to be offended by or confronted with alien or unfamiliar
perspectives at live performances, where there can be no channel-changing.
Is the word “censorship” still adequate to describe what suppresses certain ideas
and forms of expression on stage? Or do we need new or additional descriptors, given
the range of forces that conspire to inhibit full and free expression in twenty-first-
Theater 38:3
© 2008 by Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre
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century theater — from global economics, to insidious marketing or funding consider-
ations, to good-faith sensitivities to minority groups and religions?
Our exploration is partial and limited, and we hope to look at some additional,
less-explored aspects of censorship — such as school drama programs — in the future.
But by starting to connect the dots, we can better see the patterns.
— Tom Sellar
doi 10.1215/01610775-2008-001
Wikiturgy
Wikipedia, the ever-expanding online compendium of human knowledge, aims for
veracity by punctiliously groomed consensus. Anyone with an Internet connection can
edit one of the encyclopedia’s entries or supply a new one to close a scholarly gap. The
project aspires to be Diderot gone digital: a twenty-first-century version of the Enlightenment
dream of an ongoing quest for truth continually refining itself through vigorous
debate. (Whether Wikipedia will actually live up to this utopian vision remains
an open question.) Recently, Brendan Gall and Christopher Stanton, a pair of Toronto
theater artists, decided to apply this egalitarian ethos to dramatic writing. The result is
the Wikiplay, an experiment in unfettered electronic collective creation that could, if
successful, transform our ideas about what constitutes a play, and a playwright.
A wiki — one of the English language’s newest and strangest-sounding nouns — is
a Web page that enables readers to edit or add to its content with impunity (and a
few clicks of keyboard and mouse). Wikipedia is the most widely known exponent of
the technology, but its use has proliferated as a tool for online collaboration. Gall and
Stanton, however, may be the first to have seen the wiki’s artistic potential. In theory,
a Web-surfing would-be-dramatist from any wired region in the world could happen
upon the Wikiplay and make a literary intervention. Gall and Stanton’s hope is that
the Wikiplay’s authorship may eventually straddle time zones, continents, and cultures,
creating a multilinguistic, multiform piece of truly global writing. (This does
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not exclude the possibility of its becoming a Babel of conflicting creative impulses; the
project’s openness may allow a minority of frequently-posting cranks to thrive, rather
than encourage the growth of border-transcending drama.)
Accessible at unspun.wikispaces.com/Wikiplay, the Wikiplay site currently features
twenty-five plays-in-progress, of wildly varying degrees of artistic interest and
stageworthiness. There have been few efforts to guide the overall shape of the play —
other than that of one anonymous visitor, who, in a paroxysm of pique brought on by
someone’s revision of a passage he or she contributed, attempted to delete the entire
Web site. (Gall and Stanton have resisted patrolling the site for mediocrity or foolishness.)
This is the seamy side of wiki-enabled collaboration: its potential susceptibility to
control and censorship. Each new textual graft is eminently fragile, subject to sudden
annihilation or capricious adjustment.
The Wikiplay’s disembodied distance from both page and stage, has, so far,
encouraged metatheatrical speculations and a healthy disregard for theatrical limitations.
On thread number two, for example, an expectant audience watches a seemingly
inexhaustible series of raised curtains recede into forced perspective. Each unveiling
only reveals another audience, waiting in the dark. The Escher-like regress of spectators
watching spectators disappears into infinity. Gall and Stanton are currently planning a
staged workshop of portions of the Wikiplay, toward a possible production, but the
project’s intrinsic immateriality may defeat such efforts. The real performance — and
dramatic conflict — occurs when a coauthor intervenes to change the script; the Wikiplay
is its own intangible stage.
— Jacob Gallagher-Ross
doi 10.1215/01610775-2008-002
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