Epic

Epic-cure: history that heals Essay History is back. Playwrights are bringing it back, urging the theatre from its obsession with the self and family to an investigation of the nation and its legacy. Even the names ring out with a sense of moment and place, regional or national rooting: The America Play, The Kentucky Cycle, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Angels in America. The Me decades are skidding to a halt before the approaching millennium, while such playwrights as Suzan-Lori Parks, Robert Schenkkan, Anna Deavere Smith and Tony Kushner begin reexploring the We, that odd congregation of others called America. Each of these recent works paints our time as diseased, uncertain. Each probes the racial, ethnic and sexual gulfs so visible from the precipice of centurys end. Each offers a tentative, suggestive, inconclusive vision of healing and redemptionnew ways of seeing a land that, although battered and bruised, as Schenkkan says of the Appalachian hills where his Kentucky Cycle is set, still remembers. Kushners Angels takes place primarily in the near-present and Twilight, Smiths one-woman choral epic, lodges us firmly in the afterburn of the 1992 L.A. riots; still, all these plays shuttle us, at least by allusion, through generations of struggle: slaveries, deaths, civil war, civil rights, immigration, new frontiers. These plays make theatrical history, too. They remove us from a recent time when the mainstream American stage was said to have no politics, no memory, no scope. The small-cast, one-set, cheap-to-produce, American domestic drama thats been our staple for the past decade or more looks even punier next to the new epic: the great, groping, revisionist, American history play. OUT WITH THE LIVING ROOM. In with what Parks dubs the Great Hole of History and its pun-implied twin, the Great Whole. An African American in her early thirties, Parks has the linguistic audacity to entitle her work The America Play, a mockingly exclusive moniker, calling attention to itself as the single work of its kind, the single history as told by the marginalizedthe other as the only. Kushner has his own kind of post-domestic-naturalism audacity: For seven hours, his fantasia spans our country and the heavens above, Angelic principalities to Americagay America, straight America, Jewish, Mormon, African, you-name-it America. Unrelated lives interpenetrate; Brooklyn becomes Antarctica; the souls of the dead link up to repair the ozone. The freedom of his imagination makes anything seem possible, even hope. The Kentucky Cycle sweeps away the kitchen-sink unities, too, taking one plot of land and telling the seven generation, marathon-length tale of its rape, pillage, plunder, and resale. Then theres the inspired Anna Deavere Smith, Americas theatrical roving reporter, speaking in the tongues of South Central L.A., giving communities their own voices, one person at a time. These epic impulses arent new, and thats part of their power. Theyre as American as Melville and apple pie. They connect the theatre of the 90s with sources as diverse as the waning American Century. Smiths testimonial dramaone stop along a series of pieces called On the Road: A Search for American Characterrecalls the Federal Theatre Projects Living Newspapers and documentary film; her vocal/gestural mimicry blends Brechts epic acting with comic impersonation. The Kentucky Cycle plays like something out of the 30s: part Group Theatre social drama, part Paul Green-style outdoor historical pageant and part WPA mural. Gertrude Steins literary experiments on Americans and their making and Adrienne Kennedys lyrical hallucinations influence The America Plays verbal jeu desprit and racial phantasmagoria. Kushner, meanwhile, who feels to me more European than his contemporaries, mix-matches Brechtian stagecraft and ideology with gay camp, Caryl Churchill-like splicing of fantasy and gritty reality with Shavian excess of wit and of words. (Even Angelss subtitle evokes Shaws similarly apocalyptic Heartbreak House; A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes becomes A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.) LIKE MOST AMERICAN THEATRE, such epic ambitions derive in part from Eugene ONeill. Like him, these artists possess one thing that lends their attempts power even when they fail: reach. Prior to writing his famous autobiographical masterworks (Long Days Journey into Night and Moon for the Misbegotten), ONeill embarked on (and abandoned incomplete) a vast, nine-play historical cycle: A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed, a name that equally suits Schenkkans own nine-play saga. (You might turn this around to describe August Wilsons decade-by-decade, African-American history cycle-in-the-making. Call it: The Dispossessed, Self-repossessed.) Unlike contemporary epicists, however, ONeills obsessions remained firmly planted within the four walls of the family manse. Im not giving a damn whether the dramatic event of each play has any significance in the growth of the country or not, he wrote a friend. The Cycle isthe history of a family.I dont want anyone to get the idea that this Cycle is much concerned with what is usually understood by American history, for it isnt. History of Photojournalism EssaySmith, on the other hand, starts simple and lets lifes complications accrue. She never manipulates, but instead lets our sympathies go where they will. She remains aloof from her characters, even as she captures them incisively. She refuses historian-speakthe surety of the single voiceopting instead for inclusive oral history. She serves up the knotty contradictions of racial and ethnic unrest and leaves us to untangle the knot. If she delivers any remedy at all, its a talking-cure. HER ENDING EXEMPLIFIES a mindful, hands-off attitude. As Twilight Bey, one of the architects of the Crip/Blood gang truce, (echoing earlier words of cultural critic Homi Bhabha) she/he reminds us that the limbo-light of dusk is a valuable time, a time when, paradoxically, we can see things we miss in the light. I see darkness as myself. I see the light as knowledge and the wisdom of the world and understanding others, and in order for me to be a, to be a true human being I cant forever dwell in darkness, I cant forever dwell in the idea of just identifying with people like me Now is such a time, she suggests, standing against the twilight sky in Dashiki tunic and Kente cloth hat; its an opportunity to identify with difference, to see, in the ethnic tensions of our nation, truths about the American character that more usual light obscures. In Angels, difference is more ideological than ethnic, and the battle is fought, not in the streets, but in the body, mind and heart. Stasis versus progressthese are Kushners dueling ideologies. The former is embodied by conservative Republicans, specifically in the compelling evil of Roy Cohn, and by the Angels, who want mankind to hobble itself, to grow roots and stand still. Progress means liberationracial, sexual and individual liberationand the mysterious work of building a better world. Even on a personal level, Angels concerns staying still or moving on, as one partner in each of the two central couples leaves, one abandoning his sick lover, the other his agoraphobic, valium-popping wife. Kushner precisely locates the play in contemporary history, 1985-90, the height of the Bush/Reagan era and the beginning of the restructuring of eastern Europe. This also covers the five years prophet Prior Walter has lived with AIDS. As Kushner scours this premillennial moment for the real sources of disease, he keeps his perspective (and ours) flipping. His sweeping vision closes beneath the statue of an Angel, commemorating the Civil War dead. The emaciated Walter stands before it, surrounded by friends, waving at us and reminding us that the Great Work of life is always just beginning. If history will guide us in this great work, though, it wont be exact. Kushners prescription is necessarily as murky and difficult as Smiths, if more pleasantly upbeat. He combines images of disease (AIDS) and death (Civil War) with those of spiritual awakening (the Angel) and healing (her cleansing fountain). He adds a blessing for More Life. Kushner leaves us with a kind of painful progress. Longing for what weve left behind, and dreaming ahead. This painful progress is our hope in this time of transition, twilight, restructuring and revision. One century dies, and a version of America dies with it. Another stands waiting to be born. We dream restlessly forward.