9/11 Response- Iris

After reading the prompt of this assignment, I found myself thinking of Brecht. I wondered if he would have hated the post-9/11 phenomenon, the constant viewing and reviewing of the footage of the towers, the flags that sprouted from our t-shirts and windows, the tears. There was no disengagement, no audience remove- for a week or two after the attacks, such remove would have been seen as impossible. For many weeks thereafter, it would have been seen as un-American. There was no man on the streetcorner, demonstrating a car crash to his captive audience- the captive audience had seen the car crash for themselves, and was deeply in mourning.

I'm not saying that this national outpouring of feeling was a bad thing, or a disingenuous thing. But I do think it was a dangerous thing. And I think Brecht would have been pretty horrified by the results. Case talks about how the theatrical drama of tragedy "invented the audience as a collective unity that, from somewhere outside of the action, could witness and judge." I think we, as a nation, were indeed an audience to a tragedy. But what we did with our experience- and what we allowed to be done for us- sounds to me like the response of someone who has had no remove, no disengagement, no time to sit and breathe and think. In other words, an audience acting like an angry mob.

I worry that I'm ranting- instead of focusing on what Brecht might have hated, let me tell you what I, personally, loved. I loved John Stewart. I loved the way he opened his broadcast by asking the audience the same question that he'd been asking everyone since the attacks- "Are you okay?" I think this is the single most important sentiment that theater and performance has brought us, post-9/11. I think that it's the reason we don't yet have a really good 9/11 play. We start to think about what happened that day, and it becomes impossible to answer that question. Am I okay? Of course I'm not okay, I'm a mess! Artaud was right, the sky is literally falling around our headings and I can't freaking handle it! Theater is immediate, it's visual, it's visceral, and no amount of spectacle or technical ingenuity can rival what we saw on our televisions, over and over. No set piece or lighting design, no matter how spare or symbolic, can compare to the terrible feeling in my stomach when I realized that there were people in those buildings. We want so badly to write a story that will give great meaning and structure to this violence, but what is the story? If it is the story of one person, how could they possibly incorporate all of the feelings that we felt into a coherent, meaningful message? What did we learn? (Did we learn anything?)

So we can't write the 9/11 play yet, not in the way that "Angels in America" became the AIDS play or "The Crucible" became the McCarthy play. We're not there yet, and that's okay. But I do believe that that play will get written, and if it's as good as the other two plays I mentioned, I believe it will bring us some measure of piece in its storytelling. Dolan talks beautifully about how "the space of performance must be harnessed to imagine love instead of hatred, to create hopeful fictions of meaningful lives instead of senseless deaths." We'll keep trying to write that play, because we'll keep trying to make sense of what happened. The impulse to write is the same as the impulse to donate blood- it's private, and personal, and painful. It's never enough. It has to be enough. Eventually, it will be enough.