It seems to me that
the most useful contribution of theatre and performance to the circumstances of
9/11 has altered dramatically as time has passed from the date of the event. I’m
still not sure, as Jess writes in her post, that enough time has passed to truly
represent the event through art in any sort of productive, critical, or successful
way (I’m not even sure what those would look like). But I do think that there
has been a shift in art’s response to the event over the past eleven years.
At first, in the
days and weeks immediately following the event, it did seem like “escape” might
have been the most useful function of theater and entertainment. But maybe not
a normal type of escape – the theatrical trance that Brecht abhors. The escape
offered after 9/11, as is evident from our readings for this week, had an
important and necessary memorial element to it. The examples from the NY Times
article, “Lights On, Broadway Dispels the Dark,” of casts singing songs like
“God Bless America” with the audiences before and after the shows, or Jon
Stewart’s apology for “another entertainment show beginning with an overwrought
speech of a shaken host” – these performances importantly did not ignore what
had happened. Rather, they paid homage to the event and the country during the
difficult time, but then went on entertaining. Sure, as A-J Aronstein points
out in his article on SplitSider, comedy in the immediate aftermath was much
more subdued and was grounded in a sense of sincerity that we might not
normally associate with it. But Broadway was back up and running in two days. Jennifer
DeVere Brody, as she writes in the “Forum on Tragedy,” went to the theater
literally the same day she visited ground zero for the first time. I’m not at
all arguing that Brody or Broadway are somehow being disrespectful to the
sacredness surround the events of 9/11. In fact, I think performance, in the
immediate aftermath of the event and because
of its acknowledgment of and reverence for what happened, provided a very
important outlet for people throughout the country to immerse themselves in
sheer entertainment.
Now that eleven
years have passed, though, I believe (or hope) we’re starting to gain a
different, more critical perspective to the events that occurred. Very shortly
after the events, in her 2003 book The
Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor points out many of the problematic
patterns surrounding the political response to 9/11 – “Women were noticeably
absent that first week…Should the instant feminization of loss surprise us? Or
the masculinist rush to save the day” (Taylor 244). Similarly, the responders
in the “Forum on Tragedy,” published a little over two months after the event,
are already able to maintain enough critical distance to evaluate whether or
not we should be labeling the event as a “tragedy.”
However, this
temporal distance might already be doing the memory of this event a disservice.
In her article “The Theater of 9/11,” Diep Tran articulates her response to the
“Pieces of Paper” multimedia piece by Michael Simon Hall: “I experienced a
quiet thoughtful evening that did not inspire tears but rather, a feeling of
wonder; wonder for that universal sense of human compassion and how effective
art can be in contextualizing, making sense of tragedy and eventually moving
forward from it.” First, I cannot believe that this single piece of performance
art allowed Tran to effectively “make sense of the tragedy and move forward
from it.” It seems reductive to believe that one piece of art could effect such
a transformation. Second, the “sense of human compassion” that Tran describes
might very well have been a factor in the large-scale volunteer movements
immediately after 9/11 that “Pieces of Paper” memorializes, but by describing
this sense as “universal,” I worry that we’re already starting to idealize the
national response to the event qua Roach.
“Selective memory requires public enactments of forgetting…more desperately to
exaggerate [the calamities] in order to mystify a previous Golden Age, now
lapsed” (Roach 3). There were plenty of American reactions after the event that
seemed to have very little to do with human compassion. Isn’t it equally
important that we remember and reflect on those reactions?
It seems important
to me that we find the right balance between acknowledging and respecting the
personal trauma that we all experienced very directly or indirectly on that
day, and maintaining enough critical distance to allow us to use an effective
medium like performance to evaluate the political, social, and personal responses
in the immediate aftermath of the event. I don’t know that we’ve succeeded in
dealing with either of these perspectives on their own as of yet, so any sort
of balance between the two is merely a hope for the very distant future.
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