Hmmm. I'm not sure how to gage something like "sincerity" with anything other than my subjective response to The Exonerated. So:
There were two emotions I found myself feeling the most strongly as I read the play. One is outrage. There are several scenes in the play when police officers and the court system display blatant corruption, abuse, neglect, and just plain arrogance to the people being interrogated/judged. The dialogue spoke for itself, as on page 18 when Gary is being interrogated and bullied by police officers ("How could you kill this woman?")--we didn't need someone describing the injustice of the system. It's almost as though when the audience has the freedom to judge what's happening as unfair as opposed to being preached to, that's how the heartstrings are plucked. At least, it's how people are "moved" in a way that motivates them to take action in the social realm. It reminds me of Brecht: "Plunged in self-identification with the protagonist's feelings, virtually the whole audience failed take part in the moral decisions of which the plot is made up" (28). After discussing his 'street scene', Brecht then says that "the object of the performance is to make is easier to give an opinion on the incident" (28).
I know the discussion had to do with epic theater and the hypothetical assumed reenactment of an actual incident. But still, alongside the first quote about "moral decisions," when I first read it I remember thinking, "Is that why we go to theater? To take part in moral decisions? I don't know if I like that." Doesn't it just reify the problem some of the theorists we've read--including Brecht himself--have with the 'wishy-washy' theological bent of Western philosophy? If Western philosophy is so crippled by too God-driven a worldview tainting our formulations of right and wrong, why is the best thing about theater a discussion about right and wrong? Because it's nominally a secular cultural site in which to have it?
Speaking of nominally secular cultural sites, Rolling Stone had an interview with Jon Stewart last fall (behind a paywall, sadly, but I can email people a scan if they want it) wherein he says:
"What annoys me most is when people are being disengenuous. To be able to see them contradict themselves--it's the magic of TiVo. Some of it is spurred from all of us talking around the office: "I'm sure that guy fucking said the exact opposite thing six months ago." Trying to line those quotes up -we call it the one-to-one. "Can you get a one-to-one with that? If you can get a one-to-one with a guy saying the exact opposite of what he said today, then you don't even have to do anything. You can just lay them back-to-back and sit back and giggle."
In my opinion, The Exonerated does much the same thing as Stewart's "one-to-one". Dialogue that spoke for itself caused an emotive reaction in me as audience member/reader, because things weren't fair! It's a solid point on which to convince me of the importance of "showing and not telling": the moved-ness of an audience hangs in the balance. Perhaps Brecht loves the theater for being the place where I'm most likely to have a moral reaction to something and consider the reasons why outside of a place like church, where people also sit and receive a dramatic presentation or riveting story, but often a critical explication of it also.
The other strong feeling I had was sadness, and I teared up most when Sunny describes the terrible botching of her husband's execution, one that lengthened his agony to thirteen minutes and set his head on fire. I'm not sure if it was the details, but I was saddened further by the fact that I responded specifically to them: I almost felt guilty, for being touched the most when someone gave me grisly details. I remember thinking, "Am I having a reaction, or am I a consumer?"
As for the impact of celebrity, I guess I wasn't surprised by the all-star roster of past performers of The Exonerated. Actors were able to contribute to a social justice cause by doing something that they do anyway, something that presumably rewarded and challenged them. I was most struck, actually, by reading in Blank and Jensen's "Uses of Empathy" piece that the actors started weeping when they heard, along with the audience, that a few of the exonerated themselves were also in the theater. What must that have felt like? To have been the conduit "channeling" who has contemplated the human suffering enough to play a part, and then be faced with the concrete figure of the person who lived that past?
There were two emotions I found myself feeling the most strongly as I read the play. One is outrage. There are several scenes in the play when police officers and the court system display blatant corruption, abuse, neglect, and just plain arrogance to the people being interrogated/judged. The dialogue spoke for itself, as on page 18 when Gary is being interrogated and bullied by police officers ("How could you kill this woman?")--we didn't need someone describing the injustice of the system. It's almost as though when the audience has the freedom to judge what's happening as unfair as opposed to being preached to, that's how the heartstrings are plucked. At least, it's how people are "moved" in a way that motivates them to take action in the social realm. It reminds me of Brecht: "Plunged in self-identification with the protagonist's feelings, virtually the whole audience failed take part in the moral decisions of which the plot is made up" (28). After discussing his 'street scene', Brecht then says that "the object of the performance is to make is easier to give an opinion on the incident" (28).
I know the discussion had to do with epic theater and the hypothetical assumed reenactment of an actual incident. But still, alongside the first quote about "moral decisions," when I first read it I remember thinking, "Is that why we go to theater? To take part in moral decisions? I don't know if I like that." Doesn't it just reify the problem some of the theorists we've read--including Brecht himself--have with the 'wishy-washy' theological bent of Western philosophy? If Western philosophy is so crippled by too God-driven a worldview tainting our formulations of right and wrong, why is the best thing about theater a discussion about right and wrong? Because it's nominally a secular cultural site in which to have it?
Speaking of nominally secular cultural sites, Rolling Stone had an interview with Jon Stewart last fall (behind a paywall, sadly, but I can email people a scan if they want it) wherein he says:
"What annoys me most is when people are being disengenuous. To be able to see them contradict themselves--it's the magic of TiVo. Some of it is spurred from all of us talking around the office: "I'm sure that guy fucking said the exact opposite thing six months ago." Trying to line those quotes up -we call it the one-to-one. "Can you get a one-to-one with that? If you can get a one-to-one with a guy saying the exact opposite of what he said today, then you don't even have to do anything. You can just lay them back-to-back and sit back and giggle."
In my opinion, The Exonerated does much the same thing as Stewart's "one-to-one". Dialogue that spoke for itself caused an emotive reaction in me as audience member/reader, because things weren't fair! It's a solid point on which to convince me of the importance of "showing and not telling": the moved-ness of an audience hangs in the balance. Perhaps Brecht loves the theater for being the place where I'm most likely to have a moral reaction to something and consider the reasons why outside of a place like church, where people also sit and receive a dramatic presentation or riveting story, but often a critical explication of it also.
The other strong feeling I had was sadness, and I teared up most when Sunny describes the terrible botching of her husband's execution, one that lengthened his agony to thirteen minutes and set his head on fire. I'm not sure if it was the details, but I was saddened further by the fact that I responded specifically to them: I almost felt guilty, for being touched the most when someone gave me grisly details. I remember thinking, "Am I having a reaction, or am I a consumer?"
As for the impact of celebrity, I guess I wasn't surprised by the all-star roster of past performers of The Exonerated. Actors were able to contribute to a social justice cause by doing something that they do anyway, something that presumably rewarded and challenged them. I was most struck, actually, by reading in Blank and Jensen's "Uses of Empathy" piece that the actors started weeping when they heard, along with the audience, that a few of the exonerated themselves were also in the theater. What must that have felt like? To have been the conduit "channeling" who has contemplated the human suffering enough to play a part, and then be faced with the concrete figure of the person who lived that past?
1 comment:
I had similar feelings of outrage and sadness as I read this play. I was angry at the policemen who through hasty assumptions or vengeance or apathy mistreated their suspects, but I was more outraged at the judge who overruled objections in Kerry's case or the lawyers who let Sunny and her husband stay in prison for years after their accuser confessed. Maybe I expected the police to act that way, and so their dialogue and actions didn't produce as sincere a reaction.
But the death of Sunny's husband was so gruesome that I found myself feeling shock and horror rather than sadness and empathy. I did feel sadness at other points in the play, but only at the human side of these tragedies: Sunny separated from her husband and children, Kerry raped and scarred in prison.
I also felt guilty as I read parts of the play, especially at the beginning when we're finding out what crimes each of them were convicted of, and also at the end when we find out in some cases who actually committed the crime. It's the kind of plain curiosity I might feel watching an episode of CSI. In the context of a play, it was easy to lose my sense of these characters as real people, and it would probably be even easier if the actors portraying them were celebrities. I'm glad you brought up the term 'consumer' because it describes some of the reservations I had about my own reaction to the piece. Where is the line between empathy and entertainment? How would it change the way we view this play if it were a fictional creation instead of a documentary drama?
Post a Comment