Democracy, conversations and theater

Tomorrow the United States celebrates its independence and our love for democracy. But perhaps it’s time to reflect on democracy — and how conversations in non-political but highly participatory contexts can shape a civilization. Or how isolation and apathy can erode its soul.

My good friend and the brilliant director, playwright and Trinity Rep artistic director Curt Columbus recently talked about this notion with graduating students at Brown University, and shared his notes with me.

Curt explains that throughout history people have defined their selves and negotiated the rules of their societies by participating in raucous public forums, where all voting citizens participate. And these forums are theaters.

• Think of the influence of the play Persians on the Athenian culture – after the Athenians had just defeated the Persians. The play empathizes with the Persians rather than just hero worshipping the victorious Athenian warriors. And the Athenians choose to be a civilized society rather than ruthless conquerors.

• Or how Shakespeare influenced the culture during the Elizabethan era, helping people to understand what it meant to be English in that turbulent time.

Curt contends that today we need theater and its shared conversations and experiences more than ever. Here are his views:

“So you might say, Curt, these are interesting demonstrations of the theater’s historical importance, but what does this have to do with us in a 21^st century, technologically sophisticated American democracy.

Noam Chomsky said, ‘The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.’

I will go a step further. The most effective way to restrict democracy is to hand over decision making power, and then become increasingly isolated, increasingly unwilling to collect, to connect, and to converse.

I believe that we reached another of those historical moments when the culture needs the theater.

The media in our cultural has raised its volume to a deafening roar. People are starving for a genuine point of interaction, a way to fight the isolation of television and film and internet. They want to find meaning through conversation, through community. And they want to collect in a room with other people to find themselves engaged, enlightened and entertained. The theater is at the crest of a cultural tidal wave in America, if we will just take our place there.

The American archeologist Howard Winters said, ‘Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ and at the same time decreases those labeled ‘you’ or ‘them’ until that category has no one left in it.’

And University of Chicago educator Robert Hutchins said, ‘The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.’

I’m sure there is a small amount of self-aggrandizement in thinking that theater can save American democracy. But I know that the great Theater is a place where you see the other, walk in their shoes, which is the ultimate humanist act, and where you rub up against the rest of the world, outside your limitations, outside your comfort zone. And that is where the democratic impulse begins at the very least.”

Happy 4^th of July.