Emily Klein

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Dissertation Overview

In this dissertation I argue that American political activists have been particularly attracted to the stage as a place to "act out" their opposition. Long before corporate America latched onto concepts like “viral marketing,” successful activists have understood the potential of staged performance to transmit ideas to their audiences, who would then transmit those ideas to their own social networks. But what rhetorical and narrative elements have made it possible for national and international activist performers to reach large, mainstream audiences? My project, located at the disciplinary intersection of performance studies, cultural studies, and theatre history, employs a grounded, historical approach to investigate how certain twentieth century American activists narrated their goals in ways that effectively attracted and empowered diverse audiences. Not accidentally, female theatrical activists are often at the center of my story; while women have not always been embraced as cultural producers in the more highly capitalized forms of culture (film, TV, etc.), theatre has been a more accessible platform for feminist activists across the Americas.

Chapter One: The Activist Aesthetics of Democratic Participation: Bridging Cultural Studies and Performance Theory

I begin with a historical overview of the innovations in political theatre that have influenced the key performance groups in this study, including the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, Brecht's Theatre of Alienation, Russian agitprop, and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. In this section I introduce the two linked discourses I trace throughout the project--the discourse of political theatre as a way to promote specific socio-political ideals, and the discourse of theatre as a social good unto itself. Here I argue for a new, interdisciplinary approach to cultural and performance studies that acknowledges their shared concern with cultural resistance, individual agency, and the relationship between marginalized groups and dominant structures of power. By looking more closely at the methods activists use to express dissent and promote democratic participation, I offer one possible model for scholarship that bridges two disparate fields.

Chapter Two: Living Newspapers and the Construction of the Citizen-Activist: Shaping Depression Era Patriotism at the Theatre

I have chosen the Federal Theatre Project as my first case study because its inception marks the moment in U.S. history when we came closest to establishing a National Theatre. Though the experiment did not survive the Depression, I am drawn to the FTP’s Living Newspaper performances because their creators made such a bold connection between the ideas of performance and citizenship. In this chapter I use published and archival materials, including journal articles, internal memos, and government reports to show how performers and public activists championed the value of the theatre and the social awareness it promoted. Relief workers with training as actors, directors, and technicians worked with unemployed journalists to script and stage plays based on issues in the news, such as the lack of affordable housing in cities and the need for public ownership of utilities. Audience feedback forms collected after these shows indicate that in suggesting how playgoers might consume and respond to news issues, these performances not only influenced popular conceptions of participatory democracy, but they also changed the way working class Americans viewed the theatre. By bringing newspaper articles to life in public settings at minimal cost to ticket-buyers, this government agency gave Depression-era audiences access to both a form of entertainment and a form of civic participation that previously had been considered out of reach for most Americans.

Chapter Three: Spectacular Citizenships: Staging Latina/o Resistance and Relajo through Performances of Pain

In this chapter I move from the "national" theatre of the American 1930s to consider a range of Mexican-American, Latin American and Latina/o forms of protest performance. I start with an analysis of El Teatro Campesino's work in 1965 and go on to investigate its formal connections to the contemporary women's collectives, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and Teatro Luna. I conceive of these three groups as connected points, crucial to understanding the legacy of Latina/o-American activist performance. Each of the groups use Latin and Latina/o performance conventions in different ways, but their narratives all demonstrate a critical investment in the idea that performance offers citizens a method to rehearse their political engagement. Moreover, these groups each use radical street performance to interrogate the validity of cultural archetypes, and they all draw on Latina/o theatre traditions, like the bawdy, raucous spirit of what Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez calls “relajo” to create a new kind of American activist theatre geared towards politicizing culturally diverse audiences.

Chapter Four: Feminist Anti-War Activism and The Structures of Trauma in the Plays of Eve Ensler and Kathryn Blume

In this chapter I move closer to our current moment to examine two U.S.-based theatrical activists whose central concerns are the intertwined and international problems of sexual violence and war: Kathryn Blume and Eve Ensler. Kathryn Blume's Lysistrata Project (2003) encouraged citizens to stage their own Lysistrata performances in protest against the Iraq war, while Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues (1996), has spawned an annual Valentine's Day anti-violence movement as well as an international women's organization. Both Ensler and Blume have used viral transmission techniques to empower individuals to stage their own performances and become part of the protest. By interpreting personal narratives from Blume and Ensler alongside the texts of The Vagina Monologues and Aristophanes' Lysistrata, I examine how these activist performers see their popular and populist work in the theatre as helping to promote civic engagement by transmitting personal trauma from actors to audience. Activism within these artists’ narratives is understood within the Freudian framework of remembering, repeating and working-through. For Blume and Ensler, repeating painful memories is a way of achieving personal catharsis and inciting audiences to take action against systems that perpetuate violence and inequality.

Chapter Five: “Like Fire Departments and Clean Air:” Marketing Theatre to the Masses as an Essential Public Good

As a point of contrast, my project’s concluding chapter interrogates questions about performance and activism from an administrative perspective. Theatre Bay Area, a San Francisco non-profit theatre organization, recently established a campaign to promote the idea of the theatre as a public good, “as critical to a healthy society as fire departments, free speech and clean air.” As a former member of this organization, I find their linguistic framing of theatre's social and civic value especially compelling. Their message, alternately aimed at funders and artists, policy makers and the general public, uses a number of different strategies to imply a direct relationship between our civic right to public theatre and a healthy public sphere. Thus, Theatre Bay Area, like the performers in my case studies, offers an argument about the transformative power of performance. Through the eyes of these activists, we can begin to understand the theatre as a potent force for political imagining as it models engaged citizenship as the key to social change.