It seems only fitting that all three shows I saw during my days at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. had political affairs at their core. Arguendo, staged by Elevator Repair Service at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, took the transcript (memorized word-for-word, beat-for-beat, stutter-for-stutter by a tight ensemble) from a landmark Supreme Court case and staged it and other found interviews with projections, dance, and semi-stylized performance to create a piece that examined, in form and content, the myriad of issues inherent in legal matters concerning self-expression. Camp David at Center Stage, meanwhile, gave a more straightforward (though still semi-fictionalized as opposed to drawn-from-document) account of President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 summit with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt at the legendary presidential getaway. Finally, there was Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II at the Shakespeare Theatre, a slick staging of arguably the most muddled play in the “Henry Cycle.”
As these brief descriptions show, each play provided a radically different take on how to stage the political. The case at the center of Arguendo is Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc., in which two strip clubs in South Bend, Indiana sued for the right to allow fully nude dancing in their clubs. The case bounced back and forth from court to court before finally landing at the nation’s highest authority, resulting in a long, complicated, and often rather absurd discussion among legal representatives and the nine Supreme Court Justices (just imagine former Chief Justice William Rehnquist speaking at length about pasties and G-strings for a moment). One of the many issues at the heart of the case concerned the meaning and medium of the messages we send, particularly with our bodies. What is the message being sent by nude dancing? And is it so very different from nudity in, as the justices often pointed out, an opera? Could the dancers achieve the same desired effects (whatever those may be) by dancing in pasties and G-strings? At what point does the medium of the message trump (or enhance) the content of the message? What this piece did so brilliantly was literally stage a similar discussion. By painstakingly recreating the courtroom argument and interviews with representatives and other figures and at the same time layering in movement (via a great deal of choreographed rolly-chair dancing, “chairography” as I call it) and caricature, Elevator Repair Service drew attention to the underlying absurdities and politics of expression within the case. It may not have been entirely effective (the stylized movement could have been dispersed throughout the piece much more liberally, and methinks ending with a naked man dancing around is perhaps a bit too “on the nose”), but it still offered a fascinating take on staging the political. On the one hand, they stuck to the script impeccably (trust me: you can listen to the recordings in the theatre lobby and check them for accuracy), so you can’t fault their research, but on the other hand, there’s the bodily layer, the body in motion and in presence, that a recording can never capture, and what they created with their bodies cycled from being in tune with to diametrically opposed to what was being said, offering all sorts of instructive juxtapositions. It reminded me of the fact that most of what we communicate to each other and to the public at large is non-verbal; it is in the body (and even in pitch and tone as opposed to literal words) that we create most of our meaning.
While Arguendo was surprising and politically/aesthetically challenging, Camp David was mostly dull and, in the end, quite disappointing. The best I can say for Camp David is that it offered an interesting counterpoint to Arguendo; where as the former had mixed real accounts with fantasized movement, the latter sought to make a place for itself in the already overstuffed arena of true stories rendered in the “realistic” mold. The play, written by Pultizer Prize-winning journalist (journalist, not playwright, as became very apparent) Lawrence Wright, seemed like a badly cobbled together TV movie that tried to create a sort of liberal fantasy-memory about one of history’s most maligned Presidents. It had the potential to be an interesting enough story: three major world leaders of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ideologies gather together to hash out a peace deal between two old enemies. Unfortunately, all the play’s many potential themes (particularly faith) were jammed into proceedings with the force of a sledgehammer, which disrupted a script already riddled with over-articulated arguments, conversational non sequiturs trying to pass for wit (or something), and unnecessary scene changes that slowed the pace and took all the tension out of the great debate. The acting was all over the place as well, with Ron Rifkin, in the role of Prime Minister Begin, ultimately, as our dramaturgy mentor Mark Bly noted, dragging the play over the line with his own (considerable) expertise. Ironically, Hallie Foote, who was arguably the weakest one in the cast, had the most interesting role. She played President Carter’s wife Rosalynn, and her encounters with Begin and President Sadat were so much more delicate and layered than the many, many showdowns between the three “real” leaders; give me a play about a First Lady subtly manipulating the egos around her over a staged pissing contest any day, says I. Beyond the technical issues, Camp David really let me down because it offered so little in the way of ambition. Sure, it’s hard to measure up to something as flashy as Arguendo, but if nothing else the play could have done a better job of challenging our perceptions of these three men and the work they did, rather than just trying to idealize them and their meeting on that famous country estate.
Whereas there were plenty of quibbles about Camp David‘s production values, Henry IV, Part II had much to praise. The play itself is, as Shakespeare Theatre Literary Associate Drew Lichtenberg contends, is the Empire Strikes Back of a Henry IV, I and II and Henry V trilogy; it has a lot of heavy lifting to do when it comes to stitching all the various strands of the story together, which means it can seem rather cobbled together at times (a better analogy might be The Two Towers in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy; Empire is, after all, in many ways the best of the Star Wars Saga). Still, there were plenty of fine performances (Stacy Keach was a hoot as Falstaff) and the whole thing was handsomely designed. What was frustrating about this production, though, was that it was so “faithfully” (e.g. done in more or less period style), barring one tiny little piece of transhistorical flair at the very beginning. The play opens with a weakened Northumberland asleep in bed as Warkworth, dressed in contemporary garb and sporting a tabloid rag shouting “ELVIS ALIVE,” gives the prologue, which concerns the ubiquity of rumor. These seems to set up a Warkworth and others as pseduo-modern commentators on the affairs of Prince Hal et al., yet nothing and no one even reminiscent of the modern realm is ever seen or heard from again. This seems a wasted opportunity; rumor is such a powerful force in political affairs, especially in affairs of state and especially in the capital of the world’s most powerful nation, so why not build more bridges between Shakespeare’s world and ours? Why titillate us with that initial connection and then drop it? If nothing else, blending the historical lines a bit more might have gone some way to making the play easier to follow…
While I cannot speak to the full smorgasbord of theatre on offer in D.C. on a season-by-season basis, I can say that it was pleasing to see such politically engaged work in our nation’s capital; I wonder what else an in-depth study of theatre season programming might show. Sadly, only one of the shows I saw (in my opinion at least) took full advantage of this opportunity to really examine political process and debate; the other two, as far as I’m concerned, played it far too safe…which might, in a way, make them the more political (or politically savvy) shows after all, which may be what Washington, D.C. is really looking for. Perhaps this deserves further investigation…