Theater of the Absurd

Have you tried to see a play or musical lately that appeals to your vision of the great America that once was? Well, good luck.

By Paul Bond

ooking for a lavish hit play that’s fun for the whole family? Wicked fits the bill. Kids especially love the catchy music, flying monkeys, and colorful little Munchkins.

The trade-off? In order to fully appreciate the pageantry, you either have to ignore — or agree with — the preachy political messages.

Wicked skewers the Bush administration’s war on terror and attacks the quaint notion that evildoers should be punished. Its efforts appear to have paid off: The play won three Tony awards and broke box-office records in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, and London.

By leaning far to the left, Wicked is a lot like most hit stage plays in which a political message lurks. Although there has been a smattering of conservative, Christian-themed plays, most have been small, amateur affairs. That has many in the industry asking why there aren’t more big-budget stage productions that buck liberal dogma.

Whither the plays challenging global-warming hysteria, or touting competition and capitalism over collectivism? Where are the acts with a pro-life message?

According to entertainment insiders, such scripts simply are not being written. That has even progressives in the theater business decrying the one-sidedness.

Chris Wiger, literary manager for the Denver Center Theatre Company, says he would be thrilled to feature a play with a conservative message, just to mix things up a bit. He reads 500 scripts a year in search of plays deserving a green light.

“About half of them have a political point of view that is usually right there on the page, and 95 percent of those are liberal.” Asked to describe one of the 5 percent that were not left leaning, he amended his estimate.

“Actually, I can’t think of even one,” says Wiger, a self-described liberal.

“The theater would be a lot more interesting if it reflected the whole country,” he says. “Audiences are mixed, but playwrights aren’t.”

Wiger says that, all things being equal, he’d prefer to make a conservative play rather than a liberal one, for the sake of intellectual diversity. But others shun that approach. Jeffrey Tangeman, a professional play director who teaches script analysis at Ithaca College in New York, says he reads 200 plays a year, and about 80 percent lean left.

“Conservatives don’t explore the arts as much as do liberals,” he conveys. “Certainly they appreciate them, but beyond that, they don’t see as much value.”

Regardless of the dearth of right-leaning plays, conservative playwrights get no special consideration akin to affirmative action. In fact, Tangeman says that, if he were confronted with two scripts equally entertaining but with opposite political messages, he’d opt for the one he agreed with. The one on the left, he admits.

“I’m looking for compelling characters on interesting journeys,” he says. “That being said, I’d take the play on the left that I’m impassioned by.”

“That’s my choice,” he says, adding, “If it’s important to conservatives to have plays they agree with, then why aren’t they making them?” A good question.

It could be they’re worried about their careers. Scott Eckern, after all, was forced to resign his post as artistic director of the California Musical Theatre after he angered liberals by donating money to support Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex marriage.

Liberals say, however, that conservatives don’t delve into the creative side of the theater business because there’s not enough money there. Or, they say, conservatives are incapable of defending their views in an entertaining way.

Nonsense, says Evan Sayet, who heads a right-leaning troupe of comedians. The reason conservatives aren’t writing and directing theater productions is because they are grown-ups.

“The profession of ‘show’ is childish,” he says. “We don’t even call it ‘work.’ We call it ‘play.’ Show business is an immature way of looking at the world.”

Sayet knows the stage well. His Right to Laugh show has been a hit at The Laugh Factory in Hollywood for a year, and he has taken it to stages across the country. He is considering introducing political skits into the act.

It’s been done with success before, most notably by a troupe called the Capitol Steps who rely mostly on song parody to skewer both the right and the left. The group, which several Senate staffers started in 1981 and now includes members who have not been congressional workers, has earned kudos for being both clever and evenhanded.

After George W. Bush defeated Al Gore for the presidency, for example, Capitol Steps sang of Florida’s deplorable hanging-chads controversy to the tune of the 1966 Supremes song, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” More recently, the group sang of depressed retirement accounts in a song called “401K,” sung to the tune of The Village People’s “YMCA.”

But conservatives looking for something meatier and perhaps more partisan in their favor, for a change, may have a new champion in David Mamet.

The famed playwright, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, declared last year that he is no longer a liberal, gladdening the hearts of conservative theatergoers everywhere.

Americans, Mamet famously wrote when coming out of the closet as a nonliberal, “are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be.”

AP IMAGES

As originally published in Newsmax magazine.