Wars and similar social depredations do not pause when we enter theaters, which means we cannot simply look for places to hide from challenges we’d rather didn’t exist.
A few hours after the United States launched a massive bombardment on Iran, I sat in a plush folding seat at the National Theater in Washington. I was there to see Stereophonic, a terrific theatrical production about a group of dysfunctional but highly creative musicians trying to record a new record. The show takes place in the mid-1970s, complete with bell bottom jeans, crocheted sweater vests, and a distinctly non-electronic vibe.
Outside the theater, located on Pennsylvania Avenue just two blocks from the White House, a showy display of police, uniformed secret service, and other security officials made it clear that events abroad might have echoes here. DC was on high alert. Citizens could carry on with their plans, but they should not—nor could not—ignore the realities.
Across the world: explosions. People literally ran for their lives. Armies clashed by night, and hour by hour a parade of self-important people wearing severe clothes held press conferences about entirely different kinds of theaters.
The theatrical experience in DC? Superb. Stereophonic is a smart character study about what can happen when a group of motivated, challenging, charged personalities lock themselves in a room with the task of creating something new. The show crackled with a clever script, snappy blasts of energetic music, and inspired stage direction. Fresh and compelling, it’s a great night at the theater.
Same planet, same time: as much fun as I had that night, I couldn’t forget the pain and fear that filled so many people elsewhere. The juxtaposition echoed and reverberated. Upstage, metaphorically speaking, a spotlight illuminated a swanky night on the town, my wife and me taking in a night at the theater. Downstage, bombs rained on cities and factories and people all across the Middle East.
By any measure, we are all subject to forces outside of our control, but there are clearly times in history that force us to wonder—and perhaps wish—for things to be different. The moral conundrum is whether it’s even possible to give oneself over to a night of artistic joy when tragic fires burn elsewhere. I treasure rare evenings seeing live theater. In other moments I take pleasure in figuring out how I might shoot a particular photograph or a script I’m readying for production. In all cases I’m aware that millions of others are not sharing my experience. They’re just hoping for ordinary things like clean water and a reassuring sunrise. When I churn about how some things feel profoundly out of balance, I realize it’s because some things are profoundly out of balance.
The adolescent in me wants to believe that art will save the world. The adult in me knows better. I know with certainty that there are no story collections or pieces of original choreography or sublime watercolor production designs that anyone can craft with any meaningful influence on the pervasive anger that’s increasingly scorching the world.
But as a matter of conscious consternation, I can’t brush my hands and accept that’s simply how things are. I can’t leave it at that. I might not be able to have a direct influence on lowering the temperature of my community, my country, or the world, but that doesn’t make me any less invested in paying attention. As a person who makes sense of life by putting ideas together, it’s my responsibility to make sure I pay attention to those aspects of the world that I wish did not exist. I believe all artists are responsible for paying attention. For myself, that wide perspective all the more reinvests a desire to create. But it also leaves me with a question.
Considering all of the many ways a person or a group of people might choose to structure their lives, how is it that so many so easily get swept into spending their precious days seeking to intimidate, or dominate, or destroy others? And if you think I’m offering an apologia for people who do not fit my own political view, read the preceding sentence again. I’m offering an equal-opportunity observation here, regardless of what political or national or religious team jersey you’re wearing. It doesn’t just apply to war. It applies to how we handle ourselves in business discussions, in school sports, in community relations, or in getting a better parking space.
If you think that’s a dumb bit of idealism, a left-leaning squeak from a naive voice, I challenge you to answer anyway. If your answer is an assertion that life is always about competition, about an endless grind for power and dominance in whatever arena you find yourself, I will politely send you off to do some more thinking. I accept that it may be true, but I also assert a conviction that it’s possible to choose to live differently. I believe that there are alternatives to self-consuming pursuits of dominance.
This is not easy. Alternatives are not natural. They must be learned. They must be created. Sadly, I also do not see them demonstrated very often, at least in consistent, constructive, sustainable ways.
I’ll speak for myself. I choose to create. I also choose to create with others who choose to create. I was not born knowing how to do anything that I can do today. Throughout my life I learned. I may do these things vocationally as a professional creative (to turn that adjective into a noun), but I like to think that my artistic muscles are just as useful when interacting with people in the world around me.
We cannot deny that competitive, often bellicose, often self-absorbed actions are not only common, but the norm. History demonstrates a categorical consistency that humanity, collectively speaking, is not generally made of groups that are very good to each other. The primary tendency through history writ small and large appears to be a constant pursuit of superiority. We angle against each other. We carry grudges. We are reluctant to share unless we calculate a benefit to ourselves in the process. While some people may sing songs of humanity’s underlying goodness— an arbitrary word in this context if ever there was one—it would appear on the merits that we are driven by other forces first. I want to believe otherwise, but the evidence does not encourage me.
Let’s go back to that night at the theater in the heart of DC. The show was a celebration of life, and I’m not talking about the story or the script. The very act of putting on a play is a moment of life’s great expression. A group of actors and lighting techs and costumers and musicians and many more got together to create something that didn’t exist before they determined to give it breath. That’s what storytelling is: it celebrates being alive. Theater is always a collaborative act. Yes, we’ve all heard about out-of-control productions— egomaniacal actors and diva directors and the like— but that’s not the general vibe. Theater is a space for creative people to work together to make something that did not exist before. If things go well, they tell a story. In telling that story, the storytellers live and the characters live and the culture…lives.
That’s why I found myself so moved by the sharp juxtaposition of where I was that night placed against the horrific events happening simultaneously around the world. Pursuit of life is not described by emerging victorious after a fight. Pursuit of life is figuring out how to work and live and create with people you might never expect to work with in the first place.