A Carl of Bind & Man. Is that anything? (Also, agent news!)

Okay folks, big stuff first. I am extremely thrilled to announce that I’ve signed with Rodney Swain at Swain-Thomas Agency for across-the-board representation in NYC and the Northeast. It’s going to be a busy autumn, I can feel it already. And now, back to your regularly scheduled newsletter/blog/thing.

*Static sound*

I’m back in New York after some time abroad that was socially, artistically, politically, and personally very educational. It’s been a long time since I was in another colonial metropole and if you’ll forgive me saying, London’s got juice. For example: the longest I waited for a subway over there was four minutes, which was itself the longest wait by roughly three minutes. Now, is that worth a few centuries of global pillage? Who can say. But coming back to New York which has all the pillage and none of the trains sure makes for a ~weird~ brain feeling!

Speaking of major cities with Muslim mayors: thank you, voters of the New York City Democratic primary, for believing in Zohran. You know how I say shit like “a better world is possible” and it’s really annoying and maybe even a lie I tell myself to fend off despair? It turns out it’s true! It’s actually true! I wasn’t lying! My god, it feels good to be on the winning side, for once, even a month and a half later. Onward to the general election!

Exit, democracy.

Among my recent travels, I went home to Montreal to see my parents. With them, I watched that CNN broadcast of Good Night, and Good Luck. Very parent-coded behaviour, especially with the TV motion smoothing that I’ve learned to stop complaining about. Look at me, not complaining.

The production was decent; I thought under-acted across the board (maybe to accommodate George?), a bit vague on the level of character while altogether too tidy and self-satisfied on structure (the “did you get it?!” video montage at the end made me want to die), but nevertheless very competent and without a doubt the most worthwhile thing CNN will air this year.

Actually watching the thing, though, gave me an intense and unshakeable feeling of unease (and not only because of the TV settings). At first I was just frustrated by wanting to see the whole stage instead of close-ups. That grew into an awareness of how much work the mediated boundary of the screen was doing in choosing what was seen and what was important, and from that point I began to bristle against how the broadcast was editing the show on my behalf. In so many words, I realized I was uncomfortable because I was watching TV pretending to be theatre and asking me not to notice the difference.

What I mean to say is by taking theatre out of the theatre and putting it on a television screen, its essential democratic characteristic is destroyed.¹ To watch theatre is to do democracy, in real and important ways. To watch TV is not. This failed transmutation was uncomfortable to witness, especially the invitation to play along in the illusion, and I think it signals a big problem for a play so enchanted with the television screen, in subject and in form. What the production does with Clooney’s unflappable characterization of Murrow, continually rendering him on giant simulated TVs onstage, positions him as a larger-than-life icon, a god, an inert symbol to be worshipped and obeyed. The show insists the symbol is benevolent; is it? I think the image of him overpowers the man, overpowers the audience, and overpowers the production’s argument for the positive impact of television in democracy, however ambivalently made.

Democracy is one of modern theatre’s great subjects, but I feel like theatre artists don’t have anywhere near the same mythology around their role as agents of democracy that, say, journalists do. I think that’s a mistake, on the whole! In any case, I was prompted by my disaffection with Good Night to reflect on how the current uhhh problems of democracy in America are reflected on stage.

Strictly comparing relevant Broadway work, we’ve got An Enemy of the People, which like Good Night takes as its subject a specific problem of democracy: assholes. We’ve got Cabaret, which takes as its subject the experience of living through the fall of democracy. We’ve got Hamilton, which is so optimistic about the American project that it hurts to think about, so I won’t.² And we’ve got Suffs, which I didn’t see so can’t get into.

Cabaret’s view of democratic society is unbearably cynical (I saw the Auliʻi Cravalho and Adam Lambert cast). The production posits with its big Emcee-goes-Nazi twist that the custodians of liberty are insincere, that freedom breeds degeneracy, and that nothing can resist the implacable advance of authoritarianism.

There’s a major wrinkle introduced with the casting of Cravalho as Sally Boyles and Calvin Leon Smith as Clifford Bradshaw. Rendering these characters as a Black American and an English Pacific Islander, in the 1930s, choosing to be there, not elsewhere, opens the door to thinking about what other kinds of freedom this society might offer beyond singing and dancing and boozing and fucking (not to discount the liberatory value of pleasure). But that gets ironed out: life is a cabaret, after all, so their commitments are merely hedonic, and only skin deep, and when the music stops our Black American will return home to collect himself in the safety of… segregated Pennsylvania? What? These people do the most baffling things, which makes it hard to read what their choices signify.

One clear thing is that the show’s primary gesture is to stage freedom for the sole purpose of crushing it. It seems to relish this power, in fact. Racial and religious integration? Crushed. Queer joy? Crushed. My bladder during the too-long first act? Crushed. The view is that love loses, that the options are conformity or death, and that when push comes to shove, everybody is just as rotten in their hearts as the worst of us. I don’t think it’s an accident or an oversight that these are the themes of fascism. I think the play is trying to do some sort of critique with this echoing, but it doesn’t have time to cohere in the second between staging fascism and then submitting to it. There’s something so smug here too, like I’m supposed to be impressed by the edginess, first with the flappers, then with the fascists. I’m not. There’s worse shit on the local news.

So that’s one theatrical response to the American political situation: surrender. A visit to the Kit Kat Club is an immersive experience of capitulation, no matter how winking or self-aware it might be (an open question).

For a counter-example, there’s An Enemy of The People. At first blush, the show seems to depict a failure of democracy in a libertarian sort of way; here’s the great individual with a special privilege, bravely resisting the wrongheaded masses and the corrupt fools that lead them to ruin! I thought this. But my esteem for the show has grown with time, and the picture is, I think, something else entirely.

For starters, and this might be obvious, the show stages a living liberal democracy in miniature. Civil society groups, the press, business interests, politicians, employees, owners, the intelligentsia, the home sphere, the public sphere; it’s all right there. That’s the guy who runs the newspaper. That’s the sailor, representing the workers! That’s the mayor! Hi, Mr. Mayor! This device illustrates very clearly how we arrived at the bad outcome of the problem of the play, like an instruction manual for how the machine works, while simultaneously inviting us to imagine other outcomes. It was all just people making choices; wouldn’t you have chosen otherwise?

This is so effective because theatre is the medium of people making choices, and every one of these choices, every compromise, every conversation, every twisted arm and regretful lie, is superbly grounded in realistic and legible interests and counter-interests. Things happen because these people negotiate, argue, and fight for what they want in their community. In other words, rather than politics happening to them, as in Cabaret, the characters are doing politics! They do it for themselves, and they do it for us, the largely silent public endowing our consent upon them to act for our benefit, in both senses of the word. So, that’s one mode in which the show is meaningfully democratic in a useful and interesting way: it depicts democracy, it depicts social agency.

The other thing is this. At the end of the play, after he has definitively lost the battle, Dr. Thomas Stockmann sticks around. Yes, the people are wrong. Yes, the leaders are corrupt. Yes, a bad thing has happened, to him and to his family and to his town. He thinks about leaving, about running away, but he can’t do it. He sincerely cares about his society and wants it improved, and so must stay and fight. To do otherwise would be to concede that things can’t ever be better; to betray himself, like his enemies have done—and what would then have been the point of fighting them, only to become them?

It’s a tragic ending in the sense of a tragedy having occurred, but I found in Jeremy Strong’s performance a profound affirmation of the basic premise of democracy. Here is a man who has learned at great cost that participation in society is not optional, and if you want to win, then you have to play.

Unlike Cabaret, An Enemy of the People doesn’t treat the failures of justice or freedom or truth as foregone conclusions, as excuses for cowardice, but as contested facts, questions never to be settled. It at least has that in common with Good Night, and Good Luck, but with the major benefit of a form that suits its content. The big differences here seem to hinge on what these plays view as the role of the citizen in society. Are they consumer, or participant?

John Dewey, philosopher of American political life, argued that for a democratic citizen, freedom is responsibility. At the closing of this American Republic, these are some of popular theatre’s responses to that notion: Cabaret shirks it, Good Night fetishizes it, and Enemy practices it. I know which one I prefer.

Love ya!

C

Links of interest:

Kate Wagner off the top rope, once again.

Speaking of our enemies in society.

Speaking of our other enemies in society.

Zohran Mamdani Better Get Ready To Fight The NYPD

Wall Street oligarchs aren't the only ones ringing the alarm against the people's mayoral candidate. That's the sound of the police

Speaking of etc. etc.

https://defector.com/the-new-york-times-clarifies-that-a-starving-child-in-gaza-also-needs-medical-care/

Speaking of speaking of speaking of speaking of.

Footnotes:

1. Axiomatically: A theatrical performance happens because of the collective and ongoing exchange of power and consent between performers and an active audience-public, any of whom can at any time change or stop the performance, or even swap places. One thinks of the climate protest at An Enemy of the People, for example. There is nothing an individuated and passive television audience-consumer can do to disrupt or alter a broadcast. It simply happens, and is a result of choices made by other people, belonging to other publics, elsewhere, in a unidirectional expression of power, agency, and control. You can change the channel, or turn off the TV, but you’re in no way involved in making what you’re watching, versus how the audience is integral to theatre being possible at all.

2. I’m just not convinced a play about a charismatic immigrant in New York City with bold ideas who raps sometimes and changes the world while pissing off the landed gentry has any resonance with our political moment.

This is the Carl Bindman Newsletter, for members of my professional or personal networks whom I think should get the scoop and be kept in the loop.

This newsletter was written on Lenapehoking, the occupied land of the Lenni Lenape.