Ok, folks – time for a literature quiz that should take you back to, oh, maybe your Sophomore language arts class. So: Who said the following line: “The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Anyone? Ah ... I see lots of hands. And yes, “Hamlet” is correct. But with that line, Shakespeare illuminates something larger than Hamlet’s desire for revenge. That line reminds us that the best theater catches everyone’s conscience, and makes all of us shift a bit in our seats. Art is political – it’s about power.
A friend once gave me a t-shirt, decorated with Andy Warhol images and the jaunty motto, “Art can’t hurt you.” I wore it a few times, feeling pretty bohemian-hip, until a colleague said, “You know, that t-shirt is totally wrong! It can too hurt.” And ... he was right. To say art can’t hurt us is to say it doesn’t have any teeth, any power – that art doesn’t matter. A quick reflection on the long history of censorship reminds us that art has always been under suspicion for blasphemy or sedition. Art makes arguments we don’t always want to hear.
But unlike editorials or ranting TV commentators, art rarely presents one single perspective, which might be its greatest virtue. Perhaps you, like me, have stood in front of a painting, or in a theater lobby at intermission, muttering darkly, “Huh ... I don’t get it.” Art, at its best, reminds us that we should never assume we “get” anything at first glance. Even those pastel-pretty landscape paintings by Claude Monet say to us, “You think you know what a pile of hay looks like? Think again. Look at a haystack in this light. And now late in the day. And again in a storm. And again in wintertime.” First impressions are always partial, imperfect. Art usefully undermines our assumption that we know it all; it keeps us from thinking simply, and from simply taking sides.
In my college classrooms, sometimes students feel so passionately about ideas they want to pick a fight with everyone who disagrees with them. Not so fast, I urge them – if you tell people they’re full of hooey, you’ll only get an “Am not!” for every one of your “Are too!”s. So how do you invite someone to try on a new perspective? Well, reach back to your childhood, and remember how those interactions with friends went. Something like: “Ok, now you play like you’re a such-and-so, and then I’ll play like I’m a something-or-other, and then let’s play like ...” and on and on. Remember? Yeah – the play’s the thing. Trying on new roles is a skill that weakens, sadly, with our harrowing passage to adulthood. But art reminds us to play with ideas. To empathize with perspectives that stretch us, however uncomfortably.
And that is why I teach plays like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, and why college students everywhere have found power in producing the play themselves, despite the controversy that often surrounds it. The Vagina Monologues is a response – a creative response – to a terrible truth about power, and that is that women worldwide suffer – and resist – the mental and physical effects of sexism in ways that are both readily apparent and everywhere ignored. But instead of dashing off a rant in the face of gruesome statistics, Ensler wrote a play, with a multitude of perspectives for us to try on. Now I’m not comfortable, myself, with every voice in that piece. But when I watch students practicing for the production, I see the power of art at work as they inhabit these different roles, empathizing with an amazing range of human experience. I test myself by the students’ brave example: How could I become a person who wouldn’t leave a battering husband? How might I live a life in which fear or belief led me to inflict violence on others? What would it be like not to feel vulnerable in my own body? And I wonder, why are these questions threatening to ask right now?
I think of a playwright controversial and censored in his own time, Molière, and the pleasure I get every year when I attend the exuberant undergraduate performance at Notre Dame, all in French, and this year coming in February, just like some productions of The Vagina Monologues. While full of humor, Molière’s political satires still leave tooth marks, thanks to talented student performers who inhabit his hypocritical, unjust, and foolishly lovable characters so fully they feel familiar to us, despite the period costumes.
The cliché says that, “Life is not a dress rehearsal.” But how much better off we’d be if we acted as if it were. Art strengthens our atrophied empathy muscles. It says, play like you’re born into a Bangkok slum and sold into sexual slavery. Play like you’re a president. Play like you’re a person who lets someone tape a bomb to your chest, and really feel the power of your belief, the strange weight of metal and wires, the pull of the duct tape on your skin. What is your life like? And what powers of imagination might revise your story?
The play is the thing. And the conscience that needs catching is always our own.