American Theatre Ensembles Volume 1

Post-1970: Theatre X, Mabou Mines, Goat Island, Lookingglass Theatre, Elevator Repair Service, and SITI Company

Mike Vanden Heuvel

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350187368
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350051553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Across two volumes, Mike Vanden Heuvel and a strong roster of contributors present the history, processes, and achievements of American theatre companies renowned for their use of collective and/or ensemble-based techniques to generate new work. This first study considers theatre companies that were working between 1970 and 1995: it traces the rise and eventual diversification of activist-based companies that emerged to serve particular constituencies from the countercultural politics of the 1960s, and examines the shift in the 1980s that gave rise to the next generation of company-based work, rooted in a new interest in form and the more mediated and dispersed forms of politics. Ensembles examined are Mabou Mines, Theatre X, Goat Island, Lookingglass, Elevator Repair Service, and SITI Company.

Preliminary chapters provide a sweeping overview of ensemble-based creation within the general historical and cultural contexts of the period, followed by a detailed study of the evolution of ensemble-based work. The case studies consider factors such as influence, funding, production, and legacies, as well as the forms of collective devising and creation, while surveying the continuing work of significant long-running companies.

Contributors provide detailed case studies of the 6 companies from the period and cover:

* A chronicle of development and methods
* Key productions and projects
* Critical reception and legacy
* A chronological overview of significant productions

From the long history of collective theatre creation, with its sources in social crises, urgent aesthetic experimentation and utopian dreaming, American ensemble-based theatre has emerged at several key points in history to challenge the primacy of author-based and director-produced theatre. As the volume demonstrates, US ensemble companies have collectively revolutionized the form and content of contemporary performance, influencing experimental, as well as mainstream practice.

CHAPTER 1

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND

Mike Vanden Heuvel

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It is no coincidence that American ensemble theatre-making is reborn and revitalized during one of the most volatile periods in American history. From its earliest manifestations with the Provincetown Players and Washington Square Players, where the idea of artist-led ensembles was first put into motion in the United States, collective creation has emerged when artists felt change in the wind and sought alternatives to mainstream practice. The period selected for the first volume of American Ensemble Theatres is no exception, although the 1970s have often been dismissed in general histories of the United States as a mere aftershock to the turbulent 1960s (with studies entitled The Lost Decade and It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, for instance), while the endpoint of this volume, 1995, carries no iconic resonance in American history as does, say, 1968, the millennium, or 9/11 (Hurrup 1996; Carroll 1990).

Yet the period between 1970 and 1995 marks a period of notable transitions. During these years the long-standing liberal consensus that shaped US economics and politics since before the Second World War gives way to a more conservative political landscape in which free-market principles clash uncomfortably with hot-button social issues. The Cold War continued to fuel extravagant spending on defense and ignited US military operations in Lebanon (1982), Grenada (1983), and Panama (1989). With the fall of Communism in 1991, the Cold War seemed poised to end until the rise of autocratic regimes, first in the former Soviet states and then worldwide, even as events in the oil-producing Middle East laid hopes of reduced tension to rest. The Arab nations and Middle East became an area of global conflict, and the United States was involved in numerous interventions there, as well as the Gulf War against Iraq (1990–1): the Afghan occupation continues to this day. Conflicts in the region would intensify after 9/11 in 2001. Ethnic wars and coups initiated American involvement in Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere.

Closer to home, second-wave feminism arrived fully at the outset of the 1970s and reshaped US labor, domestic and cultural sectors before encountering a fierce backlash in the 1980s and transitioning into new forms in the 1990s.The AIDS crisis marked a signal moment in American consciousness and transformed political activism in profound ways, in addition to altering the landscape of American theatre. The groundwork for the tech revolutions of the 1990s was laid during the 1970s and 1980 as well. Perhaps most momentously, these decades see the full flowering of postmodernism and the onset of globalism and usher in a new neoliberal order that significantly impacts the arts in general and ensemble theatre in particular.

The year 1970 is significant if for no other reason than it marks the pinnacle of the first term of Richard Nixon’s presidency, begun in the ferment of 1968. What followed, of course, has received more attention, as Nixon would be reelected for a second term following a landslide victory in 1972 only to be roiled by the Watergate scandal and its cover-ups. These would lead to the president’s eventual resignation on August 9, 1974. By that time, however, Nixon had reshaped the nation and the presidency in important ways, laying the foundation for the resurgence of conservatism by demonizing the counterculture of the 1960s in the eyes of a “silent majority” set fair to raise its voice by the 1980s. In American theatre, by contrast, by 1970 the pinnacle of collective theatre-making appeared to have been reached as the major radical ensembles begin to disperse. The movement showed signs of receding slowly into the past, such that Arnold Aronson was led to report—focusing on the movement of collectivist theatre in New York City that gave rise to the Living Theatre, Open Theater, and the Performance Group— that “[t]he ensemble theatre movement had essentially disappeared by the mid-1970s” (2000, 102). Similarly, James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal framed and titled their collection of essays on “radical theatres” Restaging the Sixties (2006) to signal an endpoint to the surge of ensemble theatre activity defining that decade and demarcating it from what would ensue.

At the outset of the 1970s, then, bearing in mind these contexts, one might reasonably predict that the future would lie, politically, in the continued ascent of Nixonian conservatism and, artistically, in the waning of the collective, radical spirit that ignited theatre ensembles of the 1950s and 1960s: and in doing so, one would be at the same time very prescient and also quite wrong.

Politics

The main trajectory of US history in the final twenty-five years of the twentieth century is typically described as a drifting away from the liberal consensus, undergirded by Keynesian economic principles, which dominated the country after the Second World War toward the resurgence of conservatism and the rise of the New Right. While this accurately describes the main trajectory, it often leaves out the parallel transformation of liberalism itself in response to the rise of the Right, an important element of the story that assumes greater significance in the twenty-first century. The liberal consensus, of course, was neither particularly liberal when compared to classical liberalism (having asserted, during and after Roosevelt’s New Deal [1933–9], a strong State role in balancing the economy and advancing individual freedom), nor especially consensual: conservative forces operated within both the Democratic and Republican parties even during Roosevelt’s terms, and as the Cold War and anti-communism grew more intense in the 1950s, outlier organizations such as the John Birch Society retained credibility with parts of the electorate. Some historians claim that the civil unrest and countercultural activism of the 1960s accelerated the rise of this nascent conservatism, while others see the conservative Republican Barry Goldwater’s overwhelming defeat in the 1964 presidential election as the humiliating low point of the ideology, after which conservatives learned to play electoral politics more effectively. In either case, as the 1970s dawned, many sectors of the industrial working class that made up the putative Democratic base were growing increasingly conservative, in part as a backlash to the directions taken by liberalism in the 1960s. But these changes also occurred in response to demographic shifts, first of “white flight” to the suburbs and then across the Southwest. But through all these decades, New Deal liberalism formed the dominant political ideology of the land, with the Democratic Party seen as its standard bearer and Republicans as the mostly moderating minority party whose role it was to advocate for business, federal fiscal restraint, and a strong national defense against Communist encroachment.

The slow crumbling of the liberal consensus that had bound Democrats and Republicans to a common set of principles after the Second World War (but which also allowed for the nationalist jingoism and technocratic establishment that the counterculture had defied since the time of the Beats) began in the 1950s and gathered force in the 1960s. Criticism of liberal policies and principles came, unsurprisingly, from conservatives, but now also from the coalitions that would eventually form the New Left in the 1960s. With a number of factors converging at the dawn of the 1970s—the catastrophe of the Vietnam War, the failure of the Civil Rights Movement to fully secure economic and social equality, the fracturing of the Democratic Party following the 1968 election, the perceived rampant liberalization of culture, and a declining economy that would soon give evidence of the limits of State planning and intervention—liberalism as a basis for national consensus fell increasingly out of favor. The 1970s, as a result, are perceived as particularly unmoored as the nation struggled for its political identity: it is no coincidence that the period, which began with Nixon’s dream of the Imperial Presidency, saw instead an unprecedented series of one-term administrations, with Ford, Carter, and, in 1992, George H. W. Bush, failing to win reelection. But by the end of the 1970s, and particularly with the election of the conservative Ronald Reagan for the first of his two terms in 1980, the United States as a whole began to shift notably to the Right. As the culture wars flared up throughout the 1980s and 1990s around issues like abortion, school busing, gay rights, affirmative action, and multicultural education, liberalism was constantly on the defensive. Meanwhile, once in power conservatives (including Reagan) struggled to maintain the purity of their own principles as they oversaw ballooning government agencies, climbing deficit spending, and a popular culture comfortable with electing them while generally ignoring their pleas for stronger traditional families, upright morality, and fiscal responsibility.

This tangled and decades-long narrative regarding shifting political sentiments has clarified only somewhat recently, displacing an older historiography that saw the 1960s and the dramatic rise (and eventual fall) of the New Left and counterculture as the fulcrum upon which these changes swung. As will be seen in the next chapter, this understanding of American history affects even the way that collective creation in theatre is said to evolve “out of” the dynamics of 1960s alternative theatre (a position I will contest). Formerly, the rise of the Right following the 1960s was seen as marking the end stage of a so-called declension hypothesis, one that emerged out of (using Allan Matusow’s resonant phrase) “the great unraveling” of American liberalism ([1985] 2009). Following the pinnacle of the Great Society’s domestic programs designed to use the powers of the federal government to combat poverty, racism, and inequality, Matusow’s argument goes, the liberal program foundered on bad planning (for instance, by seeking to alleviate poverty by distributing funds and services rather than by politically and economically empowering the poor) and bad luck (the Vietnam War). Furthermore, the radical ideals of the New Left, which sought to undermine rather than rectify the fundamental principles of capitalism and traditional structures of liberal democracy, pushed moderate liberals further leftward. By 1968, the argument continues, all parties associated with liberalism were becoming unraveled and the spectacular results were on display in the streets outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the 1970s, with both old and new Lefts in disarray, Matusow concludes, Americans became illiberal and divisive, turning inward and away from the public political sphere to pursue hedonistic goals. (These, conveniently, aligned with conservatism’s desire to unstitch forms of collective identity to produce niche-buying consumers.) By 1980, Ronald Reagan arrived to sanctify that arrangement and to drive the final stake into the heart of the liberal, interventionist state.

This declension hypothesis gained credence in part because it is satisfyingly dramatic and well positioned to serve, for the Left, both nostalgia and indignation (one of the best accounts is Todd Gitlin’s Days of Hope and Rage) and, for the Right, the basis for the then-out-of-the-desert-came-forth-a-savior myth that continues to shape the legacy of Reagan. However, it misrepresents this important political shift in American politics and culture in consequential ways. First, the hypothesis unrealistically foreshortens and encapsulates the process of transformation, disregarding both the important skirmishes between liberalism and conservatism that preceded the 1960s as well as the many ways that these continued in and beyond the 1970s. It also places undue weight on the 1960s by making it the lever for all subsequent transformations. The hypothesis also leads many to assume that the counterculture, so antithetical to both the traditional Left and Right, simply became collateral damage and disappeared after 1968 (or 1972 when America’s role in the Vietnam War ended). This obscures the counterculture’s continued vitality into and beyond the 1970s in movements like feminism, AIDs awareness, and activism for social justice—not to mention its value to capitalism itself as a harbinger of the principles of hedonism and self-actualization that would make everything from soft drink preferences to personal care philosophies an expression of individual identity and brand.

1980 and All That

By most accounts, the American political scene of the period was dominated by Ronald Reagan, first as a popular pitchman for conservative causes—his televised talk in support of Goldwater, “A Time for Choosing,” became known “The Speech” and thrust him into political office—then as Governor of California from 1967 to 1975, followed by a failed run at the 1977 Republican nomination, and finally as a two-term president from 1981 to 1989. Not unexpectedly, a Reagan myth has developed that depicts him as an underdog who beat all odds to vanquish liberalism and “Make America Great Again.” In fact, Regan was a consequence, rather than the origin, of America’s shift to the Right: this movement certainly did gain momentum from the “great unraveling” of the 1960s, but it was driven as well by events having little to do with that decade, such as the economic downturns of the 1970s, developments in the Cold War, and the outbreak on the cusp of the 1980s of the culture wars. Mostly, a new generation of conservatives energized by Goldwater’s humiliating 1964 debacle had become more proactive, engaging in organizing and outreach activities that included developing new media outlets, initiating new think tanks and publishing houses, and reconnecting with faith-based organizations by, for instance, bringing the formerly quietist evangelicals into their camp (Greenberg 2009).

When Reagan won in stunning fashion over Jimmy Carter in 1980, capturing forty-six states and over 50 percent of the popular vote as well as gaining the Senate for Republicans for the first time since 1952, Republican moderates were shocked, but liberals were confounded into disarray, self-denial, and a decade’s worth of soul searching. Moderate Republicans, many as stunned as liberals that Americans at last expressed a belief that a conservative could govern, were soon won over by the new president’s pro-business tax cuts and strong positions on defense—if not initially eager to wade into hot-button social issues such as school prayer and women’s rights. Reagan’s unwavering faith in supply-side, “trickle down” economics (which, despite numerous failures in balancing federal budgets—glaringly so during Reagan’s two terms—continues to be, under the rubric of “Reaganomics,” the de facto Republican economic philosophy) and his vocal criticism of forms of liberty and identity based in collective principles, provided a substantial boost to a nascent focus on individual prosperity that had been building throughout the 1970s. Buoyed by an improving economy—one that helped launch the dramatic wealth inequality that still dogs the nation today—and a more attractive environment for investment and growth, middle America generally grew wealthier and pursued new forms of private enterprise and gratification in what came to be called “the New Gilded Age.” This would continue, through peaks and valleys, until the stock market crash of 1987.

The rise of Reagan under these historical conditions plays a significant role in his most lasting legacy, which was to reconfigure both the Republican and Democratic parties along the lines of his particular brand of conservatism. His election overthrew the notion, held since Goldwater had tested the thesis in 1964, that a staunch conservative could never win the presidency (based on this fear, former President Gerald Ford considered running again in 1980 after Reagan began dominating the Republican primaries). Over his two terms, Reagan would shift Republican moderates further to the Right such that when his vice president, George H. W. Bush, ran to succeed him in 1988, his formerly moderate positions on abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment more closely paralleled Reagan’s than his own from a decade earlier. More tellingly, after he gained the Republican nomination in 1988, Bush passed over several strong moderates and selected the relatively unknown conservative Senator Dan Quayle as his running mate.

Similarly, after their defeat in 1980 the Democrats found themselves reckoning with significant shifts in demographics that showed core constituencies, such as labor, fading. Elements within the party began efforts to reorient the Democratic platform, first by reshaping its economic principles. Responding to the stagnant US economy of the 1970s, the so-called neoliberals sought to move away from the New Deal and Great Society principles based in economic fairness and a redistributive tax code and to shift policy toward rejuvenating capitalism through more efficient and open markets. Democrats nominated a neoliberal, Walter Mondale (who selected Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, the first female vice presidential candidate in the country’s history), in 1984, but following his rout at the hands of Reagan other solutions were pursued. The key player became the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), made up largely of conservative Southern Democrats who took into their platform the neoliberals’ market-friendly economic plans and joined these with a new emphasis on the sort of values—patriotism, family, entrepreneurship, responsibility—that were thought to have drawn off the “Reagan Democrats” to the Republican ranks. Their efforts produced some successes, as when in 1986 Democrats captured the Senate. However, their 1988 presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, presented himself as a competent neoliberal manager but failed to convey a strong sense of such values and was painted by his opponent as a 1960s liberal holdover. After Dukakis was soundly defeated, the DLC continued to strive for a synthesis of existing New Deal liberalism, neoliberal pragmatism, and values-driven principles, and in the early 1990s they found their ideal candidate in Bill Clinton.

Aided by an economy hindered by the leftover Reagan deficits and deregulatory mania (as President Bush was forced to oversee a bailout of the savings and loan industry), Clinton defeated the incumbent and returned the Democrats to the White House for the first time in twelve years. He immediately encountered strong Congressional opposition that led to Republicans, with the conservative Newt Gingrich as their spokesperson, to enact a “Contract with America” that repeated Reagan policy promises (as well as slashing the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA] budget by 40 percent). The Democrats were badly beaten in the midterm elections and lost both Houses, and so Clinton’s first term and a good part of his second were fought on the defensive. This, added to the several investigations regarding financial transactions and sexual indiscretions that dogged him throughout the election and into his presidency—and would lead to his impeachment by the House in 1998 (he was acquitted by the Senate the following year)—weakened his ability to enact even the moderate reforms he claimed to support as a pragmatic centrist.

During his two terms (1993–2001) the Democratic Party committed to a center-right platform based in economic principles that prioritized open global markets and free trade while also partially dismantling the social safety net (supporting, for instance, “welfare to work” legislation). Clinton and the New Democrats could still claim victory by virtue of a revived economy following the 1987 market bust, and for balancing the federal budget and creating a rare surplus. He accomplished this, in part, by deepening Reagan’s deregulation of the financial sector (which some see as contributing the Great Recession of the early twenty-first century). But while overseeing an economic boom tied to the rise of Silicon Valley and the high-tech markets, Clinton also enacted tough-on-crime legal reforms, such as the “three strikes and you’re out” sentencing guidelines that disproportionately victimized minorities and produced huge increases in the US incarceration rate (Serrianne 2015). Moving the party further toward the center-right, Clinton allowed himself to be maneuvered into signing both the “don’t ask don’t tell” bill that further stigmatized gay and transgender members of the military while allowing them to continue serving and the Defense of Marriage Act that effectively outlawed gay marriage and defined marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman. On a number of related fronts, Clinton and the New Democrats eased the party toward solidifying their appeal to what now seemed moderates while at the same breaking with some of their historical constituencies.

Despite the moderation of these liberal policies, the 1990s saw increasing acts of domestic violence launched against what terrorists believed were unconstitutional acts of government overreach. In 1993, the compound of the Branch Davidians, a separatist religious group in Waco, Texas, was stormed by federal agents and US military personnel and resulted in the deaths of seventy-four Davidians and ten agents. The year 1995 brought the most violent act of domestic terrorism ever recorded in the United States when Timothy McVeigh, a veteran of the Gulf War, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. The Age of Terror was upon the country well before 9/11 and to this day domestic acts of terrorism far outnumber attacks by international actors.

Economy

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw the US economy go through...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Historical and Cultural Background
• 2 American Ensemble Theatres, 1970–95
• 3 Theatre X
• 4 Mabou Mines
• 5 Goat Island
• 6 Lookingglass Theatre Company
• 7 Elevator Repair Service
• 8 Siti Company
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint