The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 11 (2000)

Challenges and Hopes for American Theatrein the Twenty-ﬁrst Century
Misako KOIKE

In this age of rapidly developing high technology and the invasion of
corporate culture, American theatre is facing extraordinary challenges.
Nevertheless, it seems to be bravely exploring and expanding its territory. This paper examines ﬁrst the effects shown in actual productions oftechnological devices and corporate cultural sensibilities in the ﬁrst andsecond sections. In the third and fourth sections, it investigates areas ofhope for American theatre in the twenty-ﬁrst century, taking examples
from the work of two women playwrights who have courageously created an arena in which the role of drama in American society is reconsidered. Both playwrights deal with current social problems via theatre, ina way no other social institutions at present can do with the same impact.
The works discussed here are: Anna Deavere Smith’s 1992 play, Fires in
the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, and Paula
Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer-Prize winning play, How I Learned to Drive.1
I THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY
American Theatre magazine, September 1999, includes a special section: “Theatre of Tomorrow,” which covers the various impacts hightechnology devices have had on a number of American playwrights.
Jennifer Tanaka reports on a “site-speciﬁc work in cyberspace” given in
New York City in the summer of 1999. “In front of ﬁfty or so New
Copyright © 2000 Misako Koike. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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Yorkers,” it was performed as a “bi-coastal” event, connecting Los Angeles to the New York stage. Two video screens set up in the theatre
space projected New York audience and L. A. audience respectively.
The distance between the two cities created an “echo” on the screen,since the spatial distance created a time difference, which gave a special
warp to the images and sounds from the other city.
Tanaka comments, “technological innovation is bubbling up in pockets everywhere” (24). She goes on to report on another production inwhich dancers in two separate locations created “a uniﬁed composite
performance space on a large screen” (26). A third example is George
Coates’s 20/20 Blake, in which William Blake’s painting was transformed “into an enormous computer-generated image that the actors literally stepped out of” (26). The same artist created in 1999 “a short playin virtual reality,” a three-character play called You Must Pay the Rent,
using “a three-dimensional navigable environment on the Web” (27).
“In theatre, as is true for the rest of society, technology is deﬁning thenext bold frontier,” writes Tanaka (24). What signiﬁcance does this‘boldness’ bring to theatre, though? I argue that technology is truly deﬁning some part of American theatre but not all of it. We cannot think of acommercial, say Broadway, musical without technology, for sure. But
what really counts after all is what is created for the audience in the theatre. Some productions succeed in keeping a subtle balance between
experimental technology and more traditional theatrical elements including the actors’ bodies.2 However, many others fail to create a balance,
resulting in an obstructive and self-wallowing use of technology.
To cite two works in which experiments with technology did not seemto be successful for one reason or another, I’d like to discuss Steve
Reich’s opera, The Cave, and Robert Wilson’s rendition of Richard
Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin. In The Cave, performed in 1993 at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the composer ambitiously experimented with creating music by assembling the sounds ofdozens of people’s voices. He then projected the images of these people
on several huge screens set up on stage. Though it was called an opera,
only four singers appeared to sing but not act, and there was no pre-written text except for the Biblical story of Abraham, Sarah and their family as the framework, with the words spoken by the people projected on
the monitors. The audience listened to Reich’s music, saw the images ofthe people on the screen and heard them talking about their feelings
towards and experiences of religion, and saw the documentary images

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of the place in which the opera was set. However, in the course of theactual process of composing his music, Reich somehow seems to havegone astray, getting too involved in the technical devices of matching
images to the rhythm of his music. The projected larger-than-life imageof a person talking exuded an individual presence of its own, almost likethat of a live actor’s body. The composer with his music cut their images
off often in a few seconds, and this gave the impression that he denied
and even insulted the humanity of the images, of the people on thescreen.3
In Robert Wilson’s Lohengrin, ﬁrst presented at New York’s
Metropolitan Opera House in March 1998, Wilson took charge of production, set design and lighting concept. The resulting production wasquite provocative and controversial to say the least. The stage wasextremely dark and generally bare in most scenes. Lights spotted only
the faces of the singers in some scenes. Towards the latter half of theopera, a bright column of yellow, blinding white or blue light extended
itself onto the stage downwards, or from right to left. The overall impression the audience received was that of a bare, dark staging, with occasional bright lighting in a few scenes.
In this production of Lohengrin, Richard Wagner and Robert Wilson
clashed with each other. Wilson’s concept of staging and lighting treated singers as if they were merely parts of the space he had created in his
mind. James Levine conducted Wagner’s music faithfully and earnestly. The members of the audience were consequently torn into two directions. On the opening night, “A barrage of boos greeted Robert Wilson’s
curtain call.”4
The use of high technology enables artists in various ﬁelds to explore
a new area of creation, but it can be a risky experiment at a high cost to
the artist. Challenges from high technology thus will demand artistically an integrated concept from artists of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Without
it, the work will fall ﬂat, or will become a mere gimmick for self-satisﬁed technicians of high-tech devices.
II

CORPORATE CULTURE VS. LEGITIMATE THEATRE

What I refer to here as “corporate culture” is the sensibility and wayof producing a theatre piece according to that of a commercial enterprise.
To be sure, every theatre venture in the United States is destined to be acommercial enterprise that follows the rules of the market. Non-proﬁt

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theatre companies try to escape commercialism, and yet, as long as theypresent works in public in a capitalist society, they cannot escape theeffect of commercialism in trying to gain an audience. “Corporate culture” on the other hand bluntly calls theatre pieces “products.” Marketingstrategy is brought in to try to “sell” these “products” to an audience of“consumers.”
Legitimate theatre resists this kind of sensibility, as Newsday theatre
critic Linda Winer says in an interview: “It’s terribly sad to have the theatre turned over to basically a corporate product as opposed to making
shows” (AT, December 1997, 51). Sylviane Gold, on reporting about “theDisney Difference,” admits: “Of course, it’s hard to believe that an oldfashioned producer would ever refer to a show as ‘product’” (18).
Broadway musicals thrive on capitalism, marketing strategy, and theaudience’s wish for entertainment. These three ideas and practices cameinto the foreground in the ﬁeld of the performing arts in the early decadesof the twentieth century in the United States, and they changed the ﬁeld
wherever the consumer market prevails. As the United States has little
government subsidy for the performing arts both on the Federal and Statelevels, consumerism has naturally been strong and dominant in the performing arts, compared with other advanced countries in the West.
Since the acclaimed ﬁrst musical, Show Boat was created in 1927, thisnew genre of performing art has been the ﬁrst in taking in technologicaldevices. In another epoch-making musical, Oklahoma! (1943), special
effects lighting and staging, together with an imaginative choreography,
made it “one of the milestones of American Musical Theatre.”5 In the
1990s, the Walt Disney Company “invaded” Broadway with Beauty andthe Beast and The Lion King. Both were remakes of movie versions of
the stories, and they were meant to be good family entertainment. The
amount of money injected into making these two musicals was enormous, and most of it went into technological devices. For example,
Beauty and the Beast, “the most technologically advanced Broadwayshow when it opened in 1994, required 48 tractor trailers to transport theﬁnished scenery and lights into” New York City’s Palace Theatre.
“There were a total of 1,358 lighting instruments used, with more than
400 cues and 59 vari-lights each housing a Macintosh computer within.
. . . Twelve miles of automation cable and three miles of lighting cablesnaked through the grid and the basement of the Palace Theatre”(Tanaka, 24–25). The whole cost of the production ran up to about $15
million.

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In 1997, following the success of Beauty and the Beast, Disneybrought The Lion King to Broadway. This time, Disney asked a wellknown experimental theatre artist Julie Taymore to direct as well as tocreate masks, costumes and scenery. Taymore did a spectacular job of
inventing masks and puppets of various sorts for the actors to wear andin some cases manipulate. She brought in and strengthened African elements in the show, especially with regard to music, characters and costumes. She also used a number of Asian theatre devices in puppetry andchoreography. The result was a huge hit musical, with tickets sold out
more than a year in advance.
Taymore’s achievement in bringing people to theatre and creating a
festive atmosphere should not be ignored. However, to an Asian audience accustomed to more subtle and artistic puppetry and the use ofvarious styles of masks, the show looked like a mere parade of imaginative masks and eye-catching puppets. To see traditional techniques ofJapanese bunraku being used onstage was a joyful event, but a goodmusical needs to be more than a spectacle: it should have music, story
and lyrics. It needs good staging by a good director. Taymore failed
unfortunately in these respects.6 The New Yorker critic John Lahr, inreviewing The Lion King, writes: “A theatrical event far more textured
and original than the ﬁlm. The musical is a series of truly vivants
tableaux—part pageant, part puppet show, part parade, with a touch of
Las Vegas revue thrown in.” Lahr compliments its “animal magnetism,”but concludes, “I call it brilliant Business Art, and the hell with it”(126–29).
Another entertainment producing company, Livent, Inc., has been
active on Broadway for a while. In 1993, it produced a hit musical, Kissof the Spider Woman, a dramatization of South American novelist
Manuel Puig’s work. In 1994, Show Boat was revived on Broadway with
Harold Prince as the director and became a hit. It put on stage a great
many more African American actors than were given lines to speak, simply to show off their historically silent presence as slaves working onplantations, ship-yards and elsewhere. It was a smart and politically correct idea to do so, as it brought a larger African American audience tothe theatre.
In 1998, Livent presented another musical, Ragtime, based on E. L.
Doctorow’s acclaimed novel that was published in 1975. Doctorow’s
Ragtime gave Livent a good vehicle to reach three groups of people:
white upper-middle-class suburbanites, Jews, and Blacks, all in one mu-

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sical. Unfortunately, however, the concept for the musical was more orless old-fashioned, and there was not much of the excitement and thrillof seeing a new, original musical. The book was prepared by Terrence
McNally, one of the hottest playwrights currently, and what he did with
Doctorow’s novel was laudatory, blending three groups of characters
quite smoothly. However, ravishing costumes and smooth staging could
not save the show from banality.7
Disney and Livent can buy great names and let them make a show.
But good musicals can only come from the intense battling and co-operation of various talents: directors, composers, book-writers, lyricists,
choreographers, set designers, costume designers, lighting artists, soundeffect artists, and actors. A naturally developed work like A Chorus Line,
which ran for 6,137 performances on Broadway, could do what is required of a good musical.8 That musical had a song, “What I Did for
Love,” a passionate dedication, which is hard to draw out from a groupof artists called together by corporate culture with big money. Livent’s
Ragtime, for instance, was reviewed thus: “Utterly resistible. . . . There’s
just no chemistry. There is much to admire in “Ragtime,” . . . but there
is ﬁnally little to fall in love with.”9
New York City since 1990 has been intent upon cleaning up the Times
Square area and has renamed it “New Times Square,” putting signposts
and stickers all over the area. The City has been enthusiastic to invite
and keep Disney, and a Disney shop was built right next to the drastically renovated Amsterdam theatre that gave The Lion King its ﬁrst New
York performance.10 Across the street from the Disney theatre, Livent
created the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, actually remodeling andputting two theatres together, and it was here that Ragtime had its ﬁrst
New York City performance. The presence of corporate culture is quite
visible in Times Square, the center of Broadway theatre, and critics say
it has changed the content as well as the faces of Broadway theatre. The
delicate balance between entertainment and art is hard to attain, but one
simply hopes that the presence of corporate culture will not destroy theatre as we know and love it now.
III

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: BRIDGING THE MULTICULTURAL GAP

African American dramatist Anna Deavere Smith’s play, Fires in the
Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, intends to bridge
the gap between two aggressively opposed groups of people by way of

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a play.11 It is a unique play, actually a collage made from the words of
26 men and women Smith interviewed before and after the tragic killings
and succeeding riot that occurred in the Crown Heights section of
Brooklyn in August 1991.12
Fires in the Mirror was performed by Smith herself, without an intermission for 90 minutes, in New York’s off-Broadway Public Theatre.
On stage, in the course of the show, she changed costume simply by
wearing eyeglasses or a cap or a bandana, bringing in a book or a pen,carrying a wash basket, putting on a jacket, giving an African touch, andso on. Thus she performed African Americans, Jews, a Mexican, a
Hispanic, and an Australian—all 26 characters in the play. Their occupations were various: Rabbi, Protestant minister, scholar, poet, student,
homemaker and so on. An extraordinary aspect of all these characters in
the play is that they all actually exist in everyday life. Smith caught each
person’s idiosyncratic behavior and use of words, made them her own,
and acted out the role of each person according to her interpretation of
his/her idiosyncrasy.
As Smith performs each of these characters, they become one, all contained in the body of the actor herself. Each of them has his/her own identity marked by race, gender, religion, culture, or class, expressed in
his/her words and behavior. However, because the roles are performedby one actor, they become one conglomerate, a ﬁctionalized entity. Thisin turn provides the audience with a realization of the abstract nature of
the individualized basis of identity. Thus, differences in gender, race,
religion, culture, or class, for the moment, lose the signiﬁcance of theirreality. The members of the audience are consequently deprived of thelegitimacy of their emotional basis for their claims of difference.
As the characters lose the basis of their claims to differences, they inturn acquire the unity, through the voice and body of the actor Smith, of
their humanity. The members of the audience now come to see what iscommon in these characters. They come to realize that these different
people can be placed side by side, instead of violently opposing one
another, in spite of their differences. In fact, it is a uniquely precious
occasion to listen to their different views and feelings all in one evening
in the theatre.
Smith has presented, by her voice and body, a common arena in which
differences can co-exist and opposing people can listen to one another.
By juxtaposing different reactions to the killings of a black boy and an
Australian scholar who by chance came to the area where the killing took

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place, and also different reactions to the riot that occurred after the incidents, Smith created a dramatic representation of the ideal of multiculturalism. Theatre has thus turned itself into a space for dialogues not only
among opposing groups on stage, but also among the audience.
The fact that Smith has created a theatrical space in which dialogue ismade possible, and in which the audience can objectively think about
opposing views from the same distance, is nothing if not a strong political message. It is hard to imagine having such an arena in everyday life,
outside the theatre.
At a preview performance before the ofﬁcial opening, Smith invitedthe people whom she depicted in her play, and after the performance hada brief session for actual dialogue among these people. Considering how
polarized these people are in everyday life, and how politicized every
action tends to become in the United States, especially in matters related to race, Smith’s invitation and actualization of dialogue should becalled a daring, brave act.
Smith in an interview with Thulani Davis talks about the need for having a dialogue in spite of differences: “I’m interested in trying to workthrough the difﬁculties of now having a dialogue with people ’cause myexperience in race is usually a monologue when it comes to being withwhite people.”13 Smith feels responsible as a black person to talk about“our experience” (42R), but she is fully aware that in order to have a dialogue, “we have to have a different way of listening, a different way of
thinking of dialogue, and a different way of thinking of the race discussion” (43L). When Smith says, “race is my work” (42L), she intends to
do her work by having a dialogue with the audience by writing a play,by her search in “language and its relationship to character” (“Intro.”,xxiii).
Concerning her interest in American character, since Fires in the
Mirror was made as “a part of a series of theater pieces called On the
Road: A Search for American Character” (“Intro.”, xxiii), Smith writes:“Mimicry is not character. Character lives in the obvious gap between
the real person and my attempt to seem like them” (xxxvii). She goes on:“My sense is that American character lives not in one place or the other,but in the gaps between the places, and in our struggle to be together inour differences. It lives not in what has been fully articulated, but in what
is in the process of being articulated” (xli).
To sum up, Smith is interested “in the gaps between the places” and“in the process of being articulated” when she is closely listening to theCHALLENGES AND HOPES FOR AMERICAN THEATRE

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person she interviews and performs later in the play as a character. This
interest of Smith’s in the “gaps” and “the process” inevitably leads tothe creation of a special “quality of listening” as Davis points out in her
interview (BOMB, 43L).
Nobel Prize novelist Toni Morrison talks about “the wholly racializedsociety that is the United States” in her discussion of American literature and society in Playing in the Dark and also in her introduction
to Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power.14 Smith joins ranks with
Morrison in examining American language and society, and revealing
how American social reality is constructed in polarized groups. This lineof efforts may facilitate bridging gulfs made by misunderstood goals ofmulticulturalism, and may help bring about the realization of American
democratic ideals of liberty and equality.
After the huge success of Fires in the Mirror, Smith created Twilight:
Los Angeles, 1992 in a similar way. It has 46 characters, all performedby Smith alone, talking about the Los Angeles race riot following thetrial of the L. A. policemen charged with the beating of Rodney King in
1992. It took more time, a little over two hours to perform. It was originally produced in Los Angeles in the early summer of 1993, directed byEmily Mann. It then came to New York, ﬁrst performed at the Public
Theatre in March 1994, directed by George C. Wolfe. As it soon becamea huge hit, it was transferred to Broadway. Smith’s efforts to create an
arena for dialogue and bridge “gaps” will be successfully continued inher search for “American character,” without much help from high technology or big corporate money.15
IV RETHINKING AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
BY WAY OF A PLAY
Paula Vogel’s play, How I Learned to Drive, is a deceptively shortplay, performed without intermission in 90 minutes, but it has morematerial than one can imagine a play can handle in so short a time. The
title of the play indicates three levels of reality: the actual “how to” level;
the metaphorical level of sexuality implied by American English in theuse of words like “drive” and “cars”; and the deeper level of American
cultural identity, since the United States is a highly car-oriented society.
Exploring all three levels of the play, Vogel has succeeded in creating atruly thoughtful and provocative examination of American culture andsociety.

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Vogel’s focus in How I Learned to Drive is on a sexual relationshipthat has developed between a teenage girl and her uncle over the courseof eighteen years. Vogel sets up a narrator, Li’l Bit, now a woman thirtyﬁve years old, looking back on the development of the relationship. The
audience is taken into her narrated world at the center of which is theperiod of her life from age eleven to sixteen, when Uncle Peck taught
her how to drive a car. The examination of their relationship concerns
the sexual awakening of and exploration by a teenage girl, trust and compassion between two “family” members, and gender power politics
played out between a middle-aged married man and a sexually inexperienced and adventurous girl, all done from the meditative viewpoint ofa mature woman.
The other three characters are called “the Greek Chorus,” and they
perform in the narrated scenes of the past together with Li’l Bit or comment on her actions. The chorus consists of a man, a woman, and a female
teenager. As the play progresses, they take turns, performing the Li’l Bit
and Peck’s “family” members. They also act as occasional outside people. For instance, the man plays Li’l Bit’s grandfather, the waiter of arestaurant where Li’l Bit and Peck meet, and high school boys who comeinto contact with Li’l Bit. The woman plays Li’l Bit’s mother, Peck’s
wife Aunt Mary, and high school girls. The teenager plays Li’l Bit’s
grandmother, and the voice of eleven-year-old Li’l Bit.
Although Li’l Bit serves as narrator, another ‘Voice’ steps in occasionally to turn the action of the play or comment on the scene in very
short phrases. Thus, structurally, the play is the memory of Li’l Bit,
focusing on the progress of her relationship with Uncle Peck, which isframed by her relationships with “family” members, high school classmates, and various others. However, the story is not narrated in chronological order. Li’l Bit’s memories are presented in fragments, with thetime of action going back and forth.
The play is set in the 1960s, in a small countryside town in Maryland.
It begins with Li’l Bit’s memory of a warm summer night, in “a parking
lot overlooking Beltsville Agricultural Farms in suburban Maryland”(9). Less than a mile away, “the crumbling concrete of U. S. One wends
its way past one room revival churches, the porno drive-in, and boarded
up motels with For Sale signs tumbling down” (9). In short, the area isplaced between green farms and the modern debris of the oldest
American highway, U. S. One, along which sexuality and religion face
one another.

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Vogel’s outstanding accomplishment in this play is her complex
treatment of sexuality. For that purpose, she limited the number of characters to the essential two in an overwhelmingly hetero-sexual society:a woman and a man. Vogel carefully constructs the play and its examination of sexuality in American culture and society through the way Li’l
Bit tells the story of her sexual awakening. It is told in such a way thatan innocent girl, now grown up, does not consider herself merely as being
taken advantage of by the patient instigation of an allegedly pedophileuncle. A fundamental trust remains between the two throughout the play.
Even at the end, when Li’l Bit goes away on a long drive, the spirit ofPeck is seated in the back seat, and Li’l Bit smilingly nods at him before
she starts the car. In this sense, the play does not become a simple attackby a woman against a domineering man. The two can both be considered, when the play ends, victims of what Judith Butler calls “compulsory heterosexuality” in a culture and society in which gender is“oppositionally and hierarchically deﬁned through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality.”16
Another outstanding achievement is Vogel’s handling of the central
female character. Vogel is almost the ﬁrst playwright who allows thecentral female character to survive sexual and other scandals.17 Li’l Bit
leads a sexually promiscuous life before and after she tells her uncle onher eighteenth birthday that she is not going to see him any more; but
she is never punished in the course of the play. Peck, on the other hand,brokenheartedly turns to alcohol and eventually dies. One day, he falls
down the stairway to the basement studio, his sanctuary, without anyone
around to help him, and he is found dead a week later. Thus, in the play
Peck faces a kind of poetic justice for his unusual sexual relationship,
while Li’l Bit escapes without any of the punishments sexually active
independent women hitherto suffered in American drama.
Peck says at one point in the play that some people have “ﬁre in the
belly,” some “ﬁre in the head,” while he has “ﬁre in the heart” and becomes depressed (46). The relationship with Li’l Bit begins when she
offers him some private moments regularly as long as he stops drinking.
So it begins as an act of compassion and later, as she becomes a sexually mature woman in a child’s body, it changes into a series of sexual
lessons to her. Thus, she has “learned” to be sexual, to practice sexualacts, and to play at gender power politics, while at the same time learning from him how to drive a car.
Peck’s “ﬁre in the heart” is not understood by his wife. She senses that102

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something is going on inside him while he is depressed, but she avoids
confronting him about it, just as Linda avoided confronting and discussing the situation with Willy Loman, her husband, in Arthur Miller’splay, Death of a Salesman (1949). The couples in these two plays live
similar lives of separation inside the same house, even though one houseis set in New York surrounded by a huge conglomeration of high-riseapartments, and the other in agricultural Maryland. Both couples lead
lives of non-understanding between husband and wife; and both husbands are depicted so as to gain the audience’s sympathy for their private sufferings.
The main reason Peck begins giving driving lessons to Li’l Bit isexplained in the scene in which he gives her the ﬁrst lesson. He says that
he has no sons, and “the nearest to a son I’ll have” (34) is Li’l Bit, towhom he wants to give “something that really matters to me.” It is, hesays, “A power.” “I feel more myself in my car than anywhere else” (34),he says, and tries to teach Li’l Bit a sense of “control.” “When you are
driving, your life is in your own two hands. Understand?” Peck tries tomake sure (33). Thus Peck is dead serious about teaching Li’l Bit how
to drive a car. She responds quite seriously to his instruction, ﬁnally gaining a sensation “of ﬂight in the body” (57) when driving. Although she
has stopped living in her body and “retreated above the neck” since the
day she was given a glimpse of a dark side of Peck’s character at age
eleven, when placed on his lap in the car (56), she did master his lessons
on “power” and “control” and enjoys having them in her hands.
A leading Marxist-feminist critic, Jill Dolan, in her review of Vogel’s
How I Learned to Drive, says that the play is “only ‘about’ incest after
the scene of Li’l Bit’s ﬁrst molestation scene” at age eleven. And she
writes, “the moment is startling, because . . . the play has been about
more than incest” (128L). She concludes her review with the following
remark: “Vogel’s play is about forgiveness and family, about the instability of sexuality, about the unpredictable ways in which we learn who
we are, how we desire, and how our growth is built on loss” (128R).
Dolan is correct in hesitating to say that the play is “about” incest and infeeling startled by the moment. I believe, however, that she misses thepoint because the play is not about incest at all.
We need to remember that there is indeed a “molestation scene” as
Dolan writes in her review. However, as I said earlier, Vogel has carefully constructed the play through the way in which Li’l Bit narrates thestory. What Dolan calls the “scene” comes towards the end of the play,

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and it is actually followed immediately by the commentary of thethirty-ﬁve year old Li’l Bit: “That day was the last day I lived in my body.
I retreated above the neck, and I’ve lived inside the ‘ﬁre’ in my head eversince. And now that seems like a long, long time ago. When we wereboth very young. . . . And I ﬁnd myself believing in things that a younger
self vowed never to believe in. Things like family and forgiveness”(56–57). Li’l Bit continues: “The nearest sensation I feel—of ﬂight inthe body—I guess I feel when I’m driving” (57). Then she follows theexact directions Peck has given her in his driving lessons. The play ends
when she ﬁnishes listing his directions, and by this time the spirit of Peckis seated in her car, nodding at her. The stage direction says: “They are
happy to be going for a long drive together” (58).
What Dolan calls the “molestation scene” is thus carefully placed at
the end of the play so that the audience will not simply label it as such.
The act was done “when we were both very young,” and it is not only
forgiven by the woman, but she is faithfully and happily following his
driving lessons and reliving joyously the scenes that happened “a long,
long time ago” but that are still alive in her. As the scene stands in theplay, the relationship between Li’l Bit and her uncle should not be considered simply as that between a victim and an aggressor.
The play is, to me, ‘about’ (if one can say a play is ‘about’ anythingat all) one side of American culture and society, which drives people tolabel delicately complex human feelings, actions, and interactions.
Consequently, people with the labels attached to them have no alternative but to become the very things they are called. Peck thus becomes an“alcoholic,” a “pedophile,” or an “incestuous” man. Li’l Bit thus becomes a “promiscuous” or “sexually insensitive” woman or a “lesbian.”
However, the play depicts these two people fully, so that one can avoid
attaching these labels to them. The audience thus can come away fromthe performance, feeling how vicious the act of labeling other people is,
how important it is to respect and understand differences they may not
be able to understand or accept at the moment.
To sum up, there is a clear political message in this seemingly short,
simple play. Paula Vogel is strongly upholding and embracing multiculturalism, respecting differences and taking a person as he/she reallyis, in a society which forces heterosexuality onto people. In How I
Learned to Drive, she has created a survivor, who with her vision of theAmerican democracy’s ideals of liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness reveals a culture and society in which gender polarizes men and104

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women and places them under its hierarchical power structure. The same
culture and society also destroy people who do not ﬁt into its prescribed
types and groupings. This survivor is a victim, if one wishes to see her
in this manner, of pedophilia, but she is much more than a mere victim,
thanks to the ‘wisdom’ she acquired through much suffering and thinking, and to the complexity of human relationships Vogel presents in theplay.
In the preceding four sections I have discussed some of the major challenges American theatre will face in the twenty-ﬁrst century. There is
the danger of self-indulgent use of high technology. There are the corporate cultural sensibility and practices American theatre needs to copewith. But there are also some positive efforts being made by playwrights
like Anna Deavere Smith who try to bridge the gulfs caused by multicultural battles. Others, like Paula Vogel, look into the core of American
culture and society in order to reconsider the system and the power structure as well as human relationships and interactions that cannot avoid
being placed beneath it, using sexuality as the focus of their investigation.
Another signiﬁcant aspect of the playwrights I discussed above reminds us of the role of theatre, leading us to reconsider the function theatre can serve in society. They created, in their plays, an open space inwhich human contact and human communication are re-examined anddialogue can occur between currently polarized groups. Although the
future of American theatre may be full of political and ﬁnancial hazards,
American theatre of the twenty-ﬁrst century, I believe, will overcome
such problems and acquire deeper and broader dimensions as it has been
doing in the present century. We can depend upon these playwrights assigns of hope for American theatre in the twenty-ﬁrst century.
NOTES
1Part of this paper is based on my presentation, “American Theatre: Three Problems
for the Twenty-ﬁrst Century,” at the symposium (in Japanese): “Will There be Another
American Century?” at The Japanese Association for American Studies’ 32nd Annual
Convention held in June 1998 at Chiba University. Part of my discussion for Section 3of this paper was published in a somewhat different form in Japanese in the March 1998
issue of Rikkyo American Studies, vol.20. Part of my discussion for Section 4 of thispaper was presented orally in Japanese in a somewhat different form at The American
Literature Society of Japan’s 38th Annual Convention held in October 1999 at KitaKyushu University.
2
For example, the Wooster Group, a leading off-off Broadway theatre company, haslong been successfully experimenting with technological devices, creating a uniquely

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105

complex form of art in which these devices are used to help human actors on stage topresent a multi-dimensional work of art. Their recent rendition of Eugene O’Neill’s 1922
play Hairy Ape, and Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights—the title ofwhich was changed to House/Lights—were successful post-modern interpretations ofwhat each playwright tried to present when the plays were ﬁrst performed in the early
decades of the twentieth century.
3
The New York Times’ music reviewer, Edward Rothstein, wrote as follows: “Eachact in the two-and-a-quarter-hour work is meant to be a portrait of a group as well as anillumination of the subject. The result is, of course, also a portrait of the authors [Steve
Reich and Beryl Korot who took charge of images], whose hands are everywhere in thisproject. . . . The result is sometimes fascinating, often tedious, sometimes tendentious
and occasionally (in the third act of American speakers, where the authors are both athome) exhilarating. . . . But there is something almost pedantic about the long, often predictable exposition of the ﬁrst two acts,” NYT, 15 October 1993, C3.
4
Leighton Kerner begins his review of Lohengrin as quoted, but he ultimately
praises Wilson’s production as an “austerely beautiful show.” (Village Voice, 31 March
1998, 123.) Brooks Adams in Art in America, September 1998, also begins his review
with: “Alternately bravoed and booed at its premiere in March,” and goes on to praise
it as “an intensely meditative reading of the opera, especially its darker overtones. . . .
It should also be understood as a self-conscious meditation on his own career.”
5Gerald Bordman writes that “the show changed fashions in musicals for two
decades” (534L).
6
Taymore received the 1998 Best Director of Musical Tony Award. However, theTony Awards are given primarily by Broadway producers and theatre owners all over
the United States, with theatre politics and ﬁnancial considerations behind them.
7
Reports on both Disney’s Lion King and Livent’s Ragtime are featured as “The
Morphing of Broadway” in American Theatre, December 1997, 14–23; 50–55.
Newsweek, 15 June 1998, reported: “The arrival of Disney and Livent has galvanized
Broadway, but what’s more signiﬁcant is that Broadway has leaped the Hudson Riverand fanned out all over the United States (and the world). There have always been roadshows, but a burgeoning appetite for Broadway Productions (helped by Rosie
O’Donnell’s regularly plugging Broadway on national TV) has expanded the quantity”(58).
8
Michael Bennett’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical, A Chorus Line,ﬁrst began as a workshop piece. It opened off Broadway in April 1975, moved to
Broadway in July 1975, and closed in April 1990.
9
Ben Brantley, “‘Ragtime’: A Diorama With Nostalgia Rampant,” New York Times,
19 January 1998.
10
It is reported: “Anyone who hasn’t visited Times Square in the past year can haveno notion of how much it has changed.” (Sylviane Gold, “The Disney Difference,”
American Theatre, December 1997, 14.) As far as “Disney difference” is concerned,
reports were around since 1994 when Beauty and the Beast was put on Broadway. New
York magazine has a feature story on it: “Broadway’s New Beast: The Inside Story of
How Disney Turned a Smash Hit Movie Into a Smash Hit Musical (It Hopes).” (MichaelGoldstein, New York, 14 March 1994, 40–45.)
11
Cornel West calls Fires in the Mirror “the most signiﬁcant artistic exploration ofBlack Jewish relations in our time.” (“Foreword,” Fires in the Mirror, xvii-xviii.)
12
A brief chronology of what happened in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in August 1991
is as follows: On the evening of 19 August 1991, a car driven by a Hasidic Jew, Yosef
Lifsh, bearing Lubavitcher Grand Rebbe, careened into two Guyanese American chil-

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MISAKO KOIKE

dren at an intersection of Brooklyn streets. Seven-year-old Gavin Cato was killed, andhis cousin Angela suffered a broken leg. An angry crowd gathered. Three hours laterand ﬁve blocks from the car accident, Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting Hasidic history professor from Australia was stabbed, and he died at a hospital two and a half hours later.
On August twentieth, rioting began on the streets, as Blacks and Lubavitchers set ﬁres,threw stones and bottles, and unleashed insults at each other and at the police. (Abridged
from Fires in the Mirror, xlvii-liii.)
13
Thulani Davis, “Anna Deavere Smith,” BOMB, Fall 1992, 42R.
14
The quote is from Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Preface, xii. Similar expressions appear in Playing in the Dark, 12–13, and also in her “Introduction” to Race-ing
Justice, xvii. In the latter book, Morrison writes: “one needs perspective, not attitudes;context, not anecdotes; analyses, not postures” (xi).
15
In March and April of 2000, Smith brought to New York’s Public Theatre anothershow, House Arrest, composed in a similar way, but this time on the theme of American
Presidency and its realities.
16
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 151, Note
6. A similar explication can be found in her “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution:
An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” 4.
17
For example, Martha in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), Blanche in
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Negro-Sarah in Adrienne
Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), or even Jessie in Marsha Norman’s ’night,
Mother (1982), is driven to madness or suicide because of her sexual promiscuity or her
search for identity, sexuality and self-control.

WORKS CITED
I.

Plays, Musicals and Operas:

A Chorus Line (1975), a musical. Book by James Kirkwood & Nicholas Dante.
Music by Marvin Hamlisch. Lyrics by Edward Kleban. Concept, directed
and choreography by Michael Bennett.
Beauty and the Beast (1994), a musical. Book by Linda Woolverton. Music by
Alan Menken. Lyrics by Howard Ashman & Tim Rice.
Death of a Salesman (1949), a play. Written by Arthur Miller, directed by Elia
Kazan. Published in Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism,ed. Gerald Weales, New York: The Viking Press, 1967.
Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992), a
play. Conceived, written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Directedby Christopher Ashley. Published by New York: Doubleday Anchor Books,
1993.
How I Learned to Drive (1997), a play. Written by Paula Vogel, directed byMark Brolaw. Published by Dramatists Play Service, 1997.
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993), a musical. Book by Terrence McNally. Musicby John Kander. Lyrics by Fred Ebb. Based on the novel by Manuel Puig.
Lohengrin (1850), (1998), an opera. Music & Libretto by Richard Wagner.
Metropolitan Opera House New Production. Conducted by James Levine.
Production/Set Designer/Lighting Concept by Robert Wilson.
Oklahoma! (1943), a musical. Book & lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, based

CHALLENGES AND HOPES FOR AMERICAN THEATRE

107

on Lynn Riggs’ play Green Grow the Lilacs. Music by Richard Rodgers.
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Dances by Agnes de Mille.
Ragtime (1998), a musical. Book by Terrence McNally. Music by Stephen
Flaherty. Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. Based on the 1975 novel by E. L.
Doctorow. Directed by Frank Galati.
Show Boat (1927), a musical. Book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Music
by Jerome Kern. Based on the novel by Edna Ferber.
Show Boat (1994), a revival of the above done at Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre,
2 Oct. 1994, directed by Harold Prince.
The Cave (1993), an opera. Conceived and developed by Steve Reich & Beryl
Korot. Music by Steve Reich. Multi-channel video & screen design by Beryl
Korot.
The Lion King (1997), a musical. Book by Roger Allers & Irene Mecchi. Music& lyrics by Elton John & Tim Rice; additional music & lyrics by Lebo M.
Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin, Julie Taymor, Hans Zimmer. Adapted from thescreenplay by Irene Mecchi & Jonathan Roberts & Linda Woolverton.
Directed by Julie Taymor.
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993), a play. Conceived, written, & performedby Anna Deavere Smith. Originally produced by the Center Theatre
Group/Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1993. Directed by Emily Mann.
Its original New York production was produced by the New York
Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre in 1994, directed by George C. Wolfe;
later moved to Broadway. Published by New York: Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1994.
II.

Reviews, Essays & Criticisms:

Adams, Brooks. “Lohengrin. (Metropolitan Opera House, New York, NewYork),” Art in America, September 1998.
Bordman, Gerald. American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle. New York: Oxford
U.P., 1986.
Brantley, Ben. “‘Ragtime’: A Diorama With Nostalgia Rampant,” New YorkTimes, 19 January 1998.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New
York: Routledge, 1990.
———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay inPhenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal, 40, December
1988.
Davis, Thulani. “Anna Deavere Smith,” BOMB: artists, writers, actors, directors, Fall 1992, No.xxxxi, 40–43. New York: New Art Publications.
Dolan, Jill. “How I Learned to Drive,” Performance Review, Theatre Journal,
March 1998, 127–28.
Gold, Sylviane. “The Disney Difference,” American Theatre, December 1997,
14–18 & 50–53.
Goldstein, Michael. “Broadway’s New Beast: The Inside Story of How Disney
Turned a Smash Hit Movie Into a Smash Hit Musical (It Hopes),” New York,
14 March 1994, 40–45.

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MISAKO KOIKE

Kerner, Leighton. “Swan Song,” Village Voice, 31 March 1998, 123.
Kroll, Jack and Maggie Malone. “Broadway Bonanza,” Newsweek, 15 June
1998, 56f.
Lahr, John. “Animal Magnetism,” New Yorker, 24 November 1997, 126–29.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
———. ed. Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill,
Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1992.
Rothstein, Edward. “Complex Delving Into Myth,” New York Times, 15
October 1993, C3.
Smith, Anna Deavere. “Introduction,” Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights,
Brooklyn and Other Identities, xxiii-xli. New York: Anchor Books, 1993.
Stasio, Marilyn. “The Selling of Ragtime,” American Theatre, December 1997,
20–23.
Tanaka, Jennifer. “On Virtual Theatre: Theatrics Out of Thin Air,” American
Theatre, September 1999, 24–27.
West, Cornel. “Foreword,” Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror, xviixxii.