July 30, 2004Show and Tell
Unlike the circus, the convention hall has no welcoming barker saying "Step right up!" or "This way, folks." The FleetCenter is barricaded. It's a little like a fun house. The floors are not insulated, so you hear the pounding of thousands of footsteps moving fast. Wires are exposed along the walls. Hallways seem temporary. Escalators suddenly won't go up, stairwell doors lock, guards gaze off into space as we ask how to get upstairs. But all of these obstructions melt in the importance of watching the show. Four years ago, I would have pooh-poohed the notion of politics as theatrical. If theater is anything, it is life made urgent. We don't waste words, gestures or time on stage. But politicians can learn from us and we can learn technique from them. In this election year, none of us can waste a moment. The theater could afford to be more political and politics needs to be a lot more theatrical. When Bill Clinton spoke, and dropped the first "Send me" in reference to Jack O'Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, gave me a clue when I asked if there was any classical actor in America who could have done what Mr. Clinton did that night. "No," he said. "He is Shavian. "There is a line from Bill Clinton that extends back through the work of Stoppard and then Shaw and then Shakespeare. One of the things we don't do is 'ideate,' which is how Shakespeare's characters speak. They don't go from moment to moment on a rosary, bead to bead. They get the entire idea and then they exhale it." Got it. We 20th and 21st century American actors are smitten with the natural, invested in intimacy. We are not trained to grab the hearts and minds of our audience, just the hearts. And speaking of grabbing hearts and minds, we found a new model in Barack Obama. "You think to yourself, 'Oh, we will all be measured from here on by this. Obama is Brando in 'Streetcar,' '' Mr. O'Brien said to me with finality. Mr. Brando did change acting forever with his performance of Stanley, because he was mind, body and heart in a way we hadn't seen before. Will Mr. Obama change black political oratory? His speech did not, for example, elicit the traditional call and response we associate with powerful black speech. The speech instead evoked speechlessness. "That guy's amazing," said the blond model sitting next to me in the hall. Mr. Obama comes out of a mixed tradition, and I'm not talking about his racial mix. He is mixing traditions of communication. As he himself explained to me: "I tap into the tradition that a lot of African-Americans tap into and that's the church. It's the church blended with a smattering of Hawaii and Indonesia and maybe Kansas, and I've learned a lot of the most important things in life from literature. I've been a professor of law. I'm accustomed to making an argument. When I am effective, it's coming from my gut." If Mr. Clinton goes from Stoppard to Shaw to Shakespeare, does Mr. Obama go from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Langston Hughes, to preachers, to slavery? No, wait. It's not that simple. Mr. Clinton takes a road that stops off at the black church. Mr. Obama stops off in a literary tradition that we do not immediately associate with black oratory. Is this what Dr. King's dream was all about? Was it about more than schools and laws? Was it about irresistible fusions, irresistible mixed oratories? Was it about all of us talking to one another and as one another? Put Mr. Obama's oratory aside for a moment. What about his magnetism? I asked Tom Freston, the former MTV chief who is now co-president of Viacom: "What makes a real rock star? How do they do that?" He told me, "They have to have a unique attitude, they have to put a twist on a well-worn theme." Got it. Mr. Obama's twist is a twist on the theme of a real, profound desire to get close to the audience, to reach out and seem to be right next to them. It's so real and so deep that it cannot be taught. In 1996, everyone bemoaned how politics was being turned over to the handlers, the dress designers and the speech coaches. But don't worry about the handlers in this case. You cannot teach the Clinton-Obama twist. To what end is the Clinton-Obama twist? Here lies the crux of the matter, and inside the crux we find I found it reassuring that the heartache and struggle was seen. It was not denied. Here we find empathy. Perhaps the best of politics and the best of theater seek to reveal the darkness and the light of the human condition, and the worst of both seek power. Hope lives in the politician's promise of tomorrow, and in the clown's expectation that eventually truth will out the tyrant. Thank goodness, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards differentiated between blind optimism and hope.This trio prepared a perfect stage upon which Senator Kerry can strut until November. I think we are moving from one tradition to another. At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, I was in the Union Oyster House. It is an old place with wood and tile, festooned in red, white and blue. Three white men in front were giving a briefing. They were very confident, wielding numbers, polls on the right, polls on the left. When Charlie Cook, a respected political analyst, was asked about young voters, he dismissed them by saying they weren't worth the time. He divided potential voters into two categories: those who still use cinderblocks and boards to build furniture and those who buy real furniture. The surer bets, Mr. Cook explained, are the ones who buy furniture. Everyone laughed. By all accounts, Mr. Cook knows his numbers, and knows his trends. But he may underestimate the young voters' potential. Jessica Tully, a producer at Uma Productions, thinks the election is going to take place on the dance floor. She wants to take hip-hop to the swing states. Sean Combs is at the convention. So is André 3000 of OutKast. They are young and they can afford furniture. It could be very expensive to stay in old models of the past, old models of who the voters are, where we can spend time and where we can't. Yet I wouldn't mind going back to listen to the speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights activist who captivated the crowds at the 1964 convention, and others who know how to mobilize people who have cinderblock furniture or cardboard homes. I want to know about the old days in order to be a part of building the future. I want to know "How did they do that?" Then. And "How can we?" Now. Anna Deavere Smith, an actress and playwright, is the director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University. |
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