Amplifying Our Differences: Schlocky Political Theatre

Power of story professionals in the theatre community have a bone to pick with our skidding common culture. They would like us to consider that the story of what you present is shaped (misshapen!) by how loudly and artificially you're induced to present it.

. . .Today even sermons in churches and temples are almost always carried through loudspeakers. If Abraham Lincoln were to reappear at the Great Hall of Cooper Union, where he gave a historic speech as a presidential candidate, exasperated audiences would be shouting at him to use a sound system.

A little McLuhan-esque wordplay -- when did the concept of "speakers" come to denote wired boxes for cranking up the volume to levels now often considered assault outside the concert or convention hall, rather than "speakers" being all-too-human individuals who get together to really listen to and be enhanced by each other's ideas?

Isn't that what we originally set out to amplify, not our differences but our understanding OF those differences, the better to hear how it can amplify our common humanity?

In a powerful story needing no amplication to hold MY attention -- its Power of Story knocks me out! -- the New York Times this week adds swelling music and sublime lyrics to Liza's latest dramatic theme, about how political noise machines distort what we value most in public policy, culture, art and education.

Amplified sound, in effect, may diminish rather than amplify our individualism, our audience, even our own ability to pay attention or care about all we've lost.

. . . when amplification took hold on Broadway, audiences inevitably grew less alert, more passive. It began changing every element of the musical, from the lyrics (which grew less subtle and intricate), to the subject matter and musical styles (the bigger, the plusher, the schlockier, the better). Musicals became less literate and more obvious, and stars like John Raitt, who had a burnished baritone voice of operatic dimensions, became marginalized. . . .no one paid much attention to the sappy lyrics.

No one paid much attention to the lyrics?? (So much for discussing our differences then. Will it soon become all sound and fury with no meaning in the actual words?) Just before my suicidal slump at hearing this, I was grateful the story went on: "Throughout this period Stephen Sondheim, the most literate composer in the history of the musical, remained a world unto himself with his own devoted audience . . ."

Which got me wondering if maybe a critical mass of us can culturally collaborate to become the most literate modern composers of political theatre, and create a deservedly devoted audience -- for the Sondheim, not just for the P.T. Barnum?

Whatever, we'd better think of SOMETHING pretty quick.

According to a Newsweek cover story last summer by David Noonan, baby boomers who exposed themselves to blasting rock bands are now suffering the consequences. More than 28 million Americans . . .have a significant degree of hearing loss, and the number is expected to swell to 78 million by 2030 . . . more than 5 million children and teenagers . . .have some hearing damage from amplified music and the general noise they encounter every day, a good deal of it funneled directly into their ears.

"If they don't take steps to protect their hearing," he wrote, "the iPod generation faces the same fate as the Woodstock generation. Or worse."

Are the classic sounds of civic life -- truth, beauty, goodness, justice, love -- enhanced or diminished when, in the name of presenting them for popular consumption, we distort their very meaning and amplify our own differences to deafening levels that do permanent damage to human ears, minds, and hearts?

Should we care, if the heavy bass and deafening levels of powerful modern difference-amplifiers blow out everybody's eardrums along with our will to live, and thus our chances for ever building any majority audience able to appreciate artistic, nuanced and truly innovative political theatre?

I'm talking about political performance created by uniquely talented humans striving to connect, to build a growing constituency around uplifting and important lyrics, not merely to scrabble for a shrinking pool of deviant voyeurs egging us on to louder and more damaging extremes.

Should we care if over-amplifying our differences hurts the very audience for which we compete, reduces it to a deaf and sightless, soulless lump of standardized test-programmed RAM? Does it matter if we the people learn to prefer politics to problem-solving, screaming to singing, mass media to personal passion?

So I'm thinking less must be more, when it comes to decibel levels so distorting that political noise machines (school and church noise machines, too!) crank way past the purported goal of enhanced sound quality for the masses, and approach the point of inflicting mass physical damage and provoke mass psychological aversion responses?

Maybe we need to redesign our political theatre for a whole new kind of sound as art, less Rock and a Hard Place (singing "If I Had a Bigger Hammer" on an endless loop) and more complex human-scale harmony from Sweet Honey in the Rock (heck, they don't even need tuneful accompaniment, much less the distorting buzz of amplification.)

A Sweet Honey in the Rock concert is a transforming experience, drenching audiences with harmonies. The rhythms change, leads change, and women dance: breathtaking music.
The women of Sweet Honey sing fiercely of being fighters, tenderly of being in love, and knowingly of being women. They take their evergrowing audiences through a complex journey of celebration and struggle. . .

If you as this story's audience are unwilling to appreciate new rhythms and hearing only the distorted bass of our differences -- it may be too late. Too late for you, for me, for intricate, subtle lyricism, for sublime music and Power of Story. Too late for the classics and maybe for civilization itself. Meanwhile, the sounds of our amplified differences will no doubt echo through the empty, cold wastelands of the galaxy for eternity -- or would, if there were any ears left to listen.

I always go for the happy endings, though. Happy needn't equate to sappy, or at least so I'm prepared to argue artfully, and where there's Life, there's Hope. The theatre story left some of both, along with a challenge and a lot of work to do:

The literate musical has been making a comeback - works like "Falsettos," "Parade," "Urinetown" and "Caroline, or Change." Still, it is notable that several of these shows and others like them played in smaller theaters that were more conducive to works where words really matter. . .
To put the best spin on things: The musical has creatively adapted to amplification. But in doing so the art form has diminished, or at least become something different.
There is no doubting the right . . .to use electronic resources. . .breaking down barriers and assimilating different traditions is the vogue right now. . . .
I suspect that this matter will actually take some hashing out.

Education too, is more conducive to smaller theaters where words really matter. Public policy debate too, is distorted when pitched beyond human reason and scale, playing to huge faceless audiences fighting just to get inside, never mind down front. Our civic art forms and collective wisdom have been distorted and diminished, and those of us old enough to remember a time when civil discourse fell not on deaf ears, seldom go out to the theatre any more.

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