{"id":65474,"date":"2015-10-26T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-10-26T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=65474"},"modified":"2015-10-25T11:25:06","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T11:25:06","slug":"striking-distance-the-violence-we-see-and-dont-see-onstage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/10\/striking-distance-the-violence-we-see-and-dont-see-onstage\/","title":{"rendered":"Striking Distance: The Violence We See, and Don\u2019t See, Onstage"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Greeks to \u2018Disgraced,\u2019 direct violence has been a theatrical staple. Structural violence, though harder to stage, is also the stuff of drama.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Heidi<\/a>

Heidi Armbruster and Aasif Mandvi in “Disgraced” at Lincoln Center in 2012. (Photo by Sara Krulwich for the New York Times)<\/p><\/div>\n

During a disastrous dinner party near the end of Ayad Akhtar\u2019s Disgraced<\/em><\/a>, a Pakistani-American lawyer who was raised Muslim learns that a younger prot\u00e9g\u00e9,<\/strong> who is African American, is being promoted over him. More bad news follows: Partners in his law firm believe he is anti-Semitic; he is no longer being assigned important cases; and his wife, who is white, has slept with the Whitney Museum curator, who is Jewish, whom they have just entertained. This disturbing confluence marks neither his nadir nor the play\u2019s emotional climax. That occurs seconds later when, as Akhtar\u2019s stage direction reads: \u201cAmir hits Emily in the face. A vicious blow. The first blow unleashes a torrent of rage, overtaking him. He hits her twice more. Maybe a third.\u201d<\/p>\n

Akhtar\u2019s Pultizer-winning play, set to be the most-produced in the country<\/a> in the coming season, is a bouillabaisse of contemporary issues boiling around one another: ethnic profiling and immigration; terrorism and Islamofascism; race and identity stereotyping of Jews, African Americans, and Muslims. But after much smart\u00a0and engaging talk among Upper East Siders, emotion and alcohol gives way to direct violence. This explosive and provocative moment is a vivid example of a shift in the representation of domestic violence; it also provides an opportunity to identify other forms of violence that are indirect, impersonal, and at least as pernicious.<\/p>\n

Violence long ago moved from the offstage convention of the Greeks when, for example, a messenger informs Oedipus and the audience that Jocasta has hung herself inside the palace. In King Lear, <\/em>Cornwall blinds Gloucester before our eyes. Edward Bond\u2019s Londoners stone a baby to death onstage in Saved. <\/em>Unrestrained sexual and physical violence animates many of Sarah Kane\u2019s plays.<\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/a>

Edward Bond\u2019s \u201cSaved,\u201d in a 2011 London revival. (Photo by Marilyn Kingwill)<\/p><\/div>\n

Disgraced <\/em>is written in a realistic style that reflects the familiar dynamic of a man committing violence against a woman, but the play differs from what is common onstage in many ways. Amir is not a serial abuser. <\/strong>He does not appear to be a controlling husband bent on exercising power. In the opening image, he sits passively as Emily sketches his portrait. Later, they interpret a verse of the Koran\u00a0on the treatment of wives very differently, with Emily\u2019s perspective more positive than Amir\u2019s: \u201cThe root verb can mean beat. But it can also mean leave. So it could be saying, if your wife doesn\u2019t listen, leave her. Not beat her.\u201d<\/p>\n

But unlike some past depictions of domestic violence,\u00a0Disgraced <\/em>offers no excuse\u2014not once, not even when, as Emily admits, \u201cI had a part in what happened.\u201d Theatre history is full of examples of women rising from the mat, figuratively, to spar another round with an abuser.<\/p>\n

Monkey Nipples<\/strong><\/p>\n

Contrast Amir and Emily with an older couple entertaining at home across a drunken evening: The abuse between George and Martha in Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf<\/em> (1962) is longstanding and unites as much as divides them: In the first act George threatens physical harm when he aims a shotgun at Martha, pulls the trigger, and a Chinese parasol \u201cblossoms\u201d from the barrel. In the second act, he threatens to kill her and grabs her by the throat, which prompts Honey to scream, \u201cMURDERER! MURDERER!\u201d By the end of the third act of their long night\u2019s journey, they remain a couple, still standing, if wobbly.<\/p>\n

In Carousel <\/em>(1945), Julie confides that Billy has hit her, which prompts Carrie to ask, \u201cWhyn\u2019t you leave him?\u201d When Billy returns from the grave to visit his daughter, he slaps her hand. Later, Julie reassures her, \u201cIt is possible, dear\u2014for someone to hit you\u2014hit you hard\u2014and not hurt at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lyrics in Fiorello <\/em>(1960) were later revised, but in the original Marie sings, \u201cI\u2019m gonna marry the very next man\/And if he likes me\/Who cares how frequently he strikes me\/I\u2019ll fetch his slippers with my arm in a sling\/Just for the privilege of wearing his ring.\u201d LaGuardia proposes to her in the next scene, the musical\u2019s last.<\/p>\n

In Danny and the Deep Blue Sea <\/em>(1984), Roberta slaps Danny, which prompts him to choke her. Soon after, they make love for the first time\u2014and slap each other again. By the following morning and the play\u2019s final scene, they are planning marriage and the future together.<\/p>\n

Punch and Judy shows, once a staple of British boardwalks, are less popular today. Traditionally, Mr. Punch, as his name implies, uses a cudgel and his hand puppet fists to bludgeon: a dog, a cat, a horse, a beggar, his neighbor, a doctor, a black servant, a policeman, a hangman, the devil, and, of course, Judy, his wife. His misanthropy hardly sounds humorous even if his violence is \u201cpreposterous,\u201d as James Twitchell calls it. A headline in Britain\u2019s Daily Mail<\/em>\u00a0showed the sea change\u00a0two summers ago: \u201cPunch and Judy show interrupted when killjoy accused organisers of \u2018glorifying child abuse.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Our standards have changed on a number of once supposedly humorous things: Is the bigotry of Archie Bunker funny, for instance, in the age of Black Lives Matter? How about his belittling of Edith? How about\u00a0Jackie Gleason\u2019s common threat to his wife Alice on\u00a0The Honeymooners<\/em>, \u201cOne of these days . . . POW!!! Right in the kisser!\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n

Widening the Lens<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Goldstein defines violence as \u201caction intended to harm.\u201d For Allen Guttmann, violence is \u201cthe unsanctioned or illegitimate use of harmful or destructive physical force.\u201d Both definitions focus on what peace scholars call direct violence. But people do not need to intend harm to cause it; and it need not be physical since violence is often masked, indirect, and systemic.<\/p>\n

According to the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington\u2014yes, we fund such an agency\u2014\u201cStructural violence refers to inequalities built into the social system.\u201d The term is usually attributed to Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, who also coined \u201ccultural violence.\u201d He calls it \u201cany aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form. Symbolic violence built into a culture does not kill or maim like direct violence or the violence built into the structure. However, it is used to legitimize either or both.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cultural violence can legitimize direct violence, structural violence, or both: A\u00a0child starved because the school lunch program fell to budget cuts, for instance, or a\u00a0child starved because his refugee camp was overwhelmed, an unintended consequence of an unavoidable war. According to Tom Woodhouse: \u201cWe end direct violence by changing conflict behavior, structural violence by removing structural contradictions, and injustices, and cultural violence, by changing attitudes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Sterling<\/a>

Sterling K. Brown and Louis Cancelmi in \u201cFather Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3\u2033 at the Public Theater. (Photo by Richard Termine)<\/p><\/div>\n

These\u00a0distinctions\u00a0provide a useful lens. Whether onstage or off, direct violence is hard to miss: Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia; Amir attacks Emily. Forms of structural and cultural violence are much harder to perceive, especially when the audience lives amid them. Plays that dramatize these dynamics, whether overtly or covertly, make recognizing such violence unavoidable, as is clear in many prominent American plays of recent years.<\/p>\n

Weeks into rehearsals of Father Comes Home from the Wars<\/em> (Parts 1, 2, & 3), Suzan-Lori Parks changed the ending.\u00a0 Instead of Hero killing Homer, Homer survives to join a chorus of runaway slaves seeking freedom. By eliminating a murder\u2014the most obvious, direct, and personal form of violence\u2014Parks shifts her audience\u2019s focus from a black-on-black crime back to her predominant focus on slavery, one of history\u2019s most egregious examples of structural violence. The Civil War itself is mostly distant in these first three parts. Parks has not written a single battle scene, onstage or off;\u00a0no swordfight, no fisticuffs. Yet, the structural violence of slavery suffuses every scene.<\/p>\n

Direct violence was the catalyst for both Fires in the Mirror <\/em>(1992) a<\/em>nd The Laramie Project <\/em>(2000): <\/em>the death of Gavin Cato in a traffic accident, the Crown Heights riots that led to the stabbing of Yankel Rosenblum, the murder of Matthew Shepard. But these instances of\u00a0violence\u00a0were\u00a0pretexts for Anna Deavere Smith and Mois\u00e9s Kaufman and his\u00a0Tectonic Theater Project to widen the lens and\u00a0dramatize \u201cinequalities built into the social system,\u201d as USIP defines structural violence.<\/p>\n

Angels in America<\/em> (1991) dramatizes HIV\u2019s attack both on Prior\u2019s body and America\u2019s body politic, including Roy Cohn\u2019s attempts to suborn justice. Structural and cultural violence towards gays and people with HIV may have\u00a0diminished since Angels <\/em>premiered as attitudes have changed\u00a0(Tony\u00a0Kushner\u2019s marriage to Mark Harris in 1993, 20\u00a0years before the Supreme Court\u2019s decision on gay marriage, was the first same-sex union covered in the Vows section of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>). Unsurprisingly, changing attitudes is precisely what\u00a0Woodehouse prescribes\u00a0for curtailing\u00a0cultural violence.<\/p>\n

Something Rotten<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 1977 essay \u201cOn Violence,\u201d Edward Bond writes: \u201cThe causes of human violence can be easily summed up. It occurs in situations of injustice. It is caused not only by physical threats, but even more significantly by threats to human dignity. . . .Whenever there is serious and constant violence, that is a sign of the presence of some major social injustice.\u201d The playwrights cited above appear to agree with Bond on the root of violence as reflected in the structural and cultural violence evident within these plays. Gays, women, or people of color wrote them all.<\/p>\n

\u201cThreats to human dignity,\u201d of course, have been reflected onstage long before Galtung\u2019s coinages: The Oresteia<\/em> ends with a system of justice replacing the endless cycle of violence perpetuated by honor killings. Two thousand years later, Shaw\u2019s Mrs. Warren\u2019s Profession<\/em> uses sexual slavery as a locus for his Fabian critique of capitalism.<\/p>\n

The purpose of playing, as Hamlet instructs the players, \u201cwas and is, to hold, as \u2019twere, the mirror up to nature.\u201d Only four bodies litter the stage of Denmark\u2019s rotting state as the curtain falls on Elsinore, but far more suffer from structural and cultural violence that is easily overlooked when it is covert and indirect. As Bond writes, \u201cLike most people, I am a pessimist by experience but an optimist by nature, and I have no doubt that I shall go on being true to my nature.\u201d In relation to violence, we can align the two: Violence in all its forms\u2014direct, structural, and cultural\u2014is committed by people and\u00a0by institutions that act on our behalf.\u00a0And\u00a0the people and institutions that make violence can also unmake it.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Russell Vandenbroucke\u00a0is a professor of theatre arts, and director of the Peace, Justice &\u00a0Transformation Program, at the University of Louisville. He previously served as\u00a0artistic director of Northlight Theatre<\/a> in Skokie, Ill.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 americantheatre.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Greeks to \u2018Disgraced,\u2019 direct violence has been a theatrical staple. Structural violence, though harder to stage, is also the stuff of drama. \u2014\u201cStructural violence refers to inequalities built into the social system.\u201d The term is usually attributed to Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, who also coined \u201ccultural violence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}