Why theater is 2017’s most politically powerful art form

We might be living in a golden age of television, but if you want to look at a popular art form that’s really been getting under people’s skin lately, turn to something a little older: theater. Since Donald Trump won the presidential election last November, every few months brings news of another political statement from a theater, and another virulent wave of outrage and counter-outrage in response.

Not long after the election, the cast of Hamilton directed a speech at Mike Pence when he attended the show, calling on the new vice president elect to protect and defend “all of us,” including those “of different colors, creeds, and orientations,” and to “uphold our inalienable rights.” In response, Trump supporters staged a boycott, albeit one that does not appear to have impacted the show’s ticket sales.

In June, the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park staged a production of Julius Caesar in which the assassinated Caesar became a Trump-like figure. The production was met with a wave of enraged op-eds — and with protesters, one of whom crashed the stage mid-performance to yell, “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right! This is unacceptable!” Sponsors withdrew their support from the production. Theater companies across the country with “Shakespeare” in their names received death threats.

Also this summer, a new staging of 1984 on Broadway had audiences fainting and vomiting in their seats; on one occasion, audience members got so riled up that they caused a disruption and were arrested. 1984 is not a politically controversial play in quite the way that Shakespeare in the Park’s Julius Caesar was — few people, if any, are so outraged by its political ideas that they are calling for a boycott or forming picket lines outside of the theater — but it is a politically powerful play, one that is sparking intense, visceral reactions in its audience.

In fact, theater in general seems to be our most politically potent art form right now. No other medium is getting under its audience’s skin in quite the same way. And that’s because theater is uniquely immediate, making it more intimate — and more susceptible to disruption — than any other medium.

The part of 1984 that’s eliciting such a strong response from its audiences is the play’s torture sequence. Our hero, Winston Smith, has been arrested by the totalitarian government under which he lives, and which is beginning the process of slowly reprogramming his brain. Their goal, explains Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, is to convince him that if the government tells him that two plus two is five, then it is. Two plus two is not only no longer four, but it never was.

To that end, O’Brien and his masked helpers slowly and methodically apply pain to Winston’s body: They beat him; they pull out his teeth and fingernails. It’s a profoundly disturbing sequence — but we don’t actually witness any of the violence on stage.

Instead, we hear O’Brien’s dispassionate instructions: “Teeth,” he says, or, “Fingernails.” We see his aides mass around Winston, and hear him scream as they descend upon him. Then the lights go out, and when they come back up Winston is dazed, insensible with pain, and bloody.

Compared to the violence that regularly appears in films, 1984’s staging should not really be shocking. “The movie version [of 1984] is much more graphic than what we put onstage,” points out Olivia Wilde, who’s currently starring in the Broadway production. But it remains profoundly unnerving.

When I saw the show, no one screamed or fainted or vomited. Instead, the entire audience emitted soft murmurs of distress every time it became clear that Winston was about to go through the ringer once again: Not the titillated “ooh, we’re about to see some violence” response you sometimes hear at the movies, but a sound of low-level dread. “Oh, God,” said the woman behind me with resigned horror as O’Brien made his final advance on Winston.

“Theater is live, and you are yards away from a human being who seems to be feeling real pain and real emotion,” Wilde explains. “There’s something about live theater that makes it feel more real, even though intellectually you know it can’t be, because we’re doing it eight times a week.”

That’s what makes 1984 so compelling — and also part of what made Julius Caesar so disturbing to Trump supporters.

The assassination of Caesar was designed to be disturbing to Trump haters, wrote Corey Stoll for Vulture after playing Brutus in the production: “A nontrivial percentage of our liberal audience had fantasized about undemocratic regime change in Washington. Acted out to its logical conclusion, that fantasy was hideous, shameful, and self-defeating.”

Meanwhile, Trump supporters in the Shakespeare in the Park audience were faced with the spectacle of a man they admired being stabbed to brutal, bloody death. Intellectually, it was clearly fake, but it felt real. It felt intimate. It was upsetting. Trump supporters in the audience lashed out — and in response, so did thousands of Trump supporters who were never anywhere near the Shakespeare in the Park production. (It’s worth noting that few Obama supporters seem to have reacted with such outrage to stagings of Julius Caesar that interpreted Caesar as an Obama figure.)

In 1984, the intimacy of the torture scenes is deliberately heightened by the destruction of the fourth wall. Toward the end of the sequence the lights come up, and Winston addresses the audience directly. “Why are you just sitting there?” he asks, looking into audience members’ eyes. “How can you just let this happen?”

It was at this moment when I saw the play that vague ideas about the Milgram experiment, which proved that humans are willing to torture each other if instructed to do so by an authority figure, floated through my head, and I wondered whether it was my moral duty to charge the stage, theater or no theater.

No one’s rushed the 1984 stage so far, Wilde says, but lots of people think about it. “Afterwards they feel guilty,” she says. “They’ll say, ‘I was just about to get up before the scene changed!’ And I think that’s what we want. You feel guilty that you didn’t do something, and then you leave and you think, ‘I want to live my life as someone who was involved, who changed things for the better.’”

The aim of 1984 is to use the intimacy and immediacy of live theater to create in its audience a visceral sense of discomfort, a sense that something is horribly wrong and must be fixed — and then invite theatergoers to use that urge to fix the world by turning their attention to their own country’s politics.

“Hopefully,” says Wilde, “it’s inspiring people to become activists.” And if it is, it’s because of the immediacy of theater itself.

The immediacy of theater makes it more moving, but that same immediacy also makes it more vulnerable to disruption, from both sides of the fourth wall.

“Theater is engaging because of a latent fear that it could collapse at any moment,” says Brett Gamboa, an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth College. “Most spectators are aware of their own potential to disrupt the performance, voluntarily or no, throughout, and that potential is a considerable factor in the tension and engagement we experience.”

Part of what makes live theater so electric and thrilling is that the audience knows that anything could all go terribly wrong at any moment, and that it might even go terribly wrong because of the audience. At the theater, actors and crewmembers are building a work of art right before our eyes, and if someone sneezes at the wrong moment, or a cellphone rings, everything could go to pieces (or at least distract the audience).

It’s exciting to see a play succeed despite the potential for any number of calamities, large or small, to befall it. What’s more, this potential offers a built-in opportunity for revenge from an angry audience member: If you get up and yell, you are definitely going to have an effect on the play.

That possibility simply doesn’t exist for other media. If you yell at the TV in your living room, nothing happens. If you get up and yell at a movie theater, you might make the rest of the audience angry, or get kicked out, but the movie will continue just as it always does. But when audience members rushed the stage at Julius Caesar, the entire production had to stop. The spell of the play broke.

“The potential for disruption is attractive,” says Gamboa, “and an easy-to-hand means for those looking for ways to gain a captive audience (and to resist or disrupt something that would otherwise progress).”

And the corollary is that in the theater, actors can respond to their audience in a way that they cannot do so anywhere else. If Mike Pence had walked into a movie theater shortly after the election last November, nothing would have happened. But at Hamilton, the cast was able to disrupt its own production (albeit after the performance had officially ended) in order to address him directly and formally, while it still had the weight of the audience’s attention.

Theater has always been immediate, and it’s always been susceptible to disruption — but in recent years, mainstream American theater hasn’t been so politically potent as to lead to death threats and arrests. In the Trump era, that seems to be changing.

The theatrical community made political critiques under Obama and George W. Bush, but mostly not so virulently, says Gamboa, or at least not in major Broadway theaters that depended on middle-class ticket sales. In general, the feeling was that if you wanted tourist ticket dollars, you made your theater accessible and nonjudgmental — not so upsetting that audiences rioted. “Most of the more strident political critiques in theater happen off-Broadway,” says Gamboa.

Gamboa argues that there are a few factors leading to mainstream theater’s newfound political potency, and to the way that audience reactions seem to spread across the country. “Facebook and the blogosphere have changed radically and the impact of such events seems more immediate and widespread than it could be before,” he says, allowing outrage over something like the Public’s Julius Caesar to spread more rapidly than it could before the rise of social media.

There’s also the example of Hamilton, which is “not quite like any other play,” Gamboa says, “given its historical concerns and its urgently contemporary casting.” Hamilton, which opened on Broadway in 2015 to enormous acclaim, became the most expensive show ever to appear on Broadway, and won a Pulitzer, has demonstrated that mainstream theater can be both political and profitable, and other theaters seem to be sitting up and taking notice.

And finally, there’s the question of Donald Trump himself. The Trump administration is historically unpopular, which means that critiquing the president onstage isn’t necessarily the box office poison it might have been under previous administrations. “A show of resistance on Broadway,” Gamboa says, “may rather attract more support than lessen it.”

Political theater is both more attractive and more easily amplified now than it was even five years ago. Which means that it’s becoming more and more possible for the medium to turn its unique immediacy to the political present, even in major mainstream companies. Theater has always had the opportunity to function as our most politically potent art form — and now, the circumstances are right for it to take full advantage of its powers.