The Theater of Power, & The Power of Theater

The teacher sat down slowly, in the circle of chairs, and it was cold. I shifted nervously, and the plastic crackled under my ass as I heard their first question to us: “what’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” My classmates blinked at the teacher and we sat in silence for ages and minutes, counting each other’s breaths. The first person to answer recounted a story I have since forgotten, as did the next, and the next. I haven’t forgotten them bursting into tears, though, or the pain that was shared in that room, between 18-year-olds, eager to learn about the power of theater.

These stories came back from time to time when the teacher deemed it necessary, to remind us what we were operating from, or why we were making a mistake. It was our origin story, the trauma that manifested our present selves. It was why we couldn’t land the ending line of a monologue, or why the denouement wasn’t clever enough, or why the design for the costumes lacked sexual prowess and self-knowledge. Our internal distress was used as fodder to develop our artistic sense of self. 

This was also when we learned how integral power was to the form of theater, how vulnerable we were to its tendrils. Directors were taught to obfuscate reality towards their will, modeled after their teachers’ own doings, and actors were taught to turn themselves to stone in the face of this violence. Our once pure love for this beautiful art form was tainted with the ire of older artists passing on their trauma, a cycle we were destined to be a part of.

This was, of course, a slow process, because theater is quite beautiful. It is sublime when activated at its fullest potential, a whirling dervish of ecstatic peaks and still frames, something we clung to in our youth. I remember seeing my uncle pray Asr with the rest of the men, or holding my aunt as she caught the holy ghost, or hearing my grandfather reciting “and with your spirit” at exactly the right moment with everyone else in the room. I felt the possession when I finished performing the first number of Seussical. It was awesome. In order to create a successful performance, one has to sacrifice a piece of themselves to the room, to ante up something beloved in hopes of true recognition. This is perhaps why it was so easy to capture us, me and my classmates, humble practitioners. This is perhaps why they could use our pain against us, and scramble our minds and hearts just enough to control us. After all, this was what we were to expect when we got older and began the real work.

The playwright, sick with voices rattling inside their heads, vomits their mania onto the actors, who are asked to soak it in and regurgitate it exactly how it was consumed. The director, abiding and holy, orders the pieces on the chessboard as they please. theater, in the western sense, is systematized manipulation, rolling a ball to a child and snatching it before they even know to reach, emptying your vessel to be filled by the will of whomever can afford to be an artist these days.

And this is how we live: yes, the countless demagogues who fill our psyches to the brim with god-shaped nothings and fascist gunk, the ones who created a cult of sorrow. Yes, they perform for us, in perhaps the most effective theater of our time, from their pulpit, eyes ablaze and bellies grumbling for our virginal tithes. And yes, we are forced to applaud, with vigor, lest our loved ones are taken, or our voices snatched, or have proto-colonies created in our homelands. Yes, they, too, believe in the power of theater. They felt the chill of excitement after they hit their first high note, or the nervous silence of a humming speaker, or the relief of getting to be someone else for an hour or two. They salute the power of theater, just as they have fashioned a theater of power.

I hope to remain devastated by the proliferation of power in this form, this form that has saved my life, that has given me purpose and reason and victory and pain. I hope to exorcise the theater’s addiction to power, and sever power’s grasp upon theater. I hope to remind myself of the sweet moments, hearing my father sing hymns in my ear, and the gospel mimes attacking each note the choir sang. I hope to remember my Anansi mask and the strike of the piano. I hope to remember the fur on my Seussical costume, and how beautiful it made me feel.