In reading “Utopia in Performance” by Jill Dolan, I found it very easy to remind myself that the original work Utopia, by Thomas More, was a satire – the term entered our common consciousness to describe a perfect world but, like many things, it originated as a folly. Dolan’s writing strangely reminded me of Brecht’s own theories of drama in a way – a consideration of how the audience may intake a work and how that affects the work outside. Thankfully, the utopia we potentially devised in O, Earth was far from The Good Person of Szechwan. Dolan seems, at least to me, to emphasize the creation of space, such as one of Paula Vogel’s playworlds.
However, what struck me as possibly subjective was that the ideas of utopian performance suggested seemed, well, subjective. They struck me as suggesting that there was some sort of way to create an ultimate utopic theatrical/performative space, which ultimately is a fantasy in my mind – every space created is active fight against a pre-existing space, eternally in conflict. It’s a fight to create new spaces for people who do not normally receive them (women, POC, LGTBQ+) and to assume utopia feels like a form of whitewashing. Even assuming utopia existing feels like a form of whitewashing, as we tend to see a created utopia – all utopias are created, and those creators are the ones who assume a power distinction by virtue of creating. It’s the ability to forge a personal utopia, in my opinion, that speaks to the personal while remaining universal that changes the balance of power.
However, is this possible? Perceiving a space such as this as a utopia is inherently, like More’s original utopia, an exercise in folly. The director Bartlett Sher, in directing South Pacific, once described how a work can feel “middle-class” – in that it barely hits a stride that is unfamiliar, choosing to coast on the audience’s comforts while using very bare unfamiliarities to titillate rather than challenge. Utopic performance is a folly in thought because performances should be challenging, attacking perception by recreating worlds. Brecht sought something like this in his “distancing effect”, the forcing of an audience to step back in order to analyze. Something similar must be initiated in order to create powerful performatice spaces, as not everyone is a theatrical and literary analyst in the making at the theater.
To challenge is to attack the norms of society – theatre is a dark mirror by which we can exaggerate or put a lens on humanity. The way to create new spaces is to directly attack what makes these spaces unsafe, and why those spaces were such in the first place. Works that come to mind that do something along those lines are Two Boys, the opera by Craig Lucas, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive and Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando. The familiar must become unfamiliar, not perfect – perfection suggests a state of eternal lack-of-lacking, which is unreal and an insult on all those who are lacking in space, safety, and artistic power.