Patriotic Theatre: Parties and Burning Flags

           To me, American culture is ruthless, beautiful, predatory, adaptive, and viral.  It inspires the best and worst in all strata of society.  It’s like napalm; it clings and burns.  It’s like free love; it gives and takes without permission.  Like all living things, it will, and must die, but before it does, I feel compelled to know it as something more than the aforementioned string of adjectives and similes.  Recently, two performances have contributed to my ongoing vivisection of the Spiritus Americana, and I would like to lay them out before you today in the contemplative afterglow of Independence Day jubilations.

            Hand2Mouth Theatre recently performed Repeat After Me, a piece the creators call ‘a manic tour through the other America’ [emphasis added].  Performing in the Bay Area as part of the bi-annual FURYFactory, Repeat After Me is structured around tableaus and musical numbers, alternating between firework scenes full of music, dance, and fabulous costumes (or the removal thereof, wink wink), and calm meditations provoking terror.  For example, one scene involves a man ecstatically drenching himself in beer to a stage rattling rendition of “Cowboy” by Kid Rock, mixed with a monologue about failing as a father.  But despite the omnipresent bi-polar dysfunction, Hand2Mouth seems to ultimately celebrate the United States.  They invite the audience to dance with them, to drink with them, to appreciate and affirm the beauty of red, white, and blue fireworks over the Boston River on July 4^th.

But if this is ‘other America’ then what is ‘us America?’  I always thought cowboys, country music, eating pie, and picnics on the 4th were part of ‘white America,’ translation ‘dominant America.’  Is Repeat After Me saying that the ‘white’ cultural experience in the United States is now marginalized as ‘other?’  These are all subjective words, defined more by experience than precise terms, so who can really say what an ‘other America’ is?  In a contested culture, who can say what is authentic?

But the idea of the United States as an internally contested identity intrigues me.  And it’s this very idea that is explored in And So We Became American, a work in progress which also performed as part of the FURYFactory.

The creative team behind Became American, headed by Zac Jaffee, Christy Funsch, and Andrea Kuchlewska, commissioned numerous locals to report their feelings of American identity onstage in a sort of word choreography.  Performers interacted with recording devices and amplifying speakers, and their mode of expression ranged from direct communication to poetry, to dance, to overlapping spoken orchestras.  Similarly diverse were the expressions themselves, some declaring that ‘America is nothing,’ others describing their experience of alienation in foreign countries, some defiantly asserting that ‘you have the right to remain selfish,’ some furtively muttering ‘no more excuses,’ and some simply dancing.  In my opinion, Became American’s range of expression, both in medium and semantics, pales compared to the full spectrum of experience here in the U.S.A.  However, I also think that it’s open acknowledgement of our contested identity strikes to the core of contemporary dialogue about our culture.

After viewing these performances, I’m still left with many questions about culture in the United States.  What about appropriation of foreign cultures?  What about cultural economics, the Hollywood exports and the culinary imports?  What about our long history of trade in human capital, and how that fits into our self-image?  If our national identity is contested, what unites the United States beyond economic, governmental, or legal ties?  Can anyone actually answer these questions?

I’m fascinated by Repeat After Me and And So We Became American because any expression of our culture seems to instantly become a mirror through which we better understand ourselves.  The moment an identity is declared, we are tacitly invited to conform or diverge, to embrace or question the representation of us, and hopefully to empathize with the ‘other America.’  Given this effect of tacit dialogue, Patriotic Theatre, understood as any performance that explores our cultural mores, is a vital tool in the ongoing investigation—and perhaps also the creation—of our national identity.