To Cancel or Cross-Examine: Why Bother Engaging with Creators We Disagree With?
By Kim Greenawalt, Director of The Stronger in Gamut Theatre’s 2 by Strindberg: The Stronger & The Outcast and
Gamut Theatre’s Director of Development & Dramaturgy
The question of “why produce art created by people we ethically don’t agree with?” isn’t going away for any theatre that chooses to engage in what we call classic stories. The Darwinian manner in which The Outcast examines its characters may as well be a predecessor to eugenics and profiling based on appearances. (Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, paved the way for eugenics to exist.) In both plays, the characters are named X and Y: Is August Strindberg giving these works the time of day, with fully realized characters and thought-out plots, or are these works caricature-ish etudes, experiments, and practice sketches? Why do we produce them for any reason? Why bother with the misogyny of The Stronger, seemingly about two women bickering over one’s affair with her husband (the husband, of course, absent)? Just replace the name Strindberg with J. K. Rowling, Orson Scott Card, Roman Polanski, Chris Brown, R Kelly, or any other creative who perpetually upholds sexist, anti-LBGTQ, or racist ideas in their art or in their personal lives or both.
Yet unlike the living artists above, there are some unique features to Strindberg. Strindberg is dead and without an estate, which means the directors on this project had artistic license to interpret his work as we saw fit.
According to Francesca Amendolia, one of two directors working on The Stronger, Strindberg’s format - a dramatic sketch featuring two actors and a table - lended itself to interpretation, regardless if Strindberg meant it to be interpreted or not. This ability to interpret, indicative of an argument rather than a polemic or treatise, allowed us to challenge the work of the author. If we wanted to arrive at some uneasy, or less-than-palatable truths we were able to do so as we presented and critiqued the work with our directorial choices.
Strindberg’s canon, with a focus on the hypocrisy of humanity, only aids us in our arrival at these uneasy truths. We see it in Strindberg’s juxtaposition of the two women in The Stronger, while the absent man seemingly gets away with his affair consequence-free. We see it in The Outcast as meta-ethics, moral relativism, and a man who thinks he is above the good and evil binary are put under the microscope.
While happy to be grappling with the “how to” of staging The Stronger as one of its directors, as a dramaturg I found that it’s the principle of producing these works that intrigued and troubled me. In the process of reckoning with my conscience over the producing of flawed works by flawed humans, I turned to self-avowed Bad Feminist Roxane Gay for answers. Gay has the following things to say in the culmination of her book Bad Feminist:
“At some point I got it into my head that a feminist was a certain kind of woman. I bought into grossly inaccurate myths about who feminists are--militant, perfect in their politics and person, man-hating, humorless. I bought into these myths even though, intellectually, I know better. I’m not proud of this. I don’t want to buy into these myths anymore. I don’t want to cavalierly disavow feminism like far too many other women have done”
“Bad feminism seems like the only way I can both embrace myself as a feminist and be myself…”
“The more I write, the more I put myself out into the world as a bad feminist but, I hope, a good woman--I am being open about who I am and who I was and where I have faltered and who I would like to become.”
To me, Gay is saying that we don’t have to be perfect to make our corner of the world a better place--we can still be our authentic selves, finding resonance wherever we do, while striving to be better humans. To paraphrase Clark Nicholson, director of The Outcast, our delving into the works of flawed humans isn’t to excuse their attitudes, but to make discoveries for ourselves. Perhaps we can like what we like and create the art that we create while admitting our source material may be flawed, and find some nuggets of truth created by flawed humans? There will continue to be flawed art, created by flawed humans, as long as people walk the earth. Make no mistake, that phrase “created by flawed humans” includes us as well: our grandchildren may be the ones to lambast us for our inadequate responses to climate crises and plastic usage as they grow up to inherit the world we’ve shaped for them. However, despite being flawed humans, we can still maintain beliefs that make our world a better place. I hope, as we reinterpret The Stronger and The Outcast, you can find your own truths in these plays.