Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

According to recent article in the Chicago Tribune, 27 public school children have been murdered in Chicago this year.

This begins to approach the number of students killed at Virginia Tech in April. While our media was saturated with the Virginia Tech incident, the Tribune is the first major news outlet to cite these Chicago deaths en masse.

No, this posting will not be a diatribe about the prevalence of violence nor the debate over the right to bear arms in our culture. We are merely a theater site, after all.

But the convergent circumstances got me thinking about Anne Frank. Why is it that in order for evil to gain our collective attention it must be perpetrated on a grand scale; but for us to truly reflect upon it, we tend to need it expressed in individual terms?

Further, is it coincidental that the victims at Virginia Tech were largely middle class, upwardly mobile, and predominantly white while the children in Chicago are not? In the case of Anne Frank, to what extent is our interest in this subject related to the fact that the victim(s) is white and middle-class? Or is it Anne Frank, despite her youth and background, embodied in her writing a degree of artistry that makes her story compelling.

There is a play currently making the rounds of American theaters based on the journal and writings of a young American woman killed in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It is a piece that has stirred up a great deal of controversy. One theater in New York declared it was programming the play, and then postponed the production. In the past couple of weeks another theater, this time in West Virginia, had a major benefactor withdraw support from the company because of its decision to program the play.

I’ve read the script, and would not advocate for producing it — not because of its political stance, but rather because I think it is bad drama. But how to explain that there are dozens of excellent plays being generated, both by Israelis and Palestinians, on this subject that are receiving no attention whatsoever in America?

If, as I have at times reassured myself, the purpose of theater is to remind us of important universal truths, how are we not simply providing a grand rationalization for reflecting the world back only in ways that we find acceptable?

This entry was posted by Edward Sobel on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 5:01 pm and is filed under The Diary of Anne Frank. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.