By Shamrock McShane, October 2008
The theater is a temporal art. It’s not like a book or a painting with which you can console yourself in the middle of the night. You can only see the play at 8 o’clock when the players put it on.
The live political theater of the presidential election is a temporal art, too. And the clock is ticking.      Keep in mind that the drama of our political theater is singularly comprised of the election. Governing and being governed is quite another matter.
Modern political theater, that of reality, has taken the form of Bertolt Brecht’s epic drama. Brecht was perhaps the greatest playwright since Shakespeare in terms of altering the course of drama as a way of viewing life.
Like the world up till Galileo, the drama from the Greeks all the way through Shakespeare was pitched at tragedy. The action built through cause and effect toward the climax. The tragic hero suffered his fate, and the audience experienced a catharsis.
What Brecht set loose on the stage more resembles chaos theory. Cause and effect are hard to figure. Events happen simultaneously and scattered throughout time and space. And the audience knows, and the players admit, that this is not reality; this is a play!
The first presidential debate of 2008 took place in Oxford, Miss., an irony that could not have passed by readers of William Faulkner. In Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, race and power burned everything down to the bone. Maybe that’s a good place to start.
The drama of the debate between the vice presidential nominees on Oct. 2 looms in my future as I write this, but you have already seen it acted out. In the theater, this is known as an informed audience - they know more about the plot than the characters in the play.
Now the plot winds through debates in Nashville, Tenn., and, finally, Hempstead, N.Y., the changing locations are Shakespearean, cinematic.
The theaters in Gainesville, as elsewhere, flit between fluff and substance, just as the campaign has tossed pearls before swine. We can talk about lipstick on a pig or we can talk about Iraq.
Entertainment, as a diversion, as a distraction from what really matters, can take on a decidedly patrician aspect. The more inconsequential the drama, that is to say the less there really is at stake, the more the consumers are likely to be fuzzy on how many properties they own.
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine at Constans Theatre on the University of Florida campus creates perhaps the proper nightmare world to parallel the one we’re living in.
Terry Klenck directs Grandma Duck is Dead at Santa Fe College, where the play about college and the very real realities beyond will command an audience discussing the election amid the columns outside building E.
The Woman in Black at the Hippodrome State Theatre is a ghost story. The Hipp is deservedly renown for its atmospheric effects, and Lauren Caldwell, in particular, stages action in a way that resonates long after the house lights come on.
At the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre, Jim Jarrell directs the AIDS-themed Falsettos, wedding gender and identity to the political discussions that will take place on the porch at intermission.
At the Gainesville Community Playhouse Jane Eyre lends her voice to the Feminist Debate. Can you picture her at Wal-Mart?
One of the best politicians in Shakespeare is Richard III. He has a leg up on all the other competitors for high office in that he doesn’t believe in God. Everyone else cowers in fear of the wrath of God should they sin. Richard knows there’s nothing to be afraid of beyond the grave and snatches all the power while everyone’s busy praying.
To call the characters in this presidential election Shakespearean is perhaps more apt than we might wish.
In the production of Julius Caesar at the Acrosstown back in 2002, Sid Homan, the UF Shakespeare scholar, was up to his gender-bending tricks, notably, turning Mark Antony into a woman.
The effect was unsettling, which of course was exactly what Homan was aiming for. Here supposedly was a woman in Roman times, a military leader, a warrior, a leader of men. It seemed a role perversely thrust upon her, a role too big for her, one might think, given the prevailing violence of the time. It made the words of lean and hungry Cassius, when describing Caesar, that much more vivid.
“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.”
There is no catharsis in the tragedy of political theater but neither is there in that of life.
We are the voters. Rather, we are some of the voters. We are the voters who read The Satellite. We are largely that cultural elite the religious right finds so distasteful. Even the libertarians among us are not much to their liking.
Both McCain and Obama want the presidency. Keep in mind the dictum of William Hazlitt, who sharpened his political eye as one of the theater’s finest critics: “The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”
Notice the first person plural. We - women and men, and blacks and whites, and Latinos and Asians, and gays and straights, and Christians and Jews, and Muslims and Buddhists and all the other divisive categories.
The debates are the height of dramatic dialogue, so it might be a good idea to review how it works. In plays, as in life, characters only speak for one reason: to get what they want. That means sometimes they tell the truth — if it will get them what they want. Sometimes they say exactly what they mean — if it will get them what they want.
In our epic drama, we are the chorus, and the chorus is divided. Our epic drama is interactive.
I’ve always hated audience participation plays. I go to the theater because I want to be a passive spectator. I don’t want to join the actors and determine the plot.
In my mind, I may side with the protagonist or antagonist.
If you choose not to vote, you become a passive spectator at what could be your own funeral. And while that wouldn’t be a tragedy, it would be a shame.