A young man’s head is battered and banged against the inside of an open refrigerator door. By the end of the messy explosion of violence that follows, three are dead, another is mortally wounded and the two survivors are drenched in stage blood.
Most startling, it’s all in the family in Tracy Letts’ “Killer Joe,” a hit at Next Theatre Lab since late summer. The above characters are either related or living together in domestic discord in a Texas trailer. Every dysfunctional clan, it seems, has its little ups and downs.
Such depictions may not be routine in live theater. But they are far from unusual, happening with enough regularity in modern drama that veteran theatergoers could hardly claim outright shock. Revulsion, yes, as the playwright intends, but moral outrage isn’t likely.
The sophisticated terrain wherein most dramatic productions roam harbors such subject matter in the context of a larger, thought-provoking, poetic, startling exploration of the human psyche or broad societal failure or both-as playwright Letts does in “Killer Joe.” Rarely is theater violence simplistic, gratuitous or purely sensational.
Theater artists and patrons therefore tend to look on the current debate raging around film and television violence with some detachment. But at the same time, they’re likely to feel something like half-guilty bloodbrothers.
While not widely viewed by the masses, the theater nevertheless has an influence on television and film that the visual arts or chamber music or opera, for example, do not. Nudity and violence on stage often preceded similar liberalization in the movies.
And in the theater, violence is a tradition as embedded as the enmity held for censorship. Shakespeare indulged in grotesque violence in his best play (“King Lear”) and in one of his worst (“Titus Andronicus”). Just the phrase “Jacobean tragedy” conjures up images of dismemberment, torture and onstage Grand Guignol. Back in 1965, acclaimed British dramatist Edward Bond, in “Saved,” depicted a group of youngsters who stone an infant to death in its carriage, as horrifying a stage image as any imaginable. And yet to compare poetic violence on stage with the televising of graphic violence into the home borders on specious. The theater is to some extent protected by its nature as an event that one must choose to attend.
“It has been prevalent since Medea axed her children,” says Randall Arney, artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre, where last season’s “Death and the Maiden” featured one character stripped to his underwear, gagged with a woman’s panties and bound to a chair. “We have a responsibility, but we’re not beaming into everyone’s homes. It’s rare our audiences include 16-year-olds or even 18-year-olds.
“But that’s not to say it’s something you should handle lightly, either,” he adds. “We have a mission to be responsible.”
Theater artists feel as strongly about that responsibility as about their right to be free of censorship, and most of the time in the U.S., they feel they’ve met that responsibility. Society, especially in recent decades, has generally agreed. And the instances of censorship involved sex, not violence.
Censors once railed against the hints of incest in “Tobacco Road” in Chicago in the ’30s; a government body voted to ban all funding for the arts recently in Marietta, Ga., partly because some money went to a local production of “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” which includes a relatively oblique (and highly moral) discussion of homosexuality; and the Dallas Theater Center recently was cited for operating a “sexually oriented business” without a license, facing a $2,000 fine, for including brief male nudity in John Guare’s much-honored “Six Degrees of Separation.”
In Chicago, though, censorship of live theater hasn’t been much of an issue in recent times. “We haven’t seen any hint of that,” says Arney, despite Steppenwolf’s often bold subject matter. Ironically, theater artists are much more cautious about violence than sex. Innocent nudity or frank sex talk is one thing; violent imagery, perhaps due to our society’s perceived out-of-control violent spin, chastens even such free-speech proponents as stage directors.
“Every time a new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie comes out, it seems they seek to answer the question, `How can we top the violence last time around?”‘ says Charles Newell, Court Theatre’s new associate artistic director, who staged the 18th Century play “The Triumph of Love,” now playing in repertory with “Cloud 9.”
“People get almost inured to it,” Newell adds. “That’s not as true in theater at all. There, the goal is to stimulate the imagination. I get as nervous as anybody else when people say something’s too violent, when censorship comes up. In history, whether you’re talking Beaumarchais (an 18th Century dramatist) or Soviet Russia, where I myself saw underground theater performed in secret for political reasons, censorship is against ideas, not for non-violence.
“But stage violence is about more than glorying in violence, which seems the point on television during sweeps month,” Newell adds. “In the theater, violence is often much less literal. In `Macbeth,’ the king is killed offstage, and yet it’s often the most horrific of images-in part because the audience member creates the violence in his or her own mind.”
That’s part of a cherished tradition, too. Film and television make violence look real, while theaters remain suggestive.
“Aristotle wrote that all violence should be offstage,” notes Mary Zimmerman, who takes that instruction to heart, even if Shakespeare (and many others) didn’t. In “The Odyssey,” which she staged with Lookingglass Theatre several years ago, Zimmerman condensed several pages of violent gouging and dismemberment in Homer to a brief scene, wherein the pouring of sand served as a postmodern symbol of blood and burial, an evocative slaughter without a hint of red.
All that said, onstage violence still has its voyeuristic appeal, and that can sell tickets. “We warn people in our ads and on the telephone that ours is a play with adult subject matter, nudity and violence,” says Letts of “Killer Joe.” “Many of them laugh and say, `We know. That’s why we’re coming.”‘
Coincidentally, Zimmerman’s latest triumph, “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,” an original and acclaimed stage piece now at the Goodman Studio Theatre, contains a biting commentary on that interrelationship. In one scene, an actor and actress sit in chairs apart from one another, engaged in slow, sexual, seductive moves. The moves accelerate and intensify and become increasingly violent, not sexual.
“I then reveal two spectators onstage, with opera glasses, who lean slowly closer and closer into the action the more violent it becomes,” Zimmerman says. “The girl in the violence then sees the spectators, and they, in shame and embarrassment, turn when they realize they’ve been caught in their voyeurism. And then the spectators see other spectators who have been watching them.
But that scene’s implicit criticism of artist and audience alike gets to the heart of the difference between stage and media violence. The art of the theater is steeped in multi-leveled commentary.
“I do feel violence on television is gratuitous, just as lovemaking scenes now seem in the movies,” says actress Kara Zediker, who was raped and murdered in the centuries-old “The Golem” at the National Jewish Theater and who is nightly attacked by her college professor in David Mamet’s relatively new “Oleanna,” now at the Wellington Theater.
“But I don’t think stage violence is misused,” Zediker says. “I’m a pacifist, as most people are, and I let myself be a victim of violence on stage only because the point is so obviously to fight it and to fight it both with great language and great ideas.”
