Theatre has always provided a ready platform for the presentation and exploitation of political beliefs or viewpoints, especially in Europe. Drama in the UK, in particular, has always been very keen on social realism since the late nineteen fifties with the emergence of Wesker, Pinter, Osborne et al and the “kitchen sink” movement.
Playwrights in the United States, while being very strong on social comment and domestic drama with the likes of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, have tended to shy away from bold political statements, with the notable exception of The Crucible.
Almost by definition, political drama is left-wing with writers like the British ones already mentioned, along with Bertold Brecht and the earlier Scandinavian and Russian writers who have all railed against capitalism and social injustice.
Left-wing politics in America are generally far less extreme than in Europe and after the McCarthy witch hunts it is perhaps not surprising that writers have tended to dwell more on social rather than purely political matters.
Of course, there are American writers who are politically aware and responsible and many explore situations on a global rather than domestic level. One such is Karen Malpede whose new collection Plays in Time explores issues that are not only relevant in the States but to the rest of the world as well.
Ms Malpede is a significant figure in East Coast contemporary drama, having written eighteen plays and being the co-founder, director and resident writer of Theater Three Collaborative which is based in New York. She is an editor and is on the faculty of the City University of New York. The four plays in this collection were each developed by Theater Three for production in New York, London, Berlin and Paris as well as in Italy and Australia.
First up is the 1994 The Beekeeper’s Daughter, set on an idyllic island in the Adriatic during the Bosnian wars of the former Yugoslavia. A young, pregnant Muslim woman is befriended by a disparate American family and reveals the horrors of one of the most brutal and cruel wars on European soil. It not only tells her heart-rending tragic story but contrasts attitudes to sex from the free-love attitude of the post-hippy West to forced sex i.e. rape, being used as a weapon in modern warfare. Powerful stuff.
Prophecy contrasts the relative comfort and complacency of a group of New York actors with the truth, albeit subjective, of the Middle-East conflicts focusing on the invasion of Iraq and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.
The third play is Another Life and again is about comfortable Americans having to face up to what is happening in the world outside and how the US is often responsible. This play deals with post 9/11 trauma and focuses on the US torture programme to chilling effect.
The final play in the collection, Extreme Whether [sic], deals with the ever popular subject of climate change. There are those who herald it as being the harbinger of a true global catastrophe and those, like a certain American president, who think the whole thing is being hyped up by a load of lefties who want to bring down capitalism. This play was written before Mr Trump’s exotic insights into the subject, so perhaps another play on the subject, bearing those thoughts in mind, would make a good comedy.
Karen Malpede is a strong, committed writer of powerful drama and is a voice that should be listened to. Michael Hasted January 2019
PLAYS IN TIME by Karen Malpede
Paperback 296pp
Published by Intellect in the USA & UK 2017
ISBN 9781783208159
