Thursday, March 22, 2007

Political Theater

A theater piece.

It's composed of dialogue already in the public domain:
  • Tony Snow press conferences;
  • Congressional testimony and debate;
  • Supreme Court oral arguments on detention and torture;
  • transcripts of hearings of Guantanamo prisoners.
The idea is: theater is premised on a gap between what people say and what they really think or mean. The complexity comes (around Beckett and Pinter) when the latter is no longer transparently available to the audience.

Politics, too, is structured by this gap. Now our politics is entirely political theater. So the gap between what's being said and its impact must be staged, acted out, in kind.

The text is made freely available for anyone to stage any way they like. The suggestion is: profits go to help stopping the war.

--E. R. O'Neill

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