The Arts Fuse Newsletter, February 12
Trump's show trials on their way? Reviews of Cat Mazza's textile designs, books on Elaine May and the women who created "The Little Review," the film "Armand," and percussive dance
From The Editor's Desk:
Amid Donald Trump’s tsunami of edicts, his appointment of himself as the head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., supposedly to usher in a “Golden Age” of American culture, has been met with derision or pooh-poohed. That is a mistake: there is no doubt in my mind that show trials – public drubbings of a strategically chosen lineup of ideological “internal enemies” -- ‘degenerates’, radical left-wingers, DEI Advocates — are going to come. Stalin and Joe McCarthy seized on sensationalized courtroom circuses to consolidate power, gin up fear, and manipulate public opinion. Trump will score retribution for his time in court while distracting the mainstream media with the interrogation of names culled from government and the news media. The authoritarian impresario Stalin held his theatrical beatdowns in august venues like the October Hall of the House of the Unions in Moscow. Why shouldn’t Trump – ever alert to maximum ratings impact – stage his histrionic roundups of collaborators with the “enemy from within” in the Kennedy Center?
Trump no longer has his favorite fixer, Roy Cohn, but his replacements, tech bros Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, have positioned themselves and social media to amplify the corrosive power of his carnival courts to the max. Even megalomaniacs like McCarthy and Stalin could not have dreamed how effectively technology can be wielded to spread the poison of show trials – to hyper-accelerate their miasma of misinformation, blurring the line between truth and lies.
What might our theater, if it was courageous rather than servile, do? Educate and provoke by mounting its own trials or docudramas on stage. In the past, plays have drawn on court transcripts, such as Eric Bentley’s Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been: The Investigations of Show-Business by the Un-American Activities Committee 1947–1958 or Peter Weiss’ The Investigation. Why not imaginatively stage edited transcripts of the trials of Trump and/or his criminal entourage? Perhaps present selections from the court proceedings that involved the now pardoned January 6 insurrectionists?
In addition, produce scripts that speak to the present crisis, such as Yukio Mishima’s 1968 drama My Friend Hitler, which includes excerpts from the Fuhrer’s speeches. The plot: it is the early ‘30s and Hitler is consolidating total control with the assistance of the wealthy industrialist Gustav Krupp, who, at the end of the drama, congratulates the Fascist leader: “You cut down the left and, as you turned the sword back, you cut down the right.” Mishima’s Hitler responds: “Yes, government must take the middle road.”
—Bill Marx, Editor-in-Chief
Archive: From the Editor's Desk
Visual Arts Review: “Cat Mazza: Network” — Weaving Technology and Tradition in Political Art
By Kathleen Stone
This show uses an impressively clever use of technology to create sign posts on a path through labor history, psychiatry, and textile design.
Film Review: “Armand” — Drowning in Portent
By Steve Erickson
In his debut feature, director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel mistakes gratuitous strangeness for genuinely uncanny adventure.
Book Review: “Making No Compromise” — The Story of the “Little Review” That Could
By David Daniel
This absorbing intellectual study continually underlines the important cultural role little magazines played, and how women were central to their existence as founders, editors, contributors, critics, and patrons.
Book Review: The Many Faces of Elaine May
By Helen Epstein
This extraordinary cultural figure has yet to receive the biography she deserves.
Dance Reviews: Mood Swings — A Boston Weekend of Percussive Dance
By Debra Cash
Whereas tap dancer Caleb Teicher is all idiosyncrasy, the Trinity Dancers wow by their perfect unison.
Doc Talk: Stranger Than (Science) Fiction at the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival
By Peter Keough
A pair of documentaries challenge the fantasies in the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival.
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Questions, comments, concerns?
Editor-in-Chief
Bill Marx
wmarx103@gmail.com
