Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Characters of the Decade - Part Two: The Top 5 Historical Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade.

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories
  1. Original Characters
  2. Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
  3. Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.
On Monday, I listed the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade. Today, I am continuing with the top 5 historical characters.
  1. Willy Brandt (Democracy, Michael Frayn)

    Before there was Clinton, there was Willy Brandt, and in his case, the stakes were exponentially higher. In Michael Frayn's tale of conflicting allegiances in East and West Germany, where for all his flaws, Brandt was exactly the politician both sides of the Iron Curtain needed, Brandt's accidental, almost farcical political self-destruction is made all the more more frustrating.

  2. George W. Bush (The Strangerer, Mickle Maher)

    Depicting the almost universally reviled (in the theater-o-sphere) current President as an existential anti-hero is about as daring as political playwriting got this decade, but the almost tragic resulting consequences for our opinions of Bush, America, and the theater couldn’t have worked without that kind of risk-taking. The sense of adventure that is celebrated in Chicago predictably confused audiences in New York, but Mickle Maher and Theater Oobleck twisted current events and universal human strife by playing to experimental theater’s greatest strengths.

  3. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (I am My Own Wife, Doug Wright)

    Every heroic political and culture figure inevitably has some dirty laundry in their closet, and in the still somewhat underrated 2004 Pulitzer Winner, a pre-Little Mermaid Doug Wright knew that the ostensible hypocrisy that shocked post-Unification Germany was much more offensive than anything about Charlotte’s sexuality. I Am My Own Wife, aided by a deadpan performance by Jefferson Mays, turned Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's story into a reflection of the audience's own struggles with ethical consistency, all while still keeping Charlotte hopelessly sympathetic.

  4. Orson Wells (Orson’s Shadow, Austin Pendleton)

    Backstage plays appeals to theater nerds first and foremost. Pendleton avoids this problem by taking Wells, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, one who Kenneth Tynan would flatly say is a better artist than Laurence Olivier straight to the ego-maniacal Olivier’s face, and putting him in the exact moment when his reputation fully disintegrates. Orson's Shadow a stunning examination of how not even the greatest artists know how to cope with their own genius, and, more generally, how no one, not even Orson Welles, could get by on talent alone.

  5. Richard Nixon (Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan)

    There’s not much that can be said for the role that hasn’t been said already, so let me just list the number of people Frank Langella beat out for the Tony award: Live Schreiber in Talk Radio, Boyd Gaines in Journey’s End Brían F. O’Byrne is Coast of Utopia, and Christopher Plumber in Inherit the Wind. Any one of those actors could have won the Tony any other year in one of the most stacked awards categories of any kind in recent memory, but Langella beat them all, with all the help from Peter Morgan’s savagely honest portrayal of Nixon that didn’t downplay his sins in the least (it may have even amplified them), but also depicted just how addictive presidential power can be to everyone who surrounds it. For someone who has seen nothing but Nixon parodies, Langella made it believable that a man that corrupt and with that little personality could command that much respect. Even with one of the worst presidents of the 20th century, there were a lot of good things about America that died with Watergate, and many of them were inherent to Morgan and Langella’s Nixon, bringing Frost/Nixon closer to The History Boys than anyone ever thought imaginable.

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posted by Ethan Stanislawski @ 5/12/2009 04:14:00 PM   0 Comments

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

The Dark Side of Internet Dumb-ocracy

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?
-Henrik Ibsen, "An Enemy of the People"
The Internet, as we've heard thousands of times, is the ultimate form of democracy. It puts the common man on the same ground as the elites, and destroys the gatekeepers and roadblocks to having your voice heard. On the Internet, the opinion of Roger Ebert matters as much as the ordinary film fan with a blog. Sure, internet comments can be awful, but if we like democracy, we have to take the good with the bad.

Anyone who's been on the Internet long enough has had this point rammed down their throats. But the problem with this argument is that it blindly assumes that democracy is, in fact, the best option. In reality, we've had thousands of years of discourse to debate what's the best political system, and by no means is the approval of democracy as universal as it is in contemporary America. Whether they know it or not, Internet advocates are positing the same assumptions that have driven the Bush administration's foreign policy: that implentation of democracy in any form is the best system, that we should applaud those who see that way, and lambast those whose don't.

I'm sure that comparing the defense of the Internet to Bush will infuriate many new media evangelists. Of course, there are fundamental differences between democracy in Iraq and democracy on the Internet. In Iraq, democracy was thrust upon the country without any input from its citizens. Internet democracy, however, grew organically out of its circumstances. Though somewhat similar to the theory in Iraq, the Internet probably has more in common with Athenian democracy. As much as we admire Greek intellect, however, there were major groups of society excluded from the democratic system in Athens. The same applies to the Internet. While Athenian democracy disenfranchised slaves, women, immigrants, and non-property owners, the Internet also underrepresents females (certainly Hillary supporters), as well as the elderly, ultra-poor, and computer illiterates.

The more pressing concern, however, is one of the deeper flaws of direct democracy: In a pure democratic system, the majority of opinion can be easily swayed by radical or dangerous thinkers with hidden agendas. The internet masses can be just as easily swayed, just as violent and—paradoxically—more resistant to new ideas. The fury directed by Ron Paul supporters at Paul's opponents on the Internet was the same fury that killed Socrates and the Salem witch trial victims. The founding fathers knew about this danger, which is why them aimed to set up a republic where the people were represented by elites rather than by a direct democracy. They recognized the inevitability of the stronger-willed people ruling with brutal power (they had just overthrown a king), so they set up a system of checks and balances to prevent a stronger power from dominating the political system entirely.

A direct democracy, conversely, has no checks and balances, and leads to stronger personalities dominating and manipulating a government while claiming to be the voice of the people. The most extreme example, Godwin's Law (or Reductio Ad Hitlerum) be damned, is the rise to power of Hitler out of the democratic government of Weimar Germany. He saw a crumbling economic system and took advantage of people's fears and weaknesses. He did this while still claiming to be a populist and maintain democracy. If you were a blond-haired, blue-eyed German, your life improved immediately after Hitler rose to power. I don't think I need to explain what happened next.

More recently, you can look to the Bush-Rove machine exploiting the rural and Southern regions of the country's hatred of elites in townhouses in the Northeast. They have focused on big government taking your tax money, while still spending exorbitantly and embracing massive corruption. They got a pass for that by exploiting the weakness of a political system that has grown extremely more democratic since the founding fathers defined the system of government. Needless to say, no one's happy about that now.

The Internet, meanwhile, use a similar tone of being the voice of the people. Little do they know that they are still being dominated by a handful of people. The longtail theory has been debunked again and again and again. Does that mean Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg are evil dictators? Maybe not, but what would you say if I had replaced Jobs and Zuckerberg with Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch?

This is not to say that the Internet is doomed to fascism, nor that Internet democracy is inherently a bad thing. What I am saying is that before you go extolling the wonders of the democratic values of the Internet, recognize that there are major flaws to Internet democracy and any democracy, some of which can be really dangerous. The Internet is exceedingly easy to manipulate. That may even been the Internet's greatest strength. But it's also the Internet's greatest liability.
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posted by Ethan Stanislawski @ 12/16/2008 09:00:00 AM   1 Comments