riting for the theatre is at its best an act of transgressionand

as teachers of playwrights, we should encourage our students to

step over the line, redraw the line, erase the line, even multiply
the lines so that we sit up, step forward, strike out.
If an intellectual or a writer is a worker in ideas who
uses words as the primary means of production, as Ngugi
wa Thiongo has said, the question then becomes how do we
encourage our students to appropriate the means of produc-
tion (to own language, to be responsible for their writing
and to be responsive to that of others) and also have them
ask: To what ends am I working? Is my writing merely an
exercise in accumulating and/or defending private property,
as it were, or a collective endeavor (even when pursued in
solitude) that draws upon and adds to a community of writers
and practitioners?
In other words, to what purpose, in whose interest am
I (are you) writing? As teachers, students and writers, what
is our relationship to the status quo, the powers that be and
were, to commonly held assumptions and stereotypes? Is it a
relationship of confrmation or challenge? Are we polishers
or a pain in the ass? (And to be a pain in the ass is, I think, a
noble enterprise.)
I believe the job of mainstream culture and mainstream
theatre is to keep the peace. Our job, as teachers, is to encour-
age new writers to break it, to disrupt the lie, to speak truth
to power. Think seriously about the word en-courage: What
are we giving our students courage to do, exactly? Not just
entertain.
Rarely do students of drama enter the classroom with
what we might call, for lack of a better term, original minds.
Surely their originality, their agency for questioning and con-
sidering, is there, but it has been dominated and subdued by
a culture that amplifes individuality over community, proft
over peace, property over human need. For we live in a culture
that is hostile to creativity and original thought that does not
serve capitalism, empire, and the most virulent by-products
of those forces: racism, homophobia, classism and sexism.
Young writers very often bring these values, albeit largely
unconsciously, into the classroom and into their writing. And
these values make for a diminished, shallow, shopworn and
deadening dramatic arts.
As teachers, we can help writers become aware of what
products their writing is sellingwhat values, what refexes,
what assumptions lie below the surface, the dead-weight of
which will drag the writing into mediocrity. For all theatre,
as Brecht reminds us, is political, and by political we mean
human and social in its interaction and impact. All theatre
deals with questions of power. Who has it? Who doesnt?
98 AMERICANTHEATREJAN08
W
On Writing
as Transgression
Teachers of young playwrights
need to turn them into dangerous citizens
By NAoMI WAllACE
opinion
Who wants to get it and how? Who lost it
and why? Who has killed for it? Who has
died for it?
Mainstream theatre, embroiled as it is in
mainstream cultural and economic pressures,
tends to reward and applaud those who ask
the questions that allow for its continued
existence, albeit with a few adjustments here
and there. But overall the status quo stands
largely untouched: Heterosexuality continues
to be foregrounded; white privilege continues
to go unquestioned; writing against injustice
continues to be sidelined; and to question our
most deeply felt assumptions is, fnally, deemed
unproductive, not to mention impolite.
When I speak of writing as transgres-
sion, I am calling for a teaching of theatre
that encourages students to write against their
taught selves and to engage, as bell hooks
puts it, in the kind of self-transgression and
critical awareness of self that will enable
them to become, as John Donne suggests,
citizens of the world. Transgression is,
among other things, a dissection of ones
self and a discovery of larger worlds. Both
processes (or perhaps they are one) involve
questioning entitlement and empathy.
While Britain is, I believe, more tolerant
about transgressive theatre than the U.S.,
students in both countries are often hesitant
to write politically. They are afraid of being
deemed doctrinaire, boring, uncreative or P.C.
(And let me digress here to say that I agree
with Marcus Brigstocke that accusations
of politically correct thought control have
become a pathetic and transparent excuse for
lazy racists, sexists and Islamophobes the land
over.) Worse, students may fear that a politi-
cally and morally informed writing might
ultimately hamper their career prospects.
We must encourage students to realize
that engaging with historyengaging with
the collective human dramas around usdoes
not lead to a dead end for writers; and here let
me simply cite the examples of Arthur Miller,
Tony Kushner, Adrienne Kennedy, August
Wilson, Dario Fo, Harold Pinter, Caryl
Churchill, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Tracey Scott
Wilson, Debbie Tucker Green, Chay Yew
and Robert OHara, to name but a few. His-
torically, theatre has been synonymous with
politically challenging and socially pressing
subjects. Shakespeare, Sheridan, Shaw and
Storey spring to mind.
But there can never be enough of a good
thing: We need more engaged and dissent-
ing writers in theatre. We need more writers
who envision theatre as a space for social and
imaginative transformation.
I tend to generalize. I like to generalize.
But what are some of the specifc ways we can
move students to think outside their own
experience, their own gender, their own race,
their own class? Here are six ways (perhaps
irresponsibly vague ways, but I hope helpful)
in which we can nudge these new writers to
transgress:
n
Help them to identify their ways of see-
ing, to use John Bergers termthe socially
and culturally determined choices they make
when writing.
100 AMERICANTHEATREJAN08
Erika LaVonn and Steven Cole Hughes in Naomi Wallaces Things of Dry Hours,
directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah at CENTERSTAGE in Baltimore, Md.
R
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opinion
JAN08AMERICANTHEATRE 101
n
Encourage them to critique these
accepted ways of seeing and to write, as
Walter Benjamin suggests, against/around
and through themto write against the grain.
n
Study the linguistic mechanisms
the lingo, jargon, rhetoric, obfuscations,
coinagethrough which inhuman systems
are maintained.
n
Disrupt the clich and the cluttered
mind. By this I mean to work against the
grit and garbage that passes for information
and that we have been trained to consume
hour in and hour out. For example, if we ask
ourselves whose husband Brad Pitt used to
be, most of us will know, despite ourselves,
that it was Jennifer Aniston, and that he is
now partnered with the gorgeous Angelina
Jolie. But if we ask ourselves how many tons
of radioactive waste were left behind by the
British and American forces in the frst Gulf
War, across a region that was once known as
the land of dates, it might take a little more
time to come up with the answer (350 tons).
One might suspect that our knowledge about
Mr. Pitt is nurtured precisely to obscure more
pressing issues.
n
Encourage this new agency and/or four-
ishing of the writer with required readings
that include not only Euripides, Webster,
Behn, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Brecht,
but the more recent transgressive writings
of Heiner Mller, Edward Bond, Trevor
Griffths, Wole Soyinka, Georg Bchner,
Betty Shamieh, Richard Montoya, Kwame
Kwei-Armah (who should be mentioned
twice), Ismail Khalidi and Kia Corthron.
And that is an ungratefully small list.
n
Encourage students of playwriting to
read history, constantly, aggressivelyto
inform themselves thoroughly of the subject
matter about which they write. As Berger
wrote at the end of the last century: In
the modern world in which thousands of
people are dying every hour as a conse-
quence of politics, no writing anywhere can
begin to be credible unless it is informed by
political awareness and principles. Writers
who have neither produce utopian trash.
The unpardonable perversity of our fn de
sicle is that of its innocence. Yes, thats
harsh. Perhaps Bergers words even seem
infexible and unforgiving, but the call for
informed writing is one of crucial importance.
If writers can reimagine language, with an
effort that aspires to fuency in history and
its myriad forces, then we can reimagine
ourselves and our communitiesand that,
for me as a writer, is the highest aspiration.
SoMETIMES I AM ASkEd ABouT
drynesswhich I think translates for the
questioner into writing devoid of passion and
complexity and entertainment. The suggestion
is that encouraging students to examine, ques-
tion and resist mainstream culture and theatre
will be off-putting, will unplug students
from their creative juices, as though creative
juice is something outside history, outside
politics and social cause-and-effect. In fact, I
think that a more ferocious creative juice can
be found in the veins of history, which, sadly,
are too often flled with blood. Not the blood
of the few, not the blood of the privileged, but
the blood of the many.
If not the question of dryness, Im con-
fronted with the question of sex, or the lack
of it. Intimacy, when writing, is political, and
I think we must acknowledge to students that
the human dramas of politics and economics
are very, very sexy and very, very intimate.
As the critic Terry Eagleton writes, our
economic world is about the plundering of
the body of its sensuous wealthhow the
body is broken down, used and abused under
capitalism. What could be more intimate and
personal than the history of our bodies and
their relationship to the world?
History itself is a study in intimacy, or
our lack of it, with others. What else is his-
tory and politics but the struggle of people
to defne who they are and what they can
and cannot do? In two books that should be
required reading, Howard Zinns A Peoples
History of the United States and Robin D.G.
Kelleys Freedom Dreams: The Black Radi-
cal Imagination, there are sex and strikes,
intrigues and visions, empire and estrange-
ment, murder and the marvelous. You name
it, its there waiting to be written about.
That millions of innocent women, men
and children in Africa have died because
of the rampant greed and criminal price-
hiking of multinationals is not sexy, but it
is intimate. That thousands have died and
many thousands more have been maimed in
the Middle East by U.S. bullets and shrapnel
is again certainly not sexy, but surely very
intimate, as is the fact that the bullets that
enter the bodies of Palestinian children, fred
by Israeli soldiers, are paid for by American
taxes earned by American workers who dream
of fshing, baseball and sex. What could be
more personal than the names that are given
to the bombs used to tear our fellow humans
in Iraq and Afghanistan into as many pieces
as possibleFishbeds, Floggers, Fulcrums.
Adams, Beehives and Bouncing Betties. There
is even a weapon called Sad Eyes. What could
be more intimate or personal than the fact that
we get up in the morning, kiss our loved ones,
go to work, come home, pay our taxesand
those taxes from our daily labor are used to
kill you and you and you, and I never saw your
face nor knew your name.
Dramatic, yes. But we are involved in the
job of dramareal drama. It is happening all
around us, every minute. And the fact is that
while we are all connected by the Internet,
that all does not include the 80 percent of
the worlds population that has never even
made a phone callbecause the lives we live
here, of abundance and so-called choice,
are predicated on the impoverishment and
suffering of most of the world.
I am not calling for a condescending
theatre or a preach to the converted theatre
but a welcoming, vigorous, inquisitive and
brutal theatre. If we encourage our students
to dig, they will fnd the body, in all its inti-
macy and vulnerability, under the garbage of
mainstream political rhetoric.
Our job as teachers, as writers with
something to humbly give those who will
replace us, must be to encourage our students
to challenge normative ways of seeing, to get
uncomfortable, to get unsafe, to get unsure.
To be safe and sure and comfortable in this
beautiful, brutalized, vandalized, depleted
but continuously awe-inspiring world is in
fact to turn away from itto turn ones back
in large part on life and that age-old succor
that writers need: truth.
Our job as teachers is to help students
move out of what I like to call the wow
state of mind to a how mind: How did it
come to this? How am I diminished by my
own ignorance? How have I been silenced in
ways I am not aware of? How do I restore to
language, on the stage, an agency and qual-
ity that clarifes rather than colludes, that
resists rather than conforms? Our job is to
encourage our students to become, through
their writing, responsible both morally and
sensuouslyto become dangerous citizens.
This should happen if not for moral reasons
then for the simple reason of self-preservation,
because if we do not, as writers and citizens,
engage in resistance to all that diminishes us,
then our humanity suffersand with it, our
sensibility as creative writers.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, Our lives
begin to end the day we become silent about
the things that matter. I continue to believe
that envisioning a different world is what
makes us half-divine. To live and write in a
world of resistance to injustice is what makes
our lives worthwhile.
Four lines of a poem by Randall Jarrell
sum up for me our interconnectedness:
In bombers named for girls,
we burned
The cities we had learned about
in school
Till our lives wore out; our bodies
lay among
The people we had killed and
never seen.
And as global warming and environmen-
tal crises, as well as human migrations, have
underlined, we live in an interdependent and
unavoidably intimate world: Yorkshire, where
I live in England, is closer to Baghdad than we
are led to believe. And Kentucky, where I was
born, is closer to Gaza or Jerusalem; London
closer to Burma (Myanmar) and Jena, La.;
New York closer to Colombia and Congo.
The distance between us is an ingenious
fabrication that it is worth spending our lives,
as teachers and writers, tearing down.
Let us transgress togetherand by this
heat, by the sparks that are generated, make
a light to see by, for all of us.
PlaywrightNaomiWallacedelivered
thispaperatyorkSt.Johnuniversity
inEngland,incollaborationwith
PalatineandtheCenterforExcellence
atyorkSt.John,inoctober2007.
HerplaysincludeThings of Dry
Hours,One Flea Spare,In the Heart of
AmericaandSlaughter City.
102 AMERICANTHEATREJAN08
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if we encourage
our students to dig,
they will fnd the body,
in all its intimacy and
vulnerability, under the
garbage of mainstream
political rhetoric.
opinion