Coping With the Trauma of Recent Events
Love Helps, Empathy Heals
With His gilded signature, the President of the United States swept away all federal Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, while threatening to prosecute anybody in the federal government who tries to protect administrators of such programs, or to otherwise defy His order. This comes on the heels of the Supreme Court striking down Affirmative Action in university admissions.
To use an old, diplomatic phrase, this is not helpful. Rather than try to temper the excesses of DEI, this is a self-proclaimed mandate to return to the edicts of white supremacy, if you believe that the 29% of eligible voters who voted for Trump — a mere 1.5% margin over Kamala Harris — constitutes a mandate. (38% of American voters stayed away from the polls for reasons that haven’t been documented.)
If so, it’s an odd mandate, to dismantle opportunities for the poor, when, in fact, from the beginning of this century through 2020, studies show widespread awareness and concern that our system is rigged against both the poor and non-White American residents in terms of their personal safety, and opportunities for social mobility. In that same two decades, the public grew to accept the LGBTQ community, and the rights bestowed upon it. All of this blew up on January 6, or seemed to. But not really. The policy shifts may suggest it, the stunned exhaustion of marginalized communities may support it, but the numbers don’t, the votes. There was no mandate for white supremacy or gay bashing. That’s an invention. A power play. A hostile takeover.
Our theater remains in the business of telling stories that entertain and help illustrate the purpose and follies of our lives, and to this purpose, representation by a variety of groups that populate the region serves the field. Los Angeles theater represents the people who live here, more so than in years gone by. In a city in which the White population is a clear statistical minority, our theater has more non-White participation than in the past, thanks to the DEI initiatives (deliberate and subconscious). It used to be very, very White, but in the past five years, artistic leadership in two major institutional theaters has flipped from White to non-White: Center Theatre Group and the Geffen Playhouse. In smaller theaters, such a flip has been marked at Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA, and Rogue Machine, joining veteran theaters (large and small) with non-White leadership such as East West Players, Robey Theatre Company, Latino Theatre Company, Playwrights’ Arena, Hero Theatre, Company of Angels, Towne Street Theatre, CASA 0101, Ophelia’s Jump, and others.
Leadership aside, local stages have also been populated with more non-White actors than in years-gone-by, even in companies with White leadership. Non-White playwrights are also seeing their works on local stages, as part of the same initiatives. Progress. Our theater is part of a fairly progressive bubble.
It’s unlikely that any of this is going to change in either direction by presidential decree. The measure is whether these plays attract audiences, and whether those audiences — whoever they are — come back for more. Putting on a play in a theater of any size is a daunting proposition financially. With anemic arts funding across the region, our theater is part of a market economy. It’s up to each theater to determine what best serves its market, and how.
I’ve come to believe that the keys to sublimating the chaos of creating theater, the chaos in a region upended by lethal wildfires, and the chaos coming from Washington, all dangle from the same keyring. The keys were carved in the lands of ancient Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths. These faiths hold that, despite the evidence of the bellicose society we now occupy, we must strive to find love and beauty in our stories, and in each other, even in our opponents. I understand that this is a contrary view to what I’ve been reading on Facebook and in YouTube forums, and that this may seem naive in a world seeped in exhaustion and seething with animus. But that animus is largely, though not entirely, a product of our media and social media. Hostility expressed online may not be as authentic or single-minded as we imagine. It stems from resentment, and resentment can be tempered with in-person empathy. There’s room for entry into the souls of the belligerent, behind the foolish and venomous remarks people make, and the beliefs they say they hold, particularly if they say them on “X,” IG and in RedNote discussions. People don’t always say in public what they feel or what they believe in private. And many people may be better, or at least more sanguine, than as they present themselves online.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez recently noted in an interview with John Stewart (she has been pilloried by her political opponents and has emerged stronger for it), there are many, many good people out there. This is not the time to succumb to the conviction that because corruption is a constant, we must yield to it, and look out only for ourselves. That’s from the playbook of authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban and Donald Trump. Notes Cortez, it suffocates the belief that the world can be a better place. Without that belief, there’s no worthy reason to tell stories in general, and to create theater in particular, or to do anything at all in the service of others.
The despondency and exhaustion derived from online yelling may stem from polarization that’s manufactured. In truth, we may not be as polarized as we are told. According to a 2021 Siena College poll, 80% of Americans share core values of “liberty, equality and progress.”
Here are two stories from a 2023 speech by Hitendra Wadhwa, when he was invited by the Biden Administration to give a speech to the federal government’s Chief Diversity Office Council on the topic, “Can the Diversity Movement Successfully Reboot Itself?”
“Daryl Davis is a Black musician who has befriended over 200 Klu Klux Klan members and convinced them, many through one-on-one conversations, to disavow their beliefs in White supremacy and walk away from the KKK. Antoinette Tuff was a bookkeeper at a school in Atlanta ten years ago when a young man called Michael Hill entered the school with an AK47 and thousands of rounds of ammunition, intent on committing a mass shooting. With great love for Michael and an intrepid spirit, Antoinette induced him to abandon his plan, lay down his gun, and surrender peacefully to the police. ‘I want you to know that I love you, OK…and I am proud of you,’ were among the words she shared with him that day.”
This is a template laid out by Jesus, and Ghandi, and Martin Luther King. This seems to me the only viable way to counter the likes of Donald Trump, his MAGA movement, and its agents of chaos and vengeance. These are seemingly intractable forces, but they’re not, when answered with long-term tenacity and patience — knowing when to push back and when to stand back — and love. It seems to me, also, to be the only viable way to sustain mental health, the capacity to resist, and to proceed in our stage community.
It’s a formula for harmony. We can make war, or we can make music. We can strive to win for our own tribe, or we can rise to theater’s cause, to bring us together in a deeper understanding of who we all are.
