Those of us with literary educations tend to draw our political opinions from literary sources before we turn to political theorists. Thus reading Ayn Rand may have created Republicans and Libertarians, and I am happy to acknowledge that an early reading of Bernard Shaw helped turn me leftward. Thinking about the upcoming debate over health care, I got down my copy of The Doctor’s Dilemma and its long and wonderful preface. The play is sort of standard witty Shaw melodrama in which a doctor falls in love with a patient’s wife and realizes that he can let the patient die and make the wife an available widow. The doctor is no such cad and withdraws from the case allowing a less competent colleague to do the patient in. This plot could show up on House or ER with only minor updating. Although one can’t imagine the wise old doctor character in any medical TV show saying, “Come, come! When you both have killed as many people as I have in my time youll feel humble enough about it.” Writing in 1911, it’s easier for Shaw to point out the absurdity and indignity of medicine than it is now, but anyone who has dealt with modern American medicine certainly knows indignity and absurdity.
Shaw is one of the few playwrights to make money from the published editions of his plays and he has provided most of them with prefaces that discuss his moral and social themes.. He is a great polemicist and his essays abound with insight and irony. Take the opening of this preface, ” That any sane nation having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity.” The preface goes on to lay out many of the ideas that went into Britain’s national health system. It also discusses some issues that were alive in 1911 and are not so today.
Nonetheless much of the essay does speak to the issues we will face in our national health care debate and I recommend it to you. He ends the essay with a list of 14 items. The last three seem particular relevant:
- Do not try to live forever. You won’t succeed.
- Use you health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.
- Take utmost care to be well born and well brought up. … Otherwise you will be what most people are at present: an un sound citizen of an unsound nation, without sense enough to be ashamed or unhappy about it.
Good advice from a man who died at 90 from complications of falling out of a tree he was pruning.
Tagged as:
Ayn Rand,
Bernard Shaw,
Doctor's Dilemma,
Health care,
Medicine
One of Alfred Harbrage’s books on Shakespeare begins with the observation that London had three theaters and audience enough for two. He wants us to see Shakespeare as a commercial playwright meeting the audience of his time. Harbrage accepts the notion that audience is a limited resource that needs to be stolen and guarded. Few in theater worry about increasing the supply of audience, instead t hey worry about limiting the supply of performance.
I came face to face with this reality when I decided to do Blythe Spirit here at the Family Foundation School. Samuel French denied me the rights because there is a Broadway revival scheduled to open in February with Angela Lansbury as Madam Arkady. I called to plead we were a high school, at least three and half hours from Broadway, and certainly we wouldn’t draw any audience from the show. The polite woman at Samuel French told me the contract required her to forbid high schools in Wyoming the rights to this play–I certainly can’t see anyone cancelling a trip from Cheyenne because they’ve already seen the play.
One of the best comedy of manners of the twentieth century, this play is a mainstay of the amateur and summer stock repertory. I cannot believe that as many as five percent of the audience for the Broadway production will be seeing the play for the first time. Those that are will be brought by friends or parents. The point of the revival is to give us a chance to see the play down with the talent and resources to make it sing. But I began to wonder if business as usual was the right way to market this performance.
What happens if they allow amateur and school performance with the proviso that the program invite the audience to the New York production? What if they create a social media campaign? In short what if they try to increase the supply of audience? This is a relatively radical idea. Ask any academic theater person, literature professor, or art historian what their function is. You’ll get a variety of answers, but I’ll bet one of them will not be, “create an audience for the art I love.” Yet if we think the arts are important to our society, we need to insure that an audience exists.
Building this audience will require finding a balance the intellectual property rights of the producers and the notion that through the creative commons we can create audience. So I’ll help them out. This looks like it’s going to be an interesting production of a good comedy. If you live in or are visiting NYC, check it out.
Tagged as:
Angela Lansbury,
Audience,
Broadway theatre,
Noel Coward,
Samuel French,
Shakespeare,
Theatre
Arguably our greatest plays are tragedies—Long Day’s Journey into Night, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire. Yet, we Americans don’t seem to have a tragic vision. Sophocles’ injunction to call no man happy until you know his end does not strike a chord with us. We do not believe that “The oldest hath borne most: we that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” We see no purpose in thinking that way. Ten minutes on Twitter will convince you American Optimism is alive and well. If we had a tragic vision, maybe we wouldn’t wander into so many wars we can’t sustain. We might think, “how could this end badly?’
Here at the Family Foundation School, I’ve been teaching a course in Greek Mythology which has included many Greek tragedies. My students have been fascinated by the loves of Zeus, the Greeks’ ideas on homosexuality, the body, and death. But tragic vision they don’t get. Oh, they know about sudden death. They may have friends who overdosed or died in car accidents. As a student said to me today, “I can see that Oedipus got screwed over,” but tragedy as an over-arching vision, as a notion of how the world works eludes them.
Perhaps I’m asking too much of eighteen year olds, but everyone in Iraq would get the Trojan Women, children in Darfur could fully understand Orestes stabbing his mother, Oedipus might make sense to the Tutsi’s or the Hutu’s. Old men in Afghanistan would understand King Lear. We Americans live collectively too safe a life and we are confident that we will prevail.
Tragedies appear in cultures that are in the midst of struggles. Athens before and at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, London as Elizabeth begins an empire on a very shaky polity, a France that Louis XIV is just welding together, a United States winning the World War and setting out on its hegemonic path. My knowledge of Asian Drama isn’t detailed enough to continue this comparison. At these times of growth and hopes, the nation’s poets reminded us, “It could all go wrong!”
As these societies matured and then withered, their poets could not sustain this vision. Everyone seemed too comfortable. Drama went to melodrama where the clearly good overcame the clearly evil. Look at American popular entertainment. Euripides might have enjoyed Die Hard with a Vengeance. But if he were the writer, Bruce Willis would need to be a more reflective character.
Don’t get me wrong. I like our safe life, but I fear that we may be asleep when we go over the precipice and never realize that “we are like Ixion bound to a wheel. (Euripides). “
Tagged as:
Family Foundation School,
Greeks,
Myth
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0512bdcc-1880-496b-abd8-e7bd1a9b4f9d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a50a2a7e-2a2b-4cb2-abf3-d68408ab0d9c)
