Submitted by kkasia on 20 May, 2011 - 10:39.
Special IFA Friday Lecture
May 27th 2011; 1:30 p.m.; room 601
Prof. Jacob Juntunen
(Faculty Fulbright Fellow, AMU School of English)
War During Peacetime:
Mainstream Theatre, Mass Media, and the 1985 Premiere of The Normal Heart
In 1999, Baz Kershaw declared contemporary mainstream theatre drained of any political efficacy. To Kershaw, financing productions in reputable theatres necessitated giving no offense to the dominant ideology; thus he advocated relinquishing mainstream spaces to capitalists and creating a radical theatre outside the spotlight. Though Kershaw’s dismissive view continues to dominate critical discourse, John Bull attempted to resuscitate mainstream theatre’s reputation in 2004. Even if auditoriums with plush, velvet seats were not where emergent ideologies entered the world, Bull reasoned, only in these widely-visited venues could a new world view be assimilated, disseminated, and normalized.
Examining the 1985 press reception of The Normal Heart, the first mainstream AIDS play in the U.S., proves Bull’s thesis sound and demonstrates the political vitality of U.S. mainstream theatre. The big-budget and much-marketed production used its position of high visibility—particularly in newspapers—to support individuals and organizations fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in ways radical performances in marginal venues could not. This gestures towards a larger theory about the political potential mainstream theatre wields in its interpolation by the mass media. Mainstream theatre can act as a negotiating force between emergent and dominant ideologies, making the radical palatable.
