What can hope mean, in a world of terror?
—Jill Dolan1
"So glad," you write—two words in total. You are laying in a hospital bed, I later learn, in Austin, Texas—your colon removed. I am sitting in my living room, which is also my kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and office, as well as my girlfriend's kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and office, on East Fifth Street, in New York City—a hot, whizzing laptop balancing on my thighs. I have just accepted your offer to join the inaugural graduate class in Performance as Public Practice at the University of Texas. The year is 2002, winter. I am eager to join you, and Stacy2 too—to move my body far away from falling skyscrapers and the smell of burning flesh.
And so begins my life in the world of ideas, in feminism, in queer theory, in writing about performances (and women) that I've loved. Twice a week for the next six years, with attention and rapture, I will listen and watch—a picture-perfect still life with water bottle, wristwatch, and pen; a crisp stack of printed notes at the center; you at the helm. "Okay then," you will say at the start of each class meeting—a deceptively simple turn of phrase—acknowledging our complex lives that delivered us here, and not without effort ("okay"), turning our collective attention away from that and toward this vital, present moment that we commit to sharing for the next ninety minutes, or three hours ("then"). Later, you will call this affective and political state of being together in suspended time and space the "utopian performative."
In your now canonized book, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, you will deftly begin by pointing our attention to the Frankfurt School—those European intellectuals who began articulating their utopian longings in the shadow of Hitler's rise to power. You will situate yourself as a brainy middle-class Jew from Pittsburgh and your project, published in 2005, as part of the "long moment after September 11"3—a time of heightened domestic and international terrorizing of poor people and people of color (through which this nation-state has always defined itself), now enacted with increased ferocity and normalization in a post-9/11 world. And you will persuasively make the case for going to the theatre amid it all, in search of hope.
Twenty years later, we will still be in that long moment—neofascism will be an imminent threat; everything from the welfare state to the ecosystem will be in danger of literal collapse. Democracy and neoliberalism will be on their deathbeds, bombs will be dropping, once again—on children, on their mothers. And we will be going to the theatre.
In the opening epigraph to your book, you will cite theatre and performance studies scholar Una Chaudhuri's contribution to Theatre Journal's 2002 special issue, Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001:
Artaud believed that the function of theatre was to teach us that "the sky can still fall on our heads." We've known for some time that this vision of theatre is impossible, Utopian, possibly even hysterical (Artaud as Chicken Little). But the Slapstick Tragedy that opened on September 11th was also a Theatre of Cruelty and might warrant some utopian explorations. The sky has fallen on our heads, and what we are seeing … threatens to do more than blind us. At a time when every cultural practice is reassessing itself and its role, perhaps we will re-entertain Artaud's mad vision of theatre as a place to encounter the unknown and the unimaginable, a place that teaches the necessary humility of not knowing.4
Theatre and war: They share an ontological status, or so it seems—dangerously live (the unknown); people dying before our eyes (the unimaginable). I write this addendum to my essay the week after the 2024 presidential elections. I bought tickets to see the epically long Gatz at The Public today; yesterday, Carmelita Tropicana's new show at the Soho Rep. Next week, a preview of a friend's show here in Philly; last weekend, Helga Davis's new opera at Fringe Arts, then the Peoplehood Parade and pageant in the park with queer kin.
To your poignant question, Jill: No, I do not know what hope can mean in a world of terror. But I do know that hope shares a common root with hoop, that all things circle back, in due time.
Like you and me.
I am so very glad that I crossed state lines to meet you, two brainy Jews, and in Texas of all places too (lech lecha). Thank you for teaching me how to teach, read, and write about performances (and women) that I've loved—you among them. Thank you for giving us all permission to find hope at the theatre, and beside one another, in the darkest of dark.
Footnotes
1. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2005), 3.
2. Musical theatre studies scholar Stacy Wolf, who was core faculty in the Performance as Public program from 2002 to 2008.
3. Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 3.
4. Una Chaudhuri et al., "A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001," Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 98.