PA: Is theater tackling today’s big ideas and issues?

OE: Perhaps more than some people give it credit for, but never enough. The theater is funny, because on the one hand it is a place where you can deal with the biggest of issues and themes. On the other hand, it’s very close to pickpockets and strip-joints. It’s entertainment, and when it’s at its best, it’s both of those things next to each other. It’s entertaining, of the street, and unpretentious, but also capable of dealing with big ideas.

Theater is in a confused place: in that way it is very much a mirror of the country. I think we are ideologically very confused. The theater is at its best when it is part of a movement. Theater is at its most eloquent when giving voice to some kind of movement in society that is compelling, powerful and pushing. I think of Clifford Odets, and the way he gave voice to the militant Jewish working class in the 1930s.

One of the biggest thinkers and exciting artists working in theater at the moment is August Wilson. The idea that he was going to take a deep breath and write a cycle of plays about 20th century America through the African American experience is an astonishingly ambitious idea, full of riches.

But you start to run out of writers after August Wilson, or Tony Kushner, you start to run out fairly quickly of writers who have set their sights that high, who have aimed to give voice to people who need to have a voice in the culture. Without that the theater is in constant danger of turning into just an entertainment or just a place to whine.

PA: After World War II, Theodore Adorno was quoted as saying art is not about pointing to alternatives, but about resisting the gun pointed at our heads.

OE: Adorno was warning against a kind of programmatic art that tried to supply answers to questions that artists can’t answer. That kind of art tends to be very ineffective. It is hard to distinguish it from propaganda of various kinds. On the other hand, the idea which I think is implicit in that Adorno quote – that artistic resistance, rebellion and boundary crossing, is the same as political resistance, I think is a false idea. They could be related, but it’s perfectly possible to have an aesthetically rebellious art that is actually deeply, deeply conservative. It’s only rebellious within its own terms.

Marx was famous for being very silent on the issue of exactly how communist society would be structured, and I think he was silent on it for the same reason that art needs to not be too programmatic about alternatives: because we don’t know what they are. What we can do is try to point out the contradictions of the way we live and bring them into as sharp a focus as possible, and thereby help people to imagine the alternative to it.

PA: Rather than giving an idea of what to think, it ought to suggest how to think critically?

OE: Except that if I say it shouldn’t be prescriptive, I’d be being prescriptive. It tends not to be as effective when it is prescriptive. You know, we were talking about August Wilson. I’ll give you an example that for me is tremendously powerful. There is an immense radicalness to Wilson’s project. On the one hand, he is doing a history of 20th century African American experience, but on the other hand there is an implicit claim that actually these African American characters are the American experience, and are speaking for America.

That’s a radical thing to do, because it’s laying claim about who gets to speak. There’s a utopian element simply to who’s allowed to tell their story that creates a positive alternative without having to actually paint a prescription.

PA: Speaking of who is able to tell their story, is it the case that new material isn’t being written or is it that it’s not being funded and promoted?

OE: I think it is more complicated. To give you an example we talked about a little bit earlier: Clifford Odets was forced into existence by the Depression and the organized resistance to it. When people started organizing, they forced a voice into existence to speak for them. In the same way Tony Kushner was forced into existence by the gay liberation movement and by the response to the AIDS crisis. Again, Tony is his own talent, but I think you have to look at not just individual talent, but you have to look at the movements or the masses out of which their talent arises. Right now I fear not just as a country but as a progressive movement we are fragile, disparate, uncertain, not unified, and it’s very hard for a writer to give voice to those great things. If we do that, the writers to give voice are going to rise up.

PA: Speaking of great voices that rose up, there is currently a reproduction of Brecht’s play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Some critics have complained about Brecht’s didacticism. How do you think Brecht might be produced in Bush country?

OE: I think [that criticism is] wrong about Brecht in general. I think Arturo Ui is an unfortunate example. I would compare it with Mother Courage, which I think is the greatest play of the 20th century. Mother Courage is a play that could be produced now with extraordinary impact. Brecht wrote it as a German watching Hitler be swept into power through elections. He then abolished elections, but he was popularly elected, and the central question in Mother Courage is how can people support something that destroys them. Perhaps it is the crucial question, because we depend ultimately on enlightened self-interest.

That play doesn’t give the answer. It leaves you with the incredible question: how can she [the main character] not see this? That’s to me the greatest part about Brecht – it’s exactly the same with Marx – he doesn’t give an answer. He points out the problem so sharply. Or in The Good Person of Szechwan, where Shen The and Shi Ta-Shen the good person can’t continue to live without being bad, and that’s pointing out the internal logic of capitalism, making a profit is exploitative. Fundamentally there isn’t any way to actually prosper and to be good in this system. It doesn’t say what the solution is; it just points out the contradiction.

PA: Is it really possible to produce popular theater today?

OE: There are a lot of barriers. There are very real economic barriers. Theater is so labor intensive: it requires the live presence of all the actors to make it happen. You can’t mass produce it. It will never be able to reach the kind of audience that electronically distributed media can reach. So then you have to say, okay, if movies and television are going to reach more people, what is it that we do better?

There is a wonderful story about David Edgar, a British playwright, who wrote a play about postwar English fascism and Enoch Powell and the rise of the racist right in England, called Destiny. The also did a television production. An interviewer said to him, “After one night on BBC 2 your play is going to be seen by five million people. In the entire run of two years in the West End, it is going to be seen by maybe 200,000 people. So doesn’t it really matter more that it is on television?” Edgar said, “No it doesn’t, because it’s reaching five million people on television but it’s reaching them at their most reactionary moment. It’s reaching them at home, alone, on their sofas in front of the TV. That’s not the moment where people’s minds change.” In the theater you like to believe that people’s consciousness can change.

PA: Is there any movement for a public theater?

OE: We have been struggling so hard to hang on to the National Endowment for the Arts that I don’t think anybody believes that we could get the support for something like that, for a Federal Theater Project. It would be fantastic. It was one of the greatest things in the history of American theater. Of course, Hallie Flanagan, who founded it, was the first item of investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949. One of the first things they did was shut down the Federal Theater Project.

You can compare it to Europe. All over Europe the theaters get 90 percent of their budgets in direct subsidy from the state, and they only have to do about 10 percent at the box office. Sixty-five percent of our income has to come from the box office. That really limits what we can do about ticket prices.

PA: Is there room for an explicitly left theater?

OE: Absolutely. I think it has to go hand-in-hand with a movement in society. That’s the thing. When I think of successful left theaters, they are always part of and integrated with movements, whether it’s Teatro Campesino coming out of the Farmworkers, or the San Francisco Troupe coming out of the antiwar protests. They arise from actual political struggles and movements within the society, and we are certainly in desperate need of a great left theater. Nobody defines themselves that way anymore. There are artists, there are people like me, there are people like Tony, who define themselves as progressive artists, but you know that’s different from there being a progressive theater. Yes, I think it would be a great thing to do.

PA: Could you talk a little bit about the impact that the NEA cutbacks are having?

OE: It’s now been about 20 years of cutting back, ever since the early Reagan years when the massive tax cuts happened. The money that we used to get from the National Endowment, we now have either to make from selling tickets, or make from getting corporations to sponsor us. That can be a problem. I’ll give you a good example: We did a show here a few months ago called Nickle and Dimed, based on Barbara Ehrenreich’s book about the minimum wage.

We had one of our major corporate sponsors, who happens to be a retail outfit and employs a lot of minimum wage workers, call us up and say, “We are very unhappy with you for doing this show, and I just don’t understand why you are doing a show that advocates a living wage, and you are depending on your friends in the corporate community for support.” They didn’t say they were going to take our money away, but there was no other reason to make that phone call other than to make us feel threatened.

Now have we survived? Absolutely. We’ve done okay and so have a lot of other theaters. But there has been no question that in the last 10-15 years there has been a dramatic loss of the African American theaters. All over the country Black theater companies have closed. It’s directly related. Because it’s not just the money they’re not getting from the NEA; it’s that when the NEA gave them big sums of money, that was a signal to everybody else, that, okay, you should support this.

So what you find is that the theaters that were more on the margins financially are gone. We have lost a lot of theaters. So, we’re not giving up and we’re not playing dead, but it’s definitely hard for us. The job description for somebody like me changed completely. Now no other artistic director in my league can succeed unless they’re a terrific fundraiser.

People don’t say that when they talk a bout my artistry or whatever, but the truth is that if I wasn’t a good fundraiser, I would fail. What an interesting sort of quiet segregation that is! All of those who could be great at running theaters, but who aren’t good fundraisers will never get a chance, will not get hired. You know what? An awful lot of these people who turn out to be really good fundraisers look like me. A lot of people that are good fundraisers turn out to be well educated, articulate white men. I wonder why that is?

PA: I read recently that you were in the movie Angels in America?

OE: They were nice enough to give me a little role in it as sort of a thank you for my work on the play, and it was really fun.

PA: Is it appearing on HBO?

OE: Yes, probably in December.

PA: And how is the screenplay as compared to the stage play?

OE: Honestly, Joe, I think it is surprisingly good. Tony wrote it. I think the script survives incredibly intact, and I think the performances are just fantastic. They’re great actors.

PA: Meryl Streep is in it?

OE: Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Emma Thompson.

PA: Who plays Roy Cohn?

OE: Al Pacino. He’s scary, genuinely scary. I think he’s given his part a superb performance, and actually those scenes in the hospital as Cohn is dying are probably the best scenes in the movie. I thought it was beautifully filmed, with Meryl Streep as Ethel Rosenberg. She even looks like Ethel. The moment when Roy Cohn dies in the movie, and Ethel Rosenberg is sitting there; she, just without thinking, and she wasn’t directed to do this, she just went [gasp of joy]. It’s just a moment of pure joy and so funny and in the movement. It was just great.