TONY K U S H N E R

THE THEATER O F UTOPIA

O h why bother to talk about the theater of Utopia, or about anything having to do with Utopia, when all you have to do is read the paper in the morning and every hope you ever had will be dashed? If you aren’t just plain stupid or so fundamentally dishonest or indifferent or shortsighted that you will deserve what’s coming, you have to see that hope is only torture now and despair would be a kind of liberation. Does anyone really believe anymore that the world is perfectible, or even refinable, improvable? We are get- ting ready to do one of those hundred-year throwback/regressions we do from time to time, groping our way towards the worst of the Nineteenth Century, managing to for- get the best lessons we might have learned and demonstrating that only in our already prodigious capacity for sheer callousness and brutality have human beings made any real progress.

The theater of Utopia? The performances will be immensely long. People won’t have to work anymore so that won’t be a problem. It will take days or even weeks to complete a single performance; we can stay all night and sing ’em all. In some parts of the world, there will be performances that go on for years; cults and even cultures will grow up around them. Divisions of labor will have become things of the past, so there will proba- bly not be actors and audience or artists and spectators. Some immensely complicated combination of tradition and spontaneity, participation and observation, intellect and impulse will shape these performances; there will be lots of rules, but somehow igno- rance of the rules - being outside - will not be a disadvantage, but will attract gratifjmg attention to strangers; but I hope there will still be great divas. There will have to be; there must be worship or it isn’t theater. Perhaps everyone present will be a diva. Travel will be involved; you will never finish where you started, and you will frequently have no idea where you are; and you will not care. Some performances will romp across the planet. There will be no tickets and no critics.

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K U S H N E R

It won’t be as corny as we fear it might be. Since most of the difficulty of living will have been eliminated from everyday life, and there wdl be no more agonized strivings after basic necessities, the Theater of Utopia could and may very well be full of strife and difficulty and gore and agony, probably very kinky-erotic - although if there is no longer advertising and commodification, will there still be fetish-sex? How depressing to think that there wouldn’t be! And it will be dangerous. Maybe even life threatening, like the Papua-New Guinea mudpeople staged battles, if we can trust that anthropology. War will certainly be a frequent subject, if the Theater of Utopia ha5 subjects, or will subjects and objects be dissolved by then into Universal Fluidity? Fluidity will be an aspect; lots of liq- uids and solids and substances in between. Food will be served, blood products exchanged, and bodily functions part of the action. Is this starting to sound too much like the Sixties? Maybe that was Utopia, or as close as we’re likely to get, and we hcked up and it went away before it managed to become perfect, before the messiah arrived. If the Dream of Reason produces monsters, does the Theater of Utopia produce Nixon?

If the State actually does wither away, the Theater of Utopia will be the State; if the State doesn’t wither, the theater will be its gravest threat, and since the State would in any event have to be at least Just (if this really is Utopia we are talking about), it (the State) will embrace the dangers, become capable of them, a civic body Fluid enough to be capable of the protean changes the Theater of Utopia will ceaselessly exhort and excite and inspire. Eschewing sentimentality, the Theater of Utopia will prove that human beings are adapt- able and able to transform and will show us shortcuts. It will not get hung up on the ques- tion of whether daily life dictates character or character dictates daily life but rather there will be astonishments that cut through that Gordian knot, visions and hallucinations and real, not stage, magic, not all of it happy - there will be harrowing confrontations with loss. If History actually ends, the Theater of Utopia will be our history, and if History doesn’t end, the Theater of Utopia wdl be a blissfd forgetting. Forgiveness will be possible.

Right now, the nearest thing to a Theater of Utopia I can imagine would be to sit in some local coliseum, say the Felt Forum, surrounded by my friends; down in the arena, the judges of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals - the Cincinnati killer-clown-judges who just ruled that homosexuals aren’t an identifiable class deserving of constitutionally- protected rights - are naked, chained, and being fed, one by one, to ravening, slathering wolverines; at the show’s finale the wolverines chow down on the carcass of Newt Gingrich, a postprandial digestive. Perhaps in the Theater of Utopia this will all be avail- able Virtually, through holograms, electrode-laced suits and seats, and appropriate, help- h l drugs. Newt’s screams as the wolverines feed will bounce off the clouds thanks to Dolby SSSSuperSurroundSSSSSound. Aroma jets will spray fear-pheromones in the air. I t will be very thrilling and satisfying and not at all wholesome. (Wolverines are the largest members of the weasel family.)

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T H E T H E A T E R O F U T O P I A

There will be live animals in the Theater of Utopia, participating freely because they know that food will be served. The presence of animals will be part of the h n ; theater will serve to express both our repatriation with Nature after our millennia-long alienation and our ongoing horror over its cruelty, over the ugly tricks practiced upon us. But the Theater of Utopia will be better in this regard than those PBS nature films because there will be no narrators or even narratives fitting the happenings suffocatingly to ideology. This will allow for randomness, surprise, and even redemption.

There will be special theatricals preoccupied with viruses and carcinogens, the great themes of which will be victory and succumbing. These will be especially popular in for- merly urban areas, which will be called “ozone-fiee zones” and which will be visited only for brief periods for the purpose of refreshing nightmares, for remembering.

Bad theater will be punishable by death, though of course everyone will be too civi- lized to carry out the sentences. Many will be sentenced.

“. . .the deeper truth of the daydream lies in what it reveals of the reality principle as such rather than in what it tells us about our wish fulfillments: since the whole drama of the lat- ter - as Freud and his hysterics taught us - lies in trying to figure out what we really want in the first place. In that case, what we are unable to wish or to bring to the narrative figu- ration of the daydream or Utopian fantasy is far more significant and symptomatic than the impoverished actually-existing three wishes themselves.. . the vocation of Utopia lies in failure; in which its epistemological value lies in the walls it allows us to feel around our minds ... the miring of our imaginations in the mode of production itself, the mud of the present age in which the winged Utopian shoes stick.. . This is the correlative, the obverse and the negative side, of Marx’s great dictum, which informed his theory and his practice for the rest of his life; namely that ‘the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality’ (Letter to Ruge, September, 1843).”

-Fredric Jameson The Seeds of Time

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