Last night I saw As You Like It at Stratford-upon-Avon from the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was as multicultural as you like, with a black Orlando, a vaguely non-white Celia, a woman Jaques, a black female Silvius, and thus a lesbian thing with Phoebe. And deaf or dumb Audrey who needed another character to interpret her sign language.
Oh and there were minor parts for a South Asian and and East Asian.
Really, considering the effort that went into providing satisfaction for the progressive political community it is amazing that the production team had any creative energy left for the play itself.
But it was great fun and My Girl Rosalind was delightful.
I get the problem. As You Like It is about the travails of a bunch of rich kids involved in family power and inheritance problems. The only character in the least bit modern, and the least bit non-patriarchal-white-supremacist is Jaques, the professional pessimist reciting his Seven Ages of Man.
Do you see the problem faced by our lords and masters in the educated ruling class? The great cultural monuments that the 50-ish white woman wants to go see are all about white culture, and often pre-industrial revolution white culture at that. The issues and concerns of the left have no place, were not even thought of back in those days. What's a woke theatre creative to do?
Well, they do what they did with As You Like It here in Stratford in 2019. And I got to see an As You Like It by the semi-pro Seattle Shakespeare Company earlier in the year. They too had a couple of reversed genders. Just to maintain their street cred in the theater community.
What these chaps really want to do is the musical version of The Boy in the Dress, "the story of a twelve-year-old boy who enjoys cross-dressing, and the reactions of his family and friends." Hey, whaddya know, RSC is doing just that this summer.
Actually, I get it. My reductive Three Peoples theory gets it. What our educated class wants these days is to be "creative." And the easiest thing to be creative about is sex. Let's ring all the changes, and the more it épates the bourgeoisie the better.
But here is my thing. What we need today is not navel-gazing by the educated class and their bribed apologists in the theater community. What we need is cultural product that explores much more the situation of the ordinary middle class in the 21st century. Not to mention the immigrant community.
What does it mean, today, living in the world of the flyover middle class, scorned and abandoned by today's educated class? What does it mean to be an immigrant to the developed west, torn between your ancestral culture, the business workaday culture and the political culture? Your ancestral culture still tugs at you and seems to be a safe place but it isn't; the workaday trust and customer-oriented culture of work and business is something that you need to master in order to make it in the city but it is frightening; and the political culture offers all kinds of temptations and short cuts, which all come with a hidden cost, that you are cannon fodder for the various political power factions in the society.
And where are the satires of modern life, satirizing all the sacred cows of the educated ruling class? Why aren't we assailed from morning to night with penetrating satires of abortion activists, LGBT organizations, journalists, NGO activists, AntiFa, woke Google employees, idiotic tweeting celebrities, and so on? How about a satire on the modern university and its feminized bureaucracy? How about a searing look at K-12 education, that looks at the insanities of failing to educate inner-city black children? Why is it that movie villains can only be white military officers and white businessmen?
Look, I get it. The reason we have the currrent "divided country," and that everyone on the left is spitting cotton, is that the left's Great Reaction is failing everywhere. But, as is the way with all cultures, the first and second encounter with failure only prompt the culture leaders to call for a bigger effort, a Big Push, in the language of World War I, an extra effort to get the team over the goal line.
It cannot be true that the whole endeavor is heading for disaster, that its glorious vision metastasizes into misery wherever it is tried. That realization doesn't come till later, till the gutters are running with blood, till the day before Thermidor.
Now, as you know, my Three Peoples theory has an exact prescription for all our ailments, and it should be taken daily.
For the People of the Subordinate Self, the prescription is to learn the trust and service culture of the city and of Axial Age religion, to graduate from the tribal and hierarchical culture of the agricultural age to the trust and responsibility culture of the city.
For the People of the Responsible Self, the prescription is to step out a little beyond the comfort of merely obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules, and dare to do something a bit dangerous.
For the People of the Creatie Self, the prescription is to understand fully the Hero's Journey, that it starts with the terror of the descent into the underworld of the unconscious, and it ends not with glorious success and the adulation of the multitude, but with a Sacrificial Death, pointing out the Way along the borderlands between Order and Chaos: dying that others may live.
Now, imagine if our theater and arts community was writing plays and movies about the meaning of life, the universe and everything informed by the wisdom of the Three Peoples theory.
That would a a world of wonders.
Oh and there were minor parts for a South Asian and and East Asian.
Really, considering the effort that went into providing satisfaction for the progressive political community it is amazing that the production team had any creative energy left for the play itself.
But it was great fun and My Girl Rosalind was delightful.
I get the problem. As You Like It is about the travails of a bunch of rich kids involved in family power and inheritance problems. The only character in the least bit modern, and the least bit non-patriarchal-white-supremacist is Jaques, the professional pessimist reciting his Seven Ages of Man.
Do you see the problem faced by our lords and masters in the educated ruling class? The great cultural monuments that the 50-ish white woman wants to go see are all about white culture, and often pre-industrial revolution white culture at that. The issues and concerns of the left have no place, were not even thought of back in those days. What's a woke theatre creative to do?
Well, they do what they did with As You Like It here in Stratford in 2019. And I got to see an As You Like It by the semi-pro Seattle Shakespeare Company earlier in the year. They too had a couple of reversed genders. Just to maintain their street cred in the theater community.
What these chaps really want to do is the musical version of The Boy in the Dress, "the story of a twelve-year-old boy who enjoys cross-dressing, and the reactions of his family and friends." Hey, whaddya know, RSC is doing just that this summer.
Actually, I get it. My reductive Three Peoples theory gets it. What our educated class wants these days is to be "creative." And the easiest thing to be creative about is sex. Let's ring all the changes, and the more it épates the bourgeoisie the better.
But here is my thing. What we need today is not navel-gazing by the educated class and their bribed apologists in the theater community. What we need is cultural product that explores much more the situation of the ordinary middle class in the 21st century. Not to mention the immigrant community.
What does it mean, today, living in the world of the flyover middle class, scorned and abandoned by today's educated class? What does it mean to be an immigrant to the developed west, torn between your ancestral culture, the business workaday culture and the political culture? Your ancestral culture still tugs at you and seems to be a safe place but it isn't; the workaday trust and customer-oriented culture of work and business is something that you need to master in order to make it in the city but it is frightening; and the political culture offers all kinds of temptations and short cuts, which all come with a hidden cost, that you are cannon fodder for the various political power factions in the society.
And where are the satires of modern life, satirizing all the sacred cows of the educated ruling class? Why aren't we assailed from morning to night with penetrating satires of abortion activists, LGBT organizations, journalists, NGO activists, AntiFa, woke Google employees, idiotic tweeting celebrities, and so on? How about a satire on the modern university and its feminized bureaucracy? How about a searing look at K-12 education, that looks at the insanities of failing to educate inner-city black children? Why is it that movie villains can only be white military officers and white businessmen?
Look, I get it. The reason we have the currrent "divided country," and that everyone on the left is spitting cotton, is that the left's Great Reaction is failing everywhere. But, as is the way with all cultures, the first and second encounter with failure only prompt the culture leaders to call for a bigger effort, a Big Push, in the language of World War I, an extra effort to get the team over the goal line.
It cannot be true that the whole endeavor is heading for disaster, that its glorious vision metastasizes into misery wherever it is tried. That realization doesn't come till later, till the gutters are running with blood, till the day before Thermidor.
Now, as you know, my Three Peoples theory has an exact prescription for all our ailments, and it should be taken daily.
For the People of the Subordinate Self, the prescription is to learn the trust and service culture of the city and of Axial Age religion, to graduate from the tribal and hierarchical culture of the agricultural age to the trust and responsibility culture of the city.
For the People of the Responsible Self, the prescription is to step out a little beyond the comfort of merely obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules, and dare to do something a bit dangerous.
For the People of the Creatie Self, the prescription is to understand fully the Hero's Journey, that it starts with the terror of the descent into the underworld of the unconscious, and it ends not with glorious success and the adulation of the multitude, but with a Sacrificial Death, pointing out the Way along the borderlands between Order and Chaos: dying that others may live.
Now, imagine if our theater and arts community was writing plays and movies about the meaning of life, the universe and everything informed by the wisdom of the Three Peoples theory.
That would a a world of wonders.
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