The Value Of Political Theater
If you’re like me, you’ve been thoroughly enjoying the recent acrobatics of Chris Christie. The former Governor of New Jersey and temporary Trump transition team head has been making the rounds lately has been making the rounds lately, ostensibly to promote his new book. (According to some spectators the tour is also to reapply for an open seat at the game of musical chairs that is this current White House.)
The acrobatics come in as Christie has been repeatedly asked about his 17-year friendship with Donald John Trump. Specifically, at one point it seemed Christie was a lock for the Vice Presidency but then not only receive no position with the administration, but was let go during before the new team even moved in. There is also the fun fact that Christie is the lawyer of record behind Jared Kushner’s father being in prison.
In every interview I’ve seen, when this strained relationship comes up, Christie bends and twists himself into all manner of shapes trying to maintain claims of friendship, rivalry, betrayal, support, criticism, and admiration for D.J. Trump and his crew. According to Christie, he can forgive all slight and disrespect because he knows Donny T. was simply “engaging in politics.” It’s that comment that I’d like to focus on because it is simultaneously revealing and deeply unsettling.
Claiming that any public official is “engaging in politics” and so maybe not everything they say should be taken as 100% genuine implies that politics is theater. If I’m honest, I don’t disagree with that notion. Politics is theater.
We all know (to greater & lesser degrees maybe,) that anyone who presents to a crowd, but especially election-seeking politicians, are engaging in some level of theater. There is a degree of performance woven in. As I tell the competitors on the Freeport Speech Team, (competing at sectionals this weekend, go Pretz!) even a speech designed to purely give information is an acting event.
In every performance, there’s an unspoken relationship between performer and audience. I’ve spoken about “suspension of disbelief” before, but simply it’s a willingness to be fooled into believing the heightened reality of the performance. An audience wants to be tricked and it’s the performer’s job to trick the audience without them knowing it.
The hard part, and I would argue the ultimate goal of theater, is not bringing the audience into the world of the performance, but rather sending them back with the values of the performance. If you step away from any artistic expression unchanged or unmoved in any emotional, spiritual, or intellectual direction, it was bad art. Art in general, but theater for the purposes of our conversation here, offers a hypothetical world to not only comment on, but also affect the real world.
Bring it back to Donny Johnny and C2. The argument is that distasteful things (putting it mildly,) can be ignored because it’s politics; politics is theater, and theater isn’t the real world. That argument doesn’t take the relationship all the way. The required final step is to ask how those distasteful things impact the real world. If the answer is that they don’t, they wouldn’t be part of the performance.
An audience must always acknowledge that they’re experiencing a hypothetical world. It’s a world that cannot exist beyond the footlights. To say that theater therefore has no value ignores the central purpose of all art.
Politics is theater. Theater and politics present theoretical scenarios with the intent of impacting the world of the performance. If we dismiss both paradigms simply because they are contrived, then theater and politics have no value.
