I regret that The Wall Street Journal doesn’t allow me to link you to the full text of Peggy Noonan’s Saturday “Declarations” column, because it has a number of provocative comments about the source of today’s creative arts. While jumping off from a brief dissection of a likely fictitious piece of war reportage from The New Republic, Noonan segues (or, as she acknowledges, lurches) into a vaguely related point:
“It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been and are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business. They have had good lives, happy lives, but there is a sense with some of them that they didn’t so much live it as view it. That they learned too much from media and not enough from life’s difficulties. That they saw much of what they know in a film or play and picked up all the memes and themes.”
This is a sweeping generalization, and surely one that can be fairly and even easily challenged, but aside from my pleasure at her suggestion that theatre does inform the popular and cultural mindset, it set me thinking about the source of our best drama. To be sure, there are works which relate directly to cultural and political crises, from the war profiteering at the center of All My Sons to the AIDS epidemic which fueled Angels in America. But at the heart of drama, it is the human dynamic that drives great work, whether set against a specific cultural backdrop (such as the 1987 stock market crash in Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate) or unmoored from the details of the outside world in order to universalize its themes (Edward Albee’s The Goat).
Posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
by
Howard Sherman
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