The Emperor presented by TFANA at Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, is a play that narrates the downfall of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in 1975, the tale written by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski a few years later in the form of fictionalized testimonies of the surviving imperial servants and officials and adapted by Colin Teevan. Its special attraction is phenomenal Kathryn Hunter, who, accompanied by an Ethiopian musician, single-handedly performs in rapid succession all of the twelve courtiers who reminisce on the emperor. This is spectacular and it alone makes the play worth seeing.
But its real wonder is the play itself -- that it is a fiction rather than a reportage. It concerns the contemporary political event but neither reports it nor describes it. Kapuscinski, who as an active journalist who covered Africa for decades was frustrated by the restriction imposed by Selassie’s court and found a way out of the difficulty by resorting to fiction and thereby came closer to evoking expressively the truth of the matter, because by elevating the account away from the reality of the event, he succeeded in reaching deeper into its more universal significance about power and its eventual dissolution. A satire or a metaphor would not have achieved this as they would still be linked directly to the actual event; only the art of fiction did it as we know in the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in the works of Shakespeare, Racine, and even Shaw and Pirandello.
My experience of two recent political plays confirmed me of my belief in the power of fiction. One is The Peculiar Patriot, at the National Black Theatre, by Liza Jessie Peterson, which addressed the imminent issue of mass incarceration and featured the playwright herself alone as the protagonist. Paradoxically, it was a fiction presented as a documentary. There was no question the show was moving; but it was a drama akin to that of fiery sermons, persuasive lectures, and passionate speeches, a straightforward narration rather than a strong theater. In contrast to a powerful storytelling, a well-agued debate, with two or more minds pitting against one another, develops interactions between characters and engages us as a theater.
The PlayCo’s Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya, by Stefano Massimi, is an admirable account of the Second Chechen Wars, 1999 - 2006 in Checnya, which the indomitable journalist Politkovaskaya covered until her death by murder in 2006. The event was passionately and persuasively told by three female performers playing several characters; but in the end it was a great storytelling, inevitably lacking in complex web of relationships among them, as The Emperor was able to achieve.
A play that reports a contemporary event, without elevating it to the level of fiction, I believe, will not endure beyond the memory of the audience who lived through its time, whereas a play on political and social issues presented as fiction has the power to remain relevant beyond the time of the event. It endures.
09.20.18
