"Alexis': Political theater in New York

Back in 2003, when a flood of new plays about the Iraqi war— including Tim Robbins's Embedded, Sam Shepard's The God of War, and David Hare's Stuff Happens— inundated New York theaters, I remember thinking that perhaps political theater's time has finally come in the U.S.

But as I look back now, I realize that just because a play is about Iraq doesn't mean it's political. David Hare may write an incisive, topical satire dramatizing the U.S. cabinet meeting that decided the Iraqi invasion (with a look-alike actress playing Condoleeza Rice and a clever imitation of "W" by Jay Sanders), but that doesn't mean it's a political play. (And anyway, Hare is British.)

What provoked me to think anew about political theater, and what that term means, is a production I saw in New York last weekend. Motus, a new Italian theater company consisting of young interdisciplinary artists, has provided a vivid example of just how fresh, immediate and exciting political theater can be with its vibrant production called Alexis. A Greek Tragedy.

Senseless death in Athens

"How to transform indignation into action" is the question that sent Motus on the trail of Antigone, that historical/mythological figure who for the Motus folks personifies the champion of justice. The result is a four-play cycle that Motus built around the myth of the brave young daughter of Oedipus who defied the cruel King Creon, buried her brother Polyneices, and as a result was sentenced to death for breaking the law.

In the process of creating their cycle, the Motus troupers learned of an event in 2008 that became the catalyst for their fourth show: the killing of a 15-year-old boy named Alexandros-Andreas Grigoropoulos (Alexis) by a policeman in the Exarchia quarter of central Athens, where tensions often run high between youths and the authorities. The senseless shooting of Alexis triggered a people's insurrection without precedent, flooding the streets of Athens with protesters from all ages and classes of Greek society. It also set off a chain reaction of youthful rebellions in other European cities, including the riots that shocked London this past summer.

For the Motus Company, the image of Alexis's dead body lying in an Athens street provided the metaphor of many forms of injustice and inhumanity that hold contemporary society in its deathly grip. Yet when the company members traveled to Athens in 2010 to explore the theme of contemporary revolt, they found to their chagrin that the event had been forgotten by the media and the public alike.

Storming the stage

Instead of being discouraged, the company members threw themselves into creating a theater piece about the nature of their journey itself. They filmed the site where Alexis (like Polyneices) lay dead and dishonored on the street. They followed Antigone's path through barren, remote Greece. They compiled interviews.

The result is a thrilling 80-minute multi-media presentation that explores how a theater company faces its responsibility to tell a story that needs to be told. Set on a bare, blood red stage, using the theater's three walls (as well as the audience itself) upon which to project the video footage, Alexis feels as if 40 actors are enacting it, not the four who actually inhabit the stage.

As it happens, in the last five minutes of Alexis more than 40 people do storm the stage when the actors call out to the audience to come up and join them in a metaphorical protest against injustice. One by one, audience members in the tiny La Mama auditorium flock to the stage, raising their arms and tossing metaphoric stones at the Creons of the world. It's a unifying moment, unlike any I've experienced since the Group Theatre days of the 1960s.

It worked for Havel and Fugard

Artists like those in the Motus company— actors willing to take risks and invite us to join them in making change— offer a working definition of political theater that can serve Americans as a model for developing our own. It's the kind of theater that Brecht wrote while exiled from Nazi Germany, that Vaclav Havel wrote while persecuted and imprisoned in Communist Czechoslovakia, that Athol Fugard wrote in apartheid Africa, that Ariel Dorfman wrote in exile from Pinochet's Chile. It's the kind of theater that can and did provoke change throughout entire societies.

The U.S. lacks a similarly strong tradition of political theater— so far. But the beginnings of such a tradition have begun to sprout in recent years, in the works of Anna Deavere Smith, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Katori Hall, J. T. Rogers and Moises Kaufman, among others.

When more writers like these demonstrate the courage to take risks and make commitments, American theater groups too may find the power to bring audiences to their feet.