On Making Tougher Political Theatre
by Dan Hoyle

In creating Tings Dey Happen, my director, Charlie Varon, and I sought to see how much we could stretch the conventions of political theatre in order to put Nigeria on stage as authentically and with as much complexity as possible. Emboldened by audiences' and critics' championing of the "challenging" language of the HBO show The Wire, David Simon's treatise-entertainment on postindustrial urban America, I embraced the principle that audiences will accept not catching every word as long as the writer makes sure they understand everything they need to know.

So I set out to make a play that didn't hold the audience's hand, but instead helicoptered them into the middle of the creeks of the Niger Delta, Nigeria's volatile oil-producing region that supplies 10 percent of America's imported oil. I did this partly because I wanted to re-create the dynamism of my experiences in Nigeria, partly because I wanted to challenge audiences politically, and partly because I wanted to stretch the conventions of political theatre. It was a great experiment, and the show's long runs in San Francisco and New York are a testament to audiences' ability and desire to be challenged and stretched.

I landed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria's oil capital, one tropical morning armed only with two cell-phone numbers and a good deal of travel experience (in 2002 the Circumnavigator's Club had funded an around-the-world trip to study globalization that became Circumnavigator, my first solo show). The drama, comedy and intensity of the Niger Delta was all mine to absorb. I didn't have a friend to wink at or shake my head with; there was no expatriate journalist hangout to laugh off the day's close calls. When I met warlords, ambassadors, militants, prostitutes and oil workers, it was on their terms: their intimidations, jokes, pleas, threats and secrets were not mediated and were all the more powerful for it. I wanted to re-create this in the play because I felt it would best serve the theatregoer's simple plea: Make It Entertaining, Dammit!--I saw a movie for a third of the price last night, the seats were really comfortable, Clooney lit up the screen and man that dialogue was snappy.

But I also wanted to make audiences stretch, both politically and aesthetically. At times, political theatre can seem a parody of itself. A monster is raised, commonly a large corporation, our current wayward political administration or some form of racist hegemony, the audience righteously shakes its fist at it, and then everyone goes home happy. No assumptions are challenged; little contradictory evidence is supplied. It's comfort food for The Left, often with some ethnic or identity-politics spice thrown in to make it feel trenchant and tap those bottomless yet unhelpful wells of upper-middle-class white guilt. If you're lucky, one scene features shirtless men, chests heaving with rage, to titillate the middle-aged women, who take to feverishly fanning themselves with their programs, and maybe a wild conga number to keep the seniors awake. The only effect I can imagine is that audience members give a nice tip to the invariably Latino or African American candy and lotion attendant in the theatre bathroom (if it's an upscale theatre) after the show.

Theatre is an emotional, not an intellectual, medium by and large, and I have gradually accepted that. The trick then is to illuminate and provoke through the emotional common language, to inject content through emotion. This may sound rather surgical, but without the fantastic visual and editing techniques of film, theatre must be resourcefully precise.

The longer I stayed in Nigeria, the more murky the truth became. There were no saints or heroes, merely a collection of flawed people, some with stronger moral codes than others, but all with a mix of self-interest and greater-good sensibilities. Thus in addition to being a show, I often felt my performances of Tings Dey Happen were a great experiment in the human ability to overcome preconceptions. Most people form their worldview in their 20s, and by the time they reach the average theatregoing age (let's say 45, to be charitable) it's pretty fixed. Trying to change a person's worldview at this age through an intellectual medium like a book is hard enough, but in theatre, where people come primarily to have their heart engaged, and not their head, it's even harder.

With Tings Dey Happen, I sought to present what's happening in the Niger Delta through the eyes of those who live and work there, not as stand-ins for political talking points. In the program notes to the show, I asked audiences to abandon their normal ideological frameworks and let their mind grapple with Nigeria's counterintuitive, contradictory and ideologically scrambled reality. The audience meets a Texas oil worker who decides to stay in Nigeria and raise his child by a Nigerian woman rather than move back to Texas to live close to his American children; a ganja-selling businessman who isn't angry at Chevron for coming to his village, but for only involving the Nigerian government instead of dealing directly with the village businessmen, as was done during the pre-independent Nigeria slave trade and palm oil trade booms; and a militant leader who explains that they attack oil companies because it makes international news, while government confrontation only brings violent suppression and no foreign journalists to write stories that might incite Western righteousness.

I went to Nigeria thinking I would create a hit piece on Big Oil, as that was the take of most of the news coverage up until that point (in the last few years, it has become more nuanced). But by staying in isolated villages for days at a time, and hanging around long enough for militants or oil workers to get tired of reciting their rhetoric, I found the reality was much more complicated. The audience's expectation, I guessed, would be for a hit piece on Big Oil, and so the show on some level tries to lead the audience through my process of discovery of the more complex truths. At the time of writing it, I was so passionate I didn't realize the ambitiousness inherent, but I wrote a play about how I went to Nigeria and found the Niger Delta Oil Crisis was as much about the history, culture, politics and society of Nigeria as it was about oil. Try writing that tagline.

The other reason I wanted audiences to stretch is because that's the only way to understand another culture. The show became a metaphor for how the West should engage with the world. In the final monologue of the show, the Community Relations Officer implores the always offstage but ubiquitous Dan to "think like a black man." The central message of the show is that all Western interventions, from tanks in Baghdad to Peace Corps volunteers, are doomed to fail unless we seek out and learn how the local people think and view the world. We don't always have to agree, but we have to try to see the world through their eyes. This is why I chose to portray the characters myself, with no mediation, and why I chose to make audiences stretch toward the material, rather than translating it all into concepts and terms we are comfortable with through our daily news sources. Case in point: The word corruption does not appear in the script, because Nigerians don't use that word a lot in everyday discussions. But corruption and fraud is present in almost every scene.

Ten years ago, my show may have been overrun by crusaders against "otherness," waving their copies of Edward Said's Orientalism and demanding how I could presume to represent all these African characters. Thankfully, this specific wave of righteousness has abated, and thousands of people have entered the Niger Delta for an intense 90 minutes in a way they never would have if everyone had sat around discussing whether or not I'm entitled to perform such a piece. The enthusiastic embrace and championing of the show by Nigerians also helped.

Though the tide is shifting, it is still in vogue to talk about how similar we all are. While I had numerous moments of sublime solidarity and companionship with Nigerians throughout my 10 months there, the experience convinced me that in fact we are quite different. But this is okay, in fact even wonderful, and we should talk about it. Instead, a culture of diversity sessions and sensitivity training has burdened us with an arsenal of politically corrupt vocabulary, but we learn nothing about how people around the world view government, God, women, education, technology, hair styles and so on. Bashing identity politics has become in vogue, and easy, as well, but my point is that the stretch I demanded of audiences, and the vulnerability of the unfamiliar, is the same stretch we need to make as citizens to understand what's happening in far-off corners of the world, and even unfamiliar neighborhoods in our own cities.

The third reason I wanted to make the audience stretch is because theatre needs it. A decade ago, it seemed that much of the literati, and most of the theatreati, viewed television as a largely fake and benignly infantile medium. Theatre, with its culture-vulture audiences, saw itself as the discerning art patron's medium. But with the ascendance and triumph of cable TV and the opportunity for niche audience shows to be profitable, television doesn't have to make shows that are safe and appealing for mass audiences. Shows like The Wire and Ricky Gervais's Extras can be "hits" by claiming a relatively small four or five million viewers (and sporting a bulging press packet of rave reviews).

Faced with this challenge, how does theatre respond? Theatre of course can't compete with the realism of the screen, but too often productions drown themselves in lavish sets to compensate for its perceived visual deficiencies. This is playing to theatre's weakness, not its strength. The magic of theatre is its ability to engage the audience's imagination in a way that TV and film never can. I play over 20 characters with no costume, just black pants and a tight-fitting black T-shirt. The characters are defined by voice and body, and with dramatic lighting and short audio clips taken from recordings I made in Nigeria; a bustling street or a quiet village hangout spot is created on a bare stage with a chair and a black cube. So often audiences talked of "being transported," of "entering a new world," of "seeing a whole village." Theatre achieves this effect most strikingly when audiences engage their imagination, not through the relatively modest visual effects that theatre can provide. Broadway can glitter fantastically, and the visual virtuosity of Mary Zimmerman's productions make me giddy, but nothing compares to the camera's ability to capture sweeping landscapes and jaw-flexing close-ups.

But there is plenty of theatre that is of the less-is-more persuasion. The primary stretch for audiences was in feeling comfortable in a completely foreign world, without Dan as the narrator, with reference points to tribes and geographic areas that were totally new, and most of all, with a cast of characters that included Nigerians speaking heavily accented English to Nigerians speaking pidgin English, Nigeria's lyrical, but coded, lingua franca.

Tings Dey Happen was a dramatic experiment in language. To the disbelief of many people on both sides of the spectrum, there was a wide divergence in comprehension. Some people, particularly younger audiences, people who have traveled abroad, have spent time in poorer, more slang-rich areas of America, or who listen regularly to hip-hop or reggae music, got every word. Others, particularly older audience members with compromised hearing ability who grew up having gang-culture translated into theatre as the singing, dancing, consonant-clucking Jets and Sharks of West Side Story, said they understood about half the show. Based on a few surveys I did in New York during postshow talkbacks, most people understood everything they felt they needed to know, even if at times they felt confused. This was the goal. There were certain scenes where I hoped audiences would blur their ears and focus their eyes, and be rewarded by catching some of the gems of pidgin English. But I built in moments of clarification from Sylvanus, the Nigerian narrator, knowing there is a certain skill and physical ability required to navigate the language of the show flawlessly, and some people have more of it than others.

I was only disappointed when I felt audiences didn't try. When I felt them folding their arms across their chest and dismissing me as a well-intentioned kid who should know that in theatre you go for ease of comprehension over authenticity. But I strongly disagree. I wanted to push authenticity over familiarity, to push nuance over comfort, to make audiences move to the edge of their seats and listen and watch closely, to listen and watch and try to understand the same way I did for 10 months in Nigeria, the same way I believe anyone who wants to really understand another culture, and what is going on in the far corners of the world, must listen and watch. You didn't even need to try that hard, as Charlie and I took great pains to make the show as accessible as possible given the complexity we were aiming for, but it requires some audience effort. As long as audiences tried, I was happy, for I knew they would get a full meal, even if they didn't catch every flavor.

It was rare when audiences didn't try, and for them there was nothing I could do. I couldn't stop the play and recite an oral version of this essay, though the smugness of the inevitably scowling bald man first row center was an inviting target. Many nights the audience simply went to Nigeria and got caught up in the drama the same way I did while I was there. The most interesting nights were when I could feel the audience unsteadied by, but resilient in the face of, the many contradictions of the play, grappling with each new contour. On those win-'em-over nights, I could feel the audience's skepticism slowly dissolve, and when the final character demands that Dan--who represents the audience ultimately--think like a black man, and they realize that they, like Dan, have indeed been trying valiantly for the last 90 minutes to see Nigeria through the eyes of those who live and work there, and realize this is the hope that can be taken from a very bleak Niger Delta, the sense of breakthrough was triumphant. Reluctantly, audience and I built something together. And although it is always made of nothing more than our imagination, it rivals the power of any other entertainment medium, and can stay with them long after they leave the theatre.