young.” Consequently, “Anti-Vietnam war plays have become a cliché, and black dramatists indict white audiences weekly from the stages of establishment theaters.”11 It was in no way surprising, that is, to see a play like Hair go from Joseph Papp’s experimental Public Theater in the East Village to Broadway within a mere six months. Nor was it any longer unusual to find that groups such as El Teatro Campesino and the Black Revolutionary Theater, both of which were founded as guerrilla theater troupes in 1965, had by the end of 1970 earned critical acclaim, bookings on conventional stages, and upper-class, white audiences. Simply put, it had become virtually impossible to provoke theater-goers’ outrage—a problem lampooned in Brian DePalma’s 1970 film Hi Mom!, where well-dressed white men and women are frightened yet exhilarated when painted black, berated, and abused by black radicals in whiteface during the performance of a play called Be Black, Baby.12 For Brustein, like many others, it was one thing to stage “actos” for United Farm Workers picket lines, or to compose something like street happenings for young black actors, or even to condemn the war in small, off-Broadway venues. But when productions of La Conquista drew praise from white theater critics, or when LeRoi Jones and the Black Arts Repertory Theater School accepted government funding, one could not help but suspect that something was amiss.
In the end, however, for Brustein, more disturbing than the effects of this permissiveness in the theater were its consequences in the realm of politics. Though they claimed to be wary of any false sense of liberation, militants and radicals quickly latched onto these “extended verbal freedoms” all the same. Given the mass media’s hospitality toward radical ideas and opinions, the result of this “muscle-flexing and tub-thumping” was “not revolution but rather theater.” When, for example, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee spokesman James Forman, or Sonny Carson of the Congress of Racial Equality interrupted church services and community meetings to demand racial justice, reparations, and so on, “then we know that the incidents have been staged for the newspaper reporters and television cameras, and should, therefore, be more properly evaluated by aesthetic standards than by political criteria.”13
According to Brustein, these performances, however “revolutionary” they might have appeared, served only to obscure the “real” issues. The only hope for change, he argued, was to be found in moderation, in “conceding that revolution in America is a stage idea, and turning away from these play actors of the ideal . . . writing off the radical extremes of the current younger generation, and trying to cultivate the genuine warmth and decency that this generation still retains.”14
Like many at this time, Brustein borrowed a great deal from the contemporary writings of Herbert Marcuse. For Marcuse, by the late 1960s, traditional political actions—petitions, marches, sit-ins, and so on—had been rendered almost entirely ineffectual. In his 1966 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” for example, despite a few closing comments regarding possibilities for qualitative change, Marcuse’s tone conveys an unmistakable despair. The “abstract tolerance” of American liberal democracy—abstract “inasmuch as it refrains from taking sides”—offered nothing, he claimed, but a mockery of “true” tolerance.15 Although contemporary cultural and social institutions allowed all sides of a given debate to be heard, “the people,” called upon to evaluate contrasting positions, had been rendered incapable of making crucial distinctions between differing points of view. The tolerance that was said to have made individuals “free” had in fact subjugated them. They were able only to “parrot, as their own, the opinions of their masters.”16 What appeared to be tolerance was little more than a mirage.
The mass media, of course, were instrumental in perpetuating the myth of a thoroughly democratic political culture.17 The press no longer played the role of the “fourth estate” but functioned instead to legitimate the existence of concrete social inequity. This was the result not of some conspiracy but of the “‘normal course of events’ . . . and . . . the mentality shaped in this course.”18 A general acceptance of inequality meant that restrictions on the media had become virtually unnecessary. In the media, “the stupid opinion” could be “treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood.”19 This apparent objectivity could be afforded because nothing was at stake. Indeed, the potential persuasiveness of the “intelligent,” “informed” opinion had been preempted. Value judgments, Marcuse argued, had been placed on all opinions prior to their articulation. But what made the mass media so harmful was the assumed naturalism of their representations. When combined with the unspoken bias of the dominant culture, he wrote, “such objectivity is spurious—more, it offends against humanity and truth by being calm where one should be enraged, by refraining from accusation where accusation is in the facts themselves.”20 The media’s “objectivity” had succeeded only in isolating the vast majority of the public from its “political existence.” Individuals had been stripped of any sense of the potential social importance of their actions. “Real opposition” had been replaced by “the satisfactions of private and personal rebellion.”21 One could do or say virtually anything without posing a significant threat to the status quo. “The publicity of self-actualization,” as he put it, “encourages nonconformity and letting-go in ways which leave the real engines of repression in the society entirely intact.”22 Actual rebellion had been replaced by formulaic expressions. In the name of self-fulfillment individuals had allowed themselves to be nullified, subsumed within a social order that only worked against their best interests.
As some readers will have recognized, Marcuse had lain the groundwork for this theory of “repressive tolerance” in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man. There he asserted that contemporary society was “irrational as a whole.” It was a “society without opposition,” one in which citizens submitted to the “peaceful production of the means of destruction, to the perfection of waste, to being educated for a defense which deforms the defenders and that which they defend.”23 Marcuse never denied that difference endured in this society, but the oppositionality necessary for dialectical thought, and thus for any meaningful, radical transformation, had essentially vanished. “The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions,” he wrote. “The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with society as a whole. . . . In this process, the ‘inner’ dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. . . . The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life.”24 Contemporary society had eradicated virtually any trace of its underlying contradictions. Difference, promoted only to enhance the illusion of inclusiveness, had ceased to be meaningful. One of the ways in which this could be seen most clearly, Marcuse believed, was in the liquidation of oppositionality from the realm of “higher culture.”
In one-dimensional society, the elements of “higher culture” that had once enabled it to stand against the dominant social reality had been expunged. This was not because the content of art had somehow been “watered down,” but because artworks had been reproduced and distributed on a mass scale. Rather than delivering the potential liberation that Walter Benjamin saw in its mechanical reproducibility, mass culture, according to Marcuse, had done just the opposite. It had succeeded in its conquest of individual consciousness by claiming to have delivered the happiness to which it once only alluded. Unlike the “true” work of art,
