Nuclear Theatre Author(s): Bonnie Marranca Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1982), pp.

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NUCLEAR THEATRE
Bonnie Marranca

For months now, almost a year, I have been keeping a file of clippings under the title "Nuclear Theatre." Into this file I put all the printed references to theatre terminology that increasingly fill reports on new weapons systems, European politics, U.S.-Soviet relations, anti-nuclear protests, arms limitations, and endless related topics. Most discussions are framed in the language of theatrical metaphor whose usage clues us in many ways how language and thought evolve in American culture. The Department of Defense's Dictionary of Militaryand Associated Terms defines "theatre" as a "geographical area outside the continental United States." In its original Greek (theatron) the word "theatre" means "a place for viewing." The "European theatre" then (or "NATO theatre")-l have never encountered anywhere the phrase "American theatre" or "Russian theatre"-is regarded as the predetermined setting ("theatre of deployment") for "theatre" or limited nuclear war, the implication being that we in the U.S. and in Russia are the audience, Europeans the actors, unless "proxywar" erupts and other characters in the nuclear drama take over the roles. Are bombs the props of the "theatre nuclear forces"? The CircularError Probable has all the stage directions blocked out. There is no mistake about it, the use of the word "theatre" demonstrates how imperial logic seeps into language, but more important, how it contributes to artificial discourse and human behavior. The very notion of "theatre" or tactical nuclear warfare is linked to the elaborate theory of deterrence which is really a euphemism for the agit prop theatre in which each side engages, the ritualistic word play that purposely confuses intentionality, pretense, and uncertainty. The rhetorical drama

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that is at the heart of East-West relations is fueled by the role-playing of masked superpower players whose dialogue has a frighteningly improvisational air about it. The thought that nuclear war might be a chance operation is overwhelming. Yet, this stylized doublespeak goes on, generating new "scenarios" comprised of code words the likes of MAD(Mutual Assured Destruction). The actors in this absurd drama terrorize us with their psychological games devised to upstage one another, this one promising a weapons freeze, that one arms reduction. Quite simply, deterrence theory offers the greatest performance opportunity for its protagonists since it is based largely on acting out the forever changing psychological attitudes toward possible scenarios. Carter's Presidential Directive 59 is one recent example, but another more theatrical one was last November's discussion of a "demonstration" of nuclear weapons-a "dress rehearsal" as it were, for a play that is always in the making but must never be made. More and more characteristics of Aristotelian tragedy manifest themselves: in the hubris of world leaders, their high-flown rhetoric, their separation from the life of the people, their belief in Necessity. Even the introduction of the term "fratricide"(the destruction of nuclear weapons which fly into the debris of explosions from earlier exploded weapons belonging to the same country or an ally) into the war vocabulary threatens to convert real danger into the familiar thematics of classical drama. (By now we are aware of the "second generation" and "family"of missiles, but this perverted attempt to make weapons a part of the "nuclear" family was underway already with the first A-bomb explosion at Alamagordo when it was telegrammed to President Truman in Potsdam that the "little boy was born.") Domestic drama has always been America's theatrical strong point. When war strategists appropriate the vocabulary of theatre by linking it to family history, they distort the deeper imagery of human relations. But not by chance has theatre provided the metaphor for war. The most social of art forms, the form in which one experiences the representation of life in a space filled with living bodies, theatre invites participation, which is what war psychology when it mobilizes a country is all about. The kind of imagery rehearsal that is taking place all around us elaborates a profoundly disturbing mode of thinking because it regards history only in terms of spectacle: Europe as a "staging ground." Not only does it abstract war, it aestheticizes war and our feelings towards it to the point of anaesthesia. The feeling for form, the desire to create and control human images in dynamic settings, to construct dialogue, to structure social relations, to manipulate emotions-in short, to create a world on a stage-is a human need for representation that must not be isolated from moral vision. The growth of the media and communications in the evolution of modern society has turned theatricalism into the twentieth-century political/art

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form: it subsumes both ideology and individuality as our way of being in the contemporary world. The incursion of the media into every realm of experience sabotages the notion of private acts, turning performance into a way of life: the media as public eye has set the private "I" on a world stage. What matters then is the imagery of the event, how it is presented for mass consumption, even seduction, and sometimes protest. In its most dangerous manifestations theatricality values appearance above essence, accommodation above ethics. Construed in such a way as to ignore human values, a regressive politics of theatrics is founded on the idea that reality can be fabricated entirely through the manipulation of public imagery. (A more healthy politics of theatrics is represented by anti-nuclear war protesters who use the performance mode to create guerilla theatre actions in marches, their posters and placards generating dialogue and imagery that criticize the war machine. Even more so, protesters who costume and make themselves up as Hiroshima victims, by submerging themselves in death imagery that confronts the horrors of war, regenerate feelings for life in their acting out of the human dimension of war. This conceptualizing of oneself is nothing short of a therapeutic survival tactic.) Let us not let nuclear war be defined for us as a casual theatrical spectacle, for if we do we shall become like Bernard Shaw's pathetic wartime characters in Heartbreak House who praised the sound of bombs overhead for their similarity to Beethoven's music. Let us not welcome nuclearism as the next style in the everchanging theatrics of contemporary politics.

Bonnie Marranca is co-editor of Performing Arts Journal. The above essay first appeared in the Village Voice.

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