On September 11, 2001 a horror happened on US soil which, in  my observation, did two particular things.  It woke us up and it closed us in. 

I watched back then as the extremity of positions were identified and then held with no middle ground.  The left, the right – everyone took sides.  Up to that moment I generally followed the lead of my party.  I voted without thinking, I believed ‘we’ were in the right and ‘they’ were in the wrong on any given issue.  But my observation after 9/11 was that this became even more extreme.  And that, as each day went by, ‘my side’ looked and sounded very much like ‘their side.’  The words were possibly different, but the energy and fear behind it all seemed very much the same.  And that is when I stopped.

For about a year I didn’t sign petitions, call my representatives, write letters without reading as much as I could about the facts.  I stopped believing just because I heard it on the news, whatever ‘it’ was and whoever was reporting ‘it’, that truth was being reported.  I questioned everything and everyone.  And, for a long time, I took very little action.

I believe that, clearly, The Global Theatre Project is a result of the events of September 11^th.  A slow decade-long development of a response to a day that I, like all others in our country and many around the world, will never forget.  Too many things were put into motion that day.  We could no longer collectively deny that there were some who truly hated us as a nation and a culture.  In our terror we looked to our borders and began, slowly, to close them.  But in those ten years something else has happened.  We stopped talking to each other and started screaming at each other.  We stopped discussing.  We took positions, found the borders which gave us comfort in confirming our sense of self.  And we held our ground.  Immobile.  Right.  All others… wrong.

Also during that time we have lost a good deal of respect in many foreign countries, and are now a military nation weakened both in our economic power and our legitimacy as the shining, pristine example of democratic values.  And during that time we have watched a generation of young Americans entering college who are defined over and over again by their parents and educators as having too strong a sense of unearned entitlement.

These, of course, are my personal observations.  How do they connect to The Global Theatre Project?  Because my burning question based on these thoughts has been: given where we are, what do we do now?

I believe there is only one answer to this question.  Which is to learn a deeper truth than ‘us’ and ‘them.’  To step away from positioning and holding ground which continues to remind us that the world is a hostile place, while we participate daily in its growing hostility.

We are all connected.  The question is do we choose to continue creating a world where our most significant connections are based on violence, territorialism, intolerance and injustice or are we ready to make a sincere effort toward a global change that is, in my mind, the only one which will secure a healthy future for us and, yes, as importantly, our neighbours.  That sincere effort requires new systems and approaches which lead us to an understanding that our connection is found through exploring what common ground we stand on.  Who we are…. As individuals, cultures and nations and how that serves an expansion of our understanding of what we are as a common humanity.  From there we can shape our future proactively, not reactively.  In my mind, this is our only hope for survival.

The Global Theatre Project launched its work by bringing attention to the situation in Belarus and the struggle and enormous courage and talent of the Belarus Free Theatre.  Our most recent project included staging a work by Florentine playwright, Stefano Massini, which was inspired by the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in ‘Una Donna Non-Rieducabile’ (A Stubborn Woman).  With each piece the artists, students and the public associated with it expanded their knowledge of suffering in the world.  But to me, that is not the true point of their work.  Or of ours.  The true point is not to bring attention to suffering so we can point to it from a distance.  The true point is to FEEL their situation and know it is our own suffering we feel.  Human suffering.  Needless and pointless.  But it exists.  It exists for as long as we choose.  And, in order to even begin to imagine that it could change, we must take a look at the core of this issue.

The anniversary of 9/11 has inspired us to take a theme that has strongly emerged for me this year at The Global Theatre Project and expand it into a multi-year inquiry.  That theme is ‘Who Is The Enemy?’ which I am announcing now as an open inquiry which we will explore in various ways over the course of the next five to ten years.  It will include everyone from children to adults, it will partner with varying institutions, cultures and individuals, it will reach beyond the discipline of theatre and of the arts,  it will evolve into its own life.

In the scene from ‘A Stubborn Woman’ entitled ‘The Intelligent People,’ Massini demonstrates so elegantly and devastatingly that taking sides is an intellectual decision and that, in the end, the viciousness of the Chechnians and the viciousness of the Russians is simply. . . viciousness.  At the graves of children and innocent people, taking sides becomes utterly irrelevant.

Ten years ago I began to see that the view from one immobile position might make us feel secure, but it requires demonizing ‘the other.’  There is no future in that.  In order to move a way from this view, we have to be courageous enough to look ‘the other’ in the face and ask ourselves in as many possible ways as we can imagine ‘Who Is The Enemy?’

Possibly with this question, we can find a reason for the loss of life on September 11, 2001.  And the loss of life that, needlessly, continues.

In memory and honor of Laura Rockefeller.  Who I made theatre with when I was young.

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