Here we go again: Theater and Democracy Redux

I wrote this on Tuesday morning, reflecting back on Election Day 2016. I hoped we wouldn’t have to do this again... but we do. It’s just before 9 AM and I’m headed south on the 405. The sky is that clear radiant blue that we only get after a big windstorm blows everything away. Not a cloud in the sky. Spectacular. Why do epoch-ending events always happen on the prettiest of days? It’s 2016. Tuesday. November 8th. Jason Bentley kicks off Morning Becomes Eclectic with a little Dylan — “Blowin' in the Wind” — maybe he’s riffing on last night’s winds but I’m hoping it’s a sign for the day, Election Day. We’ve been staring at that damn, now cursed, needle all summer pointing at 90% chance, so it seems we’re right on the edge. I hear Sharon Jones sing “This Land is Your Land” and then REM’s “It’s the End of The World as We Know It,” as I drive into the parking lot, and there’s no doubt what Jason’s playing with. It’s one of those moments when KCRW seems to be tapped into the vein of the day giving us a collective soundtrack for this LA movie we’re all playing our roles in. I sit there in the car feeling like Michael Stipe is ushering in the moment where a woman will be elected president. That’s what he’s saying, right? That’s what’s about to end... right? Feeling a little overcome and a bit too proud of it all, I tear up as I park. I feel so grateful to be connected to KCRW so I send a quick, overly earnest email to Jennifer Ferro explaining that, “I’m tearing up in my car and just so damned grateful to be a part of KCRW.” (I know, forgive me, I’m a product of the theater.) It feels like the beginning of not just a great day, but a whole new moment. I wipe the tears from my eyes, thinking they’re the only ones I’ll shed that day, stick my “I Voted!” sticker on my shirt, and turn off the radio. It’ll be most of the day before I tune back in, ready to feed the political junkie in me with non-stop coverage the second I’m headed back north on the 405. For reasons that will only be clear hours later, I flash back 16 years to an election night when I was working late at the Taper. That night started well, too. That same buzz in the air. A sort of tempting inevitability. We’d just closed King Hedley II and just opened Closer and we’re a week out from the New Work Festival. I knew I’d be at the annex late so I kept running back to Nancy and Jason in the press office (they had the only TV feed) to see how the results were coming in. Early things were going so well. Florida? Check... wait... what? I shake it off. It’ll be years before I realize that cast of characters, who would fill courtrooms in 2000 arguing over chads and butterfly ballots, will all reappear decades later still driving vote counting... or this time the reverse. It’s like recognizing the characters across Shakespeare... ah, of course, Falstaff would play him... only more sinister. A friend sarcastically texts me, “GOOD NEWS: she wins, we get a Taco Truck ON EVERY CORNER — those are the rules!” That’s the last time I remember laughing that night. The next days are a muddle. We were all looking to make sense of it and do something, anything. I was moved to tears by a piece of craft paper stuck to the side of the Broad Art Center at UCLA with blue painter’s tape. In black capital letters, it said, “I WILL MAKE WORK TO FIX THIS,” and beneath it, UCLA art students' signatures scrawled in pen and pencil taking an oath to go on and right what was wrong. I retreated to the theater and the Greeks for answers, as if looking back to their time might hold an answer for our time... I’d been mulling over the Greeks a lot (and still am). Even in the weeks before that 2016 election I was searching for the answers to a divided time in the theater: Little did I know what would demand our attention in the coming four years and beyond. “How would we even begin?” feels like such an innocent question. I remember a conversation early the next week with a friend’s dad who had lived through World War II as a young child, “What was shocking was not just what happened but how quickly it happened. You woke up one day and everything changed. It never went back.” I think I only really understood what he was trying to say four years after that when I drove home on Thursday afternoon in March of 2020 and then didn’t leave my house much for the next two years as a pandemic literally shut our theaters down. Cut to yesterday, two days before another Election Day — heading south on the 405 on another beautiful, cloudless day right after a windstorm. It’s the horns of Quincy Jones’ “Love and Peace” that Novena Carmel spins first, not Bob Dylan, but it felt like time folded back on itself. Here I am again. Here we are again. I’m worried about what comes next. I’m worried about what the days ahead hold. I think back to those songs that moved me to tears eight years ago: “Blowin in the Wind”, “This Land is Our Land,” and “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” It’s that last one that really gets me, like the music supervisor of the film we lived through the past eight years really added that one with a deep sense of poetic and dramatic irony, smiling, "Ah, they have no idea what’s about to happen..." Looking back and trying to look forward, I hold on to all the same things. I’m grateful for the public squares that have stayed steady through it. I still cling to KCRW to feel connected to our time and our place. I still make a pilgrimage to the theater every week to, as some say, sit in a dark room with strangers to listen to people grapple with what it means to be human. I look back at a question I posed in 2016 while grappling with all this, “I keep wondering if we have not replaced the healing catharsis of drama with the coarse, narcissistic fame of reality TV?” That feels more true than ever. As I know now, my flashback was more of a premonition than a trip down memory lane. That muddle I felt back in 2016 is the muddle I feel now, only worse. While we all figure out what comes next and where we'll find the strength to get us through, I'm moved to tears, yet again, by that craft paper petition blue taped to the wall where artists committed to do what we do with purpose. I invite you to join them and join me in not the last line but the first, I WILL MAKE WORK TO FIX THIS. This is Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater for KCRW.