One weeps in the theater, and then runs all the more cheerfully to oppress one’s fellow men.
—Rousseau, Letter to M. d’Alembert (1758)
I guess we have Les Mis coming.
—Donald Trump on his plans for the Kennedy Center (2025)
This past summer, a purged and realigned Kennedy Center welcomed Donald and Melania Trump as guests of honor for its season opener, Les Misérables. Les Mis has been one of Trump’s favorites for a long time. Once an aspiring Broadway producer, Trump has used the battle hymn of the musical’s radical leftists, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” in his rallies and state functions for years. If a mega musical about resistance to arbitrary state violence can be so seamlessly incorporated into the MAGAverse, what chance does any theater have to resist?
The question of whether theater can change people is an old one. When, in 1758, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau read about plans to build a theater in Geneva, he was appalled. Despite writing and composing at least eleven operas and plays himself, Rousseau replied with a screed against theater: theater will make citizens lazy, less likely to spend time outside in nature; it will appeal to the worst in them, amplify prejudice, make them want to buy lots of unnecessary stuff. Theater can’t make people better, because theater has to conform to existing public taste to find an audience. Theater’s main redeeming quality, as Rousseau will later write in the preface to his play Narcissus is that at least it ensures a couple hours not spent on worse and more destructive vices (a devil’s bargain familiar to anyone with a toddler and a tablet).
Today, we have scarier things than theater to worry about. Theater isn’t where we are trained as consumers, where our worst prejudices and vices are fed back to us and algorithmically amplified, where we lose the ability to focus on work or feel for nature. Theater isn’t shaping hearts and minds; it’s not great at conveying even the most obvious ideological content, however catchy the tunes. And this is why we need it.
In Theater after Film, Martin Harries argues that theater is important because of its apparent weakness, not its strength. Harries sets his book in the decades after World War II, when Hollywood was the culture industry and before it lost its dominance to television and digital content. In those years, film’s “richness . . . as a medium for realist narrative” and the particular ways it solicited an audience’s attention made it a powerful means of conveying ideology, shaping perception, and forming subjects. In Harries’s dialectical analysis, it was the sheer power of film that underscored theater’s poverty, and thus theater’s own revelatory power:
[T]he importance of theater in this period would be measurable (if it were measurable) in inverse proportion to its limited power to shape perception. It was precisely because theater had so little power to shape subjects that it could so powerfully stage how subjects were shaped.
What theater lacks in the richness of film’s illusions, it offers in its peeks behind the curtain. Harries is particularly drawn to metatheater: the staging devices that draw an audience’s attention to the theatricality of the performance. These are aesthetic devices that reveal the theatricality of the stage, but they are also political tools to reveal ideology for what it is. Ways of seeing the world that seemed natural and inevitable are exposed as staged and produced.
Throughout his account, Harries is very careful to argue through specifics: he contextualizes media and aesthetics within particular historical moments. He emphasizes that “not only is theater not one thing, and film not some other thing, but each of these is divided: each is several things.” The structure of the book follows this insight. Instead of offering a comprehensive history of one thing (theater, film) or even those two things in relation, Harries offers a series of short chapters offering constellations of their relationships.
Roughly the first half of the book focuses on theories of media and mass culture. Harries’s writing is particularly rich in the conversations it weaves across media, film, literary, and theater studies and the ways he defines and elaborates concepts across them. Harries unravels his key terms—among them, participation, public sphere, apparatus—through short case studies of a range of works including Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience and Antonin Artaud’s radio play To have done with the judgment of god. Frankfurt School philosophers—Adorno and Walter Benjamin in particular—are at the center of Harries’s account of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and history. They also inform the fragmentary structure of his chapters, which are in conversation, but many of which could also stand alone.
The second half of the book centers on three playwrights: Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy, who each offer a different way of imagining the relationship between theater and film. Beckett is at heart of this section for the ways that his theater posited “theater’s condition of possibility as the negation of cinema.” Throughout the book, but in the sections on Beckett in particular, Harries’s remarkable acuity at close readings in English, German, and French draws unexpected connections. This is particularly true of his analysis of Beckett’s Endgame, which brings together a close reading of the performance texts as well as an analysis of his staging of the play in Germany to reveal how Beckett’s famously hermetic stage architecture changed across languages and productions.
Though his name doesn’t appear as a section heading, a fourth playwright—Bertolt Brecht—weaves through Harries’s analysis. In these sections, Brecht serves less as a playwright than as a theorist concerned with the problems of the apparatus of theater, that is, with both the material infrastructure and ideological underpinning of theater’s modes of production. Brecht’s most famous essay about the apparatus of theater production, “The Modern Theater Is the Epic Theater,” came out a few years after the tremendous commercial success of his anti-capitalist musical The Threepenny Opera. Even a musical about the essential criminality of capitalism fills seats with industrialists and real estate moguls; as Harries puts it, “the apparatus will ensure that anything, no matter how apparently rebarbative becomes a commodity to be delivered.”
This apparatus, however powerful, is also historically contingent. And if Brecht offers reason for despair, he also holds out the hope of “refunctionalization” (Umfunktionalizierung): that theater and mass media alike might be reappropriated by their producers and, under different social and political conditions, serve different ends. Not only that, but techniques within the theater can push for this refunctionalization, above all by revealing the machinery of the apparatus itself. Brecht and Beckett are usually seen as opposites: Brecht instrumentalizing theater for political goals and Beckett preserving an aesthetic realm that stands apart from mundane politics. But Harries offers a Brechtian analysis of Beckett, giving us new ways of thinking about each: considering Beckett’s politics through Brecht’s aesthetics.
While Harries emphasizes that he is not writing a comprehensive history or creating a canon, one of the book’s great contributions is nevertheless its sustained analysis of Adrienne Kennedy’s work in ways that are closely attentive not only to her identity and biography, but also to the aesthetic structures and theatrical techniques of her work. Harries focuses on A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), in which
In crudely dialectical terms, Kennedy’s play performs a kind of synthesis of Williams and Beckett. If Williams’s thesis is that drama can be made through the distillation of an openness to the myths of mass culture, and Beckett’s antithesis that drama can continue only through attempts at mass culture’s negation, Kennedy’s synthesis adopts the affective logic of Williams’s embrace of the mass cultural surround and yet combines it with Beckett’s insistence on negation and a remade dramatic form.
With Kennedy, we see not only the negation but also the transformation of Hollywood. First, the formal innovations of her work “empty out the narrative forms and the logic of character” from which classic Hollywood draws its ideological appeal and power. Her plays forestall easy consumption. Second, by bringing Black American subjectivity and history to the center of her plays, she throws a wrench in Hollywood’s “structure of solicitation,” which oriented itself to white audiences.
A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White does this work in its very title. Harries argues that in the play’s “multivalent title,”
[a]n imperative also lurks: however strenuously an unwritten Jim Crow law might decree against the practice, a movie star, any movie star, has no choice but to star in black and white. There is a utopian suggestion that whatever the genius of the system might have collectively planned when it produced stars, those stars must violate those boundaries legislating whatever segregated spaces of fantasy and identification that system might have imagined it could maintain and control.
Harries describes the first, unglamorous workshop production of the play—more an open rehearsal than a premiere: “that this quintessential play about mass-mediated subjectivity initially had a minute private audience is an ironic culmination of the situation of theater after film.” Kennedy’s work is an answer to the core problem of the book: how can art resist a culture industry so powerful that it reincorporates and defangs any seeming critique into hegemonic discourse? Incorporate it right back, but make it weird and let the creaky old stage machinery show its cracks. There is no way out but through.
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Theater after Film. By Martin Harries. University of Chicago Press, 2025. 304 pp. $30.00.
