I am not arguing against political theatre. It’s a legitimate genre, and we remain free to accept or reject its political component—provided we understand its implications. The real issue is not whether or not one may place artistic skills and values at the service of political ends in creating new works, but whether or not one may use political skills and values to alter and subvert the integrity of existing, enduring, artistic works. Inevitably, Sharon invokes Brecht, who, despising a Gesamtkunstwerk of feeling, proceeded to create one of thinking. What he wanted us to think about, in real time while performance proceeds, was those sociopolitical implications. He employed his famous Alienation Effect in the writing, directing/designing, and acting of his plays to that purpose. He struggled with the role of music, which un-alienates the listener if it’s any good; nonetheless, his collaboration with Kurt Weill produced things that sting and linger nearly one hundred years on. All perfectly above-board; take it or leave it. But what Sharon seems to want is the adaptation of these techniques to the very works against which they were invented to rebel. He is fond of the notion of a separation (he calls it an “unbinding”) of production elements, so that they co-exist but do not reinforce one another. (He calls it an “opening out” of the work, so that it doesn’t keep saying the same damn thing all the time.) That avoids “Mickey Mousing” (a term which in opera is usually taken to mean a literal duplication of a musical cue by a physical action, e. g., Rodolfo dabbing Mimì’s cheek to the pizzicato “plink, plink,”), but which in Sharon’s meaning cleans the table of the entire ideal of an integrated production, and replaces an experience of emotional participation, about which one may think afterward, with an intellectual manipulation that objectifies the experience itself. Not above-board, in my opinion.

The political bent of the auteur disruptors is always toward the progressive left. Sharon’s is the current edition. For him, it’s not just that our country has moral flaws, things to live down. “America was founded on genocide and slavery,” he announces, and he finds “power in the metaphor that America is a house built on a rotten foundation, therefore doomed to collapse.” These are views from the political margin, and opera is somehow implicated, not merely imported from Europe but “imposed upon the land.” So Sharon’s politics has a strong anti-colonialist ingredient, as well as the usual anti-capitalist complaints, with which one can easily sympathize so long as a practical alternative is not required. And until they begin to become the point with respect to art.

Things don’t always turn out as envisioned. As bad as matters may have been between the arts and Washington, D. C., the Peter Sellars of 1997 was optimistic. He ended his talk with the prediction that “The next century is the century of Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela.” Sellars is brilliant and informed, but he missed the boat on that one, unable to foresee that democracy and show business were about to become one and the same.