After a few hot and heavy weeks of focusing on Great Barrington town politics, I took a break last weekend and went to see WAM Theatre’s fall show, “Holy Laughter,” a comedy written by Catherine Trieschmann, directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian, and produced by Kristen Van Ginhoven. I was in the mood for some laughs, and the play provided them — along with some food for thought.
The main character, Abigail (Amie Lytle), is a young woman Episcopal priest. Putting those four words together in a sentence (young woman Episcopal priest) is still new and rare enough to require some underscoring. The play conducts a kind of thought experiment, placing the earnest and well-meaning Abigail in a difficult situation, and asking us to imagine some “what-ifs” that I’d wager have never before been explored on the stage.
This is the power of artistic expression: allowing ordinary people to imagine possibilities that we may not yet be ready to confront in real life, but are willing to entertain in the realm of fiction. It was no accident that the realization of equality for gay Americans was preceded by a good decade of arts activism, as television and movies presented fictional scenarios that gradually accustomed mainstream America to the idea that gay folks were just ordinary loving human beings, as entitled to social rights as anyone else.
The same playbook has been followed for women and other identity-based minorities, with arts activists using the creative imagination to pave the way for real-life progress in equal rights. Through the influence of fiction on fact, the arts play a huge role in creating new realities.
There’s an interesting tension these days between the social media revolution, which allows everyone with an Internet connection or smart phone to become the author of their own reality show; and the constant bombardment by media producers of all stripes, all vying for our attention and allegiance.
The big media producers like Fox, CNN, The New York Times, etc., seem to hope that most of us will remain passive consumers of whatever “content” is fed to us. But more and more, it seems that ordinary folks are awakening to the power of our unprecedented access to media tools, and learning how to use our creativity to send messages of our own out into the public sphere.
Here in the Berkshires, I’ve found myself at the heart of the cultural shift from media consumer to media producer that’s been enabled by our brave new digital world. I founded the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers in 2011 to open up new opportunities for women to share our perspectives with audiences, and this led me to found Green Fire Press in 2015, a publishing service that takes the next step of midwifing high-quality books into the world.
Suddenly, it’s apparent that we don’t need to knock at the doors of the big media establishment anymore, begging for access; we can open and walk through new doors of our own making, on to a playing field that may still be tilted towards the bigger players, but definitely accessible to all.
WAM Theatre, too, was founded by Kristen Van Ginhoven to create new opportunities for women playwrights and directors to have their work produced, enriching our community with their distinctive voices. Kristen’s creative vision includes the practice of “double philanthropy”; WAM donates 25 percent of box office proceeds to organizations that make the lives of women and girls better. The beneficiaries of the “Holy Laughter” production are Sisters for Peace and Hands in Outreach, locally based organizations that work together to provide education and social assistance for poor women and girls in Nepal and other under-developed regions.
We live in a time of rapid change, in which we often seem to be lurching from one catastrophe to the next, whether environmental or social. Still I believe we humans have the capacity — the intelligence, the discernment and good sense — to solve all the problems that are staring us in the face in these opening years of the 21st century. We can do it — if we tune into the positive, forward-looking side of our creative imagination, and work together to make our dreams reality.
There is also a dark, shadow side of the human imagination, which can see and produce nothing but violence, domination and destruction. That aspect of our psyches gets played out in the media, too, with disaster films, violent pornography, and ugly Internet attacks.
The task of those of us who place ourselves on the side of goodness and light is to nurture the creative sparks in ourselves and those around us, to make space for our visions to be heard, and to put our voices together to demand and create positive change in our communities and our world.
Every play produced, every book written, every public discussion convened makes a difference, the inspiration rippling out in ways that we cannot predict, but can joyfully acknowledge.
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The weekly EDGE WISE column is curated by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D., associate professor of comparative literature, gender studies and media studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and the Founding Director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Women writers interested in publishing in EDGE WISE can find writers’ guidelines on the Festival website, or may submit queries or columns to Jennifer@berkshirewomenwriters.org.
