Hillbilly Tragedy
What’s Not Playing in American Theatres
in the 2017–18 Season
Paul David Young
In November 2016, the forgotten, un- or underemployed, white, Christian,
heterosexual, working class male of Middle America elected Donald Trump, so
goes the hypothesis. Allegedly, pollsters failed to detect this group and account
for its views in presidential prognostication, and the Democrats had “lost” the
election because they likewise did not heed its cries of pain.
Before announcing the 2017–18 season, American theatres had had the luxury
of several post-election months to consider the street protests and counter-
demonstrations, the debates about the legitimacy of the election, and the NPR
listening tours devoted to the neglected white Christian working-class straight
male in the heartland. Had the “mainstream” or “fake” news media (as the right
prefers to call everything other than Fox News and Breitbart) been misled by its
alleged “liberal bias” into ignoring the anger of this key slice of the American
electorate? Had American theatre similarly ignored this demographic group? And
if so, would American theatre respond to the election and correct this omission?
In theory, theatre should adapt quickly to respond to such events.
To find out, I undertook a survey of the 2017–18 season. Before I began my
research, I felt confident that there were already many plays circulating about
this supposedly forgotten figure in the American political landscape, and that
American theatre had surely jumped in to take a closer look after the election.
I was completely wrong.
Perhaps I had been misled into believing that American theatre was addressing
the issues of this group because of a limited number of plays. I had unwittingly
expanded the anecdotal evidence into a solid trend. This kind of empirically
unsupported generalization is characteristic of human thinking, as Daniel
© 2018 Paul David Young
PAJ 119 (2018), pp. 13–24.
doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00405
13
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and other behavioral scientists have found. As a spe-
cies, we tend to be lazy and will extrapolate from a meager data set rather than
undertake the hard work of fully analyzing a question or problem.
One very high-profile play may have contributed considerably to my false impres-
sion. Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, which opened at the Public Theater in New York on
November 3, 2016, sounded as if it had been written with the surprise results of
the election in mind. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated
for a Tony Award. The play transferred to Broadway but closed after twenty-four
previews and 105 regular performances, a respectable run for a non-musical in
New York commercial theatre.
Sweat is a fairly old-fashioned play, running chronologically and logically. Its
characters personify the unemployed or underemployed worker whose surefire,
good-wage job at the factory is becoming extinct. Like many plays in the American
canon, such as William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life and Eugene O’Neill’s The
Iceman Cometh, it takes place in a bar. Sweat earnestly embraces the cause of the
working class in America and shows how economic downturn manifests itself
in spoiled relationships, lost lives, animosity toward immigrants, and racial bias.
Though it does have a slight focus on the women in this situation, Sweat trains
its eye broadly on the social problems caused by the departure of manufacturing
from these communities.
Before I investigated, I believed that, apart from Sweat, theatre offered many simi-
larly themed plays that touched on the lives of the dispossessed worker, in keep-
ing with its tradition of sympathy for the underclasses throughout the twentieth
century. Annie Baker’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize–winning The Flick featured people in
dead-end jobs, for example. I thought of American theatre’s long history of sym-
pathizing with the downtrodden laborer and even communism. Eugene O’Neill
often lent a sympathetic ear to the working class and the oppressed. Clifford
Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, and indeed much of the theatre movement with which
he was involved during the 1930s—funded in part by the U.S. government—
looked at the plight of the working class and the inequities of wealth distribution,
and encouraged the contemplation of socialism and communism as alternative
systems. In the 1940s and 1950s, the plays of Tennessee Williams and William
Inge often featured a lower-class drifter, one of the dispossessed of society, as the
tortured hero and love object. The Marxist politics of the 1960s found abundant
expression through The Living Theatre, El Teatro Campesino, San Francisco Mime
Troupe, Bread and Puppet Theater, and other groups of the era.
In assuming the theatre would respond to the political and social climate, I
recalled the strong European tradition of championing the working class in
14 PAJ 119
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
drama. Among the Germans, there were Piscator, Brecht, Peter Hacks, Heiner
Müller, Franz Xavier Kroetz, and many Expressionist dramatists. Austrian Elfriede
Jelinek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize, was a member of the Communist Party
for many years, and her plays make no secret of her strong views on capitalism,
feminism, and the lingering fascism in her homeland today. In Russia, Maxim
Gorky’s plays brought class struggle to the stage before the Revolution, and after
1917 the Blue Blouse group was only one of the many proletarian agitprop the-
atres spreading the doctrines of communism to the laboring masses. Left-leaning
theatres in the West also promoted the worker’s cause. For example, the Angry
Young Men of Britain’s post-war theatre often fronted for the working class and
explicitly railed against inequality and the persistent privileges of the haute
bourgeoisie and landed gentry, as in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, David
Storey’s The Contractor, and Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley. London’s
Royal Court Theatre has steadily given a voice to the underclasses of the city
and the provinces, continuing today with the revival in 2017 of Jim Cartwright’s
Road. In Italy, Nobel recipient Dario Fo, an avowed communist whose wife was
kidnapped, tortured, and raped by fascists linked to the Italian police, created
militant left-wing theatre for decades and even ran for mayor of Milan as part
of his political engagement. In Latin America, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the
Oppressed in Brazil marched bravely into politics through both direct action
and participatory approaches to performance.
Of course, the function of art in whatever medium is usually not to be transpar-
ently topical or too obviously tied to a blip in time, but to enrich and expand
our understanding in a way that stands outside current events and speaks across
time. Literalness and didacticism kill drama. Not too many years ago, theatres
pumped out countless plays about Iraqi war veterans, though in my survey of
this season, I encountered no such plays. By and large, these dramas were help-
ful to neither American theatre nor the veterans’ cause. I found that I began to
avoid those plays, regardless of their pedigree or promise.
Trump’s election, however, endangers democracy and civil society in unprec-
edented ways and has caused some to rethink the detachment of art from its
times. Many activists in the arts and in the population at large have been suitably
alarmed by the election and feel an urgency to organize, become better informed,
and take part directly in the political system. Along with many others, I fear that
the United States is about to slip into fascism or some similar form of authori-
tarianism. The evil already done by this administration is unspeakable; the list
of its horrific acts is endless. Trump’s dog whistles to racists in Charlottesville,
his dismissal of respected journalism as “fake news,” his disregard of the Con-
stitution and its protections and procedures, his swampy ethics, his campaign’s
murky ties to the Russian government, and his bombastic tease about starting
YOUNG / Hillbilly Tragedy 15
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
a nuclear war require that theatre pay attention to the discontent in society that
may have resulted in the election of such a disturbingly unqualified person to
the presidency.
Many theatre artists have spoken out since the election, and I am one of them. In
addition to protesting in the 2017 Women’s March, I am a member of a diverse
group of theatre artists called “Weekly Action Meeting” (WAM) that gathers to
telephone our elected representatives in Washington and Albany and to register
complaints directly with federal agencies implementing the revanchist agenda
of the new administration. My 2017 play Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of
the Deal parodied Trump. My personal experiences led me to believe that theatre
artistic directors must be alert to the times and would be composing the theatre
season in light of the urgent social issues highlighted by the election.
The Trump voters, the ones who gave him Electoral College leverage, have been
dissected extensively since the surprise “victory.” According to various exit polls,
voter turnout favored Trump among the following: whites, males, persons without
a college degree, self-identified conservatives, Republicans, rural or suburban
residents (not city dwellers), heterosexuals, evangelical Christians, and those with
income less than $50,000 per annum. The Electoral College analysis of the 2016
election often focuses on the cluster of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
This area of the country was considered relatively secure for the Democratic
candidate, the so-called Electoral College “firewall” of Michigan, Wisconsin,
Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.
The handwringing over the white hetero Christian working man in the heartland
has raced to the top of the bestseller list with Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s memoir
about his Kentucky kin and the sunset of their American dream after they migrate
to Ohio just as the economy there no longer offers easy employment. Vance puts
the responsibility for the troubles that hillbillies face, not on government, but on
themselves. He doesn’t believe that public policy lies at the root of the inequali-
ties and other sufferings of this group. A significant portion of this population
consists of drug addicts and alcoholics. Vance attributes this kind of chemical
laziness to the communal despair, the feeling that they never had a future, that
fate had doomed them from the start, so there was no point in trying. Vance’s
mother struggles with drugs and alcohol.
In examining the 2017–18 theatre season for portrayals of Vance’s lost American,
I knew what I was looking for. Vance and I have a lot in common. The “hillbilly”
in Vance’s title refers to my native Kentucky. I grew up there; Vance was part of a
Kentucky diaspora that landed his family in the neighboring state of Ohio. When
I was a child, Kentucky regularly competed for last place in having the worst
16 PAJ 119
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
educational system in the nation. Vance’s mother was a nurse, like my mother.
His father disappeared; mine was unemployed for long stretches of my childhood.
Like Vance, my parents encouraged me to attend the local community college if
I felt the need for higher education. I went to Yale College instead; Vance went
to Yale Law School, to the bewilderment of his family. Like Vance’s mother, a
number of the people I knew in Kentucky became fatally involved in drugs. A
boy who was one of my childhood pals died of fentanyl overdose, as did his
father. An honor student in my high school class became a meth addict, as did
the sister of a friend. Another of my high school classmates is serving time for
murder. Various other childhood playmates have done stints in prison.
My hometown enjoyed a boom in the 1950s, when the U.S. built a nuclear refin-
ing facility for its bombs and dammed two large rivers to provide electricity for
the plant, which in turn attracted other industry. The nuclear refining facility
was later wound down and was closed completely in 2013 by USEC, the nuclear
operator formerly known as the U.S. Enrichment Corporation, which was spun
off from the federal government in 1998. Other manufacturing also departed
simultaneously.
As demonstrated by analysis of census statistics, my hometown is an epicenter
of evangelical Christianity, the kind of revivalist Protestantism to which Vance’s
family adheres. Local politics have shifted from the middle ground to the
extreme right, prodded by Fox News, preachers, and ignorance. The newspaper
in my hometown changed its name from Sun Democrat to just Sun, and now
its politics, like those of the local television station owned by the same family,
skew hard right.
The climate is arch “conservative” Republican, i.e. distrustful of government. I
trace this hostility toward outside intervention primarily to federal court orders to
undo segregated housing and education and other forms of racial discrimination.
Vance’s subgroup is all white. These white people are, by and large, racists, in my
experience, and it doesn’t take much to uncover that ugly fact in conversation.
They complain about the welfare state and “Washington,” implying or saying
outright that dark-skinned people are taking advantage of the system and white
people are picking up the tab. They are unable to digest the truth about how
government largesse subsidizes every aspect of their life, fantasizing that they
operate as completely independent beings. The facts are entirely to the contrary. A
recent survey by Wallethub found that out of all the states in the union Kentucky
was “number one” in the net inflow of federal largesse and that the state was
the most dependent of all on federal funding to provide social services, financial
support, and infrastructure for its citizens.
YOUNG / Hillbilly Tragedy 17
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Let it be understood that I do not believe that Trump masterfully responded to
unaddressed grievances from the struggling white working class, victimized by
Eastern seaboard elites, international trade, and treaties. Hillary Clinton actu-
ally won the majority of votes nationwide, but Trump was declared president
because of the peculiar workings of the Electoral College. I believe that other
factors contributed to the outcome, such as Russian meddling in favor of Trump
and James Comey’s unsubstantiated insinuations against Clinton while main-
taining his silence about the evidence of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
The undemocratic structure of the Electoral College together with Republican
gerrymandering systematically favored Trump. I believe that, to the extent
that he represents “populism,” Trump’s appeal is to the racism, misogyny, and
homophobia of Vance’s hillbilly. Still, I was curious to know if American theatre
was guilty of neglecting this slice of the working class and its issues. Whether
or not this demographic group is responsible for the pseudo-election of Trump,
there are communities in pain with lots of problems that could use some atten-
tion. These people may make for unsympathetic subject matter for blue-state
audiences, but there may be some compelling stories here that could change the
national dialogue.
My survey is unscientific and unverifiable and subjective. My conclusion is
nonetheless strongly supported. No play in the current season scrutinized here
puts the missing Trump voter on stage. My method was to analyze the 2017–18
season in New York and at prominent regional theatres. I looked at the season
at fifty-one theatres, covering 368 shows. I may well have failed to account for
theatres that might have changed the results. In some cases, the theatre season
for 2017–18 was available in full; in others, only the fall season. I used whatever
data were available. In assembling the list of theatres that I would examine, I
decided to make a special effort to include some Kentucky and Ohio theatres
(such as the Market House Theatre in my hometown), based on the theory that,
if anywhere, these theatres were on the front lines of this social battleground.
This geographic oversampling might have skewed the scores in some classifica-
tions, though it does not alter the ultimate conclusion of my review.
I tried particularly to find theatres near Jackson, Kentucky, Vance’s ancestral
homeland before the migration of his grandparents to Ohio. Google only iden-
tified movie theatres near Jackson, not live theatres that might have the topical
dramatic programming I sought to find. Eastern Kentucky University, the nearest
place of higher learning, has a center for the arts. The programming there featured
a large number of Christmas-themed productions (among them a 1960s Christ-
mas spectacular with oldsters Herman’s Hermits, Gary Puckett and the Union
Gap, and The Grass Roots [a band, not a political movement]), dance and music
18 PAJ 119
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
performances, and, believe it or not, the Harvey Fierstein-Cyndi Lauper musical
confection Kinky Boots, about a drag queen who saves a shoe business, but nothing
that came close to addressing the forgotten white hetero Christian male worker,
even in Vance’s home country. Prestonsburg, Kentucky, a little over an hour from
Jackson, has two theatres. The Mountain Arts Center in Prestonsburg features
various musical programs, much of it Christmas-themed or country music, with
the odd Kiss tribute band thrown in. The Jenny Wiley Theater in Prestonsburg is
offering The Addams Family and A Christmas Carol, and The Musical Adventures of
Flat Stanley for children. The Biblical Times Dinner Theater is not too far away,
in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, though I did not include it in my survey; none of
the programming there appeared to alter the conclusion of my study.
In determining the subject matter of a show and whether it might hit upon the
missing white male Christian hetero hillbilly/hillbilly-in-exile demographic, I
relied on the promotional blurbs in each institution’s mailings or on its website
to determine the essence of the production. It is entirely possible that I missed
plays grounded strongly in the themes of the worker or the working class because
they were hidden beneath advertising rhetoric of “universal” themes or general
verbal dazzle.
The categories that I used to characterize the subject matter of the plays are
bluntly and vaguely conceived. Over the course of looking at the various pro-
grams across the nation, some of the categories began to blur or shift, and I
added some new ones. A play may touch on many themes, some of which may
not be evident in the promotional materials. Often I found, however, that the
content was being packaged in a certain way and that a categorization was not
unfair, though admittedly mine may be mistaken and might have been different
if it had popped up later in my survey. For example, at the start I did not have
“Christmas” as a category and classified several Christmas musicals as “Musical
Extravaganzas.” Though no play in my survey scored a direct hit, there were a few
that came close to addressing the neglected Christian white hetero working-class
male but, unlike Sweat, did not feature this figure and his struggles.
Three plays dealt with class but not specifically the white working class. The
Trump vote came from whites; black voters favored Clinton in the election by
something like ninety percent. The revival at the Signature Theatre of Suzan-Lori
Parks’s Red Letter Plays, In the Blood and Fucking A, based obliquely on Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, brought to the stage a view of the underclass that
was almost unheard of elsewhere in the theatre season. These are not, however,
stories of the Trump faction because of race and gender.
YOUNG / Hillbilly Tragedy 19
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
The lead character of In the Blood is a woman living under a freeway overpass
with an assortment of children. Everyone in her life sexually exploits her as she
struggles to provide for her unusual family. Her best friend is a prostitute. The
lead in the companion play, Fucking A, is an abortionist whose buddy is the white
mayor’s black mistress—both working women. Parks’s quite eloquent plays are
so strong and sensitive that, while vividly rooted in a representation of reality,
they in a sense transcend their subject matter. But when confined to the basic
character descriptions and plot, the plays don’t speak to the supposedly forgotten
problems of the white male working class of Middle America; Parks is addressing
the problem of the black working class, or indeed, underclass. She is not writ-
ing about the Caucasian constituency of Hillbilly Elegy. The white abortionist in
Fucking A frankly rejects the sexual morality of the evangelical Christian white
people of Hillbilly Elegy. The protagonists in Parks’s plays are also women and
therefore hardly represent the supposed missing link: white men.
Similarly, Dominique Morisseau’s hit Skeleton Crew, playing at the Actors Theatre
of Louisville, Baltimore Center Stage, and Marin Theatre Company (following
a New York premiere at Atlantic Stage 2 in 2016), focuses on the black working
class. Skeleton Crew is part of her three-play cycle called “The Detroit Projects,”
the other two parts of which deal with racial tension in Detroit in 1967 (Detroit
’67) and the black jazz scene in East Detroit (Paradise Blue). Like Sweat, the
narrative in Skeleton Crew revolves around a factory closing, which upends the
human relationships among the workers. The white working-class male is not
the subject of this play.
A couple of plays approached the theme of inequality and privilege through plots
about college admissions. The Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) season includes
Anthony Giardina’s Dan Cody’s Yacht about educational opportunity and wealth.
The blurb in the promotional brochure reads:
In a small Boston suburb, a single schoolteacher is struggling to get by
when the wealthy father of one of her students surprises her with a pro-
posal that could change her daughter’s life. Suddenly their worlds collide
in ways that open up the question: what truly separates the haves and
the have nots [sic]? Is it wrong to seize an incredible chance, even if the
circumstances seem questionable? Loosely inspired by a passage from
“The Great Gatsby,” [sic] this timely new play by the author of The City
of Conversation probes the troubling relationship of finance to educational
opportunity in American life today.
The MTC production, appearing in May 2018, is a world premiere and so more
information about the specifics of plot and character are not currently available.
20 PAJ 119
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
However, clearly the play is explicitly concerned with the disparities in life tra-
jectories caused by the disproportionate distribution of wealth in the U.S. Dan
Cody’s Yacht is not, however, concerned with the displaced factory worker or the
feelings of helplessness asserted by the white working class in Middle America.
While she may have concerns about her daughter’s access to the university sys-
tem and whether she has the financial wherewithal to pay for the education if
the opportunity came along, a female schoolteacher who is considering sending
her daughter to college does not evoke well the plight of anxious working-class
males who fear the loss of their factory jobs.
Similarly, Admissions, a new play by Joshua Harmon premiering in February 2018
at Lincoln Center Theatre, pokes at liberal orthodoxy and taunts the presumably
left-leaning theatre audience with anxieties about ideological heresy. A synopsis
of the plot, according to the Lincoln Center website, reads:
Sherri Rosen-Mason is head of the admissions department at The Hillcrest
School, fighting to diversify the student body. And alongside her husband,
the school’s Headmaster, they’ve largely succeeded in bringing a stodgy
institution into the twenty-first century. But when their only son sets
his sights on an Ivy League university, personal ambition collides with
progressive values, with convulsive results. ADMISSIONS [sic] is a new
play that explodes the ideals and contradictions of liberal white America.
College admissions “Not In My Backyard” this play may be, but a portrayal of
the right-wing-voting, unemployed or underemployed white male of the Midwest,
it is not. The point of view, at least judging by the promotional blurb, is from
the other side of white America, the part that is not racist, pseudo-Christian,
and xenophobic.
Eric Pfeffinger’s Human Error puts red-state conservatives on stage in a comedy
about a fertility clinic mix-up. It had a world premiere at the Toledo Repertoire
Theatre in November 2017 and will play at the Denver Center for Performing
Arts in May 2018. The script is available online. All is well by the end of the
play, after views are shared, babies are born, and friendships across the ideologi-
cal divide are formed. The Denver Center website describes the plot as follows:
Madelyn and Keenan are NPR-listening, latte-sipping, blue-state liberals,
while Heather and Jim are NRA-cardholding, truck-driving, red-state
conservatives. After an unfortunate mix-up by their blundering fertil-
ity doctor, Heather becomes pregnant with the wrong family’s embryo.
Now the two couples face sharing an uproarious nine-month odyssey
YOUNG / Hillbilly Tragedy 21
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
of culture shock, clashing values, changing attitudes and unlikely—but
heartfelt—friendships.
The red state representatives here are fairly well-to-do, not unemployed. The
husband has his own business with TV commercials in which he stars. The
rednecks are rich enough to have a second home. True enough, the couples spar
over church, football, guns, TV size, and yoga, but the light banter of the play
doesn’t shine a spotlight on the downtrodden worker of Hillbilly Elegy.
A play at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn approaches the class divide through
romantic comedy. Cute Activist by Milo Cramer, as presented on the Starr’s web-
site, is careful that it not be taken too seriously as a political play. It is described
as “playfully fabulist, wildly satirical, anti-romantic comedy, that asks questions
about the way activism fits—or doesn’t fit—into our daily lives.” The play seems
to feature a kind of reverse class structure. It takes place “[i]n a spooky town in
mythical Connecticut where inequality reigns, and activists wield an awesome,
sorcery-like power.” The action is summarized as “a shadowy ring of part-time
waitresses part-time rebels [sic] do battle with a baroque and tyrannical local
Landlord [sic].” It is possible that this work embraces the lost cause of the
neglected hillbilly, but somehow all the rom-com and fantasy elements make
that seem improbable, at least to me.
Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men played at New York’s Public Theater in 2014
and will be a part of the 2017–18 season at Marin Theatre Company (it will be
re-staged again on Broadway by Second Stage in June 2018). At first glance, Lee’s
play might seem to target the very class of neglected Trump voters; however,
despite the promise of its name, the play doesn’t deliver unemployed steelwork-
ers. Rather, it is a fairly conventional family dramedy that pokes fun at the pale
hetero male.
My survey encompassed 368 shows from a total of fifty-one institutions, both
in New York and across the U.S. As one might expect, a sizable chunk of the
productions are what I categorized as “musical extravaganzas,” which meant
that the focus is on the music and stage production values, and not so much
the content. Of the sixty-six musicals being offered at the theatres surveyed, in
any case, none seemed to come close to the neglected figures of Hillbilly Elegy.
Forty-two productions focused primarily on race. Gender (fifteen), immigration
(thirteen), adolescence-centered plays (thirteen), and aging (ten) were strongly
represented. Twenty productions were Christmas-themed. Another twenty-six
seemed to be pure fantasy tales without any reference to the contemporary world
as far as I could tell.
22 PAJ 119
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Twenty-three were Shakespeare revivals or Shakespeare-themed plays. Political
thrillers (nineteen), sex/love comedy/drama (twenty), artistic ambition (twelve),
and general family drama (fourteen) were the other double-digit scorers. The rest I
classified as: ancient Greek revival, sexual orientation, chronic illness or disability,
revolution, urban life, Chekhov revival, world extinction, crime drama, Israel,
psychodrama, addiction, light comedy, horror, Ibsen revival, religion, puppets,
and gun violence. For fourteen plays, I could not determine the subject matter.
The promotional material promised a rollicking good time, but what the plot
or subject matter might be remained a mystery to me. In none of these cases,
however, did I have any remote sense that the play came close to treating the
topic I was investigating.
Many of the topics with which theatre is dealing in the 2017–18 season, such as
race, gender, adolescence, and aging, are vital aspects of our society and deserve
the attention that they receive on today’s stages in America. I am nonetheless
struck by American theatre’s neglect of the struggling white working-class het-
erosexual male in the heartland.
I will avoid discussing numerous problematic questions related to my inquiry:
how to bring about class-consciousness, whether the bourgeois intelligentsia of the
institutionalized theatre is the proper agent to dramatize oppression, or whether
theatre as an art form in America is still of such cultural significance that it might
play a role in elevating political awareness at all. Today’s worker plays are put on
for the bourgeoisie. Who else could afford to see Sweat on Broadway? Is there
any real chance that drama in the United States could reach the working class
and, in particular, white heterosexual Christian working-class male in Middle
America, awaken the consciousness of his position in society and the identity
of the true forces depriving him of a decent human existence, and compel him
to political action? Alas, I’m afraid that such expectations would be entirely
misplaced. American theatre is entertainment, and programmers are afraid that
their audiences will desert them. Planning is cautious with a bias to avoid more
controversial topics of social revolution in favor of other issues around which
consensus has more safely coalesced.
While I do not accept the hypothesis that Trump’s election was a legitimate result
of his responding validly to discontent among the Christian hetero working-class
male in Middle America, it must be admitted that theatre is ignoring Vance’s
hillbilly. He is nowhere to be found in the landscape of the 2017–18 American
theatre season.
YOUNG / Hillbilly Tragedy 23
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Theaters surveyed:
New York Theatre Workshop
Vineyard Theatre
New Victory Theater
Manhattan Theatre Club
La MaMa
Signature Theatre
Atlantic Theatre Company
Second Stage Theater
Primary Stages
Playwrights Horizons
Classic Stage Company
MCC Theater
The Bushwick Starr
Abrons Arts Center
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
Arena Stage
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
Theatre for a New Audience
59e59 Theaters
St. Ann’s Warehouse
Lincoln Center Theatre
The New Group
Abingdon Theatre Company
Public Theater
Mark Taper Forum
Guthrie Theater
Steppenwolf Theatre
Goodman Theatre
Wilma Theater
Geffen Playhouse
Miami Actors Playhouse at the
Miracle Mile
Alliance Theatre
Denver Center for the Performing Arts
Baltimore Center Stage
ART – Boston
La Jolla Playhouse
SF American Conservatory Theater
Seattle Repertory Theatre
Marin Theatre Company
Yale Repertory Theatre
Alley Theatre
Actors Theatre of Louisville
Market House Theatre (Paducah, Ky.)
Cleveland Playhouse
Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park
Eastern Kentucky University Center
for the Arts
Jenny Wiley Theater (Prestonburg, Ky.)
McCarter Theatre Center
Long Wharf Theatre
Two River Theater
Brooklyn Academy of Music
PAUL DAVID YOUNG is a contributing editor to PAJ and writes for Hyper-
allergic. His 2017 Trump satire, Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of
the Deal, performed by four clowns at Judson Church in New York, was
featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine,
The Village Voice (“Voice Choice”), The Wall Street Journal, Hyperallergic,
StageBuddy, FrontRowCenter, TheaterIsEasy, and Time Out New York. www
.pauldavidyoung.com
24 PAJ 119
l
D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d
f
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
i
r
e
c
t
.
m
i
t
.
e
d
u
p
a
/
j
j
/
l
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d
f
/
/
4
0
2
(
1
1
9
)
/
1
3
1
7
9
7
3
2
4
p
a
/
/
j
j
_
a
_
0
0
4
0
5
p
d
.
f
b
y
g
u
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Download pdf