James Lileks notes a Tim Blair post (“Playwright Confused”) about “another challenging, brave, provocative, heroic, dissenting” play, in which students are asked “to name a contemporary hero who is prepared to give up personal wealth for what he believes in.” The name of the play is “Osama, the Hero” — a title the director says is “deliberately provocative . . . to shock us into action.”
[The play] is a brave piece of dissent that forces us to confront our preconceptions. Or would, if anyone in the audience didn’t already share the author’s preconceptions about other people’s preconceptions.
The play is described as “provocative.” Naturally. There’s no finer word in the modern artist’s lexicon. That’s the role of art: to resist the affirmation of societal confidence, because it leads to things like war and big cars and bigger houses in cul-del-sac burbs where pot-bellied yobs have an entire room for their NASCAR cap collection. This cannot stand; the center must not hold. That rough beast isn’t going to birth itself, you know; we have to rip it out, saddle it up and ride all the way to
so we can get on with whatever comes next. And whatever it might be it has to be better than this, because THIS is television-as-anesthesia, food packed in tinfoil, guns in all the wrong hands (citizens and soldiers, neither of whom can be trusted) and a general willful refusal of everyone else to understand that this is possibly the nadir of human civilization right here, and if they’d stop enjoying their life for one – single – second for a change, they’d realize it. Over here, look at us! We are provoking you! . . . . Bethlehem As Blair notes, a play that makes fun of the other side would be provocative, but it would never enter their minds to do a play about a kid whose head gets lopped off because he declares Salman Rushdie his hero. On some level they realize that the backlash would be dangerous . . . .
The Tim Blair post is worth reading in its entirety.