E Is for Empathy, F Is for Fingersmith

Augusto Boal, in his Theatre of the Oppressed, takes a cynical view of dramaturgy that excites empathy. He describes that the dominate powers in a given society use empathetic theater as a means to normalize systems that reinforce their control. Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, as adapted for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival by Alexa Junge, demonstrates how empathetic theater can be used to assert the rights of an oppressed group in the face of belligerent social systems.

Fingersmith's impact centers on the work of Waters, Junge, Sara Bruner (who plays Sue Trinder) and Erica Sullivan (who plays Maud Lilly). Waters and Junge craft a suspenseful love journey between Sue and Maud, and Bruner and Sullivan deliver grounded performances that inspire empathy in the travails of the protagonists.

The first act is told through the point of view of Sue, a "fingersmith," or jill-of-all-crimes in Victorian England. She's hired on to a con by the Gentleman (Elijah Alexander) to defraud Maud Lilly. The Gentleman is paying court to the heiress whose inheritance is in trust until she marries. Sue is to hire on as Maud's servant to support the Gentleman's suit. Once the pair are married, they plan to dump Maud into a mad house. Her inheritance will go to the Gentleman, and he and Sue will split the take. As the women spend more and more time with each other, however, they develop a friendship that blossoms into an illicit love affair. After a cliff-hanger chapter-end at the end of Act I, Maud takes over as the point of view character. Act II likewise ends in a cliff-hanger, whetting appetites for the climactic Act III.

It's hard not to draw parallels between the drowningly homophobic milieu that Waters writes in Fingersmith with Indiana and Arkansas' attention-grabbing attempts at passing discriminatory anti-gay laws, and Oklahoma's acquiescence to gay-conversion therapy. When gay kids are being driven onto the streets by parents who are too caught up in their own prejudices to love their offspring, when American Protestant morality equates itself with discrimination on the basis of sexuality, we need stories that normalize homosexual love. Fingersmith, at least with Bruner and Sullivan in the protagonic roles, takes the audience on a journey on which we root for Sue and Maud to overcome the homophobic road-blocks thrown in their path by Waters' Victorian England. Whether or not we in the audience are lesbians, we can empathize with this love story. Since non-heterosexuals are gleefully and anachronistically oppressed in the U.S., empathy plays the opposite role in Fingersmith of how Boal describes it. Instead of normalizing systems of oppression, this dramaturgy in Fingersmith normalizes equality.

Fingersmith uses classic empathetic dramaturgy to assert the rights of our homosexual citizens. Since some of our other, more Victorian, citizens, are currently in the process of trying to take homosexual rights away, Waters' story is especially timely.

A Boalian Viewing of "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" (Spoilers)

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In Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, the first chapter analyzes The Poetics as descriptive of theater as an instrument of social homogenization. Boal treats all narratives with an Aristotelian structure as propaganda. Captain America: The Winter Soldier has such a structure, and promotes a libertarian view of government surveillance justified by fear tactics as un-American.

In short, Aristotle's "coercive system of tragedy," according to Boal  presents an individual who, due to his or her hamartia, or fatal flaw, stands outside the social norm. The tragedian uses empathy to help us identify with the protagonist. Through the recognition of his or her error and the ensuing catastrophe, the protagonist's hamartia is purged from society. Our empathy leads to fear that the same could happen to us, and we are supposed to experience catharsis, or rejection of the anticonstitutional flaw we share with the protagonist.

Boal divides this process into four stages:

First Stage ~ Stimulation of the hamartia; the character follows an ascending path toward happiness accompanied empathetically by the spectator. Then comes the moment of reversal: the character, with the spectator, starts to move from happiness to misfortune; fall of the hero. (37)

Captain America's (Chris Evans) hamartia falls under Boal's fifth type of Aristotelian conflict: "Anachronistic Individual Ethos Versos Contemporary Social Ethos." (45) His world view is defined by 1940s patriotism, and the belief that America stands for honesty, loyalty and freedom. His world view stands in contrast to that of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) who is leading the development of weapons of mass destruction for S.H.I.E.L.D. As Cap observes, "This isn't freedom; this is fear." Our empathy for him is facilitated through a pair of audience surrogates: Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). Sam offers a human alternative to Cap's superhuman invulnerability. As a veteran of our current wars and the leader of a PTSD support group, Sam represents an identifiably human reaction to war. Black Widow is a female alternative to the male-centric world of superhero movies. As Rob Keyes notes on Screen Rant, Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow has emerged as the leading superheroine in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has yet to produce a film with a woman in the title role. Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson is meant to connect the audience to the humanity of our service-people in a film about a superhuman soldier, and Johansson's Black Widow is a major connection point for Marvel's female audience. The trio's moment of reversal comes with Nick Fury's apparent assassination, and their fall when Cap and Black Widow are bombed out of the bunker. They become fully rejected by the contemporary social ethos of militarization justified by terror.

Second Stage ~ The character recognizes his error - agnagorisis. Through the empathetic relationship dianoia-reason, the spectator recognizes his own error, his own hamartia, his own anticonstitutional flaw.

The protagonist and audience surrogates realize that they've been serving HYDRA under the guise of S.H.I.E.L.D. By situating the audience in sympathy with Cap, Falcon and Black Widow, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely imply that we share their interest in anachronistic values of righteous battle for freedom against the modern culture of fear and government surveillance.

Third Stage ~ Catastrophe; the character suffers the consequences of his error, in a violent form, with his own death or with the death of loved ones.

Neither Captain America nor any of the deuteragonists die. The Winter Soldier (the antagonist situated as an anti-Captain America), however, represents a death of Cap's best friend. As Falcon observes before the showdown, "Whoever he used to be, the guy he is now, he's not the kind you save - he's the kind you stop." In other words, the Winter Soldier is not Bucky. Widow's exposition earlier in the movie is more explicit: she talks about the Winter Soldier as a "ghost".  Cap's loss of Bucky Barnes to HYDRA crystallizes his alienation from the contemporary social ethos.

Fourth Stage ~ The spectator, terrified of the spectacle of the catastrophe is cured of his hamartia.

Captain America's hamartia, at its root, was mistaking S.H.I.E.L.D. for HYDRA. More universally, he mistakenly ascribed his own anachronistic prioritization of freedom to the culture of fear promoted within the government. Since he and his collaborators are the ones with whom Marvel wants us to identify, Captain America: The Winter Soldier serves to comment upon the current culture of government surveillance justified by fear of terrorism within a science fiction fantasy narrative.