Sitrep 9: March 30, 2025: The Currency of Pessimism

One only needed to look at the title of Abby Schroering’s article to see what kind of tone was going to initiate some of this past week’s discussion. Like Sarah perhaps, I am a little unclear how Churchill’s experimental use of theatrical form in The Skriker “trains the spectator to decenter anthropocentric perceptions” (183) in ways that automatically invoke Schroering’s ecodramaturgical concerns (“Nobody Loves Me and the Sun’s Going to Kill Me”). But. The apocalyptic tone of the play and accompanying article had me resonating with Ricardo’s comment that part of The Skriker’s affective power stems from the fact that “pessimism is always current.” I had already been thinking about Churchill’s play in relation to the human tendency towards eschatological anxieties, how every generation seems to have its Y2K, its 2012 phenomenon, its Trump, to just skim the surface of the past quarter century. Social media algorithms certainly exploit this tendency, but so does media media, and anyway, humans don’t seem to need much help in believing that the end of the world is nigh. Or at least that the end of their understood and hoped for world is irretractably altering. We seem to have baked this kind of thinking into our religions, psychology, history, science, watercooler discussions, and scholarship. Schroering alludes to this commonality when she says, “for Churchill, the utopia that has withered away is the potential of a socialist, feminist society, replaced with a ‘capitalism now felt as a global, cosmic system governing the value of all human and nonhuman life’” (182).  Yikes, and…yes. When put in those terms, it can be hard not to feel hopeless at times.  

What interests me more than doomsday nihilism though, is what emerges from the ‘withering away’ of the hoped for utopia. What happens in the “uncanny discomfort” of capitalism’s pervasive dehumanization (192) or any other crises of pessimism? What about when trying to teach theatre? Select canonical plays? If Churchill’s response to her withered utopia is to make something like The Skriker, then pessimism might be more than a crippling gloom, and has the potential to function as a kind of creative catalyst. I could read the Skriker’s opening monologue fifty times and not get to the creative end of it. The sophistication in the wordplay, the direct challenge offered to the spectator to sit in the unfamiliar – no really, sit here, “ready or not here we come quick or dead of night” this is going to last for four entire pages, - the necessity of an actor and director to make performance decisions about this linguistic monolith that will require abandoning the usual bag of tricks, all of this forces a kind of existential reckoning – do I give up on this piece of theatre, or do I open up to it? Do I stagnate here, or push forward? In Churchill’s career, she seems to keep reinventing, keep trying, keep creating, converting pessimism into what Schroering calls theatre’s superpower: “the ability to do it again, differently” (192).  That for me, is the value that can be found in so-called pessimism. I often and regularly acknowledge the human capacity for ruinous and harmful behaviors, sometimes to the point of despair, but I have never felt this habit to be something wholly cynical in me. Instead, I’ve always felt pessimism to be more of a fork in the road than resignation, a place where hurt feelings and disappointments get expressed and acknowledged, but also where choices get made. The capital ‘p’ Problems this class exposes week after week could result in a perfectly logical communal withdrawal over the “dark realization that, as individuals…(we) have little if any agency to do anything…” (185).   But when Marina makes her lists, when Craig finds compelling dramaturgical structures and glimmers of progress in Hammerstein’s blemished writing, when Emmy relishes in the hopeful repetitions of jazz structure in Water by the Spoonful, when Ricardo celebrates beauty and cultural representation in a flawed canonical musical, or better yet, when he discovers that there really isn’t any reason why he can’t play Angel Cruz, then we see signs all around us that we haven’t given up just yet, that pessimism can lead to recognition that certain forms of utopia might not happen now, might not happen ever, but can pivot us to what-instead-can-happen, what-instead-is-our-shared pursuit, what-instead-we-can-create. Pessimism might indeed be always current, but its currency is most valuable when it nudges us from gloom to grief to generative thinking, when it is our tipping point.