By Bill Marx

We desperately need plays and musicals — produced by local companies with courage and nerve — that acknowledge that the cancer of autocracy is here, today, and becoming stronger. That is the demand — will any in the arts community answer the call?

L.-r.: Carousel Stage Director Anne Bogart; Boston Foundation President (and “the Starkeeper/Dr. Selden” in Carousel) Lee M. Pelton; Colonial Theatre General Director Joey Riddle; City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture Interim Director Kenny Mascary; BLO Music Director and Carousel conductor David Angus (seated); ArtsBoston Executive Director Catherine Peterson; BLO Artistic Director Nina Yoshida Nelsen; BLO General Director and CEO Bradley Vernatter. Photo: courtesy BLO

Is there a farce — on stage or screen — that explores the following premise? The world is systematically falling apart and, in the middle of the conflagration, sits people carrying on as usual, ignoring the carnage going on around them. They go about their daily lives as others are kidnapped by masked police, misinformation dominates public discussion, education on all levels is trashed, nature malfunctions, and the government puts the kibosh on freedom of speech, movement, and the potential to instigate change.

Passivity this extreme can be found in some silent film comedies. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin greet violent disasters with deadpan acceptance, though they battle like hell not to drown in the tidal waves of turmoil. Master dramatists, such as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, come closest to nailing a state of unnatural indifference in the face of catastrophe. In terms of film, there’s Joe E. Brown’s Osgood Fielding III at the end of Some Like it Hot, serenely batting away all objections, no matter how crippling, to what he desires – a comfortable life on his yacht with his love.

Boston’s arts community — particularly its theater and performing arts companies — appears to be oblivious to the stark realities crowding in around us, producing a real-life version of what could charitably be described as the farce of denial. A sampling of the critical issues being overlooked: the Trump administration’s determined (and increasingly successful) undermining of democracy and voting rights, free speech, science research, the independent judiciary, and a functioning government. And there is more. Due process is being kicked to the curb, the U.S. Constitution cast aside, and the economy sunk. Recently, MAGA-driven policies hit home in the Boston-area when Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national Tufts Graduate student, was “disappeared” by ICE and shanghaied from campus to Louisiana, the latter action defying a court order decreeing that Öztürk be kept in the state. The student’s apparent offense: she co-authored an op-ed in the school newspaper, The Tufts Daily, sympathetic to the Palestinians. Predictably, our theaters have not dared to touch the Israeli/Palestinian dilemma, though there is plenty of drama to be had. For example, probing the duplicitous behavior of universities, which have repressed the student-led pro-Palestine and anti-war movement, and the allegations of antisemitism weaponized by Trump’s administration in its attacks on higher education.

Regarding Israel, and all the other issues mentioned above, our stages have been mum. They are kowtowing, like Columbia University and a few giant D.C. law firms, to the oppressive moves of the powers-that-be. Should our theaters step aside during an American crisis? Should they be handed a pass — as ‘just entertainment’ — and turn their ears away from the reactionary buzzsaw? They do so at their peril. Rather than stage dramas or musicals of bold provocation, productions that decry an encroaching dictatorship, our stages are content to blow bubbles of theatrical escapism. Granted, fascists and their followers enjoy ‘a good night out’, so Boston-area box offices may not suffer during a regime of censorship regulated by the actions of a police state. But the price will be the end of artistic freedom, along with the diminishment of human dignity.

As our democracy teeters, why have our stage companies decided to hide? They could bring in challenging political theater productions and companies, even for a night or two, perhaps for a staged reading. Theatrical rebels exist: I challenge our stages to move away from what, over the past decades, has become safe, consumer-friendly programming, the candy-assed land of Jersey Boys or Cats. Instead of acknowledging an existential crisis in governance (let alone facing it), our major theaters are supplying diversions for the upper crust, like Nassim, or staging musical comedies, such as Hello Dolly! at the Lyric Stage or Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) at the American Repertory Theater. Is that really what our theaters should be doing? By proceeding as if everything is normal, they are greasing Trump’s authoritarian wheels with song and dance.

Boston Lyric Opera’s recent PR celebration of its upcoming staging of Carousel added insult to injury. At the Emerson Colonial Theatre, “municipal, community and cultural leaders in Boston [came] together to mark a milestone moment in the American musical theater — and the city’s role in making it happen. Eighty years ago on March 27, the now-iconic Rodgers & Hammerstein musical opened its pre-Broadway tryout at Boston’s Colonial Theater. The 1945 run galvanized Boston’s reputation as a great ‘tryout town’ for plays and musicals headed to New York. The event ends with a community singalong of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the musical’s timeless and timely anthem of resilience and community support.”

“You’ll Never Walk Alone”? Community support? Timeless and timely? In what privileged world is BLO and Boston’s movers and shakers living? Eight decades have passed since that anthem assured war-weary, God-fearing Americans all would be well. We are now in a time of fragmentation and state-sanctioned, court-cancelling mass deportation. (According to ICE, 370 illegal aliens in Massachusetts have been rounded up so far. Who stands by their side?) Who is this “you” that won’t be stepping out alone? The immigrants, students, and protesters currently being “disappeared” out of the country (some into maximum security prisons) without due process? (As of this writing, the mealy-mouthed Tufts University admin is not accompanying Öztürk through the wind and rain.) Is this “you” those who are battling the illiberal upheaval — the accelerating demolition of our politics, the slicing and dicing of our government? Or is this “you” the rich, the powerful, and the well-connected — shoulder-to-shoulder with audience members who can afford the show’s $67 to $85 ticket? Perhaps it is the oligarchs, like Elon Musk, who have “hope in their heart”? After all, Trump is promising “a golden sky” after America makes it through the “storm” of tariffs. (Note: “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is plastered in the BLO’s ads for the show.)

Many of those “vanished” by Trump & Company are facing their trials alone. Our theaters might consider recognizing this grim state of affairs by taking on shows that ask us to empathize with those that are being isolated. If our performing arts companies really wanted to support their neighbors — beyond the usual marketing hoo-ha — they might put a spotlight on the deep fear running through Boston-area neighborhoods, using the stage, as it has been in the past, to inspire collective action and dissent. Instead, we have our cultural poobahs paying nostalgic homage to an era of Boston’s theatrical history that is gone, baby, gone. Unless you count the try-outs of Diane “Broadway or Bust” Paulus at the well-heeled, strategically silent American Repertory Theater.

Let’s face facts: Carousel opened in Boston the year America helped defeat fascism in Europe. We desperately need plays and musicals — produced by companies with courage and nerve — that acknowledge that the cancer of autocracy is in this country, today, and becoming stronger. That is the demand — will any in the arts community heed the call?

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.