Just as individuals have mechanisms to forget inconvenient truths or traumatic events from the past, so does the community, nation and globe. Just as the child violently abused might loose recall, so may a society loose the truth of its past. So can institutions.īecause I throw the term “social amnesia” around so freely, I want to take a little time to give it a chance to become part of your tool-set for interpreting the world at large. As amnesia is one of the defense mechanisms of man (or woman) so social amnesia is a defense against collective traumas. Perhaps it is most like our reactions to vicarious trauma which is at some distance from the individual.
HIGH-TECH AMERICANA - SOCIAL AMNESIA: A Live Movie, conceived, written, designed and directed by Impossible Theater and John Schneider.Perhaps its course is like the background violence that (still) surrounds life in many settings too much like the “nasty, brutish and short” Hobbes supposed of earlier times. Though the message is often timely, the play lacks a single, definable creative impulse such as was supplied by Chris Hardman in his social satire ''Vacuum'' or by JoAnne Akalaitis in the Mabou Mines nuclear commentary ''Dead End Kids.'' In the case of ''Social Amnesia,'' earnestness exceeds ingenuity. Along with the theme of American Indians, there are several other, less evocative motifs - a bag lady camped in Washington young people, so-called ''auto-lemmings,'' who protest injustice by throwing themselves in front of moving cars.
SOCIAL AMNESIA IMPOSSIBLE THEATER RICHMOND MOVIE
Moments misfire, as in a movie marquee featuring a fictitious film, ''The Iron Heel,'' starring William Hurt and Sally Field - an opportunity to make an irrelevant joke about the actress's early role as a flying nun. That Orwellian transformation could itself be the material for an evening's dramatic investigation, but it is only one of many topics glancingly studied in the kaleidoscopic ''Social Amnesia,'' which sometimes seems to be suffering from an overload of information. That woman at the computer is subjected to a battery of questions and assigned a personal identity number, which, naturally, leads directly to her depersonalization. Through cutouts on a graph-papered screen, we see fashion shows in shop windows, a woman entranced by a computer and other reminders of an acquisitive, technological society. Using what is described as a ''nine-projector computerized dissolve slide system,'' the production has a high-tech gloss, and there are many clever visual touches. The conceptual approach is photographic rather than cinematic, crosscutting live performance with still views of the Washington Monument, city streets and early American landscapes. ''Social Amnesia'' is subtitled ''A Live Movie,'' but ''A Live Slide Show'' would be more accurate. In one of the show's several humorous refrains, Columbus is first glimpsed ''off the coast of Amerigo Vespucci land.'' Later, we hear about American Indians ''ghost-dancing.'' The strongest narrative element is the story of American Indians, as verbalized by Black Elk and others who regard the discovery of America as an invasion. The point of view is that of downtrodden victims who are treated as losers.
Zinn's work, it emphasizes the personal rather than the governmental or the global. The play, presented in the academy's Lepercq Space, draws its inspiration from two books - Russell Jacoby's ''Social Amnesia'' and Howard Zinn's ''People's History of the United States.'' As in Mr. If anything, ''Social Amnesia'' tries to be too inclusive, or rather, its aggregate approach vitiates individual political points. The production says things that bear repeating - about passivity, compromise and complicity, and about the obligation of citizens to stand up for moral principles. As such, it is a reminder that the avant-garde is not necessarily hermetic when it comes to public issues. ''SOCIAL AMNESIA,'' the first theatrical event in this year's Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is experimental theater with a social conscience.
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