Moral Actors
by T. Adamson

The villains of Titans are invisible. They crash around offstage, breaking glass, making people disappear. (To a shared invisibility? Are there different ways of being invisible offstage?) We know their agency acronyms, but they are not named. They are not granted the charisma of the melodramatic villain. They are not allowed to flaunt their impunity, as it is so often flaunted in the all-too-familiar fascist spectacles of Trump-era political theater. They are not allowed to soliloquize or to remind us that they too are emotionally-conflicted human beings who bleed and laugh when prickled and tickled- nor are they allowed any equivalent form of moral obfuscation. They are obfuscated because Titans is not a play so much interested in interrogating immorality as it is in cultivating and celebrating committed moral actors. We are not encouraged do to the easy work of sitting back and condemning them; we are invited (playfully and polyvocally) to take account of us, whoever this us may be. We are encouraged to become the protagonists of our own heroic manga-style origin stories: to procure whistles, to record federal agents, to demand warrants, not because these actions are obligations, but because these actions are rights.

And look, I truly get that it’s Mario Party out here. The game is rigged and the rules constantly shifting. I’m vulnerable and so are you. We spend so much time hustling like Gabriel, jumping through hoops like Fran, scrambling to locate the magical Chris Pratts that will resolve all our problems, that we hardly have time to pause and question why we need those Chris Pratts in the first place. But thankfully Jesse’s play reminds us that we’re not playing this rigged game alone. We are playing with allies of every generation, of every race, of diverse linguistic backgrounds, legal statuses, genders, and sexualities. We are playing with the people who compose the systems and institutions that surround us. We are playing with people playing as teachers and with people playing as students. And by playing better, by playing cooperatively, we bring into visibility what the Bad Actors currently playing at far-right fascism seek to keep hidden in the dark invisible spaces offstage. We bring the political out of the calcified reactionary past (Rafah was) and into the bleeding screaming horn-honking trafficjam of the present (Rafah is). Into the temporality of moral action and theatrical possibility.

Too often theater institutions (and not just theater institutions) operate with the isolationist rugged-individualistic logic of Bel and Riyo’s supervillain tower: entrench, detach, protect, survive, surveil. Production models often move so slowly that theater’s essential liveness, its unique ability to react to the now, is fatally curtailed, hamstringing any artist’s capacity to speak intentionally to the specific political now. This is a debilitating limitation at a time when American political reality is more unstable- more aggressively mercurial- than ever, and the result is a theatrical landscape in which the looming and eternal truths of theory are consistently privileged over the needful, situational truths of praxis. How can a writer write with political urgency when they can’t guarantee that their work will be seen for a minimum of two years (if they’re lucky)? I don’t mean to imply that these general, theoretical truths are in any way inessential, but if they are all our theater models are equipped to attend, then our dramaturgy will remain woefully incomplete and audiences will be left with no other options than to continue turning to ChatGPT and other LLMs when they need language to address the pertinent urgencies of now.

But this play- and the commissioning model through which it was created- reminds us that inside every stone tower (note to self: rewrite essay to highlight connection between Jesse’s tower imagery and the Marxist retelling of the Tower of Babel in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) there is someone with the power and agency to either shut or open the door. Human beings are not LLMs; we are not obligated by the cold logic of prediction models and path dependencies. We can refuse. We can resist. We can have a world around us full of people who don’t know us and who would protect us anyway. We can name our voids. Perhaps we can even combat the Invisible Malefactors Who Seek To Disappear Us by opening the doors of our respective towers and by walking out into that ancient site of democracy, the theatron, the place where we make and are made visible, where we see and are seen.