Plays that send a message

Can theater change the world?

This is the seemingly ridiculous but very real question being tacitly asked lately by some of the most provocative theater.

In one piece, Mike Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," the question isn't even remotely tacit. At the end of two deeply entertaining and horrifying hours about the allure of high-tech electronics and the human-rights abuses in their manufacturing in Chinese sweatshops, we are given handouts on the way out of the Public Theater.

Titled "What Happens Next," the leaflet suggests that audiences, if they "choose not to ignore what you've learned tonight," should email Apple's new CEO, upgrade their beloved devices only "when it is truly needed" and tell others because "in a world of silence, speaking itself is action."

Theatergoers got another handout last spring, at the end of the devastating Broadway revival of Larry Kramer's 1985 AIDS drama, "The Normal Heart." On the night I was there, the still-furious playwright himself stood on the street distributing the paper. This one, titled "Please Know," updated the terrible global statistics and the ongoing blame and what this "continues to say about us all."

As far as I know, nothing will be handed out after "Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays." This is an anthology of nine short commissioned pieces by a wide swath of playwrights, including Neil LaBute, Paul Rudnick and Mo Gaffney, that officially opens next Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village.

But Monday, for one night only, the preview performance (plus an introduction and post-curtain question-and-answer session) will be streamed live to Canada, Australia and more than 40 theaters and universities in 25 states -- including many that ban both gay marriage and civil unions.

Moisés Kaufman, one of the project's participating playwrights and artistic director of the co-producing Tectonic Theater Project, is convinced of theater's power to effect social change. "Of course it can, because it can talk to us about society, politics, interpersonal relationships. But above all," he told me in a phone interview this week, "theater can talk to us about our most private selves, at the most personal level. That's the conversation in which change occurs."

The man speaks from experience. He and the Tectonic were responsible for "The Laramie Project," the influential piece based on interviews about the 1998 murder of gay student Matthew Shepard at the University of Wyoming. Kaufman also directed the 2002 movie and, 10 years after the brutal hate crime, the group revisited the town with a follow-up, which was performed simultaneously by groups in 100 cities.

Kaufman and company were even invited to the White House for the signing of the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, though he is quick to add, "You don't do theater to pass legislation."

Since 1997, I have been saving an issue of American Theatre magazine titled "Is Art Really Good for You?" I especially treasure a rare interview with Wallace Shawn, the affable-looking actor who also is the extraordinary author of deeply subversive and disturbing plays about what we allow to happen to protect the ways we prefer to live. His work is upsetting, irritating, utterly unforgettable.

In his 1983 "Aunt Dan and Lemon," which was revived in 2003 with Lili Taylor and Kristen Johnston, a fragile female character justifies fascism by explaining, ever so sweetly, that we empower others -- that is, the government -- to do our violence in order to protect our privileged lives.

In "Fever," an Obie-winning solo he performed Off-Broadway in 1990 and 2007, he narrates the thoughts of a disintegrating American traveler on the bathroom floor of a hotel in a "poor country" where a "small war" is happening. "If food is provided for the hungry children," he says, rejecting the unpleasant economic repercussions, "certain operas will not be performed. . . . Artists who produce works of art that inspire sympathy for the poor do not change the life of the poor."

Eventually, the narrator cannot drink a cup of coffee "without tracing it to the peasants and the beans." As Shawn said in that magazine interview, "My plays are really about the audience. The main character is you."

In "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," Daisey is far more specific and direct about the need to trace our favorite products to their source. "Clear action is called for," he told me, explaining that a more "correct" ending would have let us off the hook by saying that the world is too complex and hard to change.

And yes, he is convinced that "theater can change the world. It is in the nature of artists to constantly question whether what they are doing makes a difference." Daisey, who has already performed his solo to more than 50,000 people over a 16-month tour, says he constantly gets copies of emails that theatergoers are sending to Apple. "More and more groups like Greenpeace and other human-rights people are using the information from the show."

But how important is it for political theater to be good art? As Kaufman sees the big picture, "It is not a requirement that all art deal with social or political issues. But in my experience, all great art does." Daisey agrees that the art is essential. "If it isn't good art, you make people your enemy very quickly. Saying that theater has a message is synonymous with saying it is terrible."

So can theater change the world? Perhaps, if the target is very specific. Larry Kramer's plays could not stop AIDS, but he certainly changed minds in what Kaufman calls "our most private selves." At least we are beyond the days when, as Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn liked to say, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union." Hardly anyone even has a land line anymore.