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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Big Brother hits Broadway

While I was scrolling through my news feed this weekend, a rather improbable Playbill headline appeared: “You Will Be Watching Big Brother.” I, of course, carried out the logical procedure for dealing with news related to a fictional dystopian character: fact-checking.

As it turns out, a popular London stage adaptation of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” will make its debut on Broadway in June.

The announcement of this forthcoming production corresponds with the novel’s recent resurgence in popularity, seemingly in response to Kellyanne Conway’s 
deployment of the term 
“alternative facts.”

In “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Winston, the protagonist, keeps an illegal diary to record his own subversive thoughts in spite of his day job with the Ministry of Truth, whose mission is to rewrite history into an“alternative truth.”

This theater production of a novel so concerned with ideological control also follows the putative dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts. Performers, artists and writers alike have critiqued the potential elimination of federal arts funding.

The surge in popularity of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” should not raise alarm that we’re entering into a totalitarian era of censorship and surveillance, but it does emphasize the ways in which art can speak to political situations, especially when the necessity of art is challenged in government and society.

Theater, along with other forms of art, has the capability to not only comment on, but to reimagine society, both past and present. “Hamilton” is the most prominent recent example of an artistic revision of history, with its refrain “History has its eyes on you.”

Despite what many people may expect, audience members become actual participants in each 
performance.

It was no surprise to see famous lines from “Hamilton” written on signs across the country during protests and marches in the past weeks. These displays show the audience participating in the fullest sense by becoming actors in their own 
history.

I doubt the “Big Brother is watching you” signs that annually decorate the walls of my high school will appear in protests. I’d be a bit alarmed if they did, but the clash between artistic expression and the government that “Nineteen Eighty-Four” represents nonetheless resonates with current climate of political antagonism toward the arts.

The forthcoming production of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” seems a timely manifesto about the relation between the political sphere and the realm of the arts.

As Toni Morrison memorably wrote of the relationship between politics and art, “The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”

Oddly enough, given that Orwell’s novel is a dystopian disaster, I think this play of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” has the potential to be both: pure politics and pure beauty.

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