Theatre Diplomacy During the Cold War: Cultural Transitions in the ‘90S and Beyond Volume V

By William Wadsworth and Jim O'Quinn

This multi-volume work began as a biography of Martha Wadsworth Coigney, who was a pioneering thought leader and advocate of internationalism in the American theatre during one of the most challenging periods in modern U.S. history. Coigney served as President of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) from 1966 to 2011. An independent NGO, ITI was devoted to the UNESCO mission of peace through mutual understanding, and, after World War II, often single-handedly sustained cultural exchange between artists on either side of the Iron Curtain, across religious divides, and in war zones. ITI was consistently in the vanguard of UNESCO's multi-lateral aim to bring all voices to the table, including former colonial peoples, developing nations, and indigenous cultures.
In partnership with Rosamond Gilder and Ellen Stewart of La Mama E.T.C., Coigney led these landmark initiatives, including the representation of U.S. multicultural theatre leadership in Moscow in 1973. What was set in motion then is playing out today.
Owing to the scope of Coigney’s work, William Wadsworth and Jim O’Quinn interviewed a wide range of her dramatist friends and professional colleagues. These conversations illumined a liberal cultural epoch (1954-86) and the U. S. Culture Wars that followed. The authors also recovered substantive original materials from Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library and the Rockefeller Archives about the life and work of Coigney, her mentor Rosamond Gilder, and Coigney’s longtime employer, the producer Roger Stevens. These materials document a sustained political effort by theatre people to socialize and liberalize post-WWII America. For these reasons, the work became much more than the story of one amazing person. It became a living history about relations between great artists and their milieu, told by the artists themselves.
The Martha Coigney story has several key elements:

• Coigney embodied the principle of internationalism as a counterforce to nationalism and fascism.
• He career is a virtual how-to manual for re-visualizing and revitalizing American theatre.
• Her life demonstrates the power of people-to-people diplomacy, based on the principles of individual human rights as established by the United Nations, the support of artistic freedom of expression, and the concept that every policy and funding mechanism finds its essence in the individual artist.
• Coigney was one of the great theatre matchmakers and promoters of experimental and devised theatre work. Within this sector, she can be said to have revolutionized the theatre profession worldwide.
• Gilder and Coigney, in their roles at ITI, led the movement to establish international theatre festivals in Europe, the USA, and globally.
• Gilder and Coigney were collaborators with Roger Stevens, Donald Oenslager, Hal Prince, Nancy Rhodes, Edward Albee, and scores of other distinguished figures in the transmission of American dramatic art overseas.
• Coigney served as advisor to and instrument for private theatre funders determined to create a national theatre accessible to working-class citizens and the poor, an investment, they believed, that was necessary to U.S. ascendency and world peace. In this they followed the inspiration of President John F. Kennedy, who articulated that to be influential, a great nation must have a great culture to contribute to the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664139497

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Copyright © 2021 by William Wadsworth and Jim O’Quinn. 821820

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Rev. date: 02/16/2021

Contents

Chapter 39 The Culture Wars Connect ITI to TCG: From Cultural Diplomacy to Corporate Messaging, 1989-2003

Chapter 40 An Interview with Anne Bogart

Chapter 41 Conversations with FOMs Cary Perloff and Lynn Gross

Chapter 42 Jim Nicola and Linda Chapman: New York Internationalism, Friends and Allies, 1992-2011

Chapter 43 Edward Albee: How Art Changes Everything

Chapter 44 ITI’s Merger with TCG: Interviews with John Sullivan, Philip Arnoult, and Joan Channick

Chapter 45 Emeritus: The Heart of Globalism

Chapter 46 Memorial Tributes and Cultural Recognition

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Chapter 39

The Culture Wars Connect ITI to TCG: From Cultural

Diplomacy to Corporate Messaging, 1989-2003

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Martha Wadsworth Coigney with Jeong Ok Kim, her

successor as President of ITI-International

Theatre is the art of the moment, the crystal that flashes the truth. Theatre is not an archive—it is an event.

—Martha Coigney, ATHE, 1991

Starting at 8:50 a.m. on that Tuesday—out world came apart and nothing made any sense, except for fear and questions and fear and numbness and fear. We all tried to find family and friends, one by one. America was blown out of its never-never-invaded land.

Starting the very same day we began to receive emails from all over the world—Boston, Bulgaria, Moscow, Istanbul, Denmark, Connecticut, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Holland, Berlin, Paris, London, Quagadougou, and on and on. These messages were from our I.T.I. family and other families. New York was everyone’s damaged hometown and wounded family.

That is why theatre is important in the world of aftershocks and bewilderment. It teaches us about others. It makes us care about others. It makes us weep and allows us to mourn. It reminds us to laugh and allows us to heal. We gather to watch theatre, the tribe around the fire, the tribe around the world.

—Martha Coigney, Director’s Notes, ITI Newsletter, 2011

The Temper of the Times, 1989-98

LET US BEGIN WITH AN EXCERPT FROM TEXT OF THE 1996 World Theatre Day address by one of the most acclaimed playwrights of the Arabic writing world, Saadallah Wannous of Syria:

I believe that the theatre, no matter what technological revolutions it undergoes, shall remain the ideal forum in which man can ponder his historical and existential condition....

I know of no other period during which the theatre was so impoverished both financially and morally. Even the privileges it once enjoyed are now replaced by lip-service rhetoric that verges on outright contempt. Let us face it, the theatre today is no longer that civic celebration that allowed us room to contemplate, encouraged us to engage in dialogue and deepened our sense of humanity.

We can best understand the danger inherent in the marginalization of culture when we realize that with revolution becoming extremely difficult and complex, culture now stands in the forefront of the forces that seek to confront the egocentric inhuman process of globalization. For it is through culture and through the critical outlooks it promotes, that man usually discovers the mechanisms of events and regains the strength to recover his humanity…Our lot is to hope, and what happens today cannot be the end of time.¹

Wannous died the year after he delivered these words, and Syria shortly thereafter was thrown into a proxy civil war, owing to environmental degradation and the egocentric global tensions he described in the address. As he grew older, Wannous, like Coigney, had come to view the world in all its raw complexity; one reaction on his part had been to create a prototype Arab Festival for Theatre Arts to be mounted in Damascus that was attended by dramatists from all over the Arab world. A comparable festival was subsequently developed in Egypt—the Cairo Festival—for which Coigney and Arnoult were asked to serve as advisers and promoters. These activities were part of how the United Nations Conventions on Human Rights gained a toe-hold in the region.

It was at the Damascus festival that Wannous introduced a project that he called theatre of politicization, to replace the traditional political theatre. Instead of revolution per se, he intended theatre to play a positive and constructive role in the process of social and political change. His initiatives, supported by ITI, laid the groundwork of dialogue and communication essential to the Arab Spring. Once again, these developments show that it is when artists come together that society gains an opportunity to investigate new ways to evolve.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet Union were momentous geopolitical events, and causes for euphoric but sometimes impossible moments for ITI diplomats. The amazing photograph below captures Coigney, Stewart, and an array of ITI board members and theatre friends visiting Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, in 1990. Imagine travelling deep into the old Soviet Union to contact directly a hitherto little known cultural repository!

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Courtesy La Mama Archives, photographer unknown

A visit to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, in 1990: Martha Coigney, third from left,

standing beside Andre-Louis Perinetti and Ellen Stewart, among other ITI

board members and theatre artists, including Valerie Khasanov of Russia

(far left), Pierre Santini of France, and Radu Beligan of Romania.

Unexpectedly, perhaps, the fall of the Berlin Wall also signaled an imminent decline in public funding for international outreach everywhere. ITI-USA lost its economic base and eventually its independence when Theatre Communications Group, representing not-for-profit theatre in the U.S., absorbed the organization. Russian theatre faced huge government cutbacks and a lurch to privatization. The last superpowers both lost a measure of interest in promoting culture or art independent of institutional, financial, and informational power.

The 1990s may be considered a walk into the wilderness for Coigney. Step by step, her life became more and more complicated. New tensions developed in Eastern Europe. She carried huge responsibilities as International President of ITI, but funds were drying up at home, in part from her inattention—she spent long periods either on the road or in Paris, punctuated by frantic catch-up sessions in New York. Respected by artists, she began to be shunned by public and private funders of theatre; the Europeans whom she had nourished in earlier decades had become thought leaders in their own countries, and consequently Coigney’s influence was immense overseas, but limited at home. The ideals of an inclusive, communal theatre culture that for two decades had inspired small and local companies was fading, to be replaced by university and institutional programs constrained by politically correct ideas and an aversion to criticism by corporate funders. Who cared about theatre? A few progressives and a shrinking cadre of middle-class audiences.

Robert Brustein boiled down the emerging problem in art-theatre funding during the 1990s to a political core:

I think that the source of the problem is that we no longer have a strong socio-economic system, such a Marxism or socialism, to modify human selfishness or curtail human greed, and organized religion doesn’t seem to be doing much to improve human character either. The result is evident today in virtually every social endeavor, including the theatre.²

So, U.S. theatre since 1990 has struggled to retain authenticity and connection across class divides, even when proportions of gender and race were not a problem. Theatre audiences dwindled as funding for education in the arts declined.

As the flag-bearer for the chief workers’ state, Mikhail Gorbachev confronted these and other global challenges by offering to a world at peace the possibility of class harmony via the balancing of capitalist and communist values. But both Russia and the United States declined the offer. Gorbachev’s proposition might have produced a world undivided by ideology in which a united Europe would become a beacon of enlightened cooperation between labor and management, and a provider of education and art for everyone, in the UNESCO model. That did not happen.

REPORTER STEPHEN NUNNS DESCRIBES HOW ITI was negatively influenced by the cultural conflicts in which political conservatives called for censorship while cutting public funding of the arts:

The fight over Animal Farm (1986) had an effect on both U.S.-I.T.I. and Martha Coigney herself. In some ways this controversy could have been anticipated; after all, the United States had withdrawn from UNESCO in 1984, claiming that the organization has extraneously politicized virtually every subject it deals with, has exhibited hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press, and has demonstrated unrestrained budgetary expansion. The U.S. refused to contribute its dues to the organization, a position that didn’t change until the country’s reentry in 2003.

Government funding was in trouble for cultural organizations and the arts were in deep trouble. Animal Farm may have been a public relations disaster for I.T.I., but it had the odd effect of hurting the organization’s reputation in the U.S. while simultaneously raising Martha to international prominence—Wole Soyenka quickly and quietly retired from the presidency of I.T.I., and Martha was elected to take his place. But within a few years, the landscape for the arts had changed irrevocably throughout the world, and Martha Coigney found herself in a strange new world.

The problems for art in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s appeared, as Martha herself put it, just when it caused cardiac arrest in the pure bosoms of the conservative guardians of our national virginity. The Culture Wars in the U.S. were reflections not from conservative dominance, but from conservative insecurity. It is no coincidence that the controversies surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition The Perfect Moment and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ happened the same year that the Berlin Wall fell. Despite the public celebratory face, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe created an existential crisis for the United States.

After forty years of engaging in a long, Hegelian dialectical dance, the U.S. suddenly found itself without a partner or an adversary. When one kind of other disappears, the subject has to look for another one. And when the other cannot be found without, they will have to be found within.

As Martha put it in scribbled notes for a speech at the time: Artists have been made the enemy—American politicians raise huge amount of money trashing the arts and the NEA. The NEA was not the only recipient of the blows—funding for I.T.I., at least in the United States, dried up as well.

Ironically, during its history up until that moment [1989], I.T.I. had been one of the few organizations that had done everything in its power to ignore the Cold War, or at least to figure out a way through (or around) the Iron Curtain. Then the Cold War stopped, because it didn’t work anymore, and so did the artistic exchange, Martha said. People could go anywhere.

Coigney summed it up in a 1990 edition of Playbill in a piece called Notes from the League outlook for world theatre, in which she wrote: For theatre, the opening up of Eastern Europe and the democratizing of country after country has created new, unexpected problems, as well as new opportunities, both for the countries concerned and for the United States. She examined the problems:

The liberated countries have new problems. Their economic situations are so desperate that the competition for funds among different artistic groups has become much greater. They have to fight for funds…Those groups are plunged into the same ice-water bath that most American artists grew up in.

ITI was created to remedy the artistic isolation between countries in the aftermath of World War II. During the Cold War years, I.T.I. was the only vehicle by which these nations could keep in touch. Being non-governmental, I.T.I. could do things others could not do.

Now the real questions: With no enemies left, how do you keep the dynamism going? Partly because this country seems to be terrible at dealing with our allies, the role of I.T.I. is greater than ever.

During the Cold War years, Europe’s consciousness of American theatre was heightened by its own cultural isolation, and many American experimental theatre groups were virtually subsidized by European governments. With the advent of a United Europe, those countries have less need to come here looking for theatre.

As a partial explanation for why the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics Arts Festival was on Martha’s ten things that shook my theatre world list, she reflected:

We are almost beginning to have a tradition of theatre festivals in North America—consider Los Angeles in 1984 during the Olympics, Montreal/Toronto in 1985, Baltimore in 1986 for the Festival of Nations, and New York in 1988, during the First New York International Festival of the Arts. This is a remarkable beginning. But we are such a disposable-conscious country, I hope festivals don’t become just the flavor of the week.³

ITI-USA was weakened in the 1990s, but not ineffective. After the Cold War, theatre remained a stabilizing force in Russia and Middle Europe despite the loss of socialist cultural funding and the cultural withdrawal of the USA (except for pop and establishment culture). ITI remained a vehicle through which dramatists in Europe reliably could communicate regardless of political chaos; dozens of its humanist and activist dramatists were catapulted to international fame for satirizing authoritarian states in keeping with the new era of global participation and choice. It was theatre people who kept community alive in Russia and helped liberate Middle Europe; connections between liberal, generous people built connections between countries and preserved nuanced civilization on both sides during the Cold War. This was useful afterwards to maintain trust—ITI offered stark contrast to materialistic and hegemonic statist diplomacy and a frenzy of power realignment.

Coigney, too, as a spokesperson for world theatre, became a symbol for amity and communication during this turbulent period of transition. Her twenty years on the ITI Executive Committee made her an elder stateswoman. That the U.S. won the Cold War and Coigney represented the U.S. meant she was strengthened to leverage theatre people towards resolving disputes: the pluralist American ideal that she embodied was emulated and valued by former colonial and minority artists in every communist and former communist country.

In a 2002 application for State Department funding, Coigney mentioned several ITI artistic exchanges with Eastern Europe and Africa, and incidentally recorded a vital trip she made to Russia when the state actors’ union of the Soviet Union was formally dismantled:

In February of 1992, the President of the International Theatre Institute, Martha Coigney, was invited to Moscow. She and the Secretary General of I.T.I. were present when the Soviet Theatre Workers Union was dissolved, and their presence was sought as proof that professional theatre connections did not have to disappear along with the old union itself. In fact, with the encouragement of I.T.I., the participant heads of the theatre unions in the new countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States created the International Confederation of Theatre Unions. Some of the new countries were already working on creating I.T.I. Centers, but it was strongly urged that the Confederation serve as a transitional guarantor of professional contact, both among long-time colleagues and new colleagues in the rest of the world. However, there was a keen sense of abandonment expressed by the smaller, non-European countries.

This indicates how Coigney mattered politically. She was trusted. She visited every one of these countries multiple times to assist with their transition and to help them feel connected. Her work in the former Soviet states—the conflicted Balkans, Georgia, Bulgaria, and even Azerbaijan—was intense. Her demonstrated diplomatic commitment was the basis of her application for USIA funding in 2002—a solid if somewhat naïve basis on which to apply to a Department of State by then impressed with itself as spokesperson for the sole superpower. Coigney extolled the strengthening of multilateral unions in the former Soviet Union, a message out of step with American exceptionalism. Besides, the U.S. State Department was inhabited by union-busting Reagan-Bush appointees, and was soon to be filled with radical post-constitutional neo-conservatives inspired by a nominally anarchistic tea party sustained by activist billionaires. But precisely for this reason—its art-certified ability to supercede otherwise immutable barriers—theatre really mattered in the older, wearier civilizations of Middle Europe and the former Soviet Union.

At home, Coigney’s person-by-person, one-artist-at-a-time approach, so effective as an antidote to Cold War tensions, became a thin thread of diplomacy in a world swept up in mass amnesia and resurgent tribalism and nationalism. The Internet turned multilateralism into a kaleidoscope. These conflicts pitted tense international obligations against local ITI-USA needs, and this face-off more or less defined Coigney’s decade. Putting food on the table also was sometimes a question.

The root of the problems Coigney faced was of course the defunding of America’s commitment to the arts and to public engagement with other countries through the arts—sharing, performance, sports, and family exchanges are effective diplomacy, but dependent upon the validation of policy. ITI’s umbrella agency UNESCO was during these years defunded, refreshed with binding constraints, then defunded again; critics rejected it for its communist involvement, then for its engagement with authoritarian states, then as anti-Semitic; the humanities and even science were too critical, subversive, revolutionary, or anti-corporate. These grim developments were echoed in Martha’s commentaries:

If the outside world is shattering and shifting into communities with new boundaries and new flags and new tensions, then our fragile art of human interchange is more important than ever.⁴

She is talking about the USA and Europe, where a new atmosphere of corporate-dominated fund-raising is forcing symphonies, operas, theatres, sports teams, reality TV and movie-award programs, health and education, serious art-focused NGOs—in short, most cultural undertakings of the public sort—to compete for a dwindling, thin stream of private money. The funding pie had shrunk. Neo-liberal primitivism ruled. Theatre’s multiplicity of anti-corporate, social, environmental, existential, and economic themes proved to be less than appealing to banks and PR departments. Indeed, truth was on the run, replaced by religious conviction and radical individualism. ITI America in the ‘90s was running out of funds.

By 1997, Coigney expressed genuine uncertainty in her ITI-USA Annual Report:

Both nationally and internationally, I.T.I. is preparing for an uncharted future. At the congress in Seoul, the structure of the organization was lightened and modified so that more resources and energies could go directly to theatre projects, not bureaucracy. Any number of I.T.I. Centers are facing new realities and shifting priorities as the world learns to wage peace and prepares for the new millennium.

Here in the U.S., I.T.I. prepares for life with a partner…If we face the changes successfully, the new organization will be a true center of American Theatre and place of welcome for our colleagues from the rest of the world.⁵

Coigney’s mind was instinctively geared toward a fight against bureaucracy. Andre-Louis Perinetti shared her concern. They saw the encroachment of corruption, procedures, rules, and national influence in UNESCO generally as a problem for exchanges between educators, scientists, and artists. In the face of this pressure, they tried to hold a community of artists together. As Perinetti saw it:

In the last two years, all of the political changes that caused our euphoria and excitement have also shown their power to cause our frustration and despair. But theatre folk are trained by despair as well as joy, and they live with disappearance. After all, the world ends for us each night when the curtain falls….

The climate in the world has called forth a new international awareness…born of new freedom…at the same time as the walls and barriers fall, so did the constraints on animosity.

The Obala Theatre [in Bosnia] sent a postcard saying, Our theatre was shelled and destroyed, it is now a shield for the people to cross the street. Those of us who are not wounded are still performing in Sarajevo.

Coigney invited another thoughtful article by her artist-educator colleague Dudley Cocke, titled End Cultural Racism Now, into her revivified ITI Newsletter in winter 2002. Cocke captured perfectly the U-turn in U.S. theatre investment, away from theatre for working men and women, the very people who saved capitalism in the 1930s and won WWII:

Our cultural policy has been taking us in the opposite direction for the past 20 years. The Reagan Administration’s withdrawal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1984 announced our isolationist intentions to the world, while on the home front, the administration began refocusing national arts policy on a few select Western European traditions. Evidence of the effect of this narrowing domestic policy is the fact that the U.S. not-for-profit professional theatre presently draws 80 percent of its audience from the top 15 percent of the U.S. population measured by income, and it followed that in the rare instances when international exchange now occurs, it is usually between elites. The result: People outside the United States have little or no chance to witness the cultural and spiritual diversity that energizes and propels the country. And now we at home are struggling to sustain this (cultural) diversity and its energy.

A RANGE OF ADDITIONAL WRITING FROM BOTH theatre artists and the journalists who covered them can help us understand the trends and developments that typified the transitional years of the early-to-mid ‘90s.

In a 1991 interview piece by Scott Parker in Southern Theatre titled Pulling Down Walls; ITI’s President continues tradition of helping professionals to stay in touch, there is a vivid glimpse of Coigney trying new ideas to fit the budget. She contacted Parker in order to promote ITI. The Cold War was over. Her job had been almost reduced to that of an underpaid theatrical talent agent. She no longer had funds to support work in the developing world, and she was no longer undergirded by the institutional strength of UCLA, University of Texas, Columbia, NYU, Yale, or Harvard to facilitate bring artists into training programs. She consulted, but that was it.

And the landscape had changed. TCG was now a major national institution; the O’Neill Center and UCLA had well-established programs of exchange with Russia, and individual theatres scouted on their own for international connections; festivals and audience-friendly programs were aided by the Internet. Martha, though, still had the ITI network with its deep, valuable contacts at her disposal, and, according to interviewer Parker, she tried some new tricks:

COIGNEY: In the last two-and-a-half years we have started two new initiatives: one is called Theatre Partners, which goes out to theatre companies all across the country, and asks them for 50 cents a seat per year, with a minimum of $5000 to formalize our relationship with them and, in a way, to remind them to use us. I discovered in the last two years that one of the best public relations or visibility recipes in our line of work is to ask people for money.

At the moment [1991] we are trying to send teams or small delegations that will create connections between theatres here and in other countries. We are trying to build an exchange memory, if you will, of not just one or two people going over to look at wonderful Vienna, but instead trying to make the connection quite specifically to a theatre or a city, at least...For example, if we bring a pair of people from a German theatre over here for two weeks, we will try to have them at a place like Milwaukee Rep or ART (American Repertory Theatre in Boston) or Arena Stage in Gainesville for five or six or seven days, and then in another city the second week. We nominate the Americans, and the posts and embassies and consulates pick the people who come in to us. Then we pick where they go here.

So it’s a transitional problem. If you look at the unification of Germany, 70 percent of the theatre artists in what used to be East Germany are out of work now, because of double staffing, in a sense. If you take Berlin itself, once it’s unified, there are twice too many theatres.

PARKER: So it’s a double source. I’m sure any kind of change is going to rock somebody’s boat...

MC: Even here in the Unites States, with our history of isolationism, I think that international connections are no longer just an intriguing luxury, they’re absolutely essential, particularly if you’re trying to prepare the next generation to take over leadership in the arts or business or what have you. They will have to understand how the rest of the world functions.

This article captured a glimpse of Coigney trying out ideas for theatrical exchange to fit budget limitations, in the context of an interview designed to promote ITI. She was preoccupied in all her public speeches with what she called American isolationism, a phrase which harkens back to the USA’s long, costly delay in getting engaged in Europe in the fight against fascism. (This distrust of the Old World has deep roots in the immigrant story of the U.S.A., but invariably it is short-sighted and blinded by fear—and, indeed, white Protestant fears have some justification. Protestantism is a minority religion in most other countries, and the U.S. developed a civilization based on decorum and mores deeply tied to a Protestant humanism and sense of individual conscience, and with it social responsibility. Translated into politics, Protestantism has meant adherence to principles of commonwealth more than autocracy.)

Martha is more politically aggressive than usual when she speaks out at the annual ATHE Conference against an unfair, isolationist 1990 Immigration Act:

There is a very quiet and dangerous action being taken in Washington that points to a new isolationism. At the very time when we should be moving to open our doors to the new international possibilities, there is a new immigration act.

The Immigration act of 1990: If the published regulations are adopted without significant changes, then the United States might as well roll up its shores and declare that America is closed.

The specific restrictions will go far toward closing down the healthy traffic of performing artists in and out of America. There is a perception in some unions and even in the INS that limiting numbers, making visa criteria much tougher, and tightening the schedules for applying for visas will combine to protect jobs and opportunities for America Theatre people. The reverse is the fact.

There is NOT a giant mob of foreign performing artists waiting to swim to this country and take all of the jobs. There are reasonable means to guard against abuses of free interchange and still offer a welcome to the theatre arts of the rest of the world. No responsible American organization involved in producing, presenting, and exchanging the theatre works of the world is in business to stifle or compromise American work or America jobs. These moves toward protectionism are incredibly dismaying because it is right now that we should be moving in the other direction outward.⁶

In a 1992 American Theatre article titled Volgograd, OHIO, critic Chris Jones identifies a surge in exchanges of theatre people between Russia and the United States. This sets off a discussion among theatre experts (including Coigney, Arnoult, and others) about the crisis in art and theatre art funding in both the U.S. and in Russia, where national theatre funding had been a staple from the 1920s. Now theatres in Russia were looking to the American model as an option, and the Americans who had always admired the Russian model were saying, Hold on a moment! Jones elicited these observations:

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The International Theatre Institute’s Martha Coigney argues that these traumatic times in the Eastern Bloc are making theatres there fragile, and the real challenge for Americans is to offer aid while staying afloat themselves. The former Soviet theatres are bereft; they are facing whole different ways of working, she says. I get desolate when I think that the U.S. is not going to pay attention.

Coigney finds it ironic that American exchanges are so popular with Russian theatres, when they probably should be looking to Western Europe. Other Americans share her discomfort at their country being used as a shining example of how to treat the theatre. We have the most unenlightened cultural policies on the globe, says Philip Arnoult of the Baltimore Theatre Project. What we do have to tell the Russians—other than that they are looking too far west? Larry Sacharow of Woodstock, N.Y.’s River Arts Repertory concurs. We should definitely not be a cultural model.

That does not mean, however that exchanges have no value. For one thing American companies find themselves surprisingly fundable. Milwaukee has persuaded a slew of corporations to help support its visit to Siberia.⁷

Some American Images Abroad⁸ was the title of another American Theatre article, this one by Felicia Londre, about the overseas face of America showing up in East European theatre at this point of transition. Londre wrote:

My eighteen-day trip to Budapest, East Berlin, and Warsaw in January, sponsored by the International Theatre Institute, yielded dozens of such signs: The Eastern Europeans want to get to know us better and that attitude is reflected in the theatre.

She made the point that American culture was being portrayed not from the level of high arts but of mass civilization. Londre saw a production of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in East Berlin culminating in a tongue-in-cheek tribute to American power. Or was it a sly dig at the author’s wrongheaded Marxism? In a mounting of the same play at Budapest’s Vigzinhaz, she noted, Macheath was rescued from the gallows by a burst of music...the Star-Spangled Banner. (It should be noted that Londre, when at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, arranged for a brilliant young dramaturg from Berlin named Thomas Engela to lecture there and at five other institutions, based on an ITI/US-USIA grant.)

It was Coigney herself who delivered what she called the Definitive Statement about American Cultural Diplomacy in the Post-Cold War Era⁹ in a lecture given at the State University of North Dakota on September 21, 1992. When she spoke of American ambivalence, she was nudging up against paradox:

Over the last two years we have witnessed a terrible attack on our own artists and their freedom of expression.

When one thinks of America and the Arts—or America and the world—one is confronted with ambivalence...Just as the walls are coming down outside of the country, they seem to go up inside.

Why is it when our system seems to triumph in other parts of the world and great risks are taken to guarantee individual freedoms, that we seem beset by doubts and angers here at home?

Artists in America are viewed with tolerance, with suspicion and jealousy. But they are not generally treated with regard and respect.

Here we are in the United States of America, made up of all the cultures of the world, brought together over two centuries from all corners of the globe—and all we seem to want to do is stay home.¹⁰

With gratitude, Coigney noted that our historic feeling of inferiority to Europe was behind us—but still, she lamented, We hesitate to share our arts with the rest of the world. She saw this as part of an identity problem, the requirement of a simplistic us-versus-them bilateral formulation in foreign relations. At that moment, in 1992, with the loss of a clear enemy, she asserted:

Just as the walls are coming down outside the country, they seem to go up inside. The rest of the world is trying out its democratic wings and we are grounded in search of a new enemy to win against.

This paradox has directly to do with the national-identity split between the owners and the workers/employees/poor that has so tortured our economic and foreign policies. As a consequence of the culture war at home, The whole American arts community is seeing the results of eleven years of indifference and neglect as well as outright hostility. This was straight talk indeed. She continued:

The farther one travels, the more one can recognize the wealth at home. We look at the great art of the rest of the world, only to recognize the achievements of our own culture. The more I travel, the tighter I wrap myself in the flag.

Martha was a good story-teller, and her experiences in the framework of ITI informed us about the isolationist lunacy of the United States:

One morning [in 1983] we were invited to the Moscow Ballet School, which was reigned over by Sofia Golvkina. At the end of the demonstration, Mme. Golvkina explained that the younger students were taken through classic training for several years and then when the classic techniques were perfected, new elements were introduced. She said, For instance, our own republics send teachers to show the Uzbek, Kazak, Georgian, Turkmen and Kirgiz dance styles. Then our Cuban comrades come to teach the Latin dance vocabulary. And finally, for JAZZ they go to LEIPZIG!

Sarcasm was what Coigney was reduced to, since she had to carry on without screaming and tearing hair about the failure of the U.S. government and its leadership to support arts education—and to directly export that most American of art forms, jazz. As a consequence, she suggested:

So, you must take a real passport and travel, or take an intellectual passport and study another culture—then you will discover the reverence for artists and theatre culture that exists in most of the world.

Coigney explained to her audience in the center of the United States exactly what the role of theatre people was in ending the Cold War and holding societies together:

Theatre people were leading the way. In the Soviet Union, major theatre figures took a public and irreversible risk in backing Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. In Romania, a leading actor was a voice of reason and humanity amid the most vicious and bloody of the national upheavals. In Lithuania, the first President was a musician. In Czechoslovakia, the students started the Velvet Revolution. They took to the streets and the theatres became their havens, their staging areas, and their first-aid stations. And their first freely elected president was a playwright, Vaclav Havel…in these countries artists were expected to lead.

Coigney then quoted Havel at length, presumably because she admired and applauded the universal message that had come out of his and her world of theatre—and especially to counter the propaganda narrative that it was Star Wars and U.S. military might that ended state-sponsored communism. In Havel’s words:

Communism was not defeated by military force, but by life, by the human spirit, by conscience, by the resistance of being and man to manipulation. It was defeated by a revolt of color, authenticity, history in all its variety and human individuality against imprisonment within a uniform ideology. This powerful signal is coming at the eleventh hour. We all know civilization is in danger. Man’s attitude to the world must be radically changed. We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use, waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.

I am in favor of a political system based on the citizen, and recognizing all his fundamental civil and human rights in their universal validity, and equally applied; that is, no member of a single race, a single nation, a single sex, or a single religion may be endowed with basic rights that are different from anyone else’s. In other words, I am in favor of what is called a civic society.

Coigney was deeply frustrated by the frenzy of deal-making after 1989:

At the same time, countries are leaping to forge bilateral links that tend to push aside