Social consciousness

With this project – Elia Kazan: A Theatre Investigation – I hope to ignite in all those that participate, audience included, a new taste for research and focus on the greater world of theatre; its history and that history’s profound and direct influence on what we do today in our world of contemporary Australian theatre.

So why focus on Elia Kazan to tell this story?

Because it was he that gave me the courage to direct my first play. I was, until that time, an actor and sometimes technician. But the world of ‘the play’ was starting to expand in my mind and my appetite for the big picture was becoming overwhelming. I wanted to paint the complete landscape of a piece, not just a corner of the canvas, and I wanted it to mean something. I wanted to saturate myself in an artform that had a direct relationship with its audience and the potential to affect it.

As potent as Kazan was as an ambitious careerist, what he mostly looked for in the work that he delivered was a greater social consciousness. Kazan’s directorial choices looked at the world’s biggest social and inherently political issues of the time, through the microcosm of domestic life.

Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty is a universal call to restore power to the common man during the Great Depression.

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Arthur Miller's All My Sons reflects the corruption of the corporate sector and shows the fallibilities of the American Dream driven by unrealistic ambitions.

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Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy is one of the last plays he directed on Broadway. It is a play that attacks the social doxology of masculinity, has a direct relationship with his views of McCarthyism and exposes the very delicate world of the ‘Hollywood Closet’, that is still alive and well in the film industry today.

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In Elia Kazan is the perfect example of a complete landscape. It was only after studying him – his circumstances and choices – that I realised that the world he was a part of, he changed to such profound effect; and that the impact of such an artist on the history of theatre must never be forgotten.

— Peta Hanrahan