The Dish

Human rights groups have criticized the Globe Theater for planning to take a touring production to North Korea:

The Globe will perform the play in the secretive state in September 2015 as part of a global tour marking the 450th anniversary of the English playwright’s birth. “We do not believe that anyone should be excluded from the chance to experience this play,” the theatre said in a statement.

But Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, said exclusion would be the order of the day if the performance went ahead in Pyongyang. “It’s going to be an extremely limited, elite audience that would see a production in any case,” Robertson told AFP on Tuesday. “It would have to be in Pyongyang, which is a showcase city whose residents are selected to live there because they have shown their loyalty,” Robertson said. “So there’s a strict pre-selection process involved right from the off.”… Amnesty International urged the theatre to “read up” on the reality of North Korea before going there. “No tragic play could come close to the misery that the 100,000 people trapped in the country’s prison camps endure – where torture, rape, starvation and execution are everyday occurrences,” Amnesty said in a statement.

Mark Lawson thinks the Globe should go ahead with the tour, arguing that North Korea is not apartheid-era South Africa:

The obvious reference point in any discussion about which stamps actors should have on their passports is the boycott of South Africa by the theatrical union Equity and other representatives of the entertainment industry, which ran from 1965 until the Mandela presidency. … [T]here was a solid logic to the embargo on exporting drama to South Africa. The plays would be performed in venues operating a policy of segregation, with the result that touring productions participated in and legitimized apartheid. The governments during the discriminatory years also strictly censored the sort of material that was admitted.

Hateful as the North Korean regime is, the situation is significantly different. The Globe will presumably have no control over the makeup of the audience, but the choice of play is its own, and the use of Shakespeare’s plays as a weapon against repression has an honorable history.

Zeljka Marosevic looks back at that “honorable history”:

When Prague was under the rule of Russia, the Czech author and philosopher Pavel Kohout ran a politically charged production of Macbeth, and the staging of this was later used as the basis for Tom Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth. Not only this, but PEN actively encouraged Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller to go to Turkey in 1985; “when the dramatists challenged the prevailing political climate so fiercely that they were ejected from a dinner at the US embassy.” And it’s not just Shakespeare that has been used as a kind of theatrical intervention. Susan Sontag’s staging of a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo made its mark in a city that was undergoing the longest siege in the history of modern warfare.

Meanwhile, Tierney Sneed marvels at how dramatically attitudes toward cultural diplomacy have changed in less than 10 years:

In 2008, the New York Philharmonic performed in Pyongyang upon invitation from the North Korean government amid US efforts to engage North Korea in nuclear weapons talks. When the Philharmonic agreed to play in 2007, a George W. Bush administration official defended the trip – which the State Department helped to coordinate – calling it a sign that “North Korea is beginning to come out of its shell,” and that it represented “a shift in how they view us, and it’s the sort of shift that can be helpful as we go forward in nuclear weapons negotiations.” PBS even broadcast the concert.

However attitudes toward North Korea have changed since Kim Jong Un took over upon his father Kim Jong Il’s 2011 death, says Sheila Smith, a senior fellow in Asia studies at the Council of Foreign Relations. “There’s now an increasing hesitancy to allow informal arts diplomacy between [North Korea] and other countries” she says, as the regime under Kim Jong Un has engaged in increasingly provocative behavior. … “It can actually run the risk of enhancing a regime that is guilty of oppression,” Smith says.

Walter Kirn’s new book Blood Will Out is an account of his friendship with the conman and murderer Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who charmed many in high society under the alias Clark Rockefeller. In an excerpt from the book, Kirn considers the place of the impostor in the American imagination – and his own complicity in “Rockefeller’s” deception:

The kidnapping, which made international news and later inspired a TV movie, exposed Clark Rockefeller as a fraud, the most prodigious serial impostor in recent history. It also connected him to a lineage older, and in a certain fashion richer, than that of the founding family of Standard Oil: the shape-shifting trickster of American myth and literature. In Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, this figure takes the form of a mutating devil aboard a riverboat who feeds on his fellow passengers’ moral defects. In Huckleberry Finn, he again stalks the Mississippi River as the Duke and the Dauphin, flamboyant mock aristocrats whose swindles are cloaked in Elizabethan claptrap. In The Great Gatsby he’s a preening gangster sprouted from a North Dakota farm boy. In Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels he’s a murderous social-climbing dilettante. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 he’s Milo Minderbinder, the blithe wheeler-dealer who’d blow up the world if he saw a profit in it. He’s the villain with a thousand faces, a kind of charming, dark-side cowboy, perennially slipping off into the sunset and reappearing at dawn in a new outfit.

But if Clark was all that (I’d learn after the trial that he understood his literary provenance and took great pride in it), then what was I?

A fool. A stubborn fool. When his story began to unravel during the manhunt, and the Rockefellers claimed not to know him, I told a fellow reporter that they were lying, a family of cowards running from a scandal. I only backed down when his German name was published and the word Lebensraum echoed through my head. The disclosure unsettled me but it also softened me, especially when more facts about his background trickled out in the days after his capture. I too had a German name and German blood, and I’d spent a summer during college living in Bavaria, his home province. I was 18 then, about the same age he was when, in 1979, two years before my stay in Munich, he left the small town of his youth for the United States. I’d left my own small town that year, for Princeton. I knew the yearning. No wonder we’d been friends.

Laura Miller calls the work “an absorbing spectacle of self-surgery,” detailing the psychology of the mark as well as that of the con man. Meanwhile, Meg Wolitzer shivers:

[T]he way Kirn tells it all makes me feel it’s entirely possible that I too might’ve allowed Clark Rockefeller to stay in my life because of a kind of lazy vanity and the pleasurable, ongoing thought that a really rich and powerful person likes me – despite the fact that I don’t like him at all. Even as the absurdities mount up, I could still imagine passively allowing a joyless friendship to continue. Life can feel so ordinary. You get up in the morning, you go to work, you pay taxes like all the other poor schlubs. The idea that someone in your midst doesn’t have to do any of that opens up a little fantasy door in the brain, a door unlocked by a pathetic magic key.