The Emmett Project
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But perversely and in the face of all logic, many of us make the opposite choice, actually cultivating emotions like indignation and sorrow in response to vast crimes. And who’s to say that’s a complete waste of time? When millions of people turn out to protest a war before it even begins, it becomes possible to believe that a certain amount of progress is being made empathywise. One dares to dream of an actual consensus against killing large numbers of people.
Art can help. From Euripides down through Goya and on to Oliver Stone, some artists have taken it as their primary responsibility to reawaken our sense of horror, to remind us–viscerally–what it is, not only for us but for others, to suffer. (Maybe arousing empathic feelings was the first job of the artist, starting with the shamans who were expected to secure an animal’s permission and forgiveness prior to a hunt.) The Neo-Futurists assume that responsibility with The Emmett Project, a theatrical lecture on the peculiarly American atrocity of lynching that draws its title–and its empathic heart–from the story of an African-American kid named Emmett Till.
But the Neo-Futurists’ telling can be wildly uneven. The conceit of having the four classmates write certain messages on a blackboard, for instance, only occasionally discloses something new; the rest of the time it just brings the show to a dead halt. Likewise a longish play within the play is amusingly melodramatic but completely digressive. And a final act of symbolic violence comes off more like bad manners than an expression of existential pain.
