Let's face it. In reality everything a President does is theater. Recently Barack Obama went around the office taking orders for take-out, then drove to the Five Guys hamburger shop to buy lunch for everyone, which he brought back in a couple grocery bags. Pretty normal stuff in the early 21st Century, except:
- Barack Obama is President of the United States.
- His office is the West Wing of the White House.
- He didn't drive himself to the hamburger place.
- His car had red and blue lights flashing throughout the trip.
- There were 2 other cars driving with him (one in front and another behind) filled with Secret Service agents.
- We know about this trip because it was all recorded by the cameras of the NBC Television Network.
You can truly say that there was nothing normal, typical or average about the entire event. President Obama was only acting like a normal boss in a typical office on an average work day doing a normal thing.
But - and this is important - this bit of theater was chosen and performed specifically to portray a normal scene. The play is a work of imagination, a bit of gaming, but the decisions about what to portray and how to portray it are aspects of reality. President Obama was deliberately acting like a normal boss in a typical office on an average work day doing a normal thing. Barack Obama chose to portray a typical office vignette and to place himself in the lead role.
Theater is real, even though what it portrays is imaginary. Good theater communicates opinions and insights about the reality which currently exists and helps to create a reality which is as yet imagined. Obama's lunchtime theater identifies the mundane take-out run as being significant to the self-identity of the United States. The President elevated the commonplace to be a symbol of an ideal of interpersonal relations toward which we ought to strive and, by casting himself in the lead role, claimed leadership in pursuing this specific ideal.
Should all of us place ourselves into roles in this same theater, the play becomes reality. That's the game.
Compare the Presidential theater of 2 other Presidents: Richard Nixon and George Washington. Nixon chose a theater of personal distinction, power, and status. It is almost inconceivable that President Nixon would have taken lunch orders from his staff, let alone go himself for take-out. He emphasized the pomp which distinguishes and distances the President from the populace. The distancing is real enough; the theater lies in whether the distance is displayed or hidden. Nixon, however, was not able to carry it off. He did not look the part (he was about as unregal as they come), he was not fully committed to the role he tried to play, and the play itself ran counter to the mood of the nation.
Washington was prosperous, married into money, was accomplished as General and adulated as a hero of the revolution, and is reputed to have had a personal presence which set him apart from the crowd wherever he went. When he became the first President under the Constitution, Washington deliberately chose to play a man of the people and to eschew the ceremony that could have made the Presidency into a mirror of European royalty. Washington's theater helped to shape the reality of the Presidency and to make possible Obama's theater of the normal.
"All the world's a stage," says Shakespeare's Jacques, "And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts," and nowhere is this more true than in the theater of the President of the United States. But perhaps Jacques misspeaks to say we are "merely" players, for in the actual reality game theatrical imagination is the parent of the next reality -- and every play is a move in the game.