Showing, not just telling …

… The Best Kind of Political Artist - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Mr. Hare explains in “The Blue Touch Paper” why he takes care to humanize the participants in both sides of the debates that he dramatizes. He learned early on that political activists who go to the theater detest complexity above all things, and his explanation of why this is so deserves to be quoted at length: “When people tell you they value political art, what they often mean is that they enjoy political propaganda which corroborates what they already think. All kinds of groups, including socialists and feminists, would ask me to reconfigure work in order to show what ought to happen instead of what does. I grew used to having to argue to the literal-minded that drama is not and cannot be a cartoon form of exhortation. It is about people, it is not about types.”