Act 4 Theaters of Action

Act 3 – Rescripting Scene 14 – McTheatre

From the book, Theatres of Capitalism: Managing the Corporate Spectacle

By David M. Boje, Ph.D. November 13, 2001

Scene 14 – McTheatre

McTheatre - Current trends in economic inequality, both domestically and globally, are sustained and legitimated in what I will call the “McTheatre” of oppression and desire. McTheatre is the nexus of McDonaldization, Disneyfication, Las Vegasization, and Post- 11 war.

Rescripting McTheatre is a Fetish-expose, scripts that raise our consciousness of the difference between use-value and surplus value, and those invisible Others beneath the stage. The dangers of McTheatre are palpable, real and on the rise. The inequity if a few rich people having more money than half the planet’s population, poses significant dangers to human dignity, democracy, political stability, fiscal sustainability, social justice, freedom, civil society, physical/mental health and environmental sustainability (Gates, 2000). Theatres of capitalism lull us into complacency.

The world's 200 richest people own assets greater than the combined income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest people (Gates, 2000).

For every year that women attend school beyond the fourth grade, the birth rate declines 20 percent. i

Fifty percent of women over age 18 can neither read nor write. Less than one percent of the world's assets are held in the name of women.

I am not the first to make a connection between Theatre and capitalism. Most notably, the Marxist connection of Theatre to capitalism, has been made by Augusto Boal (1979), first in his book Theater of the Oppressed, translated from the Spanish Teatro de Oprimido (1974a), and a more recent collection of his talks and training approaches, in Games for actors and non-actors (1992). Boal, more recently, prefers to relabel his work “Rainbow of Desire.” The question is how can Rainbow of desire transform McTheatre, Las Vegasization, Disneyfication, and postmodern war?

Boal writes and coaches a Theatre of liberation from all forms of oppression. Boal (1974b: ix) begins by saying, “this book attempts to show that all Theatre is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political and Theatre is one of them.”

1 Capitalist Theatre appropriated spectacle from the Greeks, and Shakespeare, the first bourgeoisie dramatist converted the character from feudal beginnings into a bourgeoisie conception, and modern spectacle came into being (Boal, 1979: 63-64). Boal (1979”: 64) qualifies this sense of history by pointing out that Shakespeare, particularly, in the Merchant of Venice, “Did not portray heroes who were avowedly bourgeois.” Boal maintains a class analysis, adding that it will not be the bourgeoisie who lead the revolution.

Boal’s theory is we are part spectator and part actor, and this makes us spect-actors. We are spect-actors who expect “order, systematization, formalization, routine, consistency, and methodical operation” in our McTheatre day-to-day consumption of spectacle.

This chapter is organized into three parts. Part I is Image Theatre, where we explore the non-verbal rhythms of McTheatre. In part II, Invisibility Theatre rescripts the dialog of work. And in part III, Forum Theatre is an experimental stage on which we can try out new scripts of work and consumption.

Image Theatre, a way to rescript capitalism

Image Theatre sets up a stage, in which we can see the body motions and interactions, in what is known as a body sculpture. Image Theatre is a silent Theatre. We will get to two, more verbal forms of Theatre that Augusto Boal uses (Invisible and Forum Theatres). For Boal (1992: xxv) “Theatre can also be the repetitive acts of daily life.” Image Theatre has the qualities Ritzer describes McDonaldization; the efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control that comes from combining Max Weber’s bureaucratic- authority with Henry Ford’s assembly line, and Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management. It is this process of rationalization, repetitiveness, and routine that we may overlook as a quite terrifying Theatre.

McDonald Theatre is a bureaucratic and Tayloristic assembly line tragedy. The production Theatre is a highly bureaucratic and scientific management script, a fast food assembly line. It is a Theatre resisted by workers tired of minimum wage, unskilled job options, and by consumers who hate fast food. Just as there is a dark side to Disney, this is no less true of McDonald. People do not really like working at McDonalds, and turnover is high. Yet the bureaucratically, scripted deskilled repetitive and mindless jobs can be learned by any seventeen year old slacker in a few minutes. This means that efficiency is sustained despite turnover. The fast food industry employee turnover averages 300 per cent a year. When workers are out the door in four months, they don't demand pensions, promotions, training or unions. So the Marxian class rebellion against exploitation and greed never happens. This is how McDonald’s “acts as a kind of moral instruction for the working class, like jail time in the ghetto.”

The point of an Image Theatre performance of McDonald’s is to depict, not only its Weberian, Taylorist, and Fordist rhythm, but the terror of being a robot in the machine.

2 In Image Theatre, we enact the various scenes, scripts, and poses of McDonald’s Theatre. Then at some point, we start to change the motions and repetitions to try out alternatives, so the spectators and spect-actors can see what a change here or there would mean.

The standardized script, the routinized jobs, the same thing, same time, same place staging of working and eating games, makes it possible for us to analyze the mechanistic aspects of McDonald’s as what Boal (1992) calls “Image Theatre.”

Back stage, unless you worked in a McDonald’s, you may loose sight of the how robotic and Tayloristic the wageworkers’ job has become. Working in a theatrical-machine model makes us act and perform like machines. Over a million young people work at McDonald’s stores doing McJobs. Sometimes it is not even Taylor’s scientific management can control what goes on:

Complaints from employees range from discrimination and lack of rights, to understaffing, few breaks and illegal hours, to poor safety conditions and kitchens flooded with sewage, and the sale of food that has been dropped on the floor (McSpotlight, 2001a).

We as consumers learn to be equally robotic as we queue up like contemporary Charlie Chaplin’s, in Modern Times, Machine Theatre. When we give up our theatrical authenticity, we give up our personal power, and it becomes theatrical capital for others to control. Off stage, we as consumers do not see the impact of McDonald on the environment.

As we study the body poses and rhythmus of McDonald’s Image Theatre, the focus is on just how scripted to its very core the modern corporation is, and how resistant we as consumers, workers, and managers are to changing those scripts. There are many directors in McDonald’s Theatre, many professional script the lines, design the stage, set up the virtual e-Theatre, train managers and workers for the local and the global stage.

We can stage an Image Theatre of McDonald’s that would be collective, animated, body sculpture. People would assume animated-statue poses of various worker and customer roles and processes that make up McDonald’s fast-food factory.

The subject matter of the McDonald’s Visual Theatre is modeling various kinds of oppression, suggested by the audience. “Consequently this will be [called] a real model of oppression” (Boal, 1992: 173). First we compose the real model, then invite the spect- actors to transform the real model into an’ ideal model,’ in which the oppression has been eliminated.

To set up the real model, volunteers take the stage and act out one proves of work or consumption. Each actor acts out a McDonald’s theme of oppression. But, there is no dialog. Body movements and rhythmic motions of body parts depict each situation of

3 oppression. The director (Boal calls his role the ‘joker’) consults the audience and removes actors from the stage that have no apparent function or convey no meaning.

The joker gives the signal to animate the model of McDonald’s on stage. More adjustments are made to make it as realistic as possible. Each actor claims a space on the stage in which they keep their repeated motions going. Someone could depict the statue of a young teenager, smiling and abut to say a scripted greeting from behind a counter. Another person would be flipping burgers, another stuff bags with fries. All would be pretending to wear headsets so they can multi-task (produce and take orders from the drive-up window). Other bodies would form statuesque poses of customers waiting in lines acting bored, or seated at tables pretending to eat. Kneeling actors could pose as children engaged in play.

You can repeat the motions until the Image Theatre is taken by the spect-actors (doing the on stage work) and by spectators (observing the collective statue) to be an accurate portrayal of McDonald’s

The second dynamics is initiated by a signal form the joker (director) for the participants to inter-relate their body motions to from the McDonald’s machine. This is a socially constructed vision of the McDonald’s model, where before it was a bunch of individuals acting separately. It is moving sculpture of the McDonald’s model of production and consumption. It depicts the repeated motions and scripted interactions between workers, between workers and managers, and between workers and customers. The rhythm is machine-like and the people are robot-like in their repeated motions and interactions.

In Image Theatre, once we have worked out the aspects of Fordism, Taylorism, and Weberism on stage, and we can visualize in Visual Theatre some of the oppressions on stage, we can rescript the poses, interactions, and get some discussion of what a more ideal McDonald’s Theatre would look like. Before we go there, I want to introduce two more Augusto Boal Theatres, Invisibility Theatre and Forum Theatre which can be applied to McDonaldization.

Invisibility Theatre, a way to bring the absent referent on stage

Invisibility Theatre is not realism; it is reality (Boal, 1992: 15).

Invisibility Theatre brings the absent reality on stage; it becomes visible, no longer hidden or taken for granted reality. Invisibility Theatre brings the absent characters, those with roles in global capitalism onto the stage, so they become visible to the spectators. If we construct an Invisibility Theatre we want to bring some characters into the restaurant, normally uninvited, such as the child labor making the toys for the Happy Meals, the animals on their way to the slaughter house, the trees in the disappearing rainforests, or the indigenous who can no longer live off the land they can no longer own, or the family

4 farmers who have sold out to take a job on a factory farm or given up. The many so- called victims of McDonaldization would become visible performers in Invisibility Theatre.

Animal rights, ecology, vegetarian, feminist, anti-sweatshop, and anti-globalist activists would become customers at the McDonald’s, their theatrics would be carnivalesque, full of parody, protest, and satire. They would be waving signs with slogans like McMurder, McGreed, and McJob.

The scenes would move from toy factory, to rain forest, to slaughterhouse, and all these scenes would be juxtaposed with the scene of a family giving their order to the McDonald’s clerk. Animal rights activists would want to gut a cow on stage and let it bleed on the stage, but family values spect-actors would prefer imitations to the real thing.

Beneath the stage, girls in their early teens use fake ID’s, their tender age ignored by bribed officials, are working 16 to 20-hour days, for about twenty pennies, in Third World sweatshops to produce McDonald’s toys, sold to consumers who save a few cents. For example, labor rights and anti-sweatshop activists allege toys distributed at McDonald's restaurants in Hong Kong are made with child labor in China.

Snoopy, Winnie the Pooh and Hello Kitty toys sold with McDonald's meals in Hong Kong are made at a mainland Chinese sweatshop that illegally employs children to package them… The children, as young as 14, work 16-hour days for the equivalent of about $2.95 -- barely the cost of one McDonald's meal in Hong Kong, the Sunday Morning Post reported (The Associated Press Date: 08/27/00 22:15).ii

The use of child labor in this contracting toy manufacturer for McDonald's was furthered confirmed in an interview with the family of a 13-year-old child workers at City Toys with South China Morning Post printed on 3 September 2000. The second report of HKCIC released on 3 September on the five Shenzhen plants found that since 28 August, there had been mass lay-off of both under-aged and adult workers. Cases of under-aged workers being locked up to escape inspection were reported from dismissed workers. Not only did McDonald's turn a deaf ear to these true stories; the corporation seemed happy only with its "announced visits" to the plants and did not demonstrate any sincerity and responsibility to the fact that under-aged workers were sacked and evidences removed to escape investigation (HKCIC, 2000).

Beneath the gleaming exteriors of the boom towns that have exploded near Hong Kong in southern China, thousands of foreign-funded factories employ millions of workers -- many of them children. “We know there are sweatshops in mainland China that employ children in ways that cannot be acceptable," said Law Yuk-kai, a human rights monitor (Chinoy, 2000).

5 In Vietnam, there are similar allegations of child labor used to make Disney toys sold at McDonald’s, but these children earn only 6 pennies an hour and work seven days a week:

There is a company in Viet Nam that manufactures many of the Disney toys that McDonald's licenses for distribution with those packages, Kid's Meals, which are solely aimed at seducing your child's desire for toys, first, and then their taste buds. That company is known as Keyhinge Toys. At the Keyhinge plant in Da Nang City, more than 90% of its employees are young women under the age of 20. These female workers earn less than $.06 (six cents) an hour while being forced to work nine to ten hours a day, seven days a week (that's just $4.20 per week, less than you make each hour) [Cannon, 2001].

Corporate Theatre becomes a set of staged acts and performances scripted to mislead the spectators, when a scandal breaks. For example, the National Labor Committee also alleges Happy Meal toys produced at Keyhinge factories in China have mandatory 14 to 15 hour shifts, such as the Chi Wah Toy factory, where in 1992, 23 workers were hospitalized and three died after benzene exposure. "I'm sure that when families go into McDonald's and get a Happy Meal, they don't think about those toys," says Charles Kernaghan (Emery, 1997). Why change the script, if the spectators are packing the Theatre? McDonald’s, when confronted with charges of child labor practices, points to its script, its code of conduct, which prohibits its subcontractors from doing such things. When customers threaten to boycott the chain, then McDonald’s promises a full inquiry and more visits to the factories by monitors. If it is a major story, blame it on "inadequate record-keeping" by the internal and external auditing system. If all else fails, cancel the contract with the maligned City Toys factory, and contract with another in China. But, if McDonald’s really cares about children, should not the children and their families be compensated over and above the poverty wages they received in abusive sweatshop conditions?

We do not need to go to Vietnam or China to find examples of McDonald’s employing children. The U.S. Department of Labor's most recent six-month child labor enforcement sweep, netted several McDonald franchises and corporate stores:

McBee Enterprises, which operates a McDonald's Restaurant franchise in West Bridgewater, MA, was fined $6,750 for employing ten 14/15 year old minors contrary to the hours standard…

A McDonald's Restaurant corporate store in Milford, MA, was fined $1,800 for employing two minors beyond the hours permitted…

Pabenco, Inc., operating a McDonald's Restaurant in Brockton, MA, was fined $4,000 for the unlawful employment of twelve minors UUS Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division, 2000).iii

There are earlier sweeps for child labor in McDonald’s that go back to 1996, with fines as high as $53,550 at a single franchise.iv In 1997, there were 129 different recurring

6 violators by corporate and franchise McDonald’s owners (Mendoza, 1997). Ask yourself, if McDonald’s is unable to consistently police child labor violations in the US, is it really that interested in child labor in Vietnam or China? And are consumers interested in young labor in either Asia or US?

The point of Invisible Theatre is to bring the off stage and the beneath the stage up front and personal onto the center stage. There would be delicious and oppressive episodes. Ronald would defend the Invisible Theatre, trying to get the spectators to notice his clowning around, to focus their attention on chasing all the Burger heisters from the main stage. This is not the silent Theatre of Image work. Here spect-actors would say provocative things like”

“Ronald, do you kill the animals yourself?”

“Ronald, how many trees are cut to make these packages?”

“Ronald, do you think your have the right to cut down the rainforests to make grazing land?”

“Ronald’s how many chickens live in a cage?”

This is a provocative engagement, an on stage encounter between spectacles of corporate power and the carnival of resistance movements. And it is corporate power that is in the McSpotlight.

The Invisible Theatre could begin with a scene reenacting the leafleting of a UK McDonald’s, challenging the nutritional value of the food, making accusations about child labor, animal cruelty, McJobs, and ecological destruction. Then, famous scenes from the trial, the longest in British history, between McDonald’s and two Greenpeace activists could be stage, focusing on the farce, the absurd lines executives spoke when they responded to questions. Indivisibility Theatre shares much in common with the Theatre of the Absurd. No need to improvise to create absurd lines, there are plenty of actual ones in the trail transcript.

Invisibility Theatre, once it has established its oppression claims, can then turn towards solutions. Vegetarians would want more salads, soy substitutes for chicken, fish, pork, and beef. These new scenes could be acted out to test worker, owner, and customer reactions. A more festive Invisible Theatre can be staged, one where people can move their tables and chairs, make special orders, take their time and eat and talk for hours. This would attract the slow food folks, but may alienate the vegetarians and animal rights activists who would want to change the menu to non-meat and for vegans non-dairy cuisine.

There could be two restaurants on the same stage, for is fast food, and the other is slow food, so that spectators would get a feel for both.

7 Forum Theatre, a way to test out new scripts of capitalism

Forum Theatre is a sort of fight or game, and like all forms of game or fight there are rules. They can be modified, but they still exist, to ensure that the players are involved in the same enterprise, and to facilitate the generation of serious and fruitful discussion (Boal, 1992: 18).

A McDonald’s Forum Theatre takes the confrontation between antagonists and protagonists to a new level, and allows for stop-action script changes, and revisions to the plot, scripts, and games so that transformations can happen.

The consumption Theatre is being actively resisted as seen in the 1999 Battle of Seattle, street Theatre, which began when crazies threw a rubbish bin through the window of a McDonald's. The distribution Theatre is being resisted by animal rights, environmental, and anti-fast food activists. The beef sales are down since the mad-cow disease crisis scared customers away from Big Mac and Quaterpounder burgers.

In Forum Theatre, more than the other two, spect-actors can call stop to the staged performances, make a change in the actors, develop a new script, or change directors. Any spect-actor can stop and restart the scene. Scenes are played again and again, with different lines, props, and characters, to fine-tune tactics and strategies to overcome felt and manifest oppression. Forum Theatre is solution oriented, a place also to test the consequences of a script change. Boal takes the role he calls the “joker,” someone to provoke people to stretch a bit more in their acting, and dare to challenge power.

Forum Theatre is also a game with rules. Image and Invisibility Theatres are pre- requisites to Forum Theatre, because the situation, its standards, scripts and routines much be thoroughly understood so that the situations of oppression can be deconstructed, and rescripting and resituations can be staged. The game of confrontation between protagonist and antagonist has its rule, as well. This allows the game to be played with a change in the rules, new rules, and new tactics can be tested for limitations and consequences.

In all three forms of Boal’s Theatre, Image, Invisibility, and Forum, a particular perspective or ideology of the world is juxtaposed or directly opposed by one or more others. Spect-actors get a chance to explore these competing images, make invisible referents visible, and have a democratic way to for spect-actors to try out script changes, plot changes, and tactics that counter various oppressions.

McDonald’s was once the most revered corporate success legend is becoming the symbol of a worldwide anti-globalism, slow food, environmentalist, anti-child labor, and anti- logo campaign, I call a carnival of resistance. Carnival theatrics is increasingly used to resist the spectacle theatrics of McDonald’s. The problem is that an increasingly vocal

8 worldwide network of protest views McDonaldization as a threat to cultural, biological, economic and social diversity.

9 i Shared Capitalism Institute web site accessed December 3, 2001 http://www.sharedcapitalism.org/index.html ii The Associated Press (2000). McDonald's toys come from sweatshop that employs children. Date: 08/27/00 22:15 accessed November 17, 2001 http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/business.pat,business/3774b670.827,.html iii US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division (2000). August 29, 2000 Press Release Accessed November 18, 2001 http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/media/press/whd/whd20000829.htm iv (1996) US Department of Labor, Employment Standards Administration division press release. “Smithburg Inc., doing business as McDonald's, 381 S. Chicago Rd., Coldwater, Mich., has been assessed a civil money penalty of $53,550 by the U.S. Department of Labor for alleged federal child labor violations” accessed November 18, 2001 http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/media/press/whd/ch3618.htm