Should theatre be socially motivated? Thoughts on Political Theater

I'm going to assume that 'socially motivated' theater means, for lack of a better term, 'political' theater.

Let's further define 'political theater' as a drama that emphasizes a political issue in an attempt to change peoples mind's about that issue. If changing peoples' minds about a specific issue (e.g., AIDS), is the starting or primarily goal of a creating 'art,' then I think it's reasonable to define that 'art' as 'political.'

Finally, let's define any play that does NOT have this as a starting or primarily goal as 'poetic' theater - with no more justification than the term 'playwright' appears to have been coined by Ben Jonson in his XLIX Epigram, To Playwright, where he argues that "true" writers of plays are 'poets' while 'playwrights' are creating something inferior. Today, of course, 'playwright' has lost that negative connotation.

I've long believed that there's a difference between political and poetic theater.

And I've always been suspicious of 'political theater,' or theater that's 'socially motivated' for the simple reason that while I believed that 'Stories' always have 'Truths' . . .

. . . 'Truths' do not necessarily have 'Stories.'

This isn't to say that certain 'Truths' cannot find their way from art into social life and politics, but the danger is producing propaganda rather than art if one's starting goal is political.

Not that propaganda is necessarily bad - I have my biases and world viewpoint, and I'll respond to propaganda as positively as the next person, but it's just really preaching to the crowd who already agrees with you and further alienating those who don't.

I don't know how great art finds Truth (or perhaps Truth somehow naturally finds its way into great art), but I think of the great plays, like Fences by August Wilson, or Master Harold & The Boys by Athol Fugard. These plays will touch anyone, everyone - and anyone and everyone, except for the naturally incorrigible, will be affected by these stories. While these stories, I'm sure, have affected and influenced social change, I don't believe that was their starting goal - they rest on an intuitively eternal Truth . . . and all else follows.

I can't "prove" any of this. I'm really arguing for creating art from a starting place of 'innocence' and 'openness' because my intuitions tells me that eternal Truth comes (somehow) out of that to create Art . . .

. . . but Art will not come out of Truth, no matter how "true" it is . . .