All Idiot, no America

Last week I went to see Berkeley Rep‘s much-hyped staging of a rock opera set to Green Day‘s 2003 concept album American Idiot. This seemed like a sure-fire winner of an evening. I am a huge fan of the album, I grew up in Berkeley, Green Day famously got their “start” at 924 Gilman, a local punk club, and I know that Berkeley Rep also helped launch Stew‘s brilliant musical Passing Strange — so I figured this couldn’t go wrong.

But I was wrong and so was the show.

The play took the record and managed to reduce all of the punky post-9/11 angst, all of the clever insights and all of the whip-smart political commentary to a thinly woven narrative about three friends and the choices they make (one gets his girlfriend pregnant; one leaves town for fortune, fame and drugs; one joins the army). Green Day’s smarts were reduced to smugness while the actors retained the band’s famous brattiness but none of their brains.

The show seems to have forgotten the ways in which the album conjures up a very difficult 21st century American landscape in which individual choices are always in conversation with larger political and cultural structures. Despite nods to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to George Bush, the play fails to make them speak to its characters, and vice versa.

All of the things that made this album so good were crushed beneath an overblown cast and an under-inflated story. The story of this record lies not in the play’s moralizing tale about drugs, family, salvation, and relationships, but in what it means to not have the choice to live elsewhere when your country is waging wars you don’t support. It articulates frustration and confusion and the knowledge that one might hold on to the American Dream despite the fact that it is so patently a lie. None of the tension that is woven throughout the album managed to make the jump to the stage. The notes sounded right and the postures looked familiar, but the sense of the sound simply wasn’t there.

There were a few nice moments, such as the staging of “When September Ends” as an allegory for an endless autumn, that began on September 11. But following such a moving evocation of that day’s losses, the story somehow fell back into its tritely packaged narrative about individual choices and their consequences. But the record isn’t fueled by petty choices, but by the sense that one can’t choose everything, and that we are somehow, regularly, caught by political and cultural forces beyond our own control. Thus: life in post-9/11 America, where we are all in danger of being American idiots.

On an airplane the following day, I dialed in the album on my iPod, to figure out if what I thought I heard in earlier listenings was still there. It was. The tensions it captures still ring true, the guitars still resonate and the lyrics still stand as one of the strongest expressions of the politics of the last decade. It is still a great album — sometimes the fury ought to remain sound.