University of Virginia Library

A Dramaturgical Model
for Interpreting Action and Conflict

Social order is a matter of consent; leaders must persuade followers to accept them. Once done, maintaining approval becomes an ongoing activity, varying in degree with the openness of the system involved. A dictator with strong military support is relatively safe in his power position; a congressman in Washington seldom leaves the campaign platform. The legitimacy possessed by any leader is his key to power; without it he loses not only status and prestige but also his ability to achieve goals.

Maintenance of legitimacy is not unlike a drama. When the script is written as comedy, its plot deliberately sanctions doubt. The audience is invited to suspend its presumptions and convictions and to focus on the incongruities and hypocrisies being dramatized by the actors. Unlike tragedy, which envelops its audience on an emotional level, comedy ultimately appeals to reason. The audience must judge the stage action: Does it confirm or deny the unmasking of the heroic figures? That is, are the power- and status-wielding actors deserving of their legitimacy, or ought they to be denuded and dislodged?

Heroes generally appeal for audience support to maintain the existing social order-i.e., their own legitimacy-on grounds of stability, orthodoxy, tradition, and the like. Their challengers, the villains who may be wearing the white hats all along, appeal for change in social order-and hence in heroic figures-on the basis of obstinacy, heresy, and stagnation in power circles.

Real-life drama flowers as comedy in environments where open criticism is considered valuable; in a democratic social order many of the mechanisms for change and development assume the public form of comedies acted before the voters, the financial supporters, the volunteer workers, etc. In the words of Hugh Duncan:

Thus social action often assumes the form of comedy played before significant audiences. It aims to challenge the credibility of the goals espoused by organizational elites in light of their (organizational) behavior. Both the heroes and the villains plot and act to win audience approval and assurance of legitimacy and cooperative support. Although some kinds of dialogue and action can always be predicted by past stage plays and the experiences of the actors and audiences involved, the outcome is seldom inevitable. In the unrehearsed and unscripted drama of social action, the heroes in the last act will be those most able to woo the audience while discrediting their opponents.

Viewed from a dramaturgical perspective, the adversary relationships engendered in the public arena by the Congregation represent a form of competition. Both parties are competing for public support. Both operate within a framework of rules, those of fair play. To do otherwise could be to draw boos from the audience and to strengthen the opponent's appeal.

Yet, differing from competition in one significant respect, such dramas are termed conflict situations. The struggle's reward is not the same for both parties. Unlike an election, where opponents compete for a particular public office, or an athletic event, where teams compete for the higher score, in social conflict situations the parties seek contradictory goals. Ordinarily such struggles in the public arena focus upon issue-relevant behavior or policy. One opponent challenges, the other defends the status quo. Both seek to have their will prevail. From the challenger's position, the goal of conflict is social change.

When a social-action group appeals for social change, the individual or organization from which such change is sought may respond in one of three ways. First, it may ignore the challenge and continue business as usual. This is an appropriate response when the challenger lacks visibility or where the request is so outrageous as to greatly undermine credibility. Second, it may defend present policy or make cosmetic modifications to give the appearance of reasonable flexibility and accommodation. Third, it

may counterattack and seek to destroy the credibility of the challenger.

The Congregation for Reconciliation, in its major action projects in Dayton, has enjoyed a great deal of visibility through the news media. This has rendered the first counter-strategy option useless to their opponents. The second option, since its use is only slightly disruptive to normal routine, has been the favored one, while the third possibility has had mostly surreptitious use.

Interestingly, the Congregation has met little public challenge to their credibility and tactics in the form of attacking their label as a Christian social-action group. Such assaults have issued, however, within private conversations and meetings, both from those being directly challenged by the group and from others more peripheral to the action. In terms of dramatic action, such gestures are specifically directed only to segments of the public audience and are used to sway important persons' opinions through the device of invitation backstage, or into the inner circle. We learned in our interviews, for instance, of one clergyman (peripheral to the target of Congregation challenge) who endorsed negative reactions among civically influential laity by privately expressing his own disillusionment with Righter. Though he had actually had only minimal acquaintance with him, he made claims of close personal ties now suffering because of Righter's credibility. Such conversations, while outside the rules of fair play, are an effective strategy technique.

In the public drama, elites-i.e., those with legitimacy-tend to make the rules, and they do so to maximize their advantage. Those who would challenge their legitimacy and authority to write the script and determine the action of the drama must do so without resorting to foul play. Surprise, then, can become an important weapon to catch elites off guard, without script or stage directions. Comedy and irony are institutionally sanctioned forms of disrespect which can be disarming to adversaries in political struggle. While no one in Dayton seems to know the actual size of the Congregation, there is a general awareness that they are not a very large group. This itself, a tiny band of activists taking on the most powerful institutions of the city, is a form of comedy and irony which the Congregation has used well.

The Congregation's image as a conflict group is firmly established. Thus, to those opposing any kind of conflict or confrontation to achieve social change, the Congregation is by definition illegitimate. Three important factors tend to offset this disadvantage. First, some people have come to accept social protest as a legitimate means to redress grievances in American society. Second, the drama is seldom played to win the approval or attention of the total community. Third, in any confrontation, the Congregation's primary objective is not preservation of their own legitimacy but the questioning of the legitimacy of their adversaries. They need be concerned with protecting their own legitimacy and credibility only within certain parameters and to certain audiences, especially the media and community leaders who tacitly support their objectives even though they may disapprove of their means. To achieve this entails honesty, avoidance of the double-cross or other forms of betrayal, accuracy in their research, and faithfulness to their theological rationale.

This is not to say the Congregation can abandon concern for image management in the broader community. Indeed, public perception of its action tactics is important, and it has usually avoided tactics likely to alienate virtually the entire community. For example, at no point in the life of this group has any member strategically used, or threatened to use, civil disobedience. No member of the Congregation has been arrested during their demonstrations. By any comparable measure, the tactics pursued by the Congregation have been milder than those followed by other social-action groups in Dayton during the late 1960s. This pattern emerged at the onset. In their first social-action project, the Christmas card leafleting of the National Cash Register Company in 1968, the message was so mild as to belie interpretation as threat. After introducing themselves as a Christian action group sponsored by the Presbyterians, their message stated:

Since this is a rather typical tone for the group, the question arises as to why others perceive them as "militant'' and "radical." Also, we should make explicit that, contrary to the image of Righter as belligerent and uncompromising, we found few who openly view him as so. On the contrary, most people, including his adversaries, find him mild-mannered, soft-spoken, well organized, and persuasive in presenting his views. Why such dramatically different images? There is no simple answer or easy explanation, but let us consider several issues related to the public image of the Congregation and its pastor.

First, the idea of a Christian church for the expressed purpose of pursuing social action is itself incongruent to a very large majority of the American public. Hence, from the onset, the problem of establishing credibility for this experimental congregation loomed large. For many, any social-action project would be "too radical." Had the proposal for an experimental social-action congregation been submitted in the form of a general referendum -to the lay people of the Miami Presbytery, approval would have been unlikely.

A social-action project in the name of the church threatens the average person far more than the same project pursued by some secular group. The church-based group creates cognitive dissonance. When a Black Panther, for example, indicts white society as racist, the average individual has a whole multitude of cognitive apparatuses for dismissing the legitimacy of the charge. But when a white middle-class Christian congregation makes the same charge, the process is complicated by their claiming legitimacy in the name of the same faith as those indicted. To dismiss the issue, the average person must find some basis to discredit his accusers. Hence, fault-finding becomes the name of the game. Retaining public legitimacy becomes an extremely difficult and precarious task.

For those most disturbed and threatened by the presence of a social-action congregation, fault-finding leaves few stones unturned. Its pastor emerges as an outside radical, understanding neither the problems of the community nor the tremendous progress already made. Members of the congregation are typified as radical or misguided idealists mesmerized by a Pied Piper, the Presbytery is controlled by kooks, and any pastor expressing the slightest sympathy becomes immediately suspect. That this reservoir of ill will was not more successfully tapped in Dayton by the Congregation's opponents seems remarkable. We can only surmise that perceptions of the particular role of religious belief in the individual and collective psyche lent this option an air of fragility. Thus, such tactics seldom occurred on front and center stage, where the audience might respond defensively and render the counterattack counterproductive.