Salon Selectives (Theatreforte)

An amalgam in which I remix what everyone said, probably misrepresent it in some cases, and then you have to click on the words to find out where they came from. You might even have to dig through comments.

Yikes. Maybe we shouldn't wish for Salon and Slate to cover theatre more often. It was so perfectly designed to be attention-getting and infuriating that it's hard to know where to begin. It is, though, a real eye-opener to see how people outside the theatre community view the theatre.

Peter Birkinhead is correct when he says that theater is increasingly less relevant, but his conclusions - that theater should become more like TV - couldn't be further off, unless he means that theater should be free or very cheap, infinitely reproducible, and go to peoples' houses.

When did television and film become the polar opposite of theatre? Both use actors to tell a story. Both mediums can learn from each other.

It's about understanding that theatre doesn't exist without an audience, and neither does TV, that's what they have in common. And if we learn from that success rather than writing it off as consumer bullshit, we might be able to stop marginalizing ourselves, and do what we have always wanted to do, connect with other human beings.

But, as a playwright living in New York who sees theater a few times a week, and sees theater in other American cities approximately once a month on average, I can say with some degree of authority that theater that looks like TV is in fact ubiquitous.

The advice about how to right all this ranges from "stop being ambitious" to "stop thinking your work is important" to "stop pandering" to "stop thinking you're smarter than your audience" to "stop trying to be so thoughtful." More positive exhortations are made to "start being more entertaining" and "start listening to communities" and "start thinking locally".

But how can the theater be irrelevant when more than 12 million people bought a ticket to a Broadway show last season? More broadly, how can the New York theater be irrelevant when there are hundreds of nonprofit Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater companies?

When did entertaining an audience become a bad thing? I can't think of a great play or film that isn't entertaining.

There is a hostility towards theatre among the masses, and I think it revolves around a perception that we are elitist and snobby. And in some ways, it is hard to argue that it isn't true.

It's not new to us, and probably not new to a lot of people in this city, but most people across the country equate "theatre" with Broadway's business of selling nostalgia. That's what they think theatre is, and it may be one of the reasons why they're not checking out their local indie theater who's producing the work of a new playwright.

The problem is that Broadway is brilliantly branded and has been for a century or more; "regional theatre" is not a brand and is about as sexy as the Periodic Table.

As for the Tony Awards, well, I'm a working playwright and I still don't care about them, which says more about Broadway than it does about theater in general.

TV is better and more adventurous than ever before, especially HBO. The exciting stuff for me is the stuff that cannot be done on TV like Eurydice at 2nd stage. I for one am tired of the endless articles about what is wrong with the theatre. We know this. Tell me what's right with it. Or if you don't know what's right with it, stop seeing Broadway and start seeing the shows that matter.

As a playwright, I don't have to compete with The Sopranos. I have contend with the stereotypes that my work is obscure, or high-brow or "not for people who watch TV." That, my friends, is a far tougher opponent than David Chase.

Theatre isn't a very "nimble" form in its current configuration. It takes too long to get a play up, which means contemporary relevance is usually sacrificed.

This is, then, the trap - like most else in American life, the theater lives from season to season, doing what is necessary rather than what is right, and it gets less relevant and less interesting and more expensive.

So, what does it take to get someone to look at something they don't care about?

I think maybe we need to stop treating theater as if it is some delicate hothouse flower in constant danger of extinction if we don't feed it exactly the right formula.

Listen, I don't know squat about pop culture. My TV isn't hooked up to cable, I rarely go to movies, I mainly listen to NPR, and I don't get a daily newspaper. So I can't talk about the innovation of "The Sopranos." But I do know that there is high regard for that TV series, and many others, that I don't hear in relation to theatre. Now, we can accept that marginalization and revel in it or we can try to figure out something that would make theatre more exciting.

Theatre people are compassionate people who want to reach out to the masses because they believe in their work and how it can help people. I truly believe that. But I also believe that they still refuse to let their art form participate in the actual culture of society. Theatre marginlizes itself more and more all the time with these off conversations of being the cultural landmark of society, while not actually being part of the culture at all.

So this incestuous loop becomes the result where the theatre is better than the population and therefore, the culture, and falls completely off the radar map of any sort of audience the theatre might wish to employ. We keep asking "Why won't you come?" And then we condemn them for not being there, and we demonize their own immersion in a popular culture that they created. What use do they have for us then? Why should they listen to us if we aren't speaking to them in a language they understand nor want to?

I want something different. I think that artists need to be border dwellers, we need to be both outside and inside our communities. Inside enough to speak for the group, outside enough to speak to the group. When we're so deep in our own subjective experience, we often miss important things that are going on.

People in the theatre are pretentious snobs who write by candlelight, even though the rest of us are using lightbulbs.

... and ...

Theatre is high art, a landscape for the mind, a sort of spiritual happening that is ceaselessly compromised by the desires of the revolting marketplace and its progeny.

But ...

I am building a cathedral - but I get to choose whether or not the cathedral I'm a part of is one of materialism and lower standards and conformism or a monument to the power of individual and group creation, the unbridled freedom of an artist without limitations.

Comments (2)

Joseph Hayes:

Aside from exposing me and the world) to an incredible collection of opinion, this entry might be the best editing job I've ever seen.

Posted by Joseph Hayes | June 15, 2007 2:26 PM

Posted on June 15, 2007 14:26

Tony:

It really tied the room together

Posted by Tony | June 15, 2007 4:49 PM

Posted on June 15, 2007 16:49

Salon Selectives

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