American Theater: Not Dead Yet? A Seattlest Debate

Jeremy: Yeah, I have no real concern for the fate of regional theaters, per se, either. It almost felt like he was setting up a strawman argument: regional theaters were founded on a decent premise, blah blah blah, but they strayed from the path and are failing. Who cares? That's business. I think it was disingenuous of him to mock Americans' preoccupation with how much better Europe does by its artists, and then to make some sort of community argument for the value of theater and how we should support it under X, Y, and Z circumstances.

Most theater businesses fail and always have; that's irrelevant to art. Most rock clubs, music labels, and art galleries fail, too. If we were to take his title as his thesis, how the theater failed America is that it failed to achieve some perverse business/artistic synergy to both be part of the local community and at the same time comment and add to it, which is, in the end, nothing but either hippie crap or grotesque "run an arts organization like a private business" management theory. Neither interests me, and neither actually touches on your criticism: namely, that the theater is unpopular because it's irrelevant.

Daisey seemed to dance around the point with his joking bit on ticket prices, about how the theater managers worried that if they lowered the tickets in a meaningful way, people still wouldn't come. He never offered any defense of the art itself, that it could draw people in on its own merit. And this, apparently, was meant to contrast the regionals and the weird Seattle "garage theater" (by which I assume he meant both low-budget and fringe) that he did.

I'm sorry, but perhaps the reason people don't give a shit about the theater in general is that self-righteous artists like him are more concerned about how weird they can make jacking-off in Jean Genet's The Balcony (which is one of my favorite plays) than anything else. In fact, I grew fed up with Daisey because he doesn't touch on anything relevant. Maybe he should take a hard look at his own work in the past and ask if he really did anything worth seeing, because I have my doubts. Maybe it's the self-absorption of spotlight huggers like Daisey that's wrong with the theater, a fault that can be duly distributed across the fringe and regional theater worlds, all the way up to Broadway. Now that'd be a critique!

Charles: Well I think we can agree that Daisey wasn't talking about what we were talking about re: the relevance of theater, though it definitely sounded as if he were going to. I realized that he wasn't going to be pointing out the real failings of theater (at least as I see them) near the end of the first "scene" when he laid the blame for theater's failure of America at the feet of the audience. Speaking to an audience filled with Seattle theater insiders, it sounded at that point like he might believe that theater has become irrelevant because of all the onstage masturbation (literally and figuratively) that goes on in the theater. But he really blamed those people for not beating off onstage enough in an effort to sell season tickets.

How surprising is that though, coming from a man whose "art" is just this side of stand-up comedy? One-man shows are all well and good, but if every single one is just a sweaty guy sitting at a desk telling stories, is it really theater? When I consider the actors I've known in my life, I'd say his dream is about par for the course with theirs, and that's why theater is now irrelevant in my book. When you put a person (or even a bunch of them) onstage and let them say and do whatever they want, the point is for the audience to listen and then clap in all the right places, nothing more. When people create other forms of art these days, a dialogue is a required part of it. There's no room for that in theater.

I imagine when Daisey got down to it, blaming his behind-the-desk masturbation for the death of theater in America ended up hitting too close to home. Ironically, Daisey is a successful force in theater these days because he has commodified and packaged his product. (In fact, really the only theater work Daisey has done that has made a larger impact on the world did so because of its existence on YouTube.) As you say, he should take a good, hard look at what he does and the relevance it has. If his monologues can't help the business of theater save itself, can anything?

I'm curious though, since we both seem to agree that this show's thesis misses the mark, do you still think American theater, in any form, can add anything to our cultural conversation?

Jeremy: Oh, absolutely. I really do. Theater is very different from film (to say nothing of visual art and literature), and it has a set of unique tools it can use to explore our culture. Personally, what I find so compelling about the theater is that it's not nearly as manipulative as I think film is. Film does the seeing for the viewer; the camera becomes the viewer's eye. And it feels for the viewer, too, with soundtracks and cinematic devices. But you can't control what people look at on the stage (one of the reasons a lot of theater isn't very good--it's really hard to do well!) and you certainly can make audiences feel a certain way just by playing a cheesy pop song.

One of the shows I've seen in the last few years that's really stuck with me is a great example of this: My Name is Rachel Corrie. Corrie was Evergreen College student who went to the Palestinian territories and was killed by an Israeli bulldozer back in 2003. The play was intended to be a fairly didactic one-person show that humanized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and made the ethical case for supporting the Palestinians, and really shouldn't have been very good.

But what was so compelling was precisely how the show failed to make its black-and-white point. Based on Corrie's journal entries, her increasingly cynical, "on message" politi-speak kept creeping in to what she wrote, and therefore what the actor was left to work with. It stopped being a story about some naive innocent with good intentions getting murdered (how her story was played in the sympathetic media) and became a story of a savvy political activist trying to manipulate the media to her side's benefit.

I don't think any film would have managed to fail quite so spectacularly to make its political point. On the stage, the only person we see is Corrie; her experiences are relayed in writing, and at least I felt by the end that she was an unreliable narrator of her own life. Any film would predictably feature lots of lingering shots of extreme poverty and desperation in the West Bank or Gaza, in hyper-saturated color and with a soundtrack of swelling symphony. But on the stage, left to confront only Corrie's own words, the audience can't be browbeaten with emotional firepower into an uncritical sympathy for the Palestinians and for Corrie. It may not have been intended by the authors of the play, but the end results was an ambivalent, challenging work and a complex, multidimensional character that, in fact, rose above the Israelis vs. Palestinians rancor that followed the show to the Rep.

And that's just one example, and a fairly simple one. The point is, the theater has unique tools at its disposal, and while I don't dispute that most theater artists ignore them or, at best, apply them poorly, that's a far cry from asserting the entire field has reached its zenith and is on the wane.

Charles: Except that with a show like the one you mention, I was not and can never be touched by it because I did not see it. Your point about cinema "seeing" for you and more easily manipulating your emotions is well taken, but I think that the conservation that can be had around a movie or a book or a blog by definition makes it that much more relevant. All of those forms can be translated onto the Web and into our homes. Theater never can be, and that's where I get lost.

It's interesting that the show you cite as an example is one-person show because I was thinking about what theater has made an impression on me. Short of the glamor of a re-make of Guys and Dolls I saw on Broadway when I was in college, the best have been one-person shows. There is still something about the power and vitality of one person alone on a stage telling his or her story. But then, that can be transfered with relative ease to the screen and I can talk about it from my office, can't I?

Jeremy: Good live music can't be easily translated into a form for the office or home, either--I welcome you to suggest as much and get the music community on my side. Some things you just have to go see to really experience, and people do go out to lots of live events. My Name is Rachel Corrie drew in a fairly diverse audience, particularly compared to most of the plays I attend, which are filled with graying heads. It touched on something, and if we had more theater like that, we'd have more people interested in the theater. As it stands, I think the only reason the Rep put it on was its pedigree (West End and Broadway) and its local angle.

As for one-person shows, you're absolutely right: there is power and vitality to just having one person standing up on the stage and saying something. But I think that's because it eliminates the so-called "willing suspension of disbelief." Too many of the ensemble plays staged in Seattle are more or less in the realist mode, and I'll give you that film does that much better than theater. Personally, I prefer theatrical events, shows that are aware of the limitations of the stage and play with it.

One-person shows do that, but plenty of other theater does, too, and it translates poorly to the screen. Tony Kushner's Angels in America is a great example--his use of the same actors playing multiple characters (and the way he uses those choices to create a dialogue) works on the stage, but just wasn't that convincing in the HBO miniseries. Its fidelity to realism either made it feel awkward and incomprehensible, or the make-up and costuming was so good you really didn't see characters X and Y as they same person, which also hurt the dynamic he was creating through those choices.

Charles: Totally true on live music, but I don't go see shows to hear the band's take on life. I go to hear the music at exceptional volumes and the energy of it being played live. To get their "art" or "comment" I throw on the CD and take in the songs over and over again.

Here's to tearing down the strictures of theater, but instead of relying on Angels in America or Rachel Corrie to do it, I say, take the form and move it out of the bounds of the proscenium or at least tear the script into shreds and try something new. Theatrical events, site-specific theater and street theater can take one to wonderful places because they are surprising and vibrant and involve the audience in the performance without turning into some kind of weird 60s-era thing where people are dragged onto stage and made to strip to their underwear. (Though I did once show my bellybutton to an audience for a dollar when I saw Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind at the Empty Space in the mid-'90s.)

Jeremy: Isn't that dangerously close to the sort of theater Mike Daisey talked up? That we agreed verged on the irrelevant? I'm not trying to make a blanket statement on it--some is good, some is bad, and it is being done and many people enjoy it. It's not all weird for the sake of being weird. Could we use more? Possibly. If it's good. Otherwise, what's it contributed? As for street theater put to the benefit of political protest or the like, I find that more often than not just plain tiresome. My point about plays like Angels in America or Rachel Corrie is that there are plays in a more traditional mode being written and performed which are relevant, which present complex subjects and problems that are deeply important to our lives. And people do respond to them, and people are seeing them.

Charles: No, no, no. I don't mean people ripping off their robes and masturbating in front of 14-year-olds. I mean women dressed in 1940s-era clothes walking around Pioneer Square with typewriters on their necks and writing poetry in a minute based on your life story. I mean a piece about a relationship that started and ended on a ferry performed on the ferry (that's not something I've seen, just an example of site-specific). Weird for the sake of weird may be entertaining sometimes, but it is no more relevant than the bland shit put on at regional theaters.

Maybe I am wrong about Rachel Corrie because, as you say, it drew a diverse audience so can affect more people's conversation. But when it comes right down to it, the majority of people in this country don't go see theater and don't really have the opportunity to see any unless the happen to get tickets to The Lion King on Broadway when they visit NYC. They certainly don't seek out fringe theater when they go anywhere else. I think when the vast majority of the country leaves an entire art form behind, that makes it largely irrelevant.

Jeremy: But that's my point. Most of what is put on at regional theaters is irrelevant and boring, and they have another option. The sort of theater you're describing does sound fascinating, but it's not too far from some of the things we have. When hundreds of zombies descend on a neighborhood, isn't that using some sort of collective art to shatter the quotidian? I'm not arguing against what you're talking about, but I think there's some presuppositions you're making.

I've never argued that fringe theater was good; it was tiresome and uncreative and utterly failed at its purported purpose to be the "writer's theater." The writers, such as they were, were usually theater school kids who were writing self-referential crap no one cared about. Picking up a listing from the Seattle Fringe Festival, virtually every third show was somehow an adaptation, parody, satire or commentary of Hamlet. Not good, not creative. But to suggest that means there aren't plenty of serious playwrights out there writing complex stories taking advantage of the theater's unique tools--whether that's on a proscenium stage, in a black box, or somewhere totally unexpected--that are relevant to our society is a proposition I don't understand.

Again, my goal isn't to defend the vast majority of the theater that's done. I'm just saying there is great theater out there that's meaningful and is cared about, debated, and relevant to more people than just the aged, well-off folks who can afford subscriptions to the larger theaters. I just feel that the cynicism some people have regarding theater threatens to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Charles: I don't think I ever said that there aren't plenty of serious playwrights out there "writing complex stories taking advantage of the theater's unique tools," I just don't think what is made with those tools is generally viewed as a useful part of the conversation anymore. But, I think we do have some common ground. It's that the performance has got to be done well and be unique.