EVERYONE'S HAVING FUN WITHOUT ME!

It's my own damn fault. I haven't been writing and the conversation's moving on without ol' SlowLearner.

As far as I can make out, it goes like this:

Laura wrote this.

George responded.

Laura responded to George.

Dan responded to Laura's first thing.

Laura responded to Dan.

Dan responded to Laura.

Plus all these postings have plenty of other players in their comments sections.

I'm still figuring my way into this conversation. It touches on a lot of things I think about, and there's about nine different blog entries I could write in response. Instead of writing any of the nine today, I'm going to put down the first few disparate responses that come to mind.

Isn't the simplest explanation for a decrease in the cultural currency of and attendance at theater the fact that movies, television, and the internet deliver the gratification of popular entertainment faster, cheaper, easier, around-the clock, and with fewer demands on the human attention-span? Why does Wal-Mart always close down mom n' pop stores? They're open later and the same items are cheaper.

Yeah, that's the simplest explanation. But maybe there's more to parse here. Laura makes references to email blasts and "supporting each other" (something I've been meaning to write my own post about), with this money quote:

Theater doesn’t need to be a dying art form, but our attitudes betray our intentions. Think about that next time you send your blast emails announcing your latest show. It doesn’t need to be this way.

This is a little confusing to me. I send out email blasts whenever I have a new play opening. The only people I can get to come to plays are people I know or people who know others involved in the production. But there's a difference between why attendance is limited at my plays and why attendance might be limited at one or many of Terrence McNally's plays.

There are more plays by new playwrights than the market can bear. The play I create, so far, are among the excess. It won't be like that forever, but that's the way it is right now. I'm totally unknown. My name isn't a brand - my name doesn't carry with it an implied promise of quality based on memories and images associated with my name.

Terrence McNally's name is a brand. He's got a couple hits behind him. Several of his plays have done good busuness in regional theater (though probably not Love! Valor! Compassion! or Corpus Christi). A new Terrence McNally play will have a marketing team behind it. It will be produced by a reputable theater company, one that carries its own brand. It may feature known actors who carry their own brands. It will be noted and reviewed by media outlets that carry their own brand. McNally is, or has been, one of the producers of new plays the market will bear. He might send an email blast to his friends, I don't know, but he doesn't have to. I have to.

So, if attendance has dropped at Terrence McNally plays over the last however many years, then we're talking about something a little harder to understand than why people don't go to plays by Mac Rogers or why attendance at theater has dropped precipitously over the last fifty years. Suddenly we're dealing with this question: If a certain subset of people have continued to be theater-goers over the last fifty years despite the the explosion of cheaper, easier forms of entertainment, but that many of them have stopped recently, then why is that?

Laura also talks about the politically strident fringe theater pushing people away. Here again is a proposition I don't completely understand. Laura uses two examples:

“It is YOU who is racist!” A prominent playwright declared by bluntly holding a mirror and having the spotlight on the audience during one production.

“Racism is horrible. Coming out as a gay or lesbian person is hard. The war is wrong. Bush is bad.”

The plays suggested by these examples sound pretty bad to me. And every Fringe play that indicated with its title that it was specifically designed to attack the Bush administration made my don't-plan-to-see list despite the fact that I enormously dislike the Bush administration. I don't need to go to theater for badly-written op-ed.

But several questions are left: have small-f fringe shows or the avant-garde political theater lost audience? Have these types of shows ever attracted audiences that would be turned off by strident leftism? How to explain the fact that anti-Bush filmmaking is an enormously lucrative industry right now, with a new movie out nearly every week? Finally and most importantly, are the unknown playwrights who produce nuanced, politically/morally ambiguous plays drawing a larger audience than the unknown playwrights producing agitprop? Now repeat that last question but substitute "known" for "unknown."

I want to touch briefly on the idea of story. Everyone so far has kicked in their idea of what "story" means, so I'll add my own two cents, at least as far as "story" in this context (from Laura's post):

I’ve taken an informal poll since leaving New York City and most people tell me that the reason they go to theater is for the ability to experience a compelling story.

I think what these people are talking about is a play where the audience cares about one or a few of the characters and is in suspense about what will happen to them next. That sounds absurdly simple: it's the point of every movie and TV show ever. If a movie or TV show fails to deliver suspense about the outcome of the story, it's incompetent, it has failed at its job. If a piece of theater fails to deliver that same suspense, it might be because it has failed, or it might be because it was never meant to create any suspense about its outcome. Rare is the Beckett or Foreman play where you get a chance to worry about what will happen to the people on stage, and that worry is at the core of narrative-based entertainment. (Many people think this is also true of Brecht, but maybe I'm a softie - I always end up worrying about Brecht characters, as much as the writer didn't want me to.)

I guess the difference is that Beckett and Foreman and some others are offering some strong nourishment in place of the missing entertainment mechanism. The problem is that like all groundbreaking artists they create a lot of imitators who can't recreate the accomplishments of their idols. They don't bother about the entertainment but they can't achieve the art either. A respectable tradition has unfortunately bestowed upon some undeserving heirs the amazing arrogance of not caring whether or not an audience experiences any pleasure at their shows.

(On the whole art vs. entertainment thing, I think the two generally mix quite happily in the same drink, but I think they're seperate impulses.)

Whenever I see that a show has been "created by" someone or several people, rather than "written by" someone, I dread seeing it. I know it means there won't be much of a story (a chracter-based dilemma for me to worry about) for me to sink my teeth into and I have to hope against probability that the ideas and/or the spectacle will compensate. Sometimes they do: NTUSA's What's That On My Head?!? and Ripple's Innocent When You Dream were two of my best playgoing experiences of the last year. But all too often I find myself watching unconnected scenes mixed with bad viewpoints, clunky multi-media, and overbearing point-making.

There's a much smaller audience for this type of show. So, if this type of show largely takes over theater, then yeah, we'll lose a lot of the subset I was talking about above.

I don't know. It's difficult to talk about the decline of attendance at theater because it's hard to get a grip on exactly which decline we're talking about. If a drop in quality and a rise in out-of-touch arrogance is a factor, how can we measure that decline apart from the inexorable force of all the new entertainment options to arise over the last hundred years? Which people have stopped going to which plays, and for what reason?

I'm going to need several more posts to zero in on the point I'm circling here. I guess it's not that I agree with some parts of Laura's argument but not others. It's more like sometimes I see what she's saying and see many of the same phenomena, but other times I don't know exactly which problem we're talking about.

--SlowLearner

Comments

[James]

"I don't need to go to theater for badly-written op-ed." YES! YES! YES!

Ahem.

Thank you for that, Mac. Well said.

Humping the Fridge,

James

[Laura Axelrod]

Hey Mac,
I was going to send an APB out for you. Glad to see you again. I know, it's a beast of a discussion but I'm glad you are a part of it now. My references in those two sections, which nobody seemed to get, was in regards to the topics that have been overplayed in theater. The first reference was to a play in particular. I am loathe to name names, but it was a breakthrough play of a fairly well-known playwright of color. If you are dying to know who it is, email me. But I'd prefer not to make too many enemies since I have enough already. Heh.