a poor player

It’s a very nice night for writing – my first Saturday night home in a long time. The weather is absolutely nasty, I have no evening rehearsal, I’ve put aside the papers I have to grade, I’ve pretty much caught up on all the leftover theatre blogs, and have some time to write on this, the absolutely worst day of the year. Tonight the clocks go back, plunging us into the darkness of standard time. The baseball season ended with St. Louis defeating Detroit in the World Series, a sure sign that whatever hope there was that summer was still around is now gone. I went up to my cabin after a morning rehearsal for Carmen with the Chautauqua Children’s Chorale, and locked down everything in preparation for the 6 or so inches of snow expected in the hills this evening. Most of the trees have lost their leaves, so yet again another fall missed (although I should be grateful for all the fall colors I did see last year in New England while on tour). Funny Thing has finally closed, and the audiences for the make-up weekend were probably a bit thinner than they would have been had there been no cancellation, but they made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers. Come November 12, Carmen will be completed, and I can finally settle in for the upcoming winter.

Some technical notes and news:

• Readers will note a new look. I sort of get tired of how the blog looks after a while, and so I changed to this style called Shaded Grey. I am hoping to do something with the color scheme a bit if I can figure out the css style sheet. I like the tab feature for each entry as well.
• I have not yet figured out the problem with Akismet, the plugin for stopping spam on WordPress. It’s supposed to work with an API key, but every time I try to get one I get an “invalid API key” message back. It has something to do with php and fopen on the server side, and it’s a bit above my skill level. So if there are any php experts reading this, please contact me so I can get this working. In the meantime I am re-opening comments, and I believe I have set the options so that anyone can register as a subscriber and post comments that way.

And lastly, something of a new direction. If you look under the “About” box in the sidebar, you’ll note a change on the tagline – “meditations on the art of theatre.” There’s a reason for that. Not having had the time to blog very much due to being involved with two productions and teaching, I’ve had some time to think about what – and who – this blog should reflect. When I first conceived it, I viewed it as having the possibility of fomenting change in the art of theatre, of debating the original tag line question “can theatre matter?” But the theatre blogosphere has developed rapidly, with new blogs coming on line every minute, it seems. All types of blogs have developed as well, from those which focus on reviews to those which focus on theatrical process to more introspective blogs. Because of my geographic location and occupation, I can already sense my voice becoming rather weak in the face of so much development.

So I’ve come to the conclusion I probably should fall into that last category, an introspective blog. I tend to be introspective anyway, to a fault at times, and my writing is mainly a reflection of those introspections. And as the word “meditation” implies, I enjoy contemplative discourse on ideas and philosophies. And since it’s not too likely I’ll have much impact on the emerging theatre blogosphere (most likely because I won’t try too hard to do so), I think it’s best to confine my blog to the introspective ruminations which best befit my temperment and situation.

And I don’t particularly enjoy controversy. I don’t necessarily avoid it, but I do not go out of my way to create it or become involved with it. Controversy tends to stir passions and other strong emotions, and I think generally gets in the way of clear reasoning, quality conversation and insightful thought. I know I do not want a blog that is controversial. I prefer the soothing connotation of meditations, writings which offer more questions than answers, more of a sense of searching for answers rather than positing definitive solutions. I’ve always preferred process over product as a point of concentration, because I believe good process produces good product. So here I want to focus more on the processes involved in my evolving ideas on theatre, as I see them and feel them and evolve with them. Simply put, I wish to let you in on my theatrical soul, for what it may be worth to you.

Before I put my first tag line to rest, however, perhaps I should ask – is there any answer to my original tag line question: “can theatre matter?” Well, any answer would be both simple and complex. It appears to me, as we move into the 21st century, that theatre can definitely matter, as it has through 2,500 years of western history. However, it will not matter in the same way and on the same scale as it has in the past. Previously, theatre mattered on a large societal scale, and it tended to be more homogenous in nature. Today, not so much. Theatre matters only to the artists who have an interest in it, or to a specific community to whom it is addressed. It is now a more heterogeneous, niche art form. It does not matter on a larger societal level beyond its spectacle or tourist value, and in that context it seldom qualifies as art.

All theatre is community theatre – so goes the popular phrase. But I think the key word in that phrase is community, and to understand how theatre can matter today, one might first have to discover the relationship between a theatre and its particular community. One also has to discard the concept of “community theatre” as bad theatre produced by amateurs à lá Waiting for Guffman (funny as that is). Communities can be looked at many ways, all of which have certain demographic features. I’ll try to give some examples:

• The “patron” community - this is the largest community I can think of. It consists of those people who go to the theatre either because they enjoy it and/or practice it. It can be further broken down into types, such as those who like musical theatre, drama, and so forth, but it’s the group which most supports theatre on a financial basis. The typical member of this community is an upper-middle class, college-educated white female over 44 who sees about 2 shows a year (according to a 2002 NEA study). This is sort of the average national theatre-viewing community, basically supporting musicals and standard, well-known dramatic works.
• The urban community – this community prefers its theatre more cutting-edge, more innovative and away from the mainstream. It tends to appreciate what’s new, what’s in and what’s fashionable. New York City is the classic example of the kind of community I mean, but the community is not restricted to NYC as a geographic entity. Every major city has some indie-style theatre rooted in an intellectual urban culture. The difference here is that NYC tends to be the trend-setter. Other urban areas generally follow NYC’s lead, and this creates the false impression of the existence of a “national” theatre (which we mistakenly label as “regional theatre.”). Our national theatre is not truly national; it is merely a standardization of the urban theatre community’s tastes. In my opinion, the urban theatre community has a stranglehold on theatre’s life and holds every other community hostage, because it sucks too many artists away from other underserved communities which could benefit from their talents.
• The “targeted” community – when a self-identified or self-selected group of people see themselves in a theatrical work, they usually flock to the theatre. These groups can be either one-shot groups (menopausal women), or more permanent communities such as the gay community or any particular ethnic or religious group. Many theatres exist to serve primarily these communities and produce works which speak to the group’s issues. In Buffalo, Studio Arena Theatre, the area’s LORT space, had its largest attendance records set for a non-musical play when it produced Over The Tavern, a play written by Buffalo native Tom Dudzik about a Polish-American Catholic family living over the family-owned bar in South Buffalo in the 1950s. That demographic hits 85% of Buffalo’s population, and they came to the theatre in droves.
• A regional theatre community – sadly, in this country we don’t have a very thriving regional theatre scene. The “regional theatres” are mostly an extension of the urban theatre community,mimicking the pattern of a Broadway season, and do not see as their mission the development of their regional voices. Regional LORT theatres in the South, for example, do not make it a point to encourage and produce plays with a southern character or voice. Same is true in the Midwest and West. It’s too bad, because I think if we could develop a truly strong regional theatre scene in this country we’d get many more people in several communities who identify with their region going to the theatre.
• The community activist community – The name says it all. So does this web site.

Of course, these communities are generalizations, and there is much crossover within and amongst them. You can probably think of some yourself. My point in listing them is more to make the point that theatre in the 21st century matters, not to the culture at large, but to small communities of people relative to the entire population. If I could wish for one direction in which theatre would evolve, it would be in the direction of getting more theatre artists to consider what community they’d like to serve and for whom they’d like to create art. Can theatre matter? Surely it can – but to whom? And why?

And now, down into the deep…. -twl