a poor player

Dunkirk, NY – It seems lately that I am surrounded by the shadows of death. I am at that stage of life where people you know begin to have operations, contract illnesses, and pass on. Right at the moment I know three people who are all coping with cancer of one sort or another. One has prostate cancer, one has colon cancer, and one has lung cancer. The oldest of them is in his early 60s. All of them are going through various chemotherapies and/or radiation treatments in an attempt to slow down or halt the advancement of their cancers. Statistically speaking, none of them will succeed. Nonetheless, the treatments will continue. In our culture, death is something which is to be put off at any cost whatsoever.

Because of this situation, I have found myself more aware of my own mortality, and perhaps subconsciously this is why I have been writing about theatrical entropy. Dealing with a concept like entropy means trying to come to grips with the notion that what once existed will no longer exist. In a metaphorical sense, theatre has been living with its own cultural cancer for some time now, and I feel that all the talk about what’s wrong with theatre, what we should do to save it, how we should change it, is merely the talk of those who want to treat theatre with some sort of cultural chemotherapy. They don’t want to see theatre die because they love it so, thus the effort to treat it in some fashion. Is it, I wonder, just simply time to let theatre die a good, honest, natural death?

Our advances in medical technology, combined with the seeming absolute mandate of the medical profession itself that death should be defeated at all costs, have given rise to the cultural notion that we should – we must – do everything in our power to stave death off until the last possible moment. Every medical show on TV portrays heroic doctors who fight with every ounce of their ability and technology to keep life going. Situations such as that of Terry Schiavo give rise to animated cultural wars. One of my cancer acquaintances, who suggested to a nurse that perhaps he might not choose to undergo chemotherapy, was given what I am sure the nurse thought was a pep talk about how that sort of talk was “defeatist” talk. I can easily understand the urge to fight death, but I question why we do not balance that urge with at least some recognition of the reality and inevitability of death, and give that some place in our society.

One of my favorite TV shows of all time is the mid-90s hit Northern Exposure. I recall an episode where Joel (Rob Morrow), a young internist portrayed as the quintessential New Yorker, goes to visit an old woman who had lived in the Alaska outback for many years to give her a checkup. The woman informs Joel she is going to die, but Joel cannot find any medical reason for her to do so. When he asks her what she thinks is wrong with her, she replies, “Nothing. I’m just going to die, that’s all.” He runs every test he can think of, but can’t find anything wrong with, yet she continues to insist she’s going to die. Everyone else in the town comes to visit her and say their goodbyes, but Joel believes they’re all crazy, and even sick, for indulging the woman’s fantasies, and continues to insist there is nothing wrong with her that would cause her death. Sure enough, within a week, the old woman is dead, and Joel is stunned.

The cancer which afflicts theatre is the cancer of technology and how it has re-shaped our culture. It is quite an amusing paradox to me that many people view the rapid growth of technology as “progress,” while viewing the rapid and uncontrolled growth of cells in the body as “cancer.” Film, TV, the Internet – all of these technological advances are killing theatre, because they are all breaking the bonds of shared value. What has given theatre life for so long in the west has been the relatively strong bond of shared values we have had as a civilization, as well as the fact that there really was no other form of entertainment to compete with live performances of any sort. But technology and its ability to deliver entertainment to the individual on demand, without the need for any sense of community, combined with the notions of “narrowcasting” and “niche marketing,” have begun the process of overwhelming and overtaking the theatre. Even attempts to incorporate technology into theatre have essentially failed, as the re-tooling process it would take for theatre spaces to become multimedia-capable venues is massive and expensive.

My grandmother, who lived to be 96, did not die of cancer. She died basically from the fact that everything more or less finally wore out. At 93 she suffered a cardiac incident, but was resuscitated at the very last moment. She also had a pacemaker put in at the same time. Because she was living with my mother, I had ample opportunity to visit her and witness her slow deterioration. During her last three years she was physically there, but emotionally and psychologically absent. Her world extended from the bedroom to the dining room table, a distance of maybe 30 feet. I often wondered why she wasn’t simply allowed to die at 93. It’s just hard to let go.

In the context of our western historical culture, theatre has had a long and distinguished existence. But the cultural cancer that afflicts it today is robbing it of its vitality and strength, giving it the metaphorical distance of 30 feet from the dining room table to the bedroom. Of course we make adaptations to living with cultural cancer (shorter plays, less characters, smaller spaces, easier ideas, new theories), but they only make more obvious the lack of vitality within the culture as a whole that theatre has. People have talked before about the “death of theatre” (Paul Simon in his 1965 song The Dangling Conversation has the line “Is the theatre really dead?“), and often the concept is sneered at, but perhaps the notion of theatre as dying is not so easily dismissed.

Bob Dylan noted that “he who isn’t busy being born is busy dying,” while Dylan Thomas urged us to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Beckett as well noted that “we are born astride a grave.” Perhaps the great paradox in all existence is that, despite the fact that everyone dies, we live as if every day is our first one on earth. I have no doubt that we who love the theatre will continue to visit it and offer our ideas and hopes for its continued survival, and perhaps we can keep it alive for a few generations yet (providing we ourselves don’t suck the remaining life out of it with our insistence that it provide us a living). I’m not against that; it’s only natural, I think. Some kinds of cancer take longer to kill you than others, and theatre’s cancer might be one of those slow-growing ones. If so, it will give us time to say our goodbyes with some dignity, honor, and perhaps even ritual. -twl