a poor player

Fredonia NY – By now I am sure most interested people have taken notice of and read the TCG article AT25: An Eye on the Future. I suppose I could comment on the article itself, but one of the fun things about having a blog is that you can do more than comment – you can contribute. I did appear once and long ago in an American Theatre article as a sidebar, but over the years it’s been proven to me that those comments I made have already become obsolete, since technology has already been co-opted. So rather than criticize the TCG article, here’s my thought on American Theatre 25 years from now.

Before answering such a question as “what will theatre be like 25 years from now?”, you have to ask yourself whether or not your answer will talk about theatre as you believe it will exist in 25 years, or theatre as you’d like it to exist in 25 years. It’s a critical distinction. All of us who work in the theatre have dreams about what we would like theatre to become, and the kind of theatre we’d like to see come about. I think of the famous (but disputed) “Radio Box Memo” purportedly written by NBC founder David Sarnoff somewhere between 1916 and 1920 (a copy has never been found), where he writes:

This (Radio Music Box) proposition would be especially interesting to farmers and others living in outlying districts removed from cities. By the purchase of a ‘Radio Music Box’ they could enjoy concerts, lectures, music, recitals, etc., which may be going on in the nearest city within their radius. While I have indicated a few of the most probable fields of usefulness for such a device, yet there are numerous other fields to which the principle can be extended….

What’s telling about this memo is the dream Mr. Sarnoff (or someone) had about radio being a medium which will bring culture to the masses. The same was said for television, the internet, and just about any other form of media developed in the last 125 years. Hope was always held out that the next new thing would bring more high culture or knowledge to society, but the truth has been that, on the whole, it only brought more commercialized junk. What we’d like something to become is not the same as what it eventually does become.

I heard a term the other day which I think applies to myself. The term is “opti-realist,” someone who holds an optimistic viewpoint but who simultaneously attempts to see things in a realistic light. I have a very opti-realistic view about the next 25 years, but it’s instructive to look back at the past 25 years as a clue to help map the next 25.

The most obvious development over the past 25 years of theatre has been the unabated commercialization of the art form. In every way imaginable, theatre has become a business whose primary purpose is to make a profit on investment. There is no longer any pretense on Broadway about the desirability of creating “art.” The only question seems to be, “will it sell?” On rare occasions, art and business mix to combine a satisfying combination, but more often than not, dollars rule the day. There is no longer any motivating principle beyond profit which determines whether or not a show comes to Broadway.

In addition, one of the most important things to understand about American culture and economy is its relentless ability to absorb and co-opt everything in its path. I remember very clearly an incident in my late 20s when I was riding an elevator, and over the Muzak speaker came a Muzak version of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” I thought to myself, “The revolution’s over.”

Off-Broadway has been co-opted in much the same way. What was once a vibrant scene of challenging and unusual theatre became a mini-Broadway, with theatres beginning to hold plays for long periods of time, and then choosing seasons according to the LORT model, building subscriber bases, and eventually catering to the white upper-middle-class which now constitutes the bulk of the theatre-going demographic according to NEA studies. They even developed their own awards system, the Obies and, to some extent, the Outer Critics Circle Awards, to legitimize themselves on a commercial level.

Given this track record, there is no reason to believe that any of this will change in the near future, nor is there any reason to believe that the current “indie theatre” trend in NYC can escape this fate.  The minute some theatre company becomes popular enough to gain attention, you can be sure that some sort of co-opting will take place. Some theatres, under these tough economic times, will eventually close, being replaced by the next up-and-coming hot theatre waiting to grab the audience, attention, subscriber base and dollars left behind. Over the next 25 years, I predict the fight will be over economic survival, not over artistic integrity. Theatres that gain any notoriety at all will have too much invested in their current MO to risk creating theatre in uncharted waters, and will cling to their current model until they die. Those who gain an economic foothold will hang around like vultures until they can swoop in and peck at the carcass. And as New York goes, so will go the rest of the major urban areas where theatres are concentrated, since they do little more than emulate the New York model.

Another factor in this more realistic than optimistic look at theatre over the next 25 years is how we are educating young theatre artists. Given the predominance of the Broadway-styled pre-professional models of training offered by the vast majority of colleges and universities in this country, there is little hope that there will be any young artists out there remotely capable of envisioning the sorts of theatre that the AT respondents suggested. Since all we are doing at the university level is throwing fish at students like they do to seals at Seaworld, instead of teaching them how to fish, we should expect that over the next 25 years we will see a glut of artists who know no other way of doing theatre other than how Broadway and the regionals do it. As a consequence, I believe that, when this model eventually breaks down (as entropy theorizes it must), the people who will be doing theatre in the next 25 years will have very little or even no college training to their credit.

So where is the optimism? Well, I suppose the analogy I’d draw here is that of thinking about a forest fire and its aftermath. Once a forest burns down, the immediate response is to lament the loss of the woods. The forest was indeed beautiful, and it served a great purpose, but its destruction was inevitable. All of us carry the seeds of our own destruction and death within us, and there is no reason to believe theatre as an art form does not either. But when you come back to a burned forest in one month, three months, six months, or a year, you can always spot life, spot growing things. But they will not be in your immediate line of vision; you may have to look carefully and below your knees to find them. I was taught after three years of living in Nebraska and desperately looking for trees changing their leaves in the autumn, to look for autumn not above my head in the trees which don’t exist in NE, but below my knees in the meadow and prairie grasses which abound. Autumn became different for me once I finally knew where to look.

I think we will see the same sort of thing over the next 25 years in theatre. Theatre will become a niche art form, as quaint as watching the Amish farm their land, or visiting colonial Williamsburg. Its appeal will be limited in scope at first, mainly to the educated or those attracted to the unique. If it gains more than a foothold in the culture, it will be because its potential for building community amongst people will be sparked by political or economic upheaval, or both. Theatre over the next 25 years will become smaller, less consequential, and highly undervalued by society at large, but this will give it the time it needs to formulate and nurture itself, and get ready for what the following 25 years will bring.

Those wishing to plant the seeds of the kind of theatre they’d like to see in 25 years should consider plowing up the ground now. The forest is burning, but the charred remains will provide the nutrients you’ll need, and the plowing will be easy. Just let it cool down a little first.  -twl