a poor player

Dunkirk NY – It is a steel-gray New Year’s Day morning here in the bowels of Western NY. I can’t tell if the sun has risen or not yet. Later this afternoon and into this even we expect some lake-effect snow. You have to be pretty hardy to live up in these parts. I think my hardiness is beginning to wear thin, though. I am sure I need to go outside later this morning and take a walk. Even 20 minutes outdoors can relieve the cabin fever a bit. I do not know how we ever got to the point in western civilization that determined that the first day in January, right in the first third of winter, should be the time of the season to celebrate a new year. Perhaps it continues to be a remnant of that hunger for light.

New Year’s Day brings with it that sense of things changing. I have been taken lately with this article from the NY Times Arts Blog about “Plays That Changed Your Life.” There have been some amazing comments from readers. I am not sure about this, but I think the comments get recycled somehow, because in perusing the list this morning I noted there were only 6 pages of comments, and when I first posted my own comments there were 7 pages, and mine now do not appear. So I think there have been many more than the web site would lead you to believe.

What this list attests to, I think, is something we all should continue to aspire to – creating theatre that has the power to change lives. We live now in a culture that emphasizes careerism; that is, we are more focused on how what we do in our lives advances our career. Many of us fall victim to this kind of thinking too often. We become more concerned with how our decisions and actions will affect our careers, and less concerned with how the development of our art can change lives.

I notice this a lot in the younger generation. My students are constantly concerned with the career aspects of their training, and the surveys I’ve seen of undergraduate and graduate theatre students again and again indicate that they always want more courses that concentrate on career-building, not on the development of their talent. They want workshops that center on how to audition better, or how to market themselves better. They want agents to come see their work and make comments. They want to know what’s the best city to move to. In short, they want to be given as clear a pathway as possible that will lead to a successful career. They seem little concerned with changing people’s lives with their art.

I even notice this with my son, who is now living in Chicago and trying to break into the theatre scene there. My last discussion with him centered mostly around the belief he had that his agent wasn’t doing enough for him, and wanted to change his headshot. Should he have a beard in his headshot, or shouldn’t he? This seemed to be a major issue for him. He hasn’t been in any shows yet (he just moved to Chicago in October), he does have an internship coming up with Chicago’s largest talent agency, where people will see him and he can network, and he’s seen one or two shows. He also has taken one acting class. But I can feel his sense of urgency (he never has been too patient a person; the apple does not fall far from the tree here), and his urgency seems not to be focused on finding a situation that will make him a better actor and create theatre that will change lives. It seems to be focused on finding situations that will advance his career.

This, I think, is at the crux of what ails theatre today, and why it’s so poorly attended and generally disregarded by the general public. We have successfully trained our audiences to understand that theatre is meant to entertain them, and not meant to change their lives. We have successfully trained our audiences to understand that theatre is basically a once-a-year financial splurge to go see something grand and beautiful, and not something they can see more often to gain more perspective on living. And we have trained ourselves, as career-oriented artists, to aim at having successful careers in the arts, rather than creating meaningful art that speaks to people’s daily lives. And if there is anything in this world that will ultimately lead to the further decline of quality in the theatre, it is this current emphasis on careerism.

Scott Walters and others have been delving a great deal in to the issues surrounding quality and class in today’s theatre. The arguments raise solid points that need discussion, but I can’t help coming away from those discussions with the famous quotation from Justice Potter Stewart concerning pornography echoing in my head. For the sake of accuracy, here’s the whole citation in context:

U.S. Supreme Court
JACOBELLIS v. OHIO, 378 U.S. 184 (1964)
APPEAL FROM THE SUPREME COURT OF OHIO. No. 11.
Argued March 26, 1963. Restored to the calendar for reargument April
29, 1963. Reargued April 1, 1964.
Decided June 22, 1964.

“MR. JUSTICE STEWART, concurring.

“It is possible to read the Court’s opinion in Roth v. United States
and Alberts v. California, 354 U.S. 476, in a variety of ways. In
saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases
was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I
have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by
negative implication in the Court’s decisions since Roth and Alberts,1
that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this
area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography.2 I shall
not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand
to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could
never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it,
and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” (emphasis mine).

Like pornography, quality may ultimately be indefinable, but people know it when they see it. I think the NY Times piece clearly indicates that. Peruse the list carefully, and you will see that the kind of theatrical quality that changes people’s lives can be found anywhere, from a production of Guys and Dolls performed by servicemen about to be shipped to Vietnam, to many famous Broadway productions (it is, after all , the NY TImes), to a dress rehearsal of A Thousand Clowns in a mental hospital, to personal identification with the characters in Torch Song Trilogy, to community theatre productions of Oliver!.

If you are a theatre artist, and you are considering making some resolutions for the new year, consider making a resolution to become more committed to creating theatre that can change people’s lives, rather than merely advancing your career. I can’t tell you what that might mean, but I think that, if you read the NY Times list carefully and note both the productions and the contexts listed there, you will, I am sure, find something that will help you determine what quality can mean  at any level of production, and what elements in a play can truly speak to people across all demographics.

For the record, here are the shows that changed my life:

• Man of La Mancha, the original ANTAR production in 1965 with Richard Kiley and Joan Diener. I was about 13 years old or so, and even at that age it was clear I had a tendency towards idealism (it was difficult to grow up in the 1960s without a sense of idealism). “The Impossible Dream” became an anthem for me. I also remember being absolutely terrified during the scene where the muleteers attacked Aldonza, and then hearing Joan Diener pour her heart out in “Aldonza,” a song that contains some of the harshest lyrics I think I have ever heard in a musical.
• The Balcony by Jean Genet. This was a college production I saw as an undergraduate, and it sealed the deal for me in terms of having a life in the theatre. It was a powerful piece about corruption, and it was performed with a graphic sexuality that caused an intense local furor, almost shutting the production down (the college president decided at the time to let it continue as a matter of artistic freedom). The show was directed by the man who became my undergraduate mentor. David was a hard-drinking, intense, manic, and probably self-destructive individual, but he knew how to produce an intense and passionate piece of theatre, particularly Shakespeare. He created an independent company of undergraduates as a Shakespeare touring group, and we toured local high schools, all on our own, with no sponsorship from the theatre department. He created theatre that changed lives. I tossed away my intent of becoming a high school English teacher thanks to this production. It was also this production that moved me away from musicals, which up to that point had been pretty much my understanding of what theatre was about, thanks to the fact that my father was an avid collector of Broadway original cast albums.
• Company, the original Broadway production. I am probably one of the few people who saw Dean Jones in the role of Bobby, which he left after a month to do some Disney flick, and was then replaced by Larry Kert. It was my first Sondheim, and while at 18 years old I probably did not get every nuance of the sophisticated score, I did know I was seeing a different kind of musical than what was playing on the record player at home. “Sorry/Grateful” and “Being Alive” stuck with me for a long time.
• West Side Story, the movie, not any theatre production. My father is Irish, my mother is Puerto Rican. They were married in 1951, and it was not the social event of the year. I think you can easily understand why this show means so much to me. Ironically enough, the location where they shot the movie, which is now Lincoln Center, is where my father grew up.
• Ten Little Indians, a Fairbury Community Theatre production. This has to rank as the most god-awful, amateurish show I have ever seen. I was in my first teaching position after graduate school, in the small Nebraska town of Fairbury, population 4,800. My first reaction upon seeing the play was total fear; I was stuck in a place as far away from New York City as I was ever going to be, and from which I would never escape, where theatre was that bad. But the more I thought about, the more I realized that, as bad as it was, there were people in this small farming community interested enough in theatre to actually get together and produce a show. It was the show that got me off my “I’m an MFA-educated professional” high horse and helped me to understand that my job as a theatre educator and theatre professional was to help others learn to create high-quality theatre no matter where they lived or who they were, and to get them to participate either as audience member or in the production itself.

Happy New Year!  -twl