Not long ago, having read the inaugural poem penned by Richard Bianco, I tweeted the following:
Poetry is dead. What pretends to be poetry now is either New Age blather or vague nonsense or gibberish. It’s zombie poetry.
Yes, this was a foolish, insensitive, off-hand response, and I regret it.* In retrospect, what I might have said (if I’d given it a few seconds more thought) is that while poetry might not be dead, it’s at least been abducted and locked up in some basement somewhere, an impostor sent out into the world to take its place. That’s a statement I’d stand by; unfortunately, because of the speed of 21st-century communication, I can’t quite get completely out from under the first statement, because it got picked up by the Washington Post. (And then, shortly thereafter, parodied as well.) So I’ve been sitting with both sentiments for a while, just to let them marinate a bit.
I found myself thinking in the last few weeks about whether there are any art forms that are unarguably dead. For some reason, my mind kept turning to cave painting; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that somebody somewhere was scrawling on cavern walls, of course, but it must have once been the defining art form of an entire subculture… and now, for all intents and purposes, it’s gone. And yet… it’s not as if painting is dead. Even more generally, people still make two-dimensional images. That much doesn’t seem to have changed.
In bandying back-and-forth with a few pissed-off poets on Twitter after my hasty assessment went viral, several smugly suggested that perhaps I’d better consider my own art form. Theater, they suggested, was way closer to death’s door than poetry. To be honest, though I know those wags were wrong, there are days in which I have asked myself whether we aren’t on the way out the door. Audiences forever get older and older, the economics of the business get shakier and shakier, and our institutions become less and less relevant to most of the country. Yes: there’s no avoiding the simple fact that if the entire American theater died tomorrow, most people wouldn’t even notice till the corpse started to stink.
(If the sun went supernova — which it’s not slated to do, incidentally — it would still take 8.3 minutes for the lights to go out on our planet. If the American theater exploded, nobody would notice until some random patron showed up at will call to pick up tickets for a show she bought tickets to months in advance.)
Anyone who thinks circumstances are any different than this, I believe, is mistaken. Our peculiar little art form — in which (in the most common American version) real-live human beings get together in the same space at the same time, agree to be relatively quiet and focused, and exchange lots of money for the right to watch other live human beings act out a story in front of them — is of relatively minor importance to most people. You know what they care about more than theater? Here’s a partial list: eating out, going to parties, watching all four major sports and a few minor ones, going to their houses of worship, doing their jobs, playing video games, exercising, having sex, taking vacations, talking on the phone with their friends, texting their friends, cooking, listening to music, and (here are the big two) going to the movies and watching television.
I’m tired of this. No, that’s not strong enough: I’m fed up with it, with the status quo, with accepting the idea that we’re only ever going to be of modest importance to a few people, that we ought to be happy we’ve found a safe little ecological niche in which to survive the culture wars. That’s not good enough for me.
I can’t stand to look at another safe season full of tidy little plays that all “make sense.” I can’t stand to keep thinking about what’s going to sell or not, or how we’re going to protect the bottom line of a non-profit theater. I don’t want to see my city’s theaters full to bursting with plays by the same white men for yet another year. I’m tired of having my relationship with audience members brokered by an institution. I want direct contact. I want engagement. I want us to mean something to people. I want them to invest in us. I want us to deserve that investment. I want us to deserve our tax deductions. I don’t think we do.
It’s time to go big or go home. It’s time to create a new theatrical ecosystem for the United States. It needs to be decentralized: no more reliance on New York and the great urban centers. It needs to be rooted in specific communities — urban, suburban, ex-urban, and rural — so that the stories we tell are targeting specific audience segments. We need to make theater more like the grocery store — a place you go for regular nourishment — and less like fine dining. It needs to be networked, so that each local community can learn from the others and share resources with the others, but it needs to be open, so that each community can use it to find and share its own voice.
We need to stop funding big theatrical institutions so mindlessly and unconditionally. We need to transfer more of our available resources (most of them?) to grass roots cultural development; let the big institutions survive with less and make do for a change. We need to favor individual artists over institutions anyway. We need to to favor plays more than grant proposals. We need to favor audience engagement over ticket prices. We need to favor flexible development paths over fixed seasons. We need to favor experimentation with technology over defending our precious little version of our art form against change. In short, we need to re-do everything.
Or die. That’s the other alternative. And of course I don’t mean “die,” exactly, but wither away slowly until we reach relative obscurity and marginalization, which I believe is where we’re headed. Oh, people will always go on telling stories for other people, just as they still go on making two-dimensional images… but it won’t look anything like the “theater” we’re familiar with right now. No more so than telling stories around a campfire resembles listening to radio dramas; no more so than radio dramas will resemble immersive 3D virtual reality stories. We can either take charge of our own evolution or sequester our genes in a safe little tide pool and hope we don’t get smashed when the asteroid hits. I choose the former. Who’s with me?
* In my defense, I do actually sort of have the credentials to make a declaration like that. As I mentioned in a recent blog post, I studied poetry at both Northwestern and at Johns Hopkins, where I got my M.A. from the Writing Seminars. I taught poetry while I was at Hopkins, and I later joined the faculty of the Maryland Institute, College of Art. My poems have appeared in journals, and I even served as the poetry editor of the increasingly successful Barrelhouse literary magazine until just a few years ago. Then again, I haven’t written a new poem or read more than a handful of newly-minted poems since I gave up that editorship, so who the hell am I?
Canon worshipping is a trap. I wonder if the critics of impressionism and expression thought art was dying? I remember as a youth I was forced to read the great poets like Chaucer and Milton, etc. They bored me silly and I hated poetry–until many years later I found Langston Hughes. No doubt there were lots of people who thought he wasn’t a poet. The arts and our perceptions of them are culturally bound. They speak to us from their cultural embeddedness and we respond from ours. …it’s the old one man’s poisin is another man’s…. Now as for theater I think the big issue is financial. I think there would be lots of theater goers among the young if it didn’t cost so much to see it. Who the heck can take a date out for $50.00 tickets, and then got to dinner? This makes theater not only driven by the grey heads (like me), but by social class status!
Oh, I totally agree: it’s become a rich and privileged endeavor: art made by the poor for the owning and middle classes. It’s ready for an overhaul. And this isn’t about aesthetics, or not only. I love both Chaucer *and* Hughes. It’s about more new diverse voices, period.
Bravo!
I agree and expand:
Instead of the majority of the theatres doing old works, and most of the rest doing recent big Broadway hits, and a tiny niche doing truly new works… that should be reversed. Old plays and chestnuts deserve revivals, but that should be the niche, like a drive-in theater or silent film cinema house.
Most institutions should be funnels for putting grant money and marketing power into artists’ hands, instead of being funding-vacuums. Enablers, not deciders.
Theatre should be to film as local, neighborhood restaurants are to national chains. Theatre should be something that young hip kids and young hip parents and tired parents and blue and white collar workers all think of as being available to them and there should be theatre that speaks to each of them. Some of them should write it.
Let’s make it all happen! Thank you, Gwydion, for this.
I *love* your expansion of this. Thanks, Brett!
So how do we make this happen right now?
Refuse to submit another play to another theater. Start your own theater company. Self-produce. Produce guerrilla plays in public. Stop buying tickets to large theaters. Stop talking about large theaters. Stop caring about them. Just a few ideas 🙂
Oh, OK. I already do that.
I know 🙂
Gwydion, really? To blanket say defund the largest institutions seems short-sighted–those institutions, as flawed as they are, draw in the majority of new artsgoers every year in this country (as homogeneous as they are). They are viewed as more accessible, more attainable places for many people who are scared to go off the beaten path. They provide tremendously successful educational components that, at their best, are training at least a small contingent of young people to care about this art form. To defund them because they have strayed, because they have move localized missions so very far away from their core, seems incredibly drastic and destabilizing–and runs a tremendous risk of simply relegating the whole community to the underground. Now, should there be forcible efforts to change them? Absolutely. Should funders realign their funding to strongly encourage home-grown projects, local casting and art, the risks associated with that, diversification and representation of the actual local community back at itself? Absolutely. But you can’t really believe that simply making these organizations disappear, which I assume is your goal, would be an immediate and blanket net positive on the field, can you? Flagships are valuable, providing lights to draw in new generations, even as they are cumbersome, hard to maintain and frustrating for those not on them. But that doesn’t mean we are served by simply inciting a rebellion to make them go away.
Clay:
My post was written from more than a little bit of haste. You’re right to call me out on my all-or-nothing language. But you’ve actually gone ahead and written a very articulate case for why our largest institutions are failing. How do we expect them to change if we don’t at least put their funding on the table? Why would we expect them to change in any way if we keep heaping resources upon them? A drastic change is in order. For example: instead of giving a random Big Theater a $50,000 grant, why not give a local playwright $50,000 and tell her to keep $5,000… then choose a theater to give the other $45,000 to in support of the production of one of her plays? I’m again making a hasty argument here… but a flipping of our priorities is called for.
And no, I don’t want those big institutions to disappear. They hold institutional knowledge that I wouldn’t want us to lose. But why aren’t they working in service to their communities instead of in service to their own continued existence? Because no one is holding them accountable to do that. And I think we need to.
And now… note the minor edits above in reaction to thinking about your comment. 🙂
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