More Thoughts on Theater

Wanted to write something concrete this morning as though it would somehow cut through the slight hangover. It's a clarifying hangover, a hangover that makes life a little simpler, a hangover more from excitement than actual booze. It's a new year and life can be fun and the year is new and what the fuck -- I'm of a certain age at this point and who the hell cares anymore whose right or wrong. I'm really starting to enjoy the genuine whateverness of a blog. I could be completely misinformed but I can say it like I'm the smartest man alive. It's for other people to see but the odds of anyone seeing it are minimal, so you can be both arrogant and yet humbly cautious at once.

Is theater art or entertainment? If its only entertainment than it almost, almost, makes sense that most theater is focused on "relevance" so much as in, how is this play relevant to what is published on the front page of the newspaper ever day. Of course, the problem with that thinking is that most people do not spend all or even some of their time thinking exclusively about what is in the newspaper and thinking that it is relevant to their life. (Should they? Another blog.) So how mainstream, institutional people at the institutions and mainstream theaters define "relevance" is actually pretty fucking flawed. . . But o well, they have to have some operating theory so I guess they go under the one that theater should confront that which everyone is talking about and we can only guess what everyone is talking about by what they put into newspapers. . . Wow, maybe theater is dying not on its own merits but for the same reasons that newspapers are dying?. . . neither here nor there. . .

Also, in addition to a ridiculous focus on "relevance" and a bad definition of it, theater follows a story telling structure more like television and movies than it needs to be. The concept of the hero and the journey and the transformation, change, and Aristotelian definitions of thematic unity and purpose. (Why has nothing more than critic, a critic who has been proven wrong in the other areas of the world -- science especially -- that he wrote about, seem to have had such a disproportionate influence on western drama? I haven't read him in a while but don't most plays still in some way follow his precepts? At least most critics do? And while he was close on physics, he was proven to be pretty fucking wrong, wasn't he? Maybe he's close but pretty fucking wrong on theater too?) Anyway, the best playwrights -- Shakespeare and Chekhov most obviously -- don't give a rat's ass to these concepts of unity and singular hero, etc. Sure, you can do productions of their plays in that fashion but you always have to cut out a bunch of stuff to make it work -- and then act as though that was the playwright's real intention he just wasn't good enough to see it. Shakespeare and Chekhov when done in total really don't follow at all the structure of most american theatre today. And, to be perfectly honest, I'm not really convinced that the audience prefers what we do today to what they wrote in the past. In fact, I think the evidence might suggest otherwise. I'm saying that maybe there wasn't a shift in the audience away from a complete different structure of theater -- the shift was in the theatermakers and then justified after the fact that it was a cultural shift. And now no one can see the forest or the trees.

Probably movies and television, or movies at least, work so well with a more focused, hero-y structure that we got confused and thought that the audience wasn't capable of different kinds of storytelling styles in different formats. Something like that though I'm only guessing.

So I'm saying, with probably more words than I need, that theater makers should bust up the structure of their work in such a way that they reincorporate all the glorious possibilities we see utilized in Shakespeare and Chekhov. So the actor is incomprehensibly aware of the audience? So the time and place jump around like the characters are swept up in a tornado? So there are six different stories that really don't cohere no matter how hard the critics try to find a thematic connection? they're connected because the playwright was interested. So there are an assortment of important characters and no heros? Plus, more options now too. People can break into song with the play being a musical. Damn dancers are good. Not the stupid imitation in a shakespeare play of the jig we for odd reasons think they were always doing, but really dancers dancing in a play. Why the hell not? use the amazing possibilities for set and light and sound design in the storytelling of the play. Unify everything in a vision of the world (like S and C) did rather than a laser-like and ultimately dull focus on thematic unity.

(Really? In a play, we can only say one thing? Really? Who came up with that fucking idea?)

Which leads me my next point: Write not about what is relevant to newspapers but what is relevant to life. Go to an art museum and see how the considerations can be political but also about the body and our relationship to the earth and animals and a striving for meaning and the soul and generalized fear and specific fear and beauty and mortality and comedy and, I mean, jesus, it's art -- it's everything and it can address everything! Why shouldn't it address everything!?! OK. Maybe not everything at once but certainly more than theater has been addressing if you take every play produced in a 50 mile area in the last year.

Look. I'm not advocating performance art. If we're any good, we should be able to do all this while still telling an entertaining story. If we can't, they we really stink. But if we can, then we should be able to pound home our desired effect better because we do it with story AND panache.

Seriously. Tell me how I'm wrong. What am I missing? Why not? Is there really anything to lose by busting up a paradigm that doesn't work particularly well anyone? BUst up the paradigm! I want that on a t-shirt. . . It's a good thing I'm already married because I'd never get laid again with that t-shirt.