When our fearless editor suggested the topic "The State of the Art," I balked. What, really, could I say about the state of the art of playwrights and playwriting? Of the universe of plays written and submitted in the course of a year, I get to read only a small slice for a few small theatres, and I've detailed what I've gleaned from that task in other essays for Scene4. It's not been a bright gleaning. Most of the scripts I've read lack a flair for finding and sifting the story lode in such a way that an audience will become rapt enough to forget their bladders and daily head-chatter. Most of the scripts ground themselves on the narrow sandbar of domestic drama/comedy, re-hashing re-hashes of dysfunctional families, limping-along relationships, sentimentalized good-personism, and so on. Very few of the scripts adventure anything, test anything -- they seem content to reflect and repeat.
As for the state of "the theatre" -- one can read the surveys by Theatre Communications Group to flesh out what one knows by intuition: theatre is a struggling business, as it usually is; artistic directors are constantly geeing and hawing between commercial and artistic choices, as they usually have to; the "theater-going public" is mostly white and aging, yet a profusion of "fringe" festivals draws in that cherished "younger crowd" with the hope that they'll replace the graying cohort. Which is to say: theatre is dead, long live the theatre, as is usually the case.
The art-form of theatre, in the list of today's "entertainment options," does not rise very high on that list because it is not a mass-form of art, like movies or music downloads. A play does not open on multiple stages on a certain date, it does not get airplay, it is not lateraled from computer to computer through file-sharing, and so on. In the cultural ecology, it occupies a specialized niche, like some form of a Darwinian finch that can only eat seeds of a certain oval shape that are colored ochre -- and the habitat that produces those unique seeds steadily dwindles.
But then I had another thought.
We live in a time of military war and assaults on logic and the mendacity of religion, and the reason these enterprises succeed is that they have successfully employed the techniques of theatrical production to make their cases stick. Now, some may consider it a secular form of blasphemy to say that theatre forwards propaganda, that an art-form often self-described and self-missioned as wanting to explore the ambiguities of the human condition would become the engine for the persuasions of propaganda.
But take a look at Brecht.
Brecht wanted to re-formulate the algorithms of the theatre of his day because he wanted his audiences to understand the world in particular ways. He was artist enough not to frog-march his attendees to his conclusions (well, at least most of the time), but in the end he wanted his ticket-buyers to go away with something about themselves changed -- mostly bettered along certain socio-politico-cultural lines, but at least (re)moved and (re)armed -- and thus fashioned his productions to get done what he wanted to get done.
He did this (and to some degree every artist does this) because he understand, as George Orwell did, that "every work of art has a meaning and a purpose -- a political, social and religious purpose," and that the reason for investing the blood, sweat, money, and belief into the work of art is to make that purpose "viral" throughout the audience so that they become infected with a new idea and, in turn, pass it on to others, who in turn...and in turn...and so on.
In other words, artists are propagandists because theatre and propaganda ("propaganda" in both our modern sense of manipulation and the Catholic sense of "propagating" the faith) are not opposites but terms that describe different locations on a continuum of persuasion. And because a continuum is all about slurred shades and not sharp points, we can glide through the continuum from, say, a Beckett play consisting of a single human exhalation (in which no one is forced to think of anything except the constancy of his or her own mortality) to the blatant political and social (re)arrangements of a Living Theatre or a Wooster Group or a Mabou Mines.
There is nothing insulting in naming artists as propagandists -- artists self-name as "artists" because they believe they have something to say/offer/sow and reap, and learn their craft to do just that (and hopefully make a living at it).
But if "artists as propagandists" is allowed, then it is also true that somewhere on this continuum propagandists can be artists. And it is here where theatre -- the techniques of, the live energy of -- exerts its greatest power -- not on Broadway but in the megachurch of Rick Warren (author of the very hot The Purpose-Driven Life), the spin doctors, the advertising board rooms, the permanent campaigns of politicians.
This is not to say that the theatre these and other groups make is good theatre, if "good" is defined the way Edward Albee once described it in a lecture, as a catalyst for change, that it should be dangerous, that it should reveal all of our shortcomings and complacency, hopefully inspiring us to live our lives more fully. "The job of the arts," Albee said,"is to hold a mirror up to us and say: 'Look, this is how you really are. If you don't like it, change.'"
But, then again, most "theatre" theatre doesn't come anywhere near this gold standard (including Albee's plays). In fact, it goes in the opposite direction, re-playing for the care and comfort of the audience the lessons of our culture's dominant curriculum about the psychological, social, economic, and political make-up of its deni(citi)zens, those patterns of behavior most in line with the corporate capitalist regime that instructs and assesses our lives. Nobody today comes out of a performance of any major theatrical production feeling changed (or even motivated to change) because nobody goes in to the production with the desire to change anything about himself or herself. Far from seeking out something "dangerous" that will reveal one's "shortcoming and complacency" (i.e., one's insufficiency and failure as a human being), people go to the theatre to be entertained -- moved, yes, engaged and intrigued, yes, but not, at the end, ready to re-form the very quick of their lives because they have now had the motes extracted from their eyes. To expect this to happen, to write this down as a caption under the picture of "good art," is to expect the blossom of religious conversion to burst forth -- and this is just silly because we long ago jettisoned the Greekish notions of theatre as a religious communal event or that anything on a stage would offend us enough to lob rotten produce or storm out in protest (or solidarity, as in Waiting for Lefty). Audiences want to come out of the theatre no different than when they walked in -- -- they just want to feel satisfied that their two hours haven't been wasted. If what they have seen is "dangerous" (whatever that word means), a threat to their souls, they are more than capable of distancing themselves from the information (like quarantining a virus) -- and most likely, when word gets out on the street that this is a "dangerous" production that is "good for you," people will stay away in droves.
(As a digression: doesn't the bathroom mirror in the morning after a sleepless night due to the ever-running anxiety tapes that play through in our heads do a much better job of lessoning us about our "shortcomings and complacency" than the latest museum-like re-production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
But you can come away from a daily onslaught of clever advertising ready to buy. You can come away from political campaigning ready to be a voter/non-voter. You can exit from Rick Warren's megachurch reaffirmed in your fight against the devil and his industrial output of sin. You can plan ahead to set aside time in January to make sure you catch the new commercials at the Super Bowl half-time show because, at that moment, they are the best show in town. You can be righteous and involved when it comes to arguing for the right to invite a landslide-download of pirated MP3s onto your hard drive. And this is because the theatre of the efforts behind all of these pitches to become involved in life are blent seamlessly into our lives -- theatre as a part of who we are, what we do, how we breathe. Theatre that gives us something back for our time invested (even if it's not always a good something). Theatre that doesn't pretend to be a medicine for our own good. Theatre that confirms rather than demands confession.
Is there a lesson here? People far smarter than I can answer that question, and the plain fact is that I don't know. Theatre is a minor art form in our culture, yet it still has the power to draw people into its orbit because the live, sweaty thing that happens on stage is unique for both audience and actor. That bond, that intimacy, has to become the source of any re-imagining of theatre as we move into the 21st century -- not spectacle, not a solely commercial calculus, but that umbilical that makes being a living human being worth being a living human being. It is intimacy, not danger, that drives theatre's heart/art. That's what the propagandists can't really reproduce, though they can form pretty good fakes of it, enough to fool most people. This is what theatre needs to re-claim if it's going to continue saying that it should have a claim upon our fortunes and our lives.
(October 2005)