Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
Friday, 11 April 2008
UPDATE (perhaps): If anyone continues to believe in the
purity-
Did you hear the one about the contemporary American theatre?
Critic walks into a bar and says to the bartender, "Unlike earlier plays about groups ... new [American] plays' character assemblages suggest the sitcom producer's instructions in The Heidi Chronicles: 'Just tell us who these women are and why they're funny.' That's not enough for Heidi ... and it's not enough for the theater, either. Yet it is enough, apparently, for a wide and affluent stratum of people, served by theaters nationwide – or maybe just for the managerial types who choose those theaters' plays. [Or for the people who write them. – GH] For them, it seems, the quest to make the figures onstage vaguely recognizable, like people you might see at the mall or on reality TV, has replaced the shock of recognition that comes with great drama. We may be living in a world so dramatic that those who provide entertainment for a living instinctively want to soften their work, providing a harmless, faintly insipid virtual reality that never encroaches too much on the actual one looming outside."
There's a lot of this going about, as the lady said to the vicar.
Another critic down the other end of the bar says, "[Sarah] Ruhl's easy-
To be fair, a collection of those earlier plays that Michael Feingold
mentions above, 1972's monumental The Off-Off-Broadway Book, contains enough
"harmless, faintly insipid virtual realities" and "easy-
The current scene may be the fault of "managerial types" who run institutional non-profits. It's possible that the serious drama that aims for more ambitious heights is still being written but not produced, cowardice being the reason. Critic David Cote suggested as much in a Swiftian modest proposal last week.
I don't think so. Unlike fifty years ago, today most playwrights and experimental theatre artists emerge from MFA programs in theatre. The writers that these critics mention are all products of these MFA programs. Their plays indeed "rank high in terms of quality workmanship," as Feingold notes. They not only sharpened their dramaturgical pencils under teachers and a charismatic guru or two; upon graduation they entered into a network of funders and producers who supported the work of both the mentors and their protégés. You don't need to look far to see the reasons why this work sometimes sounds and looks the same. Great drama might yet still be produced by these MFA graduates. But insofar as these programs cater to an aesthetic paradigm of "a harmless, vaguely insipid virtual reality" with the reward of production by an American theatre sympathetic to that paradigm, the likelihood is less.
As Cote points out, theatres like the Public Theater and the New York Theatre Workshop are opening their doors to these theatre artists – so, really, the system is working; slowly, but that's the way systems work. Maybe that's the joke. What is still lacking is that "unexpected shock of recognition" that Feingold tells us is the mark of great drama. That's where the system fails.
For some people, that "great drama" that Feingold mentions is going to
stick in the craw, for it assumes that there's such a thing as
"not-
There is a touch of revolutionary messianism in every great artist; it's a part of their madness. The great dramatists of the modern period, from Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw and Brecht on to Müller and Barker, believed that they were responsible, as part of their mission, for changing the theatre at its roots: the whole theatre: form, content, education, criticism, technique, economics, audience, cultural position and approach. (Beckett may have seemed less ambitious, but even so, he was creating a theatre that he wanted to see in opposition to the theatre that he saw around him.)
MFA programs, by their nature, are designed to crush out the revolutionary and messianic strain. They are evolutionary: they take a raw talent, set it a series of hoops to jump through and requirements to complete, and at the end that talent receives a document guaranteeing that the talent has met the bureaucratic requirements of the institution and satisfied its representatives in the classroom and bursar's office. The talent also receives entrée into a working guild, a means to a livelihood, not unlike the apprenticeship process of the feudal era. The MFA process adapts the talent to the environment, as evolution adapts the biological specimen to its environment. But true revolution comes from without. True revolution seeks to change the environment to provide the full exercise of the self's – and the talent's – possibilities. A process which encourages adaptation to an existing paradigm of aesthetics (including the unexamined underlying ideologies of contemporary theatre and academia, which are businesses as well, as we're always reminded – but there's a limit to what numbers can tell us about art, or the human spirit) cripples the individual talent, even as it claims to refine the raw material of that talent. The most valuable education is self-education; let's not mistake academia for anything other than a symbol of learning, and not learning itself.
How many critics, playwrights or artistic directors does it take to change a light bulb – I mean, the American theatre? Well, perhaps only one – but, like the psychiatrist's light bulb, the American theatre has to want to change.
Posted at 5.09 pm in /Drama
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