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Monday, 15 December 2008
An audience turning from its theatre, or a
theatre from its audience?
(Phylicia Rashad in a scene from Lincoln
Center Theater's
production of Bernarda Alba. Photo by Paul
Kolnik
on the cover of All America's a Stage)
I've not been getting to the theatre much these days, and a new report
from the National Endowment for the Arts indicates that I'm not alone.
In the New York Times today, Patrick Healy reports on a new study from the NEA that indicates
an "overall
nationwide decline in audiences for nonmusical theatre":
High ticket prices do not appear to be the primary factor, according to
the report by the National Endowment for the Arts that is being released
on Monday. Instead the Cassandras who have been fretting over the future
of Americans' dramatic appetites seem to have a point; there are more
straight plays than demand for them, endowment officials said.
Since 1992 the number of people attending such plays in the United
States has fallen to 21 million in 2008 from 25 million.
This despite a 100% increase in the number of theatres around the
country since 1990, many of these in "states with relatively small
populations that have historically had modest numbers of theaters."
There is much talk about the so-called human "need" for theatre
generically, for experiencing "stories" as part of a massed community;
someone is not telling these communities about this need, apparently. Of
course, it may well be that audiences are finding this experience
elsewhere than in theatres: at music concerts (and musicals, which have
not experienced the same steep dropoff in attendance as straight plays),
sporting events, political rallies, films. Perhaps the spectators are
finding that theatrical experiences as created by most theatre artists do
not speak truly to their condition or their lives. There is no truth
there; only lies.
Once the theatre offers audiences the respect, consideration and
experience that they can't find in any other aesthetic form, perhaps they
will return. The dark experience of tragedy, a form which has long been
considered by many an irrelevance to contemporary human experience, has
been precisely what has been missing, and no wonder; its death was
reported by George Steiner as long ago as 1961. Critics and
artistic directors
find it uncomfortable and impossible to market within the current ideology
of youth, innocence, hope and vague change. (The Soho Rep's recent
production of Blasted succeeded in spite of, rather than because
of, the current theatrical Ideology of Marketed Entertainment, critics and
artistic
directors both the handmaidens of that ideology. It was necessary to its
audience.) The lessons of tragedy are unfathomable in the age of the
post-show discussion, which seeks if not closure at the very least
comfort: tragedy provides neither. The tragic consciousness is necessary
to a fully cognizant vision of this world, not theatre itself. But where
is the fun in that? And no one wants their fun to be taken away.
Contemporary straight theatre has dissolved into the trivial. Audiences
know this; while the NEA's meaninglessly-titled study All
America's a Stage (available in full in .pdf form here; if all America's a stage, why do we need any
others?) does not come out and say it (for it would
constitute a slap in the face to the contemporary theatre as well as those
who create it), the shrinking audience is symptomatic of the sickness of
the American theatre, not the cause of that sickness. It is the result of
a dying
imagination.
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Superfluities
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Long-form theory and polemic
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